“Watts-Dunton writes poetry because he loves writing it,” said
Swinburne to me once. “I write poetry, I suppose, to escape from
boredom.”
There is truth in the statement, but there is more behind the
statement than appears at the first glance.
New and incoming tides of poetry lapped at his feet each morning, and
the incoming of each new tide of poetry was to him as fresh, pure,
crystalline-sweet, and free, as is the tide that rolls in upon the
shore each day from the vastnesses and the sweetnesses of the central
sea.
Hence he gave himself up to it, plunged in it, sported in it, with
the zeal and rapture of a boy. Had the call to think poetry, dream
poetry, write poetry, plunge himself into poetry, come to him as part
of a set task, had he been compelled, in the mood or out of the mood,
to take up poetry as an occupation, he would have turned from it as
the sea-loving swimmer turns from a stagnant pool. It would have been
to him the “boredom” of which he had spoken, not the “escape from
boredom.”
I have said that the impression I formed of him after my first visit
was that of a man who lived in a world of his own--a world which,
so far as his body was concerned, was, with the exception of his
experiences on and by the sea, bounded, for the greater part of
his later life, by the four walls of his home, and by the limits
of his daily walk, but which, in the imaginative and mental sense,
was illimitable. Human and normal in passion, and in every other
respect, as I believe him to have been (so far, that is to say, as
genius, which by overbalancing one side of a man’s nature, inevitably
necessitates some underbalancing on the other, ever _can_ be said to
be normal), he had seemed to me, on the occasion of that first visit,
a creature of other flesh and blood than ours, an elusive ethereal
poetic essence, rather than a man of like passions to our own.
It had seemed to me as if the busy world, in which other men made
love and married, begot children, bought and sold, laboured and
schemed--though it lay outside his very door--was a million miles
away from the monastic quiet of the book-lined room in which he lived
and dreamed and wrote.
I do not say that it was so. All I say is that it had seemed so to me
on that first meeting, but I am not sure that the impression I then
formed was accurate.
I came away feeling as if I had been in the company of a creature
living in an unreal world, whereas now I think that, to the man
whom I had left behind in that book-lined room, life was infinitely
more real than it is to us. I had left behind me, given over to
ecstatic abandonment to the mood of the moment, and believing
intensely in the reality and actuality of all which that mood called
forth, or created, _a child at play with his toys_, for in spite of
the magnificence and the maturity of his intellect (may I not say
_because_ of the magnificence and the maturity of his intellect?)
the child lived on and was alive to the last in Algernon Charles
Swinburne as it lives in few others.
What he had meant when he spoke of writing poetry “to escape
from boredom” was that he was a tired child turning for comfort,
self-forgetfulness and consolation to his toys; and to him (happy
man!) even his life-work, even Poetry itself, was, in a sense, a
toy. That was why to the last he turned to it--an old man in years,
though I could never bring myself to think of him as old--with such
eager and childlike anticipation. The child heart, which could
exult and build up dreams around his toys, remained; but his toys
were changed--that was all. That was why he so loved and was so
loved by children. They recognised him, bearded man as he was, as
one of themselves. That was why he was so instantly at home with
them, and they with him. That, too, was why he so revelled in Mr.
Kenneth Grahame’s _The Golden Age_--not with the mild reminiscent
and ruminant interest and pleasure of a staid grown-up, chewing
the cud of childhood, but with a boy of ten’s actual and intense
identification with, and abandonment of himself to the part he was
acting, and with all a boy of ten’s natural and innate love of fun
and of mischief. I have seen him literally dance and caper and
whistle (yes, whistle) with all an eager boy’s rapture, over some
new toy treasure-trove, in the shape of a poem, by himself or by a
friend, a “find” in the shape of a picture, a print, or a coveted
first edition, picked up, during his rambles, at a stall.
“Eccentricity of genius,” you say?
Not at all. It meant merely that _his boyhood was as immortal as his
genius, as ineradicable as his intellectual greatness_.
Warm as was my regard for Algernon Charles Swinburne the man,
profound as is my admiration of him as a poet, I am not sure that to
this child-side of him must not be attributed much that was noblest
and most lovable in his noble and lovable personality, as well as
much that was loftiest and most enduring in his work.
Of him we must say, as Mr. William Watson has so finely said of
Tennyson, that he
Is heard for ever, and is seen no more;
but in seeking, for the purpose of these Recollections, to conjure
the living man before me, in striving to recall my conversations
with him, and in remembering, as I always do and shall remember, his
great-heartedness, I am reminded of what Watts-Dunton once said to me
in a letter.
“You will recall,” he wrote, “what Swinburne was remarking to you
the other day, when we were discussing the envy, hatred and malice
of a certain but very small section of the literary craft. ‘Yes,’
said Swinburne, ‘but these are the intellectually-little writing
fellows who do not matter and who do not count. The biggest men,
intellectually, are always the biggest-natured. Great hearts go
generally with great brains.’”
And I think--I am sure--that the saying is true.