In Good Company. Coulson Kernahan
I venture to think that he rather overrates Landor and underrates Calverley.
We should not have inserted ‘Youth and Art’ [the lines by Browning referring to ‘Gibson’s hash’ to which Mr. Swinburne took such objection] or ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ or Croker’s ‘Miss Peel.’ We ought to have put in Pope’s ‘I know a thing.’
I remember talking to Tennyson about Dirce, and he said it was too classical for English taste. I do not think many people would care for it, but perhaps it might be added. Stygean Set is not a cultivated expression, not better than lot, and if Dirce was a shade it did not matter whether Charon forgot himself or not.
I really feel much obliged to Mr. Swinburne for whom I have sincere regard. Perhaps if you see him you will tell him of my obligation.
His article strengthens my decided opinion that the book is a very difficult one to edit. All the experts have different ideas about it. Lang, Swinburne, Gosse, Dobson, and Palgrave are all opposed.
I hope you are quite well.
Always truly,
F. L. L.
VI
In all my conversations with Swinburne, I cannot recall one instance of his interrupting a speaker. He would, it is true, go off at a conversational tangent, as when, talking of Francis Hinde Groome and Suffolk, he interpolated apparently irrelevant remarks upon the curious names of some Yorkshire villages, having presumably only discovered that morning that one of these villages bore the delightful name of “Beggar my Neighbour.” But, though one could see by his flashing eye that the hounds of utterance were chafing and fretting to fling themselves upon the quarry, he invariably waited till the other speaker had made an end of it before letting go the leash. To everything that Watts-Dunton said, then or at any time, he listened almost as a disciple might listen to a master, and again and again he urged me to use any influence I had with the author of Aylwin to induce him to give that then unpublished work to the world, and to allow his Athenæum essays to be collected and issued in book form.
“Only,” said Swinburne at a white heat of enthusiastic admiration, “if every page, on which they were printed, represented a hundred pound bank-note; if the back and the sides of the cover were of the finest beaten gold—that would not be too costly a raiment for the noblest critical work, dealing with first principles, that has ever been given to the world.”
That this was Swinburne’s deliberate opinion of the value of his brother poet’s and brother friend’s work, and was not the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, I have reason to know, for he used similar expressions in my presence on many occasions. I observe, too, that Mr. James Douglas, in his book Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist, and Critic, quotes Swinburne as describing Watts-Dunton as “the first critic of his time, perhaps the largest minded and surest sighted of any age”—a judgment which, as Mr. Douglas reminds us, Rossetti endorsed.
Watts-Dunton, rumpling up his hair with one hand, tried to turn the conversation into other channels, but Swinburne was obdurate.
“You, who know Walter’s magnificent, magician-like power of concentrating into the fourteen lines of a sonnet what no other poet could have said with equal power and felicity in forty, will agree with me when I tell you what perhaps you do not know, for he never speaks of it himself. When he was a young man, he lost a manuscript book of poems of which he had no copy. By these lost poems the world is, I believe, as poor as if Gabriel Rossetti’s early poems had never been recovered from his wife’s coffin. It was an incomparable loss to literature, a loss which can never be replaced.”
I did not know of these lost poems, for, intimate as I had been with Watts-Dunton for many years, he had never even hinted at their existence, or rather at their non-existence. But, except to admit the loss and to make light of it, he refused to be drawn either by Swinburne or by myself, and turned the conversation upon the former’s Ode to Music, written, I think, for the opening of the Chicago Exhibition. But of this Swinburne, in his turn, refused to talk, averring that he had clean forgotten it—that a task like that, once completed, he never thought of again, and that his mind was full at the moment of his Tennyson Threnody.
On this occasion I saw yet another side of him. I had brought with me two bunches of exquisite flowers—arum lilies, lilies of the valley, snowdrops and some exotics—one for Miss Teresa Watts, one for Swinburne. A flower was to him as it had been to Philip Marston, the one unchanging and perfect thing in a changing and decaying world, as fair, as fresh and as immortal as in the days of our youth. In an ecstasy of delight, he took the flowers from my outstretched hand as reverently as the communicant takes into his hands the consecrated bread of the sacrament, as tenderly as a young mother takes into her arms her new-born child. He bent his head over them in a rapture that was almost like a prayer, his eyes when he looked up to thank me for the gift alight and brimming over with thoughts that were not far from tears. For many minutes he sat holding them, turning them this way and that, too rapt in his worship to speak or to think of anything else.
Then he turned to Miss Watts with his courtly bow.
“As you have been as equally honoured as I, you will not think me robbing you if I carry my bunch away with me to put them in water and to place them in my own room. I want to find them there when I wake in the morning.”
He rose in his quiet way, the flowers in his hand, bowed again to Miss Watts and myself and left the room. In a few minutes the door reopened, but only wide enough to let him slip through, and he stole, rather than walked, to the chair, where he seated himself among us again, almost as noiselessly as a card is shuffled back to its place in the pack.
VII
“Watts-Dunton writes poetry because he loves writing it,” said Swinburne to me once. “I write poetry, I suppose, to escape from boredom.”
There is truth in the statement, but there is more behind the statement than appears at the first glance.
New and incoming tides of poetry lapped at his feet each morning, and the incoming of each new tide of poetry was to him as fresh, pure, crystalline-sweet, and free, as is the tide that rolls in upon the shore each day from the vastnesses and the sweetnesses of the central sea.
Hence he gave himself up to it, plunged in it, sported in it, with the zeal and rapture of a boy. Had the call to think poetry, dream poetry, write poetry, plunge himself into poetry, come to him as part of a set task, had he been compelled, in the mood or out of the mood, to take up poetry as an occupation, he would have turned from it as the sea-loving swimmer turns from a stagnant pool. It would have been to him the “boredom” of which he had spoken, not the “escape from boredom.”
I have said that the impression I formed of him after my first visit was that of a man who lived in a world of his own—a world which, so far as his body was concerned, was, with the exception of his experiences on and by the sea, bounded, for the greater part of his later life, by the four walls of his home, and by the limits of his daily walk, but which, in the imaginative and mental sense, was illimitable. Human and normal in passion, and in every other respect, as I believe him to have been (so far, that is to say, as genius, which by overbalancing one side of a man’s nature, inevitably necessitates some underbalancing on the other, ever can be said to be normal), he had seemed to me, on the occasion of that first visit, a creature of other flesh and blood than ours, an elusive ethereal poetic essence, rather than a man of like passions to our own.
It had seemed to me as if the busy world, in which other men made love and married, begot children, bought and sold, laboured and schemed—though it lay outside his very door—was a million miles away from the monastic quiet of the book-lined