Poetry in the late nineteenth centurycharge (51). 16 "Watson was a fiercely patriotic man," Nelson says, who
"demanded the highest conduct of his nation" (51). Maybe. But it is
difficult to avoid the feeling that Watson's inept sonnets are written with an
eye to the main chance. He is putting himself on show as Tory, patriot, and
by implication monarchist. (By 1885, Queen Victoria's dislike of Gladstone
was common knowledge, and any threat to the empire was anathema to
her.) Watson is therefore to be seen as the acceptable face of poetry.
The face was on show again in 1890. In that year Watson published his
edition of Austin's English Lyrics. His preface to that volume makes plain
his intention to put considerable distance between himself and other
contemporary poets:
Unless immemorial principles of right taste and judgment are to be annulled,
life, substance, reason, and reality, with a just balance of sense and sound, are
what future generations will look for in our singers. And surely if poetry is
not to sink altogether under the lethargy of an emasculate euphuism, and
finally to die surfeited with unwholesome sweetmeats, crushed under a load
of redundant ornament, and smothered in artificial rose-leaves, the strenuous
and virile temper which animates this volume must come to be more and
more the temper of English song? 17The originator of this "emasculate euphuism" - its unmanly rhetoric - is
apparently the Romantic radical Percy Bysshe Shelley, deceased for over
sixty years. Among Shelley's unnatural progeny are, of course, Swinburne
and his followers: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and other
writers whose names, rightly or wrongly, would be associated with "the
Decadence" represented in the short-lived but controversial Yellow Book
(1894-97). It is weu known that, with the arrest of Wilde in April 1895,
Watson - together with other reactionary authors - sent a telegram to John
Lane (the publisher of the Yellow Book), who was then in New York City.
The telegram urged Lane to dismiss Aubrey Beardsley, notorious for his
sexually provocative illustrations, from his post as the journal's art editor.
Watson, according to Nelson, "like so many Victorians, had merely
tolerated the fin-de-siecle artists and poseurs, and had only waited for the
right moment to act" (in). But Watson's very public behavior would have
been further evidence of his acceptability to the powers-that-were, and it
was surely in this spirit that he meant to be taken. The announcement of
Alfred Austin as Poet Laureate must therefore have hurt.
Crowell takes for granted the Marquess of Salisbury's cynicism in
appointing Austin. Apparently, Prime Minister Salisbury told Sir Algernon
West that Austin was given the Laureateship "[f]or the best possible reason,
because he wanted it" (Alfred Austin, 157). But so did Lewis Morris, so did
Watson, and for that matter so did Sir Edwin Arnold, whose The Light of
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