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Title: Theodore Watts-Dunton - Poet, Novelist, Critic
Author: Douglas, James
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Theodore Watts-Dunton - Poet, Novelist, Critic" ***
Transcribed from the 1904 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Theodore Watts-Dunton, from a painting by Miss H. B. Norris]
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
POET NOVELIST CRITIC
BY
JAMES DOUGLAS
[Picture: Decorative graphic, Natura Benigna]
WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
* * * * *
LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 PATERNOSTER ROW
1904
SYNOPSIS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER 11
CHAPTER II
COWSLIP COUNTRY 26
CHAPTER III
THE CRITIC IN THE BUD 40
CHAPTER IV
CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM 50
CHAPTER V
EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES 61
CHAPTER VI
SPORT AND WORK 65
CHAPTER VII
EAST ANGLIA 72
CHAPTER VIII
LONDON 87
CHAPTER IX
GEORGE BORROW 95
CHAPTER X
THE ACTED DRAMA 117
CHAPTER XI
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 138
CHAPTER XII
WILLIAM MORRIS 170
CHAPTER XIII
THE ‘EXAMINER’ 183
CHAPTER XIV
THE ‘ATHENÆUM’ 190
CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER 228
CHAPTER XVI
A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR 242
CHAPTER XVII
‘THE LIFE POETIC’ 262
CHAPTER XVIII
AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS 295
CHAPTER XIX
WALES 312
CHAPTER XX
IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE 321
CHAPTER XXI
THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION 345
CHAPTER XXII
A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES 363
CHAPTER XXIII
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION 372
CHAPTER XXIV
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR 382
CHAPTER XXV
GORGIOS AND ROMANIES 389
CHAPTER XXVI
‘THE COMING OF LOVE’ 393
CHAPTER XXVIII
“CHRISTMAS AT THE ‘MERMAID’” 422
CHAPTER XXVIII
CONCLUSION 442
ILLUSTRATIONS
Theodore Watts-Dunton. From a painting by Miss H. Frontispiece
B. Norris
Reverie. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at ‘The Pines’ 1
The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts. (From a Water 28
Colour by Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)
‘The Thicket,’ St. Ives. (From a Water Colour by 32
Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)
Slepe Hall: Cromwell’s Supposed Residence at St. 36
Ives. (From an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
‘Evening Dreams with the Poets.’ (From an Oil 68
Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Painted and 92
Carved Cabinet
A Letter Box on the Broads. (From an Oil Painting 114
at ‘The Pines.’)
Pandora. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at ‘The Pines’ 140
‘The Green Dining Room,’ 16 Cheyne Walk. (From a 161
Painting by Dunn, at ‘The Pines.’)
One of the Carved Mirrors at ‘The Pines,’ 162
decorated with Dunn’s copy of the lost Rossetti
Frescoes at the Oxford Union
Kelmscott Manor. (From a Water Colour by Miss May 170
Morris.)
‘The Pines.’ (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.) 262
A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Lacquer 266
Cabinet
Summer at ‘The Pines’—I 268
A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Chinese Divan 270
described in ‘Aylwin’
Summer at ‘The Pines’—II 274
‘Picture for a Story.’ (Face and Instrument 276
designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)
Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd 312
Moel Siabod and the River Lledr 314
Snowdon and Glaslyn 318
Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff. (From 342
an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at 364
‘The Pines.’)
‘John the Pilgrim.’ (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.) 416
NATURA BENIGNA
_What power is this_? _what witchery wins my feet_
_To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow_,
_All silent as the emerald gulfs below_,
_Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat_?
_What thrill of earth and heaven_—_most wild_, _most sweet_—
_What answering pulse that all the senses know_,
_Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow_
_Where_, _far away_, _the skies and mountains meet_?
_Mother_, ’_tis I reborn_: _I know thee well_:
_That throb I know and all it prophesies_,
_O Mother and Queen_, _beneath the olden spell_
_Of silence_, _gazing from thy hills and skies_!
_Dumb Mother_, _struggling with the years to tell_
_The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes_.
[Picture: Reverie. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines]
Introduction
‘It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide
circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full
acknowledged: that one thing was—to die.’—DOUGLAS JERROLD.
ALTHOUGH in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living
writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general
reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it.
Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong,
Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source
of his education. He replied: “Cambridge, scholastically, and
Watts-Dunton’s articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the
‘Athenæum’ from the purely literary point of view. I have been a reader
of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I
should have been without them.” Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that
he bought the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ simply to possess one article—Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s article on Poetry. There are many other men of letters
who would give similar testimony. With regard to his critical work, Mr.
Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on Poetry,
describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as ‘the first critic of our time, perhaps the
largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,’ {1} a judgment which,
according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s
‘Encyclopædia,’ Rossetti endorsed. In this same article it is further
said:—
“He came to exercise a most important influence on the art and
culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many
volumes—in the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum’ (since 1876), the
‘Nineteenth Century,’ the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ etc.—he has let year
after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always
dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous,
and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his.
But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he is only
ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and
other poems that, from the ‘Athenæum,’ etc., have found their way
into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has
contributed to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ‘Chambers’s
Encyclopædia,’ etc. The chief note of his poetry—much of it written
in youth—is its individuality, the source of its inspiration Nature
and himself. For he who of all men has most influenced his brother
poets has himself remained least influenced by them. So, too, his
prose writings—literary mainly, but ranging also over folk-lore,
ethnology, and science generally—are marked as much by their
independence and originality as by their suggestiveness, harmony,
incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight. They have made
him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not Jeffrey, is
a parallel.” {2}
These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, written before
his theory of the ‘Renascence of Wonder’ was exemplified in ‘Aylwin’ and
‘The Coming of Love,’ show, I think, that this book would have had a
right to exist even if his critical writings had been collected into
volumes; but as this collection has never been made, and I believe never
will be made by the author, I feel that to do what I am now doing is to
render the reading public a real service. For many years he has been
urged by his friends to collect his critical articles, but although
several men of letters have offered to relieve him of that task, he has
remained obdurate.
Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was not an eager
student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings. Like most boys born with the
itch for writing, I began to spill ink on paper in my third lustre. The
fermentation of the soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy,
modelled upon ‘Lycidas,’ on the death of an indulgent aunt, also drove me
to welter in drowsy critical journals. By some humour of chance I
stumbled upon the ‘Athenæum,’ and there I found week by week writing that
made me tingle with the rapture of discovery. The personal magic of some
unknown wizard led me into realms of gold and kingdoms of romance. I
used to count the days till the ‘Athenæum’ appeared in my Irish home, and
I spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into
ponderous tomes. Well I remember the advent of the old, white-bearded
Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes: even now I can smell the
pungent odour of the damp paste and glue. In those days I was a solitary
bookworm, living far from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name
of the magician who was carrying me into so ‘many goodly states and
kingdoms.’ With boyish audacity I wrote to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’
begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naïve appeal
provoked a smile in Took’s Court. But although the editor was dumb, I
exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials, ‘J. D.,’ under the
solemn rubric, ‘To Correspondents.’
It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles with the
unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the name of my hero,
Theodore Watts. Of course, the sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my
execrable imitation of ‘Australia’s Mother’ was printed in the ‘Belfast
News-Letter’ I felt like Byron when he woke up and found himself famous.
Afterwards, when I had plunged into the surf of literary London, I learnt
that the writer who had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was
well known in cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.
There was, indeed, no account of him in print. It was not till 1887 that
I found a brief but masterly memoir in ‘Celebrities of the Century.’ The
article concluded with the statement that in the ‘Athenæum’ and in the
Ninth Edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ Mr. Watts-Dunton had
‘founded a school of criticism which discarded conventional authority,
and sought to test all literary effects by the light of first principles
merely.’ These words encouraged me, for they told me that as a boy I had
not been wrong in thinking that I had discovered a master and a guide in
literature. Then came the memoir of Philip Bourke Marston by the
American poetess, Louise Chandler Moulton, in which she described Mr.
Watts-Dunton as ‘a poet whose noble work won for him the intimate
friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord Tennyson, and was the first
link in that chain of more than brotherly love which binds him to
Swinburne, his housemate at present and for many years past.’ I also
came across Clarence Stedman’s remarks upon the opening of ‘The Coming of
Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ first printed in the ‘Athenæum.’ He was
enthusiastic about the poet’s perception of ‘Nature’s grander aspects,’
and spoke of his poetry as being ‘quite independent of any bias derived
from the eminent poets with whom his life has been closely associated.’
When afterwards I made his acquaintance, our intercourse led to the
formation of a friendship which has deepened my gratitude for the
spiritual and intellectual guidance I have found in his writings for
nearly twenty years. Owing to the popularity of ‘The Coming of Love’ and
of ‘Aylwin’—which the late Lord Acton, in ‘The Annals of Politics and
Culture,’ placed at the head of the three most important books published
in 1898—Mr. Watts-Dunton’s name is now familiar to every fairly educated
person. About few men living is there so much literary curiosity; and
this again is a reason for writing a book about him.
The idea of making an elaborate study of his work, however, did not come
to me until I received an invitation from Dr. Patrick, the editor of
Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ to write for that
publication an article on Mr. Watts-Dunton—an article which had been
allotted to Professor Strong, but which he had been obliged through
indisposition to abandon at the last moment. I undertook to do this.
But within the limited space at my command I was able only very briefly
to discuss his work as a poet. Soon afterwards I was invited by my
friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, to write a monograph upon Mr. Watts-Dunton
for Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, and, if I should see my way to do so, to
sound him on the subject. My only difficulty was in approaching Mr.
Watts-Dunton, for I knew how constantly he had been urged by the press to
collect his essays, and how persistently he had declined to do so.
Nevertheless, I wrote to him, telling him how gladly I should undertake
the task, and how sure I was that the book was called for. His answer
was so characteristic that I must give it here:—
“MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,—It must now be something like fifteen years
since Mr. John Lane, who was then compiling a bibliography of George
Meredith, asked me to consent to his compiling a bibliography of my
articles in the ‘Athenæum’ and elsewhere, and although I emphatically
declined to sanction such a bibliography, he on several occasions did
me the honour to renew his request. I told him, as I have told one
or two other generous friends, that although I had put into these
articles the best criticism and the best thought at my command, I
considered them too formless to have other than an ephemeral life. I
must especially mention the name of Mr. Alfred Nutt, who for years
has been urging me to let him publish a selection from my critical
essays. I am really proud to record this, because Mr. Nutt is not
only an eminent publisher but an admirable scholar and a man of
astonishing accomplishments. I had for years, let me confess,
cherished the idea that some day I might be able to take my various
expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon poetry, and
mould them into a coherent and, perhaps, into a harmonious whole.
This alone would have satisfied me. But year by year the body of
critical writing from my pen has grown, and I felt and feel more and
more unequal to the task of grappling with such a mass. To the last
writer of eminence who gratified me by suggesting a collection of
these essays—Dr. Robertson Nicoll—I wrote, and wrote it with entire
candour, that in my opinion the view generally taken of the value of
them is too generous. Still, they are the result of a good deal of
reflection and not a little research, especially those in the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ and I am not so entirely without literary
aspiration as not to regret that, years ago, when the mass of
material was more manageable, I neglected to collect them and edit
them myself. But the impulse to do this is now gone. Owing to the
quite unexpected popularity of ‘The Coming of Love’ and of ‘Aylwin,’
my mind has been diverted from criticism, and plunged into those much
more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction in which I used to
revel long before. If you really think that a selection of passages
from the articles, and a critical examination and estimate of the
imaginative work would be of interest to any considerable body of
readers, I do not know why I should withhold my consent. But I
confess, judging from such work of your own as I have seen, I find it
difficult to believe that it is worth your while to enter upon any
such task.
I agree with you that it is difficult to see how you are to present
and expound the principles of criticism advanced in the ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ etc., without discussing those two
imaginative works the writing of which inspired the canons and
generalizations in the critical work—‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of
Love.’ As regards ‘Aylwin,’ however, I cannot help wincing under the
thought that in these days when so much genius is at work in prose
fiction, your discussion will seem to give quite an undue prominence
to a writer who has published but one novel. This I confess does
disturb me somewhat, and I wish you to bear well in mind this aspect
of the matter before you seriously undertake the book. As to the
prose fiction of the present moment, I constantly stand amazed at its
wealth. If, however, you do touch upon ‘Aylwin,’ I hope you will
modify those generous—too generous—expressions of yours which, I
remember, you printed in a review of the book when it first
appeared.”
After getting this sanction I set to work, and soon found that my chief
obstacle was the superabundance of material, which would fill several
folio volumes. But although it is undoubtedly ‘a mighty maze,’ it is
‘not without a plan.’ In a certain sense the vast number of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s generalizations upon literature, art, philosophy, and what
Emerson calls ‘the conduct of life,’ revolve round certain fixed
principles which have guided me in the selection I have made. I also
found that to understand these principles of romantic art, it was
necessary to make a thorough critical study of the romance, ‘Aylwin,’ and
of the book of poems, ‘The Coming of Love.’ I think I have made that
study, and that I have connected the critical system with the imaginative
work more thoroughly than has been done by any other writer, although the
work of Mr. Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been acutely
discussed, not only in England but also in France and in Italy.
The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as that of his
poetry and fiction. He poured into his criticism the intellectual and
imaginative force which other men pour into purely artistic channels, for
he made criticism a vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his
irony. His criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime. Their vitality
is not impaired by the impermanence of their texts. No critic has
surpassed his universality of range. Out of a full intellectual and
imaginative life he has evolved speculations which cut deep not only into
the fibre of modern thought but into the future of human development.
Great teachers have their day and their disciples. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
day and disciples belong to the young future whose dawn some of us
already descry. For, as Mr. Justin McCarthy wrote of ‘Aylwin,’ ‘it is
inspired by the very spirit of youth,’ and this is why so many of the
younger writers are beginning to accept him as their guide. Mr.
Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life which, I
think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the pessimists across
the history of the soul of man. That is the aspect of his work which
calls for the comprehension of the new generation. The old cosmogonies
are dead; here is the new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse
of wonder reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion
of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna which no
assaults of science can shake.
But, although the main object of this book is to focus, as it were, the
many scattered utterances of Mr. Watts-Dunton in prose and poetry upon
the great subject of the Renascence of Wonder, I have interspersed here
and there essays which do not touch upon this theme, and also excerpts
from those obituary notices of his friends which formed so fascinating a
part of his contributions to the ‘Athenæum.’ For, of course, it was
necessary to give the charm of variety to the book. Rossetti used to
say, I believe, that there is one quality necessary in a poem which very
many poets are apt to ignore—the quality of being amusing. I have always
thought that there is great truth in this, and I have also thought that
the remark is applicable to prose no less than to poetry. This is why I
have occasionally enlivened these pages with extracts from his
picturesque monographs; indeed, I have done more than this. Not having
known Mr. Watts-Dunton’s great contemporaries myself, I have looked about
me for the aid of certain others who did know them. I have not hesitated
to collect from various sources such facts and details connected with Mr.
Watts-Dunton and his friends as are necessarily beyond the scope of my
own experience and knowledge. Among these I must prominently mention one
to whom I have been specially indebted for reminiscences of Mr.
Watts-Dunton and his circle. This is Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, eldest son
of the ‘parable poet,’ a gentleman of much too modest and retiring a
disposition, who, from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s first appearance in London
right onwards, was brought into intimate relations with himself, his
relatives, Rossetti, William Morris, Westland Marston, Philip Bourke
Marston, Madox Brown, George Borrow, Stevenson, Minto, and many others.
I have not only made free use of his articles, but I have had the
greatest aid from him in many other respects, and it is my bare duty to
express my gratitude to him for his services. I have also to thank the
editor of the ‘Athenæum’ for cordially granting me permission to quote so
freely from its columns; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging my
debt to the many other publications from which I have drawn materials for
this book.
