Kitabı oku: «Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic», sayfa 10

Chapter XII
WILLIAM MORRIS

It is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris. In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s ‘Athenæum’ monographs is the one upon him. Between these two there was an intimacy of the closest kind – from 1873 to the day of the poet’s death. This, no doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic power, accounts for the extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend. I have heard more than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything else that has been published about him. It is a grievous loss to literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of Morris is scarcely likely to write one. Morris, when he was busy in Queen’s Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti’s death.

When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote ‘Aylwin’ he did not contemplate that the Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott Manor. The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and D’Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti. Morris’s passion for angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were spent at Kelmscott. Treffry Dunn’s portrait of him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the picture.

Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting facts with regard to ‘Hurstcote Manor’ and Morris: —

“Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to in ‘Aylwin’ (chap. lx. book xv.) as the ‘enthusiastic angler’ who used to go down to ‘Hurstcote’ to fish. At that time this fine old seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of Rossetti and Morris. Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who, with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris’s will. The series of ‘large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams’ supporting the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls – a peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would go to the attics to listen to them.

With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful ‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name). I wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr. Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded tapestry – so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull grey texture’ – depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the ‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more beautiful woman – Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”

Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott, was Morris’s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South Kensington Museum – a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died prematurely. Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s anecdotes of the causeries at Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that it is a pity they have never been recorded in print. Middleton was one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s collaborators in the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ to which he contributed the article on ‘Rome,’ one of the finest essays in that work.

Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum.’ And the poet, might well say this, for those who have studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The House of the Wolfings,’ ‘The Roots of the Mountains,’ ‘The Glittering Plain,’ ‘The Well at the World’s End,’ ‘The Tale of Beowulf,’ ‘News from Nowhere,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ will be inclined to put them at the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s purely critical work. The ‘Quarterly Review,’ in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ I record these facts, not in order to depreciate the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s monograph in the ‘Athenæum.’

The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death: —

“Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us all – that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconciled – nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain – the thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil – would have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, ‘Enjoy.’ Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of wealth – cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius such as his – surrounded by friends, some of whom were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt of the earth – it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous powers were at their best – and died without pain. The scheme of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him – it was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned out – he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk about – the mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: ‘I have enjoyed my life – few men more so – and death in any case is sure.’”

It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton’s reflections upon the wear and tear of genius: —

“It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Look at Gladstone,’ he would say, ‘look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work.’ No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the ‘dry light of intelligence,’ a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of ‘the thinking machine’ only, but of the whole man – the whole ‘genial’ nature of the worker – his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitæ.

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collating of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.”

Mr. Watts-Dunton’s critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than in his remarks upon Morris’s translation of the Odyssey: —

“Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris’s translation; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualities – those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poets – are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote… Morris’s translation of the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ etc. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the ‘Saga Library.’ Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem – for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.”

In connection with William Morris, readers of ‘The Coming of Love’ will recall the touching words in the ‘Prefatory Note’: —

“Had it not been for the intervention of matters of a peculiarly absorbing kind – matters which caused me to delay the task of collecting these verses – I should have been the most favoured man who ever brought out a volume of poems, for they would have been printed by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press. As that projected edition of his was largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the subscribers is, I am told, required from me. Among the friends who saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he would die – myself. To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to come upon us. And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my verses in one of Mr. Lane’s inviting little volumes will be dimmed and marred by the thought that Morris’s name also might have been, and is not, on the imprint.”

As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of ‘The Coming of Love’ is an instance of that artistic conscientiousness which up to a certain point is of inestimable value to the poet, but after that point is reached, baffles him. The poem had been read in fragments and deeply admired by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved. Certain fragments of it had appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ and other journals, but the publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing to the fact that certain portions of it had been lent and lost. Morris not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an édition de luxe of the book, but he actually took the trouble to get a full list of subscribers, and insisted upon allowing the author a magnificent royalty. Nothing, however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then, when the book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which robbed us of one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. And even after Morris’s death the poet’s executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis and the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were willing and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems should be brought out. Subsequently, when a large portion of the lost poems was found, the volume was published by Mr. John Lane. This anecdote alone explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is never tired of dwelling upon the nobility of Morris’s nature, and upon his generosity in small things as well as in large.

Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject is the following. When Morris published his first volume in the Kelmscott Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy of the book. He also sent him a presentation copy of the second and third. But knowing how small was the profit at this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott Press, Mr. Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these presentation copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest against such extravagance. Mrs. Morris assured him that it would be perfectly useless to do so. But when the edition of Keats was coming out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to grapple with the matter, and one Sunday afternoon when he was at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:

‘Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber to the Keats, and I give my commission for it in the presence of witnesses. I am a paying subscriber to the Keats.’

‘All right, old chap, you’re a subscriber.’

In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the Keats; and when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the following Sunday afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had been made. Morris laughed.

‘All right, there’s no mistake – that is my presentation copy of Keats.’

But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was being discussed – the marvellous Chaucer with Burne-Jones’s illustrations – Mr. Watts-Dunton knew that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and probably sunk, and he said to Morris:

‘Now, Morris, I’m going to talk to you seriously about the Chaucer. I know that it’s going to be a dead loss to you, and I do really and seriously hope that you do not contemplate anything so wild as to send me a presentation copy of that book. You know my affection for you, and you know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me pain to accept it.’

‘Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to stay my hand, for, between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some money over it; but the Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned Jones and I are going to join in the presentation of a copy to Algernon Swinburne.’

After this Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mind was set at rest, as he told Mrs. Morris. But when Mr. Swinburne’s copy reached ‘The Pines’ it was accompanied by another one – ‘Theodore Watts-Dunton from William Morris.’

Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr. Watts-Dunton also tells. Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess a copy of ‘The Golden Legend,’ bought the Kelmscott edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris this. Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.

‘What! Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of mine! Why I thought he did not care for black letter reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy of every book I brought out.’

And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent to ‘The Pines,’ one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for Mr. Swinburne.

Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles,’ tells this amusing story: —

“Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled into seeing and hearing the great poet-singer Stead, whose rhythms have had such a great effect upon the ‘art poetic,’ the author of ‘The Perfect Cure,’ and ‘It’s Daddy this and Daddy that,’ and other brilliant lyrics. A friend with whom Morris had been spending the evening, and who had been talking about poetic energy and poetic art in relation to the chilly reception accorded to ‘Sigurd,’ persuaded him – much against his will – to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr. Stead, whose performance consisted of singing a song, the burden of which was ‘I’m a perfect cure!’ while he leaped up into the air without bending his legs and twirled round like a dervish. ‘What made you bring me to see this damned tomfoolery?’ Morris grumbled; and on being told that it was to give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest, without poetic art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way out. If Morris were now alive – and all England will sigh, ‘Ah, would he were!’ – he would confess, with his customary emphasis, that the poet had nothing of the slightest importance to learn, even from the rhythms of Mr. Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses that were beyond the powers of the ‘Great Vance.’”