I have been delighted by a notice of you in the _Echo_, which I
am told is by Coulson Kernahan. That must be a charming fellow
who wrote it. Why don’t you collect your loyal supporters around
you (there are only two of us, Kernahan and Watts) over a little
dinner at your Club?
Yours ever,
THEODORE WATTS.
“Robinson, if you had not been the most modest and delicate-minded
man in contemporary literature, you would have trebled your fame and
trebled your income. That is what C. K. says of you, but I have said
it for a quarter of a century.”
This was the beginning of my long friendship with Watts-Dunton, and
I enter thus fully into a merely trivial and personal matter for
the reason that the letter I have quoted is very characteristic of
the writer. “Good fellowship” was, I repeat, the first article in
Watts-Dunton’s creed. His very religion was based upon it. He once
said to me that were it not that some good men and women would see
irreverence where he meant none, and of which he was by temperament
and by his very sense of wonder incapable, he should like to write an
article “The Good-fellowship of God,” taking as his text the lines of
Omar Khayyám, in which the old tent-maker speaks of those who picture
a “surly” God:
“And daub His Visage with the Smoke of Hell;
They talk of some strict testing of us--Pish!
He’s a Good Fellow and ’twill all be well.
“To word it thus may sound profanely to some ears,” commented
Watts-Dunton, “but old Khayyám was only trying to express in his
pagan way--though I suspect there is as much of FitzGerald as of
Omar in the rendering--his belief in the loving Fatherhood of God
which is held by every Christian. In fact ‘good-fellowship’ stands
to Shakespeare’s ‘cakes-and-ale’-loving, and jolly fraternity, for
the ‘Human Brotherhood’ of which the stricter church and chapel going
folk speak, and I suspect that there is sometimes less acrimony and a
broader human outlook over cakes and ale in an inn than there is over
urn-stewed tea, bread and butter and buns in some of the Church or
Chapel Tea-meetings that went on when I was a boy.”
My article about Robinson was merely an attempt to set out his
qualifications for the post of Inspector of Prisons. Those
qualifications were many and my space was limited. Hence the article
was as dull and stodgy a recital of facts as ever was written. There
was as much in it from which to infer that the writer was a “charming
fellow” as there is in a rice pudding by which to prove that the cook
can sing divinely. But Robinson was a “good fellow.” My article,
among other things, made that at least clear. According to the gospel
of good-fellowship as held by Watts-Dunton, a good fellow could be
appreciated only by a good fellow, just as he once wrote to me, “My
theory always is that a winsome style in prose comes from a man whose
heart is good.” I had shown appreciation of his friend, and, partisan
and hero of friendship that he was, he was willing to take the rest
on trust. Rightly to appreciate his friend was to win Watts-Dunton’s
heart at the start.
One sometimes hears or sees it stated that Watts-Dunton was
indifferent alike to literary fame and to criticism, adverse or
favourable. No one who knew him other than very slightly could think
thus. Watts-Dunton was, in scriptural phrase, “a man in whom was no
guile.” He was transparently ingenuous of thought and purpose and did
not attempt to conceal his gratification at the success of _Aylwin_
or the pleasure which a discriminating and sympathetic appreciation
afforded him. This only added to the respect and affection of his
friends. It would have wounded us to think that the man we bore
intellectually in such profound reverence, personally in such deep
affection, could play the _poseur_ and affect to despise the deserved
success and recognition which his work had won. W. E. Henley is said
to have thanked God that he had “never suffered the indignity of a
popular success.” Henley deserved success, popular or otherwise, if
ever writer did, for he never stooped to do less than his best, nor
sought to achieve by shoddy means the success which thus attained
is indeed to be despised. But a success deservedly won, even if a
so-called popular success, every writer in his heart desires. To
pretend otherwise is mere insincerity. It is not “playing the game,”
for even the pursuit of Letters is none the worse for a touch of the
English sporting spirit. It is indeed the chief reproach of those
of us who follow the craft of Letters that we are “artists” rather
than sportsmen. Englishmen fight the better and write the better for
seeing alike in writing and in fighting something of a “game.”[A]
Literature is a race in which every competitor hopes, and rightly,
to come in first. If he be fairly beaten on his merits, he will
admit and ungrudgingly, if a sportsman as well as a writer, that
the better man has won. This does not mean he is content tamely to
sit down under defeat. It means, on the contrary, harder work and
severer training, so that on other occasions, by redoubling his
exertions, he himself may be the man who wins on his merits. And if
he fail again and yet again, instead of sneering at the prize as
worthless, he will, if he ever heard it, recall the story of the
two artists. A very young painter, who afterwards became great,
stood in his obscure and struggling days, when no one had heard his
name or would look at his pictures, before the greatest canvas of
the greatest painter of the time. The grandeur of the work, alike
in conception and in execution, staggered him. Possibly there was
despair at his heart as he asked himself how could he, too poor for
proper opportunity of study, too poor even to afford a model, or to
buy oils, ever hope to emulate such a masterpiece as this. But at
least there was at his heart no meanness, no envy, no disposition
to belittle or to grudge the other his high place. Throwing back
his head, with flashing eyes and a throb in his voice he exclaimed
proudly, radiantly, “And I, too, am an artist!”
[A] This was penned before the war.
But when Henley, who strained and strained splendidly to carry
off the first prize--and missed--belittles its value, and would
have us to believe that he is better pleased to carry off “the
last event”--the “Consolation Prize”--of “never having suffered
the indignity of a popular success,” we distrust his sportsmanship
and his sincerity. Watts-Dunton never posed after that manner. He
was glad of his success and proud of it. It was because success,
instead of increasing his literary stature in his own eyes as
not infrequently happens, only made him increasingly modest and
diffident, that he was sometimes supposed to care nothing for his
literary laurels. In one respect his success was something of a
disappointment to him, not so much because it illustrated the truth
of Goethe’s saying--nearer seventy than sixty as Watts-Dunton was
when he achieved that success--“the wished-for comes too late,” but
because it was not the success he expected and to which he believed
himself most to be entitled.
Mr. Douglas calls his book on Watts-Dunton _Theodore Watts-Dunton,
Poet, Novelist, and Critic_, and the description and the order in
which those descriptions appear were of Watts-Dunton’s own choosing.
It was first as a poet, secondly as a novelist, and only thirdly,
if at all, as a critic, that he wished and hoped to be remembered,
whereas those who held the balance of values in letters were inclined
to reverse that order and to place the critic first and the poet last.
Watts-Dunton was--I would emphasise this point strongly--an amateur
in letters to the last, never the professional “literary man.” It is
because he was by temperament the amateur, not the professional, that
he took his success so seriously and did not conceal a certain almost
childlike gratification (which was not vanity) that it afforded
him. Your shrewd professional writer would have spent less time in
contemplation of his success, and more in seeking how best to exploit
and advertise that success to his professional advantage.
Watts-Dunton, on the contrary, took the success of _Aylwin_ very much
as a young mother takes her firstling. He dandled it, toyed with it,
hugged it, not altogether without something of the wonder and the
awe with which a fond mother regards her firstborn. An amateur, as I
say, and to the last he could hardly believe his own ears, his own
eyes, at finding that his work had a high “market” value, and that
one publisher was ready to bid against another for his next book.
Truth to tell he was not a little flustered by it all. “Hostages to
posterity” of his sort carried responsibilities with them, not the
least of which was the expectation that he would follow up _Aylwin_
with other books. I remember the portentous, almost troubled knitting
of his brows when perhaps a little maliciously I hinted that it
was no use his bringing out new editions of _Aylwin_, or brooding
over new prefaces for new editions of the same novel. “What your
public and your publishers demand from you,” I said, “is _Aylwin’s_
successor, not new editions, but a new book.”
“Ah!” he said with deep meaning--no one could put so much into an
“ah” as he--and, figuratively, collapsed.