in good company 17

in good company 17

“Ah!” he said with deep meaning--no one could put so much into an

“ah” as he--and, figuratively, collapsed.

 

 

 

 

ONE ASPECT OF THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

 

 

I have often been asked by those who did not know Theodore

Watts-Dunton what was the secret of the singular power he appeared to

exercise over others and the equally singular affection in which he

was held by his friends.

 

My answer was that Watts-Dunton’s hold upon his friends, partly

personal as it was and partly intellectual, was chiefly due to his

extraordinary loyalty. Of old, certain men and women were supposed to

be possessed of the “evil eye.” Upon whom they looked with intent--be

it man, woman, or beast--hurt was sooner or later sure to fall.

 

If there be anything in the superstition, one might almost believe

that its opposite was true of Watts-Dunton. He looked upon others

merely to befriend, and if he did not put upon them the spell, not of

an evil but of a good eye, he exercised a marvellous personal power,

not, as is generally the case, upon weaker intellects and less marked

personalities than his own, but upon his peers; and even upon those

whom in the world’s eye would be accounted greater than he. That any

one man should so completely control, and even dominate, two such

intellects as Swinburne and Rossetti seemed almost uncanny. I never

saw Rossetti and Watts-Dunton together, for the former had been

dead some years when I first met Watts-Dunton, but my early literary

friendships were with members of the little circle of which Rossetti

was the centre, and all agree in their testimony to the extraordinary

personal power which Watts-Dunton exercised over the poet-painter.

But Swinburne--and here I speak with knowledge--Watts-Dunton

absolutely dominated. It was, “What does Walter say about it?”

“Walter thinks, and I agree with him, that I ought to do so and so,”

or, “Let us submit the matter to Watts-Dunton’s unfailing judgment.”

 

Here, for fear of a possible misunderstanding, let me say that, if

any reader assume from what I have just written that Swinburne was

something of a weakling, that reader is very much mistaken. It is

true that the author of _Atalanta in Calydon_ was a greater force

in intellect and in imagination than in will power and character,

but he was not in the habit of deferring to others as he deferred

to Watts-Dunton, and when he chose to stand out upon some point,

or in some opinion, he was very difficult to move. It was only, in

fact, by Watts-Dunton that he was entirely manageable, yet there was

never any effort, never even any intention on Watts-Dunton’s part to

impose his own will upon his friend. I have heard his influence upon

Swinburne described as hypnotic. From that point of view I entirely

dissent. Watts-Dunton held his friends by virtue of his genius for

friendship--“Watts is a hero of friendship,” Mr. William Michael

Rossetti once said of him--and by the passionate personal loyalty

of which I have never known the equal. By nature the kindest of

men, shrinking from giving pain to any living creature, he could

be fierce, even ferocious, to those who assailed his friends. It

was, indeed, always in defence of his friends, rarely if ever in

defence of himself--though he was abnormally sensitive to adverse

criticism--that he entered into a quarrel and, since dead friends

could not defend themselves, he constituted himself the champion of

their memory or of their reputation, and even steeled himself on more

than one occasion to a break with a living friend rather than endure

a slight to one who was gone. “To my sorrow,” he writes in a letter,

“I was driven to quarrel with a man I loved and who loved me, William

Minto, because he, with no ill intentions, printed certain injurious

comments upon Rossetti which he found in Bell Scott’s papers.”

 

It was my own misfortune, deservedly or undeservedly, to have a

somewhat similar experience to that of Professor Minto; but in my

case the estrangement, temporary only as it was, included Swinburne

as well as Watts-Dunton. In telling the story, and for the first

time here, I must not be supposed for one moment to imagine that any

importance attaches or could attach to a misunderstanding between

such men as Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and a scribbler of sorts like

myself, but because a third great name, that of Robert Buchanan,

comes into it.

 

It is concerned with Buchanan’s attack upon Rossetti in the famous

article _The Fleshly School of Poetry_, which appeared anonymously

(worse--pseudonymously) in the _Contemporary Review_. Not long

after Buchanan’s death I was asked to review Mr. Henry Murray’s

_Robert Buchanan and other Essays_ in a critical journal, which I

did, and Swinburne and Watts-Dunton chanced to see the article. To

say that they took exception to what I said about Buchanan, would

be no description of their attitude, for Swinburne not only took

exception but took offence and of the direst--so much so as to make

it necessary that for a season I should discontinue my visits to The

Pines.

 

And here let me interpolate that I entirely agree with Mr. James

Douglas when he says in his volume, _Theodore Watts, Poet, Novelist

and Critic_, “It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of

the day upon the painful subject of the Buchanan affair. Indeed, I

have often thought it is a great pity that it is not allowed to die

out.” But when in the next sentence Mr. Douglas goes on to say, “The

only reason why it is still kept alive seems to be that, without

discussing it, it is impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s

nervous illness about which so much has been said,” I am entirely out

of agreement with him, as the quotation which I make from my article

will show. Since Mr. Douglas _has_ reopened the matter--he could

hardly do otherwise in telling the story of Watts-Dunton’s literary

life--I have the less hesitation in reprinting part of the article

in which I endeavoured to clear Buchanan of what I held, and still

hold, to be a preposterous charge. I may add that I quite agree with

Mr. Douglas when he says that we must remember “the extremely close

intimacy which existed between these two poet friends (Rossetti and

Watts-Dunton) in order to be able to forgive entirely the unexampled

scourging of Buchanan in the following sonnet, if, as some writers

think, Buchanan was meant.”

 

Mr. Douglas then quotes the sonnet _The Octopus of the Golden

Isles_, which I do not propose here to reprint. That Buchanan was

meant is now well known, and in fact Mr. Douglas himself says in

the same chapter that Watts-Dunton’s definition of envy as the

“literary leprosy” has often been quoted in reference to the case

of Buchanan. My article on Buchanan is too long to give in its

entirety, and, even omitting the passages with no direct bearing

upon the misunderstanding which it caused, is lengthier than I could

wish. My apology is, first, that in justice to Watts-Dunton and to

Swinburne I must present their case against me ungarbled. Moreover,

as the foolish bogey-story--like an unquiet ghost which still walks

the world unlaid--that Buchanan was the cause of Rossetti taking to

drugs, the cause even of Rossetti’s death, is still repeated, and

sometimes believed, I am not sorry of another and last attempt to

give the bogey its _quietus_. Here are the extracts from my article:

 

“Mr. Murray quotes evidently with appreciation Buchanan’s tribute

to his ancient enemy Rossetti, I do not share Mr. Murray’s

appreciation, for Buchanan’s tribute has always seemed to me more

creditable to his generosity than to his judgment. He speaks of

Rossetti as ‘in many respects the least carnal and most religious

of modern poets.’

 

“Here he goes to as great an extreme as when he so savagely

attacked Rossetti as ‘fleshly.’ About this attack much nonsense

has been written. We have been told that it was the cause of

Rossetti’s taking to chloral; and I have heard even Rossetti’s

death laid at Buchanan’s door. To my thinking talk of that sort

is sheer nonsense. If Rossetti took to chloral because Buchanan

called his poetry ‘fleshly,’ Rossetti would sooner or later have

taken to chloral, had Buchanan’s article never been written. But

when Buchanan in the fulness of his remorse calls Rossetti ‘the

most religious of modern poets’ he is talking equally foolishly.

 

“Rossetti ‘the most religious of modern poets’! Why, Rossetti’s

religion was his art. To him art was in and of herself pure,

sacred, and inviolate. By him the usual order of things was

reversed. It was religion which was the handmaid, art the

mistress, and in fact it was only in so far as religion appealed

to his artistic instincts that Rossetti can be said to have had

any religion at all.

 

“And when Buchanan sought to exalt Rossetti to a pinnacle of

purity he was guilty of a like extravagance. That Rossetti’s

work is always healthy not even his most enthusiastic admirers

could contend. Super-sensuous and southern in the warmth of

colouring nearly all his poems are. Some of them are heavy with

the overpowering sweetness as of many hyacinths. The atmosphere

is like that of a hothouse in which, amid all the odorous

deliciousness, we gasp for a breath of the outer air again. There

are passages in his work which remind us far more of the pagan

temple than of the Christian cloister, passages describing sacred

rites which pertain not to the worship of the Virgin, but to the

worship of Venus.

 

“Buchanan was a man who lived heart and soul in the mood of the

moment. He had a big brain which was quick to take fire, and at

such times, both in his controversies and in his criticism, he

was apt to express himself with an exaggeration at which in his

cooler hours he would have been the first to hurl his Titanic

ridicule.

 

“It may seem ungenerous to say so, but even his beautiful

dedicatory poem to Rossetti strikes me as a lapse into false

sentiment.

 

_To An Old Enemy_