William Watson’s Prose Works

Dr. QAISER ZOHA ALAM
Ranchi College, Ranchi

In addition to poetry Sir William Watson (1858-1935) wrote prose occasionally. His prose works, meagre and insignificant though, were delightful enough. Coulson Kernahan compares Watson’s prose with that of Swinburne. He imagines he has two tumblers of water, into each of which some substance has been dissolved. The elaborate illustration is as follows: “So long as this substance is held in solution the water remains cloudy. But into one tumbler I drop a grain or two of a certain chemical. The water clears, and, at the bottom, crystals form, while the water in the other tumbler remains clouded. The water in the tumbler which stands for the prose of William Watson has been clarified (that in the other tumbler has not) by the precipitate of style”.¹ Let us add that Watson had style when he wrote prose, as he had in poetry. The Atlantic ‘Monthly (1893, p. 694) informs us that Watson showed that his knowledge was abundant and his touch sure, which is evident from his introduction to his anthology of Lyric Love. Some people think that Watson should claim attention as an acute and able critic. C. H. Ross says about the quality of his prose: “He has not the startling paradox of Matthew Arnold nor the bombastic extravagance of Mr. Swinburne, nor the exuberant diction of Lowell. Unlike these, he has written no prose that will be remembered alongside of his poetry, if not after it is forgotten”. ²

But Excursions in Criticism gave Watson a respectable place among his contemporary critics, such as Gosse and Dobson. His themes were broad-based, and his criticism not inaccurate. He was a man of sound scholarship. Ross praises Watson for his “independence of judgement, unhampered by the fashionable standards of the day. Great names do not frighten him.” Watson praised Arnold but he could speak disparagingly of Arnold­–the Aristotle of his time. He spoke of “that absence of all just sense of proportion which distinguishes a contemporary school of criticism –a school whose loudest, most voluble apostles are capable of naming villain in the same breath with Dante.” Watson made Dr. Johnson say in Dr. Johnson on Modern Poetry, “Browning could read men. The pity is men cannot read Browning.” Again he said about Browning: “Such tolerance of obscurity and vagueness has never before been witnessed. Browning is the most obvious illustration. Had Browning’s poetry appeared in any other critical age than our own the best accredited judges would have said, ‘This writer has not mastered the ele­mentary art of making his meaning plain: he expects us to disentangle the threads which he declines to take the trouble of untangling for us’ – but our contemporaries patiently plod their way through jungles of tormented language, and seem rather to enjoy the exercise.”

In his prose, he wrote on a wide variety of subjects. This can be deduced from a few titles of his essays: Some Literary Idolatries. The Lancashire Laureate, Mr. Hardy’s Tess, Ibsen’s Prose Dramas and Dr. Johnson on Modern Poetry. Watson thought that “Tess must take its place among the great tragedies, to have read which is to have permanently enlarged the boundaries of one’s intellectual and emotional experience.” This opinion of Hardy’s Tessis evidently sane and correct. Similarly the sincerity behind Watson’s statement on Ibsen cannot be doubted. A long quotation here would be helpful­–

“To those enthusiasts, however, who would place him on an equality with the greatest dramatists, sane and sober criticism can only reply: ‘No; this narrow intensity of vision, this preoccupation with a part of existence, is never the note of the masters. They deal with life; he deals only with death-in-life. They treat of society; he treats only of the rottenness of society. Their subject is human nature; his human disease’...Artists like Ibsen turn the House of life into a moral hospital, and see nothing in men and women hut interesting ‘cases’ ... That his own aim is passionately moral I do not doubt, but wisdom, it seems to me, lies somewhere midway between this determined pessimism and the contrary spirit which is forever singing ‘God’s in his heaven – all’s right with the world.’ All is not right with the world; but, then, neither is all wrong with the world, as Ibsen would apparently have us believe”. ³

We may not agree with Watson here but we cannot fail to notice the confidence and power with which Watson made this statement. Those who say that Watson’s poetry lacked imagination, passion, and poetic beauty, should have at least noticed the poetic qualities of Watson’s prose.

In Some Literary Idolatries Watson maintained that Dekker, Webster, Tourneur and Ford were overpraised, and also said that Webster and Poe were not poets of the first rank. In this very essay, he propounded his own theory about poetry:” ...the authentic masters, are they not masters in virtue of their power of nobly elucidating the difficult world, not of exhibiting it in a fantastic limelight? And after all, the highest beauty in art is, perhaps transcendent propriety. The touches which allure us by strangeness, or which ‘surprise by a fine excess’ belong at best to the second order of greatness. The highest, rarest, and most marvellous of all, are those which simply compel us to feel they are supremely fit and right ⁴.” And Watson, as we have, seen always stressed the value of style. Somewhere else he said: “The truth is, style is high breeding.” He further said of style: “What we do imply when we speak of a horse or a woman or a poem, as having style, is a certain crowning attitude which we recognize instinctively as the result and sum of various essentially aristocratic qualities which fuse in perfect harmony and rhythm...” And Watson thought “Serenity” and “a certain tough of hauteur” to be perhaps inseparable from style in its most impressive manifestations.”

Watson had complaints that the younger poets (then he was also one of them) received scant attention and also people did not buy their works. He said: “Yet I am bound to admit that this need for the poet is felt by but few persons in our day. With one exception there is not a single living English poet, the sales of whose poems would not have been thought contemptible by Scott and Byron. The exception is, of course, that apostle of British imperialism – that vehement and voluble glorifier of Britannic ideals, whom I dare say you will readily identify from my brief, and, I hope, not disparaging description of him. With that one brilliant and salient exception, England’s living singers succeed in reaching only a pitifully small audience”.⁵ Watson had Kipling in mind, it is an easy guess. Perhaps Watson forgot that Scott and Byron were great literary geniuses. Because of his jingoism, Kipling had become a colossal figure. But unfor­tunately it is also true that our poet was neglected, and he knew it. Watson offered his contemporaries his “most sincere condolences on the hard fate which condemned them to be born there at all in the latter part of the nineteenth century.” The only modification of these views would be that people read poetry, though they did not buy books.

About the aim of poetry Watson said, that it “is to keep, fresh within us our often flagging sense of life’s greatness and grandeur.” Watson answered in The Academy some questions raised by Arthur Symons. In defence of the British Philistine; he said, “Now I should like to ask, what has the British Philistine done that he should have a book shied at his head in the way Mr. Symons thinks desirable”. ⁶ Speaking about Meredith’s writings, he went on to say, “I, fancy, however, that when Meredith’s devotees speak of the British Philistine they really mean the vast majority of the public and it seems to me a little absurd, that because there is an author whose writings the public are comparatively indifferent to, it should be constantly assured that the only person not in the least responsible for such indifference is the author.” This shows that our author could give scathing criticism in prose.
He presented his point clearly and logically. Hisnotes to the Collected Poems are written with brevity and simplicitythe two qualities he thought essential to make good style.

Besides the titles we have already enumerated, other important prose works of Watson are Excursions in Criticism; Being Some Prose Recreation of a Rhymer (1893, The Poet’s Place in the Scheme of Life (1913), actually a lecture delivered in the United States, and Pencraft: A Plea for Older Ways. He showed his traditionalist leanings in his prose works as in his poetry.

References

¹ C. Kernahan. Five More Famous Living Poets.Thornton Butterworth Ltd. (1928) Pp. 279-280.    
² C. H. Ross. The Poetry of William Watson, The Sewanee Review. Vol. 3 (1894-’95). P. 168.
³ Ibid, Pp. 170-171.
⁴  C. Weygandt. William Watson and his Poetry. The Sewanee Review.  Vol. XII (1901). P. 196.
⁵ W. L. Phelps. The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. Dodd, Mead Co. (1938) P. 45.
⁶ Arther Symons. Dramatis Personae.Faber & Gwyer. (1923) P. 47.