Chapter I
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER
“‘The renascence of wonder,’ to employ Mr. Watts-Dunton’s appellation
for what he justly considers the most striking and significant
feature in the great romantic revival which has transformed
literature, is proclaimed by this very appellation not to be the
achievement of any one innovator, but a general reawakening of
mankind to a perception that there were more things in heaven and
earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.”—DR. R. GARNETT:
Monograph on Coleridge.
UNDOUBTEDLY the greatest philosophical generalization of our time is
expressed in the four words, ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ They suggest
that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to Mr.
Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that set in
after the publication of Darwin’s great book. This phrase, which I first
became familiar with in his ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ article on
Rossetti, seems really to have been used first in ‘Aylwin.’ The story
seems originally to have been called ‘The Renascence of Wonder,’ but the
title was abandoned because the writer believed that an un-suggestive
name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the practical
point of view. For the knowledge of this I am indebted to Mr. Hake, who
says:—
“During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in Great James Street,
several of his friends had chambers in the same street, and among
them were my late father, Dr. Gordon Hake—Rossetti’s friend and
physician—Mr. Watts-Dunton and myself. Mr. Watts-Dunton, as is well
known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as a
writer. I have heard him tell scores of stories full of plot and
character that have never appeared in print. On a certain occasion
he was suffering from one of his periodical eye troubles that had
used occasionally to embarrass him. He had just been telling Mr.
Swinburne the plot of a suggested story, the motive of which was the
‘renascence of wonder in art and poetry’ depicting certain well-known
characters.
I offered to act as his amanuensis in writing the story, and did so,
with the occasional aid of my father and brothers. The story was
sent to the late F. W. Robinson, the novelist, then at the zenith of
his vogue, who declared that he ‘saw a fortune in it,’ and it was he
who advised the author to send it to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. As
far as I remember, the time occupied by the work was between five and
six months. When a large portion of it was in type it was read by
many friends,—among others by the late Madox Brown, who thought some
of the portraits too close, as the characters were then all living,
except one, the character who figures as Cyril. Although
unpublished, it was so well known that an article upon it appeared in
the ‘Liverpool Mercury.’ This was more than twenty years ago.”
The important matter before us, however, is not when he first used this
phrase, which has now become a sort of literary shorthand to express a
wide and sweeping idea, but what it actually imports. Fortunately Mr.
Watts-Dunton has quite lately given us a luminous exposition of what the
words do precisely mean. Last year he wrote for that invaluable work,
Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ the Introduction to volume
iii., and no one can any longer say that there is any ambiguity in this
now famous phrase:—
“As the storm-wind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty
billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the
effect of the French Revolution. It was nothing less than a great
revived movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic
acceptance in all things, including literature and art. To this
revival the present writer, in the introduction to an imaginative
work dealing with this movement, has already, for convenience’ sake,
and in default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of
Wonder. As was said on that occasion, ‘The phrase, the Renascence of
Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing
man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious
life: the impulse of acceptance—the impulse to take unchallenged and
for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are—and the
impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.’
It would seem that something works as inevitably and as logically as
a physical law in the yearning which societies in a certain stage of
development show to get away, as far away as possible, from the
condition of the natural man; to get away from that despised
condition not only in material affairs, such as dress, domestic
arrangements and economies, but also in the fine arts and in
intellectual methods, till, having passed that inevitable stage, each
society is liable to suffer (even if it does not in some cases
actually suffer) a reaction, when nature and art are likely again to
take the place of convention and artifice. Anthropologists have
often asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark
womb of some remote semi-human brain, which, by first stirring,
lifting, and vitalizing other potential and latent faculties, gave
birth to man? Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a
vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder? But certainly it is not
rash, as regards the races of man, to affirm that the more
intelligent the race the less it is governed by the instinct of
acceptance, and the more it is governed by the instinct of wonder,
that instinct which leads to the movement of challenge. The
alternate action of the two great warring instincts is specially seen
just now in the Japanese. Here the instinct of challenge which
results in progress became active up to a certain point, and then
suddenly became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have
full play, and then everything became crystallized. Ages upon ages
of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were required
before the Mongolian savage was developed into the Japanese of the
period before the nature-worship of ‘Shinto’ had been assaulted by
dogmatic Buddhism. But by that time the instinct of challenge had
resulted in such a high state of civilization that acceptance set in
and there was an end, for the time being, of progress. There is no
room here to say even a few words upon other great revivals in past
times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian renascence of the
ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in philosophical
speculation, which had previously been arrested, was revived; when
the old sciences were revived; and when some modern sciences were
born. There are, of course, different kinds of wonder.”
This passage has a peculiar interest for me, because I instinctively
compare it with the author’s speech delivered at the St. Ives old Union
Book Club dinner when he was a boy. It shows the same wide vision, the
same sweep, and the same rush of eloquence. It is in view of this great
generalization that I have determined to quote that speech later.
The essay then goes on in a swift way to point out the different kinds of
wonder:—
“Primitive poetry is full of wonder—the naïve and eager wonder of the
healthy child. It is this kind of wonder which makes the ‘Iliad’ and
the ‘Odyssey’ so delightful. The wonder of primitive poetry passes
as the primitive conditions of civilization pass; and then for the
most part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of
wonder—the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery of man’s
life and the mystery of nature’s theatre on which the human drama is
played—the wonder, in short, of Æschylus and Sophocles. And among
the Romans, Virgil, though living under the same kind of Augustan
acceptance in which Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, is
full of this latter kind of wonder. Among the English poets who
preceded the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed
there is no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he
can only be slightly touched upon. He stands at the head of those
who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the
wonder of the ‘world at hand.’ Of the poets whose wonder is of the
simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of
the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king. But
it is not the wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in
the following sentences. It is the spiritual wonder which in our
literature came afterwards. It is that kind of wonder which filled
the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Webster, of
Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the old ballads: it is that poetical
attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen
powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which
man finds himself entangled, dominate it. That this high temper
should have passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance
is quite inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction
of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract
from the Introduction to ‘Aylwin.’ Perhaps the difference between
the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian
on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better
understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective
periods.”
Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and relative
humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type of absolute
humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin.’
I will now quote a passage from an article in the ‘Quarterly Review’ on
William Morris by one of Morris’s intimate friends:—
“The decorative renascence in England is but an expression of the
spirit of the pre-Raphaelite movement—a movement which has been
defined by the most eminent of living critics as the renascence of
the ‘spirit of wonder’ in poetry and art. So defined, it falls into
proper relationship with the continuous development of English
literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last century and
a half, and is no longer to be considered an isolated phenomenon
called into being by an erratic genius. The English Romantic school,
from its first inception with Chatterton, Macpherson, and the
publication of the Percy ballads, does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
finely pointed out, aim merely at the revival of natural language; it
seeks rather to reach through art and the forgotten world of old
romance, that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of
which poets gain glimpses through
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:—
“It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that
mysterious side of nature and man’s life which to other painters of
his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the
wings of sport. It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity
as Dante’s Dream, La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they
Met Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that
Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern
art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical
imitation of the facts of nature.
For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in
modern Europe, if it is not a mere passing mood, if it is really the
inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of
civilization (when the sanctions which have made and moulded society
are found to be not absolute and eternal, but relative, mundane,
ephemeral, and subject to the higher sanctions of unseen powers that
work behind ‘the shows of things’), then perhaps one of the first
questions to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the
nineteenth century is, In what relation does he stand to the
newly-awakened spirit of romance? Had he a genuine and independent
sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over Europe
had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation, prosaic
acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic materialism? Or was his
apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence and awe the
result of artistic environment dictated to him by other and more
powerful and original souls around him? I do not say that the mere
fact of a painter’s or poet’s showing but an imperfect sympathy with
the Renascence of Wonder is sufficient to place him below a poet in
whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, because we should then be
driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti above our great
realistic painters, and we should be driven to place a poet like the
author of ‘The Excursion’ and ‘The Prelude’ beneath a poet like the
author of ‘The Queen’s Wake’; but we do say that, other things being
equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be
judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement which we
call the Renascence of Wonder—call it so because the word romanticism
never did express it even before it had been vulgarized by French
poets, dramatists, doctrinaires, and literary harlequins.
To struggle against the prim traditions of the eighteenth century,
the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types instead of
character, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Balzac, and Hugo
struggled, was well. But in studying Rossetti’s works we reach the
very key of those ‘high palaces of romance’ which the English mind
had never, even in the eighteenth century, wholly forgotten, but
whose mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked. Not all the
romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with
their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood
of romance) could equal the romantic spirit expressed in a single
picture or drawing of Rossetti’s, such, for instance, as Beata
Beatrix or Pandora.
For while the French romanticists—inspired by the theories (drawn
from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck, and Herder—cleverly
simulated the old romantic feeling, the ‘beautifully devotional
feeling’ which Holman Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it: he
was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded
the great renascence of materialism that he might have lived and
worked amidst the old masters. Hence, in point of design, so
original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in Lilith,
Hesterna Rosa, Michael Scott’s Wooing, the Sea Spell, etc., we have
to turn to the sister art of poetry, where only we can find an
equally powerful artistic representation of the idea at the core of
the old romanticism—the idea of the evil forces of nature assailing
man through his sense of beauty. We must turn, we say, not to
art—not even to the old masters themselves—but to the most perfect
efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery—to such ballads as
‘The Demon Lover,’ to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan,’ to
Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ for parallels to Rossetti’s most
characteristic designs.”
These words about Coleridge recall to the students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
work a splendid illustration of the true wonder of the great poetic
temper which he gives in the before-mentioned essay on The Renascence of
Wonder in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’:—
“Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ and ‘Kubla Khan’
are, as regards the romantic spirit, above—and far above—any work of
any other English poet. Instances innumerable might be adduced
showing how his very nature was steeped in the fountain from which
the old balladists themselves drew, but in this brief and rapid
survey there is room to give only one. In the ‘Conclusion’ of the
first part of ‘Christabel’ he recapitulates and summarizes, in lines
that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in succinctness of
statement, the entire story of the bewitched maiden and her terrible
foe which had gone before:—
A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady’s prison.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine—
Thou’st had thy will! By tairn and rill,
The night-birds all that hour were still.
But now they are jubilant anew,
From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!
Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!
Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the human
drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul of poetic
wonder. So great is the maleficent power of the beautiful witch that
a spell is thrown over all Nature. For an hour the very woods and
fells remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic consciousness of
her—
The night-birds all that hour were still.
When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare,
and ‘the night-birds’ are jubilant anew. This is the very highest
reach of poetic wonder—finer, if that be possible, than the
night-storm during the murder of Duncan.”
And now let us turn again to the essay upon Rossetti from which I have
already quoted:—
“Although the idea at the heart of the highest romantic poetry
(allied perhaps to that apprehension of the warring of man’s soul
with the appetites of the flesh which is the basis of the Christian
idea), may not belong exclusively to what we call the romantic temper
(the Greeks, and also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less
familiar with it, as we see in the ‘Salámán’ and ‘Absál’ of Jámí),
yet it became a peculiarly romantic note, as is seen from the fact
that in the old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its
logical expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all
romantic art. But, in order to express this stupendous idea as fully
as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to adopt the
asceticism of the old masters? This is the question that Rossetti
asked himself, and answered by his own progress in art.”
In the same article, Mr. Watts-Dunton discusses the crowning specimen of
Rossetti’s romanticism before it had, as it were, gone to seed and passed
into pure mysticism, the grand design, ‘Pandora,’ of which he possesses
by far the noblest version:—
“In it is seen at its highest Rossetti’s unique faculty of treating
classical legend in the true romantic spirit. The grand and sombre
beauty of Pandora’s face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep
blue-grey eyes as she tries in vain to re-close the fatal box from
which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves
as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with
agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest
romantic mood.”
It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction of this
masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too grateful. The
influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s teachings is seen in the fact that the
idea of the Renascence of Wonder has become expanded by theological
writers and divines in order to include within its scope subjects
connected with religion. Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened
its ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander White’s
‘Appreciation’ of Bishop Butler. He quotes one of the Logia discovered
by the explorers of the Egypt Fund:—‘Let not him that seeketh cease from
his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he
shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have
rest.’ He then points out that Bishop Butler was ‘one of the first to
share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of religion.’
And now I must quote a passage alluding to the generalization upon
absolute and relative humour which I shall give later when discussing the
humour of Mrs. Gudgeon. I shall not be able in these remarks to dwell
upon Mr. Watts-Dunton as a humourist, but the extracts will speak for
themselves. Writing of the great social Pyramid of the Augustan age, Mr.
Watts-Dunton says:—
“This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the symmetry which Blackstone
so much admired in the English constitution and its laws; and when,
afterwards, the American colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid
of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model. At the base—patient
as the tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony—was the
people, born to be the base and born for nothing else. Resting on
this foundation were the middle classes in their various strata, each
stratum sharply marked off from the others. Then above these was the
strictly genteel class, the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in
dress if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of
right. Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the
monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the sacred
structure save that a little—a very little—above him sat God, the
suzerain to whom the prayers even of the monarch himself were
addressed. The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done a daring
thing, and an original thing, by striking off the apex of this
pyramid, and it might reasonably have been expected that the building
itself would collapse and crumble away. But it did nothing of the
kind. It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off—a structure to
serve afterwards as a model of the American and French pyramids, both
of which, though aspiring to be original structures, are really built
on exactly the same scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour as that
upon which the pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built.
Then came the Restoration: the apex was restored: the structure was
again complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever, stronger than
ever.
With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic
movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural
side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be
described realistically. Yet we must not suppose that in the
eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations,
without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty
of gazing honestly in her face. She does not work in that way. In
the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a
great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. In the
period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will
give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the
greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen. In the time of
Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a
diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable
insight and intellectual breadth that his generalizations cover not
only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual
limbs of so complex an epoch as the twentieth century.”
Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour is in prose
fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got into romantic poetry,
as he himself understood romantic poetry; for he did not class ballads
like Kinmont Willie, where there are such superb touches of humour, among
the romantic ballads. And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked,
his poems, like Morris’s, are entirely devoid of humour, although both
the poets were humourists. But the readers of Rhona’s Letters in ‘The
Coming of Love’ will admit that a delicious humour can be imported into
the highest romantic poetry.
With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of
English Literature,’ I must conclude my remarks upon the keynote of all
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, whether imaginative or critical:—
“The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have
ended with Milton. For Milton, although born only twenty-three years
before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs
properly to the period of romantic poetry. He has no relation
whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and
which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain
contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by
Ben Jonson. From the moment when Augustanism really began—in the
latter decades of the seventeenth century—the periwig poetry of
Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true
poets. All the periwig poets became too ‘polite’ to be natural. As
acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the
most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom
everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of
Cathay.”
One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the most
powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in Rossetti’s
poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in ‘Aylwin,’ but in ‘The Coming
of Love.’ But in order fully to understand Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work it is
necessary to know something of his life-history, and thanks to the aid I
have received from certain of his friends, and also to a little
topographical work, the ‘History of St. Ives,’ by Mr. Herbert E. Norris,
F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long before he
was known in London.
Chapter II
COWSLIP COUNTRY
SOME time ago I was dipping into the ‘official pictorial guides’ of those
three great trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the
Great Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St.
Ives—not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town in
Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell spent those
five years of meditation upon which his after life was nourished. In the
Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon these words: ‘At Slepe Hall dwelt
the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little
Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace of Mr.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the English sonnet and
judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of poetry and art are familiar
to lovers of our national literature.’ ‘Well,’ I thought, when I found
similar remarks in the other two guides, ‘here at least is one case in
which a prophet has honour in his own country.’ This set me musing over
a subject which had often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the
whimsical workings of the Spirit of Place. To a poet, what are the
advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a microcosm
like St. Ives? If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet were as great
as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne, or as that of his dead
friend, Rossetti, I should not have been surprised to find the place of
his birth thus associated with his name. But whether or not Rossetti was
right in saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘had sought obscurity as other
poets seek fame,’ it is certain that until quite lately he neglected to
claim his proper place among his peers. Doubtless, as the ‘Journal des
Débats’ has pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in
subject and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique
quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo through
the world, there is one respect in which they were less lucky than their
friend. They were born in the macrocosm of London, where the Spirit of
Place has so much to attend to that his memory can find but a small
corner even for the author of ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ or for the author of
‘Atalanta in Calydon.’
Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law
repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country—Buttercup Land, as the
Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good luck.
Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with Rhona
Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess of the
D’Urbervilles. For the poet born in a microcosm becomes identified with
it in the public eye, whereas the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom
associated with his birthplace.
To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater advantage
in being born in a microcosm. He sees the drama of life from a point of
view entirely different from that of the novelist born in the macrocosm.
The human microbe, or, as Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human
cheese-mite in the macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other
cheese-mite on the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe
or every other cheese-mite in the round.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work is saturated with memories of the Ouse. Cowper
had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who first
flung the rainbow of romance over the river and over the sweet meadows of
Cowslip Land, through which it flows. In these lines he has described a
sunset on the Ouse:—
More mellow falls the light and still more mellow
Around the boat, as we two glide along
’Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,
The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.
She knows the nightingales of ‘Portobello’;
Love makes her know each bird! In all that throng
No voice seems like another: soul is song,
And never nightingale was like its fellow;
For, whether born in breast of Love’s own bird,
Singing its passion in those islet bowers
Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers
The rosy river’s glowing arms engird,
Or born in human souls—twin souls like ours—
Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.
[Picture: The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts. (From a Water Colour by
Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)]
Now, will it be believed that this lovely river—so famous too among
English anglers for its roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, and gudgeon—has
been libelled? Yes, it has been libelled, and libelled by no less a
person than Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath
the reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:—
“There is, as far as I know, nothing like the Ouse elsewhere in
England. I do not mean that our river surpasses or even equals in
picturesqueness such rivers as the Wye, the Severn, the Thames, but
that its beauty is unique. There is not to be seen anywhere else so
wide and stately a stream moving so slowly and yet so clearly.
Consequently there is no other river which reflects with such beauty
the scenery of the clouds floating overhead. This, I think, is owing
to the stream moving over a bottom which is both flat and gravelly.
When Carlyle spoke of the Ouse dragging in a half-stagnant way under
a coating of floating oils, he showed ‘how vivid were his perceptive
faculties and also how untrustworthy.’ I have made a good deal of
enquiry into the matter of Carlyle’s visit to St. Ives, and have
learnt that, having spent some time exploring Ely Cathedral in search
of mementoes of Cromwell, he rode on to St. Ives, and spent about an
hour there before proceeding on his journey. Among the objects at
which he gave a hasty glance was the river, covered from the bridge
to the Holmes by one of those enormous fleets of barges which were
frequently to be seen at that time, and it was from the newly tarred
keels of this fleet of barges that came the oily exudation which
Carlyle, in his ignorance of the physical sciences and his contempt
for them, believed to arise from a greasy river-bottom. And to this
mistake the world is indebted for this description of the Ouse, which
has been slavishly followed by all subsequent writers on Cromwell.
This is what makes strangers, walking along the tow-path of
Hemingford meadow, express so much surprise when, instead of seeing
the oily scum they expected, they see a broad mirror as clear as
glass, whose iridescence is caused by the reflection of the clouds
overhead and by the gold and white water lilies on the surface of the
stream.”
If the beauty of the Ouse inspired Mr. Norris to praise it so eloquently
in prose, we need not wonder at the pictorial fascination of what
Rossetti styled in a letter to a friend ‘Watts’s magnificent star
sonnet’:—
The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears,
And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
An angel’s, yet with woman’s dearer wiles;
But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
What shaped those shadows like another boat
Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,
And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
According to Mr. Sharp, Rossetti pronounced this sonnet to be the finest
of all the versions of the Doppelganger idea, and for many years he
seriously purposed to render it in art. It is easy to understand why
Rossetti never carried out his intention, for the pictorial magic of the
sonnet is so powerful that even the greatest of all romantic painters
could hardly have rendered it on canvas. Poetry can suggest to the
imagination deeper mysteries than the subtlest romantic painting.
No sonnet has been more frequently localized—erroneously localized than
this. It is often supposed to depict the Thames above Kew, but Mr.
Norris says that ‘every one familiar with Hemingford Meadow will see that
it describes the Ouse backwater near Porto Bello, where the author as a
young man was constantly seen on summer evenings listening from a canoe
to the blackcaps and nightingales of the Thicket.’
That excellent critic, Mr. Earl Hodgson, the editor of Dr. Gordon Hake’s
‘New Day,’ seems to think that the ‘lily-isles’ are on the Thames at
Kelmscott, while other writers have frequently localized these
‘lily-isles’ on the Avon at Stratford. But, no doubt, Mr. Norris is
right in placing them on the Ouse.
This, however, gives me a good opportunity of saying a few words about
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s love of the Avon. The sacred old town of
Stratford-on-Avon has always been a favourite haunt of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s. No poet of our time has shown a greater love of our
English rivers, but he seems to love the Avon even more passionately than
the Ouse. He cannot describe the soft sands of Petit Bot Bay in Guernsey
without bringing in an allusion to ‘Avon’s sacred silt.’ It was at
Stratford-on-Avon that he wrote several of his poems, notably the two
sonnets which appeared first in the ‘Athenæum,’ and afterwards in the
little volume, ‘Jubilee Greetings at Spithead to the Men of Greater
Britain.’ They are entitled ‘The Breath of Avon: To English-speaking
Pilgrims on Shakspeare’s Birthday’:—
Whate’er of woe the Dark may hide in womb
For England, mother of kings of battle and song—
Rapine, or racial hate’s mysterious wrong,
Blizzard of Chance, or fiery dart of Doom—
Let breath of Avon, rich of meadow-bloom,
Bind her to that great daughter sever’d long—
To near and far-off children young and strong—
With fetters woven of Avon’s flower perfume.
Welcome, ye English-speaking pilgrims, ye
Whose hands around the world are join’d by him,
Who make his speech the language of the sea,
Till winds of Ocean waft from rim to rim
The Breath of Avon: let this great day be
A Feast of Race no power shall ever dim.
From where the steeds of Earth’s twin oceans toss
Their manes along Columbia’s chariot-way;
From where Australia’s long blue billows play;
From where the morn, quenching the Southern Cross,
Startling the frigate-bird and albatross
Asleep in air, breaks over Table Bay—
Come hither, pilgrims, where these rushes sway
’Tween grassy banks of Avon soft as moss!
For, if ye found the breath of Ocean sweet,
Sweeter is Avon’s earthy, flowery smell,
Distill’d from roots that feel the coming spell
Of May, who bids all flowers that lov’d him meet
In meadows that, remembering Shakspeare’s feet,
Hold still a dream of music where they fell.
It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr. Watts-Dunton
wrote the cantata, ‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ a poem in which breathes
the very atmosphere of Shakespeare’s town. There are no poetical
descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the
descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.
[Picture: ‘The Thicket,’ St. Ives. (From a Water Colour by Fraser at
‘The Pines.’)]
* * * * *
A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes called, ‘The
Green Country,’ is Hemingford Meadow, adjoining St. Ives. It is a level
tract of land on the banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of
alluvium from the overflowings of the river. In summer it is clothed
with gay flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as
a skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is a
famous skating centre. On the opposite side of the meadow is The
Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely picture. This, no doubt, is
the scene described in one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s birthday addresses to
Tennyson:—
Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.
There through the branches of the glittering trees
The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze
Sends forth methinks a thrill—a conscious thrill
That tells yon meadows by the steaming rill—
Where, o’er the clover waiting for the bees,
The mist shines round the cattle to their knees—
‘Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!’
The meadow leads to what the ‘oldest rustic inhabitant’ calls the ‘First
Hemingford,’ or ‘Hemingford Grey.’ The imagination of this same ‘oldest
inhabitant’ used to go even beyond the First Hemingford to the Second
Hemingford, and then of course came Ultima Thule! The meadow has quite a
wide fame among those students of nature who love English grasses in
their endless varieties. Owing to the richness of the soil, the
luxuriant growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in
England. For years the two Hemingfords have been the favourite haunt of
a group of landscape painters the chief of whom are the brothers Fraser,
two of whose water-colours are reproduced in this book.
* * * * *
Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more advantage
than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through Huntingdonshire into
East Anglia. It was not, however, near St. Ives, but in another somewhat
distant part of Cowslip Country that the gypsies depicted in ‘The Coming
of Love’ took an active part in haymaking. But alas! in these times of
mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer hope to see
such a picture as that painted in the now famous gypsy haymaking song
which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth of Rhona Boswell. Moreover,
the prosperous gryengroes depicted by Borrow and by the author of ‘The
Coming of Love’ have now entirely vanished from the scene. The present
generation knows them not. But it is impossible for the student of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s poetry to ramble along any part of Cowslip Country, with
the fragrance of newly-made hay in his nostrils, without recalling this
chant, which I have the kind permission of the editor of the ‘Saturday
Review’ (April 19, 1902) to quote:—
Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’ {34}
Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,
Sayin, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it
To lennor and love!’
Hark, the sharpenin’ scythes that tingle!
See they come, the farmin’ ryes!
‘Leave the dell,’ they say, ‘an’ pingle!
Never a gorgie, married or single,
Can toss the kas in dell or dingle
Like Romany chies.’
Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’
Bees are a-buzzin’ in chaw an’ clover
Stealin’ the honey from sperrits o’ morn,
Shoshus leap in puv an’ cover,
Doves are a-cooin’ like lover to lover,
Larks are awake an’ a-warblin’ over
Their kairs in the corn.
Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’
Smell the kas on the baval blowin’!
What is that the gorgies say?
Never a garden rose a-glowin’,
Never a meadow flower a-growin’,
Can match the smell from a Rington mowin’
Of new made hay.
All along the river reaches
‘Cheep, cheep, chee!’—from osier an’ sedge;
‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ rings from the beeches;
Every chirikel’s song beseeches
Ryes to larn what lennor teaches
From copse an’ hedge.
Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’
Lennor sets ’em singin’ an’ pairin’,
Chirikels all in tree an’ grass,
Farmers say, ‘Them gals are darin’,
Sometimes dukkerin’, sometimes snarin’;
But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin’,’
Toss the kas!
Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’
Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,
Sayin’, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it
To lennor and love!’
Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was Slepe, and
that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a farmer for five years
in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the late forties. When Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s friend, Madox Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the
scenery for his famous picture, ‘Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,’ he could
present only an imaginary farm.
Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being born in a
microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing stories full of local
colour and character which, according to friends of D. G. Rossetti, would
keep the poet-painter up half the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr.
Hake in his account of the origin of ‘Aylwin’ which I have already given.
I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe Hall which I have heard
Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would certainly make a good nucleus for
a short story. It is connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement
Shorter, in some reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes:
“My mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns by
inheritance some freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe
Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed. At Slepe Hall, a
picturesque building, she went to school in girlhood. She remembers Mr.
Watts-Dunton, the author of ‘Aylwin,’ who was also born at St. Ives, as a
pretty little boy then unknown to fame.”
[Picture: Slepe Hall: Cromwell’s Supposed Residence at St. Ives. (From
an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)]
When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they
sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in
building lots. It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell
was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older
house whose cellars remained intact. This was, of course, a tremendous
event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the
schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to
watch the workmen in their task of demolition. In the early stages of
this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was
centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found,
whence Oliver Cromwell’s ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his
terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks
about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds. But no such
secret chamber could be found. When at length the work had proceeded so
far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure
was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact,
Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it
was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives,
that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the
world—
Imposteur à la Mecque et prophète à Mèdine.
Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at
the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that,
before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to
St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel
friends, in Slepe Hall cellars. No treasure turned up, but what was
found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once
christened ‘Cromwell’s wine’ by the local humourist of the town, who was
also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much
interest as the boys in the exploration. The workmen, of course, at once
began knocking off the bottles’ necks and drinking the wine, and were
soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a
teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to
take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days
that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell’s wine and perhaps imbibed some of
the Cromwellian spirit and pluck. Consequently the young urchins carried
off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called ‘Oliver’s
Tree,’ and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink. The
wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to
have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous—elder
wine. Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was,
he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell’s
elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, ‘I was never even
excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being
drunk on Oliver Cromwell’s elder-wine.’ The wine was probably about a
century old.
I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve
was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time
than is usual. He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat
elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly
biology, and also art and music. As has been said in the notice of him
in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ he is one of the few contemporary
poets with a scientific knowledge of music. Owing to his father’s
passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this
accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his
writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the
lower animals.
Upon the subject of “the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase,
‘the dumb animals,’” Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often
been eloquent about ‘those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St.
Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful
animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe
the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry
like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could
direct it to trace out any given name in the company.’
“Of course,” he says, “the ‘lower animals’ are no more dumb than we
are. With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape
from isolation—to get as close as may be to some other conscious
thing—which is a great factor of progress. With them, as with us,
each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others
around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless
accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what
these signs and sounds shall be. Those among us who have gone at all
underneath conventional thought and conventional expression—those who
have penetrated underneath conventional feeling—know that neither
thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all. The voice cannot
do it, as we see by comparing one language with another. Wordsworth
calls language the incarnation of thought. But the mere fact of
there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this. If
there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream of,
the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd. Soul cannot
communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when you
can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a ‘lower
animal,’ interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with
them as it is with men. Nay, with some temperaments and in some
moods, the communication is far, far closer. ‘When I am assailed
with heavy tribulation,’ said Luther, ‘I rush out among my pigs
rather than remain alone by myself.’ And there is no creature that
does not at some points sympathize with man. People have laughed at
Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed
upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used
to lavish his endearments. Neither I nor my companion had a pet
passion for leeches. Erskine probably knew leeches better than we,
for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of
which they know nothing. Like most dog lovers, we had no special
love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge. ‘I wish
women would purr when they are pleased,’ said Horne Tooke to Rogers
once.”
Chapter III
THE CRITIC IN THE BUD
ONE of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the
nooks of old England and ‘ould Ireland’; I have a propensity for
‘dawdling and dandering’ among them whenever the occasion arises, and I
am yielding to it here.
Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been
compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of
brochures upon the surrounding villages. One of these, called ‘St. Ives
and the Printing Press,’ has greatly interested me, for it reveals the
wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural
districts lies ready for the picking up. I am tempted to quote from
this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell’s time the temper which
produced Cromwell has remained. During the time when at Cambridge George
Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond
of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen’s, revolted against the discipline and the
doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the
Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed. The house whence
issued these fulminations was the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street, now pulled
down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father, having
remained during all this time a printing office. Mr. Norris gives a very
picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the
house, with its pointed roof, ‘king posts’ and panelling, reminding one
of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices. Mr. Norris also
tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the ‘Crown Inn,’ that
William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear
the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens. According to
Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John
Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father
when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor. A
curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer
addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the
eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to
Lamb, and inspired some of Elia’s most delightful touches of humour.
This poem of Dyer’s opens thus:—
Though much I love th’ Æolian lyre,
Whose varying sounds beguil’d my youthful day,
And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
In fabled groves, among th’ Aonian choir:
Yet more on native fields, thro’ milder skies,
Nature’s mysterious harmonies delight:
There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
What is the moon’s pale orb that cheer’d the lonesome night?
I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
No purple Venus round my Hammond’s bow’r,
No blue-ey’d graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
The king of gods here rains no golden show’r,
Nor have these lips e’er sipt Castilian dews.
At the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer’s time,
if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at
this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his
boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general. Filled
with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that
boyish utterance. It interests me much, because I seem to see in it
adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I
hope to enrich these pages. I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking
advantage of a lucky accident—the accident that a member of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown
newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported. In 1854, ‘W. Theodore
Watts,’ as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be
himself a member—if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just
left it—on account of his father’s great local reputation as a man of
learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the
toast, ‘Science.’ In the ‘Cambridge Chronicle’ of that date the
proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given
to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by
the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely
improvized. The subject which he discussed was ‘The Influence of Science
upon Modern Civilization’:—
“It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical
lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs
straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches. Now, of
all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most
hopeful one for humanity is physical science—that branch of the tree
which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to
bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present
wondrous state of development. I am aware that the assertion that
Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by
many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person
young and inexperienced as myself. It is heterodox; it clashes, for
instance, with the venerable superstition of ‘the wisdom of the
ancients’—a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my
friend Mr. Wright’s old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been
talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the
point:—
For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men lere.
But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom
in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply
abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients
more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy. It is
the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong
only to individuals. There can be no doubt that, of contemporary
individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and
is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with
generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact. As
Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, ‘Those who came
first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least
experience. Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in
arms—chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under
Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the
white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are
prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can
supply.
And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own
English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity. What, for instance,
was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans—what but the
wildest Astrology? What schoolboy has not chuckled over the
ingenious old Herodotus’s description of the sun being blown out of
the heavens? Or again, at old Plutarch’s veracious story of the
hedgehogs and the grapes? Nay, there are absurdities enough in such
great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us
that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters
appertaining to the Physical Sciences.
Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the
ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence. But
theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our
day—though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has
been proving to us lately—is, as essentially, the day of Science. I
might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here—the constitution
of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking
as the soul of antiquity). Was that scientific? Surely not.
The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was
beauty, sensuous beauty. This prevailing passion for the beautiful
exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said:
it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in
their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture. The
productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful,
and, as such, will never fade and decay, for
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that
Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity.
Athens was too imaginative and poetical. Sparta was too warlike and
barbarous. Rome was too sensual and gross. It had to wait for the
steady Teutonic mind—the plodding brains of modern England and modern
Germany. That Homer is the father of poetry—that Æschylus is a
wonder of sublimity—that Sophocles and Euripides are profound masters
of human passion and human pathos—that Aristophanes is an exhaustless
fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour—no one in this room, or
out of it, is more willing to admit than I am. But is that to blind
us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison and Lyell are
greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or Aristotle?
The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied
through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius. Every right
action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he
attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad
thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius. And this was
not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and
breathing faith with him. He believed it in his childhood, in his
youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the
deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of
Laocoon, around his giant brain. Well, gentlemen, don’t let us laugh
at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a
beautiful one, and typical of many great truths. And I have often
thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than
Socrates. I mean the great man—mankind. He, too, has his good
genius and his evil genius. The former we will designate science,
the latter we will call superstition. For ages upon ages,
superstition has had the sway over him—that evil genius, who blotted
out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and
substituted all manner of blinding errors—errors which have made him
play
Such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of
creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells
us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries. In a word,
the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the
angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the
fiends.
But, at last, God has permitted man’s long, long experience to be
followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient
enemy, and clasped the hands of Science—Science, that good genius who
makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the ethereal
lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns king of
the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of Methusaleh into
seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human frame, and ranges
through its most secret chambers, until at last nothing, save the
mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden; who maps out all the
nations of the earth; showing how the sable Ethiopian, the dusky
Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the intellectual European, are
but differently developed exemplars of the same type of manhood, and
warning man that he is still his ‘brother’s keeper’ now as in the
primeval days of Cain and Abel.
The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his dædal wings up
into the starry night, there where ‘God’s name is writ in worlds,’
and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving
around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever
around the great central sun—‘The Great White Throne of God!’
The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long
vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world
which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first,
as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious
course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid
mass, ‘without form and void,’ where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled
in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages,
having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had
intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life,
to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns,
compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable
dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder
of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious
forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian,
the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and
bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle
in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath
their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders,
the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and
the basest work of God—the creation of the thinking, reasoning,
sinning animal, Man.
And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing
and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand
work of developing the divinity within it. I know, indeed, that it
is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will
decline and vanish, ‘like the civilizations of old.’ But I venture
to deny it in toto. From a human point of view, it is utterly
impossible. And without going into the question (for I see the time
is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed
away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life
after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times
more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I
contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern
must of necessity be futile and fallacious. And for this reason,
that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science
has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of
antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political
life, and come to its own conclusions. So isolated, indeed, was one
nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of
each other’s existence. A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh,
was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for
Italy alone. There was no science then to ‘put a girdle round about
the earth’ (as Puck says) ‘in forty minutes.’ But now, a new idea
brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the
whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole
habitable globe—from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru. I
am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the
ruler of the waves. The day may come that will see her sink to a
second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe. In
spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that
will see Russia the dominant power in Europe. The day may come that
will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and
learning. It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each
race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race—that the
negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian
race is now lording it over the negro. Why not? It would be only
equity. But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of
nationalities. I speak again of the great man, Mankind—the one
indivisible man that Science is making him. He will never
retrograde, because ‘matter and mind comprise the universe,’ and
matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind—because good
must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made? Henceforth his
road is onward—onward. Science has helped to give him such a start
that nothing shall hold him back—nothing can hold him back—save a
fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God.”
But I am wandering from the subject of the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street
and its connection with printing. The last important book that was ever
printed there was a very remarkable one. It was the famous essay on
Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that
time a curate of the St. Ives Church—a book that was the result of an
enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book,
moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought. It has
passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.
Chapter IV
CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM
MRS. CRAIGIE has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that
London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the
provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the
nation. It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than
that in which Theodore Watts grew up. Indeed, his early life may be
compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening
and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of
the Mill family. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father was in many respects a very
remarkable man. ‘He was,’ says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in
Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ‘a naturalist intimately connected with
Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of
considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert
White of the Ouse valley.’ There is, as the ‘Times’ said in its review
of ‘Aylwin,’ so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of
the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made
to identify all the characters. Many of these guesses have been wrong;
and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr.
Hake, who, in two papers in ‘Notes and Queries’ identified many of the
characters. Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that
the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the
story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father. Mr. Hake, however,
tells us that this is not so. Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the
author’s uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to
say later. I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable
account of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father in Mr. Norris’s ‘History of St.
Ives’:—
“For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was
the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though
his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford
Abbots. According to the following extracts from ‘The Cambridge
Chronicle and University Journal’ of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died
quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: ‘We record with much regret
the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died
after an hour’s illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he
had been taken after the seizure. Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was
called in, but without avail. At the inquest the post-mortem
examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing
fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions,
resulted in syncope. Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back
to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme
heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of
death.
Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the
oldest solicitors in the county. He had also devoted much time and
study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a
well-known figure in the scientific circles of London. He was for
years connected with Section E of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee. He read papers
on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other
Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles
of geology. Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors,
and in the Association’s reports upon this subject some of the most
interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by
Mr. Watts. He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical
Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.’
Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last
moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he
had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the ‘Antiquary’
for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire
Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months
after his death. It was, however, not by Archæology, but by his
geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation.
And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison,
Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the
geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton
Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied
by Mr. Matton. In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is
mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr.
Watts at St. Ives. Since his death there have been frequent
references to him as a man of ‘encyclopædic general knowledge.’
He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St.
Ives have been more liked or more generally respected. His great
delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the
changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our
neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself. On such occasions the
present writer has often met him and had many interesting
conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science.”
With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mother, the Duntons,
although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in
Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several
generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic
chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr.
Jessopp in his charming essay, ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.’ This
essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the
Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, and treating of the Register
of Crab House Nunnery. In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother’s
to his father’s name, by a deed in Chancery.
I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in
temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about
Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend)
used to tell. When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets
pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school
library a copy of Wells’s ‘Stories after Nature,’ and read them with
great avidity. Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was
reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small
family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to
find, in a number of the ‘Illuminated Magazine,’ a periodical which his
father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one
of the ‘Stories after Nature’ reprinted with an illustration by the
designer and engraver Linton. He said to his father, ‘Why, I have read
this story before!’ ‘That is quite impossible,’ said his father, ‘quite
impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number
of a magazine.’ ‘I have read it before; I know all about it,’ said the
boy. ‘As I do not think you untruthful,’ said the father, ‘I think I can
explain your hallucination about this matter.’ ‘Do, father,’ said the
son. ‘Well,’ said the father, ‘I do not know whether or not you are a
poet. But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams. You have told me
before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape
that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.’ ‘Yes,
father, that often occurs.’ ‘Well, the reason for that is this, as you
will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each
other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but
it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things,
one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the
other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy
hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.’ The
explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.
The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the
father said, ‘Well, Walter, have you read this before?’ ‘Yes,’ said the
boy falteringly, ‘unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain,
father.’ And so it went on from month to month. When the boy had grown
into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the
literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells’s
‘Joseph and His Brethren’ and ‘Stories after Nature.’ Rossetti was
agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of ‘Joseph
and His Brethren,’ he was very familiar with the ‘Stories after Nature.’
‘Well,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘they appeared in the “Illuminated
Magazine.”’ ‘Who should have thought,’ said Rossetti, ‘that the
“Illuminated Magazine” in its moribund days, when Linton took it up,
should have got down to St. Ives. Its circulation, I think, was only a
few hundreds. Among Linton’s manœuvres for keeping the magazine alive
was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells’s “Stories after Nature”
without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book
form.’ ‘They did then appear in book form first?’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
‘Yes, but there can’t have been over a hundred or two sold,’ said
Rossetti. ‘I discovered it at the British Museum.’ ‘I read it at
Cambridge in my school library,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. It was the
startled look on Rossetti’s face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell
him the story about his father and the ‘Illuminated Magazine.’
It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to
express himself in literature rather early. But it will be new to many,
and especially to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ that as a mere child he
contributed to its pages. When he was a boy he read the ‘Athenæum,’
which his father took in regularly. One day he caught a correspondent of
the ‘Athenæum’—no less a person than John P. Collier—tripping on a point
of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance. He had
stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father’s
books. He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing
the blunder with youthful scorn. In due time the correction was noted in
the Literary Gossip of the journal. Soon after, his father had occasion
to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he
said, ‘Walter, have you been marking this book?’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘But
you know I object?’ ‘Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.’
‘Why,’ said his father, ‘somebody has been writing about this very
passage to the “Athenæum.”’ ‘Yes, father,’ replied the boy, red and
ungrammatical with proud confusion, ‘it was me.’ ‘You!’ cried his
astonished father, ‘you!’ And thus the matter was explained. Mr.
Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his
first contribution to the ‘Athenæum.’
* * * * *
Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton,
it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando
Watts. His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have
made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism. As I have already
pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of
Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero. The importance of this character
in ‘Aylwin’ is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find
that the character of Philip is its motive power. After his death,
everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams,
his fantasies and his whims. This effect of making a man dominate from
his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be
unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some
critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there
they leave it. What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls ‘the tragic mischief’ of the
drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and
mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of ‘The Veiled Queen.’
There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an
interest. He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish,
and German. And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover
of the acted drama. One of his stories in connection with acting is
this. A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission
to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and
sometimes Cromwell’s Barn. Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on
returning home after the performance said, ‘I have seen a little actor
who is a real genius. He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund
Kean’s acting. I shall go and see him every night. And he went. The
actor’s name was Robson. When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in
London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the
second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon. He went to the theatre
and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so
impressed him down at St. Ives. From that time he followed Robson to
whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known
figure among the playgoers of the Olympic. He always contended that
Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time. Mr. Hake seems to
have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in
London:—
“He was,” says Mr. Hake, “a man of extraordinary learning in the
academic sense of the word, and he possessed still more extraordinary
general knowledge. He lived for many years the strangest kind of
hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts. His two
great passions were philology and occultism, but he also took great
interest in rubbings from brass monuments. He knew more, I think, of
those strange writers discussed in Vaughan’s ‘Hours with the Mystics’
than any other person—including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he
managed to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the
physical sciences, especially astronomy. He seemed to be learning
languages up to almost the last year of his life. His method of
learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow—that is
to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died, it is said
that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among
his books. He used to express great contempt for Borrow’s method of
learning languages from dictionaries only. I do not think that any
one connected with literature—with the sole exception of Mr.
Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G. Latham—knew so much of him as I
did. His personal appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin,
as described in the novel. Although he never wrote poetry, he
translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese
poets. I remember that he was an extraordinary admirer of Shelley.
His knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists was a
link between him and Mr. Swinburne.
At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum reading
room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed to know
anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he spoke to me
it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should disturb the other
readers, which in his eyes would have been a heinous offence. For
very many years he had been extremely well known to the second-hand
booksellers, for he was a constant purchaser of their wares. He was
a great pedestrian, and, being very much attached to the north of
London, would take long, slow tramps ten miles out in the direction
of Highgate, Wood Green, etc. I have a very distinct recollection of
calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living
close to him in Percy Circus. Books were piled up from floor to
ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember
where to find every book and what there was in it. It is a singular
fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to
have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas
Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him ‘the
scholar.’ How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that
surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must
have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the
north of London where ‘the scholar’ was taking his chop and bottle of
Beaune. He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after
another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I
think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of ‘Aylwin,’
and myself. But at Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines,
when and where my father and I used to meet him. His memory was so
powerful that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he
had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part.
He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to
the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life. He
always reminded me of Charles Lamb’s description of George Dyer.
Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only
of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent
to touch upon his inner life. He was a still greater recluse than
the ‘Philip Aylwin’ of the novel. I think I am right in saying that
he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of
age. Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these
studies that he sympathized with the author of ‘Aylwin’s’ friend, the
late Lord de Tabley. I remember one story of his peculiarities which
will give an idea of the kind of man he was. He had a brother, Mr.
William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him in every
way—strikingly good-looking, with great charm of manner and savoir
faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial
knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of
British military and naval exploits—where he was really learned.
Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a
parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great
volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in
the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until
at last he got to be called the ‘walking encyclopædia.’ The result
was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an
original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was
frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned
brother. This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply
amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories
as to what people had said to him on this subject.” {60}
Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of one of his
stories. I may add that the editor of ‘Notes and Queries,’ Mr. Joseph
Knight, knew James Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he ‘can testify
to the truth’ of Mr. Hake’s ‘portraiture.’
Chapter V
EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES
ALTHOUGH an East Midlander by birth it seems to have been to East Anglia
that Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathies were most strongly drawn. It was
there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it was to East
Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.
On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the Hemingford side
already described, the country, though not so lovely as the western side,
is at first fairly attractive; but it becomes less and less so as it
nears the Fens. The Fens, however, would seem to have a charm of their
own, and Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness
that could hardly be surpassed. It was here as a boy that he made
friends with the Gryengroes—that superior variety of the Romanies which
Borrow had known years before. These gypsies used to bring their Welsh
ponies to England and sell them at the fairs. I must now go back for
some years in order to enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic
description of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country,
which appeared in ‘Great Thoughts’ in 1903.
“I shall never forget my earliest recollections of them. My father
used sometimes to drive in a dogcart to see friends of his through
about twelve miles of Fen country, and he used to take me with him.
Let me say that the Fen country is much more striking than is
generally supposed. Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the
midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are divided
by dykes; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles.
This gives an importance to the skies such as is observed nowhere
else except on the open sea. The flashing opalescent radiance of the
sea is apt to challenge the riches of the sky, and in a certain
degree tends to neutralize it; but in the Fen country the level,
monotonous greenery of the crops in summer, and, in autumn and
winter, the vast expanse of black earth, make the dome of the sky, by
contrast, so bright and glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams
and suggests a roof of rainbows; and in cloudy weather it seems
almost the only living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more
magical still. And as to sunsets, I do not know of any, either by
land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen
country. The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal
to do with it. The sun frequently sets in a pageantry of gauzy
vapour of every colour, quite indescribable.
The first evening that I took one of these drives, while I was
watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps of
twitch-grass, set burning by the farm-labourers, which stretched
right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the dogcart and pointed
to a ruddy fire glowing, flickering, and smoking in an angle where a
green grassy drove-way met the dark-looking high-road some yards
ahead. And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky
figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about. ‘The
gypsies!’ I said, in the greatest state of exultation, which soon
fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle and saw a lot of these
dusky people running and leaping like wild things towards the
dog-cart. ‘Will they kill us, father?’ I said. ‘Kill us? No,’ he
said, laughing; ‘they are friends of mine. They’ve only come to lead
the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at it.’ They came
flocking up. So far from the mare starting, as she would have done
at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome
the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose
with their tawny but well-shaped fingers, and caressing her neck.
Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw.
When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was fascinated by the
charm of the picture. Outside the tents in front of the fire, over
which a kettle was suspended from an upright iron bar, which I
afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was spread a large dazzling white
table-cloth, covered with white crockery, among which glittered a
goodly number of silver spoons. I afterwards learnt that to possess
good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons, was as ‘passionate
a desire in the Romany chi as in the most ambitious farmer’s wife in
the Fen country.’ It was from this little incident that my intimacy
with the gypsies dated. I associated much with them in after life,
and I have had more experiences among them than I have yet had an
opportunity of recording in print.”
This pretty gypsy girl was the prototype, I believe, of the famous Rhona
Boswell herself.
It must of course have been after the meeting with Rhona in the East
Midlands—supposing always that we are allowed to identify the novelist
with the hero, a bold supposition—that Mr. Watts-Dunton again came across
her—this time in East Anglia. Whether this is so or not, I must give
this picture of her from ‘Aylwin’:—
“It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie’s friend,
Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl. Graylingham Wood and
Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of
a superior kind of Gypsies called Gryengroes, that is to say,
horse-dealers. Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell
them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that
Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales. Compared
with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie
seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona’s limbs were always on the
move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions. Her laugh
seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it
was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most Gypsy
girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona’s laughter was a
sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards, when she
grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her. It seemed
to emanate, not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame.
If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the
ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some
idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona
would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor, some
miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of
flowers that she had been weaving for herself. This induced Winnie
to weave for herself a coronet of seaweeds, and an entire morning was
passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.”
Chapter VI
SPORT AND WORK
IT was at this period that, like so many young Englishmen who were his
contemporaries, he gave attention to field sports, and took interest in
that athleticism which, to judge from Wilkie Collins’s scathing pictures,
was quite as rampant and absurd then as it is in our own time. It was
then too that he acquired that familiarity with the figures prominent in
the ring which startles one in his reminiscences of George Borrow. But
it will scarcely interest the readers of this book to dwell long upon
this subject. Nor have I time to repeat the humorous stories I have
heard him tell about the queer characters who could then be met at St.
Ives Fair (said to have been the largest cattle fair in England), and at
another favourite resort of his, Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge.
Stourbridge Fair still exists, but its glory was departing when Mr.
Watts-Dunton was familiar with it; and now, possibly, it has departed for
ever. Of Cambridge and the entire county he tells many anecdotes. Here
is a specimen:—
Once in the early sixties he and his brother and some friends were
greatly exercised by the news that Deerfoot, the famous American Indian
runner in whom Borrow took such an interest, was to run at Cambridge
against the English champion. When the day came, they drove to Cambridge
in a dog-cart from St. Ives, about a dozen miles. The race took place in
a field called Fenner’s Ground, much used by cricketers. This is how, as
far as I can recall the words, he tells the anecdote:—
“The place was crammed with all sorts of young men—’varsity men and
others. There were not many young farmers or squires or yeomen
within a radius of a good many miles that did not put in an
appearance on that occasion. The Indian won easily, and at the
conclusion of the race there was a frantic rush to get near him and
shake his hand. The rush was so wild and so insensate that it
irritated me more than I should at the present moment consider it
possible to be irritated. But I ought to say that at that time of my
life I had developed into a strangely imperious little chap. I had
been over-indulged—not at home, but at the Cambridge school to which
I had been sent—and spoilt. This seems odd, but it’s true. It was
the boys who spoilt me in a curious way—a way which will not be
understood by those who went to public schools like Eton, where the
fagging principle would have stood in the way of the development of
the curious relation between me and my fellow-pupils which I am
alluding to. There is an inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct
in the genus homo which causes boys, without in the least knowing
why, to select one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and
spoil him, almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which
is so valuable in the social struggle for life that follows
school-days. This kind of emperor I had been at that school. It
indicated no sort of real superiority on my part; for I learnt that
immediately after I had left the vacant post it was filled by another
boy—filled for an equally inscrutable reason. The result of it was
that I became (as I often think when I recall those days) the most
masterful young urchin that ever lived. If I had not been so, I
could not have got into a fury at being jostled by a good-humoured
crowd. My brother, who had not been so spoilt at school, was very
different, and kept urging me to keep my temper. ‘It’s capital fun,’
he said; ‘look at this blue-eyed young chap jostling and being
jostled close to us. He’s fond of a hustle, and no mistake. That’s
the kind of chap I should like to know’; and he indicated a young
’varsity man of whose elbow at that moment I was unpleasantly
conscious, and who seemed to be in a state of delight at other elbows
being pushed into his ribs. I soon perceived that certain men whom
he was with seemed angry, not on their own account, but on account of
this youth of the laughing lips and blue eyes. As they were trying
to make a ring round him, ‘Hanged if it isn’t the Prince!’ said my
brother. ‘And look how he takes it! Surely you can stand what he
stands!’ It was, in fact, the Prince of Wales, who had come to see
the American runner. I needed only two or three years of buffeting
with the great life outside the schoolroom to lose all my
imperiousness and learn the essential lesson of give-and-take.”
For a time Mr. Watts-Dunton wavered about being articled to his father as
a solicitor. His love of the woods and fields was too great at that time
for him to find life in a solicitor’s office at all tolerable. Moreover,
it would seem that he who had been so precocious a student, and who had
lived in books, felt a temporary revulsion from them, and an irresistible
impulse to study Nature apart from books, to study her face to face. And
it was at this time that, as the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ remarks, he
‘moved much among the East Anglian gypsies, of whose superstitions and
folklore he made a careful study.’ But of this period of his life I have
but little knowledge. Judging from Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ in the
‘Bookman,’ he alone had Mr. Watts-Dunton’s full confidence in the matter.
So great was his desire to pore over the book of nature, there appears to
have been some likelihood, perhaps I ought to say some danger, of his
feeling the impulse which had taken George Borrow away from civilization.
He seems, besides, to have shared with the Greeks and with Montaigne a
belief in the value of leisure. It was at this period, to judge from his
writings, that he exclaimed with Montaigne, ‘Have you known how to
regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
than he who has taken empires and cities.’ I suppose, however, that this
was the time when he composed that unpublished ‘Dictionary for
Nature-worshippers,’ from which he often used to quote in the ‘Athenæum.’
There is nothing in his writings so characteristic as those definitions.
Work and Sport are thus defined: ‘Work: that activity of mind or body
which exhausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or health to
the individual. Sport: that activity of mind or body which, in
exhausting the vital forces, yields pleasure and health to the
individual. The activity, however severe, of a born artist at his easel,
of a born poet at his rhymings, of a born carpenter at his plane, is
sport. The activity, however slight, of the born artist or poet at the
merchant’s desk, is work. Hence, to work is not to pray. We have called
the heresy of Work modern because it is the characteristic one of our
time; but, alas! like all heresies, it is old. It was preached by
Zoroaster in almost Mr. Carlyle’s words when Concord itself was in the
woods and ere Chelsea was.’
[Picture: ‘Evening Dreams with the Poets.’ (From an Oil Painting at ‘The
Pines.’)]
In one of his books Mr. Watts-Dunton writes with great eloquence upon
this subject:—
“How hateful is the word ‘experience’ in the mouth of the
littérateur. They all seem to think that this universe exists to
educate them, and that they should write books about it. They never
look on a sunrise without thinking what an experience it is; how it
is educating them for bookmaking. It is this that so often turns the
true Nature-worshipper away from books altogether, that makes him
bless with what at times seems such malicious fervour those two great
benefactors of the human race, Caliph Omar and Warburton’s cook.
In Thoreau there was an almost perpetual warring of the Nature
instinct with the Humanity instinct. And, to say the truth, the
number is smaller than even Nature-worshippers themselves are
aware—those in whom there is not that warring of these two great
primal instincts. For six or eight months at a time there are many,
perhaps, who could revel in ‘utter solitude,’ as companionship with
Nature is called; with no minster clock to tell them the time of day,
but, instead, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle in the
morning, the shifting of the shadows at noon, and the cawing of rooks
going home at sunset. But then to these, there comes suddenly, and
without the smallest warning, a half-recognized but secretly sweet
pleasure in looking at the smooth high-road, and thinking that it
leads to the city—a beating of the heart at the sound of the distant
railway-whistle, as the train winds its way, like a vast gliding
snake, to the whirlpool they have left.
In order to realize the folly of the modern Carlylean heresy of work,
it is necessary to realize fully how infinitely rich is Nature, and
how generous, and consequently what a sacred duty as well as wise
resolve it is that, before he ‘returns unto the ground,’ man should
drink deeply while he may at the fountain of Life. Let it be enough
for the Nature-worshipper to know that he, at least, has been
blessed. Suppose he were to preach in London or Paris or New York
against this bastard civilization, and expatiate on Nature’s largess,
of which it robs us? Suppose he were to say to people to whom
opinion is the breath of life, ‘What is it that this civilization of
yours can give you by way of compensation for that of which it robs
you? Is it your art? Is it your literature? Is it your music? Is
it your science?’ Suppose, for instance, he were to say to the
collector of Claudes, or Turners, or David Coxes: ‘Your possessions
are precious undoubtedly, but what are even they when set against the
tamest and quietest sunrise, in the tamest and quietest district of
Cambridge or Lincoln, in this tame and quiet month, when, over the
treeless flat you may see, and for nothing, purple bar after purple
bar trembling along the grey, as the cows lift up their heads from
the sheet of silver mist in which they are lying? How can you really
enjoy your Turners, you who have never seen a sunrise in your lives?’
Or suppose he were to say to the opera-goer: ‘Those notes of your
favourite soprano were superb indeed; and superb they ought to be to
keep you in the opera-house on a June night, when all over the south
of England a thousand thickets, warm with the perfumed breath of the
summer night, are musical with the gurgle of the nightingales.’
Thoreau preached after this fashion, and was deservedly laughed at
for his pains.
Yet it is not a little singular that this heresy of the sacredness of
work should be most flourishing at the very time when the sophism on
which it was originally built is exploded; the sophism, we mean, that
Nature herself is the result of Work, whereas she is the result of
growth. One would have thought that this was the very time for
recognizing what the sophism had blinded us to, that Nature’s
permanent temper—whatever may be said of this or that mood of hers—is
the temper of Sport, that her pet abhorrence, which is said to be a
vacuum, is really Work. We see this clearly enough in what are
called the lower animals—whether it be a tiger or a gazelle, a ferret
or a coney, a bat or a butterfly—the final cause of the existence of
every conscious thing is that it should sport. It has no other use
than that. For this end it was that ‘the great Vishnu yearned to
create a world.’ Yet over the toiling and moiling world sits Moloch
Work; while those whose hearts are withering up with hatred of him
are told by certain writers to fall down before him and pretend to
love.
The worker of the mischief is, of course, civilization in excess, or
rather, civilization in wrong directions. For this word, too, has to
be newly defined in the Dictionary before mentioned, where you will
find it thus given:—Civilization: a widening and enriching of human
life. Bastard or Modern Western Civilization: the art of inventing
fictitious wants and working to supply them. In bastard civilization
life becomes poorer and poorer, paltrier and paltrier, till at last
life goes out of fashion altogether, and is supplanted by work. True
freedom is more remote from us than ever. For modern Freedom is thus
defined: the exchange of the slavery of feudality for the slavery of
opinion. Thoreau realized this, and tried to preach men back to
common-sense and Nature. Here was his mistake—in trying to preach.
No man ever yet had the Nature-instinct preached into him.”
Chapter VII
EAST ANGLIA
WHATEVER may have been those experiences with the gryengroes which made
Groome, when speaking of the gypsies of ‘Aylwin,’ say ‘the author writes
only of what he knows,’ it seems to have been after his intercourse with
the gypsies that he and a younger brother, Alfred Eugene Watts (elsewhere
described), were articled as solicitors to their father. His bent,
however, was always towards literature, especially poetry, of which he
had now written a great deal—indeed, the major part of the volume which
was destined to lie unpublished for so many years. But before I deal
with the most important period of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life—his life in
London—it seems necessary to say a word or two about his visits to East
Anglia, and especially to the Norfolk coast. There are some admirable
remarks upon the East Coast in Mr. William Sharp’s chapter on
‘Aylwinland’ in ‘Literary Geography,’ and he notes the way in which Rhona
Boswell links it with Cowslip Land; but he does not give examples of the
poems which thus link it, such as the double roundel called ‘The Golden
Hand.’
THE GOLDEN HAND {73a}
PERCY
Do you forget that day on Rington strand
When, near the crumbling ruin’s parapet,
I saw you stand beside the long-shore net
The gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?
RHONA
Do I forget?
PERCY
You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy band
Around your hair which shone as black as jet:
No fairy’s crown of bloom was ever set
Round brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.
I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:
Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:
Love-lips (with one tattoo ‘for dukkerin’ {73b}) tanned
By sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.
RHONA
Do I forget?
The Golden Hand shone there: it’s you forget,
Or p’raps us Romanies ondly understand
The way the Lover’s Dukkeripen is planned
Which shone that second time when us two met.
PERCY
Blest ‘Golden Hand’!
RHONA
The wind, that mixed the smell o’ violet
Wi’ chirp o’ bird, a-blowin’ from the land
Where my dear Mammy lies, said as it fanned
My heart-like, ‘Them ’ere tears makes Mammy fret.’
She loves to see her chavi {74} lookin’ grand,
So I made what you call’d a coronet,
And in the front I put her amulet:
She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.
PERCY
Blest ‘Golden Hand’!
In the same way that the velvety green of Hunts is seen in the verses I
have already quoted, so the softer side of the inland scenery of East
Anglia is described in the following lines, where also we find an
exquisite use of the East Anglian fancy about the fairies and the
foxglove bells.
At a waltz during certain Venetian revels after the liberation from the
Austrian yoke, a forsaken lover stands and watches a lady whose
child-love he had won in England:—
Has she forgotten for such halls as these
The domes the angels built in holy times,
When wings were ours in childhood’s flowery climes
To dance with butterflies and golden bees?—
Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breeze
Shook out those English harebells’ magic chimes
On that child-wedding morn, ’neath English limes,
’Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?
The love that childhood cradled—girlhood nursed—
Has she forgotten it for this dull play,
Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and sway
Like dancers in a telescope reversed?
Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,
‘Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed’?
But was it this that bought her—this poor splendour
That won her from her troth and wild-flower wreath
Who ‘cracked the foxglove bells’ on Grayland Heath,
Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,
Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,
Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,
Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,
When Love grew grave—to hide her soul’s surrender?
Mr. Sharp has dwelt upon the striking way in which the scenery and
atmosphere are rendered in ‘Aylwin,’ but this, as I think, is even more
clearly seen in the poems. And in none of these is it seen so vividly as
in that exhilarating poem, ‘Gypsy Heather,’ published in the ‘Athenæum,’
and not yet garnered in a volume. This poem also shows his lyrical
power, which never seems to be at its very best unless he is depicting
Romany life and Romany passion. The metre of this poem is as original as
that of ‘The Gypsy Haymaking Song,’ quoted in an earlier chapter. It has
a swing like that of no other poem:—
GYPSY HEATHER
‘If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it’ll show
him the selfsame heather where it wur born.’—SINFI LOVELL.
[Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the ‘Petrel,’ takes from his
pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south
seas, the Melbourne post had brought him—a letter from Rhona, staying
then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by the
Boswells, called ‘Gypsy Heather.’ He takes from the envelope a
withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on
which Rhona has written the words, ‘Remember Gypsy Heather.’]
I
Remember Gypsy Heather?
Remember Jasper’s camping-place
Where heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,
And scents of meadow, wood and chase,
Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?
Remember where, in Rington Furze,
I kissed her and she asked me whether
I ‘thought my lips of teazel-burrs,
That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,
Felt nice on a rinkenny moey {76} like hers?’—
Gypsy Heather!
II
Remember Gypsy Heather?
Remember her whom nought could tame
But love of me, the poacher-maiden
Who showed me once my father’s game
With which her plump round arms were laden
Who, when my glances spoke reproach,
Said, “Things o’ fur an’ fin an’ feather
Like coneys, pheasants, perch an’ loach,
An’ even the famous ‘Rington roach,’
Wur born for Romany chies to poach!”—
Gypsy Heather!
III
Remember Gypsy Heather?
Atolls and reefs, you change, you change
To dells of England dewy and tender;
You palm-trees in yon coral range
Seem ‘Rington Birches’ sweet and slender
Shading the ocean’s fiery glare:
We two are in the Dell together—
My body is here, my soul is there
With lords of trap and net and snare,
The Children of the Open Air,—
Gypsy Heather!
IV
Remember Gypsy Heather?
Its pungent breath is on the wind,
Killing the scent of tropic water;
I see her suitors swarthy skinned,
Who pine in vain for Jasper’s daughter.
The ‘Scollard,’ with his features tanned
By sun and wind as brown as leather—
His forehead scarred with Passion’s brand—
Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,
Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,—
Gypsy Heather!
V
Remember Gypsy Heather?
Now Rhona sits beneath the tree
That shades our tent, alone and weeping;
And him, the ‘Scollard,’ him I see:
From bush to bush I see him creeping—
I see her mock him, see her run
And free his pony from the tether,
Who lays his ears in love and fun,
And gallops with her in the sun
Through lace the gossamers have spun,—
Gypsy Heather!
VI
Remember Gypsy Heather?
She reaches ‘Rington Birches’; now,
Dismounting from the ‘Scollard’s’ pony,
She sits alone with heavy brow,
Thinking, but not of hare or coney.
The hot sea holds each sight, each sound
Of England’s golden autumn weather:
The Romanies now are sitting round
The tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;
Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,—
Gypsy Heather!
VII
Remember Gypsy Heather?
She’s thinking of this withered spray
Through all the dance; her eyes are gleaming
Darker than night, yet bright as day,
While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;
I see the lips—the upper curled,
A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,
Whence—while the floating shawl is twirled,
As if a ruddy cloud were swirled—
Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,—
Gypsy Heather!
VIII
Remember Gypsy Heather?
In storm or calm, in sun or rain,
There’s magic, Rhona, in the writing
Wound round these flowers whose purple stain
Dims the dear scrawl of Love’s inditing:
Dear girl, this spray between the leaves
(Now fading like a draggled feather
With which the nesting song-bird weaves)
Makes every wave the vessel cleaves
Seem purple of heather as it heaves,—
Gypsy Heather!
IX
Remember Gypsy Heather?
Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of home
Are everywhere; the skylark winging
Through amber cloud-films till the dome
Seems filled with love, our love, a-singing.
The sea-wind seems an English breeze
Bearing the bleat of ewe and wether
Over the heath from Rington Leas,
Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,
You taught me Romany ’neath the trees,—
Gypsy Heather!
Another reason that makes it necessary for me to touch upon the inland
part of East Anglia is that I have certain remarks to make upon what are
called ‘the Omarian poems of Mr. Watts-Dunton.’ Although, as I have
before hinted, St. Ives, being in Hunts, belongs topographically to the
East Midlands, its sympathies are East Anglian. This perhaps is partly
because it is the extreme east of Hunts, and partly because the mouth of
the Ouse is at Lynn: to those whom Mr. Norris affectionately calls St.
Ivians and Hemingfordians, the seaside means Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Cromer,
Hunstanton, and the towns on the Suffolk coast. The splendour of Norfolk
ale may also partly account for it. This perhaps also explains why the
famous East Anglian translator of Omar Khayyàm would seem to have been
known to a few Omarians on the banks of the Ouse and Cam as soon as the
great discoverer of good things, Rossetti, pounced upon it in the penny
box of a second-hand bookseller. Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s obituary
notice of F. H. Groome in the ‘Athenæum’ will recall these words:—
“It was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of
sympathy at ‘The Pines’ during that first luncheon; there was that
other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm.
We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps
all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be
esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual
personal contact with the wonderful old ‘Fitz.’ As a child of eight
he had seen him, talked with him, been patted on the head by him.
Groome’s father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s
most intimate friends. This was at once a delightful and a powerful
link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when
he heard, as he soon did, the toast to ‘Omar Khayyàm,’ none drank
that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, as the Romanies
say, true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first
sight.”
This is the poem alluded to: it is entitled, ‘Toast to Omar Khayyàm: An
East Anglian echo-chorus inscribed to old Omarian Friends in memory of
happy days by Ouse and Cam’:—
CHORUS
In this red wine, where memory’s eyes seem glowing,
And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showing
What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
We drink to thee, right heir of Nature’s knowing,
Omar Khayyàm!
I
Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowing
Her scriptured orbs on Time’s wide oriflamme,
Nature’s proud blazon: ‘Who shall bless or damn?
Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!’
CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
II
Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowing
Through Persian gardens, widened till it swam—
A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam—
Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,—
CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
III
Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,
And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,
And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,
And swish of scythe in Bredfield’s dewy mowing?
CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
IV
’Twas Fitz, ‘Old Fitz,’ whose knowledge, farther going
Than lore of Omar, ‘Wisdom’s starry Cham,’
Made richer still thine opulent epigram:
Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.—
CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
V
In this red wine, where Memory’s eyes seem glowing,
And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showing
What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!
Omar Khayyàm!
It was many years after this—it was as a member of another Omar Khayyàm
Club of much greater celebrity than the little brotherhood of Ouse and
Cam—not large enough to be called a club—that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote the
following well-known sonnet:—
PRAYER TO THE WINDS
On planting at the head of FitzGerald’s grave two rose-trees whose
ancestors had scattered their petals over the tomb of Omar Khayyàm.
“My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon
it.”
OMAR KHAYYÀM TO KWÁJAH NIZAMI.
Hear us, ye winds! From where the north-wind strows
Blossoms that crown ‘the King of Wisdom’s’ tomb,
The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,
Dreaming in seed of Love’s ancestral rose,
To meadows where a braver north-wind blows
O’er greener grass, o’er hedge-rose, may, and broom,
And all that make East England’s field-perfume
Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows.
Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!
This granite covers him whose golden mouth
Made wiser ev’n the Word of Wisdom’s King:
Blow softly over Omar’s Western herald
Till roses rich of Omar’s dust shall spring
From richer dust of Suffolk’s rare FitzGerald.
I must now quote another of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s East Anglian poems, partly
because it depicts the weird charm of the Norfolk coast, and partly
because it illustrates that sympathy between the poet and the lower
animals which I have already noted. I have another reason: not long ago,
that good East Anglian, Mr. Rider Haggard interested us all by telling
how telepathy seemed to have the power of operating between a dog and its
beloved master in certain rare and extraordinary cases. When the poem
appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ (December 20, 1902), it was described
as ‘part of a forthcoming romance.’ It records a case of telepathy
between man and dog quite as wonderful as that narrated by Mr. Rider
Haggard:—
CAUGHT IN THE EBBING TIDE
The mightiest Titan’s stroke could not withstand
An ebbing tide like this. These swirls denote
How wind and tide conspire. I can but float
To the open sea and strike no more for land.
Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sand
Her feet have pressed—farewell, dear little boat
Where Gelert, {82} calmly sitting on my coat,
Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!
All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:
Yet these air-pictures of the past that glide—
These death-mirages o’er the heaving tide—
Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,
Will break my heart. I see them and I hear
As there they sit at morning, side by side.
THE FIRST VISION
_With Raxton elms behind—in front the sea_,
_Sitting in rosy light in that alcove_,
_They hear the first lark rise o’er Raxton Grove_;
‘_What should I do with fame_, _dear heart_?’ _says he_.
‘_You talk of fame_, _poetic fame_, _to me_
_Whose crown is not of laurel but of love_—
_To me who would not give this little glove_
_On this dear hand for Shakspeare’s dower in fee_.
_While_, _rising red and kindling every billow_,
_The sun’s shield shines_ ’_neath many a golden spear_,
_To lean with you against this leafy pillow_,
_To murmur words of love in this loved ear_—
_To feel you bending like a bending willow_,
_This is to be a poet_—_this_, _my dear_!’
O God, to die and leave her—die and leave
The heaven so lately won!—And then, to know
What misery will be hers—what lonely woe!—
To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieve
Will make me a coward as I sink, and cleave
To life though Destiny has bid me go.
How shall I bear the pictures that will glow
Above the glowing billows as they heave?
One picture fades, and now above the spray
Another shines: ah, do I know the bowers
Where that sweet woman stands—the woodland flowers,
In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay—
That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hours
Wore angel-wings,—till portents brought dismay?
THE SECOND VISION
_Proud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel_,
_She smiles on him_—_on him_, _the prouder giver_,
_As there they stand beside the sunlit river_
_Where petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel_:
_The chirping reed-birds_, _in their play or quarrel_,
_Make musical the stream where lilies quiver_—
_Ah_! _suddenly he feels her slim waist shiver_:
_She speaks_: _her lips grow grey_—_her lips of coral_!
‘_From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are swaying_,
_The seeds of which that gypsy girl has spoken_—
’_Tis fairy grass_, _alas_! _the lover’s token_.’
_She lifts her fingers to her forehead_, _saying_,
‘_Touch the twin hearts_.’ _Says he_, ‘’_Tis idle playing_’:
_He touches them_; _they fall_—_fall bruised and broken_.
* * * * *
Shall I turn coward here who sailed with Death
Through many a tempest on mine own North Sea,
And quail like him of old who bowed the knee—
Faithless—to billows of Genesereth?
Did I turn coward when my very breath
Froze on my lips that Alpine night when he
Stood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,
While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?
Each billow bears me nearer to the verge
Of realms where she is not—where love must wait.—
If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urge
That friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,
To come and help me, or to share my fate.
Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.
[The dog, plunging into the tide and striking
towards him with immense strength, reaches
him and swims round him.]
Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of paw
Here gazing like your namesake, ‘Snowdon’s Hound,’
When great Llewelyn’s child could not be found,
And all the warriors stood in speechless awe—
Mute as your namesake when his master saw
The cradle tossed—the rushes red around—
With never a word, but only a whimpering sound
To tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.
In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,
Should I, brave friend, have needed other speech
Than this dear whimper? Is there not a bond
Stronger than words that binds us each to each?—
But Death has caught us both. ’Tis far beyond
The strength of man or dog to win the beach.
Through tangle-weed—through coils of slippery kelp
Decking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyes
Shine true—shine deep of love’s divine surmise
As hers who gave you—then a Titan whelp!
I think you know my danger and would help!
See how I point to yonder smack that lies
At anchor—Go! His countenance replies.
Hope’s music rings in Gelert’s eager yelp!
[The dog swims swiftly away down the tide.
Now, life and love and death swim out with him!
If he should reach the smack, the men will guess
The dog has left his master in distress.
You taught him in these very waves to swim—
‘The prince of pups,’ you said, ‘for wind and limb’—
And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.
ENVOY
(The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the sand.)
’Twas in no glittering tourney’s mimic strife,—
’Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,
While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,
And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife—
’Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,
Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove
Conquered and found his foe a soul to love,
Found friendship—Life’s great second crown of life.
So I this morning love our North Sea more
Because he fought me well, because these waves
Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore
Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves
That yawned above my head like conscious graves—
I love him as I never loved before.
In these days when so much is written about the intelligence of the lower
animals, when ‘Hans,’ the ‘thinking horse,’ is ‘interviewed’ by eminent
scientists, the exploit of the Second Gelert is not without interest. I
may, perhaps, mention a strange experience of my own. The late Betts
Bey, a well-known figure in St. Peter’s Port, Guernsey, had a fine black
retriever, named Caro. During a long summer holiday which we spent in
Guernsey, Caro became greatly attached to a friend, and Betts Bey
presented him to her. He was a magnificent fellow, valiant as a lion,
and a splendid diver and swimmer. He often plunged off the parapet of
the bridge which spans the Serpentine. Indeed, he would have dived from
any height. His intelligence was surprising. If we wished to make him
understand that he was not to accompany us, we had only to say, ‘Caro, we
are going to church!’ As soon as he heard the word ‘church’ his barks
would cease, his tail would drop, and he would look mournfully resigned.
One evening, as I was writing in my room, Caro began to scratch outside
the door, uttering those strange ‘woof-woofs’ which were his canine
language. I let him in, but he would not rest. He stood gazing at me
with an intense expression, and, turning towards the door, waited
impatiently. For some time I took no notice of his dumb appeal, but his
excitement increased, and suddenly a vague sense of ill seemed to pass
from him into my mind. Drawn half-consciously I rose, and at once with a
strange half-human whine Caro dashed upstairs. I followed him. He ran
into a bedroom, and there in the dark I found my friend lying
unconscious. It is well-nigh certain that Caro thus saved my friend’s
life.
Chapter VIII
LONDON
BETWEEN Mr. Watts-Dunton and the brother who came next to him, before
mentioned, there was a very great affection, although the difference
between them, mentally and physically, was quite noticeable. They were
articled to their father on the same day and admitted solicitors on the
same day, a very unusual thing with solicitors and their sons. Mr.
Watts-Dunton afterwards passed a short term in one of the great
conveyancing offices in London in order to become proficient in
conveyancing. His brother did the same in another office in Bedford Row;
but he afterwards practised for himself. Mr. A. E. Watts soon had a
considerable practice as family solicitor and conveyancer. Mr. Hake
identifies him with Cyril Aylwin, but before I quote Mr. Hake’s
interesting account of him, I will give the vivid description of Cyril in
‘Aylwin’:—
“Juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wideawake. He
had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he
gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the
little crow’s feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately
as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim
and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have
considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and
sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an
impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often
produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek
which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of
sedateness . . . but in the one glance I had got from those watchful,
sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to
them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.”
Cyril Aylwin was at first thought to be a portrait of Whistler, which is
not quite so outrageously absurd as the wild conjecture that William
Morris was the original of Wilderspin. Mr. Hake says:—
“I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been
inquired about more than any other in the book. I knew him, I think,
even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group. He was
a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s—Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts. He lived at
Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly
after I had met him at a wedding party. Among the set in which I
moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist.
His style of humour always struck me as being more American than
English. While bringing out humorous things that would set a dinner
table in a roar, he would himself maintain a perfectly unmoved
countenance. And it was said of him, as ‘Wilderspin’ says of ‘Cyril
Aylwin,’ that he was never known to laugh.” {88}
After a time Mr. Watts-Dunton joined his brother, and the two practised
together in London. They also lived together at Sydenham. Some time
after this, however, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to abandon the law for
literature. The brothers migrated to Sydenham, because at that time Mr.
Watts-Dunton pursued music with an avidity and interest which threatened
for a time to interfere with those literary energies which it was now his
intention to exercise. At that time the orchestral concerts at the
Crystal Palace under Manns, given every morning and every afternoon, were
a great attraction to music lovers, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, who lived close
by, rarely missed either the morning or the afternoon concert. It was in
this way that he became steeped in German music; and afterwards, when he
became intimate with Dr. F. Hueffer, the musical critic of the ‘Times,’
and the exponent of Wagner in Great Britain, he became a thorough
Wagnerian.
It was during this time, and through the extraordinary social attractions
of his brother, that Mr. Watts-Dunton began to move very much in London
life, and saw a great deal of what is called London society. After his
brother’s death he took chambers in Great James Street, close to Mr.
Swinburne, with whom he had already become intimate. And according to
Mr. Hake, in his paper in ‘T. P.’s Weekly’ above quoted from, it was here
that he wrote ‘Aylwin.’ I have already alluded to his record of this
most interesting event:—
“I have just read,” he says, “with the greatest interest the article
in your number of Sept. 18, 1903, called ‘How Authors Work Best.’
