A great living savant has characterized the Bible as 'a collection of

the rude imaginings of Syria,' 'the worn-out old bottle of Judaism

into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.' The

great savant was angry when he said so. The 'new wine' of science is

a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets

from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much

intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless. But whatever may

become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have

passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of

Chaldaea,--the 'old bottle' is going to be older yet,--the Bible is

going to be eternal. For that which decides the vitality of any book

is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul--not the

knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the

universe, unseen as well as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just

that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always

assume--that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as

this--that of a noble humility before a God such as He 'in whose

great Hand we stand.' This is why--like Alexander's mirror--like

that most precious 'Cup of Jemshid,' imagined by the Persians--the

Bible reflects to-day, and will reflect for ever, every wave of human

emotion, every passing event of human life--reflect them as

faithfully as it did to the great and simple people in whose great

and simple tongue it was written. Coming from the Vernunft of Man,

it goes straight to the Vernunft. This is the kind of literature

that never does die: a fact which the world has discovered long ago.

For the Bible is Europe's one book. And with regard to Asia, as far

back as the time of Chrysostom it could have been read in languages

Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan;

now it can be read in every language, and in almost every dialect,

under the sun.

And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms.

Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful;

the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible

to sing so badly. It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I

should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should

find it in their hearts to sing Marot's Psalms when they might have

sung David's--that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable

jig, 'O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation'; and that Anthony,

King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, 'Stand

up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.' For, although it is given to the

very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the

ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar

convolution.

In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the

English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in

various incarnations, are fastidious.

When Lord Macaulay's tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating

the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British

Museum to study us through our books--what volume can he take as the

representative one--what book, above all others, can the ghostly

librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into

the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure

in the earth? We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the

English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the

Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most

exalted and its most abject phases. That in the same volume can be

found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the

grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of

Brady and Tate--masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous

is an inspired bard--would be adequate evidence that the Church using

it must be a British Church--that British, most British, must be the

public tolerating it.

'By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy

Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and

Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver

us.'

Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in

such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music

are so mysteriously blended--blended so divinely that the man who can

utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch

close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from

some of us. Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that

could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said:--'More than any

race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and

energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is

their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration

as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.' And now listen to

this:--

When we, our wearied limbs to rest,

Sat down by proud Euphrates' stream,

We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,

And Zion was our mournful theme.

Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have

thus degraded the words: 'By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat

down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.' For, to achieve such

platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the

'Hopkins element,' an element which is quite an insular birthright of

ours, a characteristic which came over with the 'White Horse,'--that

'dull and greasy coarseness of taste' which distinguishes the British

mind from all others; that 'achtbrittische Beschranktheit,' which

Heine speaks of in his tender way. The Scottish version is rough,

but Brady and Tate's inanities are worse than Rous's roughness.

Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and

the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it

come? It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking

the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end,

and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set

the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for

generations:--'What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental,

difference between English literature--and all other Western

literatures--Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?' The simple

truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been

bipartite as now--has always been, as now, half sublime and half

homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired

by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk

schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such

of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them.

For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has

been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction

of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he

is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty. When St.

Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins,

a heathen then, in possession of the soil.

There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says.

The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous,

much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by

nature none of the Hebraic style. But, somehow, here is the

difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is

born of taste--though le style c'est la race; and though the

Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone;

yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of

many years--just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows

not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him--so

may the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil

be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years. The

result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their

deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the

Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes

when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in

parts of Raleigh's 'History of the World,' in Jeremy Taylor's

sermons, in Hall's 'Contemplations,' and other such books of the

seventeenth century.

The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined. To

define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life. When we

say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean

that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or

unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or

conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental.

It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or

grace--manner is conscious power or grace. But the Great Style, both

in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace

in one.

And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression

of a national temper? Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does.

Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive

with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness

of the Aryan mind--not, certainly, to those who, though producing

AEschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians,

but to the descendants of Shem,--the only gentleman among all the

sons of Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the

face of God and live, can see not much else. The Great Style, in a

word, is Semitic. It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic. For

though two of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt,

plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the

most part. The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as

compared with Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high

reach of ethical writing as even that noble and well-known passage

from Manu, beginning, 'Single is each man born into the world, single

he dies,' etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared

with the ethical parts of Scripture. The Persians have the grace

always, the power often, but the unconsciousness almost never. We

might perhaps say that there were those in Egypt once who came near

to the great ideal. That description of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,'

the Queen of Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British

Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite. Conscious power

and conscious grace are Hellenic, of course. That there is a deal of

unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons

by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how

artificial he seems. And note that, afterwards, when he who

approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the

Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the

Nile. It is to the Latin races--some of them--that has filtered

Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has

been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain,

but straight from the Hebrew.

What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have--unconsciousness;

often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalite.

Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too. The Hopkins

element,--the dull and stupid homeliness,--the coarse grotesque,

mingle with and mar its finest effects. Over it all the atmosphere

is that of pantomime--singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner's

libretti. Even that great final conflict between gods and men and

the swarming brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the

Volu-seeress, when from Yotunland they come and storm the very gates

of Asgard;--even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar

picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and

digesting the universe to chaos. But, out of the twenty-three

thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no

one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist

to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement. This is why

style in literature is virtue. Like royalty, the Great Style 'can do

no wrong.'

Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far

the largest endowment. They wanted another element, in short, not

the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that

of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live;

as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold--two of the finest and most delicate

minds of modern times--can testify.

But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before

the Bishops' Bible or Coverdale's Bible; long before even Aldhelm's

time--Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon

mind. From the time when Caedmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep

beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the

Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic.

Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was

steeped had been Hebraism at second hand--that of the Vulgate

mainly--till Tyndale's time, or rather till the present Authorized

Version of the Bible appeared in 1611. 'There is no book,' says

Selden, 'so translated as the Bible for the purpose. If I translate

a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into

French-English. "Il fait froid," I say, 'tis cold, not it makes

cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into

English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that

language is kept.'

And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal

accuracy--importation of Hebraisms--was not of itself enough to

produce a translation in the Great Style--a translation such as this,

which, as Coleridge says, makes us think that 'the translators

themselves were inspired.' To reproduce the Great Style of the

original in a Western idiom, the happiest combination of

circumstances was necessary. The temper of the people receiving

must, notwithstanding all differences of habitation and civilization,

be elementally in harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it

must be poetic rather than ratiocinative. Society must not be too

complex--its tone must not be too knowing and self-glorifying. The

accepted psychology of the time must not be the psychology of the

scalpel--the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics of newspaper

cynicism; above all, enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered

synonymous terms. Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the

faintest suspicion of nineteenth century flavour. That this is the

kind of national temper necessary to such a work might have been

demonstrated by an argument a priori. It was the temper of the

English nation when the Bible was translated. That noble

heroism--born of faith in God and belief in the high duties of

man--which we have lost for the hour--was in the very atmosphere that

hung over the island. And style in real life, which now, as a

consequence of our loss, does not exist at all among Englishmen, and

only among a very few Englishwomen--having given place in all classes

to manner--flourished then in all its charm. And in literature it

was the same: not even the euphuism imported from Spain could really

destroy or even seriously damage the then national sense of style.

Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what

must that be? Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do

all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and

yet must be free from any soupcon of that 'artifice,' in the

'abandonment' of which, says an Arabian historian, 'true art alone

lies.' For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art,

the Semites show but small conception, even in Job. It was too

sacred for that--drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike

unknown.

But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation

of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical

prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic

and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be

chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon;

just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even

ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion. It

must be neither verse nor prose, it seems. It must be a new movement

altogether. The musical movement of the English Bible is a new

movement; let us call it 'Bible Rhythm.' And the movement was

devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. Thanks to

Difficulty--thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls 'Hebrew

phrase and English phrase,' the translators fashioned, or rather,

Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor

wholly the other--a movement which, for music, for variety,

splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English

poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern

world--a movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself--but a

form in which 'artifice' is really 'abandoned' at last. This rhythm

it is to which we referred as running through the English

Prayer-book, and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest

reaches perhaps being in the Psalms--this rhythm it is which the

Hopkinses and Rouses have--improved! It would not be well to be too

technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest literary importance

just now, and it is necessary to explain clearly what we mean.

Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is

technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the

fulfilment of expectation. In rhymed verse this is obvious: having

familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet's rhymes, we

take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to

this arrangement. In blank verse the law of expectation is less

apparent. Yet it is none the less operative. Having familiarized

ourselves with the poet's rhythm, having found that iambic foot

succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun

to grow monotonous, variations occur--trochaic, anapaestic,

dactylic--according to the law which governs the ear of this

individual poet;--we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals

these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are

fulfilled. And our delight is augmented if also our expectations

with regard to caesuric effects are realized in the same proportions.

Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has

an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say,

to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence,--we expect

that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard

to the initial foot of any sequence,--there must be, not far ahead,

that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses

have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader

shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights. And when

this expectation of caesuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified

in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which

obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final

third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result.

In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from

poetry is in the recognition of law. The more obvious and formulated

is the law,--nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian,--the more

pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear. This is why uneducated

people may delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank

verse; this is why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme,

takes pleasure in such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom.

But, as the ear becomes more cultivated, it demands that these

indications of law should be more and more subtle, till at last

recognized law itself may become a tyranny and a burden. He who will

read Shakespeare's plays chronologically, as far as that is

practicable, from 'Love's Labour's Lost' to the 'Tempest,' will have

no difficulty in seeing precisely what we mean. In literature, as in

social life, the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny,

to freedom that is lawful. Now the great features of Bible Rhythm

are a recognized music apart from a recognized law--'artifice' so

completely abandoned that we forget we are in the realm of

art--pauses so divinely set that they seem to be 'wood-notes wild,'

though all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious

law too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties

infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties that

are unexpected. There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the

'moving music which is life'; it is the living metre of the surging

sea within the soul of him who speaks; it is the free effluence of

the emotions and the passions which are passing into the words. And

if this is so in other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms,

where 'the flaming steeds of song,' though really kept strongly in

hand, seem to run reinless as 'the wild horses of the wind'?"

Chapter XVI

A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR

THE reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of

what I may call 'The Renascence of Wonder' essays gave me so much trouble

that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay

typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton's criticism dealing with what he calls 'the

laws of cause and effect in literary art' it naturally occurred to me to

write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two. In response to my

letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection

for a friend took entire precedence of his own work:--

"MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,--The selections from my critiques must really

be left entirely to yourself. They are to illustrate your own

critical judgment upon my work, and not mine. Overwhelmed as I am

with avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge

into the countless columns of the 'Athenaeum,' in quest of articles

of mine which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden

at the present moment. I can think of only one article which I

should specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in

part--not on account of any merit in it which I can recall, but

because it was the means of bringing me into contact with one of the

most delightful men and one of the most splendidly equipped writers

of our time, whose sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond

measure. A few days after the article appeared, the then editor of

the 'Athenaeum,' Mr. MacColl, the dear friend with whom I was

associated for more than twenty years, showed me a letter that he had

received from Traill. It was an extremely kind letter. Among the

many generous things that Traill said was this--that it was just the

kind of review article which makes the author regret that he had not

seen it before his book appeared. I wrote to Traill in

acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not until a good while

after this that we met at the Incorporated Authors' Society dinner.

At the table where I was sitting, and immediately opposite me, sat a

gentleman whose countenance, especially when it was illuminated by

conversation with his friends, perfectly charmed me. Although there

was not the smallest regularity in his features, the expression was

so genial and so winsome that I had some difficulty in persuading

myself that it was not a beautiful face after all, and his smile was

really quite irresistible. The contrast between his black eyebrows

and whiskers and the white hair upon his head gave him a peculiarly

picturesque appearance. Another thing I noticed was a boyish kind of

lisp, which somehow, I could not say why, gave to the man an added

charm. I did not know it was Traill, but after the dinner was over,

when I was saying to myself, 'That is a man I should like to know,' a

friend who sat next him--I forget who it was--brought him round to me

and introduced him as 'Mr. Traill.' 'You and I ought to know each

other,' he said, 'for, besides having many tastes in common, we live

near each other.' And then I found that he lived near the

'Northumberland Arms,' between Putney and Barnes. I think that he

must have seen how greatly I was drawn to him, for he called at The

Pines in a few days--I think, indeed, it was the very next day--and

then began a friendship the memory of which gives me intense

pleasure, and yet pleasure not unmixed with pain, when I recall his

comparatively early and sudden death. I used to go to his

gatherings, and it was there that I first met several interesting men

that I had not known before. One of them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney

Low, then the editor of the 'St. James's Gazette.' And I also used

to meet there interesting men whom I had known before, such as the

late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose 'Light of Asia,' and other such works, I

had reviewed in the 'Athenaeum.' I do not hesitate for a moment to

say that Traill was a man of genius. Had he lived fifty years

earlier, such a writer as he who wrote 'The New Lucian,' 'Recaptured

Rhymes,' 'Saturday Songs,' 'The Canaanitish Press' and 'Israelitish

Questions,' 'the Life of Sterne,' and the brilliant articles in the

'Saturday Review' and the 'Pall Mall Gazette,' would have made an

unforgettable mark in literature. But there is no room for anybody

now--no room for anybody but the very, very few. When he was about

starting 'Literature,' he wrote to me, and a gratifying letter it

was. He said that, although he had no desire to wean me from the

'Athenaeum,' he should be delighted to receive anything from me when

I chanced to be able to spare him something. It was always an

aspiration of mine to send something to a paper edited by so

important a literary figure--a paper, let me say, that had a finer,

sweeter tone than any other paper of my time--I mean, that tone of

fine geniality upon which I have often commented, that tone without

which, 'there can be no true criticism.' A certain statesman of our

own period, who had pursued literature with success, used to say

(alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead), that the

besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of gentlemanlike

feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all the other

educated classes. This might have been so then, but, through the

influence mainly of 'Literature' and H. D. Traill, it is not so now.

Many people have speculated as to why a literary journal, edited by

such a man, and borne into the literary arena on the doughty back of

the 'Times,' did not succeed. I have a theory of my own upon that

subject. Although Traill's hands were so full of all kinds of

journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is a mistake to

suppose that his own journal was badly edited. It was well edited,

and it had a splendid staff, but several things were against it. It

confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as I remember,

give its attention to much else. Its price was sixpence; but its

chief cause of failure was what I may call its 'personal appearance.'

If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor at the

beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the first

quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper or a

magazine. When the 'Saturday Review' was started, its personal

appearance--something quite new then--did almost as much for it as

the brilliant writing. It was the same with the 'Pall Mall Gazette'

when it started. Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a

great deal in clothes. Now, as I told Traill when we were talking

about this, 'Literature' in appearance seemed an uninviting cross

between the 'Law Times' and 'The Lancet'--it seemed difficult to

connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a

business-like looking sheet as that. Traill laughed, but ended by

saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of

mine. Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died

only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten. I should

be sorry indeed to think that. All that I can say is that for a book

such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about

Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as

any that Traill's own delightful whimsical imagination could have

pictured."

Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton's wishes, and I do this with the

more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on

Sterne and the imaginative work--the theory of absolute humour

exemplified in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article.

It was a review of Traill's 'Sterne,' in the 'English Men of Letters,'

and it appeared in the 'Athenaeum' of November 18, 1882. I will quote

the greater part of it:--

"Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated

writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and

Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while

Addison as a humorist is not even talked about. In gauging the

quality of poetry--in finding for any poet his proper place in the

poetic heavens--there is always uncertainty and difficulty. With

humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily

in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous

relations, and that the quality of every man's humour depends upon

the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable. If,

for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities

deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his

relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey

to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and

the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and

the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent. Again, if

a man's sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is

confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between

individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is

surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt--according, at least, to

the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according

to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon

in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the

Philistine only. If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree)

Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer's sense of the incongruous

is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill

calls 'the irony of human intercourse,' he is indeed a humourist, and

in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily

of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of

the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to

apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest

and deepest incongruities possible. And it will be found that these

harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very 'order of the

universe' itself and the mind of man. In certain temperaments the

eternal incongruities between man's mind and the scheme of the

universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and

Novalis; but to other temperaments--to a Rabelais or Sterne, for

instance--the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder,

turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most

temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some 'paradis

artificiel.' Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is

that of 'human intercourse,' if he has no sense of this much deeper

irony--the irony of man's intercourse with the universal harmony

itself--he cannot be ranked with the very greatest. Of this irony in

the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive,

while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment. Of Swift and Carlyle it

might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible

apprehension of it. And if we should find that this quality exists

in 'Tristram Shandy,' how high, then, must we not place Sterne! And

if we should find that Cervantes deals with the 'irony of human

intercourse' merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity,

terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne? Why

is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is

based so melancholy? Because it only sees the farce from the human

point of view. The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a

soul deeply conscious of man's ludicrous futility in his relations to

his fellow-man. But while the futilities of 'Don Quixote' are tragic

because terrene, the futilities of 'Tristram Shandy' are comic

because they are derived from the order of things. It is the great

humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock

at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the

constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram's nose. And if

Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end

a benevolent king; and hence all is well.

While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a

humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne

under a classification. In Sterne's writings every kind of humour is

to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must

have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as

Addison's, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare's. In loving

sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by

Sterne in his 'fat, foolish scullion.' Lower than the Dogberry type

there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to

whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph. While

the news of Bobby's death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen,

suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must

follow such a sad calamity to the 'fat, foolish scullion,' scrubbing

her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of

her own life, and consequently to the wail that 'Bobby is certainly

dead' her soul merely answers as she scrubs, 'So am not I.' In four

words that scullion lives for ever.

Sterne's humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian,

Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for

such a Proteus? So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at

first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing

its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the

method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can

work. Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed

the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of

Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate

between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on

the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne's

natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or

Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the

humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation. But

the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly

shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which

he pretended to be. And after all this is the important question as

regards Sterne. Lamb's critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly

seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own 'self-pleasing

quaintness.' When any form of art departs in any way from

symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it

is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic?

That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we

feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the

artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust. In the

humourous portions of Sterne's work there is, probably, not a page,

however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and

therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an

offence. . . .

'Yorickism' is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of

the humour of Swift. One recognizes that the universe is rich in

things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the

universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate. One recognizes

that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and

(because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that

there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as

a man. The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in

the temperament--the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of

Apemantus. And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to

say which fate is more terrible, Swift's or Carlyle's--that of the

man whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing

intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious,

conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot.

It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick.

It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in

a roar, or of him who, in the words of the 'cadet of the house of

Keppoch,' was 'sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick,

a very great favourite of the gentlemen.' Sterne, like Jaques and

Hamlet, deals with 'the irony of human intercourse,' but what he

specially recognizes is a deeper irony still--the irony of man's

intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the

intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical

being--the irony, in short, of man's position amid these natural

conditions of life and death. It is in the apprehension of this

anomaly--a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature--that

Sterne's strength lies.

Man, the 'fool of nature,' prouder than Lucifer himself, yet 'bounded

in a nutshell,' brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more

account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little

'beastie' whose house is ruined by the ploughshare--here is, indeed,

a creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at

and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter! There is

nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because

they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is

nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a

horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the

grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed,

so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared

with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are

fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist. That

Sterne's donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain

natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he

should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of

certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in

it no material for humoristic treatment. To render him absurd you

must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back

panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human

cook. Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is

tried by human standards. But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey

who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and

cooked the macaroons. All other humour is thin compared with this.

Besides, it never grows old. It is difficult, no doubt, to think

that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the

kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no

advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre. Certainly up to the

present moment the anomaly of man's position upon the planet is not

lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and

development. On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in

speaking of Thoreau. If man was a strange and anomalous 'piece of

work' as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a 'piece of

work' does he appear now! He has the knack of advancing and leaving

the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it? By the fact of his

being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions.

A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal

kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once

supposed) from any 'inner yearning' for progress, but because it was

pushed on by overmastering circumstances. An ungulate becomes the

giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and

yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to

leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve. But

man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of

harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the

other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips

them so completely that he forgets he is one of them. If Uncle

Toby's progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the

fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to

buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain

Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of

the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is

the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.

And while Sterne's abiding sense of the struggle between man's

spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical nature accounts

for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour, it greatly accounts

for his indecencies too. Sterne had that instinct for idealizing

women, and the entire relations between the sexes which accompanies

the poetic temperament. To such natures the spiritual side of sexual

relations is ever present; and as a consequence of this the animal

side never loses with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was

enveloped in their boyish days. Not that we are going to justify

Sterne's indecencies. Coleridge's remark that the pleasure Sterne

got from his double entendre was akin to 'that trembling daring with

which a child touches a hot teapot because it has been forbidden,'

partly explains, but it does not excuse, Sterne's transgressions

herein. The fact seems to be that if we divide love into the passion

of love, the sentiment of love, and the appetite of love, and inquire

which of these was really known to Sterne, we shall come to what will

seem to most readers the paradoxical conclusion that it was the

sentiment only. There is abundant proof of this. In the 'Letter to

the Earl of --,' printed by his daughter, after dilating upon the

manner in which the writing of the 'Sentimental Journey' has worn out

both his spirits and body, he says: 'I might indeed solace myself

with my wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been

a sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the

contrary. The world has imagined because I wrote "Tristram Shandy"

that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.' Upon this

passage Mr. Traill has the pertinent remark: 'The connubial

affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently,

opposed to the sentimental emotions--as the lower to the higher. To

indulge the former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and

carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend

one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex

indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.' Now, to men of

this kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious

double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more animal

temperament. The incongruity between the ideal and the actual

relations brings poignant distress at first, and afterwards a sense

of irresistible absurdity. Originally the fascination of repulsion,

it becomes the fascination of attraction, and it is not at all

fanciful to say that in Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne

(quite unconsciously to himself perhaps) realized to his own mind

those two opposite sides of man's nature whose conflict in some form

or another was ever present to Sterne's mind. And, as we say, it has

a deep relation to the kind of humour with which Sterne was so richly

endowed. After one of his most sentimental flights, wherein the

spiritual side of man is absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a

sudden revulsion (which at first was entirely natural, if even

self-conscious afterwards). The incongruity of all this sentiment

with man's actual condition as an animal strikes him with

irresistible force, and he says to man, 'What right have you in that

galley after all--you who came into the world in this extremely

unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency of functions which

are if possible more unspiritual and more absurd still?'

No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with sexual

matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but rather

far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of this great

and eternal incongruity of man's existence--the conflict of a

spiritual nature and such aspirations as man's with conditions

entirely physical. And perhaps the only truly philosophical

definition of the word 'indecency' would be this: 'A painful and

shocking contrast of man's spiritual with his physical nature.' When

Hamlet, with his finger on Yorick's skull, declares that his 'gorge

rises at it,' and asks if Alexander's skull 'smelt so,' he shocks us

as deeply in a serious way as Sterne in his allusion to the winding

up of the clock shocks us in a humourous way, and to express the

sensation they each give there is, perhaps, no word but 'indecent.'"

I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the metaphysical

meaning of humour. In order to show what are his opinions upon wit, I

think I shall do well to turn from the 'Athenaeum' articles, and to quote

from the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' a few sentences upon wit, and upon

the distinction between comedy and farce. For the obvious reason that

the 'Athenaeum' articles are buried in oblivion, and the 'Encyclopaedia

Britannica' articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it is from the

former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of the most important

parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work are to be found in the 'Encyclopaedia

Britannica.' Perhaps, however, I had better introduce my citations by

saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton's connection with that work.

The story of the way in which he came to write in the 'Encyclopaedia' has

been often told by Prof. Minto. At the time when the ninth edition was

started, he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and

were seeing each other constantly. When Minto was writing his articles

upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that Baynes would be

delighted to get work from him. But at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton had

got more critical work in hand than he wanted, and besides he had already

a novel and a body of poetry ready for the press, and wished to confine

his energies to creative work. Besides this, he felt, as he declared,

that he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike

pedestrian style of an encyclopaedia. But when the most important

treatise in the literary department of the work--the treatise on

Poetry--was wanted, a peculiar difficulty in selecting the writer was

felt. The article in the previous edition had been written by David

Macbeth Moir, famous under the name of 'Delta' as the author of 'The

Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.' Moir's article was intelligent enough,

but quite inadequate to such a work as the publishers of the

'Encyclopaedia' aspired to make. A history of Poetry was, of course,

quite impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the

principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as exemplified by

the poetry of the great literatures. It was decided, according to

Minto's account, that there were but three men, that is to say,

Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Theodore Watts, who could produce this

special kind of work, the other critics being entirely given up to the

historic method of criticism. The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes

went to London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and

explaining exactly what was wanted.

I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier choice.

Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on 'The Coming of Love' in the 'Saturday

Review' has written very luminously upon this subject. He tells us that,

wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant fragment,

owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the space that could be

given to it. The truth is that the essay is but the introduction to an

exhaustive discussion of what the writer believes to be the most

important event in the history of all poetry--the event discussed under

the name of 'The Renascence of Wonder.' The introduction to the third

volume of the new edition of Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English

Literature' is but a bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings upon

this subject. It has been said over and over again that since the best

critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our literature to

equal this treatise on Poetry. It has been exhaustively discussed in

England, America, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, where it

has been compared to the critical system of Goethe. Those who have not

read it will be surprised to hear that it is not confined to the

formulating of generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent

passages on human life and human conduct.

It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist, Vanbrugh, that

Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous distinction between comedy

and farce:--

"In order to find and fix Vanbrugh's place among English comic

dramatists, an examination of the very basis of the comedy of

repartee inaugurated by Etheredge would be necessary, and, of course,

such an examination would be impossible here. It is chiefly as a

humourist, however, that he demands attention.

Given the humorous temperament--the temperament which impels a man to

get his enjoyment by watching the harlequinade of life, and

contrasting it with his own ideal standard of good sense, which the

harlequinade seems to him to mock and challenge--given this

temperament, then the quality of its humourous growth depends of

course on the quality of the intellectual forces by means of which

the temperament gains expression. Hence it is very likely that in

original endowment of humour, as distinguished from wit, Vanbrugh was

superior to Congreve. And this is saying a great deal: for, while

Congreve's wit has always been made much of, it has, since Macaulay's

time, been the fashion among critics to do less than justice to his

humour--a humour which, in such scenes as that in 'Love for Love,'

where Sir Sampson Legend discourses upon the human appetites and

functions, moves beyond the humour of convention and passes into

natural humour. It is, however, in spontaneity, in a kind of lawless

merriment, almost Aristophanic in its verve, that Vanbrugh's humour

seems so deep and so fine, seems indeed to spring from a fountain

deeper and finer and rarer than Congreve's. A comedy of wit, like

every other drama, is a story told by action and dialogue, but to

tell a story lucidly and rapidly by means of repartee is exceedingly

difficult, not but that it is easy enough to produce repartee. But

in comic dialogue the difficulty is to move rapidly and yet keep up

the brilliant ball-throwing demanded in this form; and without

lucidity and rapidity no drama, whether of repartee or of character,

can live. Etheredge, the father of the comedy of repartee, has at

length had justice done to him by Mr. Gosse. Not only could

Etheredge tell a story by means of repartee alone: he could produce a

tableau too; so could Congreve, and so also could Vanbrugh; but

often--far too often--Vanbrugh's tableau is reached, not by fair

means, as in the tableau of Congreve, but by a surrendering of

probability, by a sacrifice of artistic fusion, by an inartistic

mingling of comedy and farce, such as Congreve never indulges in.

Jeremy Collier was perfectly right, therefore, in his strictures upon

the farcical improbabilities of the 'Relapse.' So farcical indeed

are the tableaux in that play that the broader portions of it were

(as Mr. Swinburne discovered) adapted by Voltaire and acted at Sceaux

as a farce. Had we space here to contrast the 'Relapse' with the

'Way of the World,' we should very likely come upon a distinction

between comedy and farce such as has never yet been drawn. We should

find that farce is not comedy with a broadened grin--Thalia with her

girdle loose and run wild--as the critics seem to assume. We should

find that the difference between the two is not one of degree at all,

but rather one of kind, and that mere breadth of fun has nothing to

do with the question. No doubt the fun of comedy may be as broad as

that of farce, as is shown indeed by the celebrated Dogberry scenes

in 'Much Ado about Nothing' and by the scene in 'Love for Love'

between Sir Sampson Legend and his son, alluded to above; but here,

as in every other department of art, all depends upon the quality of

the imaginative belief that the artist seeks to arrest and secure.

Of comedy the breath of life is dramatic illusion. Of farce the

breath of life is mock illusion. Comedy, whether broad or genteel,

pretends that its mimicry is real. Farce, whether broad or genteel,

makes no such pretence, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up

between itself and the audience, says, 'My acting is all sham, and

you know it.' Now, while Vanbrugh was apt too often to forget this

the fundamental difference between comedy and farce, Congreve never

forgot it, Wycherly rarely. Not that there should be in any literary

form any arbitrary laws. There is no arbitrary law declaring that

comedy shall not be mingled with farce, and yet the fact is that in

vital drama they cannot be so mingled. The very laws of their

existence are in conflict with each other, so much so that where one

lives the other must die, as we see in the drama of our own day. The

fact seems to be that probability of incident, logical sequence of

cause and effect, are as necessary to comedy as they are to tragedy,

while farce would stifle in such an air. Rather, it would be

poisoned by it, just as comedy is poisoned by what farce flourishes

on; that is to say, inconsequence of reasoning--topsy-turvy logic.

Born in the fairy country of topsy-turvy, the logic of farce would be

illogical if it were not upside-down. So with coincidence, with

improbable accumulation of convenient events--farce can no more exist

without these than comedy can exist with them. Hence we affirm that

Jeremy Collier's strictures on the farcical adulterations of the

'Relapse' pierce more deeply into Vanbrugh's art than do the

criticisms of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt. In other words, perhaps the

same lack of fusion which mars Vanbrugh's architectural ideas mars

also his comedy."

