Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

All I am allowed to say about the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Mr. Swinburne is that the friendship began in 1872, that it soon developed into the closest intimacy, not only with the poet himself, but with all his family. In 1879 the two friends became house-mates at ‘The Pines,’ Putney Hill, and since then they have never been separated, for Mr. Watts-Dunton’s visits to the Continent, notably those with the late Dr. Hake recorded in ‘The New Day,’ took place just before this time. The two poets thenceforth lived together, worked together; saw their common friends together, and travelled together. In 1882, after the death of Rossetti they went to the Channel Islands, staying at St. Peter’s Port, Guernsey, for some little time, and then at Petit Bot Bay. Their swims in this beautiful bay Mr. Watts-Dunton commemorated in two of the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love’: —

NATURE’S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH(A MORNING SWIM OFF GUERNSEY WITH A FRIEND)As if the Spring’s fresh groves should change and shakeTo dark green woods of Orient terebinth,Then break to bloom of England’s hyacinth,So ’neath us change the waves, rising to takeEach kiss of colour from each cloud and flakeRound many a rocky hall and labyrinth,Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,Show how the sea’s fine rage dares make and break.Young with the youth the sea’s embrace can lend,Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bendOver the magic wonders of the worldTHE LANGUAGE OF NATURE’S FRAGRANCY(THE TIRING-ROOM IN THE ROCKS)These are the ‘Coloured Caves’ the sea-maid built;Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,For she must fly at every tide’s return,And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.Outside behold the bay, each headland giltWith morning’s gold; far off the foam-wreaths burnLike fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearnUp sand more soft than Avon’s sacred silt.And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,From lips of may or rose or eglantine,Comes with the language of a breath benign,Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,Like scent of sea-weed rich of morn and brine.

The two friends afterwards went to Sark. A curious incident occurred during their stay in the island. The two poet-swimmers received a bravado challenge from ‘Orion’ Horne, who was also a famous swimmer, to swim with him round the whole island of Sark! I need hardly say that the absurd challenge was not accepted.

During the cruise Mr. Swinburne conceived and afterwards wrote some glorious poetry. In the same year the two friends went to Paris, as I have already mentioned, to assist at the Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse.’ Since then their love of the English coasts and the waters which wash them, seems to have kept them in England. For two consecutive years they went to Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast, for bathing. It was there that Mr. Swinburne wrote some of his East Anglian poems, and it was there that Mr. Watts-Dunton conceived the East coast parts of ‘Aylwin.’ It was during one of these visits that Mr. Swinburne first made the acquaintance of Grant Allen, who had long been an intimate friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s. The two, indeed, were drawn together by the fact that they both enjoyed science as much as they enjoyed literature. It was a very interesting meeting, as Grant Allen had long been one of Swinburne’s most ardent admirers, and his social charm, his intellectual sweep and brilliance, made a great impression on the poet. Since then their visits to the sea have been confined to parts of the English Channel, such as Eastbourne, where they were near neighbours of Rossetti’s friends, Lord and Lady Mount Temple, between whom and Mr. Watts-Dunton there had been an affectionate intimacy for many years – but more notably Lancing, whither they went for three consecutive years. For several years they stayed during their holiday with Lady Mary Gordon, an aunt of Mr. Swinburne’s, at ‘The Orchard,’ Niton Bay, Isle of Wight. During the hot summer of 1904 they were lucky enough to escape to Cromer, where the temperature was something like twenty degrees lower than that of London. A curious incident occurred during this visit to Cromer. One day Mr. Watts-Dunton took a walk with another friend to ‘Poppy-land,’ where he and Mr. Swinburne had previously stayed, in order to see there again the landslips which he has so vividly described in ‘Aylwin.’ While they were walking from ‘Poppyland’ to the old ruined churchyard called ‘The Garden of Sleep,’ they sat down for some time in the shade of an empty hut near the cliff. Coming back Mr. Watts-Dunton said that the cliff there was very dangerous, and ought to be fenced off, as the fatal land-springs were beginning to show their work. Two or three weeks after this a portion of the cliff at that point, weighing many thousands of tons, fell into the sea, and the hut with it.

A friendship so affectionate and so long as the friendship between these two poets is perhaps without a parallel in literature. It has been frequently and beautifully commemorated. When Mr. Swinburne’s noble poem, ‘By the North Sea,’ was published, it was prefaced by this sonnet: —

TO WALTER THEODORE WATTS

‘WE ARE WHAT SUNS AND WINDS AND WATERS MAKE US.’

Landor.Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breathThe spirit of man fulfilling – these createThat joy wherewith man’s life grown passionateGains heart to hear and sense to read and faithTo know the secret word our Mother saithIn silence, and to see, though doubt wax great,Death as the shadow cast by life on fate,Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.Brother, to whom our Mother, as to me,Is dearer than all dreams of days undone,This song I give you of the sovereign threeThat are, as life and sleep and death are, one:A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea,Where nought of man’s endures before the sun.

1882 was a memorable year in the life of Mr. Watts-Dunton. The two most important volumes of poetry published in that year were dedicated to him. Rossetti’s ‘Ballads and Sonnets,’ the book which contains the chief work of his life, bore the following inscription: —

TOTHEODORE WATTSTHE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR ME,THESE FEW MORE PAGESARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

A few weeks later Mr. Swinburne’s ‘Tristram of Lyonesse,’ the volume which contains what I regard as his ripest and richest poetry, was thus inscribed: —

TO MY BEST FRIENDTHEODORE WATTSI DEDICATE IN THIS BOOKTHE BEST I HAVE TO GIVE HIMSpring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,That twice have made keen April’s clarion soundSince here we first together saw and heardSpring’s light reverberate and reiterate wordShine forth and speak in season. Life stands crownedHere with the best one thing it ever found,As of my soul’s best birthdays dawns the third.There is a friend that as the wise man saithCleaves closer than a brother: nor to meHath time not shown, through days like waves at strifeThis truth more sure than all things else but death,This pearl most perfect found in all the seaThat washes toward your feet these waifs of life.The Pines, April, 1882.

But the finest of all these words of affection are perhaps those opening the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the magnificent Collected Edition of Mr. Swinburne’s poems issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1904: —

‘To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition of my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the occasion.’

Once also Mr. Watts-Dunton dedicated verses of his own to Mr. Swinburne, to wit, in 1897, when he published that impassioned lyric in praise of a nobler and larger Imperialism, the ‘Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain’: —

“TO OUR GREAT CONTEMPORARY WRITER OFPATRIOTIC POETRY,ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

You and I are old enough to remember the time when, in the world of letters at least, patriotism was not so fashionable as it is now – when, indeed, love of England suggested Philistinism rather than ‘sweetness and light.’ Other people, such as Frenchmen, Italians, Irishmen, Hungarians, Poles, might give voice to a passionate love of the land of their birth, but not Englishmen. It was very curious, as I thought then, and as I think now. And at that period love of the Colonies was, if possible, even more out of fashion than was love of England; and this temper was not confined to the ‘cultured’ class. It pervaded society and had an immense influence upon politics. On one side the Manchester school, religiously hoping that if the Colonies could be insulted so effectually that they must needs (unless they abandoned all self-respect) ‘set up for themselves,’ the same enormous spurt would be given to British trade which occurred after the birth of the United States, bade the Colonies ‘cut the painter.’ On the other hand the old Tories and Whigs, with a few noble exceptions, having never really abandoned the old traditions respecting the unimportance of all matters outside the parochial circle of European diplomacy, scarcely knew where the Colonies were situated on the map.

There was, however, in these islands one person who saw as clearly then as all see now the infinite importance of the expansion of England to the true progress of mankind – the Great Lady whose praises in this regard I have presumed to sing in the opening stanza of these verses.

I may be wrong, but I, who am, as you know, no courtier, believe from the bottom of my heart that without the influence of the Queen this expansion would have been seriously delayed. Directly and indirectly her influence must needs be enormous, and, as regards this matter, it has always been exercised – energetically and even eagerly exercised – in one way. This being my view, I have for years been urging more than one friend clothed with an authority such as I do not possess to bring the subject prominently before the people of England at a time when England’s expansion is a phrase in everybody’s mouth. I have not succeeded. Let this be my apology for undertaking the task myself and for inscribing to you, as well as to the men of Greater Britain, these lines.”

I feel that it is a great privilege to be able to present to my readers beautiful photogravures and photographs of interiors and pictures and works of art at ‘The Pines.’ Many of the pictures and other works of art at ‘The Pines’ are mementoes of a most interesting kind.

Among these is the superb portrait of Madox Brown, at this moment hanging in the Bradford Exhibition. Madox Brown painted it for the owner. An interesting story is connected with it. One day, not long after Mr. Watts-Dunton had become intimate with Madox Brown, the artist told him he specially wanted his boy Nolly to read to him a story that he had been writing, and asked him to meet the boy at dinner.

‘Nolly been writing a story!’ exclaimed Mr. Watts-Dunton.

‘I understand your smile,’ said Madox Brown; ‘but you will find it better than you think.’

At this time Oliver Madox Brown seemed a loose-limbed hobbledehoy, young enough to be at school. After dinner Oliver began to read the opening chapters of the story in a not very impressive way, and Mr. Watts-Dunton suggested that he should take it home and read it at his leisure. This was agreed to. Pressure of affairs prevented him from taking it up for some time. At last he did take it up, but he had scarcely read a dozen pages when he was called away, and he asked a member of his family to gather up the pages from the sofa and put them into an escritoire. On his return home at a very late hour he found the lady intently reading the manuscript, and she declared that she could not go to bed till she had finished it.

On the next day Mr. Watts-Dunton again took up the manuscript, and was held spellbound by it. It was a story of passion, of intense love, and intense hate, told with a crude power that was irresistible.

Mr. Watts-Dunton knew Smith Williams (the reader of Smith, Elder & Co.), whose name is associated with ‘Jane Eyre.’ He showed it to Williams, who was greatly struck by it, but pointed out that it terminated in a violent scene which the novel-reading public of that time would not like, and asked for a concluding scene less daring. The ending was modified, and the story, when it appeared, attracted very great attention. Madox Brown was so grateful to Mr. Watts-Dunton for his services in the matter that he insisted on expressing his gratitude in some tangible form. Miss Lucy Madox Brown (afterwards Mrs. W. M. Rossetti) was consulted, and at once suggested a portrait of the painter, painted by himself. This was done, and the result was the masterpiece which has been so often exhibited. From that moment Oliver Madox Brown took his place in the literary world of his time. The mention of Oliver Madox Brown will remind the older generation of his friendship with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, one of the most pathetic chapters in literary annals.

Although Rossetti never fulfilled his intention of illustrating what he called ‘Watts’s magnificent star sonnet,’ he began what would have been a superb picture illustrating Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sonnet, ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow.’ He finished a large charcoal drawing of it, which is thus described by Mr. William Sharp in his book, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a Record and a Study’: —

“It represents a female figure standing in a gauzy circle composed of a rainbow, and on the frame is written the following sonnet (the poem in question by Mr. Watts-Dunton):

THE WOOD-HAUNTER’S DREAMThe wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:‘Though meads are sweet when flowers at morn uncurl,And woods are sweet with nightingale and merle,Where are the dreams that flush’d thy childish bed?The Spirit of the Rainbow thou would’st wed!’I rose, I found her – found a rain-drenched girlWhose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearlColoured the rain above her golden head.But when I stood by that sweet vision’s sideI saw no more the Rainbow’s lovely stains;To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyedThe sun showed naught but dripping woods and plains:‘God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains,’The wood-sprite laugh’d, ‘Our seeker finds a bride!’

Rossetti meant to have completed the design with the ‘woods and plains’ seen in perspective through the arch; and the composition has an additional and special interest because it is the artist’s only successful attempt at the wholly nude – the ‘Spirit’ being extremely graceful in poise and outline.

I am able to give a reproduction of another of Rossetti’s beautiful studies which has never been published, but which has been very much talked about. Many who have seen it at ‘The Pines’ agree with the late Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest of all his female faces. It is thus described by Mr. William Sharp: “The drawing, which, for the sake of a name, I will call ‘Forced Music,’ represents a nude half-figure of a girl playing on a mediæval stringed instrument elaborately ornamented. The face is of a type unlike that of any other of the artist’s subjects, and extraordinarily beautiful.”

I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of the girl in the version of the picture here reproduced, are by Dunn. These two exquisite drawings were made from the same girl, who never sat for any other pictures. Her face has been described as being unlike that of any other of Rossetti’s models and yet combining the charm of them all.

I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any personal description of him. For my part I do not sympathize with this extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one’s personal characteristics described in print. What is there so dreadful or so sacred in mere print? The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter there was ‘a great gulf fixed.’ Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr. Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of friends or strangers, remarks – delicate enough, no doubt – are made about them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in ever so small a degree. Not so very long ago I remained in a room after Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it. Straightway there were the freest remarks about him, not in the least unkind, but free. Some did not expect to see so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences, described his dark-brown eyes as ‘green’ – through a printer’s error, no doubt. Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his absent friend, Mr. Swinburne – and so on, and so on. Now, what is the difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation? Merely that the printed report reaches a wider – a little wider – audience. That is all. I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in the papers. Some energetic gentleman – possibly some one living in the neighbourhood – took the following ‘Kodak’ of him. It appeared in ‘M.A.P.’ and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could be painted. In years to come, when he and I and the ‘Kodaker’ are dead, it may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written about him: —

“Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance. For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and thick moustache are partially shot with grey. But he looks not a day over forty-five. Generally he carries a book. Often, however, he turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits. For – it will be news to lie-abeds of the district – Wimbledon Common is lively with rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until the moon rises again. To him, morning, although he has seen more sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious pageant. This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet, novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour.”

The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to the sea-side. One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his country places, such as Boar’s Hill.

I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the famous Master of Balliol. I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton’s intellectual powers and various accomplishments. There was no one, I have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem. That air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett’s friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr. Watts-Dunton.

Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were these visits with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett’s house, where he had the opportunity of meeting some of the most prominent men of the time. He has described the Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to them. I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of December 22, 1894.

“It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the poet of ‘Atalanta’ and the student of Plato and translator of Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no common strength. They took expeditions into the country together, and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at Jowett’s quiet autumnal retreat at Boar’s Hill. The Master of Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself the admiration of men of poetic genius. To say which poet admired and loved him most deeply – Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr. Swinburne – would be difficult. He seemed to join their hands all round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett. He was always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his verses as in telling him what he liked. And although the poets of our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to straightforward men like Jowett. That Jowett’s judgment in artistic matters, and especially in poetry, was borné no one knew better than himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would otherwise have been allowed to him. For, notwithstanding the Oxford epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary knowledge. He was fond of quoting Hallam’s words that without an exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction; and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge, he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion. They are not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble and most truly lovable. The kind of restraint in social intercourse resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett’s taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for talking’s sake. If a proper and right response to a friend’s remark chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or uneducated man. It is, however, extremely difficult to write reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett. In order to bring out one of Jowett’s pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism.”

Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits that the two friends used to pay to Jowett’s rural retreat at Boar’s Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian. The two poets used to spend the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master to Boar’s Hill. Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry will remember the following sonnets: —

THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR’S HILLTo A. C. SIOne after one they go; and glade and heath,Where once we walked with them, and garden bowersThey made so dear, are haunted by the hoursOnce musical of those who sleep beneath;One after one does Sorrow’s every wreathBind closer you and me with funeral flowers,And Love and Memory from each loss of oursForge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.Since Love and Memory now refuse to yieldThe friend with whom we walk through mead and fieldTo-day as on that day when last we parted,Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?Love shapes a presence out of Memory’s dream,A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.IICan he be dead? We walk through flowery waysFrom Boar’s Hill down to Oxford, fain to knowWhat nugget-gold, in drift of Time’s long flow,The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,Still talks of Plato while the scene belowBreaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.Can he be dead? He shares our homeward walk,And by the river you arrest the talkTo see the sun transfigure ere he setsThe boatmen’s children shining in the wherryAnd on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,Making the clumsy craft an angel’s ferry.IIIThe river crossed, we walk ’neath glowing skiesThrough grass where cattle feed or stand and stareWith burnished coats, glassing the coloured air —Fading as colour after colour dies:We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise —Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;We win the scholar’s nest – his simple fareMade royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.Ah! well that kindred heart within him knewThe poet’s heart of gold that gives the spell!Can he be dead? Your heart being drawn to him,How shall ev’n Death make that dear presence dimFor you who loved him – us who loved him well?

Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill. Not the least interesting among the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith. Mr. William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton. Speaking of Swinburne’s championship, in the ‘Spectator,’ of Meredith’s first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the ‘Pall Mall Magazine,’ of December 1901, says: —