Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

James Douglas

James Douglas

Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

NATURA BENIGNA

What power is this? what witchery wins my feet

To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,

All silent as the emerald gulfs below,

Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?

What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—

What answering pulse that all the senses know,

Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow

Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?

Mother, ’tis I reborn: I know thee well:

That throb I know and all it prophesies,

O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell

Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!

Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell

The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.

Introduction

�It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full acknowledged: that one thing was – to die.’ – Douglas Jerrold.

Although in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it.

Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong, Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source of his education. He replied: “Cambridge, scholastically, and Watts-Dunton’s articles in the �Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the �Athenæum’ from the purely literary point of view. I have been a reader of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I should have been without them.” Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that he bought the �Encyclopædia Britannica’ simply to possess one article – Mr. Watts-Dunton’s article on Poetry. There are many other men of letters who would give similar testimony. With regard to his critical work, Mr. Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on Poetry, describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as �the first critic of our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,’ [1 - �Studies in Prose.’] a judgment which, according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s �Encyclopædia,’ Rossetti endorsed. In this same article it is further said: —

“He came to exercise a most important influence on the art and culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many volumes – in the �Examiner,’ the �Athenæum’ (since 1876), the �Nineteenth Century,’ the �Fortnightly Review,’ etc. – he has let year after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous, and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his. But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he is only ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and other poems that, from the �Athenæum,’ etc., have found their way into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has contributed to the �Encyclopædia Britannica,’ �Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ etc. The chief note of his poetry – much of it written in youth – is its individuality, the source of its inspiration Nature and himself. For he who of all men has most influenced his brother poets has himself remained least influenced by them. So, too, his prose writings – literary mainly, but ranging also over folk-lore, ethnology, and science generally – are marked as much by their independence and originality as by their suggestiveness, harmony, incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight. They have made him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not Jeffrey, is a parallel.” [2 - �Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ vol. x., p. 581.]

These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, written before his theory of the �Renascence of Wonder’ was exemplified in �Aylwin’ and �The Coming of Love,’ show, I think, that this book would have had a right