Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

‘It is true,’ said I. ‘If you don’t give up that pipe for a time, the child will die, or else be a ricketty thing all his life. If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your husband can be.’

‘Chavo agin pipe, Pep!’ said Rhona.

‘Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,’ said Dereham, in that hail-fellow-well-met tone of his, which he reserved for the Romanies – a tone which no Romany could ever resist. And he took it gently from the woman’s lips. ‘Don’t smoke any more till I come to the camp and see the chavo again.’

‘He be’s a good friend to the Romanies,’ said Rhona, in an appeasing tone.

‘That’s true,’ said the woman; ‘but he’s no business to take my pipe out o’ my mouth for all that.’

She soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain the pipe. Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty high-road leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona. Perpinia remained, keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking child.

It was determined now that Rhona was the very person to be used as the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold’s poem, for she was exceptionally intelligent. So instead of going to the camp, the oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse, and heather towards ‘Kingfisher brook,’ and when we reached it we sat down on a fallen tree.

Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl so much, in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a story either told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from my pocket the gypsy girl began to clap her hands. Her anticipation of enjoyment sent over her face a warm glow.

Her complexion, though darker than an English girl’s, was rather lighter than an ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable hue; but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for me, described it as a mingling of pansy purple and dark tawny. The pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both above and below, and this had the peculiar effect of making the eyes seem always a little contracted and just about to smile. The great size and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem smaller than it really was; they also lessened the apparent size of the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.

Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried, ‘Look at the Devil’s needles! They’re come to sew my eyes up for killing their brothers.’

And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a rainbow gauze, caught the sun as he swept dazzling by, did really seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by the lights shed from the girl’s eyes.

‘I dussn’t set here,’ said she. ‘Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly Brook.’ And that’s the king o’ the dragon-flies: he lives here.’

As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to justify their Romany name and sew up the girl’s eyes.

‘The Romanies call them the Devil’s needles,’ said Dereham; ‘their business is to sew up pretty girls’ eyes.’

In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while sat down again to listen to the ‘lil,’ as she called the story.

Glanville’s prose story, upon which Arnold’s poem is based, was read first. In this Rhona was much interested. But when I went on to read to her Arnold’s poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at the lovely bits of description – for the country about Oxford is quite remarkably like the country in which she was born – she looked sadly bewildered, and then asked to have it all read again. After a second reading she said in a meditative way: ‘Can’t make out what the lil’s all about – seems all about nothink! Seems to me that the pretty sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy makes this ’ere gorgio want to cry. What a rum lot gorgios is surely!’

And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and laughing aloud.

‘Let’s go to the camp!’ said Dereham. ‘That was all true about the nicotine – was it not?’

‘Partly, I think,’ said I, ‘but not being a medical man I must not be too emphatic. If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.’

‘Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,’ growled Dereham. ‘Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco – pheugh!’”

After giving these two delightful descriptions of Borrow and his environment, I will now quote Mr. Watts-Dunton’s description of their last meeting: —

‘The last time I ever saw Borrow was shortly before he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air – a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and from its association with ‘the last of Borrow’ I shall never forget it.’

A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE

The Last Sight of George Borrow

We talked of ‘Children of the Open Air,’
Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
Till, on a day, across the mystic bar
Of moonrise, came the ‘Children of the Roof,’
Who find no balm ’neath evening’s rosiest woof,
Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.

We looked o’er London where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And lore of woods and wild wind-prophecies —
Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.

While the noble music of this double valediction in poetry and prose is sounding in our ears, my readers and I, ‘with wandering steps and slow,’ may also fitly take our reluctant leave of George Borrow.

Chapter X

THE ACTED DRAMA

It was during the famous evenings in Dr. Marston’s house at Chalk Farm that Mr. Watts-Dunton was for the first time brought into contact with the theatrical world. I do not know that he was ever closely connected with that world, but in the set in which he specially moved at this time he seems to have been almost the only one who was a regular playgoer and first-nighter, for Rossetti’s playgoing days were nearly over, and Mr. Swinburne never was a playgoer. Mr. Watts-Dunton still takes, as may be seen in his sonnet to Ellen Terry, which I shall quote, a deep interest in the acted drama and in the acting profession, although of late years he has not been much seen at the theatres. When, after a while, he and Minto were at work on the ‘Examiner’ Mr. Watts-Dunton occasionally, although I think rarely, wrote a theatrical critique for that paper. The only one I have had an opportunity of reading is upon Miss Neilson – not the Miss Julia Neilson who is so much admired in our day; but the powerful, dark-eyed creole-looking beauty, Lilian Adelaide Neilson, who, after being a mill-hand and a barmaid, became a famous tragedian, and made a great impression in Juliet, and in impassioned poetical parts of that kind. The play in which she appeared on that occasion was a play by Tom Taylor, called ‘Anne Boleyn,’ in which Miss Neilson took the part of the heroine. It was given at the Haymarket in February 1876. I do not remember reading any criticism in which so much admirable writing – acute, brilliant, and learned – was thrown away upon so mediocre a play. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon Miss Neilson’s acting were, however, not thrown away, for the subject seems to have been fully worthy of them; and I, who love the acted drama myself, regret that the actress’s early death in 1880, robbed me of the pleasure of seeing her. She was one of the actresses whom Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet on Sunday evenings at Marston’s, and I have heard him say that her genius was as apparent in her conversation as in her acting. Miss Corkran has recently sketched one of these meetings, and has given us a graphic picture of Mr. Watts-Dunton there, contrasting his personal appearance with that of Mr. Swinburne. They must indeed have been delightful gatherings to a lover of the theatre, for there Miss Neilson, Miss Glyn, Miss Ada Cavendish, and others were to be met – met in the company of Irving, Sothern, Hermann Vezin, and many another famous actor.

