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With regard to the gipsies, although I knew George Borrow intimately, and saw a great deal of Mr. Watts-Dunton's other Romany Rye friend, the late Frank Groome, I did not know Sinfi Lovell or Rhona Boswell. But I may say that those who have said that Sinfi Lovell was painted from the same model as Mr. Meredith's Kiomi are mistaken.
His method of learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow, that is to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died it is said that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among his books. He used to express great contempt for Borrow's method of learning languages from dictionaries only. Watts-Dunton's uncle Mr.
I knew him, I think, even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group. He was a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton's Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts. He lived at Park House, Sydenham, and died suddenly either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly after I had met him at a wedding party. Among the set in which I moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist.
Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint, and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the expression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break Break" will serve for illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems.
For humorous Rossetti, I daresay, the very contrast made Theodore's company the more precious. He himself had assuredly been, and the memory of him still was, the master-fact in Watts-Dunton's life. 'Algernon' was as an adopted child, 'Gabriel' as a long-lost only brother. As he was to the outer world of his own day, so too to posterity Rossetti, the man, is conjectural and mysterious.
Watts-Dunton would give the memoir of his great friend to the world, but there is such a thing as knowing a man too well to be his biographer. It is, however, an open secret that a vivid sketch of Rossetti's personality has been given to the world in Mr. Watts-Dunton's well-known romance Aylwin, where the artist D'Arcy is drawn from Rossetti.
But the student should certainly familiarize himself with Theodore Watts-Dunton's famous article on "Poetry" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, now reprinted with additions in his Renascence of Wonder.
And, swiftly though he embraced the chance, and much though he made of it in the courses of apple-pie and of cheese, he seemed touchingly ashamed of 'holding forth. Often, before he had said his really full say on the theme suggested by Watts-Dunton's loud interrogation, he would curb his speech and try to eliminate himself, bowing his head over his plate; and then, when he had promptly been brought in again, he would always try to atone for his inhibiting deafness by much reference and deference to all that we might otherwise have to say.
But, scant though my memories are of the moments there, very full and warm in me is the whole fused memory of the two dear old men that lived there. I wish I had Watts-Dunton's sure faith in meetings beyond the grave. I am glad I do not disbelieve that people may so meet. I like to think that some day in Elysium I shall not without diffidence approach those two and reintroduce myself.
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