I have often been asked by those who did not know Theodore
Watts-Dunton what was the secret of the singular power he appeared to
exercise over others and the equally singular affection in which he
was held by his friends.
My answer was that Watts-Dunton’s hold upon his friends, partly
personal as it was and partly intellectual, was chiefly due to his
extraordinary loyalty. Of old, certain men and women were supposed to
be possessed of the “evil eye.” Upon whom they looked with intent--be
it man, woman, or beast--hurt was sooner or later sure to fall.
If there be anything in the superstition, one might almost believe
that its opposite was true of Watts-Dunton. He looked upon others
merely to befriend, and if he did not put upon them the spell, not of
an evil but of a good eye, he exercised a marvellous personal power,
not, as is generally the case, upon weaker intellects and less marked
personalities than his own, but upon his peers; and even upon those
whom in the world’s eye would be accounted greater than he. That any
one man should so completely control, and even dominate, two such
intellects as Swinburne and Rossetti seemed almost uncanny. I never
saw Rossetti and Watts-Dunton together, for the former had been
dead some years when I first met Watts-Dunton, but my early literary
friendships were with members of the little circle of which Rossetti
was the centre, and all agree in their testimony to the extraordinary
personal power which Watts-Dunton exercised over the poet-painter.
But Swinburne--and here I speak with knowledge--Watts-Dunton
absolutely dominated. It was, “What does Walter say about it?”
“Walter thinks, and I agree with him, that I ought to do so and so,”
or, “Let us submit the matter to Watts-Dunton’s unfailing judgment.”
Here, for fear of a possible misunderstanding, let me say that, if
any reader assume from what I have just written that Swinburne was
something of a weakling, that reader is very much mistaken. It is
true that the author of _Atalanta in Calydon_ was a greater force
in intellect and in imagination than in will power and character,
but he was not in the habit of deferring to others as he deferred
to Watts-Dunton, and when he chose to stand out upon some point,
or in some opinion, he was very difficult to move. It was only, in
fact, by Watts-Dunton that he was entirely manageable, yet there was
never any effort, never even any intention on Watts-Dunton’s part to
impose his own will upon his friend. I have heard his influence upon
Swinburne described as hypnotic. From that point of view I entirely
dissent. Watts-Dunton held his friends by virtue of his genius for
friendship--“Watts is a hero of friendship,” Mr. William Michael
Rossetti once said of him--and by the passionate personal loyalty
of which I have never known the equal. By nature the kindest of
men, shrinking from giving pain to any living creature, he could
be fierce, even ferocious, to those who assailed his friends. It
was, indeed, always in defence of his friends, rarely if ever in
defence of himself--though he was abnormally sensitive to adverse
criticism--that he entered into a quarrel and, since dead friends
could not defend themselves, he constituted himself the champion of
their memory or of their reputation, and even steeled himself on more
than one occasion to a break with a living friend rather than endure
a slight to one who was gone. “To my sorrow,” he writes in a letter,
“I was driven to quarrel with a man I loved and who loved me, William
Minto, because he, with no ill intentions, printed certain injurious
comments upon Rossetti which he found in Bell Scott’s papers.”
It was my own misfortune, deservedly or undeservedly, to have a
somewhat similar experience to that of Professor Minto; but in my
case the estrangement, temporary only as it was, included Swinburne
as well as Watts-Dunton. In telling the story, and for the first
time here, I must not be supposed for one moment to imagine that any
importance attaches or could attach to a misunderstanding between
such men as Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and a scribbler of sorts like
myself, but because a third great name, that of Robert Buchanan,
comes into it.
It is concerned with Buchanan’s attack upon Rossetti in the famous
article _The Fleshly School of Poetry_, which appeared anonymously
(worse--pseudonymously) in the _Contemporary Review_. Not long
after Buchanan’s death I was asked to review Mr. Henry Murray’s
_Robert Buchanan and other Essays_ in a critical journal, which I
did, and Swinburne and Watts-Dunton chanced to see the article. To
say that they took exception to what I said about Buchanan, would
be no description of their attitude, for Swinburne not only took
exception but took offence and of the direst--so much so as to make
it necessary that for a season I should discontinue my visits to The
Pines.
