in good company 14

in good company 14

I refer of course to Mr. James Douglas’s _Theodore Watts-Dunton,

Poet, Novelist and Critic_, a work which with all its faults, and

it has many, is of remarkable interest. I do not say this because

Mr. Douglas has told us everything that can be told, and much that

it was unnecessary to tell about the life and work, the memorable

friendships and the literary methods of the author of _Aylwin_, but

because Mr. Douglas has with infinite care and pains harvested,

sifted, winnowed, and gleaned the whole field of Watts-Dunton’s

literary labours. The portion of the book in which the fine gold

of his writings upon Wonder as the primal Element in all religion;

upon the first awakenings in the soul of man of a sense of Wonder,

or perhaps I should say upon the awakening, the birth, of a soul

in man by means of Wonder; the noble exposition of the Psalms, the

Prayer Book, and of the Bible in its relation to the soul and to

the Universe; the analysis of Humour; the portions that deal with

Nature and Nature-Worship; with the methods and Art of great writers

in poetry and prose, and with First Principles generally--these in

themselves and by themselves make Mr. Douglas’s book unique.

 

I am not sure, indeed, that it will not eventually do more for

Watts-Dunton’s reputation as a thinker than the publication of a

whole library of his collected writings. For in his contributions to

the periodical Press, Watts-Dunton is apt sometimes to be diffuse.

He becomes befogged, as it were, with the multitudinousness of his

own learning. His “cogitations”--the word is more applicable to most

of his work than “essays”--were so prodigious, branched out into

such innumerable but always fascinating and pregnant side issues,

as to bewilder the ordinary reader. In Mr. Douglas’s book with

such judgment are the passages selected, that we get the best of

Watts-Dunton in a comparatively small compass, clarified, condensed,

and presented with cameo clearness. It contains, I admit, not a

little with which I would willingly away. I tire sometimes of gypsies

and gorgios and Sinfi Lovell, as I tire of the recurrence of the

double-syllabled feminine rhyming of “glory” and “story,” “hoary” and

“promontory,” in some of the sonnets.

 

Mr. Douglas quotes Rossetti as affirming of Watts-Dunton that he

was the one man of his time who with immense literary equipment was

without literary ambition. This may be true of the Theodore Watts of

Rossetti’s time. It is not altogether true of the Watts-Dunton whom I

knew during the last quarter of a century.

 

The extraordinary success of _Aylwin_, published, be it

remembered--though some of us had been privileged to see it long

before--in 1898, when the author was 66, bewildered and staggered

Watts-Dunton, but the literary ambitions which that success aroused

came too late in life to be realised. Though a prodigious and

untiring worker, he was unsystematic and a dreamer. The books that

he intended to write would have outnumbered the unwritten volumes of

Robert Louis Stevenson. Had Stevenson lived longer, his dream-books

would one day have materialised into manuscript and finally into

paper and print. He was one of those whom Jean Paul Richter had in

mind when he said: “There shall come a time when man shall awaken

from his lofty dreams and find--his dreams still there, and that

nothing has gone save his sleep.” Stevenson worked by impulse. His

talk and his letters--like too plenteously-charged goblets, which

brim over and run to waste--were full of stories he was set upon

writing, but from which on the morrow he turned aside to follow some

literary Lorelei whose lurings more accorded with the mood of the

moment.

 

“I shall have another portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this

story that has played me out,” he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin in

January, 1875. “The story is to be called _When the Devil was Well_.

Scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own

unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the

story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander one step aside,

but go ever before its face and ever swifter and louder until the pit

receives its roaring?”

 

But Stevenson worked of set purpose, and, for the most part, sooner

or later in another mood, went rainbow-chasing again, hoping to

find--like the pot of gold which children believe lies hidden where

the rainbow ends--his broken fragments of a dream that he might

recover and weave them into story form.

 

Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he found that the vision had wholly

faded, or that the mood to interpret it had gone, and so more often

he failed. But Watts-Dunton was content only to dream and, alas, to

procrastinate, at least in the matter of screwing himself up to the

preparation of a book. In that respect he was the despair even of his

dearest friends.

 

Francis Hinde Groome wrote to me as far back as January, 1896:

 

“Watts, I hope, has _not_ definitely abandoned the idea of a Life of

Rossetti, or he might, he suggests, weave his reminiscences of him

into his own reminiscences. But I doubt. The only way, I believe,

would be for some one regularly day after day to engage him in talk

for a couple of hours and for a shorthand writer to be present to

take it down. If I had the leisure I would try and incite him thereto

myself.”

 

I agree with Groome that that was the only way out of the difficulty.

Left to himself, I doubt whether Watts-Dunton would ever have

permitted even _Aylwin_, ready for publication as it was, to see the

light. Of the influences which were brought to bear to persuade him

ultimately to take the plunge, and by whom exerted, no less than of

the reasons why the book was so long withheld, I shall not here

write. Mr. Douglas says nothing of either matter in his book, and the

presumption is that he was silent by Watts-Dunton’s own wish. This,

however, I may add, that were the reasons for withholding the book

so long fully known, they would afford yet another striking proof of

the chivalrous loyalty of Watts-Dunton’s friendship. One reason--it

is possible that even Mr. Douglas is not aware of it, for it dates

back to a time when he did not know Watts-Dunton, and I have reason

to believe that the author of _Aylwin_ spoke of it only at the time,

and then only to a few intimates, nearly all of whom are now dead--I

very much regret I do not feel free to make known. It would afford an

unexampled instance of Watts-Dunton’s readiness to sacrifice his own

interests and inclinations, in order to assist a friend--in this case

not a famous, but a poor and struggling one.

 

If his unwillingness to see his own name on the back of a book was

a despair to his friends, it must have been even more so to some

half-dozen publishers who might be mentioned. The enterprising

publisher who went to him with some literary project, Watts-Dunton

“received,” in the words of the late Mr. Harry Fragson’s amusing

song, “most politely.” At first he hummed and haw’d and rumpled his

hair protesting that he had not the time at his disposal to warrant

him in accepting a commission to write a book. But if the proposed

book were one that he could write, that he ought to write, he became

sympathetically responsive and finally glowed, like fanned tinder,

touched by a match, under the kindling of the publisher’s pleading.

“Yes,” he would say. “I cannot deny that I could write such a book.

Such a book, I do not mind saying in confidence, has long been in my

mind, and in the mind of friends who have repeatedly urged me to such

work.” The fact is that Watts-Dunton was gratified by the request and

did not disguise his pleasure, for with all his vast learning and

acute intellect there was a singular and childlike simplicity about

him that was very lovable. Actually accept a commission to write the

book in question he would not, but he was not unwilling to hear the

proposed terms, and in fact seemed so attracted by, and so interested

in, the project that the pleased publisher would leave, conscious

of having done a good morning’s work, and of having been the first

to propose, and so practically to bespeak, a book that was already

almost as good as written, already almost as good as published,

already almost as good as an assured success. Perhaps he chuckled at

the thought of the march he had stolen on his fellow publishers, who

would envy him the inclusion of such a book in his list. Possibly,

even, he turned in somewhere to lunch, and, as the slang phrase goes,

“did himself well” on the strength of it.

 

But whatever the publisher’s subsequent doings, the chances were

that Watts-Dunton went back to his library, to brood over the idea,

very likely to write to some of us whose advice he valued, or more

likely still to telegraph, proposing a meeting to discuss the project

(I had not a few such letters and telegrams from him myself);

perhaps in imagination to see the book written and published; but

ultimately and inevitably--to procrastinate and in the end to let the

proposal lapse. Like the good intentions with which, according to the

proverb, the road to perdition is paved, Watts-Dunton’s book-writing

intentions, if intentions counted, would in themselves go far to

furnish a fat corner of the British Museum Library. That he never

carried these intentions into effect is due to other reasons than

procrastination.

 

It is only fair to him to remember that his life-work, his _magnum

opus_, must be looked for not in literature but in friendship.

Stevenson’s life-work was his art. “I sleep upon my art for a

pillow,” he wrote to W. E. Henley. “I waken in my art; I am unready

for death because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know

how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can

conceive of being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my

art; I _am_ not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.”

 

Watts-Dunton’s life-work, I repeat, was not literature nor poetry,

but friendship. Stevenson sacrificed himself in nothing for his

friends. On the contrary, he looked to them to sacrifice something

of time and interest and energy on his behalf. Watts-Dunton’s whole

life was one long self-sacrifice--I had almost written one fatal

self-sacrifice--of his own interests, his own fame, in the cause of

his friends. His best books stand upon our shelves in every part

of the English-speaking world, but the name that appears upon the

cover is not that of Theodore Watts-Dunton, but of Dante Gabriel

Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He wrote no Life of either,

but how much of their life and of their life’s best work we owe to

Watts-Dunton we shall never know. Their death was a cruel blow to

him; but, had he died first, the loss to Rossetti and to Swinburne

would have been terrible and irreparable. Just as, to Stevenson,

life seemed almost unimaginable without his art, so I find it hard,

almost impossible, to picture Swinburne’s life at The Pines, failing

the sustaining and brotherly presence of Watts-Dunton. Often, when

Watts-Dunton was ailing, I have come away from there with a sinking

at my heart lest it should be Watts-Dunton who died first, and I can