Without for a moment wishing to institute comparisons between the merit

of Mr. Watts-Dunton's literary articles and the merit of other literary

articles by other contemporary writers, I may at least say that between

his articles and theirs the difference is not one of degree, it is one of

kind. Theirs are compact, business-like compressions of facts admirably

fitted for an Encyclopaedia. No attempt is made to formulate

generalizations upon the principles of literary art, and this must be

said in their praise--they are faultless as articles in a book of

reference. But no student of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work who turns over the

pages of an article in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' can fail after

reading a few sentences to recognize the author. Generalizations, hints

of daring theories, novel and startling speculations, graze each other's

heels, until one is dazzled by the display of intellectual brilliance.

That his essays are out of place in an Encyclopaedia may be true, but

they seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating

idiosyncrasy upon their coldly impersonal environment.

Chapter XVII

'THE LIFE POETIC'

[Picture: 'The Pines.' (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)]

I have been allowed to enrich this volume with photographs of 'The Pines'

and of some of the exquisite works of art therein. But it is unfortunate

for me that I am not allowed to touch upon what are the most important

relations of Mr. Watts-Dunton's life--important though so many of them

are. I mean his intimacy with the poet whose name is now beyond doubt

far above any other name in the contemporary world of letters. I do not

sympathize with the hyper-sensitiveness of eminent men with regard to

privacy. The inner chamber of what Rossetti calls the 'House of Life'

should be kept sacred. But Rossetti's own case shows how impossible it

is in these days to keep those recesses inviolable. The fierce light

that beats upon men of genius grows fiercer and fiercer every day, and it

cannot be quenched. This was one of my arguments when I first answered

Mr. Watts-Dunton's own objection to the appearance of this monograph.

The times have changed since he was a young man. Then publicity was

shunned like a plague by poets and by painters. If such men wish the

light to be true as well as fierce, they must allow their friends to

illuminate their 'House of Life' by the lamp of truth. If Rossetti

during his lifetime had allowed one of his friends who knew the secrets

of his 'House of Life' to write about him, we might have been spared

those canards about him and the wife he loved which were rife shortly

after his death. Byron's reluctance to take payment for his poetry was

not a more belated relic of an old quixotism than is this dying passion

for privacy. Publicity may be an evil, but it is an inevitable evil, and

great men must not let the wasps and the gadflies monopolize its uses.

It may be a reminiscence of an older and a nobler social temper, the

temper under the influence of which Rossetti in 1870 said that he felt

abashed because a paragraph had appeared in the 'Athenaeum' announcing

the fact that a book from him was forthcoming. But that temper has gone

by for ever. We live now in very different times. Scores upon scores of

unauthorized and absolutely false paragraphs about eminent men are

published, especially about these two friends who have lived their poetic

life together for more than a quarter of a century. Only the other day I

saw in a newspaper an offensive descriptive caricature of Mr. Swinburne,

of his dress, etc. It is interesting to recall the fact that mendacious

journalism was the cause of Mr. Watts-Dunton's very first contribution to

the 'Athenaeum,' before he wrote any reviews at all. At that time the

offenders seem to have been chiefly Americans. The article was not a

review, but a letter signed 'Z,' entitled 'The Art of Interviewing,' and

it appeared in the 'Athenaeum,' of March 11, 1876. As it shows the great

Swinburne myth in the making, I will reproduce this merry little skit:--

"'Alas! there is none of us without his skeleton-closet,' said a

great writer to one who was congratulating him upon having reached

the goal for which he had, from the first, set out. 'My skeleton

bears the dreadful name of "American Interviewer." Pity me!' 'Is he

an American with a diary in his pocket?' was the terrified question

always put by another man of genius, whenever you proposed

introducing a stranger to him. But this was in those ingenuous

Parker-Willisian days when the 'Interviewer' merely invented the

dialogue--not the entire dramatic action--not the interview itself.

Primitive times! since when the 'Interviewer' has developed indeed!

His dramatic inspiration now is trammelled by none of those foolish

and arbitrary conditions which--whether his scene of action was at

the 'Blue Posts' with Thackeray, or in the North with Scottish

lords--vexed and bounded the noble soul of the great patriarch of the

tribe. Uncribbed, uncabined, unconfined, the 'Interviewer' now

invents, not merely the dialogue, but the 'situation,' the place, the

time--the interview itself. Every dramatist has his favourite

character--Sophocles had his; Shakspeare had his; Schiller had his;

the 'Interviewer' has his. Mr. Swinburne has, for the last two or

three years, been--for some reason which it might not be difficult to

explain--the 'Interviewer's' special favourite. Moreover, the

accounts of the interviews with him are always livelier than any

others, inasmuch as they are accompanied by brilliant fancy-sketches

of his personal appearance--sketches which, if they should not

gratify him exactly, would at least astonish him; and it is surely

something to be even astonished in these days. Some time ago, for

instance, an American lady journalist, connected with a 'Western

newspaper,' made her appearance in London, and expressed many 'great

desires,' the greatest of all her 'desires' being to know the author

of 'Atalanta,' or, if she could not know him, at least to 'see him.'

The Fates, however, were not kind to the lady. The author of

'Atalanta' had quitted London. She did not see him, therefore--not

with her bodily eyes could she see him. Yet this did not at all

prevent her from 'interviewing' him. Why should it? The 'soul hath

eyes and ears' as well as the body--especially if the soul is an

American soul, with a mission to 'interview.' There soon appeared in

the lady's Western newspaper a graphic account of one of the most

interesting interviews with this poet that has ever yet been

recorded. Mr. Swinburne--though at the time in Scotland--'called'

upon the lady at her rooms in London; but, notwithstanding this

unexampled feat of courtesy, he seems to have found no favour in the

lady's eyes. She 'misliked him for his complexion.' Evidently it

was nothing but good-breeding that prevented her from telling the

bard, on the spot, that he was physically an unlovely bard. His

manners, too, were but so-so; and the Western lady was shocked and

disgusted, as well she might be. In the midst of his conversation,

for example, he called out frantically for 'pen and ink.' He had

become suddenly and painfully 'afflated.' When furnished with pen

and ink he began furiously writing a poem, beating the table with his

left hand and stamping the floor with both feet as he did so. Then,

without saying a word, he put on his hat and rushed from the room

like a madman! This account was copied into other newspapers and

into the magazines. It is, in fact, a piece of genuine history now,

and will form valuable material for some future biographer of the

poet. The stubborn shapelessness of facts has always distressed the

artistically-minded historian. But let the American 'Interviewer' go

on developing thus, and we may look for History's becoming far more

artistic and symmetrical in future. The above is but one out of many

instances of the art of interviewing."

It is all very well to say that irresponsible statements of this kind are

not in the true sense of the word believed by readers; they create an

atmosphere of false mist which destroys altogether the picture of the

poet's life which one would like to preserve. And I really think that it

would have been better if I or some one else among the friends of the

poets had been allowed to write more freely about the beautiful and

intellectual life at 'The Pines.' But I am forbidden to do this, as the

following passage in a letter which I have received from Mr. Watts-Dunton

will show:

"I cannot have anything about our life at 'The Pines' put into print,

but I will grant you permission to give a few reproductions of the

interesting works of art here, for many of them may have a legitimate

interest for the public on account of their historic value, as having

come to me from the magician of art, Rossetti. And I assure you that

this is a concession which I have denied to very many applicants,

both among friends and others."

[Picture: A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Lacquer Cabinet]

Mr. Watts-Dunton's allusion to the Rossetti mementoes requires a word of

explanation. Rossetti, it seems, was very fond of surprising his friends

by unexpected tokens of generosity. I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say

that during the week when he was moving into 'The Pines,' he spent as

usual Wednesday night at 16 Cheyne Walk, and he and Rossetti sat talking

into the small hours. Next morning after breakfast he strolled across to

Whistler's house to have a talk with the ever-interesting painter, and

this resulted in his getting home two hours later than usual. On

reaching the new house he saw a waggon standing in front of it. He did

not understand this, for the furniture from the previous residence had

been all removed. He went up to the waggon, and was surprised to find it

full of furniture of a choice kind. But there was no need for him to

give much time to an examination of the furniture, for he found he was

familiar with every piece of it. It had come straight from Rossetti's

house, having been secretly packed and sent off by Dunn on the previous

day. Some of the choicest things at 'The Pines' came in this way. Not a

word had Rossetti said about this generous little trick on the night

before. The superb Chinese cabinet, a photograph of which appears in

this book, belonged to Rossetti. It seems that on a certain occasion

Frederick Sandys, or some one else, told Rossetti that the clever but

ne'er-do-well artist, George Chapman, had bought of a sea-captain,

trading in Chinese waters, a wonderful piece of lacquer work of the

finest period--before the Manchu pig-tail time. The captain had bought

it of a Frenchman who had aided in looting the Imperial Palace.

Rossetti, of course, could not rest until he had seen it, and when he had

seen it, he could not rest until he had bought it of Chapman; and it was

taken across to 16 Cheyne Walk, where it was greatly admired. The

captain had barbarously mutilated it at the top in order to make it fit

in his cabin, and it remained in that condition for some years.

Afterwards Rossetti gave it to Mr. Watts-Dunton, who got it restored and

made up by the wonderful amateur carver, the late Mr. T. Keynes, who did

the carving on the painted cabinet also photographed for this book.

There is a long and interesting story in connection with this piece of

Chinese lacquer, but I have no room to tell it here.

* * * * *

[Picture: Summer at 'The Pines'--I]

All I am allowed to say about the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and

Mr. Swinburne is that the friendship began in 1872, that it soon

developed into the closest intimacy, not only with the poet himself, but

with all his family. In 1879 the two friends became house-mates at 'The

Pines,' Putney Hill, and since then they have never been separated, for

Mr. Watts-Dunton's visits to the Continent, notably those with the late

Dr. Hake recorded in 'The New Day,' took place just before this time.

The two poets thenceforth lived together, worked together; saw their

common friends together, and travelled together. In 1882, after the

death of Rossetti they went to the Channel Islands, staying at St.

Peter's Port, Guernsey, for some little time, and then at Petit Bot Bay.

Their swims in this beautiful bay Mr. Watts-Dunton commemorated in two of

the opening sonnets of 'The Coming of Love':--

NATURE'S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

(A MORNING SWIM OFF GUERNSEY WITH A FRIEND)

As if the Spring's fresh groves should change and shake

To dark green woods of Orient terebinth,

Then break to bloom of England's hyacinth,

So 'neath us change the waves, rising to take

Each kiss of colour from each cloud and flake

Round many a rocky hall and labyrinth,

Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,

Show how the sea's fine rage dares make and break.

Young with the youth the sea's embrace can lend,

Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,

Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,

Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,

Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend

Over the magic wonders of the world

THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE'S FRAGRANCY

(THE TIRING-ROOM IN THE ROCKS)

These are the 'Coloured Caves' the sea-maid built;

Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,

For she must fly at every tide's return,

And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.

Outside behold the bay, each headland gilt

With morning's gold; far off the foam-wreaths burn

Like fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearn

Up sand more soft than Avon's sacred silt.

And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,

From lips of may or rose or eglantine,

Comes with the language of a breath benign,

Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,

Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,

Like scent of sea-weed rich of morn and brine.

The two friends afterwards went to Sark. A curious incident occurred

during their stay in the island. The two poet-swimmers received a

bravado challenge from 'Orion' Horne, who was also a famous swimmer, to

swim with him round the whole island of Sark! I need hardly say that the

absurd challenge was not accepted.

During the cruise Mr. Swinburne conceived and afterwards wrote some

glorious poetry. In the same year the two friends went to Paris, as I

have already mentioned, to assist at the Jubilee of 'Le Roi s'Amuse.'

Since then their love of the English coasts and the waters which wash

them, seems to have kept them in England. For two consecutive years they

went to Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast, for bathing. It was there that

Mr. Swinburne wrote some of his East Anglian poems, and it was there that

Mr. Watts-Dunton conceived the East coast parts of 'Aylwin.' It was

during one of these visits that Mr. Swinburne first made the acquaintance

of Grant Allen, who had long been an intimate friend of Mr.

Watts-Dunton's. The two, indeed, were drawn together by the fact that

they both enjoyed science as much as they enjoyed literature. It was a

very interesting meeting, as Grant Allen had long been one of Swinburne's

most ardent admirers, and his social charm, his intellectual sweep and

brilliance, made a great impression on the poet. Since then their visits

to the sea have been confined to parts of the English Channel, such as

Eastbourne, where they were near neighbours of Rossetti's friends, Lord

and Lady Mount Temple, between whom and Mr. Watts-Dunton there had been

an affectionate intimacy for many years--but more notably Lancing,

whither they went for three consecutive years. For several years they

stayed during their holiday with Lady Mary Gordon, an aunt of Mr.

Swinburne's, at 'The Orchard,' Niton Bay, Isle of Wight. During the hot

summer of 1904 they were lucky enough to escape to Cromer, where the

temperature was something like twenty degrees lower than that of London.

A curious incident occurred during this visit to Cromer. One day Mr.

Watts-Dunton took a walk with another friend to 'Poppy-land,' where he

and Mr. Swinburne had previously stayed, in order to see there again the

landslips which he has so vividly described in 'Aylwin.' While they were

walking from 'Poppyland' to the old ruined churchyard called 'The Garden

of Sleep,' they sat down for some time in the shade of an empty hut near

the cliff. Coming back Mr. Watts-Dunton said that the cliff there was

very dangerous, and ought to be fenced off, as the fatal land-springs

were beginning to show their work. Two or three weeks after this a

portion of the cliff at that point, weighing many thousands of tons, fell

into the sea, and the hut with it.

[Picture: A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Chinese Divan described in

'Aylwin']

A friendship so affectionate and so long as the friendship between these

two poets is perhaps without a parallel in literature. It has been

frequently and beautifully commemorated. When Mr. Swinburne's noble

poem, 'By the North Sea,' was published, it was prefaced by this

sonnet:--

TO WALTER THEODORE WATTS

'WE ARE WHAT SUNS AND WINDS AND WATERS MAKE US.'

Landor.

Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath

The spirit of man fulfilling--these create

That joy wherewith man's life grown passionate

Gains heart to hear and sense to read and faith

To know the secret word our Mother saith

In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great,

Death as the shadow cast by life on fate,

Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.

Brother, to whom our Mother, as to me,

Is dearer than all dreams of days undone,

This song I give you of the sovereign three

That are, as life and sleep and death are, one:

A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea,

Where nought of man's endures before the sun.

1882 was a memorable year in the life of Mr. Watts-Dunton. The two most

important volumes of poetry published in that year were dedicated to him.

Rossetti's 'Ballads and Sonnets,' the book which contains the chief work

of his life, bore the following inscription:--

TO

THEODORE WATTS

THE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR ME,

THESE FEW MORE PAGES

ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

A few weeks later Mr. Swinburne's 'Tristram of Lyonesse,' the volume

which contains what I regard as his ripest and richest poetry, was thus

inscribed:--

TO MY BEST FRIEND

THEODORE WATTS

I DEDICATE IN THIS BOOK

THE BEST I HAVE TO GIVE HIM.

Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,

And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,

That twice have made keen April's clarion sound

Since here we first together saw and heard

Spring's light reverberate and reiterate word

Shine forth and speak in season. Life stands crowned

Here with the best one thing it ever found,

As of my soul's best birthdays dawns the third.

There is a friend that as the wise man saith

Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me

Hath time not shown, through days like waves at strife

This truth more sure than all things else but death,

This pearl most perfect found in all the sea

That washes toward your feet these waifs of life.

THE PINES,

_April_, 1882.

But the finest of all these words of affection are perhaps those opening

the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the magnificent Collected Edition of

Mr. Swinburne's poems issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1904:--

'To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition

of my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the

occasion.'

Once also Mr. Watts-Dunton dedicated verses of his own to Mr. Swinburne,

to wit, in 1897, when he published that impassioned lyric in praise of a

nobler and larger Imperialism, the 'Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the

Men of Greater Britain':--

"TO OUR GREAT CONTEMPORARY WRITER OF

PATRIOTIC POETRY,

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

You and I are old enough to remember the time when, in the world of

letters at least, patriotism was not so fashionable as it is

now--when, indeed, love of England suggested Philistinism rather than

'sweetness and light.' Other people, such as Frenchmen, Italians,

Irishmen, Hungarians, Poles, might give voice to a passionate love of

the land of their birth, but not Englishmen. It was very curious, as

I thought then, and as I think now. And at that period love of the

Colonies was, if possible, even more out of fashion than was love of

England; and this temper was not confined to the 'cultured' class.

It pervaded society and had an immense influence upon politics. On

one side the Manchester school, religiously hoping that if the

Colonies could be insulted so effectually that they must needs

(unless they abandoned all self-respect) 'set up for themselves,' the

same enormous spurt would be given to British trade which occurred

after the birth of the United States, bade the Colonies 'cut the

painter.' On the other hand the old Tories and Whigs, with a few

noble exceptions, having never really abandoned the old traditions

respecting the unimportance of all matters outside the parochial

circle of European diplomacy, scarcely knew where the Colonies were

situated on the map.

There was, however, in these islands one person who saw as clearly

then as all see now the infinite importance of the expansion of

England to the true progress of mankind--the Great Lady whose praises

in this regard I have presumed to sing in the opening stanza of these

verses.

I may be wrong, but I, who am, as you know, no courtier, believe from

the bottom of my heart that without the influence of the Queen this

expansion would have been seriously delayed. Directly and indirectly

her influence must needs be enormous, and, as regards this matter, it

has always been exercised--energetically and even eagerly

exercised--in one way. This being my view, I have for years been

urging more than one friend clothed with an authority such as I do

not possess to bring the subject prominently before the people of

England at a time when England's expansion is a phrase in everybody's

mouth. I have not succeeded. Let this be my apology for undertaking

the task myself and for inscribing to you, as well as to the men of

Greater Britain, these lines."

[Picture: Summer at 'The Pines'--II]

I feel that it is a great privilege to be able to present to my readers

beautiful photogravures and photographs of interiors and pictures and

works of art at 'The Pines.' Many of the pictures and other works of art

at 'The Pines' are mementoes of a most interesting kind.

Among these is the superb portrait of Madox Brown, at this moment hanging

in the Bradford Exhibition. Madox Brown painted it for the owner. An

interesting story is connected with it. One day, not long after Mr.

Watts-Dunton had become intimate with Madox Brown, the artist told him he

specially wanted his boy Nolly to read to him a story that he had been

writing, and asked him to meet the boy at dinner.

'Nolly been writing a story!' exclaimed Mr. Watts-Dunton.

'I understand your smile,' said Madox Brown; 'but you will find it better

than you think.'

At this time Oliver Madox Brown seemed a loose-limbed hobbledehoy, young

enough to be at school. After dinner Oliver began to read the opening

chapters of the story in a not very impressive way, and Mr. Watts-Dunton

suggested that he should take it home and read it at his leisure. This

was agreed to. Pressure of affairs prevented him from taking it up for

some time. At last he did take it up, but he had scarcely read a dozen

pages when he was called away, and he asked a member of his family to

gather up the pages from the sofa and put them into an escritoire. On

his return home at a very late hour he found the lady intently reading

the manuscript, and she declared that she could not go to bed till she

had finished it.

On the next day Mr. Watts-Dunton again took up the manuscript, and was

held spellbound by it. It was a story of passion, of intense love, and

intense hate, told with a crude power that was irresistible.

Mr. Watts-Dunton knew Smith Williams (the reader of Smith, Elder & Co.),

whose name is associated with 'Jane Eyre.' He showed it to Williams, who

was greatly struck by it, but pointed out that it terminated in a violent

scene which the novel-reading public of that time would not like, and

asked for a concluding scene less daring. The ending was modified, and

the story, when it appeared, attracted very great attention. Madox Brown

was so grateful to Mr. Watts-Dunton for his services in the matter that

he insisted on expressing his gratitude in some tangible form. Miss Lucy

Madox Brown (afterwards Mrs. W. M. Rossetti) was consulted, and at once

suggested a portrait of the painter, painted by himself. This was done,

and the result was the masterpiece which has been so often exhibited.

From that moment Oliver Madox Brown took his place in the literary world

of his time. The mention of Oliver Madox Brown will remind the older

generation of his friendship with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet,

one of the most pathetic chapters in literary annals.

[Picture: 'Picture for a Story.' (Face and Instrument designed by D. G.

Rossetti, background by Dunn.)]

Although Rossetti never fulfilled his intention of illustrating what he

called 'Watts's magnificent star sonnet,' he began what would have been a

superb picture illustrating Mr. Watts-Dunton's sonnet, 'The Spirit of the

Rainbow.' He finished a large charcoal drawing of it, which is thus

described by Mr. William Sharp in his book, 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a

Record and a Study':--

"It represents a female figure standing in a gauzy circle composed of

a rainbow, and on the frame is written the following sonnet (the poem

in question by Mr. Watts-Dunton):

THE WOOD-HAUNTER'S DREAM

The wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:

'Though meads are sweet when flowers at morn uncurl,

And woods are sweet with nightingale and merle,

Where are the dreams that flush'd thy childish bed?

The Spirit of the Rainbow thou would'st wed!'

I rose, I found her--found a rain-drenched girl

Whose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearl

Coloured the rain above her golden head.

But when I stood by that sweet vision's side

I saw no more the Rainbow's lovely stains;

To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyed

The sun showed naught but dripping woods and plains:

'God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains,'

The wood-sprite laugh'd, 'Our seeker finds a bride!'

Rossetti meant to have completed the design with the 'woods and plains'

seen in perspective through the arch; and the composition has an

additional and special interest because it is the artist's only

successful attempt at the wholly nude--the 'Spirit' being extremely

graceful in poise and outline.

* * * * *

I am able to give a reproduction of another of Rossetti's beautiful

studies which has never been published, but which has been very much

talked about. Many who have seen it at 'The Pines' agree with the late

Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest of all

his female faces. It is thus described by Mr. William Sharp: "The

drawing, which, for the sake of a name, I will call 'Forced Music,'

represents a nude half-figure of a girl playing on a mediaeval stringed

instrument elaborately ornamented. The face is of a type unlike that of

any other of the artist's subjects, and extraordinarily beautiful."

* * * * *

I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of the girl in

the version of the picture here reproduced, are by Dunn. These two

exquisite drawings were made from the same girl, who never sat for any

other pictures. Her face has been described as being unlike that of any

other of Rossetti's models and yet combining the charm of them all.

* * * * *

I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any

personal description of him. For my part I do not sympathize with this

extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one's personal

characteristics described in print. What is there so dreadful or so

sacred in mere print? The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I

think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter

there was 'a great gulf fixed.' Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr.

Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of

friends or strangers, remarks--delicate enough, no doubt--are made about

them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in

ever so small a degree. Not so very long ago I remained in a room after

Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it. Straightway there were the freest remarks

about him, not in the least unkind, but free. Some did not expect to see

so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him

to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences,

described his dark-brown eyes as 'green'--through a printer's error, no

doubt. Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his

absent friend, Mr. Swinburne--and so on, and so on. Now, what is the

difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation?

Merely that the printed report reaches a wider--a little wider--audience.

That is all. I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition

to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in

the papers. Some energetic gentleman--possibly some one living in the

neighbourhood--took the following 'Kodak' of him. It appeared in

'M.A.P.' and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could

be painted. In years to come, when he and I and the 'Kodaker' are dead,

it may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written

about him:--

"Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn

lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin

has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he

loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes

and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance.

For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and

thick moustache are partially shot with grey. But he looks not a day

over forty-five. Generally he carries a book. Often, however, he

turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits. For--it will be

news to lie-abeds of the district--Wimbledon Common is lively with

rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere

the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until

the moon rises again. To him, morning, although he has seen more

sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious

pageant. This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore

Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet,

novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour."

The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to

the sea-side. One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late

Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his

country places, such as Boar's Hill.

I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the

famous Master of Balliol. I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great

admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton's

intellectual powers and various accomplishments. There was no one, I

have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem. That

air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett's

friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr.

Watts-Dunton.

Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton's life were these visits

with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett's house, where he had the opportunity of

meeting some of the most prominent men of the time. He has described the

Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to

them. I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which

appeared in the 'Athenaeum' of December 22, 1894.

"It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the

poet of 'Atalanta' and the student of Plato and translator of

Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no

common strength. They took expeditions into the country together,

and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at

Jowett's quiet autumnal retreat at Boar's Hill. The Master of

Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself

the admiration of men of poetic genius. To say which poet admired

and loved him most deeply--Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr.

Swinburne--would be difficult. He seemed to join their hands all

round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of

the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett. He was

always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his

verses as in telling him what he liked. And although the poets of

our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times

past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after

all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are

poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to

straightforward men like Jowett. That Jowett's judgment in artistic

matters, and especially in poetry, was borne no one knew better than

himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical

subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and

this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would

otherwise have been allowed to him. For, notwithstanding the Oxford

epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be

more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary

knowledge. He was fond of quoting Hallam's words that without an

exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction;

and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge,

he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion. They are

not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to

secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the

Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a

great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble

and most truly lovable. The kind of restraint in social intercourse

resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as

his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett's

taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the

peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for

talking's sake. If a proper and right response to a friend's remark

chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to

deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to

be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of

keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or

uneducated man. It is, however, extremely difficult to write

reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett. In order to bring out

one of Jowett's pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it

has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and

then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism."

Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits

that the two friends used to pay to Jowett's rural retreat at Boar's

Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the

riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian. The two poets used to spend

the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master

to Boar's Hill. Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry will remember

the following sonnets:--

THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR'S HILL

To A. C. S.

I

One after one they go; and glade and heath,

Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers

They made so dear, are haunted by the hours

Once musical of those who sleep beneath;

One after one does Sorrow's every wreath

Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,

And Love and Memory from each loss of ours

Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.

Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield

The friend with whom we walk through mead and field

To-day as on that day when last we parted,

Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?

Love shapes a presence out of Memory's dream,

A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.

II

Can he be dead? We walk through flowery ways

From Boar's Hill down to Oxford, fain to know

What nugget-gold, in drift of Time's long flow,

The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;

He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,

Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,

Still talks of Plato while the scene below

Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.

Can he be dead? He shares our homeward walk,

And by the river you arrest the talk

To see the sun transfigure ere he sets

The boatmen's children shining in the wherry

And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,

Making the clumsy craft an angel's ferry.

III

The river crossed, we walk 'neath glowing skies

Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare

With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air--

Fading as colour after colour dies:

We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise--

Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;

We win the scholar's nest--his simple fare

Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.

Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.

Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew

The poet's heart of gold that gives the spell!

Can he be dead? Your heart being drawn to him,

How shall ev'n Death make that dear presence dim

For you who loved him--us who loved him well?

Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always

loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill. Not the least interesting among

the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious

contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith. Mr.

William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the

intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton.

Speaking of Swinburne's championship, in the 'Spectator,' of Meredith's

first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the 'Pall Mall

Magazine,' of December 1901, says:--

"Among those who read and considered" [Meredith's work] "was another

young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the

most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . . If

the letter signed 'A. C. Swinburne' had not appeared, another signed

'Theodore Watts' would have been published, to the like effect. It

was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith,

A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion."

The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the

article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the 'Athenaeum' on 'Poems and Lyrics of

the Joy of Earth.' After this appeared articles appreciative of

Meredith's prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others. But it was Mr.

Watts-Dunton who led the way. The most touching of all the testimonies

of love and admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr

Watts-Dunton, or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet

addressed to him on his seventy-fourth birthday. It appeared in the

'Saturday Review' of February 15, 1902:--

TO GEORGE MEREDITH

(ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)

This time, dear friend--this time my birthday greeting

Comes heavy of funeral tears--I think of you,

And say, ''Tis evening with him--that is true--

But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;

Still he is spared--while Spring and Winter, meeting,

Clasp hands around the roots 'neath frozen dew--

To see the 'Joy of Earth' break forth anew,

And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.'

Love's remnant melts and melts; but, if our days

Are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, still,

Still Winter has a sun--a sun whose rays

Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,

And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,

Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.

The allusion to 'funeral tears' was caused by one of the greatest

bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years,

namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the

'Athenaeum.' I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often

heard Mr. Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration

the fine charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and

style of his conversation.

But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of

'The Pines' Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.

I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of

Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between

the external facets of Tennyson's character and the 'abysmal deeps' of

his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet's son, is the only man

living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet.

Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries

nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and

Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy. So

long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his

seventy-first birthday. It attracted much attention, and although it was

not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well

he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to

another:--

TO ALFRED TENNYSON, ON HIS PUBLISHING, IN HIS SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR, THE

MOST RICHLY VARIOUS VOLUME OF ENGLISH VERSE THAT HAS APPEARED IN HIS

OWN CENTURY.

Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs

Whose magic waters to a flood expand,

Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,

The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.

From honeyed flowers,--from balm of zephyr-wings,--

From fiery blood of gems, {286} through all the land,

The river draws;--then, in one rainbow-band,

Ten leagues of nectar o'er the ocean flings.

Rich with the riches of a poet's years,

Stained in all colours of Man's destiny,

So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears

The misty main, and, taking now the sea,

Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears

The ashen billows of Eternity.

Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a

garden party, and they fraternized at once. Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open

invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this

invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth. One point in

which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the 'Table Talk') or with Mr.

Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson's ear was defective at the very

first. He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show

a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the

demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of

poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best

occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield. As an

illustration of Tennyson's sensibility to the most delicate nuances of

metrical music, I remember at one of those charming 'symposia' at 'The

Pines,' hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English

poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of

Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of

this. It referred to the two sonnets upon 'The Omnipotence of Love' in

the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of 'Aylwin'

and 'The Coming of Love.' These sonnets appeared in an article called

'The New Hero' in the 'English Illustrated Magazine' in 1883. Mr.

Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article

reached him. The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has

often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the

son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high

position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to

his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets. Tennyson,

who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in

criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of

the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge. The line was

this:--

And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.

Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially praised by two

other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris, to whom the sonnet

had been read in manuscript. Tennyson's criticism was that there were

too many sibilants in the line, and that although, other things being

equal, 'scents' might be more accurate than 'scent,' this was a case

where the claims of music ought to be dominant over other claims. The

present Lord Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they were right,

and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting 'scent' in place

of 'scents.'

Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson's sensibility to

criticism was the result, not of imperious egotism, but of a kind of

morbid modesty. Tennyson used to say that "to whatsoever exalted

position a poet might reach, he was not 'born to the purple,' and that if

the poet's mind was especially plastic he could never shake off the

reminiscence of the time when he was nobody."

On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the

summer-house at Aldworth to read to him 'Becket,' then in manuscript.

