With the exception of a few articles and poems reprinted in brochure
form from encyclopædias and periodicals, Watts-Dunton in his lifetime
published two books only--_Aylwin_ and _The Coming of Love_. A
successor to the former is in existence, and will shortly be issued
by Mr. John Lane. Were Watts-Dunton still alive, the book would, I am
convinced, even now be in manuscript. Part definitely with a book,
that it might go to press, he would not, so long as a chance remained
of holding on to it, to dovetail in a poem or a prose passage,
perhaps from something penned many years ago, or to rewrite, amend,
or omit whole chapters. I have seen proofs of his as bewildering in
the matter of what printers call “pulling copy about” as a jigsaw
puzzle. _Aylwin_ itself represents no one period of the author’s
lifetime, but all his literary life, up to the actual final passing
for press.
This is true also of the new book _Carniola_, commenced, under the
title of _Balmoral_, as far back as the days before Watts-Dunton left
St. Ives to come to London, and, upon it, he was more or less at work
up to the last. It takes its new title from the hero, who, the son of
an English father and an Hungarian mother, was christened Carniola,
after the Hungarian town of that name where he was born.
The story I have not read in its entirety, but I know that
Watts-Dunton considered the love interest stronger even than in
_Aylwin_, and his pictures of life more varied and painted in upon a
wider canvas.
The portions I have seen strike me--remembering, as has already been
said, how little Watts-Dunton’s personality and literary manner
were influenced by any of the great contemporaries with whom he was
intimately associated--as more Borrovian than anything else he has
written.
This applies particularly to the conversations. Unlike some later
novelists, who aim at crispness in conversational passages, by so
“editing” what is said as to “cut” the inevitable and necessary
commonplaces of conversation, and record only what is witty,
epigrammatic and to the point, Watts-Dunton, like Borrow, sets all
down exhaustively--the “give and take” of small talk, with all the
“I saids” and “he saids” in full, and with illuminating little
descriptions of the gestures and feelings of the speaker.
This gives a reality and naturalness to the dialogue, which we
miss, for all their smartness, crispness, and epigram, in the work
of certain more modern novelists, reading whom, one is inclined to
wonder whether two ordinary mortals ever did, in real life, rattle
off, impromptu, quite so many brilliant repartees, and clever
epigrams, in so short a time.
Very Borrovian too are the open-air and nature-loving passages of
_Carniola_, and the gypsy scenes of which there are many. Readers of
_Aylwin_ will be interested to meet with a gypsy girl, Klari, drawn
from real life, who, in Watts-Dunton’s opinion, is more beautiful
and more attractive than Sinfi Lovell of _Aylwin_ and _The Coming
of Love_. Those who had any personal knowledge, or have read the
books, of one of the most fascinating and romantic figures and fine
scholars of his time, the late Francis Hinde Groome, will find him
drawn--Watts-Dunton believed faithfully--in the character of Stormont.
Another striking piece of characterisation is the wheelwright,
Martin, whose “religiosity”--not to be confounded with the sincerity
and unselfishness of a truly religious man or woman--is narrow,
self-seeking, cruel, and Calvinistic.
“Make a success--and run away from it!” said a great and experienced
publisher to me one day. Watts-Dunton made a great success with
_Aylwin_. It will be interesting to see whether by following _Aylwin_
with a second novel of Bohemian life--the character on which he
has lavished most care is that of an Hungarian gypsy, a Punch and
Judy showman, and the scene is laid partly in England and partly in
Hungary--Watts-Dunton will prove the publisher to be, in this case at
least, wrong.
The rest of Watts-Dunton’s contributions to literature must be sought
for in back numbers of the reviews, magazines and critical journals,
and as Introductory Studies and Essays prefixed to reprints. That a
man of his enormous and many-sided knowledge should apply himself to
the craft of letters practically from early manhood to extreme old
age, and leave only two published volumes behind him, establishes
surely a record in these days of over-publication. One cannot wonder
that his readers and admirers should ask that he be more adequately
represented on their bookshelves by the collection, into permanent
volume form, of his many incomparable articles and essays. Until that
is done, I may perhaps be permitted to point out that in a sense
such a work already exists. The literary harvest of Watts-Dunton’s
life has been reaped, winnowed, and garnered into one volume which,
indeed, is not only a volume but a Watts-Dunton library in itself.