And here let me interpolate that I entirely agree with Mr. James
Douglas when he says in his volume, _Theodore Watts, Poet, Novelist
and Critic_, “It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of
the day upon the painful subject of the Buchanan affair. Indeed, I
have often thought it is a great pity that it is not allowed to die
out.” But when in the next sentence Mr. Douglas goes on to say, “The
only reason why it is still kept alive seems to be that, without
discussing it, it is impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s
nervous illness about which so much has been said,” I am entirely out
of agreement with him, as the quotation which I make from my article
will show. Since Mr. Douglas _has_ reopened the matter--he could
hardly do otherwise in telling the story of Watts-Dunton’s literary
life--I have the less hesitation in reprinting part of the article
in which I endeavoured to clear Buchanan of what I held, and still
hold, to be a preposterous charge. I may add that I quite agree with
Mr. Douglas when he says that we must remember “the extremely close
intimacy which existed between these two poet friends (Rossetti and
Watts-Dunton) in order to be able to forgive entirely the unexampled
scourging of Buchanan in the following sonnet, if, as some writers
think, Buchanan was meant.”
Mr. Douglas then quotes the sonnet _The Octopus of the Golden
Isles_, which I do not propose here to reprint. That Buchanan was
meant is now well known, and in fact Mr. Douglas himself says in
the same chapter that Watts-Dunton’s definition of envy as the
“literary leprosy” has often been quoted in reference to the case
of Buchanan. My article on Buchanan is too long to give in its
entirety, and, even omitting the passages with no direct bearing
upon the misunderstanding which it caused, is lengthier than I could
wish. My apology is, first, that in justice to Watts-Dunton and to
Swinburne I must present their case against me ungarbled. Moreover,
as the foolish bogey-story--like an unquiet ghost which still walks
the world unlaid--that Buchanan was the cause of Rossetti taking to
drugs, the cause even of Rossetti’s death, is still repeated, and
sometimes believed, I am not sorry of another and last attempt to
give the bogey its _quietus_. Here are the extracts from my article:
“Mr. Murray quotes evidently with appreciation Buchanan’s tribute
to his ancient enemy Rossetti, I do not share Mr. Murray’s
appreciation, for Buchanan’s tribute has always seemed to me more
creditable to his generosity than to his judgment. He speaks of
Rossetti as ‘in many respects the least carnal and most religious
of modern poets.’
“Here he goes to as great an extreme as when he so savagely
attacked Rossetti as ‘fleshly.’ About this attack much nonsense
has been written. We have been told that it was the cause of
Rossetti’s taking to chloral; and I have heard even Rossetti’s
death laid at Buchanan’s door. To my thinking talk of that sort
is sheer nonsense. If Rossetti took to chloral because Buchanan
called his poetry ‘fleshly,’ Rossetti would sooner or later have
taken to chloral, had Buchanan’s article never been written. But
when Buchanan in the fulness of his remorse calls Rossetti ‘the
most religious of modern poets’ he is talking equally foolishly.
“Rossetti ‘the most religious of modern poets’! Why, Rossetti’s
religion was his art. To him art was in and of herself pure,
sacred, and inviolate. By him the usual order of things was
reversed. It was religion which was the handmaid, art the
mistress, and in fact it was only in so far as religion appealed
to his artistic instincts that Rossetti can be said to have had
any religion at all.
“And when Buchanan sought to exalt Rossetti to a pinnacle of
purity he was guilty of a like extravagance. That Rossetti’s
work is always healthy not even his most enthusiastic admirers
could contend. Super-sensuous and southern in the warmth of
colouring nearly all his poems are. Some of them are heavy with
the overpowering sweetness as of many hyacinths. The atmosphere
is like that of a hothouse in which, amid all the odorous
deliciousness, we gasp for a breath of the outer air again. There
are passages in his work which remind us far more of the pagan
temple than of the Christian cloister, passages describing sacred
rites which pertain not to the worship of the Virgin, but to the
worship of Venus.
“Buchanan was a man who lived heart and soul in the mood of the
moment. He had a big brain which was quick to take fire, and at
such times, both in his controversies and in his criticism, he
was apt to express himself with an exaggeration at which in his
cooler hours he would have been the first to hurl his Titanic
ridicule.
