My best thanks for your most kind letter which has been forwarded
to me here where I am staying with Tennyson. When I get home I
will write to suggest a day for us to meet at Putney. Tennyson,
with whom I took a long walk of three miles this morning, is in
marvellous health, every faculty (at 82) is as bright as it was
when his years were 40. He is busy writing poetry as fine as
anything he has ever written. He read out to me last night three
poems which of themselves would suffice to make a poet’s fame.
Really he is a miracle. This is a lovely place--I don’t know how
many miles above the level of the sea--bracing to a wonderful
degree.
Ever yours,
THEODORE WATTS.
The accepted tradition of Watts-Dunton as what Swinburne had called
the ogre of the _Athenæum_ goaded him, was a bugbear and a purgatory
to him to his very life’s end.
“I see that you mention Mr. William Watson as a friend of yours,” he
wrote to me. “---- who was here the other day, greatly vexed and even
distressed me by telling me that Mr. Watson is under the impression
that I have written disparagingly of his work. Why, it was I who at
a moment, when Rossetti refused to look at any book sent to him,
persuaded him to read _The Prince’s Quest_ years ago, and got him
to write to the author (for though a bad correspondent myself, I am
exemplary in persuading my friends to be good ones). It was I who
wrote to Fisher Unwin when he sent me _Wordsworth’s Grave_, urging
him to reprint _The Prince’s Quest_.”
Not once but a score of times he spoke to me of his high admiration
of some of Mr. Watson’s poems, as well as of poems by Stephen
Phillips, John Davidson, Mrs. Clement Shorter, and many others of the
younger poets. His championship of a certain other writer of verse
who shall be nameless, involved him in a controversy which was like
to end in a personal severance between himself and his correspondent.
“What you said about ---- is specially amusing,” he wrote, “because
on the very morning after you were here I got a letter from an
acquaintance abusing me to such a degree that I am by no means
sure it will not end in a personal severance. And all because
I was backing up one whom he describes as the most impudent
self-advertising man that has ever claimed to be a poet. According
to the irate one, he has nobbled not only New Grub Street complete,
but also sub-edits the ---- and writes himself up there, and devotes
his time to paragraphing himself in the ----! I pointed out in my
answer that to me, who do not read these organs, save slightly, that
the question of physical power and time presented itself and made me
sceptical as to the possibility of a man who has produced many verses
of late, and good ones to boot, being such a prolific rival of Mr.
Pears and Mr. Colman, and as I said so in rather a chaffy way, my
correspondent has taken umbrage. But oh, ‘these writing fellows!’ as
Wellington used to call the knights of the ink-horn.”
I suspect that it was what Watts-Dunton calls his “chaffy way” more
than his championship of the verse-maker which gave offence to
his correspondent. His humour was of the old-fashioned Dickensian
sort, but heavier of foot, more cumbrous of movement, occasionally
somewhat grim, and rumbling, like distant thunder, over a drollery.
It is possible that what he meant for playful raillery at his
correspondent’s exasperation that a verse-maker should enter into a
competition with Mr. Colman and Mr. Pears, by advertising his wares
in the same way that they advertise mustard or soap, was taken as a
seriously meant reproof. Be that as it may, for I did not hear the
sequel of the controversy, Watts-Dunton, so far from being the ogre
he was painted, was, on the contrary, something of a fairy godmother
to many a young and struggling poet of parts. But even so he found
that poets not of the first rank are hard to please.
Acknowledging the receipt of a presentation copy of verses from an
acquaintance of his and mine, I chanced to inquire whether Theodore
Watts was likely to review the book in the _Athenæum_. “God forbid!”
wrote the poet in reply. “If so, he would simply make my unfortunate
book the peg upon which to hang a wonderful literary robe of spun
silk and fine gold. He would begin--omitting all mention of me or my
book--with some generalisation, some great first principle, whether
of life, literature, science or art, no one, other than himself or
the God who made him, could ever be sure beforehand. In his hands it
would be absorbingly fresh, learned, illuminative and fascinating.