I refer of course to Mr. James Douglas’s _Theodore Watts-Dunton,
Poet, Novelist and Critic_, a work which with all its faults, and
it has many, is of remarkable interest. I do not say this because
Mr. Douglas has told us everything that can be told, and much that
it was unnecessary to tell about the life and work, the memorable
friendships and the literary methods of the author of _Aylwin_, but
because Mr. Douglas has with infinite care and pains harvested,
sifted, winnowed, and gleaned the whole field of Watts-Dunton’s
literary labours. The portion of the book in which the fine gold
of his writings upon Wonder as the primal Element in all religion;
upon the first awakenings in the soul of man of a sense of Wonder,
or perhaps I should say upon the awakening, the birth, of a soul
in man by means of Wonder; the noble exposition of the Psalms, the
Prayer Book, and of the Bible in its relation to the soul and to
the Universe; the analysis of Humour; the portions that deal with
Nature and Nature-Worship; with the methods and Art of great writers
in poetry and prose, and with First Principles generally--these in
themselves and by themselves make Mr. Douglas’s book unique.
I am not sure, indeed, that it will not eventually do more for
Watts-Dunton’s reputation as a thinker than the publication of a
whole library of his collected writings. For in his contributions to
the periodical Press, Watts-Dunton is apt sometimes to be diffuse.
He becomes befogged, as it were, with the multitudinousness of his
own learning. His “cogitations”--the word is more applicable to most
of his work than “essays”--were so prodigious, branched out into
such innumerable but always fascinating and pregnant side issues,
as to bewilder the ordinary reader. In Mr. Douglas’s book with
such judgment are the passages selected, that we get the best of
Watts-Dunton in a comparatively small compass, clarified, condensed,
and presented with cameo clearness. It contains, I admit, not a
little with which I would willingly away. I tire sometimes of gypsies
and gorgios and Sinfi Lovell, as I tire of the recurrence of the
double-syllabled feminine rhyming of “glory” and “story,” “hoary” and
“promontory,” in some of the sonnets.
Mr. Douglas quotes Rossetti as affirming of Watts-Dunton that he
was the one man of his time who with immense literary equipment was
without literary ambition. This may be true of the Theodore Watts of
Rossetti’s time. It is not altogether true of the Watts-Dunton whom I
knew during the last quarter of a century.
The extraordinary success of _Aylwin_, published, be it
remembered--though some of us had been privileged to see it long
before--in 1898, when the author was 66, bewildered and staggered
Watts-Dunton, but the literary ambitions which that success aroused
came too late in life to be realised. Though a prodigious and
untiring worker, he was unsystematic and a dreamer. The books that
he intended to write would have outnumbered the unwritten volumes of
Robert Louis Stevenson. Had Stevenson lived longer, his dream-books
would one day have materialised into manuscript and finally into
paper and print. He was one of those whom Jean Paul Richter had in
mind when he said: “There shall come a time when man shall awaken
from his lofty dreams and find--his dreams still there, and that
nothing has gone save his sleep.” Stevenson worked by impulse. His
talk and his letters--like too plenteously-charged goblets, which
brim over and run to waste--were full of stories he was set upon
writing, but from which on the morrow he turned aside to follow some
literary Lorelei whose lurings more accorded with the mood of the
moment.
“I shall have another portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this
story that has played me out,” he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin in
January, 1875. “The story is to be called _When the Devil was Well_.
Scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own
unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the
story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander one step aside,
but go ever before its face and ever swifter and louder until the pit
receives its roaring?”
But Stevenson worked of set purpose, and, for the most part, sooner
or later in another mood, went rainbow-chasing again, hoping to
find--like the pot of gold which children believe lies hidden where
the rainbow ends--his broken fragments of a dream that he might
recover and weave them into story form.
Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he found that the vision had wholly
faded, or that the mood to interpret it had gone, and so more often
he failed. But Watts-Dunton was content only to dream and, alas, to
procrastinate, at least in the matter of screwing himself up to the
preparation of a book. In that respect he was the despair even of his
dearest friends.
Francis Hinde Groome wrote to me as far back as January, 1896:
“Watts, I hope, has _not_ definitely abandoned the idea of a Life of
Rossetti, or he might, he suggests, weave his reminiscences of him
into his own reminiscences. But I doubt. The only way, I believe,
would be for some one regularly day after day to engage him in talk
for a couple of hours and for a shorthand writer to be present to
take it down. If I had the leisure I would try and incite him thereto
myself.”
I agree with Groome that that was the only way out of the difficulty.
