Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be. The ‘Noctes’ are dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to save them, squeezes away all the political events – so important once, so unimportant now – all the foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in them. He eliminates all the critiques upon all those ‘greatest poems’ and those ‘greatest novels of the age’ written by Christopher’s friends – friends so famous once, so peacefully forgotten now. And he has left what he calls the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ i.e. ‘that portion of the work which deals with or presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of literary, artistic, or political interest only.’ And, although Mr. Skelton uses thus the word ‘comedy’ in its older and wider meaning, it is evident that it is as an ‘amazing humourist’ that he would present to our generation the great Christopher North. And assuredly, at this the ‘delighted spirit’ of Christopher smiles delightedly in Hades. For, however the ‘Comic Muse’ may pout upon hearing from Mr. Skelton that ‘the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” belong to her,’ it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson’s life was to cultivate her – was to be an ‘amazing humourist,’ in short. It is clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he most of all affected, that which we call technically ‘Rabelaisian.’ To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot. His personality was enormous. He had more of that demonic element – of which since Goethe’s time we have heard so much – than any man in Scotland. Everybody seems to have been dominated by him. De Quincey, with a finer intellect than even his own – and that is using strong language – looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master. It is positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey’s ‘Autobiographic Sketches,’ to come again and again upon the naïve refrain: ‘I think so, so does Professor Wilson.’ Gigantic as was the egotism of the Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism of Christopher North. In this, as in everything else, he was the opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s desire was to create eccentric humourous characters, but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself. Wilson’s great ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create. He would like the universe to himself. If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a smile: ‘Don’t you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I – John Wilson?’ He always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler were John Wilson – as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather, what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered. This determination to be a humourous character it was – and no lack of literary ambition – that caused him to squander his astonishing powers in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man, lament.

Many articles in ‘Blackwood’ – notably the one upon Shakspeare’s four great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge’s poetry – show that his insight into the principles of literary art was true and deep – far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form, nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his merits.

Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to ask us, on our oath, why Wilson’s fourteen volumes of brilliant, eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the ‘Coverley’ papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that mere elaborated intellectual ‘humour’ has the seeds of dissolution in it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live; and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian. But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what precise meaning we attach to the word ‘Rabelaisian’ – though the subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us. Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist – the comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits, with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the almighty joke of the Cosmos – a mood which in literature is rarer than in life – rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.

Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the Shakspeares, the Molières, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles, the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots – upon whom the rich tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls. Among these – to whom to create is everything – Sterne would perhaps have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and never read Rabelais; while Dickens’s growth was a development from Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr. Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters. Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor could do that. But, strip the ‘Shepherd’s’ talk of its Scottish accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose rush in the ‘Recreations’ and the ‘Essays’ we are so familiar with. While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to be purposely destroyed, and the ‘Opium-Eater’ becomes a fantastic creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.

The ‘amazing humour’ of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the ‘writing fellows’ at all. We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our time. One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be found – where he ought to be found – at Stratford-on-Avon. This is interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there were Rabelaisians, even among the ‘writing fellows,’ before Rabelais; the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, ‘in a duck-pond drowned him,’ he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the ‘Birds’ alone puts Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: ‘Let down the curtain; the farce is done,’ they were prophetic as regards the literary Rabelaisians – prophetic in this, that no writer has since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood – the mood, that is, of the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped upon several; for the great Curé divides his qualities among his followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in the ‘Paradise of Fruits,’ from which every other fruit in the garden drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits with stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits – the love of life – the fine passion for victuals and drink – has fallen to several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of ‘John Buncle’; to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the ‘Jolly Beggars’), to John Skinner, the author of ‘Tullochgorum.’ Shakspeare, having everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as Cervantism. Some of the scenes in ‘Henry the Fourth’ and ‘Henry the Fifth’ are rich with it. So is ‘Twelfth Night,’ to go no further. Dickens’s Rabelaisianism stopped with ‘Pickwick.’ If Hood’s gastric fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief. Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we ask the reader – who may very likely have been to an undergraduates’ wine-party, or to a medical students’ revel, or who may have read the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ – we seriously and earnestly ask him whether, among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.

And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say to Mr. Skelton – for we believed in Professor Wilson once – it breaks our heart to say that Wilson’s Rabelaisianism is nothing but jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains. We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly – if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!’

Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue that all creatures know, ‘I live, I live, I live!’ But, whatever might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring about the literary cheerfulness of the ‘Noctes’ that, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real Wilson is the Wilson of the ‘Isle of Palms,’ ‘The City of the Plague,’ of the ‘Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,’ of the ‘Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,’ Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that ‘almost the only passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our nature – tender compassion – confiding affection, and gentleness and sorrow.’

He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been – Mr. Skelton inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say decidedly, he was not.

Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his wit. Now, Wilson’s intellect was exceedingly and wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay.”

No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and saw the author of it. Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry between the ‘Athenæum’ and the ‘Academy.’

“You belong to us,” said Appleton. “The ‘Academy’ is the proper place for you. You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy’s camp.”

“And shall I tell you why I have joined the ‘Athenæum’ in place of the ‘Academy’?” said Watts; “it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you did not.”

“For months and months I have been urging you to write in the ‘Academy,’” said Appleton.

“That is true, no doubt,” said Watts, “but while MacColl offered me an important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon metaphysics. It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late. If to join the ‘Athenæum’ is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a Philistine am I.”

I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends afterwards. Shirley, in his ‘Reminiscences’ of Rossetti, like most of his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the poet-painter. I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays. I have heard him say more than once that Skelton’s style had a certain charm for him, and he could not understand why Skelton’s position is not as great as it deserves to be. ‘Scotsmen,’ he said, ‘often complain that English critics are slow to do them justice. This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol’s life. He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile Club. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in the great literary cockpit of London. To say the truth, the Scottish cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can more than take care of himself. For my part, with the exception of Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was liked.’

As will be seen further on, before the review of the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ’ appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the ‘Athenæum’ an article on ‘The Art of Interviewing.’ From this time forward he became the chief critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ and for nearly a quarter of a century – that is to say, until he published ‘The Coming of Love,’ when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any kind – he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic style – a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.

As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his creative work is of the closest kind. Indeed, it has been said by Rossetti that ‘the subtle and original generalizations upon the first principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own poetry.’ The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets. Rossetti used humourously to call him ‘The Symposiarch,’ and no doubt the influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr. Marston’s, Madox Brown’s, and Mrs. Procter’s, may be traced in his writings. For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of spontaneous conversation overheard. Its variety of manner, as well as of subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism. In it are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation, irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit. To the ‘Athenæum’ he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as ‘The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,’ ‘The Troubadours and Trouvères,’ ‘The Children of the Open Air,’ ‘The Gypsies,’ ‘Cosmic Humour,’ ‘The Effect of Evolution upon Literature.’ And although the most complete and most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the vast ocean of the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ and the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, that contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian minister, to the ‘Rivista d’ Italia.’ In this article she makes frequent allusions to the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and quotes freely from them. Rossetti once said that ‘the reason why Theodore Watts was so little known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as eagerly as other men sought fame’; but although his indifference to literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be profound.

There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates. His treatise in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ on ‘Poetry’ is alone sufficient to show how deep has been his study of poetic principles. The essay on the ‘Sonnet,’ too, which appeared in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ is admitted by critics of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject. It has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl Leutzner in his treatise, ‘Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.’

The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the ‘Athenæum’ are admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B. Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the ‘Idler.’ The allusion to the ‘smart slaters’ will be sufficient to indicate the approximate date of the interview.

“Having read your treatise on poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ which, it is said, has been an influence in every European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in sympathy with the poetry of the present hour.”

“I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic. To say the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism. Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same misconception seems to be spreading in England – attacks which the smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers.”

“It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd.”

“I do not believe in answering attacks. The public, as I say, knows that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a review. It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one’s excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike reviewing than mine. Yet it has one good quality, I think – it is never unkindly. I never will take a book for review unless I can say something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour.”

“Then you never practise the smart ‘slating’ which certain would-be critics indulge in?”

“Never! In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give pain to a young writer. In the next place, this ‘smart slating,’ as you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world. Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as many miles of such smart ‘slating’ as could be achieved by any six of the smart slaters. A charming phrase of yours, ‘smart slaters’! But I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my time – men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they hold such work in contempt. Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for instance. Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day of his valuable life are wasted on ‘leader’ writing, but there is in any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he! going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it. Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him. While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little spiteful brow, Grant Allen’s good-natured sayings have the very wit that the unlucky sweater and ‘slater’ is trying for. Read what he said about William Watson, and see how kind he is. Compare his geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. Again, take Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. But it was not, I suppose, of such as they that you came to talk about. You are asking me whether I am in sympathy with the younger writers of my time. My answer is that I cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am. In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work and their aims. No doubt there are some points in which they and I agree to differ.”