Chapter XIIWILLIAM MORRIS

At the very juncture in question Lord Lorne was suddenly and unexpectedly appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal Highnessdid not return until Rossetti’s health had somewhat suddenly broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most intimate friends.

My account of the friendship between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti would not be complete without the poem entitled, ‘A Grave by the Sea,’ which I think may be placed beside Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ Shelley’s ‘Adonais,’ Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis,’ and Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale,’ as one of the noblest elegies in our literature:—

A GRAVE BY THE SEAIYon sightless poet[157]whom thou leav’st behind,Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,Above the grave he feels but cannot see,Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?Ah no!—For all his sobs, he seems to meLess lonely standing there, and nearer thee,Than I—less lonely, nearer—standing blind!Free from the day, and piercing Life’s disguiseThat needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,His inner eyes may see thee as thou artIn Memory’s land—see thee beneath the skiesLit by thy brow—by those beloved eyes,While I stand by him in a world apart.III stand like her who on the glittering RhineSaw that strange swan which drew a faëry boatWhere shone a knight whose radiant forehead smoteHer soul with light and made her blue eyes shineFor many a day with sights that seemed divine,Till that false swan returned and arched his throatIn pride, and called him, and she saw him floatAdown the stream: I stand like her and pine.I stand like her, for she, and only she,Might know my loneliness for want of thee.Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,And then, departing like a vision thence,Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.IIILast night Death whispered: ‘Death is but the nameMan gives the Power which lends him life and light,And then, returning past the coast of night,Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaimThe sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?Art thou not vanished—vanished from my sight—Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?With Nature dumb, save for the billows’ moan,Engirt by men I love, yet desolate—Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,King’d by my sorrow, made by grief so greatThat man’s voice murmurs like an insect’s drone—What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?IVLast night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,Flickering with blazon of the human story—Time’s fen-flame over Death’s dark territory—Will leave no trail, no sign of Life’s aggression.Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.Since Life is only Death’s frail feudatory,How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?’I answered thus: ‘If Friendship’s isle of palmIs but a vision, every loveliest leaf,Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calmThis soul of mine in this most fiery grief?If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,What balm in knowing that Love is Death’s—what balm?’VYea, thus I boldly answered Death—even IWho have for boon—who have for deathless dower—Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,Filling with music earth and sea and sky:‘O Death,’ I said, ‘not Love, but thou shalt die;For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,Death striking Love but strikes to deify.’Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,I watched—I listened for that voice of thine,Though Reason said: ‘Nor voice nor face can come.’Birchington,Eastertide, 1882.

A GRAVE BY THE SEA

Yon sightless poet[157]whom thou leav’st behind,Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,Above the grave he feels but cannot see,Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?Ah no!—For all his sobs, he seems to meLess lonely standing there, and nearer thee,Than I—less lonely, nearer—standing blind!

Free from the day, and piercing Life’s disguiseThat needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,His inner eyes may see thee as thou artIn Memory’s land—see thee beneath the skiesLit by thy brow—by those beloved eyes,While I stand by him in a world apart.

I stand like her who on the glittering RhineSaw that strange swan which drew a faëry boatWhere shone a knight whose radiant forehead smoteHer soul with light and made her blue eyes shineFor many a day with sights that seemed divine,Till that false swan returned and arched his throatIn pride, and called him, and she saw him floatAdown the stream: I stand like her and pine.

I stand like her, for she, and only she,Might know my loneliness for want of thee.Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,And then, departing like a vision thence,Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.

III

Last night Death whispered: ‘Death is but the nameMan gives the Power which lends him life and light,And then, returning past the coast of night,Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaimThe sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?Art thou not vanished—vanished from my sight—Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?

With Nature dumb, save for the billows’ moan,Engirt by men I love, yet desolate—Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,King’d by my sorrow, made by grief so greatThat man’s voice murmurs like an insect’s drone—What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?

Last night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,Flickering with blazon of the human story—Time’s fen-flame over Death’s dark territory—Will leave no trail, no sign of Life’s aggression.Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.Since Life is only Death’s frail feudatory,How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?’

I answered thus: ‘If Friendship’s isle of palmIs but a vision, every loveliest leaf,Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calmThis soul of mine in this most fiery grief?If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,What balm in knowing that Love is Death’s—what balm?’

Yea, thus I boldly answered Death—even IWho have for boon—who have for deathless dower—Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,Filling with music earth and sea and sky:‘O Death,’ I said, ‘not Love, but thou shalt die;For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,Death striking Love but strikes to deify.’

Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,I watched—I listened for that voice of thine,Though Reason said: ‘Nor voice nor face can come.’

Birchington,Eastertide, 1882.

Mr. Watts-Dunton has written many magnificent sonnets, but the sonnet in this sequence beginning—

Last night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,’

is, I think, the finest of them all. The imaginative conception packed into these fourteen lines is cosmic in its sweep. In the metrical scheme the feminine rhymes of the octave play a very important part. They suggest pathetic suspense, mystery, yearning, hope, fear; they ask, they wonder, they falter. But in the sestet the words of destiny are calmly and coldly pronounced, and every rhyme clinchesthe voice of doom, until the uttermost deep of despair is sounded in the iterated cry of the last line. The craftsmanship throughout is masterly. There is, indeed, one line which is not unworthy of being ranked with the great lines of English poetry:

Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session.

Here by a bold use of the simple verb ‘strikes’ a whole poem is hammered into six words. As to the interesting question of feminine rhymes, while I admit that they should never be used without an emotional mandate, I think that here it is overwhelming.

