Kitabı oku: «Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic», sayfa 17
Chapter XVIII
AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS
I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary friendships would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends. There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting between him and James Russell Lowell. Shortly after Lowell had accepted the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at dinner. During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one. He observed that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the conversation. The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English writers – Dickens, Thackeray, and others. As the dinner wore on, his conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also upon the prominent political men of the previous generation – Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and the like. Then the name of the Alabama came up; the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American), dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the Alabama escape. This diatribe he concluded thus: ‘You know we owe England nothing.’ In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton, manifestly addressing his remarks to him.
These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the first time, he said: “Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong. You owe England a very great deal, for I see you are an American.”
“What do we owe England?” said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.
“You owe England,” he said, “for an infinity of good feeling which you are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans. So kind is the feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English people themselves. They are petted and made much of, until at last it has come to this, that the very fact of a person’s being American is a letter of introduction.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel between the two. After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:
“You were very sharp upon me just now, sir.”
“Not in the least,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “You were making an onslaught on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were addressing your conversation to me.”
“Well,” replied Mr. Lowell, “I will confess that I did address my conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts.”
“That is my little name,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But I really don’t see why that should induce you to address your conversation to me. I suppose it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies. An entire mistake! I have several charming American friends, and I am a great admirer of many of your most eminent writers. But I notice that whensoever an American book is severely handled in the ‘Athenæum,’ the article is attributed to me.”
“I do not think,” said Mr. Lowell, “that you are a lover of my country, but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never wrote.”
And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more confidential.
“Well,” he said, “I will tell you something that, I think, will not be altogether unpleasant to you. When I came to take up my permanent residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about London and Londoners, and I said to him: ‘There is one man whom I very much want to meet.’ ‘You!’ said he, ‘why, you can meet anybody from the royal family downwards. Who is the man you want to meet?’ ‘It is a man in the literary world,’ said I, ‘and I have no doubt you can introduce me to him. It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in the “Athenæum.”’ My friend laughed. ‘Well, it is curious,’ he replied: ‘that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you to. I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures on my writing which I don’t much approve of.’ Does that interest you?” added Mr. Lowell.
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
“Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the ‘Athenæum’ I have read every article you have written?”
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
“Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said to a friend of mine: ‘At last there is a new voice in English criticism?’”
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But you must first tell me what that article was, for I don’t believe there is one of my countrymen who could do so.”
“That article,” said Lowell, “was an essay upon the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ and it opened with an Oriental anecdote.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that does interest me very much.”
“And I will go further,” said Lowell: “every line you have written in the ‘Athenæum’ has been read by me, and often re-read.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “I confess to being amazed, for I assure you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my name is absolutely unknown. And I must add that I feel honoured, for it is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for some of your critical essays. But still, I don’t quite forgive you for your onslaught upon my poor little island! My sympathies are not strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon in temper. But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way, and I don’t quite forgive you.”
The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.
“Won’t you come to see me,” said Lowell, “at the Embassy?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Then you ought to know!” said Lowell. “Another proof of the stout sufficiency of the English temper – not to know where the American Embassy is! It is in Lowndes Square.” Then he named the number.
“Why,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the Swinburne family – a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the open air at I don’t know what age of life – something like eighty. She was a friend of Turner’s, and is the possessor of some of Turner’s finest works.”
“So you actually go next door, and don’t know where the American Embassy is! A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English temper! However, as you come next door, won’t you come and see me?”
“I shall be delighted,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton; “but I am perfectly sure you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man.”
“On the contrary,” said Lowell, “I always reserve to myself an hour, from five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette.”
Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution, this hour over a cigarette once a week.
This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling the way in which Lowell’s Anglophobia became milder and milder, ‘fine by degrees and beautifully less,’ until at last it entirely vanished. Then it was followed by something like Anglo-mania. Lowell began to talk with the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways which he would formerly have deprecated. The climax of this revolution was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:
“Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have ceased to be able to follow you. The English ladies are – let us say, charming; English gentlemen are – let us say, charming, or at least some of them. Everything is charming! But there is one thing you cannot say a word for, and that is our detestable climate.”
“And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!” said Lowell. “I positively cannot live out of it.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “you and I will cease to talk about England and John Bull, if you please. I cannot follow you.”
In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his own country. There never was a stauncher American than James Russell Lowell. Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed man. Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to Lowell. Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest sonnets. It appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ after Lowell’s death, and it has been frequently reprinted in the United States. It now appears in ‘The Coming of Love.’ It was addressed ‘To Britain and America: On the Death of James Russell Lowell,’
Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
Your fathers drew, for Freedom’s pioneers,
Your English speech, your dower of English blood —
Ye ask to-day, in sorrow’s holiest mood,
When all save love seems film – ye ask in tears —
‘How shall we honour him whose name endears
The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?’
Your hands he joined – those fratricidal hands,
Once trembling, each, to seize a brother’s throat:
How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
Between you still? – Keep Love’s bright sails afloat
For Lowell’s sake, where once ye strove and smote
On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.
This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile. Apart from his intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey, Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans. Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during several years they saw each other nearly every day. That was before Whistler’s genius had received full recognition. I may recall that during a certain controversy concerning Whistler’s animosity against the Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the ‘Times’ of August 12, 1903: —
“In the ‘Times’ of to-day Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., says: ‘I was on friendly terms with Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never heard him at any time testify animosity against the Academy or its members.’
My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty years, but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so intimate that during part of this period we met almost every day. Indeed, at one time we were jointly engaged on a weekly periodical called ‘Piccadilly,’ for which Du Maurier designed the cover, and for which Whistler furnished his very first lithographs, by the valuable aid of Mr. T. Way. During that time there were not many days when he failed to ‘testify animosity’ against the Academy and its members. To say the truth, the testifications on this subject by ‘Jimmy,’ as he was then called, were a little afflictive to his friends. Whether he was right or wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified to express an opinion.
May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my admiration of your New York Correspondent’s amazingly vivid portrait of one of the most vivid personalities of our time? It is a masterpiece… ”
When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most appreciative estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for the ‘Athenæum.’ I am tempted to quote it nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with American literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words of mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards Americans: —
“As a personality Bret Harte seems to have exercised a great charm over his intimate friends, and I am not in the least surprised at his being a favourite. It is many years since I last saw him. I think it must have been at a club dinner given by William Black; but I have a very vivid remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have been more than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred to me that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles Dickens, might have been an admirable actor. On that account the following incident is worth recording. A friend of mine, an American poet, who at that time was living in London, brought him to my chambers, and did me the honour of introducing me to him. Bret Harte had read something about the London music-halls, and proposed that we should all three take a drive round the town and see something of them. At that time these places took a very different position in public estimation from what they appear to be doing now. People then considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very inane, as, indeed, they were, and were shy about going to them. I hope they have improved now, for they seem to have become quite fashionable. Our first visit was to the Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one or two songs that gave the audience immense delight – some comic, some more comic from being sentimental-maudlin. And we saw one or two shapeless women in tights. Then we went to the ‘Oxford,’ and saw something on exactly the same lines. In fact, the performers seemed to be the same as those we had just been seeing. Then we went to other places of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to the distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women seemed to be finding so amusing. At that time, indeed, the almost only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the theatres was that at Evans’s supper-rooms, where, under the auspices of the famous Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh rarebit while listening to the ‘Chough and Crow’ and ‘The Men of Harlech,’ given admirably by choir-boys. Years passed before I saw Bret Harte again. I met him at a little breakfast party, and he amused those who sat near him by giving an account of what he had seen at the music-halls – an account so graphic that I think a fine actor was lost in him. He not only vivified every incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every performer in a peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the humour of it. His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ fame. This proved to me what a genius he had for accurate observation, and also what a remarkable memory for the details of a scene. His death has touched English people very deeply.
It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte – easy to say that he was a disciple of Dickens – easy to say that in richness, massiveness, and variety he fell far short of his great and beloved master. No one was so ready to say all this and more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte himself. For of all the writers of his time he was perhaps the most modest, the most unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where he believed honour to be due.
But the comparison between the English and American story-tellers must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of the latter. If Dickens showed great superiority to Bret Harte on one side of the imaginative writer’s equipment, there were, I must think, other sides of that equipment on which the superiority was Bret Harte’s.
Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of universal criticism Bret Harte’s reputation will be found to be of the usual ephemeral kind. It is, of course, impossible to speak on such matters with anything like confidence. But it does seem to me that Bret Harte’s reputation is more likely than is generally supposed to ripen into what we call fame. For in his short stories – in the best of them, at least – there is a certain note quite indescribable by any adjective – a note which is, I believe, always to be felt in the literature that survives. The charge of not being original is far too frequently brought against the imaginative writers of America. What do we mean by ‘originality’? Scott did not invent the historic method. Dickens simply carried the method of Smollett further, and with wider range. Thackeray is admittedly the nineteenth century Fielding. Perhaps, indeed, there is but one absolutely original writer of prose fiction of the nineteenth century – Nathaniel Hawthorne. By original I mean simply original. I do not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his epoch. But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a fiction in which the material world and the spiritual world were not merely brought into touch, but were positively intermingled one with the other.
Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material for literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly fascinating kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it adequately. This is what I mean: in the wonderful history of the nineteenth century there are no more picturesque figures than those goldseekers – those ‘Argonauts’ of the Pacific slope – who in 1848 and 1849 showed the world what grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call ‘the Anglo-Saxon race.’ The Australian gold-diggers of 1851 who followed them, although they were picturesque and sturdy too, were not exactly of the strain of the original Argonauts. The romance of the thing had been in some degree worn away. The land of the Golden Fleece had degenerated into a Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Moreover, the Tom Tiddler’s Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a comparatively easy distance from the Antipodean centre of civilization. ‘Canvas Town’ could easily be reached from Sydney. But to reach the Golden Fleece sought by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer had before him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind. Every Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of gold. He must either trek overland – that is to say, over those vast prairies and then over those vast mountain chains which to men of the time of Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up the limitless ‘far West’ regions which only a few pioneers had dared to cross – or else he must take a journey, equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy vessel in which he could get a passage. It follows that for an adventurer to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece at all implied in itself that grit which adventurers of the Anglo-Saxon type are generally supposed to show in a special degree. What kind of men these Argonauts were, and what kind of life they led, the people of the Eastern states of America and the people of England had for years been trying to gather from newspaper reports and other sources; but had it not been for the genius of Bret Harte this most picturesque chapter of nineteenth-century history would have been obliterated and forgotten. Thanks to the admirable American writer whom England had the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many years, those wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the Sierra Nevada are as familiar to us as is Dickens’s London. Surely those who talk of Bret Harte as being ‘Dickens among the Californian pines’ do not consider what their words imply. It is true, no doubt, that there was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens and the temperament of Bret Harte. They both held the same principles of imaginative art, they both felt that the function of the artist is to aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him beautiful ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called realism which lowers man in his aspirations – which calls before man’s imagination degrading pictures of his ‘animal origin’ – is to do him a disservice. For man has still a long journey before he reaches the goal. Yet though they were both by instinct idealists as regards character-drawing, they both sought to give their ideals a local habitation and a name by surrounding those ideals with vividly painted real accessories, as real as those of the ugliest realist.
With regard to Bret Harte’s Argonauts and the romantic scenery in which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a bold thing to say whether Dickens could or could not have painted them, and whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or would not have been as good as Bret Harte’s pictures. But Dickens never did paint these Argonauts; he never had the chance of painting them. Bret Harte did paint them, and succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens succeeded in painting certain classes of London life. Now, assuredly, I should have never dreamt of instituting a comparison of this kind between two of the most delightful writers and the most delightful men that have lived in my time had not critics been doing so to the disparagement of one of them. But if one of these writers must be set up against another, I feel that something should be said upon the other side of the question – I feel that something should be said on those points where the American had the advantage. Take the question of atmosphere, for instance. Let us not forget how enormously important is atmosphere in any imaginative picture of life. Without going so far as to say that atmosphere is as important, or nearly as important, as character, let me ask, What was it that captured the readers of ‘Robinson Crusoe’? Was it the character of Defoe’s hero, or was it the scenery and the atmosphere in which he placed him? Again, see what an important part scenery and atmosphere played in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ in ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ in ‘Marmion,’ and in ‘Waverley.’ And surely it was the atmosphere of Byron’s ‘Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair,’ that mainly gave these poems their vogue. And, in a certain sense, it may be said that Dickens gave to his readers a new atmosphere, for he was the first to explore what was something new to the reading world – the great surging low-life of London and the life of the lower stratum of its middle class. It seems that the pure novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and picturesque atmosphere. It was natural for England to look to American writers to enrich English literature with a new imaginative atmosphere, and she did not look in vain. But, notwithstanding all that had been done by writers like Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and others to bring American atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave us an atmosphere that was American and yet as new as though the above-mentioned writers had never written. He had the advantage of depicting a scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his predecessors as it was unlike everything else in the world. It is doubtful whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as the mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and Canada.
Every one is born with an instinct for loving some particular kind of scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the birth-environment as is generally supposed. It would have been of no avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty canons, peaks, and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had had a natural genius for loving and depicting them; and this, undoubtedly, he had, as we see by the effect upon us of his descriptions. Once read, his pictures are never forgotten. But it was not merely that the scenery and atmosphere of Bret Harte’s stories are new – the point is that the social mechanism in which his characters move is also new. And if it cannot be denied that in temperament his characters are allied to the characters of Dickens, we must not make too much of this. Notwithstanding all the freshness and newness of Dickens’s characters they were entirely the slaves of English sanctions. Those incongruities which gave them their humourous side arose from their contradicting the English social sanctions around them. But in Bret Harte’s Argonauts we get characters that move entirely outside those sanctions of civilization with which the reader is familiar. And this is why the violent contrasts in his stories seem, somehow, to be better authenticated than do the equally violent contrasts in Dickens’s stories. Bret Harte’s characters are amenable to no laws except the improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch. And yet underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep ‘law-abidingness’ which the late Grant Allen despised as being ‘the Anglo-Saxon characteristic.’ To my mind, indeed, there is nothing so new, fresh, and piquant in the fiction of my time as Bret Harte’s pictures of the mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right outside all the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own peculiar instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.
We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from the old sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good deal of that natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was surrendered by the first human compact in order to secure its substitute, civil liberty. We get vivid pictures of the racial qualities which enable the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots and flourish in almost every square mile of the New World that lies in the temperate zone. Let a group of this great race of universal squatters be the dwellers in Roaring Camp, or a party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a ‘no man’s land,’ or even a gang of mutineers from the Bounty, it is all one as regards their methods as squatters. The moment that the mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they improvise a code of laws something like the camp laws of Bret Harte’s Argonauts, and the code on the whole works well.
Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence of the presentation, Bret Harte’s pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature. And again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more sought after. This accounts in a large measure for the growing interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
Bret Harte’s stories give the reader a sense of the open air second only to Borrow’s own pictures. And if I am right in thinking that the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
And now what about his power of creating new characters – not characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters? Well, here one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens. Dickens, of course, used a larger canvas – gave himself more room to depict his subjects.
If Bret Harte’s scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories and not long novels? For it is very difficult in a short story to secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to nature – the last perfection of imaginative art.
All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection. In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature. The shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from which a long novel may be free.”