That Mr. Watts-Dunton had a peculiar insight into histrionic art was shown by what occurred on his very first appearance at the Marston evenings, whither he was taken by his friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, who used to tell the following story with great humour; and Rossetti also used to repeat it with still greater gusto. I am here again indebted to his son, Mr. Hake – who was also a friend of Dr. Marston, Ada Cavendish, and others – for interesting reminiscences of these Marston evenings which have never been published. Mr. Watts-Dunton at that time was, of course, quite unknown, except in a very small circle of literary men and artists. Three or four dramatic critics, several poets, and two actresses, one of whom was Ada Cavendish, were talking about Irving in ‘The Bells,’ which was a dramatization by a writer named Leopold Lewis of the ‘Juif Polonais’ of Erckmann-Chatrian. They were all enthusiastically extolling Irving’s acting; and this is not surprising, as all will say who have seen him in the part. But while some were praising the play, others were running it down. “What I say,” said one of the admirers, “is that the motif of ‘The Bells,’ the use of the idea of a sort of embodied conscience to tell the audience the story and bring about the catastrophe, is the newest that has appeared in drama or fiction – it is entirely original.”

“Not entirely, I think,” said a voice which, until that evening, was new in the circle. They turned round to listen to what the dark-eyed young stranger, tanned by the sun to a kind of gypsy colour, who looked like William Black, quietly smoking his cigarette, had to say.

“Not entirely new?” said one. “Who was the originator, then, of the idea?”

“I can’t tell you that,” said the interrupting voice, “for it occurs in a very old Persian story, and it was evidently old even then. But Erckmann-Chatrian took it from a much later story-teller. They adapted it from Chamisso.”

“Is that the author of ‘Peter Schlemihl’?” said one.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Watts-Dunton, “but Chamisso was a poet before he was a prose writer, and he wrote a rhymed story in which the witness of a murder was the sunrise, and at dawn the criminal was affected in the same way that Matthias is affected by the sledge bells. The idea that the sensorium, in an otherwise perfectly sane brain, can translate sights and sound into accusations of a crime is, of course, perfectly true, and in the play it is wonderfully given by Irving.”

“Well,” said Dr. Marston, “that is the best account I have yet heard of the origin of ‘The Bells.’”

Then the voice of one of the disparagers of the play said: “There you are! The very core of Erckmann-Chatrian’s story and Lewis’s play has been stolen and spoilt from another writer. The acting, as I say, is superb – the play is rot.”

“Well, I do not think so,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “I think it a new and a striking play.”

“Will you give your reasons, sir?” said Dr. Marston, in that old-fashioned courtly way which was one of his many charms.

“Certainly,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “if it will be of any interest. You recollect Coleridge’s remarks upon expectation and surprise in drama. I think it a striking play because I cannot recall any play in which the entire source of interest is that of pure expectation unadulterated by surprise. From the opening dialogue, before ever the burgomaster appears, the audience knows that a murder has been committed, and that the murderer must be the burgomaster, and yet the audience is kept in breathless suspense through pure expectation as to whether or not the crime will be brought home to him, and if brought home to him, how.”

“Well,” said the voice of one of the admirers of the play, “that is the best criticism of ‘The Bells’ I have yet heard.” After this the conversation turned upon Jefferson’s acting of Rip Van Winkle, and many admirable remarks fell from a dozen lips. When there was a pause in these criticisms, Dr. Marston turned to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said, “Have you seen Jefferson in ‘Rip van Winkle,’ sir?”

“Yes, indeed,” was the reply, “many times; and I hope to see it many more times. It is wonderful. I think it lucky that I have been able to see the great exemplar of what may be called the Garrick type of actor, and the great exemplar of what may be called the Edmund Kean type of actor.”

On being asked what he meant by this classification, Mr. Watts-Dunton launched out into one of those wide-sweeping but symmetrical monologues of criticism in which beginning, middle, and end, were as perfectly marked as though the improvization had been a well-considered essay – the subject being the style of acting typified by Garrick and the style of acting typified by Robson. As this same idea runs through Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism of Got in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ (which I shall quote later), there is no need to dwell upon it here.