Mr. Douglas quotes Rossetti as affirming of Watts-Dunton that he was the one man of his time who with immense literary equipment was without literary ambition. This may be true of the Theodore Watts of Rossetti’s time. It is not altogether true of the Watts-Dunton whom I knew during the last quarter of a century.
The extraordinary success of _Aylwin_, published, be it remembered--though some of us had been privileged to see it long before--in 1898, when the author was 66, bewildered and staggered Watts-Dunton, but the literary ambitions which that success aroused came too late in life to be realised. Though a prodigious and untiring worker, he was unsystematic and a dreamer. The books that he intended to write would have outnumbered the unwritten volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson. Had Stevenson lived longer, his dream-books would one day have materialised into manuscript and finally into paper and print. He was one of those whom Jean Paul Richter had in mind when he said: “There shall come a time when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find--his dreams still there, and that nothing has gone save his sleep.” Stevenson worked by impulse. His talk and his letters--like too plenteously-charged goblets, which brim over and run to waste--were full of stories he was set upon writing, but from which on the morrow he turned aside to follow some literary Lorelei whose lurings more accorded with the mood of the moment.
“I shall have another portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this story that has played me out,” he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin in January, 1875. “The story is to be called _When the Devil was Well_. Scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander one step aside, but go ever before its face and ever swifter and louder until the pit receives its roaring?”
But Stevenson worked of set purpose, and, for the most part, sooner or later in another mood, went rainbow-chasing again, hoping to find--like the pot of gold which children believe lies hidden where the rainbow ends--his broken fragments of a dream that he might recover and weave them into story form.