Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of the famous ‘Green Dining Room’ at 16 Cheyne Walk, to which Mr. Hake refers. Mr. Hake also writes in the same article: “With regard to the two circular mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy Grail, ‘in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt,’ I do not remember seeing these there. But they are evidently the mirrors decorated with copies by Dunn of the lost Holy Grail frescoes once existing on the walls of the Union Reading-Room at Oxford. These beautiful decorations I have seen at ‘The Pines,’ but not elsewhere.” I am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of one of these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has generously permitted to be specially taken for this book.

And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake’s fascinating book of poetry, ‘The New Day,’ which must live, if only for its reminiscences of the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor: —

THE NEW DAYIIn the unbroken silence of the mindThoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,And life is back among the days behind —The spectral days of that lamented love —Days whose romance can never be repeated.The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.These vanished hours, where are they stored away?Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?Its utterances are swallowed up in day;The gabled house, the mighty master gone.Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall —What dreams he of the days we there recall?IIO, happy days with him who once so loved us!We loved as brothers, with a single heart,The man whose iris-woven pictures moved usFrom Nature to her blazoned shadow – Art.How often did we trace the nestling ThamesFrom humblest waters on his course of might,Down where the weir the bursting current stems —There sat till evening grew to balmy night,Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strandWhere we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,That seemed to utter plaudits while we plannedTriumphal labours of the day to be.The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.IIILike some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rillStill calls the flowers upon its misty bankTo stoop into the stream and drink their fill.And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.Slowly a loosened weed another meets;They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.We are here surely if the world, forgot,Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;We are here surely at this witching spot, —Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,It is as if a play pervaded all.IVSitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,With many a speaking vision on the wall,The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl —’Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,And Art grew fragrant in the glow of springWith homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,Fed by the waters of the forest stream;Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;Or else was mingled the rough billow’s gleeWith cries of petrels on a sullen sea.VRemember how we roamed the Channel’s shore,And read aloud our verses, each in turn,While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to captureThe potent word that makes a thought abiding,And wings it upward to its place of rapture,While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonderThat art knew not the mighty reverieThat moves earth’s spirit and her orb asunder,While ocean’s depths, even, seem a shallow sea.Yet with rare genius could his hand impartHis own far-searching poesy to art.

The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all. It makes me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with him a new atmosphere – the salt atmosphere which envelops ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna. And yet perhaps the description of

‘The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming’

is equally fascinating.

Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush, has in his sonnet ‘The Shadow on the Window Blind,’ made Kelmscott Manor and the poetic life lived there still more memorable: —

Within this thicket’s every leafy lairA song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,Though red behind their nests the moon has swum —But still I see that shadow writing there! —Poet, behind yon casement’s ruddy square,Whose shadow tells me why you do not come —Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,Flying and singing through thine inch of air —Come thither, where on grass and flower and leafGleams Nature’s scripture, putting Man’s to shame:‘Thy day,’ she says, ‘is all too rich and brief —Thy game of life too wonderful a game —To give to Art entirely or in chief:Drink of these dews – sweeter than wine of Fame.’

‘Aylwin,’ too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and Kelmscott.

The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk, has been declared by one of Rossetti’s most intimate friends to be marvellously graphic and true: —

“On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and pictures upon easels, I found D’Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa. Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in no mood to meet strangers. However, he sprang up and introduced me to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one of Mr. D’Arcy’s chief buyers. This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.

He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a stranger somewhat disconcerted him.

After he was gone D’Arcy said: ‘A good fellow! One of my most important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are going to be friends, I hope.’

‘He seems very fond of pictures,’ I said.

‘A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.’

A little while after this gentleman’s departure, in came De Castro, who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently his métier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker. Talk was his stock-in-trade.

The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going, but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose to go, but on getting a sign from D’Arcy that he wished me to stay I sat down again. At last D’Arcy said:

‘You had better go now, De Castro – you have kept that hansom outside for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with him alone.’

De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left us.

D’Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing abstractedly at the fireplace.

‘Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things. I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can’t sleep is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant. I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.’

Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature. He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall. Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens. Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.

My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned to the house I found that D’Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at work in the studio.

After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:

‘No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie. Every man has one side of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing. I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.’

‘And children,’ I said – ‘do you like children?’

‘Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals – until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their charm goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal? What makes you sigh?’

My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ‘Prince of the Mist’ on Snowdon. And I said to myself, ‘How he would have been fascinated by a sight like that!’

My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid movements – so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in him became wit. Beneath the coruscations of this wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.

His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every ‘jeu d’esprit’ seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.

While he was talking he kept on painting.”

Chapter XII

WILLIAM MORRIS

It is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris. In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s ‘Athenæum’ monographs is the one upon him. Between these two there was an intimacy of the closest kind – from 1873 to the day of the poet’s death. This, no doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic power, accounts for the extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend. I have heard more than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything else that has been published about him. It is a grievous loss to literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of Morris is scarcely likely to write one. Morris, when he was busy in Queen’s Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti’s death.

When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote ‘Aylwin’ he did not contemplate that the Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott Manor. The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and D’Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti. Morris’s passion for angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were spent at Kelmscott. Treffry Dunn’s portrait of him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the picture.

Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting facts with regard to ‘Hurstcote Manor’ and Morris: —

“Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to in ‘Aylwin’ (chap. lx. book xv.) as the ‘enthusiastic angler’ who used to go down to ‘Hurstcote’ to fish. At that time this fine old seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of Rossetti and Morris. Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who, with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris’s will. The series of ‘large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams’ supporting the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls – a peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would go to the attics to listen to them.

With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful ‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name). I wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr. Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded tapestry – so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull grey texture’ – depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the ‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more beautiful woman – Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”

Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott, was Morris’s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South Kensington Museum – a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died prematurely. Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s anecdotes of the causeries at Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that it is a pity they have never been recorded in print. Middleton was one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s collaborators in the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ to which he contributed the article on ‘Rome,’ one of the finest essays in that work.

Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum.’ And the poet, might well say this, for those who have studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The House of the Wolfings,’ ‘The Roots of the Mountains,’ ‘The Glittering Plain,’ ‘The Well at the World’s End,’ ‘The Tale of Beowulf,’ ‘News from Nowhere,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ will be inclined to put them at the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s purely critical work. The ‘Quarterly Review,’ in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ I record these facts, not in order to depreciate the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s monograph in the ‘Athenæum.’

The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death: —

“Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us all – that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconciled – nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain – the thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil – would have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, ‘Enjoy.’ Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of wealth – cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius such as his – surrounded by friends, some of whom were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt of the earth – it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous powers were at their best – and died without pain. The scheme of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him – it was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned out – he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk about – the mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: ‘I have enjoyed my life – few men more so – and death in any case is sure.’”

It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton’s reflections upon the wear and tear of genius: —

“It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Look at Gladstone,’ he would say, ‘look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work.’ No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the ‘dry light of intelligence,’ a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of ‘the thinking machine’ only, but of the whole man – the whole ‘genial’ nature of the worker – his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitæ.

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collating of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.”

Mr. Watts-Dunton’s critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than in his remarks upon Morris’s translation of the Odyssey: —

“Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris’s translation; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualities – those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poets – are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote… Morris’s translation of the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ etc. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the ‘Saga Library.’ Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem – for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.”