Although another visitor, whom he esteemed very highly, both as a poet

and an old friend, was staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer

to read the play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone. And this no doubt was

because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism. Freedom of

criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr. Watts-Dunton is the

most outspoken on the subject of the poet's art. The entire morning was

absorbed in the reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, 'the remarks upon

poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made the

fortune of any critic.'

On the subject of what has been called Tennyson's gaucherie and rudeness

to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax very indignant. 'There was to

me,' he said, 'the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson's bluntness.

I would there were a leaven of Tennyson's single-mindedness in the

society of the present day.'

One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as Tennyson's rudeness to

women shows how entirely the man was misunderstood. Mrs. Oliphant has

stated that Tennyson, in his own house, after listening in silence to an

interchange of amiable compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson,

said abruptly, 'What liars you women are!' 'I seem to hear,' said Mr.

Watts-Dunton, 'Tennyson utter the exclamation--utter it in that tone of

humourous playfulness, followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized

the rudeness as entirely as Douglas Jerrold's laugh neutralized the sting

of his satire. For such an incident to be cited as instance of

Tennyson's rudeness to women is ludicrous. When I knew him I was, if

possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me

with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious

people. I did not feel that I had any claim to such treatment, for he

was, beyond doubt, the greatest literary figure in the world of that

time. There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which

springs up after a period of laudation.'

The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of stricture

upon Tennyson's work was that, considering his enormous powers as a poet,

he seemed deficient in the gift of inventing a story:--"The stanzas

beginning, 'O, that 'twere possible'--the nucleus of 'Maud'--appeared

originally in 'The Tribute.' They were the finest lines that Tennyson

ever wrote--right away the finest. They suggested some superb story of

passion and mystery; and every reader was compelled to make his own guess

as to what the story could possibly be. In an evil moment some friend

suggested that Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story.

A person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson might

perhaps have invented an adequate story--might perhaps have invented a

dozen adequate stories; but he could not have invented a worse story than

the one used by Tennyson in the writing of his monodrama. But think of

the poetic riches poured into it!"

I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton once made

in regard to 'The Princess.' "Shakspeare," he said, "is the only poet

who has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of which

is fanciful. The extremely insincere story of 'The Princess' is filled

with such noble passages of sincere poetry as 'Tears, idle tears,' 'Home

they brought her warrior dead,' etc., passages which unfortunately lose

two-thirds of their power through the insincere setting."

Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the 'Magazine of Art'

invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write an article upon the portraits of

Tennyson. Mr. Watts-Dunton consulted the poet upon this project, and he

agreed, promising to aid in the selection of the portraits. The result

was two of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been

written--in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without a knowledge

of these articles no student of Tennyson can be properly equipped. It is

tantalizing that they have never been reprinted. Tennyson died before

their appearance, and this, of course, added to the general interest felt

in them.

After Tennyson's death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two penetrating essays upon

Tennyson in the 'Nineteenth Century,' one of them being his reminiscences

of Tennyson as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a

nature-poet in reference to evolution. It will be a great pity if these

essays too are not reprinted. Mr. Knowles, the editor, also included Mr.

Watts-Dunton among the friends of Tennyson who were invited to write

memorial verses on his death for the 'Nineteenth Century.' To this

series Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one of

the several poems upon Tennyson not published in 'The Coming of Love'

volume, which, I may note in passing, contains 'What the Silent Voices

Said,' the fine 'sonnet sequence' commemorating the burial of Tennyson:--

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

'THE CROWD IN THE ABBEY WAS VERY GREAT.'

Morning Newspaper.

I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold

What others saw not--his lov'd face sublime

Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime

Of Tennyson's long day that grows not old;

And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;

And, 'Who art thou,' the music seemed to chime,

'To mourn that King of song whose throne is Time?'

Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.

Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow's shame:

'So great he was, striving in simple strife

With Art alone to lend all beauty life--

So true to Truth he was, whatever came--

So fierce against the false when lies were rife--

That love o'erleapt the golden fence of Fame.'

By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr. Watts-Dunton was one

of the few friends of the poet, including Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T.

Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll, and others, who contributed

reminiscences of him to the 'Life.' In a few sentences he paints this

masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled, 'Impressions: 1883-1892'

{291}:--

"All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti's was a peculiarly winning

personality, but no one has been in the least able to say why.

Nothing is easier, however, than to find the charm of Tennyson. It

lay in a great veracity of soul: it lay in a simple

single-mindedness, so childlike that, unless you had known him to be

the undoubted author of poems as marvellous for exquisite art as for

inspiration, you could not have supposed but that all

subtleties--even those of poetic art--must be foreign to a nature so

simple.

Working in a language like ours--a language which has to be moulded

into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art--how can this great,

inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered artist of 'The

Princess,' 'The Palace of Art,' 'The Day-Dream,' and 'The Dream of

Fair Women'?

Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he said--viz.

that it was the thing he thought. Behind his uncompromising

directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy of the grand

old type. As he stood at the porch of Aldworth meeting a guest or

bidding him good-bye--as he stood there, tall far beyond the height

of average men, his skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and

wind--as he stood there, no one could mistake him for anything but a

great forthright English gentleman. Always a man of an extraordinary

beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the beauty of old age to

a degree rarely seen. He was the most hospitable of men. It was

very rare indeed for him to part from a guest without urging him to

return, and generally with the words, 'Come whenever you like.'

Tennyson's knowledge of nature--nature in every aspect--was simply

astonishing. His passion for 'stargazing' has often been commented

upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante, no poet in any land has

so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the

lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a

thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he

persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding

lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong,

and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that

he passed away in the light he so much loved--in a room where there

was no artificial light--nothing to quicken the darkness but the

light of the full moon, which somehow seems to shine more brightly at

Aldworth than anywhere else in England.

In a country having a composite language such as ours it may be

affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of poetry:

one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other appealing to the

few who are sensitive to the felicitous expression of deep thought

and to the true beauties of poetic art.

Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his use of

what Dante calls the 'sieve for noble words' his skill transcends

that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities

of thought and of diction in the great passages seem little short of

miraculous, and there are so many that it is easy to understand why

he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore.

That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will

take the trouble to compare the first edition of 'Romeo and Juliet'

with the received text, the first sketch of 'The Merry Wives of

Windsor' with the play as we now have it, and the 'Hamlet' of 1603

with the 'Hamlet' of 1604, and with the still further varied version

of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. Next

to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two

great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace

public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps,

Chaucer; but since Shakespeare's time no one has met with anything

like Tennyson's success in effecting a reconciliation between popular

and artistic sympathy with poetry in England."

Chapter XVIII

AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS

I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton's literary friendships

would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends.

There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting

between him and James Russell Lowell. Shortly after Lowell had accepted

the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at

dinner. During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the

conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one. He observed

that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the

conversation. The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English

writers--Dickens, Thackeray, and others. As the dinner wore on, his

conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was

equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also

upon the prominent political men of the previous generation--Palmerston,

Lord John Russell, and the like. Then the name of the Alabama came up;

the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American),

dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the

Alabama escape. This diatribe he concluded thus: 'You know we owe

England nothing.' In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton,

manifestly addressing his remarks to him.

These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at

last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the

first time, he said: "Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong. You owe

England a very great deal, for I see you are an American."

"What do we owe England?" said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now

began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.

"You owe England," he said, "for an infinity of good feeling which you

are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans. So kind is the

feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the

middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English

people themselves. They are petted and made much of, until at last it

has come to this, that the very fact of a person's being American is a

letter of introduction."

Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so

penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause

in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel

between the two. After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his

chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:

"You were very sharp upon me just now, sir."

"Not in the least," said Mr. Watts-Dunton. "You were making an onslaught

on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were

addressing your conversation to me."

"Well," replied Mr. Lowell, "I will confess that I did address my

conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts."

"That is my little name," said Mr. Watts-Dunton. "But I really don't see

why that should induce you to address your conversation to me. I suppose

it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American

newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies. An

entire mistake! I have several charming American friends, and I am a

great admirer of many of your most eminent writers. But I notice that

whensoever an American book is severely handled in the 'Athenaeum,' the

article is attributed to me."

"I do not think," said Mr. Lowell, "that you are a lover of my country,

but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never

wrote."

And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more

confidential.

"Well," he said, "I will tell you something that, I think, will not be

altogether unpleasant to you. When I came to take up my permanent

residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine

about London and Londoners, and I said to him: 'There is one man whom I

very much want to meet.' 'You!' said he, 'why, you can meet anybody from

the royal family downwards. Who is the man you want to meet?' 'It is a

man in the literary world,' said I, 'and I have no doubt you can

introduce me to him. It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in

the "Athenaeum."' My friend laughed. 'Well, it is curious,' he replied:

'that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you

to. I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures

on my writing which I don't much approve of.' Does that interest you?"

added Mr. Lowell.

"Very much," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.

"Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the

'Athenaeum' I have read every article you have written?"

"Very much," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.

"Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said

to a friend of mine: 'At last there is a new voice in English

criticism?'"

"Very much," said Mr. Watts-Dunton. "But you must first tell me what

that article was, for I don't believe there is one of my countrymen who

could do so."

"That article," said Lowell, "was an essay upon the 'Comedy of the Noctes

Ambrosianae,' and it opened with an Oriental anecdote."

"Well," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "that does interest me very much."

"And I will go further," said Lowell: "every line you have written in the

'Athenaeum' has been read by me, and often re-read."

"Well," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "I confess to being amazed, for I assure

you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my

name is absolutely unknown. And I must add that I feel honoured, for it

is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for

some of your critical essays. But still, I don't quite forgive you for

your onslaught upon my poor little island! My sympathies are not

strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic

than Anglo-Saxon in temper. But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way,

and I don't quite forgive you."

The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.

"Won't you come to see me," said Lowell, "at the Embassy?"

"I don't know where it is."

"Then you ought to know!" said Lowell. "Another proof of the stout

sufficiency of the English temper--not to know where the American Embassy

is! It is in Lowndes Square." Then he named the number.

"Why," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt

of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the

Swinburne family--a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the

open air at I don't know what age of life--something like eighty. She

was a friend of Turner's, and is the possessor of some of Turner's finest

works."

"So you actually go next door, and don't know where the American Embassy

is! A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English

temper! However, as you come next door, won't you come and see me?"

"I shall be delighted," said Mr. Watts-Dunton; "but I am perfectly sure

you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man."

"On the contrary," said Lowell, "I always reserve to myself an hour, from

five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette."

Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an

hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution,

this hour over a cigarette once a week.

This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling

the way in which Lowell's Anglophobia became milder and milder, 'fine by

degrees and beautifully less,' until at last it entirely vanished. Then

it was followed by something like Anglo-mania. Lowell began to talk with

the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways

which he would formerly have deprecated. The climax of this revolution

was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:

"Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have

ceased to be able to follow you. The English ladies are--let us say,

charming; English gentlemen are--let us say, charming, or at least some

of them. Everything is charming! But there is one thing you cannot say

a word for, and that is our detestable climate."

"And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!" said

Lowell. "I positively cannot live out of it."

"Well," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "you and I will cease to talk about

England and John Bull, if you please. I cannot follow you."

In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with

all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his

own country. There never was a stauncher American than James Russell

Lowell. Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed

man. Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling

between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to

Lowell. Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest

sonnets. It appeared in the 'Athenaeum' after Lowell's death, and it has

been frequently reprinted in the United States. It now appears in 'The

Coming of Love.' It was addressed 'To Britain and America: On the Death

of James Russell Lowell,'

Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood

And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,

Your fathers drew, for Freedom's pioneers,

Your English speech, your dower of English blood--

Ye ask to-day, in sorrow's holiest mood,

When all save love seems film--ye ask in tears--

'How shall we honour him whose name endears

The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?'

Your hands he joined--those fratricidal hands,

Once trembling, each, to seize a brother's throat:

How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands

Between you still?--Keep Love's bright sails afloat

For Lowell's sake, where once ye strove and smote

On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.

This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton's feelings

towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile. Apart from his

intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence

Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most

cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey,

Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans.

Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during

several years they saw each other nearly every day. That was before

Whistler's genius had received full recognition. I may recall that

during a certain controversy concerning Whistler's animosity against the

Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the

'Times' of August 12, 1903:--

"In the 'Times' of to-day Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., says: 'I was on

friendly terms with Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never

heard him at any time testify animosity against the Academy or its

members.'

My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty years,

but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so intimate

that during part of this period we met almost every day. Indeed, at

one time we were jointly engaged on a weekly periodical called

'Piccadilly,' for which Du Maurier designed the cover, and for which

Whistler furnished his very first lithographs, by the valuable aid of

Mr. T. Way. During that time there were not many days when he failed

to 'testify animosity' against the Academy and its members. To say

the truth, the testifications on this subject by 'Jimmy,' as he was

then called, were a little afflictive to his friends. Whether he was

right or wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified

to express an opinion.

May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my admiration of

your New York Correspondent's amazingly vivid portrait of one of the

most vivid personalities of our time? It is a masterpiece. . . . "

When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most appreciative

estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for the 'Athenaeum.' I

am tempted to quote it nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with

American literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words

of mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton's feelings towards Americans:--

"As a personality Bret Harte seems to have exercised a great charm

over his intimate friends, and I am not in the least surprised at his

being a favourite. It is many years since I last saw him. I think

it must have been at a club dinner given by William Black; but I have

a very vivid remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have

been more than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred

to me that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles

Dickens, might have been an admirable actor. On that account the

following incident is worth recording. A friend of mine, an American

poet, who at that time was living in London, brought him to my

chambers, and did me the honour of introducing me to him. Bret Harte

had read something about the London music-halls, and proposed that we

should all three take a drive round the town and see something of

them. At that time these places took a very different position in

public estimation from what they appear to be doing now. People then

considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very inane, as,

indeed, they were, and were shy about going to them. I hope they

have improved now, for they seem to have become quite fashionable.

Our first visit was to the Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one

or two songs that gave the audience immense delight--some comic, some

more comic from being sentimental-maudlin. And we saw one or two

shapeless women in tights. Then we went to the 'Oxford,' and saw

something on exactly the same lines. In fact, the performers seemed

to be the same as those we had just been seeing. Then we went to

other places of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to

the distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women

seemed to be finding so amusing. At that time, indeed, the almost

only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the theatres was

that at Evans's supper-rooms, where, under the auspices of the famous

Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh rarebit while listening to the

'Chough and Crow' and 'The Men of Harlech,' given admirably by

choir-boys. Years passed before I saw Bret Harte again. I met him

at a little breakfast party, and he amused those who sat near him by

giving an account of what he had seen at the music-halls--an account

so graphic that I think a fine actor was lost in him. He not only

vivified every incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every

performer in a peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the

humour of it. His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson

of 'Rip Van Winkle' fame. This proved to me what a genius he had for

accurate observation, and also what a remarkable memory for the

details of a scene. His death has touched English people very

deeply.

* * * * *

It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte--easy to say that he was a

disciple of Dickens--easy to say that in richness, massiveness, and

variety he fell far short of his great and beloved master. No one

was so ready to say all this and more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte

himself. For of all the writers of his time he was perhaps the most

modest, the most unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where

he believed honour to be due.

But the comparison between the English and American story-tellers

must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of the latter. If

Dickens showed great superiority to Bret Harte on one side of the

imaginative writer's equipment, there were, I must think, other sides

of that equipment on which the superiority was Bret Harte's.

Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of

universal criticism Bret Harte's reputation will be found to be of

the usual ephemeral kind. It is, of course, impossible to speak on

such matters with anything like confidence. But it does seem to me

that Bret Harte's reputation is more likely than is generally

supposed to ripen into what we call fame. For in his short

stories--in the best of them, at least--there is a certain note quite

indescribable by any adjective--a note which is, I believe, always to

be felt in the literature that survives. The charge of not being

original is far too frequently brought against the imaginative

writers of America. What do we mean by 'originality'? Scott did not

invent the historic method. Dickens simply carried the method of

Smollett further, and with wider range. Thackeray is admittedly the

nineteenth century Fielding. Perhaps, indeed, there is but one

absolutely original writer of prose fiction of the nineteenth

century--Nathaniel Hawthorne. By original I mean simply original. I

do not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his epoch.

But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a fiction in which

the material world and the spiritual world were not merely brought

into touch, but were positively intermingled one with the other.

Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material for

literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly fascinating

kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it adequately. This

is what I mean: in the wonderful history of the nineteenth century

there are no more picturesque figures than those goldseekers--those

'Argonauts' of the Pacific slope--who in 1848 and 1849 showed the

world what grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call

'the Anglo-Saxon race.' The Australian gold-diggers of 1851 who

followed them, although they were picturesque and sturdy too, were

not exactly of the strain of the original Argonauts. The romance of

the thing had been in some degree worn away. The land of the Golden

Fleece had degenerated into a Tom Tiddler's Ground. Moreover, the

Tom Tiddler's Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a comparatively

easy distance from the Antipodean centre of civilization. 'Canvas

Town' could easily be reached from Sydney. But to reach the Golden

Fleece sought by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer

had before him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind. Every

Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of gold.

He must either trek overland--that is to say, over those vast

prairies and then over those vast mountain chains which to men of the

time of Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up the limitless 'far West'

regions which only a few pioneers had dared to cross--or else he must

take a journey, equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy

vessel in which he could get a passage. It follows that for an

adventurer to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece at

all implied in itself that grit which adventurers of the Anglo-Saxon

type are generally supposed to show in a special degree. What kind

of men these Argonauts were, and what kind of life they led, the

people of the Eastern states of America and the people of England had

for years been trying to gather from newspaper reports and other

sources; but had it not been for the genius of Bret Harte this most

picturesque chapter of nineteenth-century history would have been

obliterated and forgotten. Thanks to the admirable American writer

whom England had the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many

years, those wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the

Sierra Nevada are as familiar to us as is Dickens's London. Surely

those who talk of Bret Harte as being 'Dickens among the Californian

pines' do not consider what their words imply. It is true, no doubt,

that there was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens

and the temperament of Bret Harte. They both held the same

principles of imaginative art, they both felt that the function of

the artist is to aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him

beautiful ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called

realism which lowers man in his aspirations--which calls before man's

imagination degrading pictures of his 'animal origin'--is to do him a

disservice. For man has still a long journey before he reaches the

goal. Yet though they were both by instinct idealists as regards

character-drawing, they both sought to give their ideals a local

habitation and a name by surrounding those ideals with vividly

painted real accessories, as real as those of the ugliest realist.

With regard to Bret Harte's Argonauts and the romantic scenery in

which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a bold thing to

say whether Dickens could or could not have painted them, and

whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or would not have

been as good as Bret Harte's pictures. But Dickens never did paint

these Argonauts; he never had the chance of painting them. Bret

Harte did paint them, and succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens

succeeded in painting certain classes of London life. Now,

assuredly, I should have never dreamt of instituting a comparison of

this kind between two of the most delightful writers and the most

delightful men that have lived in my time had not critics been doing

so to the disparagement of one of them. But if one of these writers

must be set up against another, I feel that something should be said

upon the other side of the question--I feel that something should be

said on those points where the American had the advantage. Take the

question of atmosphere, for instance. Let us not forget how

enormously important is atmosphere in any imaginative picture of

life. Without going so far as to say that atmosphere is as

important, or nearly as important, as character, let me ask, What was

it that captured the readers of 'Robinson Crusoe'? Was it the

character of Defoe's hero, or was it the scenery and the atmosphere

in which he placed him? Again, see what an important part scenery

and atmosphere played in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' in 'The Lady

of the Lake,' in 'Marmion,' and in 'Waverley.' And surely it was the

atmosphere of Byron's 'Giaour,' 'The Bride of Abydos,' and 'The

Corsair,' that mainly gave these poems their vogue. And, in a

certain sense, it may be said that Dickens gave to his readers a new

atmosphere, for he was the first to explore what was something new to

the reading world--the great surging low-life of London and the life

of the lower stratum of its middle class. It seems that the pure

novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and picturesque

atmosphere. It was natural for England to look to American writers

to enrich English literature with a new imaginative atmosphere, and

she did not look in vain. But, notwithstanding all that had been

done by writers like Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and

others to bring American atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave

us an atmosphere that was American and yet as new as though the

above-mentioned writers had never written. He had the advantage of

depicting a scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his

predecessors as it was unlike everything else in the world. It is

doubtful whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as

the mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and

Canada.