Thence he would launch out into an essay, incomparable in knowledge
and in scholarship, that would deal with everything in heaven or on
earth, in this world or the next, other than my unhappy little book.
He would, in fact, open up so many worlds of wonder and romance, in
which to lose himself, that I should think myself fortunate if, at
the end of his review, I found my name as much as mentioned, and
should count myself favoured were there as much as one whole line in
the whole four page essay in the _Athenæum_ about my little book.”
I am free to admit that there is much that is true in the analysis
of Watts-Dunton’s method of reviewing, and that he was aware of this
himself will be seen by my next quotation. It so happened that he
did, much pressed though he was at the time, put his own work aside,
and review the book in question in the _Athenæum_. He did so from the
single desire to forward the interests of a young poet.
Here is part of a letter which he afterwards sent to me upon the
subject. The review itself I did not see, but that it was upon the
lines anticipated and failed to satisfy the poet in question is very
clear.
“My method of reviewing, though it is well understood by the
more famous men, does not seem to please and to satisfy the less
distinguished ones; and this makes me really timid about reviewing
any of them. But I believe, indeed I am sure, that my methods of
using a book as an illustration of some first principle in criticism
gives it more importance, attracts to it more attention than any more
businesslike review article of the ordinary kind would, because my
speciality is known to be that of dealing with first principles.
“I am just off again to Dursley in Gloucestershire to visit, with
Swinburne, his mother and sister, who are staying there.
“I think I have satisfied myself that Shakespeare’s evident
familiarity with Gloucestershire is owing to his having stayed at
Dursley with one of the Shakespeares who was living there during his
lifetime. The Gloucestershire names of people mentioned by him are
still largely represented at Dursley and the neighbourhood, and the
description of the outlook toward Berkeley is amazingly accurate.”
But Watts-Dunton had cause to regret his kindly action in departing
from his almost invariable rule to review only poets of the first
standing, nor was he allowed, free from irritating distractions,
peacefully to pursue his researches into Shakespeare’s associations
with Gloucestershire. The poet wrote again--this time to complain
that the review was not sufficiently eulogistic. Watts-Dunton sent me
the letter with the following comment:
“What the devil would these men have? I suppose we are all to fall at
their feet as soon as they have written a few good verses and discuss
them as we discuss Sophocles, Æschylus, and Sappho. Does this not
corroborate what Swinburne was saying to you the other day about the
modesty of the first-rate poet and the something else of the others?”
After Watts-Dunton’s return from Gloucester, I was lunching with
Swinburne and himself at The Pines, and the aggrieved poet called
in person while I was there. Swinburne, who hated to make a new
acquaintance, and not only resolutely refused himself to every one,
but, when Watts-Dunton had visitors with whom he was unacquainted,
frequently betook himself to his own sanctum upstairs until they were
gone, happened that morning to be in an impish mood. At any other
time he would have stormed at the bare suggestion of admitting the
man to the house. But on this particular morning he took a Puck-like
delight in the hornets’ nest which Watts-Dunton had brought about
his ears by what Swinburne held to be an undeserved honour and
kindness to an undeserving and ungrateful scribbler, and he wished,
or pretended to wish, that the poet be admitted. He vowed, and before
heaven, that a windy encounter between the “grave and great-browed
critic of the _Athenæum_” and the “browsing and long-eared bardling
with a grievance” would be as droll as a comedy scene from _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_.
Watts-Dunton--outwardly smiling indulgently at his friend’s whimsical
and freakish mood, but inwardly by no means regarding the matter in
the light of a jest, and not a little chafed and sore--declined to
see the caller then or at any other time.
“Reviewing poets other than those of the first rank,” he protested,
“is the most thankless task on God’s earth. The smaller the man is
intellectually, the harder, the more impossible he is to please,
and the greedier he is of unstinted adulation. Strain your critical
sense and your generosity to the point of comparing him to Marlowe or
Marvell, and he will give you to understand that his work has more
of the manner of Shelley. Compare him to Shelley, and the odds are
he will grumble that it wasn’t Shakespeare, and I’m not sure that
some of them would rest contented with that. I have tried to do a
kindness, and I have succeeded only in making an enemy. That fellow
is implacable. He will pursue me with hatred to the end of my life.”