But the following sentence in it set me reflecting: ‘Flaubert took
ten years to write and repolish “Madame Bovary,” Watts-Dunton twenty
years to write, recast, and conclude “Aylwin.”’ The statement about
‘Aylwin’ has often been made, and in these days of hasty production
it may well be taken by the author as a compliment; but it is as
entirely apocryphal as that about Scott’s brother having written the
Waverley Novels, and as that about Bramwell Brontë having written
‘Wuthering Heights.’ As to ‘Aylwin,’ I happen to be in a peculiarly
authoritative position to speak upon the genesis of this very popular
book. If any one were to peruse the original manuscript of the story
he would find it in four different handwritings—my late father’s, and
two of my brothers’, but principally in mine.
Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that its
composition did not take twenty years to achieve. It was dictated to
us.”
Dr. Gordon Hake is mainly known as the ‘parable poet,’ but as a fact he
was a physician of extraordinary talent, who had practised first at Bury
St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, until he partly retired to
be private physician to the late Lady Ripon. After her death he left
practice altogether in order to devote himself to literature, for which
he had very great equipments. As ‘Aylwin’ touched upon certain subtle
nervous phases it must have been a great advantage to the author to
dictate these portions of the story to so skilled and experienced a
friend. The rare kind of cerebral exaltation into which Henry Aylwin
passed after his appalling experience in the Cove, in which the entire
nervous system was disturbed, was not what is known as brain fever. The
record of it in ‘Aylwin’ is, I understand, a literal account of a rare
and wonderful case brought under the professional notice of Dr. Hake.
As physician to Rossetti, a few years after the death of his beloved
wife, Dr. Hake’s services must have been priceless to the poet-painter;
for, as is only too well known, Rossetti’s grief for the death of his
wife had for some time a devastating effect upon his mind. It was one of
the causes of that terrible insomnia to relieve himself from which he
resorted to chloral, though later on the attacks upon him by certain foes
intensified the distressing ailment. The insomnia produced fits of
melancholia, an ailment, according to the skilled opinion of Dr. Hake,
more difficult than all others to deal with; for when the nervous system
has sunk to a certain state of depression, the mind roams over the
universe, as it were, in quest of imaginary causes for the depression.
This accounts for the ‘cock and bull’ stories that were somewhat rife
immediately after Rossetti’s death about his having expressed remorse on
account of his ill-treatment of his wife. No one of his intimates took
the least notice of these wild and whirling words. For he would express
remorse on account of the most fantastic things when the fits of
melancholia were upon him; and when these fits were past he would smile
at the foolish things he had said. I get this knowledge from a very high
authority, Dr. Hake’s son—Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, before mentioned—who
knew Rossetti intimately from 1871 until his death, having lived under
the same roof with him at Cheyne Walk, Bognor and Kelmscott. After
Rossetti’s most serious attack of melancholia, his relations and friends
persuaded him to stay with Dr. Hake at Roehampton, and it was there that
the terrible crisis of his illness was passed.
It is interesting to know that in the original form of ‘Aylwin’ the
important part taken in the development of the story by D’Arcy was taken
by Dr. Hake, under the name of Gordon, and that afterwards, when all
sorts of ungenerous things were written about Rossetti, D’Arcy was
substituted for Gordon in order to give the author an opportunity of
bringing out and showing the world the absolute nobility and charm of
Rossetti’s character.
[Picture: A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Painted and Carved
Cabinet]
Among the many varieties of life which Mr. Watts-Dunton saw at this time
was life in the slums; and this was long before the once fashionable
pastime of ‘slumming’ was invented. The following lines in Dr. Hake’s
‘New Day’ allude to the deep interest that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
shown in the poor—shown years before the writers who now deal with the
slums had written a line. Artistically, they are not fair specimens of
Dr. Gordon Hake’s verses, but nevertheless it is interesting to quote
them here:—
Know you a widow’s home? an orphanage?
A place of shelter for the crippled poor?
Did ever limbless men your care engage
Whom you assisted of your larger store?
Know you the young who are to early die—
At their frail form sinks not your heart within?
Know you the old who paralytic lie
While you the freshness of your life begin?
Know you the great pain-bearers who long carry
The bullet in the breast that does not kill?
And those who in the house of madness tarry,
Beyond the blest relief of human skill?
These have you visited, all these assisted,
In the high ranks of charity enlisted.
That Mr. Watts-Dunton has retained his interest in the poor is shown by
the sonnet, ‘Father Christmas in Famine Street,’ which was originally
printed as ‘an appeal’ on Christmas Eve in the ‘Athenæum’:—
When Father Christmas went down Famine Street
He saw two little sisters: one was trying
To lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,
Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.
From out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweet
Leapt, as in answer to the other’s sighing,
While came a murmur, ‘Don’t ’ee keep on crying—
I wants to die: you’ll get my share to eat.’
Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the city
Hymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,
Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.
Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,
‘They do His bidding—if in thrifty fashion:
They let the little children go to Him.’
With this sonnet should be placed that entitled, ‘Dickens Returns on
Christmas Day’:—
A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: ‘Dickens dead?
Then will Father Christmas die too?’—June 9, 1870.
‘Dickens is dead!’ Beneath that grievous cry
London seemed shivering in the summer heat;
Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:
‘Dickens is dead!’ said they, and hurried by;
Street children stopped their games—they knew not why,
But some new night seemed darkening down the street.
A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,
Cried, ‘Dickens dead? Will Father Christmas die?’
City he loved, take courage on thy way!
He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.
Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey—
Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,
Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears—
Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!
Let me say here, parenthetically, that ‘The Pines’ is so far out of date
that for twenty-five years it has been famous for its sympathy with the
Christmas sentiment which now seems to be fading, as this sonnet shows:—
THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT ‘THE PINES.’
Life still hath one romance that naught can bury—
Not Time himself, who coffins Life’s romances—
For still will Christmas gild the year’s mischances,
If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry—
To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry—
To smile with eyes outshining by their glances
The Christmas tree—to dance with fairy dances
And crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.
And as to us, dear friend, the carols sung
Are fresh as ever. Bright is yonder bough
Of mistletoe as that which shone and swung
When you and I and Friendship made a vow
That Childhood’s Christmas still should seal each brow—
Friendship’s, and yours, and mine—and keep us young.
I may also quote from ‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice’ this romantic
description of the Rosicrucian Christmas:—
(The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called ‘The
Rosy Scar,’ depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine
galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of
Rosenkreutz, as a ‘rosy phantom.’ The Lover reads aloud the
descriptive verses on the frame.)
While Night’s dark horses waited for the wind,
He stood—he shone—where Sunset’s fiery glaives
Flickered behind the clouds; then, o’er the waves,
He came to them, Faith’s remnant sorrow-thinned.
The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,
Cried, ‘Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?
Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,
The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.’
All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;
Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,
Flushed the grey sky—flushed sea and sail and spar,
Flushed, blessing every slave’s woe-wasted cheek.
Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:
‘Sufferers, take heart! Christ lends the Rosy Scar.’
Chapter IX
GEORGE BORROW
IT was not until 1872 that Mr. Watts-Dunton was introduced to Borrow by
Dr. Gordon Hake, Borrow’s most intimate friend.
The way in which this meeting came about has been familiar to the readers
of an autobiographical romance (not even yet published!) wherein Borrow
appears under the name of Dereham, and Hake under the name of Gordon.
But as some of these passages in a modified form have appeared in print
in an introduction by Mr. Watts-Dunton to the edition of Borrow’s
‘Lavengro,’ published by Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., in 1893, there will be
nothing incongruous in my quoting them here:—
“Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon
grew up an intimacy between us. It has been my experience to learn
that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference
of age between friends of either sex. At that time I do not think I
had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on
terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men,
each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father. Basevi
was one of these: so was Lineham. I daresay it was owing to some
idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young
fellows with whom I was brought into contact was mainly confined to
matters connected with field-sports. I found it far easier to be
brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age
than with men. But as Basevi told me that it was the same with
himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all. When
Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any
difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same
with himself.
One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near
Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and
in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons
came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common,
evidently bound for the house.
‘Dereham!’ I said. ‘Is there a man in the world I should so like to
see as Dereham?’
And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in
the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.
‘Why do you want so much to see him?’ asked Gordon.
‘Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the
Open Air.’
Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant. But it is
necessary here to explain what that meaning was.
We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the
picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels,
‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as
ever it was—perhaps rarer. It was, we believed, quite an affair of
individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost.
That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is
known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with
science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the
man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it. In human
souls—in one, perhaps, as much as in another—there is always that
instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is
always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as
close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals
this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some
few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the
blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to
some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’
herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to
brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and
Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English
gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children
of the Open Air.’ But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of
his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing
pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Brontë, the sensitivity to
human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love
passion—disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct
with which they were undoubtedly endowed. I was perfectly conscious
that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers—that is, I
was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a
free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion
to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child
of the Open Air.
Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there
are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other
barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to
overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the
attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what this kind of
Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not
the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to
touch her close, soul to soul—but another ego enisled like his
own—sensitive, shrinking, like his own—a soul which, love him as it
may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the
universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other
Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations.
But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon
Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no
more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a
beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a
Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a
mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A
balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s
sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious
life.
To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot
touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will
go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a
dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky,
the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love
of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature
seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.
Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no
retreating, and we were introduced.
He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much
annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that
drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still.
My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling
of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible
barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully. I knew from his books
that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way
directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he
considered that in these his own special directions lay all the
knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to
Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was
its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk
of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be
‘prying,’ though there I should have been quite at home. I knew,
however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet
literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of
eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned,
and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I
touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Dereham
evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar
with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I
touched upon beer, the British bruiser, ‘gentility nonsense,’ and
other ‘nonsense’; then upon etymology—traced hoity-toityism to
‘toit,’ a roof—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a
withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but
with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of
Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet
narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having
been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had
shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night,
escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and
afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been
hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim,
having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding
at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in
the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to
sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the
subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and
at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.
We all went out of the house and looked over the common. It chanced
that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the
sunken road opposite to Gordon’s house. These same gypsies, by the
by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared
in the ‘Graphic.’ Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they
were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but
basket-makers. After passing this group we went on the common. We
did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty
figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them,
striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now
stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose
lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now
stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.
After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham’s suggestion,
for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the
‘Bald-Faced Stag’ in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should
introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the special
glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I
remember—a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been
tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from
an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at
the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a
rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the
meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of
those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was
Dereham’s special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on
the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a
summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood
Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical
and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us
there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a
rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on
the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away.
Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in
connection with the rainbow—how, by making a ‘trus’hul’ (cross) of
two sticks, the Romany chi who ‘pens the dukkerin can wipe the
rainbow out of the sky,’ etc. Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a
man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into
a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record,
upon the subject of the ‘Spirit of the Rainbow’ which I, as a child,
went out to find.
Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I
found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar
with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers,
seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him
closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the
silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under
his arm, a true ‘Child of the Open Air.’
‘Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green
umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?’ I murmured to
Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the
Park, said in a dreamy way, ‘Old England! Old England!’
It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham’s
arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the
trees, ‘Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?’ And then, calling to
mind the books he had written, I said: ‘He went into the Dingle, and
lived alone—went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as
Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone,
for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring
from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the
Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi
Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been
placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.’
‘But the most damning thing of all,’ said Gordon, ‘is that umbrella,
gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.’
‘Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,’ said I.
‘So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is
quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never.
No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story
finds himself able to realize from Dereham’s description the misery
of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East
Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with
starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion,’ I said to
Gordon, ‘that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the
Nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could
never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition.
To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was
as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander
Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.’
‘Ambition and the green gamp,’ said Gordon. ‘But look, the rainbow
is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries;
and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the
light.’
But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open
Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human
kind which the ‘Child of the Open Air’ must needs lack.
Knowing Dereham’s extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of
meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close
to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the
terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that
walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why
Dereham should at once take to me—reasons that had nothing whatever
to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon
Dereham’s character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably
had their nests. By the expression on Dereham’s face as he stood and
gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
‘Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was
drained?’ I said.
‘I should think so,’ said he dreamily, ‘and every kind of water
bird.’
Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, ‘But how
do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?’
‘You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of
Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.’
‘I don’t mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,’ he said.
‘No,’ said I, ‘but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at
Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.’
‘Then you know Whittlesea Mere?’ said Dereham, much interested.
‘I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,’ I
said, ‘and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know
the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized. He
was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much
across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of
the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.’
I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave
him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the
viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected
child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper—as he, Dereham, when
a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
‘The gypsies,’ said Dereham, ‘always believed me to be a Romany. But
surely you are not a Romany Rye?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it
has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and
low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?’
‘I should think not,’ said Dereham indignantly.
‘But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.’
‘Gordon is my only link to that dark world,’ I said, ‘and even you
don’t object to Gordon. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the
taint of printers’ ink.’
He laughed. ‘Who are you?’
‘The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child
in short frocks,’ I said, ‘and have never yet found an answer. But
Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself
with any such troublesome query.’
This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as
these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man’s
personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in
many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself
into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly
vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
gypsies and East Anglia.
‘You are an Englishman?’ said Dereham.
‘Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,’ I said, using a
phrase of his own in one of his books—‘if not a thorough East
Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.’
‘Nearly,’ said Dereham.
And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
‘Shales mare,’ a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who
could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk
farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and
when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare
with myself behind her in a dogcart—an East Anglian dogcart; when I
praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth,
Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most
buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told
him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the
rainbow he loved was ‘the glassy Ouse’ of East Anglia, and the only
place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was
the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing
that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East
Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment
we became friends.
Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He
turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity
between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon
a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the
distance.
‘It is on sand alone,’ said Dereham, ‘that the sea strikes its true
music—Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.’
‘The best of the sea’s lutes,’ I said, ‘is made by the sands of
Cromer.’”
These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above
quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus
described by the ‘Gordon’ of the story in one of the sonnets in ‘The New
Day’:—
And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!
How often ’mid the deer that grazed the park,
Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,
Made musical with many a soaring lark,
Have we not held brisk commune with him there,
While Lavengro, there towering by your side,
With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
To tell the legends of the fading race—
As at the summons of his piercing glance,
Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
While you called up that pendant of romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!
In the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and in Chambers’ ‘Cyclopædia of English
Literature,’ and scattered through scores of articles in the ‘Athenæum,’
I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without number. They
afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man that exists or
is ever likely to exist. But, of course, it is quite impossible for me
to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many more important
figures waiting to be introduced. Still, I must find room for the most
brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush these pages with
a colour which I feel they need. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been described as
the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in verse or in prose,
and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but never, I think, is he
so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.
I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of gypsy life is
to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England
where East Anglia and the Midlands join. It adds interest to the
incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona
Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow. This also is a chapter from
the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to
be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow’s books:—
“It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with
what Dereham called ‘gypsy gold,’ and the bright green of the foliage
showed scarcely a touch of bronze—at that very moment, indeed, when
the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and
the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their
half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy,
and pimpernel. Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man
could give. He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of
gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days. In
conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I
chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume
of Matthew Arnold in which appears ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ Dereham said
he well remembered my directing his attention to ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’
After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was
scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever
the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be, from any supposed
artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of
the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or
even understand its motive in the least degree. I challenged this,
contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above
a gypsy’s intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the
most illiterate person could grasp it.
‘I wish,’ said Dereham, ‘you would come with me to the camp and try
the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp.
As to gypsy men,’ said he, ‘they are too prosaic to furnish a fair
test.’
We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became
very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense,
and many other pet subjects of his. I already knew that he was no
lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the
‘trumpery great,’ although in other regards he was such a John Bull.
By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition.
As we were walking along, Dereham’s eyes, which were as longsighted
as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush
some distance off. He stopped and said: ‘At first I thought that
white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a
magpie,’—next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies’ most famous bird.
On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the
leaves. As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: ‘It is
wounded—or else dying—or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?’
‘Hawk!’ said Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed
into the sky. ‘The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his
quarry and made his meal. I fancied he has himself been ‘chivvied’
by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.’
