Theodore Watts-Dunton Part 16

Many articles in 'Blackwood'-notably the one upon Shakspeare's four great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge's poetry-show that his insight into the principles of literary art was true and deep-far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form, nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his merits.

Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to ask us, on our oath, why Wilson's fourteen volumes of brilliant, eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the 'Coverley' papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we fear that our answer would have to be this bipart.i.te one: first, that mere elaborated intellectual 'humour' has the seeds of dissolution in it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live; and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian.

But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what precise meaning we attach to the word 'Rabelaisian'-though the subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.

Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist-the comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits, with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the almighty joke of the Cosmos-a mood which in literature is rarer than in life-rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.

Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the Shakspeares, the Molieres, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles, the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots-upon whom the rich tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.

Among these-to whom to create is everything-Sterne would perhaps have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and never read Rabelais; while d.i.c.kens's growth was a development from Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr.

Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters.

Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor could do that. But, strip the 'Shepherd's' talk of its Scottish accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose rush in the 'Recreations' and the 'Essays' we are so familiar with.

While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to be purposely destroyed, and the 'Opium-Eater' becomes a fantastic creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.

The 'amazing humour' of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the 'writing fellows' at all.

We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our time. One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be found-where he ought to be found-at Stratford-on-Avon. This is interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there were Rabelaisians, even among the 'writing fellows,' before Rabelais; the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, 'in a duck-pond drowned him,' he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the 'Birds' alone puts Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: 'Let down the curtain; the farce is done,' they were prophetic as regards the literary Rabelaisians-prophetic in this, that no writer has since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood-the mood, that is, of the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped upon several; for the great Cure divides his qualities among his followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in the 'Paradise of Fruits,' from which every other fruit in the garden drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits with stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits-the love of life-the fine pa.s.sion for victuals and drink-has fallen to several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of 'John Buncle'; to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the 'Jolly Beggars'), to John Skinner, the author of 'Tullochgorum.' Shakspeare, having everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as Cervantism. Some of the scenes in 'Henry the Fourth' and 'Henry the Fifth' are rich with it. So is 'Twelfth Night,' to go no further.

d.i.c.kens's Rabelaisianism stopped with 'Pickwick.' If Hood's gastric fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief.

Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we ask the reader-who may very likely have been to an undergraduates'

wine-party, or to a medical students' revel, or who may have read the 'Noctes Ambrosianae'-we seriously and earnestly ask him whether, among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.

And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say to Mr. Skelton-for we believed in Professor Wilson once-it breaks our heart to say that Wilson's Rabelaisianism is nothing but jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In reading the 'Noctes' we feel, as Jefferson's Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains.

We say to ourselves, 'How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn't pretend to be jolly-if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!'

Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master's humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue that all creatures know, 'I live, I live, I live!' But, whatever might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring about the literary cheerfulness of the 'Noctes' that, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real Wilson is the Wilson of the 'Isle of Palms,' 'The City of the Plague,' of the 'Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,' of the 'Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,' Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that 'almost the only pa.s.sions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our nature-tender compa.s.sion-confiding affection, and gentleness and sorrow.'

He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole c.o.c.kney army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been-Mr. Skelton inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say decidedly, he was not.

Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his wit. Now, Wilson's intellect was exceedingly and wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay."

No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and saw the author of it. Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry between the 'Athenaeum' and the 'Academy.'

"You belong to us," said Appleton. "The 'Academy' is the proper place for you. You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy's camp."

"And shall I tell you why I have joined the 'Athenaeum' in place of the 'Academy'?" said Watts; "it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you did not."

"For months and months I have been urging you to write in the 'Academy,'"

said Appleton.

"That is true, no doubt," said Watts, "but while MacColl offered me an important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon metaphysics. It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late. If to join the 'Athenaeum' is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a Philistine am I."

I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends afterwards. Shirley, in his 'Reminiscences' of Rossetti, like most of his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the poet-painter. I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays. I have heard him say more than once that Skelton's style had a certain charm for him, and he could not understand why Skelton's position is not as great as it deserves to be.

'Scotsmen,' he said, 'often complain that English critics are slow to do them justice. This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol's life. He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile Club. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in the great literary c.o.c.kpit of London. To say the truth, the Scottish c.o.c.k is really longer in spur and beak than the English c.o.c.k, and can more than take care of himself. For my part, with the exception of Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was liked.'

As will be seen further on, before the review of the 'Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae' appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the 'Athenaeum' an article on 'The Art of Interviewing.' From this time forward he became the chief critic of the 'Athenaeum,' and for nearly a quarter of a century-that is to say, until he published 'The Coming of Love,' when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any kind-he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic style-a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.

As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his creative work is of the closest kind. Indeed, it has been said by Rossetti that 'the subtle and original generalizations upon the first principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own poetry.' The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets.

Rossetti used humourously to call him 'The Symposiarch,' and no doubt the influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr.

Marston's, Madox Brown's, and Mrs. Procter's, may be traced in his writings. For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of spontaneous conversation overheard. Its variety of manner, as well as of subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism. In it are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation, irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit. To the 'Athenaeum' he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as 'The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,' 'The Troubadours and Trouveres,'

'The Children of the Open Air,' 'The Gypsies,' 'Cosmic Humour,' 'The Effect of Evolution upon Literature.' And although the most complete and most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the vast ocean of the 'Examiner,' the 'Athenaeum,' and the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, that contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian minister, to the 'Rivista d' Italia.' In this article she makes frequent allusions to the 'Athenaeum' articles, and quotes freely from them.

Rossetti once said that 'the reason why Theodore Watts was so little known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as eagerly as other men sought fame'; but although his indifference to literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be profound.

There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates. His treatise in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' on 'Poetry' is alone sufficient to show how deep has been his study of poetic principles. The essay on the 'Sonnet,'

too, which appeared in 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' is admitted by critics of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject. It has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl Leutzner in his treatise, 'Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.'

The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the 'Athenaeum' are admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B.

Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the 'Idler.' The allusion to the 'smart slaters' will be sufficient to indicate the approximate date of the interview.

"Having read your treatise on poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' which, it is said, has been an influence in every European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are really ent.i.tled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in sympathy with the poetry of the present hour."

"I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic. To say the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.

Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same misconception seems to be spreading in England-attacks which the smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers."

"It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd."

"I do not believe in answering attacks. The public, as I say, knows that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a review. It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one's excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike reviewing than mine. Yet it has one good quality, I think-it is never unkindly. I never will take a book for review unless I can say something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour."

"Then you never practise the smart 'slating' which certain would-be critics indulge in?"

"Never! In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give pain to a young writer. In the next place, this 'smart slating,' as you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world.

Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as many miles of such smart 'slating' as could be achieved by any six of the smart slaters. A charming phrase of yours, 'smart slaters'! But I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my time-men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they hold such work in contempt. Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for instance. Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day of his valuable life are wasted on 'leader' writing, but there is in any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he!

going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.

Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.

While the typical smart writer is ill.u.s.trating the primal curse by making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little spiteful brow, Grant Allen's good-natured sayings have the very wit that the unlucky sweater and 'slater' is trying for. Read what he said about William Watson, and see how kind he is. Compare his geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. Again, take Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. But it was not, I suppose, of such as they that you came to talk about. You are asking me whether I am in sympathy with the younger writers of my time. My answer is that I cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.

In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work and their aims. No doubt there are some points in which they and I agree to differ."

"And what about our contemporary novelists? Perhaps you do not give attention to fiction?"

"Give attention to novels! Why, if I did not, I should not give attention to literature at all. In a true and deep sense all pure literature is fiction-to use an extremely inadequate and misleading word as a subst.i.tute for the right phrase, 'imaginative representation.' 'The Iliad,' 'The Odyssey,' 'The aeneid,' 'The Divina Commedia,' are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our writers. The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and the mustard-seed. A time which has given birth to such novelists as many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time for the English novel. Criticism will have to recognize, and at once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of the 'literature of power,' and if criticism does not so recognize it, so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing boy-it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be stretched to fit the muscles as they swell."

"I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?"

"Well, there I am a 'galled jade' that must needs 'wince' a little.

No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity. The chief argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed with the journal's own authority-and the same applies, of course, to the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious. With regard to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to be always on his guard against it. An editor cannot read all the books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary world. When Jones asks him for Brown's book for review, the editor cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones's name, but that of the journal.

In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great injustice may flow from this. I myself have more than once heard a good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything."

Now that the day of the 'smart slaters' is over, it is interesting to read in connection with these obiter dicta the following pa.s.sage from the article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the 'Athenaeum,' spoke of its record and its triumphs:-

"The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through its columns. Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the editorial 'we.' But with regard to the general public, the reader of a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of the 'we,' and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. These were the views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the best writers of our time there can be no doubt. Some very ill.u.s.trious men have given very emphatic expression to them. On a certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced himself, and told how he had stood 'dividing the swift mind' as to whether he could or could not offer the man his hand. 'I think I should have offered him mine,' said Rossetti, 'although no one detests his offence more than I do.' And then the conversation ran upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old friends could not shake hands. 'There is one kind of miscreant,'

said Rossetti, 'whom you have forgotten to name-a miscreant who in kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when he knows it to be good. That is the man who should never defile my hand by his touch. By G.o.d, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste bread and salt with him. I would quietly get up and go.' Tennyson, on afterwards being told this story, said, 'And who would not do the same? Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege-sacrilege against art.' Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume of the 'Athenaeum' worked on the great principle that the critic's primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pa.s.s by. Their pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his coadjutors; and from its commencement the 'Athenaeum' has striven to avoid slashing and smart writing. A difficult thing to avoid, no doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever. Of all forms of writing, the founders of the 'Athenaeum' held the shallow, smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable. And here again the views of the 'Athenaeum' have remained unchanged. The critic who works 'without a conscience or an aim' knows only too well that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses of human nature-the love that people have of seeing each other attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself.

For although man has a strong instinct for admiration-else had he never reached his present position in the conscious world-he has, running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct-the instinct for contempt. A reviewer's ridicule poured upon a writer t.i.tillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority. It is by pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist hopes to kill two birds with one stone-to gratify his own malignity and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so.

Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all. Many brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever, have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart saying. One of these writers-the greatest wit of the nineteenth century-used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered his own prodigious powers of wit, 'I will engage in six lessons to teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks it worth his while to learn.' And the 'Athenaeum,' at the time when Hood was reviewing d.i.c.kens in its columns, could have said the same thing. The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching."

Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor should 'come down a cropper' over some matter of fact, and open the door to troublesome correspondence. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the mysterious 'we' must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the authority of the oracle? When a contributor 'comes down a cropper,'

although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of the 'Sat.u.r.day Review' under Cook) refuse to insert a correction. Now, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, 'the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy does it feel in setting other intelligences right.' I have been told that it was a tradition in the office of the 'Examiner,' and also in the office of the 'Athenaeum,' that Theodore Watts had not only never been known to 'come down a cropper,' but had never given the 'critical gnats'

a chance of pretending that he had to. One day, however, in an article on Frederick Tennyson's poems, speaking of the position that the poet Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr.

Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith-the same Smith whom 'Z'

(the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the 'Athenaeum'-had been admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith's with the metaphors of Shakespeare. The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great man:-