Yet in this particular instance, as in many others, Watts-Dunton’s
error had been only on the side of excessive generosity, for which
Swinburne had taken him to task. Swinburne himself, it is idle to
say, was a Jupiter in his judgments. He was ready to vacate his
own throne and hail one poet as a god, or utterly to overwhelm
another with a hurled avalanche of scorn. But at least he reserved
his laudation and his worship, or else his “volcanic wrath” and
thunderbolts, for his masters and his peers. He delivered judgment
uninfluenced by the personal element or by kindly sentiment and easy
good nature. Watts-Dunton’s good-hearted efforts to find something
to praise in the work even of little men occasionally annoyed
Swinburne, and drew the fire of his withering criticism upon the
target of their work. It was the one and only thing upon which I
knew them to differ, and in this connection I should like to add a
word upon the relationship which existed between these two brothers
in friendship and in song. Ideal as was that relationship, it had
this drawback--that it tended to “standardize,” if I may so phrase
it, their prejudices upon purely personal, as apart from critical or
intellectual issues.
Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks in _The Professor at the Breakfast
Table_ of “that slight inclination of two persons with a strong
affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when
they sit side by side together.”
This saying has a mental as well as a physical application. It is
surprising, as I have elsewhere said, how entirely Watts-Dunton’s
individuality remained uninfluenced by his close association with
two men of such strongly-marked and extraordinary individuality as
Rossetti and Swinburne. One reservation must, however, be made. On
certain personal matters the plumb of Watts-Dunton’s judgment was apt
slightly to be deflected out of line by Swinburne’s denunciation. If
Swinburne thundered an anathema against some one who had provoked
his wrath, Watts-Dunton, even if putting in a characteristically
indulgent word for the offender, was inclined--if unconsciously and
against his better judgment--to view the matter in the same light.
Similarly, if Watts-Dunton had some small cause of complaint--it
might even be a fancied cause of complaint--and Swinburne heard
of it, the latter’s attachment to his friend caused him so to
trumpet his anger as to magnify the matter to undue importance in
Watts-Dunton’s eyes as well as in his own.
In this way and in this way only the association between Watts-Dunton
and Swinburne was to the advantage of neither, as the mind of the one
reacted sometimes upon the mind of the other to produce prejudice
and to impair judgment. I have no thought or intention of belittling
either in saying this. It is no service to the memory of a friend
to picture him as a superman and superior to all human weakness.
But if Watts-Dunton was not without his prejudices and literary
dislike, he was as a critic the soul of honour, and would not write
a line in review of the work of the man or woman concerning whom he
had justly or unjustly already formed an unfavourable opinion. As a
reviewer he set a standard which we should do well to maintain. He
was no Puritan. To him everything in life was spiritually symbolic,
and nothing was of itself common or unclean. The article in which
he dealt with Sterne’s indecencies shirks nothing that needed to be
said upon the subject, but says it in such a way as to recall Le
Gallienne’s happy definition of purity--as the power to touch pitch
while remaining undefiled--for in all Watts-Dunton’s spoken no less
than in his written word, there was no single passage, no single
line, which one could on that score regret. In his poems the red
flambeau of passion and the white taper of purity burn side by side
on one altar. His innate love of purity, his uncompromising attitude
towards everything suggestive or unclean, were among his most marked
characteristics as writer and as man. It is well for literature that
one of the greatest critics of our day should have thus jealously
guarded the honour of the mistress whom he served. As a poet, he was
of the company of those who, in his own words:
Have for muse a maiden free from scar,
Who knows how beauty dies at touch of sin.
He kept unsullied the white shield of English Literature, and his
influence for good is none the less lasting and real because it can
never be estimated.