This saying has a mental as well as a physical application. It is surprising, as I have elsewhere said, how entirely Watts-Dunton’s individuality remained uninfluenced by his close association with two men of such strongly-marked and extraordinary individuality as Rossetti and Swinburne. One reservation must, however, be made. On certain personal matters the plumb of Watts-Dunton’s judgment was apt slightly to be deflected out of line by Swinburne’s denunciation. If Swinburne thundered an anathema against some one who had provoked his wrath, Watts-Dunton, even if putting in a characteristically indulgent word for the offender, was inclined--if unconsciously and against his better judgment--to view the matter in the same light.
Similarly, if Watts-Dunton had some small cause of complaint--it might even be a fancied cause of complaint--and Swinburne heard of it, the latter’s attachment to his friend caused him so to trumpet his anger as to magnify the matter to undue importance in Watts-Dunton’s eyes as well as in his own.
In this way and in this way only the association between Watts-Dunton and Swinburne was to the advantage of neither, as the mind of the one reacted sometimes upon the mind of the other to produce prejudice and to impair judgment. I have no thought or intention of belittling either in saying this. It is no service to the memory of a friend to picture him as a superman and superior to all human weakness. But if Watts-Dunton was not without his prejudices and literary dislike, he was as a critic the soul of honour, and would not write a line in review of the work of the man or woman concerning whom he had justly or unjustly already formed an unfavourable opinion. As a reviewer he set a standard which we should do well to maintain. He was no Puritan. To him everything in life was spiritually symbolic, and nothing was of itself common or unclean. The article in which he dealt with Sterne’s indecencies shirks nothing that needed to be said upon the subject, but says it in such a way as to recall Le Gallienne’s happy definition of purity--as the power to touch pitch while remaining undefiled--for in all Watts-Dunton’s spoken no less than in his written word, there was no single passage, no single line, which one could on that score regret. In his poems the red flambeau of passion and the white taper of purity burn side by side on one altar. His innate love of purity, his uncompromising attitude towards everything suggestive or unclean, were among his most marked characteristics as writer and as man. It is well for literature that one of the greatest critics of our day should have thus jealously guarded the honour of the mistress whom he served. As a poet, he was of the company of those who, in his own words: