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Rossetti used to say that since Blake there has been no more visionary painter in the art world than Smetham. I remember one or two extraordinary pictures of his especially one depicting a dragon in a fen, of which Rossetti had a great opinion; and I believe this, with other pictures of Smetham's, is in the hands of Mr. Watts-Dunton.
It was a mystery inherent in the richly-laden atmosphere of The Pines.... While I stood talking to Watts-Dunton talking as loudly as he, for he was very deaf I enjoyed the thrill of suspense in watching the door through which would appear Swinburne. I asked after Mr. Swinburne's health. Watts-Dunton said it was very good: 'He always goes out for his long walk in the morning wonderfully active.
On the strand is sitting a man of noble and furrowed brow. It is Mazzini, still thinking of Liberty. And anon the tiny young English amphibian comes ashore to fling himself dripping at the feet of the patriot and to carol the Republican ode he has composed in the course of his swim. 'He's wonderfully active active in mind and body, Watts-Dunton says to me.
He is sounding his own depths, and out of mere shyness, at times, uses the transparent amateur trick of pretending that he was writing of someone else. Years afterwards, when Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him, "What is the real nature of autobiography?" he answered in questions: "Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man's life? or is it a picture of the man himself his character, his soul?"
I suspect, too, that the first impulse to write about the Boers came not from the Muse within, but from Theodore Watts-Dunton without.... 'Now, Algernon, we're at war, you know at war with the Boers. I don't want to bother you at all, but I do think, my dear old friend, you oughtn't to let slip this opportunity of, etc., etc.
If Swinburne had lost a trouser-button, they would not have felt it inappropriate, one feels, for the Archbishop of Canterbury to hurry to the scene and go down on his knees on the floor to look for it.... Well, no doubt, Swinburne was an absurd character. And so was Watts-Dunton. And so, perhaps, is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But for I knew he had once been as high and copious a singer in talk as in verse I had hoped to hear utterances from him. And it did not seem that my hope was to be fulfilled. Watts-Dunton sat at the head of the table, with a huge and very Tupperesque joint of roast mutton in front of him, Swinburne and myself close up to him on either side. He talked only to me.
The thrill of the past was always strong in me when Watts-Dunton mentioned seldom without a guffaw did he mention 'Jimmy Whistler. I think he put in the surname because 'that fellow' had not behaved well to Swinburne.
Borrow did not recognise in Mr Watts-Dunton the young man whom he had seen bathing on the beach at Great Yarmouth, pleased to be near his hero, but too much afraid to venture to address him. Writing of this meeting at Coombe End, Mr Watts-Dunton says: "There is however no doubt that Borrow would have run away from me had I been associated in his mind with the literary calling.
The question that has so far not been settled is: Did Watts-Dunton put his hand over Swinburne's mouth and forcibly stop him from shouting? As we know, he certainly stopped him from swearing before ladies, except in French. But, as for shouting, Swinburne had already exhausted himself when he went to the Pines.
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