Left to himself, I doubt whether Watts-Dunton would ever have
permitted even _Aylwin_, ready for publication as it was, to see the
light. Of the influences which were brought to bear to persuade him
ultimately to take the plunge, and by whom exerted, no less than of
the reasons why the book was so long withheld, I shall not here
write. Mr. Douglas says nothing of either matter in his book, and the
presumption is that he was silent by Watts-Dunton’s own wish. This,
however, I may add, that were the reasons for withholding the book
so long fully known, they would afford yet another striking proof of
the chivalrous loyalty of Watts-Dunton’s friendship. One reason--it
is possible that even Mr. Douglas is not aware of it, for it dates
back to a time when he did not know Watts-Dunton, and I have reason
to believe that the author of _Aylwin_ spoke of it only at the time,
and then only to a few intimates, nearly all of whom are now dead--I
very much regret I do not feel free to make known. It would afford an
unexampled instance of Watts-Dunton’s readiness to sacrifice his own
interests and inclinations, in order to assist a friend--in this case
not a famous, but a poor and struggling one.
If his unwillingness to see his own name on the back of a book was
a despair to his friends, it must have been even more so to some
half-dozen publishers who might be mentioned. The enterprising
publisher who went to him with some literary project, Watts-Dunton
“received,” in the words of the late Mr. Harry Fragson’s amusing
song, “most politely.” At first he hummed and haw’d and rumpled his
hair protesting that he had not the time at his disposal to warrant
him in accepting a commission to write a book. But if the proposed
book were one that he could write, that he ought to write, he became
sympathetically responsive and finally glowed, like fanned tinder,
touched by a match, under the kindling of the publisher’s pleading.
“Yes,” he would say. “I cannot deny that I could write such a book.
Such a book, I do not mind saying in confidence, has long been in my
mind, and in the mind of friends who have repeatedly urged me to such
work.” The fact is that Watts-Dunton was gratified by the request and
did not disguise his pleasure, for with all his vast learning and
acute intellect there was a singular and childlike simplicity about
him that was very lovable. Actually accept a commission to write the
book in question he would not, but he was not unwilling to hear the
proposed terms, and in fact seemed so attracted by, and so interested
in, the project that the pleased publisher would leave, conscious
of having done a good morning’s work, and of having been the first
to propose, and so practically to bespeak, a book that was already
almost as good as written, already almost as good as published,
already almost as good as an assured success. Perhaps he chuckled at
the thought of the march he had stolen on his fellow publishers, who
would envy him the inclusion of such a book in his list. Possibly,
even, he turned in somewhere to lunch, and, as the slang phrase goes,
“did himself well” on the strength of it.
But whatever the publisher’s subsequent doings, the chances were
that Watts-Dunton went back to his library, to brood over the idea,
very likely to write to some of us whose advice he valued, or more
likely still to telegraph, proposing a meeting to discuss the project
(I had not a few such letters and telegrams from him myself);
perhaps in imagination to see the book written and published; but
ultimately and inevitably--to procrastinate and in the end to let the
proposal lapse. Like the good intentions with which, according to the
proverb, the road to perdition is paved, Watts-Dunton’s book-writing
intentions, if intentions counted, would in themselves go far to
furnish a fat corner of the British Museum Library. That he never
carried these intentions into effect is due to other reasons than
procrastination.
It is only fair to him to remember that his life-work, his _magnum
opus_, must be looked for not in literature but in friendship.
Stevenson’s life-work was his art. “I sleep upon my art for a
pillow,” he wrote to W. E. Henley. “I waken in my art; I am unready
for death because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know
how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can
conceive of being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my
art; I _am_ not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.”
Watts-Dunton’s life-work, I repeat, was not literature nor poetry,
but friendship. Stevenson sacrificed himself in nothing for his
friends. On the contrary, he looked to them to sacrifice something
of time and interest and energy on his behalf. Watts-Dunton’s whole
life was one long self-sacrifice--I had almost written one fatal
self-sacrifice--of his own interests, his own fame, in the cause of
his friends. His best books stand upon our shelves in every part
of the English-speaking world, but the name that appears upon the
cover is not that of Theodore Watts-Dunton, but of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He wrote no Life of either,
but how much of their life and of their life’s best work we owe to
Watts-Dunton we shall never know. Their death was a cruel blow to
him; but, had he died first, the loss to Rossetti and to Swinburne
would have been terrible and irreparable. Just as, to Stevenson,
life seemed almost unimaginable without his art, so I find it hard,
almost impossible, to picture Swinburne’s life at The Pines, failing
the sustaining and brotherly presence of Watts-Dunton. Often, when
Watts-Dunton was ailing, I have come away from there with a sinking
at my heart lest it should be Watts-Dunton who died first, and I can
well believe that, long ago, a like dread sometimes possessed those
who loved Rossetti. Cheerfully and uncomplainingly, Watts-Dunton gave
his own life and his own life’s work for them, and his best book is
the volume of his devotion to his friends.
The sum of that devotion will never fully be known, but it was as
much at the service of the unknown, or those who were only little
known among us, as of the famous. He had his enemies--“the hated
of New Grub Street” was his playful description of himself--and
some of them have not hesitated to hint that he attached himself
barnacle-wise or parasite-wise to greater men than himself for
self-seeking reasons. Borne thither on their backs--it was sometimes
said--he was able to sun himself upon Parnassian heights, otherwise
unattainable; and being in their company, and of their company, he
hoped thus to attract to himself a little of their reflected glory.
The truth is that it was not their abilities nor their fame which
drew Watts-Dunton to Rossetti and to Swinburne, but his love of the
men themselves, and his own genius for friendship. Being the men they
were, he would first have been drawn to them, and thereafter have
come to love them just as wholly and devotedly had they to the end of
their lives remained obscure.
So far from seeking the company or the friendship of the great, he
delighted in making friends in humble ranks of life.
Anyone who has accompanied Watts-Dunton on a morning walk will
remember a call here at a cottage, a shop, or it may be an inn
where lived some enthusiastic but poor lover of books, birds or
children, and the glad and friendly greetings that were exchanged.
If, as occasionally happened, some great person--great in a social
sense, I mean--happened to be a caller at The Pines, when perhaps a
struggling young author, painter, or musician, in whom Watts-Dunton
was interested or was trying to help, happened to be there, one
might be sure that, of the two, it would not be the great man who
would be accorded the warmer greeting by Watts-Dunton and--after
his marriage--by his gracious, beautiful and accomplished young
wife. What he once said of Tennyson is equally true of Watts-Dunton
himself. “When I first knew Tennyson,” he said, “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.” Watts-Dunton who, in his poems and in his conversation,
could condense into a sentence what many of us could not as
felicitously convey in a page, puts the whole matter into two
words, “manly respect.” Unless he had good cause to do otherwise,
he, no less than Tennyson, was prepared to treat others with “manly
respect,” irrespective of fame, riches, or rank. That is the attitude
neither entirely of the aristocrat nor of the democrat, but of the
gentleman to whom what we call “snobbishness” is impossible.
One more reason why Watts-Dunton’s contribution to “Letters” in
the publishers’ lists runs to no greater extent than two volumes,
is that so many of his contributions to “Letters” took the form of
epistles to his friends. The writing of original, characteristic and
charming letters--brilliant by reason of vivid descriptive passages,
valuable because used as a means of expressing criticism or conveying
knowledge--is an art now so little practised as likely soon to be
lost.
Watts-Dunton’s letter writing was possibly the outcome of his habit
of procrastination. To put off the settling down in dead earnest to
some work which he felt ought to be done, but at which he “shied,” he
would suddenly remember a letter which he thought should be penned.
“I must write So-and-so a line first,” he would say, which line, when
it came to be written, proved to be an essay in miniature, in which
he had--carelessly, and free from the irking consciousness that he
was writing for publication and so must mind his words--thrown off
some of his weightiest and wisest thoughts. He protested throughout
his life that he was a wickedly bad correspondent. None the less
he wrote so many charming and characteristic letters that, could
they--and why not?--be collected, they would add yet another to the
other reputations he attained.
Swinburne, in recent years at least, did not share his friend’s
predilection for letter writing. The author of _Atalanta in
Calydon_ once said to me, almost bitterly, that had he in early and
middle life refrained from writing and from answering unnecessary
letters--unnecessary in the sense that there was no direct call or
claim upon him to write or to answer them--there would be at least
twelve more volumes by him, and of his best, in the publishers’
lists. One letter which arrived when I was a guest at The Pines led
Swinburne to expound his theory of letter answering. It was from a
young woman personally unknown to him, and began by saying that a
great kindness he had once done to her father emboldened her to ask
a favour to herself--what it was I now forget, but it necessitated a
somewhat lengthy reply.
“The fact that I have been at some pains to serve the father, so far
from excusing a further claim by the daughter, is the very reason
why, by any decent member of that family, I should not again be
assailed,” Swinburne expostulated.
“She says,” he went on, “that she trusts I won’t think she is
asking too much, in hoping that I will answer her letter--a letter
which does not interest me, nor concern me in the least. She could
have got the information, for which she asks, elsewhere with very
little trouble to herself and none to me. The exasperating thing
about such letters,” he continued, getting more and more angry, “is
this. I feel that the letter is an unwarrantable intrusion. Out
of consideration to her father I can’t very well say so, as one
does not wish to seem churlish. But, in any sense, to answer her
letter, necessitates writing at length, thus wasting much precious
time, to say nothing of the chance of being dragged into further
correspondence. It is one’s impotency to make such folk see things
reasonably which irritates. I have to suppress that irritation,
and that results in further irritation. I am irritated with myself
for being irritated, for not taking things philosophically as
Watts-Dunton does, as well as irritated with her, and the result is
the spoiling of a morning’s work. She will say perhaps, and you may
even say, ‘It is only one letter you are asked to write.’ Quite so.
Not much, perhaps, to make a fuss about. But” (he pounded the table
with clenched fist angrily) “multiply that one person by the many who
so write, and the net total works out to an appalling waste of time.”
My reply was to remind him of N. P. Willis’s protest that to ask a
busy author to write an unnecessary letter was like asking a postman
to go for a ten miles’ walk--to which I added, “when he has taken
his boots off.” Swinburne had never heard the saying, and, with
characteristic veering of the weather-vane of his mood, forgot alike
his letter-writing lady and his own irritation, in his delight at a
fellow sufferer’s happy hit.
“Capital!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“Capital! The worm has turned, and shows that, worm as he is, he is
not without a sting in his tail!”
In his later years Swinburne wrote few letters except to a relative,
a very intimate friend, or upon some pressing business. The uninvited
correspondent he rarely answered at all. For every letter that
Swinburne received, Watts-Dunton probably received six, and sooner
or later he answered all. The amount of time that went in letters,
which in no way concerned his own work, or his own interests, and
were penned only out of kindness of heart, was appalling. Had he
refrained from writing letters intended to hearten or to help some
friend or some young writer, or to soften a disappointment, the books
that are lost to us--a Life of Rossetti, for instance--might well
be to the good. If a book by a friend happened to be badly slated
in a critical journal--and no calamity to a friend is borne with
more resignation and even cheerfulness by some of us who “write”
than a bad review of a friend’s book--Watts-Dunton, if he chanced to
see the slating, would put work aside, and sit down then and there
to indite to that friend a letter which helped and heartened him
or her much more than the slating had depressed. I have myself had
letters from fellow authors who told me they were moved to express
sympathy or indignation about this or that bad review of one of my
little books--the only effect of their letter being to rub salt into
the wound, and to make one feel how widely one’s literary nakedness
or even literary sinning had been proclaimed in the market place.
Watts-Dunton’s letters not only made one feel that the review in
question mattered nothing, but he would at the same time find
something to say about the merits of the work under review, which
not only took the gall out of the unfriendly critic’s ink, but had
the effect of setting one newly at work, cheered, relieved, and
nerved to fresh effort.
I do not quote here any of these letters, as they are concerned only
with my own small writings, and so would be of no interest to the
reader. Instead, let me quote one I received from him on another
subject. A sister of mine sent me a sonnet in memory of a dead poet,
a friend of Watts-Dunton’s and mine, and, having occasion to write
to him on another matter, I enclosed it without comment. Almost by
return of post came the following note, in which he was at the pains,
unasked, to give a young writer the benefit of his weighty criticism
and encouragement:
“My thanks for sending me your sister’s lovely sonnet. I had no
idea that she was a genuine poet. It is only in the seventh line
where I see an opening for improvement.
To _a_ great/darkness and/in a/great light.
It is an error to suppose that when the old scansion by quantity
gave place to scansion by accent, the quantitative demands upon a
verse became abrogated. A great deal of attention to quantity is
apparent in every first-rate line--
The sleepless soul that perished in its prime,
where by making the accent and the quantity meet (and quantity,
I need not remind you, is a matter of consonants quite as much
as of vowels) all the strength that can be got into an iambic
English verse is fixed there. Although, of course, it would make
a passage monotonous if in every instance quantity and accent
were made to meet, those who aim at the best versification give
great attention to it.”
This is one instance only out of many of his interest in a young
writer who was then personally unknown to him; but in turning
over for the purpose of this article those letters of his, which
I have preserved, I have found so many similar reminders of his
great-heartedness that I am moved once again to apply to Theodore
Watts-Dunton the words in which many years ago I dedicated a book
to him. They are from James Payn’s _Literary Recollections_. “My
experience of men of letters is that for kindness of heart they have
no equal. I contrast their behaviour to the young and struggling,
with the harshness of the Lawyer, the hardness of the Man of
Business, the contempt of the Man of the World, and am proud to
belong to their calling.”