I have often been asked by those who did not know Theodore Watts-Dunton what was the secret of the singular power he appeared to exercise over others and the equally singular affection in which he was held by his friends.

My answer was that Watts-Dunton’s hold upon his friends, partly personal as it was and partly intellectual, was chiefly due to his extraordinary loyalty. Of old, certain men and women were supposed to be possessed of the “evil eye.” Upon whom they looked with intent—be it man, woman, or beast—hurt was sooner or later sure to fall.

If there be anything in the superstition, one might almost believe that its opposite was true of Watts-Dunton. He looked upon others merely to befriend, and if he did not put upon them the spell, not of an evil but of a good eye, he exercised a marvellous personal power, not, as is generally the case, upon weaker intellects and less marked personalities than his own, but upon his peers; and even upon those whom in the world’s eye would be accounted greater than he. That any one man should so completely control, and even dominate, two such intellects as Swinburne and Rossetti seemed almost uncanny. I never saw Rossetti and Watts-Dunton together, for the former had been dead some years when I first met Watts-Dunton, but my early literary friendships were with members of the little circle of which Rossetti was the centre, and all agree in their testimony to the extraordinary personal power which Watts-Dunton exercised over the poet-painter. But Swinburne—and here I speak with knowledge—Watts-Dunton absolutely dominated. It was, “What does Walter say about it?” “Walter thinks, and I agree with him, that I ought to do so and so,” or, “Let us submit the matter to Watts-Dunton’s unfailing judgment.”

Here, for fear of a possible misunderstanding, let me say that, if any reader assume from what I have just written that Swinburne was something of a weakling, that reader is very much mistaken. It is true that the author of Atalanta in Calydon was a greater force in intellect and in imagination than in will power and character, but he was not in the habit of deferring to others as he deferred to Watts-Dunton, and when he chose to stand out upon some point, or in some opinion, he was very difficult to move. It was only, in fact, by Watts-Dunton that he was entirely manageable, yet there was never any effort, never even any intention on Watts-Dunton’s part to impose his own will upon his friend. I have heard his influence upon Swinburne described as hypnotic. From that point of view I entirely dissent. Watts-Dunton held his friends by virtue of his genius for friendship—“Watts is a hero of friendship,” Mr. William Michael Rossetti once said of him—and by the passionate personal loyalty of which I have never known the equal. By nature the kindest of men, shrinking from giving pain to any living creature, he could be fierce, even ferocious, to those who assailed his friends. It was, indeed, always in defence of his friends, rarely if ever in defence of himself—though he was abnormally sensitive to adverse criticism—that he entered into a quarrel and, since dead friends could not defend themselves, he constituted himself the champion of their memory or of their reputation, and even steeled himself on more than one occasion to a break with a living friend rather than endure a slight to one who was gone. “To my sorrow,” he writes in a letter, “I was driven to quarrel with a man I loved and who loved me, William Minto, because he, with no ill intentions, printed certain injurious comments upon Rossetti which he found in Bell Scott’s papers.”

It was my own misfortune, deservedly or undeservedly, to have a somewhat similar experience to that of Professor Minto; but in my case the estrangement, temporary only as it was, included Swinburne as well as Watts-Dunton. In telling the story, and for the first time here, I must not be supposed for one moment to imagine that any importance attaches or could attach to a misunderstanding between such men as Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and a scribbler of sorts like myself, but because a third great name, that of Robert Buchanan, comes into it.

It is concerned with Buchanan’s attack upon Rossetti in the famous article The Fleshly School of Poetry, which appeared anonymously (worse—pseudonymously) in the Contemporary Review. Not long after Buchanan’s death I was asked to review Mr. Henry Murray’s Robert Buchanan and other Essays in a critical journal, which I did, and Swinburne and Watts-Dunton chanced to see the article. To say that they took exception to what I said about Buchanan, would be no description of their attitude, for Swinburne not only took exception but took offence and of the direst—so much so as to make it necessary that for a season I should discontinue my visits to The Pines.

And here let me interpolate that I entirely agree with Mr. James Douglas when he says in his volume, Theodore Watts, Poet, Novelist and Critic, “It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of the day upon the painful subject of the Buchanan affair. Indeed, I have often thought it is a great pity that it is not allowed to die out.” But when in the next sentence Mr. Douglas goes on to say, “The only reason why it is still kept alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s nervous illness about which so much has been said,” I am entirely out of agreement with him, as the quotation which I make from my article will show. Since Mr. Douglas has reopened the matter—he could hardly do otherwise in telling the story of Watts-Dunton’s literary life—I have the less hesitation in reprinting part of the article in which I endeavoured to clear Buchanan of what I held, and still hold, to be a preposterous charge. I may add that I quite agree with Mr. Douglas when he says that we must remember “the extremely close intimacy which existed between these two poet friends (Rossetti and Watts-Dunton) in order to be able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of Buchanan in the following sonnet, if, as some writers think, Buchanan was meant.”

