The pathetic side of the last two or three years of Watts-Dunton’s
life was that he had outlived nearly every friend of youth and middle
age, and, with the one or two old friends of his own generation who
survived, he had lost touch. Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, William
Morris, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, William Black, Dr. Gordon
Hake, Westland and Philip Marston, Jowett, Louise Chandler Moulton,
William Sharp, James Russell Lowell, George Meredith, were gone.
Mr. William Rossetti, the only one of the old fraternity left,
now rarely, he tells me, leaves his own home. In any case he and
Watts-Dunton had not met for years. Mr. Edmund Gosse, once a frequent
and always an honoured visitor to The Pines, was rarely if ever there
during the years that I came and went.
It was between Swinburne and Mr. Gosse that the intimacy existed,
though by both the inmates he was to the last held in high regard.
Mr. Gosse would have the world to believe that he grows old, but no
one who knows him either personally or by his writings can detect
any sign of advancing years. On the contrary, both in the brilliance
of his personality and of his later intellectual achievements, he
appears to possess the secret of eternal youth. It was neither
oncoming years nor any lessening of friendship between him and
Swinburne which was responsible for Mr. Gosse’s defection, but the
fact that he had added to his other duties that of Librarian to
the House of Lords. This, and his many and increasing official and
literary activities, kept, and keep him closely occupied, and so it
was that his name gradually, insensibly, dropped out of the list of
visitors at The Pines.
Mr. Thomas Hake was with Watts-Dunton to the end, and indeed it was
not a little due to the help of “The Colonel” (the name by which
from his boyhood Mr. Hake was known at The Pines on account of his
cousinship with and his likeness to Colonel, afterwards General
Charles Gordon) that Watts-Dunton accomplished so much literary work
in his last decade. Some of the younger men, Mr. Clement Shorter,
accompanied now and then by his poet-wife, Mr. James Douglas, Mr.
Henniker-Heaton, Dr. Arthur Compton-Rickett, and Mr. F. G. Bettany,
remained in touch with The Pines until Watts-Dunton’s death. I met
none of them there myself, as after I went to live a long way from
London my own visits were less frequent, and being a friend of older
standing, with memories in common which none of the newer friends
whom I have mentioned shared, it was generally arranged that I was
the only guest. That there was no forgetfulness or lessening of
friendship on Watts-Dunton’s part towards the friends whom he now
rarely met, is evident by the following extract from a letter in
reply to a question on my part whether it would be possible for him
to be my guest at one of the Whitefriars’ Club weekly gatherings.
“I should look forward,” he said, “to seeing some of the truest and
best friends I have in the world, including yourself, Robertson
Nicoll, Richard Whiteing, and Clement Shorter. And when you tell
me that F. C. Gould is a Friar (the greatest artistic humorist now
living in England) I am tempted indeed to run counter to my doctor’s
injunctions against dining out this winter.
“The other day I had the extreme good luck to find and buy the famous
lost water-colour drawing of the dining-room at 16 Cheyne Walk, with
Rossetti reading out to me the proofs of _Ballads and Sonnets_. I
am sending photographs of it to one or two intimate friends, and I
enclose you one. The portrait of Rossetti is the best that has ever
been taken of him.”
Of all the friendships which Watts-Dunton formed late in life none
was so prized by him as that with Sir William Robertson Nicoll. As it
was I who made the two known to each other, and in doing so, removed
an unfortunate and what might have been permanent misunderstanding, I
may perhaps be pardoned for referring to the matter here.
The name of Sir William coming up one day in a conversation, I
discovered to my surprise that Watts-Dunton was feeling sore about
some disparaging remark which Sir William was supposed to have made
about him. I happened to know how the misunderstanding came about,
and I told Watts-Dunton the following true story, illustrating how
easily such misunderstandings arise, and illustrating too the petty
and “small beer” side of “literary shop” gossip. It concerned an
editor and an author. The author employed a literary agent, who
offered the editor one of the author’s stories. “I have set my face
against the middleman in literature,” the editor replied. “If Mr.
---- likes to offer me his story direct, I’ll gladly take it, and pay
his usual price per thousand words, but buy it through an agent I
won’t.”
This came to the ears of the author, who remarked: “That’s rather
unreasonable on ----’s part. I buy, through an agent, the periodical
he edits. I don’t expect him to stand in the gutter, like a newsboy,
selling me his paper himself at a street corner, and I don’t see why
he should object to my offering him my wares by means of an agent.”
This not unfriendly remark was overheard by some one, who told it
to some one else, who repeated it to another person, that person in
his turn passing it on, and so it went the round of Fleet Street and
certain literary clubs. The copper coinage of petty personal gossip,
unlike the pound sterling coin of the realm, becomes magnitudinally
greater, instead of microscopically less, by much circulation.
Instead of infinitesimal attritions, as in the case of the coin,
there are multitudinous accretions, until the story as it ultimately
started life, and the story as it afterwards came to be told, would
hardly recognise each other, at sight, as blood relatives. By the
time the innocent remark of the author came to the ears of the editor
concerned, it had so grown and become so garbled, that its own father
would never have known it. “Have you heard what So-and-so the
author said about you?” the editor was asked. “He said that he hoped
to live to see you in the gutter, selling at the street corner the
very paper you now edit.” Not unnaturally the editor’s retort was
uncomplimentary to the author, who, when the retort came to his ears,
expressed an opinion about the editor which was concerned with other
matters than the editorial objection to the middleman in literature,
and so a misunderstanding (fortunately long since removed) arose in
good earnest.
I should not put this chronicle of journalistic small beer--a
version as it is of the famous Three Black Crows story--on record,
were it not that it was exactly in the same way that an innocent
remark of Sir William Robertson Nicoll’s had been misrepresented to
Watts-Dunton. This I did my best to explain to the latter, but not
feeling as sure as I wished to be that all soreness was removed,
I asked him to lunch with me at the Savage Club, and then invited
Dr. Nicoll, as he then was, to meet him. There was at first just a
suspicion of an armed truce about Watts-Dunton, in whose memory the
supposed attack upon himself was still smouldering, but his interest
and pleasure in the conversation of a student and scholar of like
attainments to his own soon dispelled the stiffness. A chance but
warmly affectionate reference to Robertson Smith by Dr. Nicoll drew
from Watts-Dunton that long-drawn “Ah!” which those who knew him well
remember as meaning that he was following with profound attention and
agreement what was being said.
“Why, I knew that man--one of the salt of the earth,” he
interpolated. Then he added gravely, more reminiscently than as if
addressing anyone, “I had affection for him!” Leaning over the table,
his singularly brilliant and penetrating eyes full upon the other, he
said almost brusquely, “Tell me what you knew of Robertson Smith!”
Dr. Nicoll responded, and within five minutes’ time the two of them
were talking together, comparing notes and exchanging experiences and
confidences like old friends. As we were parting, Watts-Dunton said
to me:
“You are coming to lunch on Monday. I wish I could persuade our
friend Nicoll here to accompany you, so that Swinburne could share
the pleasure of such another meeting as we have had here to-day.”
The invitation was accepted by Dr. Nicoll with the cordiality with
which it was offered, and I may add with the usual result, for the
intervener. “Patch up a quarrel between two other persons--and find
yourself left out in the cold,” Oscar Wilde once said to me. I had
merely removed a misunderstanding, not patched up a quarrel, but the
result of my bringing Watts-Dunton, Nicoll, and Swinburne together
was that, on the occasion of the first meeting of all three, they
had so much to talk about, and talked about it so furiously, that I
had cause to ask myself whether the “two” in the proverb should not
be amended to “three,” so as to read “Three’s company; four’s none.”
Thereafter, and to his life’s end, Watts-Dunton could never speak too
gratefully or too appreciatively of Sir William Robertson Nicoll.
He came indeed to hold the latter’s judgment alike in literature and
scholarship, as in other matters, in the same admiration with which
Swinburne held the judgment of Watts-Dunton himself.
Thus far it is only of Watts-Dunton’s friends that I have written,
reserving the last place in my list, which in this case is the first
in precedence, for the only name with which it is fitting that, in my
final word, his name should be coupled. I have said that the pathetic
side of his later years was that he had outlived so many of the men
and women he loved. To outlive one’s nearest and dearest friends must
always be poignant and pathetic, but in other respects Watts-Dunton’s
life was a full and a happy one, and never more so than in these
later years, for it was then that the one who was more than friend,
the woman he so truly loved, who as truly loved him, became his wife.
