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Updated: May 5, 2025
And now, clearlier still, as I write in these after-years, do I see that dining-room of The Pines; the long white stretch of table-cloth, with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and another at the extreme end of it; Watts-Dunton between us, very low down over his plate, very cosy and hirsute, and rather like the dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice found in Wonderland.
The various devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a single emotional reflection of some situation or desire. Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of grammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browning and Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of their lyrics by a lack of perspicuity.
Mr Watts-Dunton, with inspiration, has asked whether or not Lavengro and The Romany Rye form a spiritual autobiography; and if they do, whether that autobiography does or does not surpass every other for absolute truth of spiritual representation. Borrow certainly did colour his narrative in places.
A very shabby trick very shabby indeed. Of course I do not vouch for the exact words in which Watts-Dunton told me this tale; but this was exactly the tale he told me. I expressed my astonishment.
Watts-Dunton told me he had heard of this from Swinburne. 'I myself, he said, 'very seldom read the magazines. But Algernon always has a look at them. There was something to me very droll, and cheery too, in this picture of the illustrious recluse snatching at the current issues of our twaddle.
So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, Watts-Dunton leaned forward and 'Well, Algernon, he roared, 'how was it on the Heath to-day? Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the question, now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the cooing of a dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke to us of his walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been taking his daily exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a Peri who had at long last been suffered to pass through Paradise.
Swinburne has, year after year, it is scarcely necessary to say, added to his fame, and all Englishmen are proud of his genius. The Definitive Edition of his works has delighted all his admirers; and just as we are going to press everyone is reading with intense interest his early novel Love's Cross Currents. Mr. Watts-Dunton is in excellent health, and his pen is as vigorous as ever.
What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed out that that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting.
Straightway there appeared in the World a little letter from Whistler, deriding 'one Algernon Swinburne outsider Putney. It was not in itself a very pretty or amusing letter; and still less so did it seem in the light of the facts which Watts-Dunton told me in some such words as these: After he'd published that lecture of his, Jimmy Whistler had me to dine with him at Kettner's or somewhere.
Gosse in his biography compared Swinburne to a coloured and exotic bird a "scarlet and azure macaw," to, be precise and the comparison remains in one's imagination. Watts-Dunton, finding the poor creature moulted and "off its feed," carried it down to Putney, resolved to domesticate it. He watched over it as a farmer's wife watches over a sick hen. He taught it to eat out of his hand.
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