Mr. Douglas then quotes the sonnet The Octopus of the Golden Isles, which I do not propose here to reprint. That Buchanan was meant is now well known, and in fact Mr. Douglas himself says in the same chapter that Watts-Dunton’s definition of envy as the “literary leprosy” has often been quoted in reference to the case of Buchanan. My article on Buchanan is too long to give in its entirety, and, even omitting the passages with no direct bearing upon the misunderstanding which it caused, is lengthier than I could wish. My apology is, first, that in justice to Watts-Dunton and to Swinburne I must present their case against me ungarbled. Moreover, as the foolish bogey-story—like an unquiet ghost which still walks the world unlaid—that Buchanan was the cause of Rossetti taking to drugs, the cause even of Rossetti’s death, is still repeated, and sometimes believed, I am not sorry of another and last attempt to give the bogey its quietus. Here are the extracts from my article:

“Mr. Murray quotes evidently with appreciation Buchanan’s tribute to his ancient enemy Rossetti, I do not share Mr. Murray’s appreciation, for Buchanan’s tribute has always seemed to me more creditable to his generosity than to his judgment. He speaks of Rossetti as ‘in many respects the least carnal and most religious of modern poets.’

“Here he goes to as great an extreme as when he so savagely attacked Rossetti as ‘fleshly.’ About this attack much nonsense has been written. We have been told that it was the cause of Rossetti’s taking to chloral; and I have heard even Rossetti’s death laid at Buchanan’s door. To my thinking talk of that sort is sheer nonsense. If Rossetti took to chloral because Buchanan called his poetry ‘fleshly,’ Rossetti would sooner or later have taken to chloral, had Buchanan’s article never been written. But when Buchanan in the fulness of his remorse calls Rossetti ‘the most religious of modern poets’ he is talking equally foolishly.

“Rossetti ‘the most religious of modern poets’! Why, Rossetti’s religion was his art. To him art was in and of herself pure, sacred, and inviolate. By him the usual order of things was reversed. It was religion which was the handmaid, art the mistress, and in fact it was only in so far as religion appealed to his artistic instincts that Rossetti can be said to have had any religion at all.

“And when Buchanan sought to exalt Rossetti to a pinnacle of purity he was guilty of a like extravagance. That Rossetti’s work is always healthy not even his most enthusiastic admirers could contend. Super-sensuous and southern in the warmth of colouring nearly all his poems are. Some of them are heavy with the overpowering sweetness as of many hyacinths. The atmosphere is like that of a hothouse in which, amid all the odorous deliciousness, we gasp for a breath of the outer air again. There are passages in his work which remind us far more of the pagan temple than of the Christian cloister, passages describing sacred rites which pertain not to the worship of the Virgin, but to the worship of Venus.

“Buchanan was a man who lived heart and soul in the mood of the moment. He had a big brain which was quick to take fire, and at such times, both in his controversies and in his criticism, he was apt to express himself with an exaggeration at which in his cooler hours he would have been the first to hurl his Titanic ridicule.

“It may seem ungenerous to say so, but even his beautiful dedicatory poem to Rossetti strikes me as a lapse into false sentiment.

To An Old Enemy

I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow,
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and tenderness I bring thee now
A lily-flower instead.

Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me.

“After Rossetti’s death, ten months later, Buchanan added the following lines:

Calmly, thy royal robe of Death around thee,
Thou sleepest, and weeping brethren round thee stand;
Gently they placed, ere yet God’s angel crowned thee,
My lily in thy hand.

I never saw thee living, oh, my brother,
But on thy breast my lily of love now lies,
And by that token we shall know each other,
When God’s voice saith ‘Arise!’

“That this is very beautiful every one will admit, but is it true to picture those who most loved Rossetti as placing Buchanan’s lily of song in his dead hand? I think not. Nor can those who know anything of the last days of Rossetti reconcile the facts with Buchanan’s imaginary picture of a sort of celestial assignation in which, by means of a lily, Rossetti and his ancient enemy and brother poet shall identify each other on the Last Day?

“I am well aware that I shall be accused of bad taste, even of brutality, in saying this; but, as Mr. Murray himself alludes to this ancient quarrel, I must protest that false sentiment is equally abhorrent—as Buchanan would have been the first to admit. Now that Buchanan has followed Rossetti where all enmities are at an end, it is right that the truth about the matter be spoken, and this unhappy assault and its not altogether happy sequel be alike forgotten.

“Robert Buchanan’s last resting-place is within sight of the sea. And rightly so. It is his own heart that Old Ocean seems most to wear away in his fretting and chafing, and the wearing away of their own heart is the most appreciable result of the warfare which such men as Buchanan wage against the world.

“That he did not fulfil his early promise, that he frittered away great gifts to little purpose, is pitifully true, but if he flung into the face of the men whom he counted hypocrites and charlatans, words which scorched like vitriol, he had, for the wounded in life’s battle, for the sinning, the suffering, and the defeated, words of helpful sympathy and an outstretched hand of practical help.

“Mr. Murray has shown Buchanan to us as he was; no hero perhaps, certainly not a saint, but a man of great heart and great brain, quick to quarrel, but as quick to own himself in the wrong; a man intensely, passionately human, with more than one man’s share of humanity’s weaknesses and of humanity’s strength, a sturdy soldier in the cause of freedom, a fierce foe, a generous friend, and a poet who, in regard to that rarest of all gifts, ‘vision,’ had scarcely an equal among his contemporaries.

“I must conclude by a serious word with Mr. Murray. Disagree with him as one may and must, one cannot but admire his fearless honesty. None the less I am of opinion that in the following passage Mr. Murray’s own pessimism has led him to do his dead friend’s memory a grievous injustice.

“‘From the broken arc we may divine the perfect round, and it is my fixed belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which struck him down but spared him for a little longer time, he would logically have completed the evolution of so many years, and have definitely proclaimed himself as an agnostic, perhaps even as an atheist.’

“Mr. Murray’s personal knowledge of Buchanan was intimate, even brotherly; mine, though dating many years back, was comparatively slight. But I have read Buchanan’s books, and I know something of the spirit in which he lived and worked, and I am convinced that Mr. Murray is wrong. It is not always those who have come nearest to the details of a man’s daily life, who have come nearest to him in spirit, as Amy Levy knew well when she wrote those lines, To a Dead Poet, which I shall be pardoned for bringing to my readers’ remembrance:

I knew not if to laugh or weep:
They sat and talked of you—
’Twas here he sat: ’twas this he said,
’Twas that he used to do.

‘Here is the book wherein he read,
The room wherein he dwelt;
And he’ (they said) ‘was such a man,
Such things he thought and felt.’

I sat and sat, I did not stir;
They talked and talked away.
I was as mute as any stone,
I had no word to say.

They talked and talked; like to a stone
My heart grew in my breast—
I, who had never seen your face,
Perhaps I knew you best.

“Buchanan was, as every poet is, a creature of mood, and in certain black moods he expressed himself in language that was open to an atheistic interpretation. There were times when he was confronted by the fact that, to human seeming, iniquity prospered, righteousness went to the wall, and injustice, vast and cruel, seemed to rule the world. To the Christian belief that the Cross of Christ is the only key to the terrible problem of human suffering, Buchanan was unable to subscribe, and at times he was tempted to think that the Power at the head of things must be evil, not good. It seems to me that at such times he would cry out in soul-travail, ‘No! no! anything but that! If there be a God at all He must be good. Before I would do God the injustice of believing in an evil God, I would a thousand times sooner believe in no God at all!’ Then the mood passed; the man’s hope and belief in an unseen beneficent Power returned, but the sonnet in which he had given expression to that mood remained. And because the expression of that mood was permanent, Mr. Murray forgets that it was no more than the expression of a mood, and tells us that he believes, had Buchanan lived longer, he would have become an atheist.

“Again I say that I believe Mr. Murray to be wrong. Buchanan, like his own Wandering Jew, trod many dark highways and byways of death, but he never remained—he never could have remained—in that Mortuary of the Soul, that cul-de-sac of Despair which we call Atheism.

* * * * *

“This is not the place in which to say it, but perhaps my editor will allow me to add how keenly I felt, as I stood by the graveside of Robert Buchanan in that little God’s acre by the sea, the inadequacy of our Burial Service, beautiful as it is, in the case of one who did not profess the Christian faith. To me it seemed little less than a mockery to him who has gone, as well as a torture to those who remain, that words should be said over his dead body which, living, he would have repudiated.

“Over the body of one whose voice is silenced by death, we assert the truth of doctrines which living he had unhesitatingly rejected. It is as if we would, coward-like, claim in death what was denied us in life.

“In the case of a man whose beliefs were those of Robert Buchanan, how much more seemly it would be to lay him to rest with some such words as these:

“‘To the God from Whom he came, we commend this our friend and brother in humanity, trusting that what in life he has done amiss, may in death be forgotten and forgiven; that what in life he has done well, may in death be borne in remembrance. And so from out our human love, into the peace of the Divine love, we commend him, leaving him with the God from Whom, when we in our turn come to depart whither he has gone, we hope to receive like pardon, forgiveness and peace. In God’s hands, to God’s love and mercy, we leave him.’”

Re-reading this article many years after it was written, I see nothing in it to which friendship or even affection for either Rossetti or Buchanan could reasonably object.

This was not the view taken by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton. It so happened that I encountered the latter in the Strand a morning or two later, and more in sadness than in anger he reproached me with “disloyalty to Gabriel, disloyalty to Algernon, and disloyalty to myself.”

I replied that touching Rossetti, as he did not happen to be the King, had never so much as heard of my small existence, nor had I ever set eyes upon him, to accuse me of disloyalty to him, to whom I owed no loyalty, struck me as a work of supererogation. And, as touching Swinburne and Watts-Dunton himself, honoured as I was by the high privilege of their friendship, I could not admit that that friendship committed me to a blind partisanship and to the identification of myself with their literary likings or dislikings or their personal quarrels.

My rejection of the penitential rÔle, to say nothing of my refusing to take the matter seriously, seemed to surprise and to trouble Watts-Dunton. While protesting the regard of every one at The Pines for me personally, he gave me to understand that Swinburne in particular was so wounded by my championship as he called it of Buchanan, that he would have some trouble in making my peace in that quarter, and even hinted that an arrangement, by which I was either to lunch or to dine at The Pines within the next few days, had better stand over. Naturally I replied—I could hardly do otherwise, as I did not see my way without insincerity to express regret for what I had written about Buchanan, though I did express regret that it had given offence to Swinburne and himself—that that must be as he chose, and so we parted, sadly on my side if not on his; and I neither saw nor heard from anyone at The Pines for some little time after. Then one morning came the following letter:

My dear Kernahan,

Don’t think any more of that unpleasant little affair. Of course neither Swinburne nor I expect our friends, however loyal, to take part in the literary quarrels that may be forced upon us. But this man had the character among men who knew him well of being the most thorough sweep, and to us it did seem queer to see your honoured name associated with such a man. But, after all, even he may not have been as black as his acquaintances painted him. Your loyalty to us I do not doubt.

Yours affectionately,
Theodore Watts-Dunton.

This was followed by a wire—from Swinburne—asking me to lunch, which I need hardly say I was glad to accept, and so my relationship to the inmates of The Pines returned to its old footing.

Since it was Swinburne much more than Watts-Dunton who so bitterly resented what I had written of Buchanan, I am glad to have upon my shelves a volume of Selections from Swinburne, published after his death, and edited by Watts-Dunton. The book was sent to me by the Editor, and was inscribed:

“To Coulson Kernahan,

whom Swinburne dearly loved, and who as dearly loved him.

From Theodore Watts-Dunton.”

My unhappy connection with the “Buchanan affair” had, it will be seen, passed entirely from Swinburne’s memory, and indeed the name of Robert Buchanan, who was something of a disturbing element even in death, as he had been in life, was never mentioned among us again. How entirely the, to me, distressing if brief rift in my friendship with Watts-Dunton—a friendship which I shall always count one of the dearest privileges of my life—was closed and forgotten, is clear from the following letter. It was written in reply to a telegram I sent, congratulating him on celebrating his 81st birthday—the last birthday on earth, alas, of one of the most generous and great-hearted of men:

The Pines, Putney, S.W.
Oct. 20th, 1913.

My dear Kernahan,

Your telegram congratulating me upon having reached my 81st birthday affected me deeply. Ever since the beginning of our long intimacy I have had from you nothing but generosity and affection, almost unexampled, I think, between two literary men. My one chagrin is that I can get only glimpses of you of the briefest kind. Your last visit here was indeed a red-letter day. Don’t forget when occasion offers to come and see us. Your welcome will be of the most heartfelt kind.

Most affectionately yours,
Theodore Watts-Dunton