Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James

      “Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon grew up an intimacy between us. It has been my experience to learn that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference of age between friends of either sex. At that time I do not think I had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men, each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father. Basevi was one of these: so was Lineham. I daresay it was owing to some idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young fellows with whom I was brought into contact was mainly confined to matters connected with field-sports. I found it far easier to be brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age than with men. But as Basevi told me that it was the same with himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all. When Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same with himself.

      One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common, evidently bound for the house.

      ‘Dereham!’ I said. ‘Is there a man in the world I should so like to see as Dereham?’

      And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.

      ‘Why do you want so much to see him?’ asked Gordon.

      ‘Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the Open Air.’

      Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant. But it is necessary here to explain what that meaning was.

      We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels, ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was – perhaps rarer. It was, we believed, quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it. In human souls – in one, perhaps, as much as in another – there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’ herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children of the Open Air.’ But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Brontë, the sensitivity to human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love passion – disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed. I was perfectly conscious that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers – that is, I was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child of the Open Air.

      Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what this kind of Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul to soul – but another ego enisled like his own – sensitive, shrinking, like his own – a soul which, love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life.

      To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.

      Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced.

      He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still. My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully. I knew from his books that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be ‘prying,’ though there I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Dereham evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I touched upon beer, the British bruiser, ‘gentility nonsense,’ and other ‘nonsense’; then upon etymology – traced