Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his dædal wings up into the starry night, there where ‘God’s name is writ in worlds,’ and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever around the great central sun – ‘The Great White Throne of God!’

The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first, as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid mass, ‘without form and void,’ where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages, having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life, to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns, compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian, the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders, the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and the basest work of God – the creation of the thinking, reasoning, sinning animal, Man.

And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand work of developing the divinity within it. I know, indeed, that it is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will decline and vanish, ‘like the civilizations of old.’ But I venture to deny it in toto. From a human point of view, it is utterly impossible. And without going into the question (for I see the time is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern must of necessity be futile and fallacious. And for this reason, that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political life, and come to its own conclusions. So isolated, indeed, was one nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of each other’s existence. A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh, was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for Italy alone. There was no science then to ‘put a girdle round about the earth’ (as Puck says) ‘in forty minutes.’ But now, a new idea brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole habitable globe – from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru. I am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the ruler of the waves. The day may come that will see her sink to a second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe. In spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that will see Russia the dominant power in Europe. The day may come that will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and learning. It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race – that the negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian race is now lording it over the negro. Why not? It would be only equity. But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of nationalities. I speak again of the great man, Mankind – the one indivisible man that Science is making him. He will never retrograde, because ‘matter and mind comprise the universe,’ and matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind – because good must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made? Henceforth his road is onward – onward. Science has helped to give him such a start that nothing shall hold him back – nothing can hold him back – save a fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God.”

But I am wandering from the subject of the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street and its connection with printing. The last important book that was ever printed there was a very remarkable one. It was the famous essay on Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that time a curate of the St. Ives Church – a book that was the result of an enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book, moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought. It has passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.

Chapter IV

CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM

Mrs. Craigie has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the nation. It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than that in which Theodore Watts grew up. Indeed, his early life may be compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of the Mill family. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father was in many respects a very remarkable man. ‘He was,’ says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ‘a naturalist intimately connected with Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert White of the Ouse valley.’ There is, as the ‘Times’ said in its review of ‘Aylwin,’ so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made to identify all the characters. Many of these guesses have been wrong; and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr. Hake, who, in two papers in ‘Notes and Queries’ identified many of the characters. Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father. Mr. Hake, however, tells us that this is not so. Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the author’s uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to say later. I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable account of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father in Mr. Norris’s ‘History of St. Ives’: —

“For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford Abbots. According to the following extracts from ‘The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal’ of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: ‘We record with much regret the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died after an hour’s illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he had been taken after the seizure. Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was called in, but without avail. At the inquest the post-mortem examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions, resulted in syncope. Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of death.

Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the oldest solicitors in the county. He had also devoted much time and study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a well-known figure in the scientific circles of London. He was for years connected with Section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee. He read papers on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles of geology. Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors, and in the Association’s reports upon this subject some of the most interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by Mr. Watts. He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.’

Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the ‘Antiquary’ for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months after his death. It was, however, not by Archæology, but by his geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation. And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison, Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied by Mr. Matton. In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr. Watts at St. Ives. Since his death there have been frequent references to him as a man of ‘encyclopædic general knowledge.’

He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St. Ives have been more liked or more generally respected. His great delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself. On such occasions the present writer has often met him and had many interesting conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science.”

With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mother, the Duntons, although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr. Jessopp in his charming essay, ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.’ This essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, and treating of the Register of Crab House Nunnery. In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother’s to his father’s name, by a deed in Chancery.

I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend) used to tell. When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school library a copy of Wells’s ‘Stories after Nature,’ and read them with great avidity. Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to find, in a number of the ‘Illuminated Magazine,’ a periodical which his father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one of the ‘Stories after Nature’ reprinted with an illustration by the designer and engraver Linton. He said to his father, ‘Why, I have read this story before!’ ‘That is quite impossible,’ said his father, ‘quite impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number of a magazine.’ ‘I have read it before; I know all about it,’ said the boy. ‘As I do not think you untruthful,’ said the father, ‘I think I can explain your hallucination about this matter.’ ‘Do, father,’ said the son. ‘Well,’ said the father, ‘I do not know whether or not you are a poet. But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams. You have told me before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.’ ‘Yes, father, that often occurs.’ ‘Well, the reason for that is this, as you will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things, one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.’ The explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.

The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the father said, ‘Well, Walter, have you read this before?’ ‘Yes,’ said the boy falteringly, ‘unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain, father.’ And so it went on from month to month. When the boy had grown into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells’s ‘Joseph and His Brethren’ and ‘Stories after Nature.’ Rossetti was agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of ‘Joseph and His Brethren,’ he was very familiar with the ‘Stories after Nature.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘they appeared in the “Illuminated Magazine.”’ ‘Who should have thought,’ said Rossetti, ‘that the “Illuminated Magazine” in its moribund days, when Linton took it up, should have got down to St. Ives. Its circulation, I think, was only a few hundreds. Among Linton’s manœuvres for keeping the magazine alive was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells’s “Stories after Nature” without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book form.’ ‘They did then appear in book form first?’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. ‘Yes, but there can’t have been over a hundred or two sold,’ said Rossetti. ‘I discovered it at the British Museum.’ ‘I read it at Cambridge in my school library,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. It was the startled look on Rossetti’s face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell him the story about his father and the ‘Illuminated Magazine.’

