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Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic
“And what about our contemporary novelists? Perhaps you do not give attention to fiction?”
“Give attention to novels! Why, if I did not, I should not give attention to literature at all. In a true and deep sense all pure literature is fiction – to use an extremely inadequate and misleading word as a substitute for the right phrase, ‘imaginative representation.’ ‘The Iliad,’ ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘The Æneid,’ ‘The Divina Commedia,’ are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our writers. The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and the mustard-seed. A time which has given birth to such novelists as many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time for the English novel. Criticism will have to recognize, and at once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of the ‘literature of power,’ and if criticism does not so recognize it, so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing boy – it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be stretched to fit the muscles as they swell.”
“I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?”
“Well, there I am a ‘galled jade’ that must needs ‘wince’ a little. No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity. The chief argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed with the journal’s own authority – and the same applies, of course, to the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious. With regard to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to be always on his guard against it. An editor cannot read all the books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary world. When Jones asks him for Brown’s book for review, the editor cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones’s name, but that of the journal.
In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great injustice may flow from this. I myself have more than once heard a good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything.”
Now that the day of the ‘smart slaters’ is over, it is interesting to read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the ‘Athenæum,’ spoke of its record and its triumphs: —
“The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through its columns. Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the editorial ‘we.’ But with regard to the general public, the reader of a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of the ‘we,’ and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. These were the views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the best writers of our time there can be no doubt. Some very illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them. On a certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced himself, and told how he had stood ‘dividing the swift mind’ as to whether he could or could not offer the man his hand. ‘I think I should have offered him mine,’ said Rossetti, ‘although no one detests his offence more than I do.’ And then the conversation ran upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old friends could not shake hands. ‘There is one kind of miscreant,’ said Rossetti, ‘whom you have forgotten to name – a miscreant who in kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when he knows it to be good. That is the man who should never defile my hand by his touch. By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste bread and salt with him. I would quietly get up and go.’ Tennyson, on afterwards being told this story, said, ‘And who would not do the same? Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege – sacrilege against art.’ Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume of the ‘Athenæum’ worked on the great principle that the critic’s primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by. Their pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his coadjutors; and from its commencement the ‘Athenæum’ has striven to avoid slashing and smart writing. A difficult thing to avoid, no doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever. Of all forms of writing, the founders of the ‘Athenæum’ held the shallow, smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable. And here again the views of the ‘Athenæum’ have remained unchanged. The critic who works ‘without a conscience or an aim’ knows only too well that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses of human nature – the love that people have of seeing each other attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself. For although man has a strong instinct for admiration – else had he never reached his present position in the conscious world – he has, running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct – the instinct for contempt. A reviewer’s ridicule poured upon a writer titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority. It is by pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist hopes to kill two birds with one stone – to gratify his own malignity and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so. Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all. Many brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever, have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart saying. One of these writers – the greatest wit of the nineteenth century – used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered his own prodigious powers of wit, ‘I will engage in six lessons to teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks it worth his while to learn.’ And the ‘Athenæum,’ at the time when Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same thing. The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching.”
Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor should ‘come down a cropper’ over some matter of fact, and open the door to troublesome correspondence. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the mysterious ‘we’ must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the authority of the oracle? When a contributor ‘comes down a cropper,’ although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of the ‘Saturday Review’ under Cook) refuse to insert a correction. Now, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, ‘the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy does it feel in setting other intelligences right.’ I have been told that it was a tradition in the office of the ‘Examiner,’ and also in the office of the ‘Athenæum,’ that Theodore Watts had not only never been known to ‘come down a cropper,’ but had never given the ‘critical gnats’ a chance of pretending that he had to. One day, however, in an article on Frederick Tennyson’s poems, speaking of the position that the poet Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr. Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith – the same Smith whom ‘Z’ (the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the ‘Athenæum’ – had been admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith’s with the metaphors of Shakespeare. The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great man: —
‘Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson’s poems, which was published in your last number, please say where I have compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?
Herbert Spencer.’The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor had at last ‘come down a cropper,’ sent a proof of Spencer’s note to Mr. Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any editorial comment at all. Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last ‘come down a cropper,’ this would have been the wisest plan. But he returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following footnote added to it: —
“It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in literary art – an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from their ranks – and it is many years since we had the pleasure of reading it. Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in which he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as ‘I speared him with a jest,’ etc. Our only object, however, in alluding to the subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as this —
– My drooping sails
Flap idly ’gainst the mast of my intent;
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should grate the golden isles —
had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer.”
Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, ‘Of course the article was Theodore Watts’s. I had forgotten entirely what I had said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.’
If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings, I think I should select this bland postscript to Spencer’s letter.
Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson. It occurred in connection with ‘Kidnapped.’ I will quote here Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the ‘Athenæum’ review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson’s works. The playful allusion to the ‘Athenæum’s’ kindness is very characteristic: —
“Of Stevenson’s sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could quote many instances; but let one suffice. When ‘Kidnapped’ appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we refused to be scared from making certain strictures. It occurred to us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts. From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to weld into one. We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer, anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him and sending him off to the plantations. The ‘Athenæum,’ whose kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small, has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its usual kind and gentle way. This aroused the wrath of the Stevensonians. Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the author of ‘Kidnapped’ himself a charming letter.’
This letter appears in Stevenson’s ‘Letters,’ and by the courtesy of Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it here: —
Skerryvore, Bournemouth.Dear Mr. Watts, – The sight of the last ‘Athenæum’ reminds me of you, and of my debt now too long due. I wish to thank you for your notice of ‘Kidnapped’; and that not because it was kind, though for that also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers. A critic like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in vain.
What you say of the two parts in ‘Kidnapped’ was felt by no one more painfully than by myself. I began it, partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist’s proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional literature very hard. Yet I do not so far deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my ‘Kidnapped’ was doomed, while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the thing it is.
And now to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight on board the ‘Covenant,’ I think it literal. David and Alan had every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out. The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not; still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity. – I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere admirer,
Robert Louis Stevenson.Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson, of his personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and Stevenson, on his part, in conversation never failed to speak of himself, as in this letter he subscribes himself, as Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sincere admirer. But Mr. Watts-Dunton’s admiration of Stevenson’s work was more tempered with judgment than was the admiration of some critics, who afterwards, when he became too successful, disparaged him. Greatly as he admired ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Catriona,’ there were certain of Stevenson’s works for which his admiration was qualified, and certain others for which he had no admiration at all. His strictures upon the story which seems to have been at first the main source of Stevenson’s popularity, ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ were much resented at the time by those insincere and fickle worshippers to whom I have already alluded. Yet these strictures are surely full of wisdom, and they specially show that wide sweep over the entire field of literature which is characteristic of all his criticism. As they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will quote them here: —
“Take the little story ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ the laudatory criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like the comet’s tail in relation to the comet. On its appearance as a story, a ‘shilling shocker’ for the railway bookstalls, the critic’s attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing. But when it is offered as a classic – and this is really how it is offered – it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different kind. It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having a like motive – stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest literature – as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke to the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible being – stories whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest kind.
It is many years since, in writing of the ‘Parables of Buddhaghosha,’ it was our business to treat at length of the grand idea of man’s dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been embodied. We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsène Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life’s road, sees on a lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards – when sin has soiled him – finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely modern story of Edgar Poe, ‘William Wilson,’ up to the earliest allegories upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart of the ‘Great Man, Mankind.’ We traced the idea, as far as our knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive – from the ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all motives – had been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that did honour to literary art. Manu, after telling us that ‘single is each man born into the world – single dies,’ implores each one to ‘collect virtue,’ in order that after death he may be met by the virtuous part of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in traversing ‘that gloom which is so hard to be traversed.’ Fine as this is, it is surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since versified by Sir Edwin Arnold) – the story of the wicked king who met after death a frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her to be only a part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own evil deeds. And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in Arda Viraf, in which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid pleasant trees whose fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of his own dual nature, a beautiful maiden, who says to him, ‘O youth, I am thine own actions.’
And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it deserves. It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery – a story of astonishing brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man’s soul is effected not by psychological development, and not by the ‘awful alchemy’ of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed new drug.
If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De Quincey’s ‘Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ it tells poorly for Stevenson’s sense of humour. If it is meant as a serious allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive with which most literatures have been enriched. That a story so coarse should have met with the plaudits that ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ met with at the time of its publication – that it should now be quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are ignored – what does it mean? Is it a sign that the ‘shrinkage of the world,’ the ‘solidarity of civilisation,’ making the record of each day’s doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our public writers? Is it that they not only have no time to think, but no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour? Is it that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and turn to it for convenient illustration? That Stevenson should have been impelled to write the story shows what the ‘Suicide Club’ had already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a charm to ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped,’ there was that morbid strain which is so often associated with physical disease.
Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all writers since Chaucer – Walter Scott – Stevenson might have been in the ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who do their best to make life hideous. It must be remembered that he was a critic first and a creator afterwards. He himself tells us how critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to writing himself. No one really understood better than he Hesiod’s fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares. No one understood better than he Joubert’s saying, ‘Fiction has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one aim is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere frightful reality.’ And for the most part he succeeded in keeping down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a crazy body.
Save in such great mistakes as ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ and a few other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert’s excellent maxim. But Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter – right by instinct. He alone is always a delight. If all art is dedicated to joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious problem than how to make men happy, then the ‘Waverley Novels’ are among the most precious things in the literature of the world.”
Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always speaks warmly is Browning. Among the many good anecdotes I have heard him relate in this connection, I will give one. I do not think that he would object to my doing so.
“It is one of my misfortunes,” said he, “to be not fully worthy (to use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning’s poetry. Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements in a general way not pleasing to my ear. When a certain book of his came out – I forget which – it devolved upon me to review it. Certain eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I expressed my irritation in something very like chaff. A close friend of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself – in fact, Mr. Swinburne – chided me for it, and I feel that he was right. On the afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began talking about the review. Lowell, I found, was delighted with it – said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had appeared for many years. ‘But,’ said he, ‘You’re a brave man to be here where Browning always comes.’ Then, looking round the room, he said: ‘Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side opposite to us. Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!’