In his marriage, as in his friendships, Watts-Dunton was singularly
fortunate. Husband and wife entertained each for the other, and to
the last, love, reverence and devotion. If to this Mrs. Watts-Dunton
added exultant, even jealous pride in her husband’s intellect, his
great reputation and attainments, he was even more proud of her
beauty and accomplishments, and his one anxiety was that she should
never know a care. When last I saw them together--married as they
had then been for many years--it was evident that Watts-Dunton had
lost nothing of the wonder, the awe, perhaps even the perplexity,
with which from his boyhood and youth he had regarded that mystery of
mysteries--womanhood. His love for her was deep, tender, worshipping
and abiding, albeit it had something of the fear with which one might
regard some exquisite wild bird which, of its own choice, comes
to the cage, and, for love’s sake, is content to forgo its native
woodland, content even to rest with closed wings within the cage,
while without comes continually the call to the green field, the
great hills and the glad spaces between sea and sky. Be that as it
may, this marriage between a young and beautiful woman--young enough
and beautiful enough to have stood for a picture of his adored Sinfi
Lovell of _Aylwin_, whom, in her own rich gypsy type of beauty, Mrs.
Watts-Dunton strangely resembled--and a poet, novelist, critic and
scholar who was no longer young, no longer even middle-aged, was
from first to last a happy one. It is with no little hesitation that
I touch even thus briefly and reverently upon a relationship too
sacred and too beautiful for further words. Even this much I should
not have said were it not that, in marriages where some disparity of
age exists, the union is not always as fortunate, and were it not
also that I know my friend would wish that his love and gratitude to
the devoted wife, who made his married years so supremely glad and
beautiful, should not go unrecorded.
The last time I saw Watts-Dunton alive was shortly before his death.
I had spent a long afternoon with Mrs. Watts-Dunton and himself,
and at night he and I dined alone, as his wife had an engagement.
In my honour he produced a bottle of his old “Tennyson” port,
lamenting that he could not join me as the doctor had limited him
to soda-water or barley-water. When I told him that I had recently
been dining in the company of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould, and
that “F. C. G.” had described soda-water as “a drink without a
soul,” Watts-Dunton was much amused. But, his soulless drink
notwithstanding, I have never known him talk more brilliantly. He
rambled from one subject to another, not from any lack of power
to concentrate or lack of memory, but because his memory was so
retentive and so co-ordinating that the mention of a name touched,
as it were, an electric button in his memory, which called up other
associations.
And by rambling I do not mean that he was discursive or vague. No
matter how wide his choice of subject, one was conscious of a sense
of unity in all that Watts-Dunton said. Religion might by others, and
for the sake of convenience, be divided into creeds, Philosophy into
schools of thought, Science into separate headings under the names of
Astronomy, Geology, Zoology, Botany, Physics, Chemistry and the like,
but by him all these were considered as component parts--the one
dovetailing into the other--of a perfect whole. One was conscious of
no disconnection when the conversation slid from this science, that
philosophy, or religion, to another, for as carried on by him, it
was as if he were presenting to the observer’s eye merely different
facets of the precious and single stone of truth. His was not the
rambling talk of old age, for more or less rambling his talk had been
ever since I had known him.
It was due partly also to his almost infinite knowledge of every
subject under the sun. The mere mention of a science, of a language,
of a system of philosophy, of a bird, a flower, a star, was, as
it were, a text upon which he would base one of his wonderful and
illuminating disquisitions. His grasp of first principles was so
comprehensive that he was able in a few words to present them boldly
and clearly for the hearer’s apprehension, whence he would pass
on to develop some new line of thought. His interests were to the
last so eager and youthful, that even comparatively unessential
side-issues--as he spoke of them--suddenly opened up into new and
fascinating vistas, down which the searchlight of his imagination
would flash and linger, before passing on, from point to point, to
the final goal of his thought.
Rossetti often said that no man that ever he met could talk with the
brilliancy, beauty, knowledge, and truth of Watts-Dunton, whose very
“improvisation” in conversation Rossetti described as “perfect” as a
“fitted jewel.” Rossetti deplored, too, on many occasions his “lost”
conversations with the author of _Aylwin_--lost because only by
taking them down in shorthand, as spoken, could one remember the half
of what was said, its incisive phrasing, its flashing metaphors and
similes, and the “fundamental brain work” which lay at the back of
all.
I am always glad to remember that on this, my last meeting with
Watts-Dunton, he was--though evidently weakening and ailing in
body--intellectually at his best. He revived old memories of
Tennyson, Rossetti, Browning, Lowell, Morris, Matthew Arnold, and
many another. He dwelt lovingly once again but with new insight
upon the first awakening of the wonder-sense in man, and how
this wonder-sense--the beginning whether in savage or in highly
civilised races of every form of religion--passed on into worship.
Our intercourse that evening was in fact more of a monologue, on
his part, than of the usual conversation between two old friends,
with interests and intimates in common. I was indeed glad that it
should be so, first because Watts-Dunton, like George Meredith (whose
talk, though I only heard it once, struck me if more scintillating
also as more self-conscious), was a compelling and fascinating
conversationalist, and secondly because his slight deafness made the
usual give-and-take of conversation difficult.
Not a little of his talk that night was of his wife, his own devotion
to her, and the unselfishness of her devotion to him. He spoke of
Louise Chandler Moulton, “that adorable woman,” as he called her,
whom Swinburne held to be the truest woman-poet that America has
given us. He charged me to carry his affectionate greetings to
Robertson Nicoll. “Only I wish I could see more of him,” he added.
“It’s hard to see so seldom the faces one longs to see.”
And then, more faithful in memory to the dead friends of long ago
than any other man or woman I have known, he spoke movingly of “our
Philip,” his friend and mine, Philip Marston. Then he took down a
book from a little bookshelf which hung to the right of the sofa
on which he sat, and, turning the pages, asked me to read aloud
Marston’s Sonnet to his dead love:
It must have been for one of us, my own,
To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread.
Had not my tears upon thy face been shed,
Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone
Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known
My loneliness; and did my feet not tread
This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled
For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan.
And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain
To think of thine eternity of sleep;
To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep.
And when this cup’s last bitterness I drain,
One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep--
Thou hadst the peace, and I the undying pain.
His only comment on the poem was that long and deeply-breathed “Ah!”
which meant that he had been profoundly interested, perhaps even
profoundly stirred. Often it was his only comment when Swinburne,
head erect, eyes ashine, and voice athrill, had in the past stolen
into the same room--noiseless in his movements, even when excited--to
chaunt to us some new and noble poem, carried like an uncooled bar of
glowing iron direct from the smithy of his brain, and still intoning
and vibrating with the deep bass of the hammer on the anvil, still
singing the red fire-song of the furnace whence it came.
We sat in silence for a space, and then Watts-Dunton said:
“Our Philip was not a great, but at least he was a true poet, as well
as a loyal friend and a right good fellow. He is almost forgotten
now by the newer school, and among the many new voices, but Louise
Chandler Moulton and Will Sharp, and others of us, have done what
we could to keep his memory green. We loved him, as Gabriel and
Algernon loved him, our beautiful blind poet-boy.”
When soon after I rose reluctantly to go, a change seemed to come
over Watts-Dunton. The animation faded out of voice and face, and was
replaced by something like anxiety, almost like pain.
“Must you go, dear fellow, must you go?” he asked sorrowfully. “There
is a bed all ready prepared, for we’d hoped you’d stay the night.”
I explained that I was compelled to return to Hastings that evening,
as I had to start on a journey early next morning. Perhaps I had let
him overexert himself too much in conversation. Perhaps he had more
to say and was disappointed not to be able to say it, for he seemed
suddenly tired and sad. The brilliant talker was gone.
“Come again soon, dear fellow. Come again soon,” he said, as he held
my hand in a long clasp. And when I had passed out of his sight and
he out of mine, his voice followed me pathetically, almost brokenly
into the night, “Come again soon, Kernahan. Come again soon, dear
boy. Don’t let it be long before we meet again.”
It was not long before we met again, but it was, alas, when I
followed to his long home one who, great as was his fame in the eyes
of the world as poet, critic, novelist and thinker, is, in the hearts
of some of us, who grow old, more dearly remembered as the most
unselfish, most steadfast, and most loving of friends.