It was, I believe, George Meredith who, when the author of _Aylwin_
changed his name from Theodore Watts to Theodore Watts-Dunton, spoke
of him as “Theodore What’s-his-name,” and added that he supposed his
friend had made the change lest posterity might confound Watts the
poet with Watts the hymn writer.
Posterity, unlike Popularity--who plays the wanton at times and
cohabits with unlawful mates--keeps chaste her house from generation
to generation and needs no hint from us to assist her choice. Her
task is to rescue reputations from the dust, no less than to “pour
forgetfulness upon the dead,” and none of us alive to-day may predict
what surprise of lost or rescued reputations Posterity may have in
store.
Over one of these reputations it is surely possible to imagine
Posterity--I will not disrespectfully say scratching a puzzled head,
but at least wrinkling in perplexity her learned brows. She will
discover when straightening out her dog’s-eared literary annals
that the name of one writer, who at the beginning of the last
decade of the nineteenth century had a great if somewhat esoteric
reputation among his brother authors, was not then to be found in
any publisher’s list, and for the somewhat curious and incontinent
reason that at that time he had published no book. It was not until
the publication of _Aylwin_ that the name of Theodore Watts, or
as he afterwards elected to be called Watts-Dunton, became widely
known outside what are sometimes not very felicitously described as
“literary circles.”
To-day the tremendous issues of the Great War have, as it were, at
a besom stroke of the gods, brushed into one box, to set aside,
upon a shelf, all the trappings, furniture and paraphernalia
of non-industrial arts and the like. Authors, artists, actors,
musicians, professors, as well as the mere politician, are, and
rightly, relegated to the back of the stage of life, and it is the
soldier and the sailor--not by their own seeking--who bulk biggest in
the public eye. But in those days of little things--the last decade
of the last century--and outside the so-called “literary circle” of
which I have spoken, there were other and outer circles of men and
women much more keenly interested in books and authors, especially
in the personality of literary celebrities, than would be possible
in these days of tragic and tremendous world-issues. In such circles
many curious, interesting and even romantic associations were woven
around the name of Theodore Watts.
He was known to be the personal friend of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold,
James Russell Lowell, Browning, and William Morris. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and George Meredith had in the past made their home with
him at Chelsea, and Swinburne had been his house mate for many years
at Putney. Rossetti and Swinburne had written and spoken of him in
terms which to outsiders seem extravagant, and both had dedicated
some of their best work to him. It was also known that he had lived
for some time with gipsies, was one of the three greatest living
authorities on gipsy lore and the gipsy language, and had been the
friend of George Borrow. This curiosity was stimulated by the fact
that Watts-Dunton was then very rarely seen at literary dinners or
functions, and was supposed more studiously even to avoid publicity
than some of his craft who might be named were supposed to seek it.
Cryptic allusions in the literary journals, reviews, and magazines
to a long-completed novel, deliberately and cruelly withheld from
publication, and tributes to his encyclopædic knowledge, did not a
little to increase this curiosity.
Thus far the reputation which Theodore Watts had attained did
not altogether belie him, but there was yet another “Theodore
Watts”--“Watts of the _Athenæum_” he was sometimes called--who had
no existence except in the imagination of certain small literary fry
by whom he was popularly supposed to be something of a “Hun” of the
pen, a shark of the literary seas, who preyed upon suckling poets.
I remember a morning in the early nineties, when I was to lunch at
Putney with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne. Being in the neighbourhood
of Temple Bar about eleven, I turned in for a cup of coffee and a
cigarette at a famous Coffee House, then much frequented by editors,
journalists, poets, rising authors and members of the literary staff
of the publishing houses and newspaper offices in or around Fleet
Street, as well as by members of the legal profession from the Temple
and the New Law Courts.
At the next table sat a young man with long hair, a velveteen jacket
and a flowing tie. He was talking so loudly to a friend, that unless
one stopped one’s ears there was no choice but to overhear the
conversation.
“Seen this week’s _Athenæum_?” he asked his friend.
“Not yet. Anything particular in it?” was the reply.
“Only a review of my poems.”
“Good?”
“Bad as it can be--bad, that is, as four contemptuous lines of small
print can make it. A book, which as you know represents the thought,
the passion and soul-travail of years; a book written in my heart’s
blood--and dismissed by the _Athenæum_ in four contemptuous lines!”
There was a pause too brief, if not too deep for tears. Then:
“Theodore Watts, of course!” he added between set teeth. “I expected
it. Everyone knows he is so insanely jealous of us younger men that
he watches the publishers’ lists for every book by a young poet
of ability to pounce upon it, and to cut it up. What has he done,
I should like to know, to give him the right to pronounce death
sentences? Why, the fellow’s never even published a book of his own.
“Shall I tell you why? He _daren’t_. There is a novel called _Aylwin_
written and ready to publish many years ago. Murray has offered him
a small fortune in advance royalties, I hear.”
Again the young man paused dramatically and looked darkly around the
room, not apparently from fear of his being overheard, but because he
wished to invite attention to the inner and exclusive knowledge which
he possessed. Then, in an ecstasy of anger that had a fine disregard
for so trivial a matter as a confusion of metaphors, he thundered:
“Because that viper Theodore Watts has stabbed so many of us in
the back anonymously in the _Athenæum_, he daren’t bring out his
novel. He can never say anything bad enough about a ‘minor poet,’
as he scornfully calls us, but he knows that some of us do a little
reviewing, and that we are waiting for him to publish his book that
we may get a bit of our own back.”
It so happened that I had in my pocket that morning a letter from
Watts-Dunton deprecating the slating in the _Athenæum_ of a book of
minor poetry by a friend of mine, and I remembered a sentence in the
letter. “By minor poet, meaning apparently a new and unknown poet,”
which prefaced a generous if discriminating and critical appreciation
of my friend’s poems.
To intrude into a conversation between strangers was, of course, as
much out of the question as to make known to others, without first
obtaining the writer’s permission, the contents of a letter written
to myself. Otherwise I could easily have convinced the aggrieved
young poet, not only that it was not Theodore Watts who had cut up
his book, but that so far from being a literary Herod and a slayer of
the poetic innocent, he was, as a matter of fact, Herod’s literary
antithesis. As the writer of the letter and those mentioned in it are
no longer with us, no harm can be done by printing part of it here:
“Like the rest of us, our Philip was mortal, and, like all of us, he
could be harsh. I got Maccoll to let him review the minor bards. He
was so terribly severe upon most of them that I was miserable; and I
fear that I had to ask Maccoll to be chary in sending them to him,
or at least I got M. to remonstrate with him for his extreme and
unaccountable harshness. My sympathies, as you know, are all with the
younger men. I love to see a young poet, or for the matter of that
_any_ young writer, get recognition.
“Robinson is the only fogey-brother I boom. Please tell him when
you see him that if I do not write to him much, it is not because
of any cooling of love. Thirty years ago he knew me for the worst
correspondent in the world. The first letter he ever wrote to me
(in sending me his novel _No Church_) I answered at the end of six
months. I wish I could help it, but I can’t. My friends have to take
me with all my infirmities on my head.”
“Our Philip,” I may say, was Philip Bourke Marston, the blind
poet; “Robinson” was F. W. Robinson, the novelist--both friends
of Watts-Dunton and mine--“Maccoll” was the then editor of the
_Athenæum_.
Had I known Watts-Dunton better (it was in the early days of our
long friendship that this Coffee House incident happened), I should
studiously have refrained from mentioning the matter to him. But
thinking it would do no more than amuse him, I was so unwise as
to tell the story over the luncheon table. Swinburne was vastly
amused, and rallied his friend gleefully for being what he described
as “the ogre of suckling bardlings,” but Watts-Dunton was visibly
distressed, and took it so much to heart that I had cause to regret
my indiscretion. He brooded over it and rumbled menacingly over
it, recurring to the matter again and again, until lunch was over,
vowing that it mattered nothing to him what this or that “writing
fellow” thought of him as a fellow writer, but that to be credited
with cruelty, and with willingness to give pain, to the younger
generation, with whom he was so entirely in sympathy, was monstrous,
was unthinkable, and was cause for cursing the day he had ever
consented to review for the _Athenæum_.
Here are some extracts from another letter in which he reverts to the
matter, and also incidentally gives an interesting peep of Swinburne
and himself on holiday:
“The crowning mistake of my life, a life that has been full of
mistakes, I fear, was in drifting into the position of literary
reviewer to a journal, and not drifting out for a quarter of a
century. I not only squandered my efforts, but made unconsciously a
thousand enemies in the literary world whom I can never hope now to
appease until death comes to my aid. Swinburne sends you his kind
regards. He and I are here staying at one of the lovely places in
the Isle of Wight, belonging to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon. It is a
fairy place. Her late husband’s father took one of the most romantic
spots of the Undercliff and turned the shelves of debris into the
loveliest Italian garden reaching down to the sea. It is so shut in
from the land that it can be seen only from the sea. It puts, as I
always say, Edgar Poe’s _Domain of Arnheim_ into the shade. I know of
nothing in the world so lovely. I have been writing a few sonnets,
but Swinburne does nothing but bathe.”
This reference to Swinburne idling reminds me of another letter I
received from Watts-Dunton, in which he pictures yet another great
poet, Tennyson, hard at work and at eighty-two. The letter has no
bearing on the matter immediately under discussion, but by way of
contrast I venture to include it here:
ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, SURREY,
_26th Sept., ’91_.