And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that
speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk—one of the kind which takes its
prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands—was wheeling up
and up, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to
swoop at and devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had
been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident,
for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest
birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk.
Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.
As we were gazing at the bird a woman’s voice at our elbows said,—
‘It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie. I shall stop
here till the hawk’s flew away.’
We turned round, and there stood a fine young gypsy woman, carrying,
gypsy fashion, a weakly child that in spite of its sallow and wasted
cheek proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a young gypsy
girl. She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not
of the typical Romany kind. It was, as I afterwards learned, more
like the beauty of a Capri girl.
She was bareheaded—there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her
head—her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a
gypsy girl’s hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the
back of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses
glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.
They were small dead dragonflies, of the crimson kind called
‘sylphs.’
To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known. The woman with
the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what was her
connection, if any, with ‘Boswell the Great’—I mean Sylvester
Boswell, the grammarian and ‘well-known and popalated gypsy of
Codling Gap,’ who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about
the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, ‘on the
accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of
Nature’s life.’
Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was Perpinia, and that the
other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, was the famous beauty of
the neighbourhood—Rhona Boswell, of whom many stories had reached him
with regard to Percy Aylwin, a relative of Rosamond’s father.
After greeting the two, Dereham looked at the weakling child with the
deepest interest, and said to the mother: ‘This chavo ought not to
look like that—with such a mother as you, Perpinia.’ ‘And with such
a daddy, too,’ said she. ‘Mike’s stronger for a man nor even I am
for a woman’—a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; ‘and as to
good looks, it’s him as has got the good looks, not me. But none on
us can’t make it out about the chavo. He’s so weak and sick he don’t
look as if he belonged to Boswell’s breed at all.’
‘How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?’ said I, looking at
the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia’s finely cut
lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.
‘Can’t say,’ said she, laughing.
‘About as many as she can afford to buy,’ interrupted ‘the beauty of
the Ouse,’ as Rhona Boswell was called. ‘That’s all. Mike don’t
like her a-smokin’. He says it makes her look like a old Londra
Irish woman in Common Garding Market.’
‘You must not smoke another pipe,’ said I to the mother—‘not another
pipe till the child leaves the breast.’
‘What?’ said Perpinia defiantly. ‘As if I could live without my
pipe!’
‘Fancy Pep a-living without her baccy!’ laughed Rhona.
‘Your child can’t live with it,’ said I to Perpinia. ‘That pipe of
yours is full of a poison called nicotine.’
‘Nick what?’ said Rhona, laughing. ‘That’s a new kind of nick. Why,
you smoke yourself!’
‘Nicotine,’ said I. ‘And the first part of Pep’s body that the
poison gets into is her breast, and—’
‘Gets into my burk,’ {112} said Perpinia. ‘Get along wi’ ye.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do it pison Pep’s milk?’ said Rhona.
‘Yes.’
‘That ain’t true,’ said Perpinia—‘can’t be true.’
‘It is true,’ said I. ‘If you don’t give up that pipe for a time,
the child will die, or else be a ricketty thing all his life. If you
do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your
husband can be.’
‘Chavo agin pipe, Pep!’ said Rhona.
‘Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,’ said Dereham, in that
hail-fellow-well-met tone of his, which he reserved for the
Romanies—a tone which no Romany could ever resist. And he took it
gently from the woman’s lips. ‘Don’t smoke any more till I come to
the camp and see the chavo again.’
‘He be’s a good friend to the Romanies,’ said Rhona, in an appeasing
tone.
‘That’s true,’ said the woman; ‘but he’s no business to take my pipe
out o’ my mouth for all that.’
She soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain the
pipe. Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty high-road
leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona. Perpinia remained,
keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking
child.
It was determined now that Rhona was the very person to be used as
the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold’s poem, for she was
exceptionally intelligent. So instead of going to the camp, the
oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse,
and heather towards ‘Kingfisher brook,’ and when we reached it we sat
down on a fallen tree.
Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl so much,
in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a story either
told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from my pocket the
gypsy girl began to clap her hands. Her anticipation of enjoyment
sent over her face a warm glow.
Her complexion, though darker than an English girl’s, was rather
lighter than an ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable
hue; but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for me,
described it as a mingling of pansy purple and dark tawny. The
pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped
and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both
above and below, and this had the peculiar effect of making the eyes
seem always a little contracted and just about to smile. The great
size and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem
smaller than it really was; they also lessened the apparent size of
the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she
laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.
Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried,
‘Look at the Devil’s needles! They’re come to sew my eyes up for
killing their brothers.’
And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky
blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a
rainbow gauze, caught the sun as he swept dazzling by, did really
seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by
the lights shed from the girl’s eyes.
‘I dussn’t set here,’ said she. ‘Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly
Brook.’ And that’s the king o’ the dragon-flies: he lives here.’
As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a
dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some
green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to
justify their Romany name and sew up the girl’s eyes.
‘The Romanies call them the Devil’s needles,’ said Dereham; ‘their
business is to sew up pretty girls’ eyes.’
In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while
sat down again to listen to the ‘lil,’ as she called the story.
[Picture: A Letter Box on the Broads. (From an Oil Painting at ‘The
Pines.’)]
Glanville’s prose story, upon which Arnold’s poem is based, was read
first. In this Rhona was much interested. But when I went on to
read to her Arnold’s poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at
the lovely bits of description—for the country about Oxford is quite
remarkably like the country in which she was born—she looked sadly
bewildered, and then asked to have it all read again. After a second
reading she said in a meditative way: ‘Can’t make out what the lil’s
all about—seems all about nothink! Seems to me that the pretty
sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy makes
this ’ere gorgio want to cry. What a rum lot gorgios is surely!’
And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility
of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and
laughing aloud.
‘Let’s go to the camp!’ said Dereham. ‘That was all true about the
nicotine—was it not?’
‘Partly, I think,’ said I, ‘but not being a medical man I must not be
too emphatic. If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for
any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.’
‘Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,’
growled Dereham. ‘Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale
tobacco—pheugh!’”
After giving these two delightful descriptions of Borrow and his
environment, I will now quote Mr. Watts-Dunton’s description of their
last meeting:—
‘The last time I ever saw Borrow was shortly before he left London to
live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge,
where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking
splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and
boiling over the West End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the
parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most
people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner
could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could
not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun
and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose
above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the
sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a
golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and
clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply. I never
saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and
from its association with ‘the last of Borrow’ I shall never forget
it.’
A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE
THE LAST SIGHT OF GEORGE BORROW
We talked of ‘Children of the Open Air,’
Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
Till, on a day, across the mystic bar
Of moonrise, came the ‘Children of the Roof,’
Who find no balm ’neath evening’s rosiest woof,
Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.
We looked o’er London where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And lore of woods and wild wind-prophecies—
Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.
While the noble music of this double valediction in poetry and prose is
sounding in our ears, my readers and I, ‘with wandering steps and slow,’
may also fitly take our reluctant leave of George Borrow.
Chapter X
THE ACTED DRAMA
IT was during the famous evenings in Dr. Marston’s house at Chalk Farm
that Mr. Watts-Dunton was for the first time brought into contact with
the theatrical world. I do not know that he was ever closely connected
with that world, but in the set in which he specially moved at this time
he seems to have been almost the only one who was a regular playgoer and
first-nighter, for Rossetti’s playgoing days were nearly over, and Mr.
Swinburne never was a playgoer. Mr. Watts-Dunton still takes, as may be
seen in his sonnet to Ellen Terry, which I shall quote, a deep interest
in the acted drama and in the acting profession, although of late years
he has not been much seen at the theatres. When, after a while, he and
Minto were at work on the ‘Examiner’ Mr. Watts-Dunton occasionally,
although I think rarely, wrote a theatrical critique for that paper. The
only one I have had an opportunity of reading is upon Miss Neilson—not
the Miss Julia Neilson who is so much admired in our day; but the
powerful, dark-eyed creole-looking beauty, Lilian Adelaide Neilson, who,
after being a mill-hand and a barmaid, became a famous tragedian, and
made a great impression in Juliet, and in impassioned poetical parts of
that kind. The play in which she appeared on that occasion was a play by
Tom Taylor, called ‘Anne Boleyn,’ in which Miss Neilson took the part of
the heroine. It was given at the Haymarket in February 1876. I do not
remember reading any criticism in which so much admirable writing—acute,
brilliant, and learned—was thrown away upon so mediocre a play. Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon Miss Neilson’s acting were, however, not
thrown away, for the subject seems to have been fully worthy of them; and
I, who love the acted drama myself, regret that the actress’s early death
in 1880, robbed me of the pleasure of seeing her. She was one of the
actresses whom Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet on Sunday evenings at
Marston’s, and I have heard him say that her genius was as apparent in
her conversation as in her acting. Miss Corkran has recently sketched
one of these meetings, and has given us a graphic picture of Mr.
Watts-Dunton there, contrasting his personal appearance with that of Mr.
Swinburne. They must indeed have been delightful gatherings to a lover
of the theatre, for there Miss Neilson, Miss Glyn, Miss Ada Cavendish,
and others were to be met—met in the company of Irving, Sothern, Hermann
Vezin, and many another famous actor.
That Mr. Watts-Dunton had a peculiar insight into histrionic art was
shown by what occurred on his very first appearance at the Marston
evenings, whither he was taken by his friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, who used
to tell the following story with great humour; and Rossetti also used to
repeat it with still greater gusto. I am here again indebted to his son,
Mr. Hake—who was also a friend of Dr. Marston, Ada Cavendish, and
others—for interesting reminiscences of these Marston evenings which have
never been published. Mr. Watts-Dunton at that time was, of course,
quite unknown, except in a very small circle of literary men and artists.
Three or four dramatic critics, several poets, and two actresses, one of
whom was Ada Cavendish, were talking about Irving in ‘The Bells,’ which
was a dramatization by a writer named Leopold Lewis of the ‘Juif
Polonais’ of Erckmann-Chatrian. They were all enthusiastically extolling
Irving’s acting; and this is not surprising, as all will say who have
seen him in the part. But while some were praising the play, others were
running it down. “What I say,” said one of the admirers, “is that the
motif of ‘The Bells,’ the use of the idea of a sort of embodied
conscience to tell the audience the story and bring about the
catastrophe, is the newest that has appeared in drama or fiction—it is
entirely original.”
“Not entirely, I think,” said a voice which, until that evening, was new
in the circle. They turned round to listen to what the dark-eyed young
stranger, tanned by the sun to a kind of gypsy colour, who looked like
William Black, quietly smoking his cigarette, had to say.
“Not entirely new?” said one. “Who was the originator, then, of the
idea?”
“I can’t tell you that,” said the interrupting voice, “for it occurs in a
very old Persian story, and it was evidently old even then. But
Erckmann-Chatrian took it from a much later story-teller. They adapted
it from Chamisso.”
“Is that the author of ‘Peter Schlemihl’?” said one.
“Yes,” replied Mr. Watts-Dunton, “but Chamisso was a poet before he was a
prose writer, and he wrote a rhymed story in which the witness of a
murder was the sunrise, and at dawn the criminal was affected in the same
way that Matthias is affected by the sledge bells. The idea that the
sensorium, in an otherwise perfectly sane brain, can translate sights and
sound into accusations of a crime is, of course, perfectly true, and in
the play it is wonderfully given by Irving.”
“Well,” said Dr. Marston, “that is the best account I have yet heard of
the origin of ‘The Bells.’”
Then the voice of one of the disparagers of the play said: “There you
are! The very core of Erckmann-Chatrian’s story and Lewis’s play has
been stolen and spoilt from another writer. The acting, as I say, is
superb—the play is rot.”
“Well, I do not think so,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “I think it a new and
a striking play.”
“Will you give your reasons, sir?” said Dr. Marston, in that
old-fashioned courtly way which was one of his many charms.
“Certainly,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “if it will be of any interest. You
recollect Coleridge’s remarks upon expectation and surprise in drama. I
think it a striking play because I cannot recall any play in which the
entire source of interest is that of pure expectation unadulterated by
surprise. From the opening dialogue, before ever the burgomaster
appears, the audience knows that a murder has been committed, and that
the murderer must be the burgomaster, and yet the audience is kept in
breathless suspense through pure expectation as to whether or not the
crime will be brought home to him, and if brought home to him, how.”
“Well,” said the voice of one of the admirers of the play, “that is the
best criticism of ‘The Bells’ I have yet heard.” After this the
conversation turned upon Jefferson’s acting of Rip Van Winkle, and many
admirable remarks fell from a dozen lips. When there was a pause in
these criticisms, Dr. Marston turned to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said, “Have
you seen Jefferson in ‘Rip van Winkle,’ sir?”
“Yes, indeed,” was the reply, “many times; and I hope to see it many more
times. It is wonderful. I think it lucky that I have been able to see
the great exemplar of what may be called the Garrick type of actor, and
the great exemplar of what may be called the Edmund Kean type of actor.”
On being asked what he meant by this classification, Mr. Watts-Dunton
launched out into one of those wide-sweeping but symmetrical monologues
of criticism in which beginning, middle, and end, were as perfectly
marked as though the improvization had been a well-considered essay—the
subject being the style of acting typified by Garrick and the style of
acting typified by Robson. As this same idea runs through Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s criticism of Got in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ (which I shall quote
later), there is no need to dwell upon it here.
“As an instance,” he said, “of Jefferson’s supreme power in this line of
acting, one might refer to Act II. of the play, where Rip mounts the
Catskill Mountains in the company of the goblins. Rip talks with the
goblins one after the other, and there seems to be a dramatic dialogue
going on. It is not till the curtain falls that the audience realizes
that every word spoken during that act came from the lips of Rip, so
entirely have Jefferson’s facial expression and intonation dramatized
each goblin.”
Between Mr. Watts-Dunton and our great Shakespearean actress, Ellen
Terry, there has been an affectionate friendship running over nearly a
quarter of a century. This is not at all surprising to one who knows
Miss Terry’s high artistic taste and appreciation of poetry. Among the
poems expressing that friendship, none is more pleasing than the sonnet
that appeared in the ‘Magazine of Art’ to which Mr. Bernard Partridge
contributed his superb drawing of Miss Terry in the part of Queen
Katherine. It is entitled, ‘Queen Katherine: on seeing Miss Ellen Terry
as Katherine in King Henry VIII’:—
Seeking a tongue for tongueless shadow-land,
Has Katherine’s soul come back with power to quell
A sister-soul incarnate, and compel
Its bodily voice to speak by Grief’s command?
Or is it Katherine’s self returns to stand
As erst she stood defying Wolsey’s spell—
Returns with those vile wrongs she fain would tell
Which memory bore to Eden’s amaranth strand?
Or is it thou, dear friend—this Queen, whose face
The salt of many tears hath scarred and stung?—
Can it be thou, whose genius, ever young,
Lighting the body with the spirit’s grace,
Is loved by England—loved by all the race
Round all the world enlinked by Shakespeare’s tongue!
With one exception I do not find any dramatic criticisms by Mr.
Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum.’ Indeed, I should not expect to find him
trenching upon the domain of the greatest dramatic critic of our time,
Mr. Joseph Knight. No one speaks with greater admiration of Mr. Knight
than his friend of thirty years’ standing, Mr. Watts-Dunton himself; and
when an essay on ‘King John’ was required for the series of Shakespeare
essays to accompany Mr. Edwin Abbey’s famous illustrations in ‘Harper’s
Magazine,’ it was Mr. Knight whom Mr. Watts-Dunton invited to discuss
this important play. The exception I allude to is the criticism of
Victor Hugo’s ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ which appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of
December 2, 1882.
The way in which it came about that Mr. Watts-Dunton undertook for the
‘Athenæum’ so important a piece of dramatic criticism is interesting. In
1882 M. Vacquerie, the editor of ‘Le Rappel,’ a relative of Hugo’s, and a
great friend of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton, together with other
important members of the Hugo cenacle, determined to get up a
representation of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ on the jubilee of its first
representation, since when it had never been acted. Vacquerie sent two
fauteuils, one for Mr. