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Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic
NATURA BENIGNA
What power is this? what witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
Mother, ’tis I reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
Introduction
‘It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full acknowledged: that one thing was – to die.’ – Douglas Jerrold.
Although in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it.
Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong, Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source of his education. He replied: “Cambridge, scholastically, and Watts-Dunton’s articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Athenæum’ from the purely literary point of view. I have been a reader of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I should have been without them.” Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that he bought the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ simply to possess one article – Mr. Watts-Dunton’s article on Poetry. There are many other men of letters who would give similar testimony. With regard to his critical work, Mr. Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on Poetry, describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as ‘the first critic of our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,’ 1 a judgment which, according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Encyclopædia,’ Rossetti endorsed. In this same article it is further said: —
“He came to exercise a most important influence on the art and culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many volumes – in the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum’ (since 1876), the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ etc. – he has let year after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous, and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his. But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he is only ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and other poems that, from the ‘Athenæum,’ etc., have found their way into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has contributed to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ etc. The chief note of his poetry – much of it written in youth – is its individuality, the source of its inspiration Nature and himself. For he who of all men has most influenced his brother poets has himself remained least influenced by them. So, too, his prose writings – literary mainly, but ranging also over folk-lore, ethnology, and science generally – are marked as much by their independence and originality as by their suggestiveness, harmony, incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight. They have made him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not Jeffrey, is a parallel.” 2
These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, written before his theory of the ‘Renascence of Wonder’ was exemplified in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love,’ show, I think, that this book would have had a right to exist even if his critical writings had been collected into volumes; but as this collection has never been made, and I believe never will be made by the author, I feel that to do what I am now doing is to render the reading public a real service. For many years he has been urged by his friends to collect his critical articles, but although several men of letters have offered to relieve him of that task, he has remained obdurate.
Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was not an eager student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings. Like most boys born with the itch for writing, I began to spill ink on paper in my third lustre. The fermentation of the soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy, modelled upon ‘Lycidas,’ on the death of an indulgent aunt, also drove me to welter in drowsy critical journals. By some humour of chance I stumbled upon the ‘Athenæum,’ and there I found week by week writing that made me tingle with the rapture of discovery. The personal magic of some unknown wizard led me into realms of gold and kingdoms of romance. I used to count the days till the ‘Athenæum’ appeared in my Irish home, and I spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into ponderous tomes. Well I remember the advent of the old, white-bearded Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes: even now I can smell the pungent odour of the damp paste and glue. In those days I was a solitary bookworm, living far from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name of the magician who was carrying me into so ‘many goodly states and kingdoms.’ With boyish audacity I wrote to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naïve appeal provoked a smile in Took’s Court. But although the editor was dumb, I exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials, ‘J. D.,’ under the solemn rubric, ‘To Correspondents.’
It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles with the unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the name of my hero, Theodore Watts. Of course, the sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my execrable imitation of ‘Australia’s Mother’ was printed in the ‘Belfast News-Letter’ I felt like Byron when he woke up and found himself famous. Afterwards, when I had plunged into the surf of literary London, I learnt that the writer who had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was well known in cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.
There was, indeed, no account of him in print. It was not till 1887 that I found a brief but masterly memoir in ‘Celebrities of the Century.’ The article concluded with the statement that in the ‘Athenæum’ and in the Ninth Edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ Mr. Watts-Dunton had ‘founded a school of criticism which discarded conventional authority, and sought to test all literary effects by the light of first principles merely.’ These words encouraged me, for they told me that as a boy I had not been wrong in thinking that I had discovered a master and a guide in literature. Then came the memoir of Philip Bourke Marston by the American poetess, Louise Chandler Moulton, in which she described Mr. Watts-Dunton as ‘a poet whose noble work won for him the intimate friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord Tennyson, and was the first link in that chain of more than brotherly love which binds him to Swinburne, his housemate at present and for many years past.’ I also came across Clarence Stedman’s remarks upon the opening of ‘The Coming of Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ first printed in the ‘Athenæum.’ He was enthusiastic about the poet’s perception of ‘Nature’s grander aspects,’ and spoke of his poetry as being ‘quite independent of any bias derived from the eminent poets with whom his life has been closely associated.’
When afterwards I made his acquaintance, our intercourse led to the formation of a friendship which has deepened my gratitude for the spiritual and intellectual guidance I have found in his writings for nearly twenty years. Owing to the popularity of ‘The Coming of Love’ and of ‘Aylwin’ – which the late Lord Acton, in ‘The Annals of Politics and Culture,’ placed at the head of the three most important books published in 1898 – Mr. Watts-Dunton’s name is now familiar to every fairly educated person. About few men living is there so much literary curiosity; and this again is a reason for writing a book about him.
The idea of making an elaborate study of his work, however, did not come to me until I received an invitation from Dr. Patrick, the editor of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’
‘Studies in Prose.’
‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ vol. x., p. 581.