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Updated: May 5, 2025
His publisher had exclaimed with energy, as Borrow himself would relate, "I want to meet with good writers, but there are none to be had: I want a man who can write like Ecclesiastes." There is something tragic in the account that Mr Watts-Dunton gives of his last encounter with Borrow: "The last time I ever saw him," he writes, "was shortly before he left London to live in the country.
He hated his social equals, and admired Tamerlane and Jerry Abershaw. It has been said that he was born three centuries too late, and that he belonged to the age when men dropped mysteriously down the river in ships, later to return with strange stories and great treasure from the Spanish Main. Mr Watts-Dunton has said:
Swinburne waited on the threshold to receive us, as it were, and pass us in. Watts-Dunton went and ensconced himself snugly in a corner. The sun had appeared after a grey morning, and it pleasantly flooded this big living-room whose walls were entirely lined with the mellow backs of books. Here, as host, among his treasures, Swinburne was more than ever attractive.
I forget whether it was at this my first meal or at another that he described a storm in which, one night years ago, with Watts-Dunton, he had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like the wave-rocked boat itself.
At seventy, he would breakfast at eight in Hereford Square, walk to Roehampton and pick up Mr. Watts-Dunton or Mr. At another "Bald-faced Hind," above Fairlop, he used to see the Gypsies, for it was their trysting place.
But mine is a resilient nature, and I promptly reminded myself that Swinburne's was a very impersonal one: he would not think the less highly of me, for he never had thought about me in any way whatsoever. All was well. I knew I could revisit The Pines, when next Watts-Dunton should invite me, without misgiving.
Or did not Watts-Dunton rather play the part of the good Samaritan? Unfortunately, all those who have hitherto attempted to describe the relations of the two men have succeeded only in making them both appear ridiculous. Mr. Gosse, a man of letters with a sting, has done it cleverly. The others, like the editors to whom I have referred, have done it inadvertently. They write too solemnly.
That he had a sweeter side to his nature there can be no doubt, and those who saw it were his wife, his step-daughter, and his friends, in particular those who, like Mr Watts-Dunton and Mr A. Egmont Hake, have striven for years to emphasise the more attractive part of his strange nature. Borrow's attitude towards literature in itself was not calculated to gain friends for him.
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 he could not omit the nickname, because it was impossible for him to feel the right measure of resentment against 'such a funny fellow. As heart-full of old hates as of old loves was Watts-Dunton, and I take it as high testimony to the charm of Whistler's quaintness that Watts-Dunton did not hate him.
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