in good company 5

in good company 5

You remember Jeffery Prowse’s lines about someone being

‘problematically sober, but indubitably drunk’?” I went on. “The

‘dissembling’ of ‘your love’ in the opening sentences of your article

may be ‘problematical,’ but the ‘kicking’ of us ‘downstairs,’ and out

of the door later on, is as ‘indubitable’ as is the fact that the

book is profoundly honoured by being reviewed by Algernon Charles

Swinburne at all.”

 

With that parting shot, at which he laughed heartily, I bade him

good-bye and came away, to find on returning to my home, a letter

from Mr. Locker-Lampson which, as it has no word that can be

considered private, and deals with matters of general literary

interest, as well as with some of the strictures by Swinburne that

have been quoted above, I venture to append:

 

NEWHAVEN COURT, CROMER,

_17th Oct._

 

DEAR KERNAHAN,

 

I have just been reading the _Forum_ for October, and I think

that altogether we may be satisfied with A. C. S.’s article.

 

I venture to think that he rather overrates Landor and underrates

Calverley.

 

We should not have inserted ‘Youth and Art’ [the lines by

Browning referring to ‘Gibson’s hash’ to which Mr. Swinburne took

such objection] or ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ or Croker’s ‘Miss

Peel.’ We ought to have put in Pope’s ‘I know a thing.’

 

I remember talking to Tennyson about Dirce, and he said it was

too classical for English taste. I do not think many people would

care for it, but perhaps it might be added. Stygean _Set_ is not

a cultivated __EXPRESSION__, not better than _lot_, and if Dirce was

a shade it did not matter whether Charon forgot himself or not.

 

I really feel much obliged to Mr. Swinburne for whom I have

sincere regard. Perhaps if you see him you will tell him of my

obligation.

 

His article strengthens my decided opinion that the book is a

_very_ difficult one to edit. All the experts have different

ideas about it. Lang, Swinburne, Gosse, Dobson, and Palgrave are

all opposed.

 

I hope you are quite well.

 

Always truly,

F. L. L.

 

 

VI

 

In all my conversations with Swinburne, I cannot recall one instance

of his interrupting a speaker. He would, it is true, go off at a

conversational tangent, as when, talking of Francis Hinde Groome

and Suffolk, he interpolated apparently irrelevant remarks upon

the curious names of some Yorkshire villages, having presumably

only discovered that morning that one of these villages bore the

delightful name of “Beggar my Neighbour.” But, though one could see

by his flashing eye that the hounds of utterance were chafing and

fretting to fling themselves upon the quarry, he invariably waited

till the other speaker had made an end of it before letting go the

leash. To everything that Watts-Dunton said, then or at any time, he

listened almost as a disciple might listen to a master, and again

and again he urged me to use any influence I had with the author of

_Aylwin_ to induce him to give that then unpublished work to the

world, and to allow his _Athenæum_ essays to be collected and issued

in book form.

 

“Only,” said Swinburne at a white heat of enthusiastic admiration,

“if every page, on which they were printed, represented a hundred

pound bank-note; if the back and the sides of the cover were of the

finest beaten gold--that would not be too costly a raiment for the

noblest critical work, dealing with first principles, that has ever

been given to the world.”

 

That this was Swinburne’s deliberate opinion of the value of his

brother poet’s and brother friend’s work, and was not the __EXPRESSION__

of a moment’s enthusiasm, I have reason to know, for he used similar

__EXPRESSION__s in my presence on many occasions. I observe, too,

that Mr. James Douglas, in his book _Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet,

Novelist, and Critic_, quotes Swinburne as describing Watts-Dunton as

“the first critic of his time, perhaps the largest minded and surest

sighted of any age”--a judgment which, as Mr. Douglas reminds us,

Rossetti endorsed.

 

Watts-Dunton, rumpling up his hair with one hand, tried to turn the

conversation into other channels, but Swinburne was obdurate.

 

“You, who know Walter’s magnificent, magician-like power of

concentrating into the fourteen lines of a sonnet what no other poet

could have said with equal power and felicity in forty, will agree

with me when I tell you what perhaps you do not know, for he never

speaks of it himself. When he was a young man, he lost a manuscript

book of poems of which he had no copy. By these lost poems the world

is, I believe, as poor as if Gabriel Rossetti’s early poems had never

been recovered from his wife’s coffin. It was an incomparable loss to

literature, a loss which can never be replaced.”

 

I did not know of these lost poems, for, intimate as I had been

with Watts-Dunton for many years, he had never even hinted at their

existence, or rather at their non-existence. But, except to admit

the loss and to make light of it, he refused to be drawn either by

Swinburne or by myself, and turned the conversation upon the former’s

_Ode to Music_, written, I think, for the opening of the Chicago

Exhibition. But of this Swinburne, in his turn, refused to talk,

averring that he had clean forgotten it--that a task like that, once

completed, he never thought of again, and that his mind was full at

the moment of his Tennyson Threnody.

 

On this occasion I saw yet another side of him. I had brought with me

two bunches of exquisite flowers--arum lilies, lilies of the valley,

snowdrops and some exotics--one for Miss Teresa Watts, one for

Swinburne. A flower was to him as it had been to Philip Marston, the

one unchanging and perfect thing in a changing and decaying world,

as fair, as fresh and as immortal as in the days of our youth. In an

ecstasy of delight, he took the flowers from my outstretched hand as

reverently as the communicant takes into his hands the consecrated

bread of the sacrament, as tenderly as a young mother takes into her

arms her new-born child. He bent his head over them in a rapture

that was almost like a prayer, his eyes when he looked up to thank

me for the gift alight and brimming over with thoughts that were not

far from tears. For many minutes he sat holding them, turning them

this way and that, too rapt in his worship to speak or to think of

anything else.

 

Then he turned to Miss Watts with his courtly bow.

 

“As you have been as equally honoured as I, you will not think me

robbing you if I carry my bunch away with me to put them in water and

to place them in my own room. I want to find them there when I wake

in the morning.”

 

He rose in his quiet way, the flowers in his hand, bowed again to

Miss Watts and myself and left the room. In a few minutes the door

reopened, but only wide enough to let him slip through, and he stole,

rather than walked, to the chair, where he seated himself among us

again, almost as noiselessly as a card is shuffled back to its place

in the pack.

 

 

VII

 

“Watts-Dunton writes poetry because he loves writing it,” said

Swinburne to me once. “I write poetry, I suppose, to escape from

boredom.”

 

There is truth in the statement, but there is more behind the

statement than appears at the first glance.

 

New and incoming tides of poetry lapped at his feet each morning, and

the incoming of each new tide of poetry was to him as fresh, pure,

crystalline-sweet, and free, as is the tide that rolls in upon the

shore each day from the vastnesses and the sweetnesses of the central

sea.

 

Hence he gave himself up to it, plunged in it, sported in it, with

the zeal and rapture of a boy. Had the call to think poetry, dream

poetry, write poetry, plunge himself into poetry, come to him as part

of a set task, had he been compelled, in the mood or out of the mood,

to take up poetry as an occupation, he would have turned from it as

the sea-loving swimmer turns from a stagnant pool. It would have been

to him the “boredom” of which he had spoken, not the “escape from

boredom.”

 

I have said that the impression I formed of him after my first visit

was that of a man who lived in a world of his own--a world which,

so far as his body was concerned, was, with the exception of his

experiences on and by the sea, bounded, for the greater part of

his later life, by the four walls of his home, and by the limits

of his daily walk, but which, in the imaginative and mental sense,

was illimitable. Human and normal in passion, and in every other

respect, as I believe him to have been (so far, that is to say, as

genius, which by overbalancing one side of a man’s nature, inevitably

necessitates some underbalancing on the other, ever _can_ be said to

be normal), he had seemed to me, on the occasion of that first visit,

a creature of other flesh and blood than ours, an elusive ethereal

poetic essence, rather than a man of like passions to our own.

 

It had seemed to me as if the busy world, in which other men made

love and married, begot children, bought and sold, laboured and

schemed--though it lay outside his very door--was a million miles

away from the monastic quiet of the book-lined room in which he lived

and dreamed and wrote.

 

I do not say that it was so. All I say is that it had seemed so to me

on that first meeting, but I am not sure that the impression I then