In all my conversations with Swinburne, I cannot recall one instance
of his interrupting a speaker. He would, it is true, go off at a
conversational tangent, as when, talking of Francis Hinde Groome
and Suffolk, he interpolated apparently irrelevant remarks upon
the curious names of some Yorkshire villages, having presumably
only discovered that morning that one of these villages bore the
delightful name of “Beggar my Neighbour.” But, though one could see
by his flashing eye that the hounds of utterance were chafing and
fretting to fling themselves upon the quarry, he invariably waited
till the other speaker had made an end of it before letting go the
leash. To everything that Watts-Dunton said, then or at any time, he
listened almost as a disciple might listen to a master, and again
and again he urged me to use any influence I had with the author of
_Aylwin_ to induce him to give that then unpublished work to the
world, and to allow his _Athenæum_ essays to be collected and issued
in book form.
“Only,” said Swinburne at a white heat of enthusiastic admiration,
“if every page, on which they were printed, represented a hundred
pound bank-note; if the back and the sides of the cover were of the
finest beaten gold--that would not be too costly a raiment for the
noblest critical work, dealing with first principles, that has ever
been given to the world.”
That this was Swinburne’s deliberate opinion of the value of his
brother poet’s and brother friend’s work, and was not the expression
of a moment’s enthusiasm, I have reason to know, for he used similar
expressions in my presence on many occasions. I observe, too,
that Mr. James Douglas, in his book _Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet,
Novelist, and Critic_, quotes Swinburne as describing Watts-Dunton as
“the first critic of his time, perhaps the largest minded and surest
sighted of any age”--a judgment which, as Mr. Douglas reminds us,
Rossetti endorsed.
Watts-Dunton, rumpling up his hair with one hand, tried to turn the
conversation into other channels, but Swinburne was obdurate.
“You, who know Walter’s magnificent, magician-like power of
concentrating into the fourteen lines of a sonnet what no other poet
could have said with equal power and felicity in forty, will agree
with me when I tell you what perhaps you do not know, for he never
speaks of it himself. When he was a young man, he lost a manuscript
book of poems of which he had no copy. By these lost poems the world
is, I believe, as poor as if Gabriel Rossetti’s early poems had never
been recovered from his wife’s coffin. It was an incomparable loss to
literature, a loss which can never be replaced.”
I did not know of these lost poems, for, intimate as I had been
with Watts-Dunton for many years, he had never even hinted at their
existence, or rather at their non-existence. But, except to admit
the loss and to make light of it, he refused to be drawn either by
Swinburne or by myself, and turned the conversation upon the former’s
_Ode to Music_, written, I think, for the opening of the Chicago
Exhibition. But of this Swinburne, in his turn, refused to talk,
averring that he had clean forgotten it--that a task like that, once
completed, he never thought of again, and that his mind was full at
the moment of his Tennyson Threnody.
On this occasion I saw yet another side of him. I had brought with me
two bunches of exquisite flowers--arum lilies, lilies of the valley,
snowdrops and some exotics--one for Miss Teresa Watts, one for
Swinburne. A flower was to him as it had been to Philip Marston, the
one unchanging and perfect thing in a changing and decaying world,
as fair, as fresh and as immortal as in the days of our youth. In an
ecstasy of delight, he took the flowers from my outstretched hand as
reverently as the communicant takes into his hands the consecrated
bread of the sacrament, as tenderly as a young mother takes into her
arms her new-born child. He bent his head over them in a rapture
that was almost like a prayer, his eyes when he looked up to thank
me for the gift alight and brimming over with thoughts that were not
far from tears. For many minutes he sat holding them, turning them
this way and that, too rapt in his worship to speak or to think of
anything else.
Then he turned to Miss Watts with his courtly bow.
“As you have been as equally honoured as I, you will not think me
robbing you if I carry my bunch away with me to put them in water and
to place them in my own room. I want to find them there when I wake
in the morning.”
He rose in his quiet way, the flowers in his hand, bowed again to
Miss Watts and myself and left the room. In a few minutes the door
reopened, but only wide enough to let him slip through, and he stole,
rather than walked, to the chair, where he seated himself among us
again, almost as noiselessly as a card is shuffled back to its place
in the pack.