“It may seem ungenerous to say so, but even his beautiful
dedicatory poem to Rossetti strikes me as a lapse into false
sentiment.
_To An Old Enemy_
I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow,
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and tenderness I bring thee now
A lily-flower instead.
Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me.
“After Rossetti’s death, ten months later, Buchanan added the
following lines:
Calmly, thy royal robe of Death around thee,
Thou sleepest, and weeping brethren round thee stand;
Gently they placed, ere yet God’s angel crowned thee,
My lily in thy hand.
I never saw thee living, oh, my brother,
But on thy breast my lily of love now lies,
And by that token we shall know each other,
When God’s voice saith ‘Arise!’
“That this is very beautiful every one will admit, but is it true
to picture those who most loved Rossetti as placing Buchanan’s
lily of song in his dead hand? I think not. Nor can those
who know anything of the last days of Rossetti reconcile the
facts with Buchanan’s imaginary picture of a sort of celestial
assignation in which, by means of a lily, Rossetti and his
ancient enemy and brother poet shall identify each other on the
Last Day?
“I am well aware that I shall be accused of bad taste, even of
brutality, in saying this; but, as Mr. Murray himself alludes
to this ancient quarrel, I must protest that false sentiment
is equally abhorrent--as Buchanan would have been the first to
admit. Now that Buchanan has followed Rossetti where all enmities
are at an end, it is right that the truth about the matter be
spoken, and this unhappy assault and its not altogether happy
sequel be alike forgotten.
“Robert Buchanan’s last resting-place is within sight of the sea.
And rightly so. It is his own heart that Old Ocean seems most to
wear away in his fretting and chafing, and the wearing away of
their own heart is the most appreciable result of the warfare
which such men as Buchanan wage against the world.
“That he did not fulfil his early promise, that he frittered
away great gifts to little purpose, is pitifully true, but if he
flung into the face of the men whom he counted hypocrites and
charlatans, words which scorched like vitriol, he had, for the
wounded in life’s battle, for the sinning, the suffering, and the
defeated, words of helpful sympathy and an outstretched hand of
practical help.
“Mr. Murray has shown Buchanan to us as he was; no hero perhaps,
certainly not a saint, but a man of great heart and great brain,
quick to quarrel, but as quick to own himself in the wrong; a
man intensely, passionately human, with more than one man’s
share of humanity’s weaknesses and of humanity’s strength, a
sturdy soldier in the cause of freedom, a fierce foe, a generous
friend, and a poet who, in regard to that rarest of all gifts,
‘vision,’ had scarcely an equal among his contemporaries.
“I must conclude by a serious word with Mr. Murray. Disagree
with him as one may and must, one cannot but admire his fearless
honesty. None the less I am of opinion that in the following
passage Mr. Murray’s own pessimism has led him to do his dead
friend’s memory a grievous injustice.
“‘From the broken arc we may divine the perfect round, and it
is my fixed belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which
struck him down but spared him for a little longer time, he would
logically have completed the evolution of so many years, and have
definitely proclaimed himself as an agnostic, perhaps even as an
atheist.’
“Mr. Murray’s personal knowledge of Buchanan was intimate, even
brotherly; mine, though dating many years back, was comparatively
slight. But I have read Buchanan’s books, and I know something of
the spirit in which he lived and worked, and I am convinced that
Mr. Murray is wrong. It is not always those who have come nearest
to the details of a man’s daily life, who have come nearest to
him in spirit, as Amy Levy knew well when she wrote those lines,
_To a Dead Poet_, which I shall be pardoned for bringing to my
readers’ remembrance:
I knew not if to laugh or weep:
They sat and talked of you--
’Twas here he sat: ’twas this he said,
’Twas that he used to do.
‘Here is the book wherein he read,
The room wherein he dwelt;
And he’ (they said) ‘was such a man,
Such things he thought and felt.’
I sat and sat, I did not stir;
They talked and talked away.
I was as mute as any stone,
I had no word to say.
They talked and talked; like to a stone
My heart grew in my breast--
I, who had never seen your face,
Perhaps I knew you best.
