Chapter IV (2)

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.”

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND AS A GOOD FELLOW

TWO SIDES OF HIS MANY-SIDEDNESS

The one thing of all others upon which Watts-Dunton set store was good-fellowship, which he counted as of greater worth even than genius. If ever he went critically astray, if ever intellectually he overrated his man, it was because he allowed his heart to outride his head. Once convince him that this or that young writer was a good fellow, and, born critic though he was, even criticism went by the board in Watts-Dunton’s intellectual estimate. If I illustrate this by a personal experience it is not to speak of myself, but because, though I have personal knowledge of many similar instances, in this instance I have the “documents” in the case before me. It concerns the circumstances by which I first came to know Watts-Dunton.

In the New Year of 1885 there appeared the first number of a weekly (afterwards a monthly) magazine with the somewhat infelicitous if not feeble title of _Home Chimes_. It was edited and owned by F. W. Robinson, then a popular novelist. To the first number Swinburne and Theodore Watts contributed poems, and in that now dead and forgotten venture the early work of many men and women who thereafter became famous is to be found. For instance, Jerome K. Jerome’s _Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow_ as well as his _Three Men in a Boat_ first saw the light there. There, much of Sir James Barrie’s early work appeared, for I once heard the author of _A Window in Thrums_ say, though I do not suppose he meant to be taken too seriously, that there was a time when to him “London” meant the place where _Home Chimes_ was published. There, early work by Eden Phillpotts, Israel Zangwill, G. B. Burgin, and a host of others who have since “come into their own” was printed, and there, I may say incidentally, part of my own first little book appeared.

“Yes,” Robinson once said to me reminiscently, “it is true that Jerome, Barrie, Phillpotts, Zangwill, Burgin and yourself all more or less ‘came out’ in _Home Chimes_, but I have my doubts sometimes whether the whole of you ever raised the sale of the magazine by so much as a number.”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “my own opinion is that, between us, we killed it.”

Be that as it may, Robinson lost heavily upon _Home Chimes_ and was hit even harder by the death of the “three-decker”--I mean by the ousting of novels in three volumes at thirty shillings in favour of novels in one volume at six shillings. The change, indeed, caused such a drop in his income that he decided to look about him for another means of livelihood outside literature, and when, soon after, an Inspectorship of H.M. Prisons became vacant, he decided to apply for the appointment. For this he had special qualifications, as he had for years closely and critically studied our Prison System and had, in fact, written and published much upon the subject. Knowing how eager he was, for pecuniary reasons, to secure the appointment, and being anxious to do what I could to assist his candidature (I plead guilty to “log-rolling” in this most justifiable instance), I asked the late Mr. Passmore Edwards, proprietor and editor of the _Echo_, the only halfpenny evening paper in those days, to let me write a sketch of Robinson in the “Echo Portrait Gallery” to which I was a contributor. In this sketch--it was signed “C. K.” merely--I touched, purposely, upon Robinson’s close study and special knowledge of the workings and defects of our Prison System. My article was seen by Theodore Watts, who wrote Robinson a letter which the latter sent on to me. It was as follows:

MY DEAR ROBINSON,

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.

ONE ASPECT OF THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

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:

MY DEAR KERNAHAN,

Don’t think any more of that unpleasant little affair. Of course
neither Swinburne nor I expect our friends, however loyal, to
take part in the literary quarrels that may be forced upon us.
But this man had the character _among men who knew him well_ of
being the most thorough sweep, and to us it did seem queer to see
your honoured name associated with such a man. But, after all,
even he may not have been as black as his acquaintances painted
him. Your loyalty to us I do not doubt.

Yours affectionately,
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON.

This was followed by a wire--from Swinburne--asking me to lunch, which I need hardly say I was glad to accept, and so my relationship to the inmates of The Pines returned to its old footing.

Since it was Swinburne much more than Watts-Dunton who so bitterly resented what I had written of Buchanan, I am glad to have upon my shelves a volume of _Selections from Swinburne_, published after his death, and edited by Watts-Dunton. The book was sent to me by the Editor, and was inscribed:

“To Coulson Kernahan,

whom Swinburne dearly loved, and who as dearly loved him.

From Theodore Watts-Dunton.”

My unhappy connection with the “Buchanan affair” had, it will be seen, passed entirely from Swinburne’s memory, and indeed the name of Robert Buchanan, who was something of a disturbing element even in death, as he had been in life, was never mentioned among us again. How entirely the, to me, distressing if brief rift in my friendship with Watts-Dunton--a friendship which I shall always count one of the dearest privileges of my life--was closed and forgotten, is clear from the following letter. It was written in reply to a telegram I sent, congratulating him on celebrating his 81st birthday--the last birthday on earth, alas, of one of the most generous and great-hearted of men:

THE PINES, PUTNEY, S.W.
_Oct. 20th, 1913._

MY DEAR KERNAHAN,

Your telegram congratulating me upon having reached my 81st
birthday affected me deeply. Ever since the beginning of our
long intimacy I have had from you nothing but generosity and
affection, almost unexampled, I think, between two literary
men. My one chagrin is that I can get only glimpses of you of
the briefest kind. Your last visit here was indeed a red-letter
day. Don’t forget when occasion offers to come and see us. Your
welcome will be of the most heartfelt kind.

Most affectionately yours,
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

THE LAST DAYS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

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.”