Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in building lots. It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older house whose cellars remained intact. This was, of course, a tremendous event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to watch the workmen in their task of demolition. In the early stages of this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found, whence Oliver Cromwell’s ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds. But no such secret chamber could be found. When at length the work had proceeded so far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact, Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives, that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the world —

Imposteur à la Mecque et prophète à Mèdine.

Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that, before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel friends, in Slepe Hall cellars. No treasure turned up, but what was found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once christened ‘Cromwell’s wine’ by the local humourist of the town, who was also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much interest as the boys in the exploration. The workmen, of course, at once began knocking off the bottles’ necks and drinking the wine, and were soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell’s wine and perhaps imbibed some of the Cromwellian spirit and pluck. Consequently the young urchins carried off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called ‘Oliver’s Tree,’ and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink. The wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous – elder wine. Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was, he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell’s elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, ‘I was never even excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being drunk on Oliver Cromwell’s elder-wine.’ The wine was probably about a century old.

I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time than is usual. He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly biology, and also art and music. As has been said in the notice of him in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ he is one of the few contemporary poets with a scientific knowledge of music. Owing to his father’s passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the lower animals.

Upon the subject of “the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase, ‘the dumb animals,’” Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often been eloquent about ‘those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could direct it to trace out any given name in the company.’

“Of course,” he says, “the ‘lower animals’ are no more dumb than we are. With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape from isolation – to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing – which is a great factor of progress. With them, as with us, each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what these signs and sounds shall be. Those among us who have gone at all underneath conventional thought and conventional expression – those who have penetrated underneath conventional feeling – know that neither thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all. The voice cannot do it, as we see by comparing one language with another. Wordsworth calls language the incarnation of thought. But the mere fact of there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this. If there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream of, the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd. Soul cannot communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when you can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a ‘lower animal,’ interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with them as it is with men. Nay, with some temperaments and in some moods, the communication is far, far closer. ‘When I am assailed with heavy tribulation,’ said Luther, ‘I rush out among my pigs rather than remain alone by myself.’ And there is no creature that does not at some points sympathize with man. People have laughed at Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used to lavish his endearments. Neither I nor my companion had a pet passion for leeches. Erskine probably knew leeches better than we, for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of which they know nothing. Like most dog lovers, we had no special love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge. ‘I wish women would purr when they are pleased,’ said Horne Tooke to Rogers once.”

Chapter III

THE CRITIC IN THE BUD

One of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the nooks of old England and ‘ould Ireland’; I have a propensity for ‘dawdling and dandering’ among them whenever the occasion arises, and I am yielding to it here.

Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of brochures upon the surrounding villages. One of these, called ‘St. Ives and the Printing Press,’ has greatly interested me, for it reveals the wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural districts lies ready for the picking up. I am tempted to quote from this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell’s time the temper which produced Cromwell has remained. During the time when at Cambridge George Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen’s, revolted against the discipline and the doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed. The house whence issued these fulminations was the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street, now pulled down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father, having remained during all this time a printing office. Mr. Norris gives a very picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the house, with its pointed roof, ‘king posts’ and panelling, reminding one of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices. Mr. Norris also tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the ‘Crown Inn,’ that William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens. According to Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor. A curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to Lamb, and inspired some of Elia’s most delightful touches of humour. This poem of Dyer’s opens thus: —

Though much I love th’ Æolian lyre,
Whose varying sounds beguil’d my youthful day,
And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
In fabled groves, among th’ Aonian choir:
Yet more on native fields, thro’ milder skies,
Nature’s mysterious harmonies delight:
There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
What is the moon’s pale orb that cheer’d the lonesome night?
I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
No purple Venus round my Hammond’s bow’r,
No blue-ey’d graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
The king of gods here rains no golden show’r,
Nor have these lips e’er sipt Castilian dews.

At the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer’s time, if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general. Filled with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that boyish utterance. It interests me much, because I seem to see in it adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I hope to enrich these pages. I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking advantage of a lucky accident – the accident that a member of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported. In 1854, ‘W. Theodore Watts,’ as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be himself a member – if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just left it – on account of his father’s great local reputation as a man of learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the toast, ‘Science.’ In the ‘Cambridge Chronicle’ of that date the proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely improvized. The subject which he discussed was ‘The Influence of Science upon Modern Civilization’: —

“It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches. Now, of all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most hopeful one for humanity is physical science – that branch of the tree which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present wondrous state of development. I am aware that the assertion that Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person young and inexperienced as myself. It is heterodox; it clashes, for instance, with the venerable superstition of ‘the wisdom of the ancients’ – a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my friend Mr. Wright’s old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the point: —

For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men lere.

But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy. It is the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong only to individuals. There can be no doubt that, of contemporary individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact. As Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, ‘Those who came first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least experience. Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in arms – chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can supply.

And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity. What, for instance, was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans – what but the wildest Astrology? What schoolboy has not chuckled over the ingenious old Herodotus’s description of the sun being blown out of the heavens? Or again, at old Plutarch’s veracious story of the hedgehogs and the grapes? Nay, there are absurdities enough in such great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters appertaining to the Physical Sciences.

Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence. But theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our day – though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has been proving to us lately – is, as essentially, the day of Science. I might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here – the constitution of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking as the soul of antiquity). Was that scientific? Surely not.

The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was beauty, sensuous beauty. This prevailing passion for the beautiful exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said: it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture. The productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful, and, as such, will never fade and decay, for

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity. Athens was too imaginative and poetical. Sparta was too warlike and barbarous. Rome was too sensual and gross. It had to wait for the steady Teutonic mind – the plodding brains of modern England and modern Germany. That Homer is the father of poetry – that Æschylus is a wonder of sublimity – that Sophocles and Euripides are profound masters of human passion and human pathos – that Aristophanes is an exhaustless fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour – no one in this room, or out of it, is more willing to admit than I am. But is that to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or Aristotle?

The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius. Every right action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius. And this was not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and breathing faith with him. He believed it in his childhood, in his youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of Laocoon, around his giant brain. Well, gentlemen, don’t let us laugh at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a beautiful one, and typical of many great truths. And I have often thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than Socrates. I mean the great man – mankind. He, too, has his good genius and his evil genius. The former we will designate science, the latter we will call superstition. For ages upon ages, superstition has had the sway over him – that evil genius, who blotted out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and substituted all manner of blinding errors – errors which have made him play

Such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.

This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries. In a word, the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the fiends.

But, at last, God has permitted man’s long, long experience to be followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient enemy, and clasped the hands of Science – Science, that good genius who makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the ethereal lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns king of the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of Methusaleh into seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human frame, and ranges through its most secret chambers, until at last nothing, save the mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden; who maps out all the nations of the earth; showing how the sable Ethiopian, the dusky Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the intellectual European, are but differently developed exemplars of the same type of manhood, and warning man that he is still his ‘brother’s keeper’ now as in the primeval days of Cain and Abel.

The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his dædal wings up into the starry night, there where ‘God’s name is writ in worlds,’ and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever around the great central sun – ‘The Great White Throne of God!’

The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first, as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid mass, ‘without form and void,’ where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages, having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life, to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns, compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian, the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders, the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and the basest work of God – the creation of the thinking, reasoning, sinning animal, Man.

And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand work of developing the divinity within it. I know, indeed, that it is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will decline and vanish, ‘like the civilizations of old.’ But I venture to deny it in toto. From a human point of view, it is utterly impossible. And without going into the question (for I see the time is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern must of necessity be futile and fallacious. And for this reason, that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political life, and come to its own conclusions. So isolated, indeed, was one nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of each other’s existence. A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh, was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for Italy alone. There was no science then to ‘put a girdle round about the earth’ (as Puck says) ‘in forty minutes.’ But now, a new idea brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole habitable globe – from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru. I am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the ruler of the waves. The day may come that will see her sink to a second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe. In spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that will see Russia the dominant power in Europe. The day may come that will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and learning. It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race – that the negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian race is now lording it over the negro. Why not? It would be only equity. But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of nationalities. I speak again of the great man, Mankind – the one indivisible man that Science is making him. He will never retrograde, because ‘matter and mind comprise the universe,’ and matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind – because good must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made? Henceforth his road is onward – onward. Science has helped to give him such a start that nothing shall hold him back – nothing can hold him back – save a fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God.”

But I am wandering from the subject of the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street and its connection with printing. The last important book that was ever printed there was a very remarkable one. It was the famous essay on Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that time a curate of the St. Ives Church – a book that was the result of an enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book, moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought. It has passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.

Chapter IV

CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM

Mrs. Craigie has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the nation. It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than that in which Theodore Watts grew up. Indeed, his early life may be compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of the Mill family. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father was in many respects a very remarkable man. ‘He was,’ says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ‘a naturalist intimately connected with Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert White of the Ouse valley.’ There is, as the ‘Times’ said in its review of ‘Aylwin,’ so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made to identify all the characters. Many of these guesses have been wrong; and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr. Hake, who, in two papers in ‘Notes and Queries’ identified many of the characters. Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father. Mr. Hake, however, tells us that this is not so. Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the author’s uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to say later. I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable account of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father in Mr. Norris’s ‘History of St. Ives’: —

“For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford Abbots. According to the following extracts from ‘The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal’ of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: ‘We record with much regret the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died after an hour’s illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he had been taken after the seizure. Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was called in, but without avail. At the inquest the post-mortem examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions, resulted in syncope. Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of death.

Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the oldest solicitors in the county. He had also devoted much time and study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a well-known figure in the scientific circles of London. He was for years connected with Section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee. He read papers on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles of geology. Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors, and in the Association’s reports upon this subject some of the most interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by Mr. Watts. He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.’

Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the ‘Antiquary’ for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months after his death. It was, however, not by Archæology, but by his geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation. And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison, Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied by Mr. Matton. In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr. Watts at St. Ives. Since his death there have been frequent references to him as a man of ‘encyclopædic general knowledge.’

He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St. Ives have been more liked or more generally respected. His great delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself. On such occasions the present writer has often met him and had many interesting conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science.”

With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mother, the Duntons, although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr. Jessopp in his charming essay, ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.’ This essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, and treating of the Register of Crab House Nunnery. In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother’s to his father’s name, by a deed in Chancery.

I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend) used to tell. When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school library a copy of Wells’s ‘Stories after Nature,’ and read them with great avidity. Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to find, in a number of the ‘Illuminated Magazine,’ a periodical which his father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one of the ‘Stories after Nature’ reprinted with an illustration by the designer and engraver Linton. He said to his father, ‘Why, I have read this story before!’ ‘That is quite impossible,’ said his father, ‘quite impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number of a magazine.’ ‘I have read it before; I know all about it,’ said the boy. ‘As I do not think you untruthful,’ said the father, ‘I think I can explain your hallucination about this matter.’ ‘Do, father,’ said the son. ‘Well,’ said the father, ‘I do not know whether or not you are a poet. But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams. You have told me before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.’ ‘Yes, father, that often occurs.’ ‘Well, the reason for that is this, as you will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things, one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.’ The explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.

The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the father said, ‘Well, Walter, have you read this before?’ ‘Yes,’ said the boy falteringly, ‘unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain, father.’ And so it went on from month to month. When the boy had grown into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells’s ‘Joseph and His Brethren’ and ‘Stories after Nature.’ Rossetti was agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of ‘Joseph and His Brethren,’ he was very familiar with the ‘Stories after Nature.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘they appeared in the “Illuminated Magazine.”’ ‘Who should have thought,’ said Rossetti, ‘that the “Illuminated Magazine” in its moribund days, when Linton took it up, should have got down to St. Ives. Its circulation, I think, was only a few hundreds. Among Linton’s manœuvres for keeping the magazine alive was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells’s “Stories after Nature” without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book form.’ ‘They did then appear in book form first?’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. ‘Yes, but there can’t have been over a hundred or two sold,’ said Rossetti. ‘I discovered it at the British Museum.’ ‘I read it at Cambridge in my school library,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. It was the startled look on Rossetti’s face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell him the story about his father and the ‘Illuminated Magazine.’

It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to express himself in literature rather early. But it will be new to many, and especially to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ that as a mere child he contributed to its pages. When he was a boy he read the ‘Athenæum,’ which his father took in regularly. One day he caught a correspondent of the ‘Athenæum’ – no less a person than John P. Collier – tripping on a point of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance. He had stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father’s books. He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing the blunder with youthful scorn. In due time the correction was noted in the Literary Gossip of the journal. Soon after, his father had occasion to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he said, ‘Walter, have you been marking this book?’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘But you know I object?’ ‘Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.’ ‘Why,’ said his father, ‘somebody has been writing about this very passage to the “Athenæum.”’ ‘Yes, father,’ replied the boy, red and ungrammatical with proud confusion, ‘it was me.’ ‘You!’ cried his astonished father, ‘you!’ And thus the matter was explained. Mr. Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his first contribution to the ‘Athenæum.’

Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton, it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando Watts. His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism. As I have already pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero. The importance of this character in ‘Aylwin’ is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find that the character of Philip is its motive power. After his death, everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams, his fantasies and his whims. This effect of making a man dominate from his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there they leave it. What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls ‘the tragic mischief’ of the drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of ‘The Veiled Queen.’ There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an interest. He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish, and German. And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover of the acted drama. One of his stories in connection with acting is this. A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and sometimes Cromwell’s Barn. Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on returning home after the performance said, ‘I have seen a little actor who is a real genius. He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund Kean’s acting. I shall go and see him every night. And he went. The actor’s name was Robson. When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon. He went to the theatre and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so impressed him down at St. Ives. From that time he followed Robson to whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known figure among the playgoers of the Olympic. He always contended that Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time. Mr. Hake seems to have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in London: —