I have tried to show the beauty of the friendship between these two rare spirits by means of other testimony than my own, for although I have been granted the honour of knowing Rossetti’s ‘friend of friends,’ I missed the equal honour of knowing Rossetti, save through that ‘friend of friends.’ But to know Mr. Watts-Dunton seems almost like knowing Rossetti, for when at The Pines he begins to recall those golden hours when the poets used to hold converse, the soul of Rossetti seems to come back from the land of shadows, as his friend depicts his winsome ways, his nobility of heart, his generous interest in the work of others, that lovableness of nature and charm of personality which, if we are to believe Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, worked, in some degree, ill for the poet. Mr. Hueffer, who, as a family connection, may be supposed to represent the family tradition about ‘Gabriel,’ has some striking and pregnant words upon the injurious effect of Rossetti’s being brought so much into contact with admirers from the time when Mr. Meredith and Mr. Swinburne were his housemates at Cheyne Walk. “Then came the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ poets like PhilipMarston, O’Shaughnessy, and ‘B. V.’ Afterwards there came a whole host of young men like Mr. William Sharp, who were serious admirers, and to-day are in their places or are dead or forgotten; and others again who came for the ‘pickings.’ They were all more or less enthusiasts.”

‘The Green Dining Room,’ 16 Cheyne Walk. (From a Painting by Dunn, at ‘The Pines.’)

Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902), says:

“With regard to the green room in which Winifred took her first breakfast at ‘Hurstcote,’ I am a little in confusion. It seems to me more like the green dining-room in Cheyne Walk, decorated with antique mirrors, which was painted by Dunn, showing Rossetti reading his poems aloud. This is the only portrait of Rossetti that really calls up the man before me. As Mr. Watts-Dunton is the owner of Dunn’s drawing, and as so many people want to see what Rossetti’s famous Chelsea house was like inside, it is a pity he does not give it as a frontispiece to some future edition of ‘Aylwin.’ Unfortunately, Mr. G. F. Watts’s picture, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was never finished, and I never saw upon Rossetti’s face the dull, heavy expression which that portrait wears. I think the poet told me that he had given the painter only one or two sittings. As to the photographs, none of them is really satisfactory.”

I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of the famous ‘Green Dining Room’ at 16 Cheyne Walk, to which Mr. Hake refers. Mr. Hake also writes in the same article: “With regard to the two circular mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy Grail, ‘in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt,’ I do not remember seeing these there. But they are evidently the mirrorsdecorated with copies by Dunn of the lost Holy Grail frescoes once existing on the walls of the Union Reading-Room at Oxford. These beautiful decorations I have seen at ‘The Pines,’ but not elsewhere.” I am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of one of these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has generously permitted to be specially taken for this book.

One of the Carved Mirrors at ‘The Pines,’ decorated with Dunn’s copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the Oxford Union

And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake’s fascinating book of poetry, ‘The New Day,’ which must live, if only for its reminiscences of the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:—

THE NEW DAYIIn the unbroken silence of the mindThoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,And life is back among the days behind—The spectral days of that lamented love—Days whose romance can never be repeated.The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.These vanished hours, where are they stored away?Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?Its utterances are swallowed up in day;The gabled house, the mighty master gone.Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall—What dreams he of the days we there recall?IIO, happy days with him who once so loved us!We loved as brothers, with a single heart,The man whose iris-woven pictures moved usFrom Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.How often did we trace the nestling ThamesFrom humblest waters on his course of might,Down where the weir the bursting current stems—There sat till evening grew to balmy night,Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strandWhere we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,That seemed to utter plaudits while we plannedTriumphal labours of the day to be.The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.IIILike some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rillStill calls the flowers upon its misty bankTo stoop into the stream and drink their fill.And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.Slowly a loosened weed another meets;They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.We are here surely if the world, forgot,Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;We are here surely at this witching spot,—Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,It is as if a play pervaded all.IVSitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,With many a speaking vision on the wall,The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl—’Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,And Art grew fragrant in the glow of springWith homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,Fed by the waters of the forest stream;Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;Or else was mingled the rough billow’s gleeWith cries of petrels on a sullen sea.VRemember how we roamed the Channel’s shore,And read aloud our verses, each in turn,While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to captureThe potent word that makes a thought abiding,And wings it upward to its place of rapture,While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonderThat art knew not the mighty reverieThat moves earth’s spirit and her orb asunder,While ocean’s depths, even, seem a shallow sea.Yet with rare genius could his hand impartHis own far-searching poesy to art.

THE NEW DAY

In the unbroken silence of the mindThoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,And life is back among the days behind—The spectral days of that lamented love—Days whose romance can never be repeated.The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.These vanished hours, where are they stored away?Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?Its utterances are swallowed up in day;The gabled house, the mighty master gone.Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall—What dreams he of the days we there recall?

O, happy days with him who once so loved us!We loved as brothers, with a single heart,The man whose iris-woven pictures moved usFrom Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.How often did we trace the nestling ThamesFrom humblest waters on his course of might,Down where the weir the bursting current stems—There sat till evening grew to balmy night,Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strandWhere we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,That seemed to utter plaudits while we plannedTriumphal labours of the day to be.The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.

III

Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rillStill calls the flowers upon its misty bankTo stoop into the stream and drink their fill.And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.Slowly a loosened weed another meets;They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.We are here surely if the world, forgot,Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;We are here surely at this witching spot,—Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,It is as if a play pervaded all.

Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,With many a speaking vision on the wall,The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl—’Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,And Art grew fragrant in the glow of springWith homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,Fed by the waters of the forest stream;Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;Or else was mingled the rough billow’s gleeWith cries of petrels on a sullen sea.

Remember how we roamed the Channel’s shore,And read aloud our verses, each in turn,While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to captureThe potent word that makes a thought abiding,And wings it upward to its place of rapture,While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonderThat art knew not the mighty reverieThat moves earth’s spirit and her orb asunder,While ocean’s depths, even, seem a shallow sea.Yet with rare genius could his hand impartHis own far-searching poesy to art.

The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all. It makes me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with him a new atmosphere—the salt atmosphere which envelops ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna. And yet perhaps the description of

‘The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming’

is equally fascinating.

Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush, has in his sonnet ‘The Shadow on the Window Blind,’ made Kelmscott Manor and the poetic life lived there still more memorable:—

Within this thicket’s every leafy lairA song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,Though red behind their nests the moon has swum—But still I see that shadow writing there!—Poet, behind yon casement’s ruddy square,Whose shadow tells me why you do not come—Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,Flying and singing through thine inch of air—Come thither, where on grass and flower and leafGleams Nature’s scripture, putting Man’s to shame:‘Thy day,’ she says, ‘is all too rich and brief—Thy game of life too wonderful a game—To give to Art entirely or in chief:Drink of these dews—sweeter than wine of Fame.’

Come thither, where on grass and flower and leafGleams Nature’s scripture, putting Man’s to shame:‘Thy day,’ she says, ‘is all too rich and brief—Thy game of life too wonderful a game—To give to Art entirely or in chief:Drink of these dews—sweeter than wine of Fame.’

‘Aylwin,’ too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and Kelmscott.

The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk, has been declared by one of Rossetti’s most intimate friends to be marvellously graphic and true:—

“On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and pictures upon easels, I found D’Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa. Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in no mood to meet strangers. However, he sprang up and introduced me to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one of Mr. D’Arcy’s chief buyers. This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a stranger somewhat disconcerted him.After he was gone D’Arcy said: ‘A good fellow! One of my most important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are going to be friends, I hope.’‘He seems very fond of pictures,’ I said.‘A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.’A little while after this gentleman’s departure, in came De Castro, who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently his métier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker. Talk was his stock-in-trade.The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going, but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose to go, but on getting a sign from D’Arcy that he wished me to stay I sat down again. At last D’Arcy said:‘You had better go now, De Castro—you have kept that hansom outside for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with him alone.’De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left us.D’Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing abstractedly at the fireplace.‘Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things. I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can’t sleep is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant. I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.’Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature. He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall. Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens. Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned to the house I found that D’Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at work in the studio.After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:‘No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie.Every man has one side of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing. I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.’‘And children,’ I said—‘do you like children?’‘Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their charm goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal? What makes you sigh?’My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ‘Prince of the Mist’ on Snowdon. And I said to myself, ‘How he would have been fascinated by a sight like that!’My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid movements—so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in him became wit.Beneath the coruscations of this wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every ‘jeu d’esprit’ seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.While he was talking he kept on painting.”

He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a stranger somewhat disconcerted him.

After he was gone D’Arcy said: ‘A good fellow! One of my most important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are going to be friends, I hope.’

‘He seems very fond of pictures,’ I said.

‘A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.’

A little while after this gentleman’s departure, in came De Castro, who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently his métier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker. Talk was his stock-in-trade.

The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going, but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose to go, but on getting a sign from D’Arcy that he wished me to stay I sat down again. At last D’Arcy said:

‘You had better go now, De Castro—you have kept that hansom outside for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with him alone.’

De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left us.

D’Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing abstractedly at the fireplace.

‘Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things. I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can’t sleep is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant. I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.’

Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature. He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall. Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens. Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.

My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned to the house I found that D’Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at work in the studio.

After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:

‘No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie.Every man has one side of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing. I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.’

‘And children,’ I said—‘do you like children?’

‘Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their charm goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal? What makes you sigh?’

My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ‘Prince of the Mist’ on Snowdon. And I said to myself, ‘How he would have been fascinated by a sight like that!’

My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid movements—so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in him became wit.Beneath the coruscations of this wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.

His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every ‘jeu d’esprit’ seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.

While he was talking he kept on painting.”

Itis natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris. In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s ‘Athenæum’ monographs is the one upon him. Between these two there was an intimacy of the closest kind—from 1873 to the day of the poet’s death. This, no doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic power, accounts for the extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend. I have heard more than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything else that has been published about him. It is a grievous loss to literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of Morris is scarcely likely to write one. Morris, when he was busy in Queen’s Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti’s death.

Kelmscott Manor. (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)

When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote ‘Aylwin’ he did not contemplate that the Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott Manor. Thepictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and D’Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti. Morris’s passion for angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were spent at Kelmscott. Treffry Dunn’s portrait of him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the picture.

Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting facts with regard to ‘Hurstcote Manor’ and Morris:—

“Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to in ‘Aylwin’ (chap. lx. book xv.) as the ‘enthusiastic angler’ who used to go down to ‘Hurstcote’ to fish. At that time this fine old seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of Rossetti and Morris. Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who, with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris’s will. The series of ‘large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams’ supporting the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls—a peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would go to the attics to listen to them.With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with low-panelled walls and the vast antiquebedstead made of black carved oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful ‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name). I wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr. Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded tapestry—so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull grey texture’—depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the ‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more beautiful woman—Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”

With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with low-panelled walls and the vast antiquebedstead made of black carved oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful ‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name). I wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr. Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded tapestry—so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull grey texture’—depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the ‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more beautiful woman—Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”

Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott, was Morris’s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South Kensington Museum—a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died prematurely.Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s anecdotes of the causeries at Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that it is a pity they have never been recorded in print. Middleton was one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s collaborators in the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ to which he contributed the article on ‘Rome,’ one of the finest essays in that work.

Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum.’ And the poet, might well say this, for those who have studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The House of the Wolfings,’ ‘The Roots of the Mountains,’ ‘The Glittering Plain,’ ‘The Well at the World’s End,’ ‘The Tale of Beowulf,’ ‘News from Nowhere,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ will be inclined to put them at the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s purely critical work. The ‘Quarterly Review,’ in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ I record these facts, not in order to depreciate the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s monograph in the ‘Athenæum.’

The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death:—

“Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us all—that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, ‘Enjoy.’ Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of wealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt of the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous powers were at their best—and died without pain. The scheme of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: ‘I have enjoyed my life—few men more so—and death in any case is sure.’”

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: ‘I have enjoyed my life—few men more so—and death in any case is sure.’”

It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton’s reflections upon the wear and tear of genius:—

“It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Look at Gladstone,’ he would say, ‘look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work.’ No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the ‘dry light of intelligence,’ a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of ‘the thinking machine’ only, but of the whole man—the whole ‘genial’ nature of the worker—his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, ofCharles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitæ.We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collating of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.”

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collating of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.”

Mr. Watts-Dunton’s critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than in his remarks upon Morris’s translation of the Odyssey:—

“Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris’s translation; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, whichset Homer apart from all other poets—are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote. . . . Morris’s translation of the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ etc. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the ‘Saga Library.’ Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem—for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.”

In connection with William Morris, readers of ‘The Coming of Love’ will recall the touching words in the ‘Prefatory Note’:—

“Had it not been for the intervention of matters of a peculiarly absorbing kind—matters which caused me to delay the task of collecting these verses—I should have been the most favoured man who ever brought out a volume of poems, for they would have been printed by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press. As that projected edition of his was largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the subscribers is, I am told, required from me. Among the friends who saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he would die—myself. To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to come upon us. And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my verses in one of Mr. Lane’s inviting little volumes will be dimmed and marred by the thought that Morris’s name also might have been, and is not, on the imprint.”

As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of ‘The Coming of Love’ is an instance of that artistic conscientiousness which up to a certain point is of inestimable value to the poet, but after that point is reached, baffles him. The poem had been read in fragments and deeply admired by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved. Certain fragments of it had appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ and other journals, butthe publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing to the fact that certain portions of it had been lent and lost. Morris not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an édition de luxe of the book, but he actually took the trouble to get a full list of subscribers, and insisted upon allowing the author a magnificent royalty. Nothing, however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then, when the book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which robbed us of one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. And even after Morris’s death the poet’s executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis and the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were willing and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems should be brought out. Subsequently, when a large portion of the lost poems was found, the volume was published by Mr. John Lane. This anecdote alone explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is never tired of dwelling upon the nobility of Morris’s nature, and upon his generosity in small things as well as in large.

Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject is the following. When Morris published his first volume in the Kelmscott Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy of the book. He also sent him a presentation copy of the second and third. But knowing how small was the profit at this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott Press, Mr. Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these presentation copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest against such extravagance. Mrs. Morris assured him that it would be perfectly useless to do so.But when the edition of Keats was coming out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to grapple with the matter, and one Sunday afternoon when he was at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:

‘Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber to the Keats, and I give my commission for it in the presence of witnesses. I am a paying subscriber to the Keats.’

‘All right, old chap, you’re a subscriber.’

In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the Keats; and when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the following Sunday afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had been made. Morris laughed.

‘All right, there’s no mistake—that is my presentation copy of Keats.’

But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was being discussed—the marvellous Chaucer with Burne-Jones’s illustrations—Mr. Watts-Dunton knew that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and probably sunk, and he said to Morris:

‘Now, Morris, I’m going to talk to you seriously about the Chaucer. I know that it’s going to be a dead loss to you, and I do really and seriously hope that you do not contemplate anything so wild as to send me a presentation copy of that book. You know my affection for you, and you know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me pain to accept it.’

‘Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to stay my hand, for, between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some money over it; but the Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned Jones and I are going to join in the presentation of a copy to Algernon Swinburne.’

After this Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mind was set at rest, as he told Mrs. Morris. But when Mr. Swinburne’scopy reached ‘The Pines’ it was accompanied by another one—‘Theodore Watts-Dunton from William Morris.’

Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr. Watts-Dunton also tells. Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess a copy of ‘The Golden Legend,’ bought the Kelmscott edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris this. Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.

‘What! Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of mine! Why I thought he did not care for black letter reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy of every book I brought out.’

And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent to ‘The Pines,’ one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for Mr. Swinburne.

Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles,’ tells this amusing story:—

“Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled into seeing and hearing the great poet-singer Stead, whose rhythms have had such a great effect upon the ‘art poetic,’ the author of ‘The Perfect Cure,’ and ‘It’s Daddy this and Daddy that,’ and other brilliant lyrics. A friend with whom Morris had been spending the evening, and who had been talking about poetic energy and poetic art in relation to the chilly reception accorded to ‘Sigurd,’ persuaded him—much against his will—to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr. Stead, whose performance consisted of singing a song, the burden of which was ‘I’m a perfect cure!’ while he leaped up into the air without bending his legs and twirled round like a dervish. ‘What made you bring me to see this damned tomfoolery?’ Morris grumbled; and on being told that itwas to give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest, without poetic art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way out. If Morris were now alive—and all England will sigh, ‘Ah, would he were!’—he would confess, with his customary emphasis, that the poet had nothing of the slightest importance to learn, even from the rhythms of Mr. Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses that were beyond the powers of the ‘Great Vance.’”

Longbefore Mr. Watts-Dunton printed a line, he was a prominent figure in the literary and artistic sets in London; but, as Mr. Hake has said, it was merely as a conversationalist that he was known. His conversation was described by Rossetti as being like that of no other person moving in literary circles, because he was always enunciating new views in phrasings so polished that, to use Rossetti’s words, his improvized locutions were as perfect as ‘fitted jewels.’ Those who have been privileged to listen to his table-talk will attest the felicity of the image. Seldom has so great a critic had so fine an audience. Rossetti often lamented that Theodore Watts’ spoken criticism had never been taken down in shorthand. For a long time various editors who had met him at Rossetti’s, at Madox Brown’s, at Westland Marston’s, at Whistler’s breakfasts, and at the late Lord Houghton’s, endeavoured to persuade him to make practical use in criticism of the ideas that flowed in a continuous stream from his lips. But, as Rossetti used to affirm, he was the one man of his time who, with immense literary equipment, was without literary ambition. This peculiarity of his was eloquently described by the late Dr. Gordon Hake in his ‘New Day’:—

You say you care not for the people’s praise,That poetry is its own recompense;You care not for the wreath, the dusty bays,Given to the whirling wind and hurried hence.

The first editor who secured Theodore Watts, after repeated efforts to do so, was the late Professor Minto, and this only came about because during his editorship of the ‘Examiner’ both he and Watts resided in Danes Inn, and were constantly seeing each other.

