Here is another excerpt from the brother's diary:--

'Gabriel had, just before Shields entered the drawing-room for me,

given two violent cries, and had a convulsive fit, very sharp and

distorting the face, followed by collapse. All this passed without

my personal cognizance. He died 9.31 p.m.; the others--Watts,

mother, Christina, and nurse, in room; Caine and Shields in and out;

Watts at Gabriel's right side, partly supporting him.'

That Mr. Watts-Dunton's influence over Rossetti extended even to his art

as a poet is shown by Mr. Benson's words already quoted. I must also

quote the testimony of Mr. Hall Caine, who says, in his

'Recollections':--

"Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed

to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without

offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts' influence in his critical

estimates; and the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I

knew him to resist Mr. Watts's opinion upon a matter of poetical

criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to

me, printed in Chapter VIII of this volume, will show. I had a

striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I

had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius

of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read

out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem 'Cloud

Confines.' As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently

was very fond of it himself. But he surprised me by saying that he

should not print it. On my asking him why, he said:

'Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better

without it.'

'Well, but you like it yourself,' said I.

'Yes,' he replied, 'but in a question of gain or loss to a poem I

feel that Watts must be right.'

And the poem appeared in 'Ballads and Sonnets' without the stanza in

question."

Here is another beautiful passage from Mr. Hall Caine's

'Recollections'--a passage which speaks as much for the writer as for the

object of his enthusiasm:--

"As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him and

beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well

known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost

without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary

friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other.

No light matter it must have been to lay aside one's own

long-cherished life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti's

closest friend and brother, at a moment like the present, when he

imagined the world to be conspiring against him; but through these

evil days, and long after them, down to his death, the friend that

clung closer than a brother was with him, as he himself said, to

protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert, to interest and inspire

him--asking, meantime, no better reward than the knowledge that a

noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted out of sorrow.

Among the world's great men the greatest are sometimes those whose

names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish aims have

been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others as to

leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal

distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price

that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy

their renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the

fine spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of

friendship. Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:

'Watts is a hero of friendship'; and indeed, he has displayed his

capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that

part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes

by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the

gainer. If in the end it should appear that he has in his own person

done less than might have been hoped for from one possessed of his

splendid gifts, let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a

quite incalculable degree, and influenced for good, several of the

foremost among those who in their turn have influenced the age. As

Rossetti's faithful friend and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John

Marshall, has often declared, there were periods when Rossetti's very

life may be said to have hung upon Mr. Watts' power to cheer and

soothe."

This anecdote is also told by Mr. Caine:--

"Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited

thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem 'Rose

Mary,' as well as two lyrics published at the time in 'The

Fortnightly Review'; but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent

assaults of criticism, that he seemed definitely to lay aside all

hope of producing further poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of

the delusion that he had for ever lost all power of doing so. It is

an interesting fact, well known in his own literary circle, that his

taking up poetry afresh was the result of a fortuitous occurrence.

After one of his most serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing

off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which

in an invalid's mind usually gather about his own too absorbing

personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite solicitation,

to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The outcome was an effort so

feeble as to be all but unrecognizable as the work of the author of

the sonnets of 'The House of Life,' but, with more shrewdness and

friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished

measureless praise upon it and urged the poet to renewed exertion.

One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and

this exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine,

with the result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his old

dexterity and mastery of hand. The artifice had succeeded beyond

every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the twofold end of

improving the invalid's health by preventing his brooding over

unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished

works. Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce

Rossetti to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by

challenging the poet's ability to compose in the simple, direct, and

emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad proper, as

distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which

he had hitherto worked in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this

second artifice practised upon him was that he wrote 'The White Ship'

and afterwards 'The King's Tragedy.'

Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of

poetic composition, and had recovered a healthy tone of body, before

he became conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further

amusing fact that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet

which, in view of the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose

judgment he reposed, had encouraged him to renewed effort. The

sonnet was bad: the critic knew it was bad, and had from the first

hour of its production kept it carefully out of sight, and was now

more than ever unwilling to show it. Eventually, however, by reason

of ceaseless importunity, he returned it to its author, who, upon

reading it, cried: 'You fraud! You said this sonnet was good, and

it's the worst I ever wrote!' 'The worst ever written would perhaps

be a truer criticism,' was the reply, as the studio resounded with a

hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the flames. It would

appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large portion of the

contents of the volume of 1881."

Mr. William Rossetti is ever eager to testify to the beneficent effect of

Mr. Watts-Dunton's intimacy upon his brother; and quite lately Madox

Brown's grandson, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who, from his connection with

the Rossetti family, speaks with great authority, wrote: 'In 1873 came

Mr. Theodore Watts, without whose practical friendship and advice, and

without whose literary aids and sustenance, life would have been from

thenceforth an impracticable affair for Rossetti.' Mr. Hueffer speaks of

the great change that came over Rossetti's work when he wrote 'The King's

Tragedy' and 'The White Ship':--

"It should be pointed out that 'The White Ship' was one of Rossetti's

last works, and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narration,

under the advice of Mr. Theodore Watts. In this he was undoubtedly

on the right track, and the 'rhymed chronicles' might have

disappeared had Rossetti lived long enough to revise the poem as

sedulously as he did his earlier work, and to revise it with the

knowledge of narrative-technique that the greater part of the poem

shows was coming to be his."

It was impossible for a man of genius to live so secluded a life as

Rossetti lived at Cheyne Walk and at Kelmscott for several years, without

wild, unauthenticated stories getting about concerning him. Among other

things Rossetti, whose courtesy and charm of manner were, I believe,

proverbial, was now charged with a rudeness, or rather boorishness like

that which with equal injustice, apparently, is now being attributed to

Tennyson. Stories got into print about his rude bearing towards people,

sometimes towards ladies of the most exalted position. And these

apocryphal and disparaging legends would no doubt have been still more

numerous and still more offensive, had it not been for the influence of

his watchful and powerful friend. Here is an interesting letter which

Rossetti addressed to the 'World,' and which shows the close relations

between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton:--

"16 CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA, S.W.

December 28, 1878.

My attention has been directed to the following paragraph which has

appeared in the newspapers: 'A very disagreeable story is told about

a neighbour of Mr. Whistler's, whose works are not exhibited to the

vulgar herd; the Princess Louise in her zeal therefore, graciously

sought them at the artist's studio, but was rebuffed by a 'Not at

home' and an intimation that he was not at the beck and call of

princesses. I trust it is not true,' continues the writer of the

paragraph, 'that so medievally minded a gentleman is really a

stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that dignified

obedience,' etc.

The story is certainly disagreeable enough; but if I am pointed out

as the 'near neighbour of Mr. Whistler's' who rebuffed, in this rude

fashion, the Princess Louise, I can only say that it is a canard

devoid of the smallest nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has

never called upon me, and I know of only two occasions when she has

expressed a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke

to me upon the subject, but I was at that time engaged upon an

important work, and the delays thence arising caused the matter to

slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject till last summer,

when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the Princess, in conversation,

had mentioned my name to him, and that he had then assured her that I

should feel 'honoured and charmed to see her,' and suggested her

making an appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as

one of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed

himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had she

called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in that

'generous loyalty' which is due, not more to her exalted position,

than to her well-known charm of character and artistic gifts. It is

true that I do not run after great people on account of their mere

social position, but I am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man

who could rebuff the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.

D. G. ROSSETTI."

At the very juncture in question Lord Lorne was suddenly and unexpectedly

appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal

Highness did not return until Rossetti's health had somewhat suddenly

broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most

intimate friends.

My account of the friendship between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti would

not be complete without the poem entitled, 'A Grave by the Sea,' which I

think may be placed beside Milton's 'Lycidas,' Shelley's 'Adonais,'

Matthew Arnold's 'Thyrsis,' and Swinburne's 'Ave Atque Vale,' as one of

the noblest elegies in our literature:--

A GRAVE BY THE SEA

I

Yon sightless poet {157} whom thou leav'st behind,

Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,

Above the grave he feels but cannot see,

Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,

Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?

Ah no!--For all his sobs, he seems to me

Less lonely standing there, and nearer thee,

Than I--less lonely, nearer--standing blind!

Free from the day, and piercing Life's disguise

That needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,

His inner eyes may see thee as thou art

In Memory's land--see thee beneath the skies

Lit by thy brow--by those beloved eyes,

While I stand by him in a world apart.

II

I stand like her who on the glittering Rhine

Saw that strange swan which drew a faery boat

Where shone a knight whose radiant forehead smote

Her soul with light and made her blue eyes shine

For many a day with sights that seemed divine,

Till that false swan returned and arched his throat

In pride, and called him, and she saw him float

Adown the stream: I stand like her and pine.

I stand like her, for she, and only she,

Might know my loneliness for want of thee.

Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,

Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,

And then, departing like a vision thence,

Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.

III

Last night Death whispered: 'Death is but the name

Man gives the Power which lends him life and light,

And then, returning past the coast of night,

Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.

What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaim

The sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?

Art thou not vanished--vanished from my sight--

Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?

With Nature dumb, save for the billows' moan,

Engirt by men I love, yet desolate--

Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,

King'd by my sorrow, made by grief so great

That man's voice murmurs like an insect's drone--

What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?

IV

Last night Death whispered: 'Life's purblind procession,

Flickering with blazon of the human story--

Time's fen-flame over Death's dark territory--

Will leave no trail, no sign of Life's aggression.

Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,

Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.

Since Life is only Death's frail feudatory,

How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?'

I answered thus: 'If Friendship's isle of palm

Is but a vision, every loveliest leaf,

Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calm

This soul of mine in this most fiery grief?

If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,

What balm in knowing that Love is Death's--what balm?'

V

Yea, thus I boldly answered Death--even I

Who have for boon--who have for deathless dower--

Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,

Filling with music earth and sea and sky:

'O Death,' I said, 'not Love, but thou shalt die;

For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,

And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,

Death striking Love but strikes to deify.'

Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,

For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,

And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;

And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,

I watched--I listened for that voice of thine,

Though Reason said: 'Nor voice nor face can come.'

BIRCHINGTON,

EASTERTIDE, 1882.

Mr. Watts-Dunton has written many magnificent sonnets, but the sonnet in

this sequence beginning--

Last night Death whispered: 'Life's purblind procession,'

is, I think, the finest of them all. The imaginative conception packed

into these fourteen lines is cosmic in its sweep. In the metrical scheme

the feminine rhymes of the octave play a very important part. They

suggest pathetic suspense, mystery, yearning, hope, fear; they ask, they

wonder, they falter. But in the sestet the words of destiny are calmly

and coldly pronounced, and every rhyme clinches the voice of doom, until

the uttermost deep of despair is sounded in the iterated cry of the last

line. The craftsmanship throughout is masterly. There is, indeed, one

line which is not unworthy of being ranked with the great lines of

English poetry:

Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session.

Here by a bold use of the simple verb 'strikes' a whole poem is hammered

into six words. As to the interesting question of feminine rhymes, while

I admit that they should never be used without an emotional mandate, I

think that here it is overwhelming.

* * * * *

I have tried to show the beauty of the friendship between these two rare

spirits by means of other testimony than my own, for although I have been

granted the honour of knowing Rossetti's 'friend of friends,' I missed

the equal honour of knowing Rossetti, save through that 'friend of

friends.' But to know Mr. Watts-Dunton seems almost like knowing

Rossetti, for when at The Pines he begins to recall those golden hours

when the poets used to hold converse, the soul of Rossetti seems to come

back from the land of shadows, as his friend depicts his winsome ways,

his nobility of heart, his generous interest in the work of others, that

lovableness of nature and charm of personality which, if we are to

believe Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, worked, in some degree, ill for the poet.

Mr. Hueffer, who, as a family connection, may be supposed to represent

the family tradition about 'Gabriel,' has some striking and pregnant

words upon the injurious effect of Rossetti's being brought so much into

contact with admirers from the time when Mr. Meredith and Mr. Swinburne

were his housemates at Cheyne Walk. "Then came the 'Pre-Raphaelite'

poets like Philip Marston, O'Shaughnessy, and 'B. V.' Afterwards there

came a whole host of young men like Mr. William Sharp, who were serious

admirers, and to-day are in their places or are dead or forgotten; and

others again who came for the 'pickings.' They were all more or less

enthusiasts."

[Picture: 'The Green Dining Room,' 16 Cheyne Walk. (From a Painting by

Dunn, at 'The Pines.')]

Mr. Hake, in 'Notes and Queries' (June 7, 1902), says:

"With regard to the green room in which Winifred took her first

breakfast at 'Hurstcote,' I am a little in confusion. It seems to me

more like the green dining-room in Cheyne Walk, decorated with

antique mirrors, which was painted by Dunn, showing Rossetti reading

his poems aloud. This is the only portrait of Rossetti that really

calls up the man before me. As Mr. Watts-Dunton is the owner of

Dunn's drawing, and as so many people want to see what Rossetti's

famous Chelsea house was like inside, it is a pity he does not give

it as a frontispiece to some future edition of 'Aylwin.'

Unfortunately, Mr. G. F. Watts's picture, now in the National

Portrait Gallery, was never finished, and I never saw upon Rossetti's

face the dull, heavy expression which that portrait wears. I think

the poet told me that he had given the painter only one or two

sittings. As to the photographs, none of them is really

satisfactory."

I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of the famous

'Green Dining Room' at 16 Cheyne Walk, to which Mr. Hake refers. Mr.

Hake also writes in the same article: "With regard to the two circular

mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy

Grail, 'in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt,' I do not

remember seeing these there. But they are evidently the mirrors

decorated with copies by Dunn of the lost Holy Grail frescoes once

existing on the walls of the Union Reading-Room at Oxford. These

beautiful decorations I have seen at 'The Pines,' but not elsewhere." I

am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of one of

these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has generously permitted to

be specially taken for this book.

[Picture: One of the Carved Mirrors at 'The Pines,' decorated with Dunn's

copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the Oxford Union]

And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake's fascinating book of

poetry, 'The New Day,' which must live, if only for its reminiscences of

the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:--

THE NEW DAY

I

In the unbroken silence of the mind

Thoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,

And life is back among the days behind--

The spectral days of that lamented love--

Days whose romance can never be repeated.

The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,

We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,

His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.

These vanished hours, where are they stored away?

Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?

Its utterances are swallowed up in day;

The gabled house, the mighty master gone.

Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall--

What dreams he of the days we there recall?

II

O, happy days with him who once so loved us!

We loved as brothers, with a single heart,

The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us

From Nature to her blazoned shadow--Art.

How often did we trace the nestling Thames

From humblest waters on his course of might,

Down where the weir the bursting current stems--

There sat till evening grew to balmy night,

Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand

Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,

That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned

Triumphal labours of the day to be.

The words were his: 'Such love can never die;'

The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.

III

Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rill

Still calls the flowers upon its misty bank

To stoop into the stream and drink their fill.

And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,

Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,

Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.

Slowly a loosened weed another meets;

They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.

We are here surely if the world, forgot,

Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;

We are here surely at this witching spot,--

Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.

A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,

It is as if a play pervaded all.

IV

Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch's tender,

With many a speaking vision on the wall,

The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,

Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl--

'Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,

Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,

And Art grew fragrant in the glow of spring

With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.

Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,

Fed by the waters of the forest stream;

Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,

Where they so often fed the poet's dream;

Or else was mingled the rough billow's glee

With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.

V

Remember how we roamed the Channel's shore,

And read aloud our verses, each in turn,

While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,

And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.

Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to capture

The potent word that makes a thought abiding,

And wings it upward to its place of rapture,

While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.

Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonder

That art knew not the mighty reverie

That moves earth's spirit and her orb asunder,

While ocean's depths, even, seem a shallow sea.

Yet with rare genius could his hand impart

His own far-searching poesy to art.

The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all. It makes

me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the

fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with

him a new atmosphere--the salt atmosphere which envelops 'Mother Carey's

Chicken,' and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna. And yet

perhaps the description of

'The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming'

is equally fascinating.

Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush,

has in his sonnet 'The Shadow on the Window Blind,' made Kelmscott Manor

and the poetic life lived there still more memorable:--

Within this thicket's every leafy lair

A song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,

Though red behind their nests the moon has swum--

But still I see that shadow writing there!--

Poet, behind yon casement's ruddy square,

Whose shadow tells me why you do not come--

Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,

Flying and singing through thine inch of air--

Come thither, where on grass and flower and leaf

Gleams Nature's scripture, putting Man's to shame:

'Thy day,' she says, 'is all too rich and brief--

Thy game of life too wonderful a game--

To give to Art entirely or in chief:

Drink of these dews--sweeter than wine of Fame.'

'Aylwin,' too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and

Kelmscott.

The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk,

has been declared by one of Rossetti's most intimate friends to be

marvellously graphic and true:--

"On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after

threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and

pictures upon easels, I found D'Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa.

Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in

no mood to meet strangers. However, he sprang up and introduced me

to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a

peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one

of Mr. D'Arcy's chief buyers. This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.

He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a

stranger somewhat disconcerted him.

After he was gone D'Arcy said: 'A good fellow! One of my most

important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are

going to be friends, I hope.'

'He seems very fond of pictures,' I said.

'A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.'

A little while after this gentleman's departure, in came De Castro,

who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in

his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his

manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly

twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to

begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been

there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently

his metier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker.

Talk was his stock-in-trade.

The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept

pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going,

but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose

to go, but on getting a sign from D'Arcy that he wished me to stay I

sat down again. At last D'Arcy said:

'You had better go now, De Castro--you have kept that hansom outside

for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still

daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with

him alone.'

De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left

us.

D'Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that

became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing

abstractedly at the fireplace.

'Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other

night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things.

I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can't sleep

is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he

seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant.

I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.'

Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the

servant if Mr. D'Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not,

I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous

evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I

walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and

so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I

was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the

eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon

astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My

curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature.

He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me

to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and

explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees,

including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall.

Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of

black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to

be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I

approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness,

to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the

garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such

as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens.

Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.

My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned

to the house I found that D'Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at

work in the studio.

After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:

'No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie. Every man has one side

of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals

which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they

can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of

men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing.

I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of

enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of

a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep

me for hours from being bored.'

'And children,' I said--'do you like children?'

'Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals--until they

become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their

charm goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful

young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal?

What makes you sigh?'

My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her 'Prince of

the Mist' on Snowdon. And I said to myself, 'How he would have been

fascinated by a sight like that!'

My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I

then formed of D'Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since

then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the

view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were

at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal

as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin's quickness of

repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it

would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic

fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid

movements--so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be

merely fancy, in him became wit. Beneath the coruscations of this

wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.

His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but

here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his

other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a

humourist of the first order; every 'jeu d'esprit' seemed to leap

from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man

like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.

While he was talking he kept on painting."

Chapter XII

WILLIAM MORRIS

IT is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris.

In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton's 'Athenaeum'

monographs is the one upon him. Between these two there was an intimacy

of the closest kind--from 1873 to the day of the poet's death. This, no

doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton's graphic power, accounts for the

extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend. I have heard more

than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs

of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this

fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything

else that has been published about him. It is a grievous loss to

literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of

Morris is scarcely likely to write one. Morris, when he was busy in

Queen's Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the

gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox

Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton

were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint

occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti's death.

[Picture: Kelmscott Manor. (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)]

When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote 'Aylwin' he did not contemplate that the

Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott

Manor. The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters

were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and

D'Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti. Morris's passion for

angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and

this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr.

Watts-Dunton's life were spent at Kelmscott. Treffry Dunn's portrait of

him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at

Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the

picture.

Mr. Hake, in 'Notes and Queries' (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting

facts with regard to 'Hurstcote Manor' and Morris:--

"Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom

I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to

in 'Aylwin' (chap. lx. book xv.) as the 'enthusiastic angler' who

used to go down to 'Hurstcote' to fish. At that time this fine old

seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of

Rossetti and Morris. Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of

Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who,

with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris's will. The series of

'large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams' supporting

the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the

ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls--a

peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after

dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would

go to the attics to listen to them.

With regard to 'Hurstcote' I well knew 'the large bedroom, with

low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved

oak' upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the

description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful

'Madonna and Child,' upon the frame of which was written 'Chiaro

dell' Erma' (readers of 'Hand and Soul' will remember that name). I

wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr.

Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and

which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads

by two or three steps to the tapestried room 'covered with old faded

tapestry--so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a

dull grey texture'--depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the

tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same

pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the

'grand brunette' (painted from Mrs. Morris) 'holding a pomegranate in

her hand'; the 'other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening

and laughing over the fruit she is holding up' (painted from the same

famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in 'The Beloved'), and

the blonde 'under the apple blossoms' (painted from a still more

beautiful woman--Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently

placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on

a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott."

Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott,

was Morris's friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine

Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South

Kensington Museum--a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one

of the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died

prematurely. Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton's anecdotes of the causeries at

Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that

it is a pity they have never been recorded in print. Middleton was one

of Mr. Watts-Dunton's collaborators in the ninth edition of the

'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' to which he contributed the article on

'Rome,' one of the finest essays in that work.

Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his

work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he

ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the

'Athenaeum.' And the poet, might well say this, for those who have

studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon 'Sigurd,'

'The House of the Wolfings,' 'The Roots of the Mountains,' 'The

Glittering Plain,' 'The Well at the World's End,' 'The Tale of Beowulf,'

'News from Nowhere,' 'Poems by the Way,' will be inclined to put them at

the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton's purely critical work. The 'Quarterly

Review,' in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations

between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable

article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of

English Literature.' I record these facts, not in order to depreciate

the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going

to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton's monograph in the 'Athenaeum.'

The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death:--

"Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries,

that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is

to us all--that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may

easily be reconciled--nay, we might even look upon him as Nature's

final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel

means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The

thought that Morris's life had ended in the tragedy of pain--the

thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest

form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the

mortal coil--would have been intolerable almost. For among the

thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief,

that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment,

and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, 'Enjoy.'

Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of

wealth--cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two

daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to

understand a genius such as his--surrounded by friends, some of whom

were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the

very salt of the earth--it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she

touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Merimee

affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted

Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy

of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and

carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as

when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the

man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his

sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne

with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This

beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous

powers were at their best--and died without pain. The scheme of life

and death does not seem so much awry, after all.

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him--it was in the

little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned

out--he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a

subject he rarely chose to talk about--the mystery of life and death.

The conversation ended with these words of his: 'I have enjoyed my

life--few men more so--and death in any case is sure.'"

It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton's

reflections upon the wear and tear of genius:--

"It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death

was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the

imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the

peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea.

'Look at Gladstone,' he would say, 'look at those wise owls your

chancellors and your judges. Don't they live all the longer for

work? It is rust that kills men, not work.' No doubt he was right

in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded

to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the 'dry light of

intelligence,' a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without

any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion

of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt

it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey

pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of 'the thinking machine'

only, but of the whole man--the whole 'genial' nature of the

worker--his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of

lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the

part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence

when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and

presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is

overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for

its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitae.

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its

amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand

such a strain. Many are of opinion that 'The Lovers of Gudrun' is

his finest poem; he worked at it from four o'clock in the morning

till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had

produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem

like 'Sigurd.' Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the

Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in

our time; think, I say, of the collating of the 'Volsunga Saga' with

the 'Nibelungenlied,' the choosing of this point from the Saga-man,

and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing

the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the

nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a

considerable portion of a poet's life? And yet so great is the

entire mass of his work that 'Sigurd' is positively overlooked in

many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last

few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three

words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt

with fills up all the available space of a newspaper."

Mr. Watts-Dunton's critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than

in his remarks upon Morris's translation of the Odyssey:--

"Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris's translation;

yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric

qualities--those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other

poets--are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully

combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek

hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the

Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the

Iliad shows. Chapman's translations show that the eagerness also can

be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of

Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking

with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the

entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured

the eagerness as completely as Chapman's free-and-easy paraphrase,

and in a rendering as literal as Buckley's prose crib, which lay

frankly by Morris's side as he wrote. . . . Morris's translation of

the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an

almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a

glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the

modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet.

But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely

original poems, such as 'The Defence of Guenevere,' 'Jason,' 'The

Earthly Paradise,' 'Love is Enough,' 'Poems by the Way,' etc. And

then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is,

of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the 'Saga

Library.' Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a

work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the

language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so

concrete as to make each Saga an English poem--for poem each one is,

if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not

metre is the first requisite of a poem."

In connection with William Morris, readers of 'The Coming of Love' will

recall the touching words in the 'Prefatory Note':--

"Had it not been for the intervention of matters of a peculiarly

absorbing kind--matters which caused me to delay the task of

collecting these verses--I should have been the most favoured man who

ever brought out a volume of poems, for they would have been printed

by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press. As that projected edition

of his was largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the

subscribers is, I am told, required from me. Among the friends who

saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of

his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he

would die--myself. To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a

point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must

die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to

think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to

come upon us. And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my

verses in one of Mr. Lane's inviting little volumes will be dimmed

and marred by the thought that Morris's name also might have been,

and is not, on the imprint."

As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of 'The Coming of

Love' is an instance of that artistic conscientiousness which up to a

certain point is of inestimable value to the poet, but after that point

is reached, baffles him. The poem had been read in fragments and deeply

admired by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved.

Certain fragments of it had appeared in the 'Athenaeum' and other

journals, but the publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing

to the fact that certain portions of it had been lent and lost. Morris

not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an edition de luxe

of the book, but he actually took the trouble to get a full list of

subscribers, and insisted upon allowing the author a magnificent royalty.

Nothing, however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book

until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the

generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then, when the

book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which robbed us of one

of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. And even after

Morris's death the poet's executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis

and the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were willing

and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems should be

brought out. Subsequently, when a large portion of the lost poems was

found, the volume was published by Mr. John Lane. This anecdote alone

explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is never tired of dwelling upon the

nobility of Morris's nature, and upon his generosity in small things as

well as in large.

Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject is the

following. When Morris published his first volume in the Kelmscott

Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy of the book. He also

sent him a presentation copy of the second and third. But knowing how

small was the profit at this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott

Press, Mr. Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these

presentation copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest

against such extravagance. Mrs. Morris assured him that it would be

perfectly useless to do so. But when the edition of Keats was coming

out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to grapple with the matter, and one

Sunday afternoon when he was at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:

'Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber to the Keats, and

I give my commission for it in the presence of witnesses. I am a paying

subscriber to the Keats.'

'All right, old chap, you're a subscriber.'

In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the Keats; and

when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the following Sunday

afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had been made. Morris laughed.

'All right, there's no mistake--that is my presentation copy of Keats.'

But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was being

discussed--the marvellous Chaucer with Burne-Jones's illustrations--Mr.

Watts-Dunton knew that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and

probably sunk, and he said to Morris:

'Now, Morris, I'm going to talk to you seriously about the Chaucer. I

know that it's going to be a dead loss to you, and I do really and

seriously hope that you do not contemplate anything so wild as to send me

a presentation copy of that book. You know my affection for you, and you

know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me pain to

accept it.'

'Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to stay my hand, for,

between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some money over it; but the

Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned Jones and I are going to join

in the presentation of a copy to Algernon Swinburne.'

After this Mr. Watts-Dunton's mind was set at rest, as he told Mrs.

Morris. But when Mr. Swinburne's copy reached 'The Pines' it was

accompanied by another one--'Theodore Watts-Dunton from William Morris.'

Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr. Watts-Dunton also

tells. Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess a copy of 'The Golden Legend,'

bought the Kelmscott edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris

this. Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.

'What! Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of mine! Why I thought he did

not care for black letter reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy

of every book I brought out.'

And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent to 'The

Pines,' one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for Mr. Swinburne.

Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about 'The Water of the Wondrous Isles,' tells

this amusing story:--

"Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled into seeing and hearing

the great poet-singer Stead, whose rhythms have had such a great

effect upon the 'art poetic,' the author of 'The Perfect Cure,' and

'It's Daddy this and Daddy that,' and other brilliant lyrics. A

friend with whom Morris had been spending the evening, and who had

been talking about poetic energy and poetic art in relation to the

chilly reception accorded to 'Sigurd,' persuaded him--much against

his will--to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr. Stead, whose

performance consisted of singing a song, the burden of which was 'I'm

a perfect cure!' while he leaped up into the air without bending his

legs and twirled round like a dervish. 'What made you bring me to

see this damned tomfoolery?' Morris grumbled; and on being told that

it was to give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest,

without poetic art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way

out. If Morris were now alive--and all England will sigh, 'Ah, would

he were!'--he would confess, with his customary emphasis, that the

poet had nothing of the slightest importance to learn, even from the

rhythms of Mr. Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses

that were beyond the powers of the 'Great Vance.'"

Chapter XIII

THE 'EXAMINER'

LONG before Mr. Watts-Dunton printed a line, he was a prominent figure in

the literary and artistic sets in London; but, as Mr. Hake has said, it

was merely as a conversationalist that he was known. His conversation

was described by Rossetti as being like that of no other person moving in

literary circles, because he was always enunciating new views in

phrasings so polished that, to use Rossetti's words, his improvized

locutions were as perfect as 'fitted jewels.' Those who have been

privileged to listen to his table-talk will attest the felicity of the

image. Seldom has so great a critic had so fine an audience. Rossetti

often lamented that Theodore Watts' spoken criticism had never been taken

down in shorthand. For a long time various editors who had met him at

Rossetti's, at Madox Brown's, at Westland Marston's, at Whistler's

breakfasts, and at the late Lord Houghton's, endeavoured to persuade him

to make practical use in criticism of the ideas that flowed in a

continuous stream from his lips. But, as Rossetti used to affirm, he was

the one man of his time who, with immense literary equipment, was without

literary ambition. This peculiarity of his was eloquently described by

the late Dr. Gordon Hake in his 'New Day':--

You say you care not for the people's praise,

That poetry is its own recompense;

You care not for the wreath, the dusty bays,

Given to the whirling wind and hurried hence.

The first editor who secured Theodore Watts, after repeated efforts to do

so, was the late Professor Minto, and this only came about because during

his editorship of the 'Examiner' both he and Watts resided in Danes Inn,

and were constantly seeing each other.

It was Minto who afterwards declared that "the articles in the 'Examiner'

and the 'Athenaeum' are goldmines, in which we others are apt to dig

unconsciously without remembering that the nuggets are Theodore Watts's,

who is too lazy to peg out his claim." The first article by him that

appeared in Minto's paper attracted great attention and roused great

curiosity. This indeed is not surprising, for, as I found when I read

it, it was as remarkable for pregnancy of thought and of style as the

latest and ripest of his essays. A friend of his, belonging to the set

in which he moved, who remembers the appearance of this article, has been

kind enough to tell me the following anecdote in connection with it. The

contributors to the paper at that time consisted of Minto, Dr Garnett,

Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, 'Scholar' Williams, Comyns Carr, Walter Pollock,

Duffield (the translator of 'Don Quixote'), Professor Sully, Dr. Marston,

William Bell Scott, William Black, and many other able writers. On the

evening of the day when Theodore Watts's first article appeared, there

was a party at the house of William Bell Scott in Chelsea, and every one

was asking who this new contributor was. It was one of the conditions

under which the article was written that its authorship was to be kept a

secret. Bell Scott, who took a great interest in the 'Examiner,' was

especially inquisitive about the new writer. After having in vain tried

to get from Minto the name of the writer, he went up to Watts, and said:

"I would give almost anything to know who the writer is who appears in

the 'Examiner' for the first time today." "What makes you inquire about

it?" said Watts. "What is the interest attaching to the writer of such

fantastic stuff as that? Surely it is the most mannered writing that has

appeared in the 'Examiner' for a long time!" Then, turning to Minto, he

said: "I can't think, Minto, what made you print it at all." Scott, who

had a most exalted opinion of Watts as a critic, was considerably abashed

at this, and began to endeavour to withdraw some of his enthusiastic

remarks. This set Minto laughing aloud, and thus the secret got out.

From that hour Watts became the most noticeable writer among a group of

critics who were all noticeable. Week after week there appeared in this

historic paper criticism as fine as had ever appeared in it in the time

of Leigh Hunt, and as brilliant as had appeared in it in the time of

Fonblanque. At this time Minto used to entertain his contributors on

Monday evening in the room over the publisher's office in the Strand, and

I have been told by one who was frequently there that these smoking

symposia were among the most brilliant in London. One can well imagine

this when one remembers the names of those who used to attend the

meetings.

It was through the 'Examiner' that Watts formed that friendship with

William Black which his biographer, Sir Wemyss Reid, alludes to. Between

these two there was one subject on which they were especially in

sympathy--their knowledge and love of nature. At that time Black was

immensely popular. In personal appearance there was, I am told, a

superficial resemblance between the two, and they were constantly being

mistaken for each other; and yet, when they were side by side, it was

evident that the large, dark moustache and the black eyes were almost the

only points of resemblance between them.

It was at the then famous house in Gower Street of Mr. Justin McCarthy

that Black and Mr. Watts-Dunton first met. Speaking as an Irishman of a

younger but not, I fear, of so genial a generation, I hear tantalizing

accounts of the popular gatherings at the home of the most charming and

the most distinguished Irishman of letters in the London of that time,

where so many young men of my own country were welcomed as warmly as

though they had not yet to win their spurs. No one speaks more

enthusiastically of the McCarthy family than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who seems

to have been on terms of friendship with them almost as soon as he

settled in London. Mr. Watts-Dunton was always a lover of McCarthy's

novels, but on his first visit to Gower Street Mr. McCarthy was, as

usual, full of the subject not of his own novels, but of another man's.

He urged his new friend to read 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' almost

forcing him to take the book away with him, which he did: this was the

way in which Mr. Watts-Dunton became for the first time acquainted with a

story which he always avers is the only book that has ever revived the

rich rustic humour of Shakespeare's early comedies. A perfect household

of loving natures, warm Irish hearts, bright Irish intellects, cultivated

and rare, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton's testimony, was that little

family in Gower Street. I think he will pardon me for repeating one

quaint little story about himself and Black in connection with this first

visit to the McCarthys. On entering the room Mr. Watts-Dunton was much

struck with what appeared to be real musical genius in a bright-eyed

little lady who was delighting the party with her music. This was at the

period in his own life which Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his 'music-mad

period.' And after a time he got talking with the lady. He was a little

surprised that he was at once invited by the musical lady to go to a

gathering at her house. But he was as much pleased as surprised to be so

welcomed, and incontinently accepted the invitation. It never entered

his mind that he had been mistaken for another man, until the other man

entered the room and came up to the lady. She, on her part, began to

look in an embarrassed way from one to the other of the two swarthy,

black-moustached gentlemen. She had mistaken Mr. Watts-Dunton for

William Black, with whom her acquaintance was but slight. The

contretemps caused much amusement when the husband of the lady, an

eminent novelist, who knew Mr. Watts-Dunton well, introduced him to his

wife. I do not know what was the end of the comedy, but no doubt it was

a satisfactory one. It could not be otherwise among such people as

Justin McCarthy would be likely to gather round him.

At that time, to quote the words of the same friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton,

Watts used frequently to meet at Bell Scott's and Rossetti's Professor

Appleton, the editor of the 'Academy.' The points upon which these two

touched were as unlike the points upon which Watts and William Black

touched as could possibly be. They were both students of Hegel; and when

they met, Appleton, who had Hegel on the brain, invariably drew Watts

aside for a long private talk. People used to leave them alone, on

account of the remoteness of the subject that attracted the two. Watts

had now made up his mind that he would devote himself to literature, and,

indeed, his articles in the 'Examiner' showed that he had only to do so

to achieve a great success. Appleton rarely left Watts without saying,

"I do wish you would write for the 'Academy.' I want you to let me send

you all the books on the transcendentalists that come to the 'Academy,'

and let me have articles giving the pith of them at short intervals."

This invitation to furnish the 'Academy' with a couple of columns

condensing the spirit of many books about subjects upon which only a

handful of people in England were competent to write, seemed to Watts a

grotesque request, seeing that he was at this very time the leading

writer on the 'Examiner,' and was being constantly approached by other

editors. It was consequently the subject of many a joke between Minto,

William Black, Watts, and the others present at the famous 'Examiner'

gatherings. After a while Mr. Norman MacColl, who was then the editor of

the 'Athenaeum,' invited Watts to take an important part in the reviewing

for the 'Athenaeum.' At first he told the editor that there were two

obstacles to his accepting the invitation--one was that the work that he

was invited to do was largely done by his friend Marston, and that,

although he would like to join him, he scarcely saw his way, on account

of the 'Examiner,' which was ready to take all the work he could produce.

On opening the matter to Dr Marston, that admirably endowed writer would

not hear of Watts's considering him in the matter. The 'Athenaeum' was

then, as now, the leading literary organ in Europe, and the editor's

offer was, of course, a very tempting one, and Watts was determined to

tell Minto about it. And this he did.

"Now, Minto," he said, "it rests entirely with you whether I shall write

in the 'Athenaeum' or not." Minto, between whom and Watts there was a

deep affection, made the following reply:

"My dear Theodore, I need not say that it will not be a good day for the

'Examiner' when you join the 'Athenaeum.' The 'Examiner' is a struggling

paper which could not live without being subsidized by Peter Taylor, and

it is not four months ago since Leicester Warren said to me that he and

all the other readers of the 'Examiner' looked eagerly for the 'T. W.' at

the foot of a literary article. The 'Athenaeum' is both a powerful and a

wealthy paper. In short, it will injure the 'Examiner' when your name is

associated with the 'Athenaeum.' But to be the leading voice of such a

paper as that is just what you ought to be, and I cannot help advising

you to entertain MacColl's proposal."

In consequence of this Mr. Watts-Dunton closed with Mr. MacColl's offer,

and his first article in the 'Athenaeum' appeared on July 8, 1876.

Chapter XIV

THE 'ATHENAEUM'

AS the first review which Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed to the 'Athenaeum'

has been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any other

of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire. It has the

additional interest, I believe, of being the most rapidly executed piece

of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton ever achieved. Mr. MacColl,

having secured the new writer, tried to find a book for him, and failed,

until Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him whether he intended to give an article

upon Skelton's 'Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae.' The editor said that

he had not thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that,

if Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to him. As the

article was wanted on the following day, it was dictated as fast as the

amanuensis--not a shorthand writer--could take it down.

It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one of his

great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays on Victor

Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as any:--

'Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun?

Here, at least, is the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' squeezed into one volume.

Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which,

as far as we remember, is this. The library of the Indian kings was

composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to

remove it. But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading

much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said:

'Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of

both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin,

which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard

to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze 'em!' The Brahmin,

understanding well what the order to 'squeeze 'em' meant (for he was

a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little

flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words

and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work,

aided by many scribes--striking out all the idle words from every

book in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted

it was found that ten camels could carry that library without

ruffling a hair. And therefore the Brahmin was appointed 'Grand

Squeezer' of the realm. Ages after this, another prince, who loved

reading much and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand

Squeezer of his time and said: 'Thy duties are neglected, O Grand

Squeezer! Thy life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.'

Thereupon the Grand Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and

squeezed and squeezed till the whole library became at last a load

that a foal would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book,

a tiny volume, containing four maxims. Yet the wisdom in the last

library was the wisdom in the first.

The appearance of Mr. Skelton's condensation of the 'Noctes

Ambrosianae' reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn

warning we always find it our duty to administer to those who show a

propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship--the warning

that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying

for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary

be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by

itself. Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension

to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call 'the writing

fellows,' for adding to the camel's burden, instead of distributing

the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected

squeezers. We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that

almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints,

while nobody reads, and, to judge from the 'spelling bees,' nobody

even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a 'writing animal' is

on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself. This

is the alarming thing. Where are we to find so many squeezers? Nay,

in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer's

every book. Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle

squeezer--what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than

that he should squeeze 'Frederick the Great'--that enormous, rank and

pungent 'haggis' from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would

flow of 'oniony liquid' that compared with it the famous

'haggis-deluge' of the 'Noctes' which nearly drowned in gravy

'Christopher,' 'the Shepherd,' and 'Tickler' in Ambrose's parlour,

would be, both for quantity and flavour, but 'a beaker full of the

sweet South'? Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what

would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to

the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson--the mighty

Christopher, who for about thirty years literally talked in type upon

every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of

which he had none; whose 'words, words, words' are, indeed, as

Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, 'as the rush of mighty waters'?

What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to

guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, 'if what is said be not to the

purpose, a single word is already too much.'

Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations

upon the 'Noctes Ambrosianae.' He loves the memory of the fine old

Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that

are too timid of grip. In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot

overdo it. There are certain parts we should have especially liked

squeezed away; and among these--will Mr. Skelton pardon us?--are the

'amazingly humourous' ones, such as the 'opening of the haggis,'

which, Mr. Skelton tells us, 'manifests the humour of conception as

well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been

surpassed by the greatest masters'; 'the amazing humour' of which

consists in the Shepherd's sticking his supper knife into a 'haggis'

(a sheep's paunch filled with the 'pluck' minced, with suet, onions,

salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy

that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save

themselves from being drowned in it! In truth, Mr. Skelton should

have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the

Professor's twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining,

omit everything 'amazingly humourous,' he will be the best

Wilson-squeezer imaginable.

Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be. The 'Noctes' are

dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to save them, squeezes away all the

political events--so important once, so unimportant now--all the

foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in

them. He eliminates all the critiques upon all those 'greatest

poems' and those 'greatest novels of the age' written by

Christopher's friends--friends so famous once, so peacefully

forgotten now. And he has left what he calls the 'Comedy of the

Noctes Ambrosianae,' i.e. 'that portion of the work which deals with

or presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and

character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it

which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of

literary, artistic, or political interest only.' And, although Mr.

Skelton uses thus the word 'comedy' in its older and wider meaning,

it is evident that it is as an 'amazing humourist' that he would

present to our generation the great Christopher North. And

assuredly, at this the 'delighted spirit' of Christopher smiles

delightedly in Hades. For, however the 'Comic Muse' may pout upon

hearing from Mr. Skelton that 'the "Noctes Ambrosianae" belong to

her,' it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson's life was to

cultivate her--was to be an 'amazing humourist,' in short. It is

clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he

most of all affected, that which we call technically 'Rabelaisian.'

To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of

the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all

his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds

hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot. His personality was

enormous. He had more of that demonic element--of which since

Goethe's time we have heard so much--than any man in Scotland.

Everybody seems to have been dominated by him. De Quincey, with a

finer intellect than even his own--and that is using strong

language--looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master. It

is positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey's 'Autobiographic

Sketches,' to come again and again upon the naive refrain: 'I think

so, so does Professor Wilson.' Gigantic as was the egotism of the

Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism

of Christopher North. In this, as in everything else, he was the

opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter

Scott. Scott's desire was to create eccentric humourous characters,

but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself. Wilson's great

ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your

superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create. He would

like the universe to himself. If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if

you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that

character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a

smile: 'Don't you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I--John Wilson?'

He always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler

were John Wilson--as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather,

what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered. This

determination to be a humourous character it was--and no lack of

literary ambition--that caused him to squander his astonishing powers

in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man,

lament.

Many articles in 'Blackwood'--notably the one upon Shakspeare's four

great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge's

poetry--show that his insight into the principles of literary art was

true and deep--far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this

inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form,

nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature

show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or

review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his

merits.

Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to

ask us, on our oath, why Wilson's fourteen volumes of brilliant,

eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund

state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the

'Coverley' papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review

articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we

fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that

mere elaborated intellectual 'humour' has the seeds of dissolution in

it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live;

and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a

humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian.

But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what

precise meaning we attach to the word 'Rabelaisian'--though the

subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.

Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will

venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of

temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic

humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist--the

comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of

mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits,

with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the

almighty joke of the Cosmos--a mood which in literature is rarer than

in life--rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common

and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.

Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For

this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save

in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the

Shakspeares, the Molieres, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles,

the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots--upon whom the rich

tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and

yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.

Among these--to whom to create is everything--Sterne would perhaps

have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and

never read Rabelais; while Dickens's growth was a development from

Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr.

Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously

tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in

Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying

the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters.

Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor

could do that. But, strip the 'Shepherd's' talk of its Scottish

accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose

rush in the 'Recreations' and the 'Essays' we are so familiar with.

While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of

De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to

be purposely destroyed, and the 'Opium-Eater' becomes a fantastic

creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.

The 'amazing humour' of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it

Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine

Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the 'writing fellows' at all.

We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our

time. One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a

pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with

a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of

our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be

found--where he ought to be found--at Stratford-on-Avon. This is

interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there

were Rabelaisians, even among the 'writing fellows,' before Rabelais;

the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all

we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of

getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, 'in a duck-pond drowned

him,' he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very

first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say

nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the 'Birds' alone puts

Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But

when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: 'Let

down the curtain; the farce is done,' they were prophetic as regards

the literary Rabelaisians--prophetic in this, that no writer has

since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood--the mood, that is, of

the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles

of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle

has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped

upon several; for the great Cure divides his qualities among his

followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in

the 'Paradise of Fruits,' from which every other fruit in the garden

drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits

with stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the

cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half

stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits--the love

of life--the fine passion for victuals and drink--has fallen to

several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of 'John Buncle';

to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the 'Jolly Beggars'),

to John Skinner, the author of 'Tullochgorum.' Shakspeare, having

everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as

Cervantism. Some of the scenes in 'Henry the Fourth' and 'Henry the

Fifth' are rich with it. So is 'Twelfth Night,' to go no further.

Dickens's Rabelaisianism stopped with 'Pickwick.' If Hood's gastric

fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the

greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are

right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into

Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief.

Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and

this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour

becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the

harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by

imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated

animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we

ask the reader--who may very likely have been to an undergraduates'

wine-party, or to a medical students' revel, or who may have read the

'Noctes Ambrosianae'--we seriously and earnestly ask him whether,

among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is

anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.

And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say

to Mr. Skelton--for we believed in Professor Wilson once--it breaks

our heart to say that Wilson's Rabelaisianism is nothing but

jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In

reading the 'Noctes' we feel, as Jefferson's Rip van Winkle must have

felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains.

We say to ourselves, 'How comparatively comfortable we should feel if

those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn't pretend to be jolly--if

they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their

ghostly liquor!'

Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of

the great master's humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do

not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the

friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who

runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue

that all creatures know, 'I live, I live, I live!' But, whatever

might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring

about the literary cheerfulness of the 'Noctes' that, notwithstanding

all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at

heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real

Wilson is the Wilson of the 'Isle of Palms,' 'The City of the

Plague,' of the 'Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,' of the 'Lights and

Shadows of Scottish Life,' Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of

Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that 'almost the only

passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler

sympathies of our nature--tender compassion--confiding affection, and

gentleness and sorrow.'

He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a

good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney

army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been--Mr. Skelton

inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us

to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say

decidedly, he was not.

Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain

sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us

that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same

elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so

is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest,

and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is

humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the

little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous,

the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary

skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more

telling his wit. Now, Wilson's intellect was exceedingly and

wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many

a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of

those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds

from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay."

No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and

saw the author of it. Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and

indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry

between the 'Athenaeum' and the 'Academy.'

"You belong to us," said Appleton. "The 'Academy' is the proper place

for you. You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have

Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy's camp."

"And shall I tell you why I have joined the 'Athenaeum' in place of the

'Academy'?" said Watts; "it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you

did not."

"For months and months I have been urging you to write in the 'Academy,'"

said Appleton.

"That is true, no doubt," said Watts, "but while MacColl offered me an

important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you

invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon

metaphysics. It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late. If to join

the 'Athenaeum' is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a

Philistine am I."

* * * * *

I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then

called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends

afterwards. Shirley, in his 'Reminiscences' of Rossetti, like most of

his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the

poet-painter. I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides

cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a

genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays. I have heard him say more than

once that Skelton's style had a certain charm for him, and he could not

understand why Skelton's position is not as great as it deserves to be.

'Scotsmen,' he said, 'often complain that English critics are slow to do

them justice. This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol's

life. He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering

under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile

Club. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the

idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in

the great literary cockpit of London. To say the truth, the Scottish

cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can

more than take care of himself. For my part, with the exception of

Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish,

Scottish, or Welsh. But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had

been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an

enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been

more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was

liked.'

As will be seen further on, before the review of the 'Comedy of the

Noctes Ambrosianae' appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the

'Athenaeum' an article on 'The Art of Interviewing.' From this time

forward he became the chief critic of the 'Athenaeum,' and for nearly a

quarter of a century--that is to say, until he published 'The Coming of

Love,' when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any

kind--he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of

which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound

generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the

phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic

style--a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in

an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.

As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness

upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his

creative work is of the closest kind. Indeed, it has been said by

Rossetti that 'the subtle and original generalizations upon the first

principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to

him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own

poetry.' The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets.

Rossetti used humourously to call him 'The Symposiarch,' and no doubt the

influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at

Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr.

Marston's, Madox Brown's, and Mrs. Procter's, may be traced in his

writings. For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic

of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of

spontaneous conversation overheard. Its variety of manner, as well as of

subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism. In it

are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation,

irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily

mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit. To

the 'Athenaeum' he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as

'The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,' 'The Troubadours and Trouveres,'

'The Children of the Open Air,' 'The Gypsies,' 'Cosmic Humour,' 'The

Effect of Evolution upon Literature.' And although the most complete and

most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the

vast ocean of the 'Examiner,' the 'Athenaeum,' and the 'Encyclopaedia

Britannica,' there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is

proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, that

contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian

minister, to the 'Rivista d' Italia.' In this article she makes frequent

allusions to the 'Athenaeum' articles, and quotes freely from them.

Rossetti once said that 'the reason why Theodore Watts was so little

known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as

eagerly as other men sought fame'; but although his indifference to

literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts

of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his

influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be

profound.

There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves

untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates. His treatise in the

'Encyclopaedia Britannica' on 'Poetry' is alone sufficient to show how

deep has been his study of poetic principles. The essay on the 'Sonnet,'

too, which appeared in 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' is admitted by critics

of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject. It

has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl

Leutzner in his treatise, 'Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.'

The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the 'Athenaeum' are

admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B.

Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the 'Idler.' The

allusion to the 'smart slaters' will be sufficient to indicate the

approximate date of the interview.

"Having read your treatise on poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia

Britannica,' which, it is said, has been an influence in every

European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned

in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of

comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his

time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English

poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the

present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are

really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in

sympathy with the poetry of the present hour."

"I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic. To say

the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque

misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.

Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I

was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in

which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are

so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same

misconception seems to be spreading in England--attacks which the

smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing

men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers."

"It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the

newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd."

"I do not believe in answering attacks. The public, as I say, knows

that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm

to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer

does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I

have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of

letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations

upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a

review. It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one's

excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful

criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike

reviewing than mine. Yet it has one good quality, I think--it is

never unkindly. I never will take a book for review unless I can say

something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour."

"Then you never practise the smart 'slating' which certain would-be

critics indulge in?"

"Never! In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give

pain to a young writer. In the next place, this 'smart slating,' as

you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world.

Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as

many miles of such smart 'slating' as could be achieved by any six of

the smart slaters. A charming phrase of yours, 'smart slaters'! But

I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my

time--men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to

mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they

hold such work in contempt. Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for

instance. Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day

of his valuable life are wasted on 'leader' writing, but there is in

any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be

achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he!

going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.

Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.

While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by

making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little

spiteful brow, Grant Allen's good-natured sayings have the very wit

that the unlucky sweater and 'slater' is trying for. Read what he

said about William Watson, and see how kind he is. Compare his

geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. Again, take

Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters

in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the

scurrility of the smart writers. But it was not, I suppose, of such

as they that you came to talk about. You are asking me whether I am

in sympathy with the younger writers of my time. My answer is that I

cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.