It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to express himself in literature rather early. But it will be new to many, and especially to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ that as a mere child he contributed to its pages. When he was a boy he read the ‘Athenæum,’ which his father took in regularly. One day he caught a correspondent of the ‘Athenæum’ – no less a person than John P. Collier – tripping on a point of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance. He had stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father’s books. He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing the blunder with youthful scorn. In due time the correction was noted in the Literary Gossip of the journal. Soon after, his father had occasion to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he said, ‘Walter, have you been marking this book?’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘But you know I object?’ ‘Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.’ ‘Why,’ said his father, ‘somebody has been writing about this very passage to the “Athenæum.”’ ‘Yes, father,’ replied the boy, red and ungrammatical with proud confusion, ‘it was me.’ ‘You!’ cried his astonished father, ‘you!’ And thus the matter was explained. Mr. Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his first contribution to the ‘Athenæum.’

Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton, it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando Watts. His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism. As I have already pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero. The importance of this character in ‘Aylwin’ is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find that the character of Philip is its motive power. After his death, everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams, his fantasies and his whims. This effect of making a man dominate from his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there they leave it. What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls ‘the tragic mischief’ of the drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of ‘The Veiled Queen.’ There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an interest. He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish, and German. And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover of the acted drama. One of his stories in connection with acting is this. A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and sometimes Cromwell’s Barn. Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on returning home after the performance said, ‘I have seen a little actor who is a real genius. He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund Kean’s acting. I shall go and see him every night. And he went. The actor’s name was Robson. When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon. He went to the theatre and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so impressed him down at St. Ives. From that time he followed Robson to whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known figure among the playgoers of the Olympic. He always contended that Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time. Mr. Hake seems to have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in London: —

“He was,” says Mr. Hake, “a man of extraordinary learning in the academic sense of the word, and he possessed still more extraordinary general knowledge. He lived for many years the strangest kind of hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts. His two great passions were philology and occultism, but he also took great interest in rubbings from brass monuments. He knew more, I think, of those strange writers discussed in Vaughan’s ‘Hours with the Mystics’ than any other person – including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he managed to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the physical sciences, especially astronomy. He seemed to be learning languages up to almost the last year of his life. His method of learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow – that is to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died, it is said that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among his books. He used to express great contempt for Borrow’s method of learning languages from dictionaries only. I do not think that any one connected with literature – with the sole exception of Mr. Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G. Latham – knew so much of him as I did. His personal appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin, as described in the novel. Although he never wrote poetry, he translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese poets. I remember that he was an extraordinary admirer of Shelley. His knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists was a link between him and Mr. Swinburne.

At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum reading room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed to know anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he spoke to me it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should disturb the other readers, which in his eyes would have been a heinous offence. For very many years he had been extremely well known to the second-hand booksellers, for he was a constant purchaser of their wares. He was a great pedestrian, and, being very much attached to the north of London, would take long, slow tramps ten miles out in the direction of Highgate, Wood Green, etc. I have a very distinct recollection of calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living close to him in Percy Circus. Books were piled up from floor to ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember where to find every book and what there was in it. It is a singular fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him ‘the scholar.’ How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the north of London where ‘the scholar’ was taking his chop and bottle of Beaune. He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of ‘Aylwin,’ and myself. But at Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines, when and where my father and I used to meet him. His memory was so powerful that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part. He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life. He always reminded me of Charles Lamb’s description of George Dyer.

Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent to touch upon his inner life. He was a still greater recluse than the ‘Philip Aylwin’ of the novel. I think I am right in saying that he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of age. Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these studies that he sympathized with the author of ‘Aylwin’s’ friend, the late Lord de Tabley. I remember one story of his peculiarities which will give an idea of the kind of man he was. He had a brother, Mr. William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him in every way – strikingly good-looking, with great charm of manner and savoir faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of British military and naval exploits – where he was really learned. Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until at last he got to be called the ‘walking encyclopædia.’ The result was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned brother. This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories as to what people had said to him on this subject.” 4

Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of one of his stories. I may add that the editor of ‘Notes and Queries,’ Mr. Joseph Knight, knew James Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he ‘can testify to the truth’ of Mr. Hake’s ‘portraiture.’

Chapter V

EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES

Although an East Midlander by birth it seems to have been to East Anglia that Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathies were most strongly drawn. It was there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it was to East Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.

On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the Hemingford side already described, the country, though not so lovely as the western side, is at first fairly attractive; but it becomes less and less so as it nears the Fens. The Fens, however, would seem to have a charm of their own, and Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness that could hardly be surpassed. It was here as a boy that he made friends with the Gryengroes – that superior variety of the Romanies which Borrow had known years before. These gypsies used to bring their Welsh ponies to England and sell them at the fairs. I must now go back for some years in order to enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic description of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country, which appeared in ‘Great Thoughts’ in 1903.