It was Minto who afterwards declared that “the articles in the ‘Examiner’ and the ‘Athenæum’ are goldmines, in which we others are apt to dig unconsciously without remembering that the nuggets are Theodore Watts’s, who is too lazy to peg out his claim.” The first article by him that appeared in Minto’s paper attracted great attention and roused great curiosity. This indeed is not surprising, for, as I found when I read it, it was as remarkable for pregnancy of thought and of style as the latest and ripest of his essays. A friend of his, belonging to the set in which he moved, who remembers the appearance of this article, has been kind enough to tell me the following anecdote in connection with it. The contributors to the paper at that time consisted of Minto, Dr Garnett, Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, ‘Scholar’ Williams, Comyns Carr, Walter Pollock, Duffield (the translator of ‘Don Quixote’), Professor Sully, Dr. Marston, William Bell Scott, William Black, and many other able writers. On the evening of the day when Theodore Watts’s first article appeared, there was a party at the house of William Bell Scott in Chelsea, and every one was asking who this new contributor was. It was one of the conditions under which the article was written that its authorship was to be kept a secret. Bell Scott, who took a great interest in the ‘Examiner,’ was especially inquisitive about the new writer. After having in vain tried to get from Minto the name of the writer, he went up to Watts, and said: “I would give almost anything to know who the writeris who appears in the ‘Examiner’ for the first time today.” “What makes you inquire about it?” said Watts. “What is the interest attaching to the writer of such fantastic stuff as that? Surely it is the most mannered writing that has appeared in the ‘Examiner’ for a long time!” Then, turning to Minto, he said: “I can’t think, Minto, what made you print it at all.” Scott, who had a most exalted opinion of Watts as a critic, was considerably abashed at this, and began to endeavour to withdraw some of his enthusiastic remarks. This set Minto laughing aloud, and thus the secret got out.

From that hour Watts became the most noticeable writer among a group of critics who were all noticeable. Week after week there appeared in this historic paper criticism as fine as had ever appeared in it in the time of Leigh Hunt, and as brilliant as had appeared in it in the time of Fonblanque. At this time Minto used to entertain his contributors on Monday evening in the room over the publisher’s office in the Strand, and I have been told by one who was frequently there that these smoking symposia were among the most brilliant in London. One can well imagine this when one remembers the names of those who used to attend the meetings.

It was through the ‘Examiner’ that Watts formed that friendship with William Black which his biographer, Sir Wemyss Reid, alludes to. Between these two there was one subject on which they were especially in sympathy—their knowledge and love of nature. At that time Black was immensely popular. In personal appearance there was, I am told, a superficial resemblance between the two, and they were constantly being mistaken for each other; and yet, when they were side by side, it was evident that the large, dark moustache and the black eyes were almost the only points of resemblance between them.

It was at the then famous house in Gower Street of Mr. Justin McCarthy that Black and Mr. Watts-Dunton first met. Speaking as an Irishman of a younger but not, I fear, of so genial a generation, I hear tantalizing accounts of the popular gatherings at the home of the most charming and the most distinguished Irishman of letters in the London of that time, where so many young men of my own country were welcomed as warmly as though they had not yet to win their spurs. No one speaks more enthusiastically of the McCarthy family than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who seems to have been on terms of friendship with them almost as soon as he settled in London. Mr. Watts-Dunton was always a lover of McCarthy’s novels, but on his first visit to Gower Street Mr. McCarthy was, as usual, full of the subject not of his own novels, but of another man’s. He urged his new friend to read ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ almost forcing him to take the book away with him, which he did: this was the way in which Mr. Watts-Dunton became for the first time acquainted with a story which he always avers is the only book that has ever revived the rich rustic humour of Shakespeare’s early comedies. A perfect household of loving natures, warm Irish hearts, bright Irish intellects, cultivated and rare, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s testimony, was that little family in Gower Street. I think he will pardon me for repeating one quaint little story about himself and Black in connection with this first visit to the McCarthys. On entering the room Mr. Watts-Dunton was much struck with what appeared to be real musical genius in a bright-eyed little lady who was delighting the party with her music. This was at the period in his own life which Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his ‘music-mad period.’ And after a time he gottalking with the lady. He was a little surprised that he was at once invited by the musical lady to go to a gathering at her house. But he was as much pleased as surprised to be so welcomed, and incontinently accepted the invitation. It never entered his mind that he had been mistaken for another man, until the other man entered the room and came up to the lady. She, on her part, began to look in an embarrassed way from one to the other of the two swarthy, black-moustached gentlemen. She had mistaken Mr. Watts-Dunton for William Black, with whom her acquaintance was but slight. The contretemps caused much amusement when the husband of the lady, an eminent novelist, who knew Mr. Watts-Dunton well, introduced him to his wife. I do not know what was the end of the comedy, but no doubt it was a satisfactory one. It could not be otherwise among such people as Justin McCarthy would be likely to gather round him.

At that time, to quote the words of the same friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton, Watts used frequently to meet at Bell Scott’s and Rossetti’s Professor Appleton, the editor of the ‘Academy.’ The points upon which these two touched were as unlike the points upon which Watts and William Black touched as could possibly be. They were both students of Hegel; and when they met, Appleton, who had Hegel on the brain, invariably drew Watts aside for a long private talk. People used to leave them alone, on account of the remoteness of the subject that attracted the two. Watts had now made up his mind that he would devote himself to literature, and, indeed, his articles in the ‘Examiner’ showed that he had only to do so to achieve a great success. Appleton rarely left Watts without saying, “I do wish you would write for the ‘Academy.’ I want you to let me send you allthe books on the transcendentalists that come to the ‘Academy,’ and let me have articles giving the pith of them at short intervals.” This invitation to furnish the ‘Academy’ with a couple of columns condensing the spirit of many books about subjects upon which only a handful of people in England were competent to write, seemed to Watts a grotesque request, seeing that he was at this very time the leading writer on the ‘Examiner,’ and was being constantly approached by other editors. It was consequently the subject of many a joke between Minto, William Black, Watts, and the others present at the famous ‘Examiner’ gatherings. After a while Mr. Norman MacColl, who was then the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ invited Watts to take an important part in the reviewing for the ‘Athenæum.’ At first he told the editor that there were two obstacles to his accepting the invitation—one was that the work that he was invited to do was largely done by his friend Marston, and that, although he would like to join him, he scarcely saw his way, on account of the ‘Examiner,’ which was ready to take all the work he could produce. On opening the matter to Dr Marston, that admirably endowed writer would not hear of Watts’s considering him in the matter. The ‘Athenæum’ was then, as now, the leading literary organ in Europe, and the editor’s offer was, of course, a very tempting one, and Watts was determined to tell Minto about it. And this he did.

“Now, Minto,” he said, “it rests entirely with you whether I shall write in the ‘Athenæum’ or not.” Minto, between whom and Watts there was a deep affection, made the following reply:

“My dear Theodore, I need not say that it will not be a good day for the ‘Examiner’ when you join the‘Athenæum.’ The ‘Examiner’ is a struggling paper which could not live without being subsidized by Peter Taylor, and it is not four months ago since Leicester Warren said to me that he and all the other readers of the ‘Examiner’ looked eagerly for the ‘T. W.’ at the foot of a literary article. The ‘Athenæum’ is both a powerful and a wealthy paper. In short, it will injure the ‘Examiner’ when your name is associated with the ‘Athenæum.’ But to be the leading voice of such a paper as that is just what you ought to be, and I cannot help advising you to entertain MacColl’s proposal.”

In consequence of this Mr. Watts-Dunton closed with Mr. MacColl’s offer, and his first article in the ‘Athenæum’ appeared on July 8, 1876.

Asthe first review which Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed to the ‘Athenæum’ has been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any other of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire. It has the additional interest, I believe, of being the most rapidly executed piece of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton ever achieved. Mr. MacColl, having secured the new writer, tried to find a book for him, and failed, until Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him whether he intended to give an article upon Skelton’s ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ.’ The editor said that he had not thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that, if Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to him. As the article was wanted on the following day, it was dictated as fast as the amanuensis—not a shorthand writer—could take it down.

It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one of his great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays on Victor Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as any:—

‘Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun? Here, at least, is the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ squeezed into one volume.Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which, as far as we remember, is this.The library of the Indian kings was composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to remove it. But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said: ‘Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin, which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze ’em!’ The Brahmin, understanding well what the order to ‘squeeze ’em’ meant (for he was a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work, aided by many scribes—striking out all the idle words from every book in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted it was found that ten camels could carry that library without ruffling a hair. And therefore the Brahmin was appointed ‘Grand Squeezer’ of the realm. Ages after this, another prince, who loved reading much and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand Squeezer of his time and said: ‘Thy duties are neglected, O Grand Squeezer! Thy life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.’ Thereupon the Grand Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and squeezed and squeezed till the whole library became at last a load that a foal would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book, a tiny volume, containing four maxims. Yet the wisdom in the last library was the wisdom in the first.The appearance of Mr. Skelton’s condensation of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn warning we always find it ourduty to administer to those who show a propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship—the warning that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by itself. Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call ‘the writing fellows,’ for adding to the camel’s burden, instead of distributing the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected squeezers. We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints, while nobody reads, and, to judge from the ‘spelling bees,’ nobody even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a ‘writing animal’ is on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself. This is the alarming thing. Where are we to find so many squeezers? Nay, in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer’s every book. Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle squeezer—what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than that he should squeeze ‘Frederick the Great’—that enormous, rank and pungent ‘haggis’ from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would flow of ‘oniony liquid’ that compared with it the famous ‘haggis-deluge’ of the ‘Noctes’ which nearly drowned in gravy ‘Christopher,’ ‘the Shepherd,’ and ‘Tickler’ in Ambrose’s parlour, would be, both for quantity and flavour, but ‘a beaker full of the sweet South’? Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson—the mighty Christopher, who for about thirty years literallytalked in type upon every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of which he had none; whose ‘words, words, words’ are, indeed, as Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, ‘as the rush of mighty waters’?What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, ‘if what is said be not to the purpose, a single word is already too much.’Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations upon the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ.’ He loves the memory of the fine old Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that are too timid of grip. In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot overdo it. There are certain parts we should have especially liked squeezed away; and among these—will Mr. Skelton pardon us?—are the ‘amazingly humourous’ ones, such as the ‘opening of the haggis,’ which, Mr. Skelton tells us, ‘manifests the humour of conception as well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been surpassed by the greatest masters’; ‘the amazing humour’ of which consists in the Shepherd’s sticking his supper knife into a ‘haggis’ (a sheep’s paunch filled with the ‘pluck’ minced, with suet, onions, salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save themselves from being drowned in it! In truth, Mr. Skelton should have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the Professor’s twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining, omit everything ‘amazingly humourous,’ he will be the best Wilson-squeezer imaginable.Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be. The ‘Noctes’ are dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, tosave them, squeezes away all the political events—so important once, so unimportant now—all the foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in them. He eliminates all the critiques upon all those ‘greatest poems’ and those ‘greatest novels of the age’ written by Christopher’s friends—friends so famous once, so peacefully forgotten now. And he has left what he calls the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ i.e. ‘that portion of the work which deals with or presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of literary, artistic, or political interest only.’ And, although Mr. Skelton uses thus the word ‘comedy’ in its older and wider meaning, it is evident that it is as an ‘amazing humourist’ that he would present to our generation the great Christopher North. And assuredly, at this the ‘delighted spirit’ of Christopher smiles delightedly in Hades. For, however the ‘Comic Muse’ may pout upon hearing from Mr. Skelton that ‘the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” belong to her,’ it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson’s life was to cultivate her—was to be an ‘amazing humourist,’ in short. It is clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he most of all affected, that which we call technically ‘Rabelaisian.’ To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot. His personality was enormous. He had more of that demonic element—of which since Goethe’s time we have heard so much—than any man in Scotland. Everybody seems to have been dominatedby him. De Quincey, with a finer intellect than even his own—and that is using strong language—looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master. It is positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey’s ‘Autobiographic Sketches,’ to come again and again upon the naïve refrain: ‘I think so, so does Professor Wilson.’ Gigantic as was the egotism of the Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism of Christopher North. In this, as in everything else, he was the opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s desire was to create eccentric humourous characters, but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself. Wilson’s great ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create. He would like the universe to himself. If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a smile: ‘Don’t you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I—John Wilson?’ He always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler were John Wilson—as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather, what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered. This determination to be a humourous character it was—and no lack of literary ambition—that caused him to squander his astonishing powers in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man, lament.Many articles in ‘Blackwood’—notably the one upon Shakspeare’s four great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge’s poetry—show that his insight into the principles of literary art was true and deep—far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this inexorable law, that nothing can live in literaturewithout form, nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his merits.Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to ask us, on our oath, why Wilson’s fourteen volumes of brilliant, eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the ‘Coverley’ papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that mere elaborated intellectual ‘humour’ has the seeds of dissolution in it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live; and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian. But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what precise meaning we attach to the word ‘Rabelaisian’—though the subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us. Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist—the comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits, with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the almighty joke of the Cosmos—a mood which in literature is rarer than in life—rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the Shakspeares, the Molières, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles, the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots—upon whom the rich tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls. Among these—to whom to create is everything—Sterne would perhaps have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and never read Rabelais; while Dickens’s growth was a development from Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr. Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters. Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor could do that. But, strip the ‘Shepherd’s’ talk of its Scottish accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose rush in the ‘Recreations’ and the ‘Essays’ we are so familiar with. While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to be purposely destroyed, and the ‘Opium-Eater’ becomes a fantastic creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.The ‘amazing humour’ of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the ‘writing fellows’ at all. We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our time.One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be found—where he ought to be found—at Stratford-on-Avon. This is interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there were Rabelaisians, even among the ‘writing fellows,’ before Rabelais; the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, ‘in a duck-pond drowned him,’ he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the ‘Birds’ alone puts Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: ‘Let down the curtain; the farce is done,’ they were prophetic as regards the literary Rabelaisians—prophetic in this, that no writer has since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood—the mood, that is, of the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped upon several; for the great Curé divides his qualities among his followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in the ‘Paradise of Fruits,’ from which every other fruit in the garden drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits with stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half stifled it) Sterne, andRichter; while the animal spirits—the love of life—the fine passion for victuals and drink—has fallen to several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of ‘John Buncle’; to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the ‘Jolly Beggars’), to John Skinner, the author of ‘Tullochgorum.’ Shakspeare, having everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as Cervantism. Some of the scenes in ‘Henry the Fourth’ and ‘Henry the Fifth’ are rich with it. So is ‘Twelfth Night,’ to go no further. Dickens’s Rabelaisianism stopped with ‘Pickwick.’ If Hood’s gastric fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief. Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we ask the reader—who may very likely have been to an undergraduates’ wine-party, or to a medical students’ revel, or who may have read the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’—we seriously and earnestly ask him whether, among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say to Mr. Skelton—for we believed in Professor Wilson once—it breaks our heart to say that Wilson’s Rabelaisianism is nothing but jolly-doggism ofthe most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains. We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!’Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue that all creatures know, ‘I live, I live, I live!’ But, whatever might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring about the literary cheerfulness of the ‘Noctes’ that, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real Wilson is the Wilson of the ‘Isle of Palms,’ ‘The City of the Plague,’ of the ‘Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,’ of the ‘Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,’ Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that ‘almost the only passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our nature—tender compassion—confiding affection, and gentleness and sorrow.’He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been—Mr. Skelton inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writingslead us to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say decidedly, he was not.Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his wit. Now, Wilson’s intellect was exceedingly and wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay.”

‘Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun? Here, at least, is the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ squeezed into one volume.

Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which, as far as we remember, is this.The library of the Indian kings was composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to remove it. But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said: ‘Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin, which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze ’em!’ The Brahmin, understanding well what the order to ‘squeeze ’em’ meant (for he was a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work, aided by many scribes—striking out all the idle words from every book in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted it was found that ten camels could carry that library without ruffling a hair. And therefore the Brahmin was appointed ‘Grand Squeezer’ of the realm. Ages after this, another prince, who loved reading much and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand Squeezer of his time and said: ‘Thy duties are neglected, O Grand Squeezer! Thy life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.’ Thereupon the Grand Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and squeezed and squeezed till the whole library became at last a load that a foal would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book, a tiny volume, containing four maxims. Yet the wisdom in the last library was the wisdom in the first.

The appearance of Mr. Skelton’s condensation of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn warning we always find it ourduty to administer to those who show a propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship—the warning that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by itself. Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call ‘the writing fellows,’ for adding to the camel’s burden, instead of distributing the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected squeezers. We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints, while nobody reads, and, to judge from the ‘spelling bees,’ nobody even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a ‘writing animal’ is on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself. This is the alarming thing. Where are we to find so many squeezers? Nay, in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer’s every book. Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle squeezer—what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than that he should squeeze ‘Frederick the Great’—that enormous, rank and pungent ‘haggis’ from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would flow of ‘oniony liquid’ that compared with it the famous ‘haggis-deluge’ of the ‘Noctes’ which nearly drowned in gravy ‘Christopher,’ ‘the Shepherd,’ and ‘Tickler’ in Ambrose’s parlour, would be, both for quantity and flavour, but ‘a beaker full of the sweet South’? Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson—the mighty Christopher, who for about thirty years literallytalked in type upon every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of which he had none; whose ‘words, words, words’ are, indeed, as Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, ‘as the rush of mighty waters’?

What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, ‘if what is said be not to the purpose, a single word is already too much.’

Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations upon the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ.’ He loves the memory of the fine old Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that are too timid of grip. In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot overdo it. There are certain parts we should have especially liked squeezed away; and among these—will Mr. Skelton pardon us?—are the ‘amazingly humourous’ ones, such as the ‘opening of the haggis,’ which, Mr. Skelton tells us, ‘manifests the humour of conception as well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been surpassed by the greatest masters’; ‘the amazing humour’ of which consists in the Shepherd’s sticking his supper knife into a ‘haggis’ (a sheep’s paunch filled with the ‘pluck’ minced, with suet, onions, salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save themselves from being drowned in it! In truth, Mr. Skelton should have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the Professor’s twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining, omit everything ‘amazingly humourous,’ he will be the best Wilson-squeezer imaginable.

Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be. The ‘Noctes’ are dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, tosave them, squeezes away all the political events—so important once, so unimportant now—all the foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in them. He eliminates all the critiques upon all those ‘greatest poems’ and those ‘greatest novels of the age’ written by Christopher’s friends—friends so famous once, so peacefully forgotten now. And he has left what he calls the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ i.e. ‘that portion of the work which deals with or presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of literary, artistic, or political interest only.’ And, although Mr. Skelton uses thus the word ‘comedy’ in its older and wider meaning, it is evident that it is as an ‘amazing humourist’ that he would present to our generation the great Christopher North. And assuredly, at this the ‘delighted spirit’ of Christopher smiles delightedly in Hades. For, however the ‘Comic Muse’ may pout upon hearing from Mr. Skelton that ‘the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” belong to her,’ it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson’s life was to cultivate her—was to be an ‘amazing humourist,’ in short. It is clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he most of all affected, that which we call technically ‘Rabelaisian.’ To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot. His personality was enormous. He had more of that demonic element—of which since Goethe’s time we have heard so much—than any man in Scotland. Everybody seems to have been dominatedby him. De Quincey, with a finer intellect than even his own—and that is using strong language—looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master. It is positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey’s ‘Autobiographic Sketches,’ to come again and again upon the naïve refrain: ‘I think so, so does Professor Wilson.’ Gigantic as was the egotism of the Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism of Christopher North. In this, as in everything else, he was the opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s desire was to create eccentric humourous characters, but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself. Wilson’s great ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create. He would like the universe to himself. If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a smile: ‘Don’t you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I—John Wilson?’ He always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler were John Wilson—as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather, what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered. This determination to be a humourous character it was—and no lack of literary ambition—that caused him to squander his astonishing powers in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man, lament.

Many articles in ‘Blackwood’—notably the one upon Shakspeare’s four great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge’s poetry—show that his insight into the principles of literary art was true and deep—far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this inexorable law, that nothing can live in literaturewithout form, nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his merits.

Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to ask us, on our oath, why Wilson’s fourteen volumes of brilliant, eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the ‘Coverley’ papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that mere elaborated intellectual ‘humour’ has the seeds of dissolution in it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live; and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian. But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what precise meaning we attach to the word ‘Rabelaisian’—though the subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us. Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist—the comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits, with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the almighty joke of the Cosmos—a mood which in literature is rarer than in life—rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.

Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the Shakspeares, the Molières, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles, the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots—upon whom the rich tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls. Among these—to whom to create is everything—Sterne would perhaps have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and never read Rabelais; while Dickens’s growth was a development from Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr. Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters. Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor could do that. But, strip the ‘Shepherd’s’ talk of its Scottish accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose rush in the ‘Recreations’ and the ‘Essays’ we are so familiar with. While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to be purposely destroyed, and the ‘Opium-Eater’ becomes a fantastic creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.

The ‘amazing humour’ of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the ‘writing fellows’ at all. We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our time.One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be found—where he ought to be found—at Stratford-on-Avon. This is interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there were Rabelaisians, even among the ‘writing fellows,’ before Rabelais; the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, ‘in a duck-pond drowned him,’ he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the ‘Birds’ alone puts Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: ‘Let down the curtain; the farce is done,’ they were prophetic as regards the literary Rabelaisians—prophetic in this, that no writer has since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood—the mood, that is, of the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped upon several; for the great Curé divides his qualities among his followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in the ‘Paradise of Fruits,’ from which every other fruit in the garden drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits with stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half stifled it) Sterne, andRichter; while the animal spirits—the love of life—the fine passion for victuals and drink—has fallen to several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of ‘John Buncle’; to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the ‘Jolly Beggars’), to John Skinner, the author of ‘Tullochgorum.’ Shakspeare, having everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as Cervantism. Some of the scenes in ‘Henry the Fourth’ and ‘Henry the Fifth’ are rich with it. So is ‘Twelfth Night,’ to go no further. Dickens’s Rabelaisianism stopped with ‘Pickwick.’ If Hood’s gastric fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief. Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we ask the reader—who may very likely have been to an undergraduates’ wine-party, or to a medical students’ revel, or who may have read the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’—we seriously and earnestly ask him whether, among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.

And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say to Mr. Skelton—for we believed in Professor Wilson once—it breaks our heart to say that Wilson’s Rabelaisianism is nothing but jolly-doggism ofthe most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains. We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!’

Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue that all creatures know, ‘I live, I live, I live!’ But, whatever might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring about the literary cheerfulness of the ‘Noctes’ that, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real Wilson is the Wilson of the ‘Isle of Palms,’ ‘The City of the Plague,’ of the ‘Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,’ of the ‘Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,’ Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that ‘almost the only passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our nature—tender compassion—confiding affection, and gentleness and sorrow.’

He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been—Mr. Skelton inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writingslead us to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say decidedly, he was not.

Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his wit. Now, Wilson’s intellect was exceedingly and wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay.”

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