In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of

them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal

friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work

and their aims. No doubt there are some points in which they and I

agree to differ."

"And what about our contemporary novelists? Perhaps you do not give

attention to fiction?"

"Give attention to novels! Why, if I did not, I should not give

attention to literature at all. In a true and deep sense all pure

literature is fiction--to use an extremely inadequate and misleading

word as a substitute for the right phrase, 'imaginative

representation.' 'The Iliad,' 'The Odyssey,' 'The AEneid,' 'The

Divina Commedia,' are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as

certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our

writers. The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old

Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and

the mustard-seed. A time which has given birth to such novelists as

many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time

for the English novel. Criticism will have to recognize, and at

once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of

the 'literature of power,' and if criticism does not so recognize it,

so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow

in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I

have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing

boy--it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough

for the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be

stretched to fit the muscles as they swell."

"I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent

critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?"

"Well, there I am a 'galled jade' that must needs 'wince' a little.

No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not

yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my

writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity. The chief

argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any

scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed

with the journal's own authority--and the same applies, of course, to

the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious. With regard

to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to

be always on his guard against it. An editor cannot read all the

books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary

world. When Jones asks him for Brown's book for review, the editor

cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up

irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes

in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones's name,

but that of the journal.

In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but

not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great

injustice may flow from this. I myself have more than once heard a

good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted

the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the

work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry

fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything."

Now that the day of the 'smart slaters' is over, it is interesting to

read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the

article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the

'Athenaeum,' spoke of its record and its triumphs:--

"The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every

line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through

its columns. Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that

the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is

difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the

editorial 'we.' But with regard to the general public, the reader of

a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of

the 'we,' and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an

author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men

ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. These were the

views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the

best writers of our time there can be no doubt. Some very

illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them. On a

certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne

Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having

accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced

himself, and told how he had stood 'dividing the swift mind' as to

whether he could or could not offer the man his hand. 'I think I

should have offered him mine,' said Rossetti, 'although no one

detests his offence more than I do.' And then the conversation ran

upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old

friends could not shake hands. 'There is one kind of miscreant,'

said Rossetti, 'whom you have forgotten to name--a miscreant who in

kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an

anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when

he knows it to be good. That is the man who should never defile my

hand by his touch. By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I

must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste

bread and salt with him. I would quietly get up and go.' Tennyson,

on afterwards being told this story, said, 'And who would not do the

same? Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege--sacrilege against

art.' Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume

of the 'Athenaeum' worked on the great principle that the critic's

primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art

and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by. Their

pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his

coadjutors; and from its commencement the 'Athenaeum' has striven to

avoid slashing and smart writing. A difficult thing to avoid, no

doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar

slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever. Of all

forms of writing, the founders of the 'Athenaeum' held the shallow,

smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable. And

here again the views of the 'Athenaeum' have remained unchanged. The

critic who works 'without a conscience or an aim' knows only too well

that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses

of human nature--the love that people have of seeing each other

attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself.

For although man has a strong instinct for admiration--else had he

never reached his present position in the conscious world--he has,

running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct--the

instinct for contempt. A reviewer's ridicule poured upon a writer

titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority. It is by

pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist

hopes to kill two birds with one stone--to gratify his own malignity

and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so.

Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is

far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all. Many

brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever,

have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart

saying. One of these writers--the greatest wit of the nineteenth

century--used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered

his own prodigious powers of wit, 'I will engage in six lessons to

teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks

it worth his while to learn.' And the 'Athenaeum,' at the time when

Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same

thing. The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and

among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching."

Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a

kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor

should 'come down a cropper' over some matter of fact, and open the door

to troublesome correspondence. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the

mysterious 'we' must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the

authority of the oracle? When a contributor 'comes down a cropper,'

although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor

cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of

the 'Saturday Review' under Cook) refuse to insert a correction. Now, as

Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, 'the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy

does it feel in setting other intelligences right.' I have been told

that it was a tradition in the office of the 'Examiner,' and also in the

office of the 'Athenaeum,' that Theodore Watts had not only never been

known to 'come down a cropper,' but had never given the 'critical gnats'

a chance of pretending that he had to. One day, however, in an article

on Frederick Tennyson's poems, speaking of the position that the poet

Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with

the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr.

Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith--the same Smith whom 'Z'

(the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the 'Athenaeum'--had been

admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer

had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith's with the metaphors of

Shakespeare. The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next

Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great

man:--

'Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson's poems,

which was published in your last number, please say where I have

compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?

HERBERT SPENCER.'

The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor

had at last 'come down a cropper,' sent a proof of Spencer's note to Mr.

Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any

editorial comment at all. Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last

'come down a cropper,' this would have been the wisest plan. But he

returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following

footnote added to it:--

"It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the

magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in

literary art--an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original

in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature

may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from

their ranks--and it is many years since we had the pleasure of

reading it. Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in

which he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as 'I speared

him with a jest,' etc. Our only object, however, in alluding to the

subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the

hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as

this--

--My drooping sails

Flap idly 'gainst the mast of my intent;

I rot upon the waters when my prow

Should grate the golden isles--

had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and

favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer."

Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, 'Of course

the article was Theodore Watts's. I had forgotten entirely what I had

said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.'

If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of

critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which

distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings, I think I should select this

bland postscript to Spencer's letter.

Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton

always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson. It

occurred in connection with 'Kidnapped.' I will quote here Mr.

Watts-Dunton's own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the

'Athenaeum' review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson's works. The

playful allusion to the 'Athenaeum's' kindness is very characteristic:--

"Of Stevenson's sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could

quote many instances; but let one suffice. When 'Kidnapped'

appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of

giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we

refused to be scared from making certain strictures. It occurred to

us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic

detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really

vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts.

From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of

two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to

weld into one. We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of

Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer,

anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power

is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story

on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding

one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the

villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him

and sending him off to the plantations. The 'Athenaeum,' whose

kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small,

has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its

usual kind and gentle way. This aroused the wrath of the

Stevensonians. Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the

author of 'Kidnapped' himself a charming letter.'

This letter appears in Stevenson's 'Letters,' and by the courtesy of Mr.

Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it

here:--

SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.

DEAR MR. WATTS,--The sight of the last 'Athenaeum' reminds me of you,

and of my debt now too long due. I wish to thank you for your notice

of 'Kidnapped'; and that not because it was kind, though for that

also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before

now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers. A critic

like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity,

and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance,

surely not in vain.

What you say of the two parts in 'Kidnapped' was felt by no one more

painfully than by myself. I began it, partly as a lark, partly as a

pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from

the canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the

cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old

friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back

door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to

me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a

man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private

means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist's

proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden:

the days of professional literature very hard. Yet I do not so far

deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing

my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality

to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my 'Kidnapped' was doomed,

while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the

thing it is.

And now to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight

on board the 'Covenant,' I think it literal. David and Alan had

every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good

conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first

attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have

taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms

and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.

The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever

ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not;

still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would

perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.--I am, dear Mr.

Watts, your very sincere admirer,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson, of his

personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and Stevenson, on

his part, in conversation never failed to speak of himself, as in this

letter he subscribes himself, as Mr. Watts-Dunton's sincere admirer. But

Mr. Watts-Dunton's admiration of Stevenson's work was more tempered with

judgment than was the admiration of some critics, who afterwards, when he

became too successful, disparaged him. Greatly as he admired 'Kidnapped'

and 'Catriona,' there were certain of Stevenson's works for which his

admiration was qualified, and certain others for which he had no

admiration at all. His strictures upon the story which seems to have

been at first the main source of Stevenson's popularity, 'Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde,' were much resented at the time by those insincere and fickle

worshippers to whom I have already alluded. Yet these strictures are

surely full of wisdom, and they specially show that wide sweep over the

entire field of literature which is characteristic of all his criticism.

As they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will quote

them here:--

"Take the little story 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' the laudatory

criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like

the comet's tail in relation to the comet. On its appearance as a

story, a 'shilling shocker' for the railway bookstalls, the critic's

attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred

qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the

world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to

its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing.

But when it is offered as a classic--and this is really how it is

offered--it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different

kind. It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having

a like motive--stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest

literature--as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke

to the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible

being--stories whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest

kind.

It is many years since, in writing of the 'Parables of Buddhaghosha,'

it was our business to treat at length of the grand idea of man's

dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been

embodied. We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsene

Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life's road, sees on a

lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards--when sin has

soiled him--finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own

sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely modern

story of Edgar Poe, 'William Wilson,' up to the earliest allegories

upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by

gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart

of the 'Great Man, Mankind.' We traced the idea, as far as our

knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and

found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive--from the

ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all

motives--had been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that

did honour to literary art. Manu, after telling us that 'single is

each man born into the world--single dies,' implores each one to

'collect virtue,' in order that after death he may be met by the

virtuous part of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in

traversing 'that gloom which is so hard to be traversed.' Fine as

this is, it is surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since

versified by Sir Edwin Arnold)--the story of the wicked king who met

after death a frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her

to be only a part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own

evil deeds. And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in

Arda Viraf, in which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid

pleasant trees whose fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of

his own dual nature, a beautiful maiden, who says to him, 'O youth, I

am thine own actions.'

And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in

which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it

deserves. It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous

tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery--a story of astonishing

brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man's

soul is effected not by psychological development, and not by the

'awful alchemy' of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the

previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed

new drug.

If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De

Quincey's 'Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,' it tells

poorly for Stevenson's sense of humour. If it is meant as a serious

allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same

motive with which most literatures have been enriched. That a story

so coarse should have met with the plaudits that 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde' met with at the time of its publication--that it should now be

quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while

all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are

ignored--what does it mean? Is it a sign that the 'shrinkage of the

world,' the 'solidarity of civilisation,' making the record of each

day's doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our

public writers? Is it that they not only have no time to think, but

no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour? Is it

that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon

them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and

turn to it for convenient illustration? That Stevenson should have

been impelled to write the story shows what the 'Suicide Club' had

already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a

charm to 'Treasure Island' and 'Kidnapped,' there was that morbid

strain which is so often associated with physical disease.

Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all

writers since Chaucer--Walter Scott--Stevenson might have been in the

ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who

do their best to make life hideous. It must be remembered that he

was a critic first and a creator afterwards. He himself tells us how

critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to

writing himself. No one really understood better than he Hesiod's

fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a

forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares. No one understood

better than he Joubert's saying, 'Fiction has no business to exist

unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one aim

is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere

frightful reality.' And for the most part he succeeded in keeping

down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a

crazy body.

Save in such great mistakes as 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' and a few

other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert's excellent maxim. But

Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter--right by

instinct. He alone is always a delight. If all art is dedicated to

joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious

problem than how to make men happy, then the 'Waverley Novels' are

among the most precious things in the literature of the world."

Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always speaks warmly

is Browning. Among the many good anecdotes I have heard him relate in

this connection, I will give one. I do not think that he would object to

my doing so.

"It is one of my misfortunes," said he, "to be not fully worthy (to

use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning's poetry.

Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative

and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements

in a general way not pleasing to my ear. When a certain book of his

came out--I forget which--it devolved upon me to review it. Certain

eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I

expressed my irritation in something very like chaff. A close friend

of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself--in fact, Mr.

Swinburne--chided me for it, and I feel that he was right. On the

afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal

Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began

talking about the review. Lowell, I found, was delighted with

it--said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had

appeared for many years. 'But,' said he, 'You're a brave man to be

here where Browning always comes.' Then, looking round the room, he

said: 'Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side

opposite to us. Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!'

'Slip away!' I said, 'to avoid Browning! You don't know him as well

as I do, after all! Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if

we stand here for a minute or two. Miss Browning, whose eyes are

looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak

to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me.

And then you will see her turn her head to Browning's ear and tell

him something. And then Browning will come straight across to me and

be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing

that be possible.'

'No, I don't believe it.'

'If you were not such a Boston Puritan,' I said, 'I would ask you

what will you bet that I am wrong.'

No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied, Miss

Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn and whisper

in Browning's ear, and Browning did come straight across the room to

us; and this is what he said, speaking to me before he spoke to the

illustrious American--a thing which on any other occasion he would

scarcely have done:

'Now,' said he, 'you're not going to put me off with generalities any

longer. You promised to write and tell me when you could come to

luncheon. You have never done so--you will never do so, unless I fix

you with a distinct day. Will you come to-morrow?'

'I shall be delighted,' I said. And he turned to Lowell and

exchanged a few friendly words with him.

After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: 'Well, this is

wonderful. You would have won the bet. How do you explain it?'

'I explain it by Browning's greatness of soul and heart. His

position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative

review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him. But

he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson,

Jowett, and others. He wishes to make it quite apparent that he

feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.'"

After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to turn to

the bound volume of my 'Athenaeum' and read the article on 'Ferishtah's

Fancies,' which I imagine must have been the review in question. This is

what I read:--

'The poems in this volume can only be described as

parable-poems--parable-poems, not in the sense that they are capable

of being read as parables (as is said to be the case with the

'Ruba'iyat' of Omar Khayyam), but parable-poems in the sense that

they must be read as parables, or they show no artistic raison d'etre

at all.

Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem? It

is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the

young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall. Or rather, it is to

imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda,

and set the preacher strumming a gypsy's tambourine. Though in the

pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so

absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses

it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere

with that entire abandon--that emotional freedom--which seems

necessary to the very existence of song. Indeed, if poetry must,

like Wordsworth's ideal John Bull, 'be free or die'; if she must know

no law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of 'L'art pour

l'art' declares); if she must not even seem to know _that_ (as the

doctrine of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it

apparently in tricksy sport alone--how can she--'the singing maid

with pictures in her eyes'--mount the pulpit, read the text, and

deliver the sermon?

In European literature how many parable poems should we find where

the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly strife? But

we discussed all this in speaking of prose parables, comparing the

stories of the Prodigal Son and Kisagotami with even such perfect

parable poetry as that of Jami. We said then what we reiterate now:

that to sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius

of a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order--a genius

rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a certain

Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot in

floriculture. Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental fancies, and

being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy with a certain

fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar with the

Persian story we allude to, the famous story of 'Poetry and

Cabbages.' Still, we will record it here for a certain learned

society.

The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers,

and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages. So the

Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tuba Tree (whose fruit becomes

flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to

another, 'The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well

be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon;

for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in

colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they

are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so

very intent upon cabbages.' So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit

on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers

out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words

of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven. So

bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer--for not only has

Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the

poet--

Breathe a stream of otto and balm,

Which through a woof of living music blown

Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?

--so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the

angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and

perfumed words upon the petals. And this was how the Angels of the

Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of 'Poetry and

Cabbages.'

But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is

nothing less than the celestial charactery of heaven, and is

consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very few--that is to

say, the eyes of those mortals who are 'of the race of Israfel.' To

common eyes--the eyes of the ordinary human cabbage-grower--what,

indeed, is that angelic caligraphy with which the petals of the

flowers are ornamented? Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful

veins and scents and colours.

But who are 'of the race of Israfel'? Not the prosemen, certainly,

as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher's idle

nonsense about the 'Alphabet of the Angels' in his 'AEdipus

Egyptiacus.' Are they, then, the poets? This is indeed a solemn

query. 'If,' says Feridun, 'the mottoes that adorn the bowers of

Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall

be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of

hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?'

One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel--the

parable-poet--the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as

reasoned conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized

in concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic

form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it

that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the

colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of

these, and to be as inseparable from them as the 'morning breath' of

the Sabaean rose is inalienable from the innermost petals--'the

subtle odour of the rose's heart,' which no mere chemistry of man,

but only the morning breeze, can steal."

It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous for Mr.

Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and we have only to contrast it--or

its richness and its rareness--with the naive, simple, unadorned style of

'Aylwin' to realize how wide is the range of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a master

of the fine shades of literary expression.

Chapter XV

THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER

AND now begins the most difficult and the most responsible part of my

task--the selection of one typical essay from the vast number of essays

expressing more or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to

all Mr. Watts-Dunton's work. I can, of course, give only one, for

already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions far beyond

those originally intended for it. Naturally, I thought at first that I

would select one of the superb articles on Victor Hugo's works, such for

instance as 'La Legende des Siecles,' or that profound one on 'La

Religion des Religion.' But, after a while, when I had got the essay

typed and ready for inclusion, I changed my mind. I thought that one of

those wonderful essays upon Oriental subjects which had called forth

writings like those of Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better.

Finally, I decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full

of profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible, that it

was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the Bible in Europe

and in America. Mr. Watts-Dunton has often been urged to reprint this

essay as a brief text-book for scholastic use, but he has never done so.

It will be noted by readers of 'Aylwin' that even so far back as the

publication of this article in the 'Athenaeum ', in 1877, Mr.

Watts-Dunton--to judge from the allusion in it to 'Nin-ki-gal, the Queen

of Death'--seems to have begun to draw upon Philip Aylwin's 'Veiled

Queen':--

"There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive

subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western

literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform

failure of these attempts. At the time that Sternhold was 'bringing'

the Psalms into 'fine Englysh meter' for Henry the Eighth and Edward

the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for

their own monarchs--notably Clement Marot for Francis the First. And

it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any

importance having been entered against it. This is astonishing, for

the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a

sacred book. Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come,

and a literary journal may be its proper medium.