in good company 15
The sum of that devotion will never fully be known, but it was as
much at the service of the unknown, or those who were only little
known among us, as of the famous. He had his enemies--“the hated
of New Grub Street” was his playful description of himself--and
some of them have not hesitated to hint that he attached himself
barnacle-wise or parasite-wise to greater men than himself for
self-seeking reasons. Borne thither on their backs--it was sometimes
said--he was able to sun himself upon Parnassian heights, otherwise
unattainable; and being in their company, and of their company, he
hoped thus to attract to himself a little of their reflected glory.
The truth is that it was not their abilities nor their fame which
drew Watts-Dunton to Rossetti and to Swinburne, but his love of the
men themselves, and his own genius for friendship. Being the men they
were, he would first have been drawn to them, and thereafter have
come to love them just as wholly and devotedly had they to the end of
their lives remained obscure.
So far from seeking the company or the friendship of the great, he
delighted in making friends in humble ranks of life.
Anyone who has accompanied Watts-Dunton on a morning walk will
remember a call here at a cottage, a shop, or it may be an inn
where lived some enthusiastic but poor lover of books, birds or
children, and the glad and friendly greetings that were exchanged.
If, as occasionally happened, some great person--great in a social
sense, I mean--happened to be a caller at The Pines, when perhaps a
struggling young author, painter, or musician, in whom Watts-Dunton
was interested or was trying to help, happened to be there, one
might be sure that, of the two, it would not be the great man who
would be accorded the warmer greeting by Watts-Dunton and--after
his marriage--by his gracious, beautiful and accomplished young
wife. What he once said of Tennyson is equally true of Watts-Dunton
himself. “When I first knew Tennyson,” he said, “I was, if possible,
a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me with
exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious
people.” Watts-Dunton who, in his poems and in his conversation,
could condense into a sentence what many of us could not as
felicitously convey in a page, puts the whole matter into two
words, “manly respect.” Unless he had good cause to do otherwise,
he, no less than Tennyson, was prepared to treat others with “manly
respect,” irrespective of fame, riches, or rank. That is the attitude
neither entirely of the aristocrat nor of the democrat, but of the
gentleman to whom what we call “snobbishness” is impossible.
One more reason why Watts-Dunton’s contribution to “Letters” in
the publishers’ lists runs to no greater extent than two volumes,
is that so many of his contributions to “Letters” took the form of
epistles to his friends. The writing of original, characteristic and
charming letters--brilliant by reason of vivid descriptive passages,
valuable because used as a means of expressing criticism or conveying
knowledge--is an art now so little practised as likely soon to be
lost.
Watts-Dunton’s letter writing was possibly the outcome of his habit
of procrastination. To put off the settling down in dead earnest to
some work which he felt ought to be done, but at which he “shied,” he
would suddenly remember a letter which he thought should be penned.
“I must write So-and-so a line first,” he would say, which line, when
it came to be written, proved to be an essay in miniature, in which
he had--carelessly, and free from the irking consciousness that he
was writing for publication and so must mind his words--thrown off
some of his weightiest and wisest thoughts. He protested throughout
his life that he was a wickedly bad correspondent. None the less
he wrote so many charming and characteristic letters that, could
they--and why not?--be collected, they would add yet another to the
other reputations he attained.
Swinburne, in recent years at least, did not share his friend’s
predilection for letter writing. The author of _Atalanta in
Calydon_ once said to me, almost bitterly, that had he in early and
middle life refrained from writing and from answering unnecessary
letters--unnecessary in the sense that there was no direct call or
claim upon him to write or to answer them--there would be at least
twelve more volumes by him, and of his best, in the publishers’
lists. One letter which arrived when I was a guest at The Pines led
Swinburne to expound his theory of letter answering. It was from a
young woman personally unknown to him, and began by saying that a
great kindness he had once done to her father emboldened her to ask
a favour to herself--what it was I now forget, but it necessitated a
somewhat lengthy reply.
“The fact that I have been at some pains to serve the father, so far
from excusing a further claim by the daughter, is the very reason
why, by any decent member of that family, I should not again be
assailed,” Swinburne expostulated.
“She says,” he went on, “that she trusts I won’t think she is
asking too much, in hoping that I will answer her letter--a letter
which does not interest me, nor concern me in the least. She could
have got the information, for which she asks, elsewhere with very
little trouble to herself and none to me. The exasperating thing
about such letters,” he continued, getting more and more angry, “is
this. I feel that the letter is an unwarrantable intrusion. Out
of consideration to her father I can’t very well say so, as one
does not wish to seem churlish. But, in any sense, to answer her
letter, necessitates writing at length, thus wasting much precious
time, to say nothing of the chance of being dragged into further
correspondence. It is one’s impotency to make such folk see things
reasonably which irritates. I have to suppress that irritation,
and that results in further irritation. I am irritated with myself
for being irritated, for not taking things philosophically as
Watts-Dunton does, as well as irritated with her, and the result is
the spoiling of a morning’s work. She will say perhaps, and you may
even say, ‘It is only one letter you are asked to write.’ Quite so.
Not much, perhaps, to make a fuss about. But” (he pounded the table
with clenched fist angrily) “multiply that one person by the many who
so write, and the net total works out to an appalling waste of time.”
My reply was to remind him of N. P. Willis’s protest that to ask a
busy author to write an unnecessary letter was like asking a postman
to go for a ten miles’ walk--to which I added, “when he has taken
his boots off.” Swinburne had never heard the saying, and, with
characteristic veering of the weather-vane of his mood, forgot alike
his letter-writing lady and his own irritation, in his delight at a
fellow sufferer’s happy hit.
“Capital!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“Capital! The worm has turned, and shows that, worm as he is, he is
not without a sting in his tail!”
In his later years Swinburne wrote few letters except to a relative,
a very intimate friend, or upon some pressing business. The uninvited
correspondent he rarely answered at all. For every letter that
Swinburne received, Watts-Dunton probably received six, and sooner
or later he answered all. The amount of time that went in letters,
which in no way concerned his own work, or his own interests, and
were penned only out of kindness of heart, was appalling. Had he
refrained from writing letters intended to hearten or to help some
friend or some young writer, or to soften a disappointment, the books
that are lost to us--a Life of Rossetti, for instance--might well
be to the good. If a book by a friend happened to be badly slated
in a critical journal--and no calamity to a friend is borne with
more resignation and even cheerfulness by some of us who “write”
than a bad review of a friend’s book--Watts-Dunton, if he chanced to
see the slating, would put work aside, and sit down then and there
to indite to that friend a letter which helped and heartened him
or her much more than the slating had depressed. I have myself had
letters from fellow authors who told me they were moved to express
sympathy or indignation about this or that bad review of one of my
little books--the only effect of their letter being to rub salt into
the wound, and to make one feel how widely one’s literary nakedness
or even literary sinning had been proclaimed in the market place.
Watts-Dunton’s letters not only made one feel that the review in
question mattered nothing, but he would at the same time find
something to say about the merits of the work under review, which
not only took the gall out of the unfriendly critic’s ink, but had
the effect of setting one newly at work, cheered, relieved, and
nerved to fresh effort.
I do not quote here any of these letters, as they are concerned only
with my own small writings, and so would be of no interest to the
reader. Instead, let me quote one I received from him on another
subject. A sister of mine sent me a sonnet in memory of a dead poet,
a friend of Watts-Dunton’s and mine, and, having occasion to write
to him on another matter, I enclosed it without comment. Almost by
return of post came the following note, in which he was at the pains,
unasked, to give a young writer the benefit of his weighty criticism
and encouragement:
“My thanks for sending me your sister’s lovely sonnet. I had no
idea that she was a genuine poet. It is only in the seventh line
where I see an opening for improvement.
To _a_ great/darkness and/in a/great light.
It is an error to suppose that when the old scansion by quantity
gave place to scansion by accent, the quantitative demands upon a
verse became abrogated. A great deal of attention to quantity is
apparent in every first-rate line--
The sleepless soul that perished in its prime,
where by making the accent and the quantity meet (and quantity,
I need not remind you, is a matter of consonants quite as much
as of vowels) all the strength that can be got into an iambic
English verse is fixed there. Although, of course, it would make
a passage monotonous if in every instance quantity and accent
were made to meet, those who aim at the best versification give
great attention to it.”
This is one instance only out of many of his interest in a young
writer who was then personally unknown to him; but in turning
over for the purpose of this article those letters of his, which
I have preserved, I have found so many similar reminders of his
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