Chapter IV (3)

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.

WHEN STEPHEN PHILLIPS READ