Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

“Among those who read and considered” [Meredith’s work] “was another young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him… If the letter signed ‘A. C. Swinburne’ had not appeared, another signed ‘Theodore Watts’ would have been published, to the like effect. It was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion.”

The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum’ on ‘Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth.’ After this appeared articles appreciative of Meredith’s prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others. But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who led the way. The most touching of all the testimonies of love and admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr Watts-Dunton, or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed to him on his seventy-fourth birthday. It appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of February 15, 1902: —

TO GEORGE MEREDITH(ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)This time, dear friend – this time my birthday greetingComes heavy of funeral tears – I think of you,And say, ‘’Tis evening with him – that is true —But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;Still he is spared – while Spring and Winter, meeting,Clasp hands around the roots ’neath frozen dew —To see the ‘Joy of Earth’ break forth anew,And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.’Love’s remnant melts and melts; but, if our daysAre swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, still,Still Winter has a sun – a sun whose raysCan set the young lamb dancing on the hill,And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.

The allusion to ‘funeral tears’ was caused by one of the greatest bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years, namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the ‘Athenæum.’ I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often heard Mr. Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration the fine charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and style of his conversation.

But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of ‘The Pines’ Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.

I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between the external facets of Tennyson’s character and the ‘abysmal deeps’ of his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet’s son, is the only man living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet. Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy. So long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his seventy-first birthday. It attracted much attention, and although it was not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to another: —

To Alfred Tennyson, on his publishing, in his seventy-first year, the most richly various volume of English verse that has appeared in his own centuryBeyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springsWhose magic waters to a flood expand,Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.From honeyed flowers, – from balm of zephyr-wings, —From fiery blood of gems, 15 through all the land,The river draws; – then, in one rainbow-band,Ten leagues of nectar o’er the ocean flings.Rich with the riches of a poet’s years,Stained in all colours of Man’s destiny,So, Tennyson, thy widening river nearsThe misty main, and, taking now the sea,Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tearsThe ashen billows of Eternity.

Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a garden party, and they fraternized at once. Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth. One point in which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the ‘Table Talk’) or with Mr. Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson’s ear was defective at the very first. He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield. As an illustration of Tennyson’s sensibility to the most delicate nuances of metrical music, I remember at one of those charming ‘symposia’ at ‘The Pines,’ hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of this. It referred to the two sonnets upon ‘The Omnipotence of Love’ in the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love.’ These sonnets appeared in an article called ‘The New Hero’ in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ in 1883. Mr. Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article reached him. The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets. Tennyson, who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge. The line was this: —

And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.

Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially praised by two other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris, to whom the sonnet had been read in manuscript. Tennyson’s criticism was that there were too many sibilants in the line, and that although, other things being equal, ‘scents’ might be more accurate than ‘scent,’ this was a case where the claims of music ought to be dominant over other claims. The present Lord Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they were right, and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting ‘scent’ in place of ‘scents.’

Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson’s sensibility to criticism was the result, not of imperious egotism, but of a kind of morbid modesty. Tennyson used to say that “to whatsoever exalted position a poet might reach, he was not ‘born to the purple,’ and that if the poet’s mind was especially plastic he could never shake off the reminiscence of the time when he was nobody.”

On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the summer-house at Aldworth to read to him ‘Becket,’ then in manuscript. Although another visitor, whom he esteemed very highly, both as a poet and an old friend, was staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer to read the play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone. And this no doubt was because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism. Freedom of criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr. Watts-Dunton is the most outspoken on the subject of the poet’s art. The entire morning was absorbed in the reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘the remarks upon poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made the fortune of any critic.’

On the subject of what has been called Tennyson’s gaucherie and rudeness to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax very indignant. ‘There was to me,’ he said, ‘the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson’s bluntness. I would there were a leaven of Tennyson’s single-mindedness in the society of the present day.’

One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as Tennyson’s rudeness to women shows how entirely the man was misunderstood. Mrs. Oliphant has stated that Tennyson, in his own house, after listening in silence to an interchange of amiable compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson, said abruptly, ‘What liars you women are!’ ‘I seem to hear,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘Tennyson utter the exclamation – utter it in that tone of humourous playfulness, followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized the rudeness as entirely as Douglas Jerrold’s laugh neutralized the sting of his satire. For such an incident to be cited as instance of Tennyson’s rudeness to women is ludicrous. When I knew him I was, if possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious people. I did not feel that I had any claim to such treatment, for he was, beyond doubt, the greatest literary figure in the world of that time. There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which springs up after a period of laudation.’

The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of stricture upon Tennyson’s work was that, considering his enormous powers as a poet, he seemed deficient in the gift of inventing a story: – “The stanzas beginning, ‘O, that ’twere possible’ – the nucleus of ‘Maud’ – appeared originally in ‘The Tribute.’ They were the finest lines that Tennyson ever wrote – right away the finest. They suggested some superb story of passion and mystery; and every reader was compelled to make his own guess as to what the story could possibly be. In an evil moment some friend suggested that Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story. A person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson might perhaps have invented an adequate story – might perhaps have invented a dozen adequate stories; but he could not have invented a worse story than the one used by Tennyson in the writing of his monodrama. But think of the poetic riches poured into it!”

I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton once made in regard to ‘The Princess.’ “Shakspeare,” he said, “is the only poet who has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of which is fanciful. The extremely insincere story of ‘The Princess’ is filled with such noble passages of sincere poetry as ‘Tears, idle tears,’ ‘Home they brought her warrior dead,’ etc., passages which unfortunately lose two-thirds of their power through the insincere setting.”

Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the ‘Magazine of Art’ invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write an article upon the portraits of Tennyson. Mr. Watts-Dunton consulted the poet upon this project, and he agreed, promising to aid in the selection of the portraits. The result was two of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been written – in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without a knowledge of these articles no student of Tennyson can be properly equipped. It is tantalizing that they have never been reprinted. Tennyson died before their appearance, and this, of course, added to the general interest felt in them.

After Tennyson’s death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two penetrating essays upon Tennyson in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ one of them being his reminiscences of Tennyson as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a nature-poet in reference to evolution. It will be a great pity if these essays too are not reprinted. Mr. Knowles, the editor, also included Mr. Watts-Dunton among the friends of Tennyson who were invited to write memorial verses on his death for the ‘Nineteenth Century.’ To this series Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one of the several poems upon Tennyson not published in ‘The Coming of Love’ volume, which, I may note in passing, contains ‘What the Silent Voices Said,’ the fine ‘sonnet sequence’ commemorating the burial of Tennyson: —

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY‘The crowd in the abbey was very great.’Morning Newspaper.I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes beholdWhat others saw not – his lov’d face sublimeBeneath that pall of death in deathless primeOf Tennyson’s long day that grows not old;And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;And, ‘Who art thou,’ the music seemed to chime,‘To mourn that King of song whose throne is Time?’Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow’s shame:‘So great he was, striving in simple strifeWith Art alone to lend all beauty life —So true to Truth he was, whatever came —So fierce against the false when lies were rife —That love o’erleapt the golden fence of Fame.’

By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr. Watts-Dunton was one of the few friends of the poet, including Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll, and others, who contributed reminiscences of him to the ‘Life.’ In a few sentences he paints this masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled, ‘Impressions: 1883–1892’ 16: —

“All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti’s was a peculiarly winning personality, but no one has been in the least able to say why. Nothing is easier, however, than to find the charm of Tennyson. It lay in a great veracity of soul: it lay in a simple single-mindedness, so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of poems as marvellous for exquisite art as for inspiration, you could not have supposed but that all subtleties – even those of poetic art – must be foreign to a nature so simple.

Working in a language like ours – a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art – how can this great, inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?

Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he said – viz. that it was the thing he thought. Behind his uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy of the grand old type. As he stood at the porch of Aldworth meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye – as he stood there, tall far beyond the height of average men, his skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind – as he stood there, no one could mistake him for anything but a great forthright English gentleman. Always a man of an extraordinary beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare indeed for him to part from a guest without urging him to return, and generally with the words, ‘Come whenever you like.’

Tennyson’s knowledge of nature – nature in every aspect – was simply astonishing. His passion for ‘stargazing’ has often been commented upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante, no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that he passed away in the light he so much loved – in a room where there was no artificial light – nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the full moon, which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in England.

In a country having a composite language such as ours it may be affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of poetry: one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other appealing to the few who are sensitive to the felicitous expression of deep thought and to the true beauties of poetic art.

Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his use of what Dante calls the ‘sieve for noble words’ his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities of thought and of diction in the great passages seem little short of miraculous, and there are so many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.”

Chapter XVIII

AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS

I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary friendships would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends. There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting between him and James Russell Lowell. Shortly after Lowell had accepted the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at dinner. During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one. He observed that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the conversation. The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English writers – Dickens, Thackeray, and others. As the dinner wore on, his conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also upon the prominent political men of the previous generation – Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and the like. Then the name of the Alabama came up; the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American), dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the Alabama escape. This diatribe he concluded thus: ‘You know we owe England nothing.’ In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton, manifestly addressing his remarks to him.

These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the first time, he said: “Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong. You owe England a very great deal, for I see you are an American.”

“What do we owe England?” said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.

“You owe England,” he said, “for an infinity of good feeling which you are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans. So kind is the feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English people themselves. They are petted and made much of, until at last it has come to this, that the very fact of a person’s being American is a letter of introduction.”

Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel between the two. After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:

“You were very sharp upon me just now, sir.”

“Not in the least,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “You were making an onslaught on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were addressing your conversation to me.”

“Well,” replied Mr. Lowell, “I will confess that I did address my conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts.”

“That is my little name,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But I really don’t see why that should induce you to address your conversation to me. I suppose it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies. An entire mistake! I have several charming American friends, and I am a great admirer of many of your most eminent writers. But I notice that whensoever an American book is severely handled in the ‘Athenæum,’ the article is attributed to me.”

“I do not think,” said Mr. Lowell, “that you are a lover of my country, but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never wrote.”

And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more confidential.

“Well,” he said, “I will tell you something that, I think, will not be altogether unpleasant to you. When I came to take up my permanent residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about London and Londoners, and I said to him: ‘There is one man whom I very much want to meet.’ ‘You!’ said he, ‘why, you can meet anybody from the royal family downwards. Who is the man you want to meet?’ ‘It is a man in the literary world,’ said I, ‘and I have no doubt you can introduce me to him. It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in the “Athenæum.”’ My friend laughed. ‘Well, it is curious,’ he replied: ‘that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you to. I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures on my writing which I don’t much approve of.’ Does that interest you?” added Mr. Lowell.

“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.

“Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the ‘Athenæum’ I have read every article you have written?”

“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.

“Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said to a friend of mine: ‘At last there is a new voice in English criticism?’”

“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But you must first tell me what that article was, for I don’t believe there is one of my countrymen who could do so.”

“That article,” said Lowell, “was an essay upon the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ and it opened with an Oriental anecdote.”

“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that does interest me very much.”

“And I will go further,” said Lowell: “every line you have written in the ‘Athenæum’ has been read by me, and often re-read.”

“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “I confess to being amazed, for I assure you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my name is absolutely unknown. And I must add that I feel honoured, for it is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for some of your critical essays. But still, I don’t quite forgive you for your onslaught upon my poor little island! My sympathies are not strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon in temper. But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way, and I don’t quite forgive you.”

The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.

“Won’t you come to see me,” said Lowell, “at the Embassy?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“Then you ought to know!” said Lowell. “Another proof of the stout sufficiency of the English temper – not to know where the American Embassy is! It is in Lowndes Square.” Then he named the number.

“Why,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the Swinburne family – a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the open air at I don’t know what age of life – something like eighty. She was a friend of Turner’s, and is the possessor of some of Turner’s finest works.”

“So you actually go next door, and don’t know where the American Embassy is! A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English temper! However, as you come next door, won’t you come and see me?”

“I shall be delighted,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton; “but I am perfectly sure you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man.”

“On the contrary,” said Lowell, “I always reserve to myself an hour, from five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette.”

Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution, this hour over a cigarette once a week.

This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling the way in which Lowell’s Anglophobia became milder and milder, ‘fine by degrees and beautifully less,’ until at last it entirely vanished. Then it was followed by something like Anglo-mania. Lowell began to talk with the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways which he would formerly have deprecated. The climax of this revolution was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him: