Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/585

 health hopeless, he took him to ‘The Pines’, his house in Putney. Henceforth, Swinburne, a child in many ways, was the centre of his world. He managed Swinburne's affairs, and stamped the macabre element out of his life and writing. The two lived together till Swinburne's death (1909), and the devoted and tactful control of Watts-Dunton prolonged Swinburne's life, though it involved a certain loss of his independence in material life and critical judgement. Watts-Dunton married in 1905 Clara, youngest daughter of Gustave A. Reich, of East India Avenue, E.C., but this did not change the quiet, ordered life at The Pines, where he died 6 June 1914. He had no children.

In the Athenæum Watts-Dunton printed from time to time scenes in verse, in which Rhona Boswell, a gipsy girl, was prominent, and the publication of these, with additions, as The Coming of Love, and Other Poems made a stir in 1897. On the whole the large and adventurous design of the verses did not ‘command an art equal to its purpose’. He made a great success in 1898 with Aylwin, a novel kept back for many years, and originally called The Renascence of Wonder. This phrase was later announced as the very pith of his critical doctrines, a protest against materialism and pessimism. Aylwin, dealing partly with the same characters as The Coming of Love, revealed a gift for romance and scenery, some admirable gipsies, especially the girl, Sinfi Lovell, and some clever sketches after famous prototypes, such as Rossetti. It also heralded that tide of mysticism which has since become a feature of the twentieth century. Although striking in plot and detail, the book has flat passages which show that the author, a good judge of style, was not a great stylist. The same criticism applies to Watts-Dunton's Athenæum articles, which he himself described as ‘too formless to have other than an ephemeral life’. Not lacking in good things and in generalizations of value, they are clogged with wise saws and ancient instances. They are clear-sighted, and were very widely admired; but their profundity has been exaggerated. Watts-Dunton was one of the first to applaud the verse of George Meredith, and many young authors owed much to his judicious encouragement. His best critical work is his essay on Poetry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th edition, 1885). His tributes to literary friends, reprinted as Old Familiar Faces (1916), are notable though discursive. His agreeable reminiscences of George Borrow may be read in his editions of Lavengro(1893) and The Romany Rye (1900). Here he dwells on Borrow's refusal to ‘figure in the literary arena’. He always protested against the jealousies and personalities of modern literary life. He lived for his friends, read endlessly, put off, polished, and altered his own compositions. The variety of his interests dissipated his energies. He had great kindliness, a good sense of fun, but little humour, and throughout his long life remained a boy in his eagerness for the latest discovery in letters or science.

Aylwin is Watts-Dunton's best imaginative work. His posthumous novel, Vesprie Towers (1916), and his collections of verses, other than The Coming of Love, are not likely to last. Of his sonnets, ‘The Octopus of the Golden Islands’ is a typical example, too close-packed with thought to read naturally. His verse in general lacks the flow and final mastery essential to great poetry. The phrasing and occasionally the rhymes have a factitious appearance. But he was a real romantic in spite of his scientific leanings, and his thoughts went beyond his achievement.

 WAVELL, ARTHUR JOHN BYNG (1882–1916), soldier and explorer—one of few who have made the Mecca pilgrimage successfully in an assumed character—was born in London 27 May 1882. His father, Colonel Arthur Henry Wavell, was the son of an adventurous soldier and fellow of the Royal Society, and his mother, Matilda Clara Beatrice, daughter of the Rev. John Byng, was a collateral descendant of the unfortunate admiral of that name. Before going to Sandhurst he spent three years at Winchester; the school's peculiar football game was to suggest to him ten years later a comparison between a ‘loose hot’ and the struggling mob of pilgrims before the black stone of the Kaaba. Commissioned in the Welsh Regiment in 1900, he saw service in the South African War before he was nineteen, and after the peace went on to Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and other ill-known northern districts to do military intelligence work. He left the army in 1906, and took a farm at Nyali, near Mombasa, where he learned Arabic, and interested himself in the religion of Islam. From this study grew a desire to explore Arabia, to which end he believed, like Sir 559