“Buchanan was, as every poet is, a creature of mood, and in
certain black moods he expressed himself in language that was
open to an atheistic interpretation. There were times when he
was confronted by the fact that, to human seeming, iniquity
prospered, righteousness went to the wall, and injustice, vast
and cruel, seemed to rule the world. To the Christian belief that
the Cross of Christ is the only key to the terrible problem of
human suffering, Buchanan was unable to subscribe, and at times
he was tempted to think that the Power at the head of things
must be evil, not good. It seems to me that at such times he
would cry out in soul-travail, ‘No! no! anything but that! If
there be a God at all He must be good. Before I would do God the
injustice of believing in an evil God, I would a thousand times
sooner believe in no God at all!’ Then the mood passed; the man’s
hope and belief in an unseen beneficent Power returned, but the
sonnet in which he had given expression to that mood remained.
And because the expression of that mood was permanent, Mr. Murray
forgets that it was no more than the expression of a mood, and
tells us that he believes, had Buchanan lived longer, he would
have become an atheist.
“Again I say that I believe Mr. Murray to be wrong. Buchanan,
like his own Wandering Jew, trod many dark highways and byways
of death, but he never remained--he never could have remained--in
that Mortuary of the Soul, that cul-de-sac of Despair which we
call Atheism.
* * * * *
“This is not the place in which to say it, but perhaps my editor
will allow me to add how keenly I felt, as I stood by the
graveside of Robert Buchanan in that little God’s acre by the
sea, the inadequacy of our Burial Service, beautiful as it is, in
the case of one who did not profess the Christian faith. To me it
seemed little less than a mockery to him who has gone, as well as
a torture to those who remain, that words should be said over his
dead body which, living, he would have repudiated.
“Over the body of one whose voice is silenced by death, we
assert the truth of doctrines which living he had unhesitatingly
rejected. It is as if we would, coward-like, claim in death what
was denied us in life.
“In the case of a man whose beliefs were those of Robert
Buchanan, how much more seemly it would be to lay him to rest
with some such words as these:
“‘To the God from Whom he came, we commend this our friend and
brother in humanity, trusting that what in life he has done
amiss, may in death be forgotten and forgiven; that what in life
he has done well, may in death be borne in remembrance. And so
from out our human love, into the peace of the Divine love, we
commend him, leaving him with the God from Whom, when we in our
turn come to depart whither he has gone, we hope to receive like
pardon, forgiveness and peace. In God’s hands, to God’s love and
mercy, we leave him.’”
Re-reading this article many years after it was written, I see
nothing in it to which friendship or even affection for either
Rossetti or Buchanan could reasonably object.
This was not the view taken by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton. It so
happened that I encountered the latter in the Strand a morning or
two later, and more in sadness than in anger he reproached me with
“disloyalty to Gabriel, disloyalty to Algernon, and disloyalty to
myself.”
I replied that touching Rossetti, as he did not happen to be the
King, had never so much as heard of my small existence, nor had I
ever set eyes upon him, to accuse me of disloyalty to him, to whom
I owed no loyalty, struck me as a work of supererogation. And, as
touching Swinburne and Watts-Dunton himself, honoured as I was by
the high privilege of their friendship, I could not admit that
that friendship committed me to a blind partisanship and to the
identification of myself with their literary likings or dislikings or
their personal quarrels.
My rejection of the penitential rôle, to say nothing of my refusing
to take the matter seriously, seemed to surprise and to trouble
Watts-Dunton. While protesting the regard of every one at The
Pines for me personally, he gave me to understand that Swinburne
in particular was so wounded by my championship as he called it of
Buchanan, that he would have some trouble in making my peace in that
quarter, and even hinted that an arrangement, by which I was either
to lunch or to dine at The Pines within the next few days, had better
stand over.
Naturally I replied--I could hardly do otherwise, as I did not see
my way without insincerity to express regret for what I had written
about Buchanan, though I did express regret that it had given offence
to Swinburne and himself--that that must be as he chose, and so we
parted, sadly on my side if not on his; and I neither saw nor heard
from anyone at The Pines for some little time after. Then one morning
came the following letter: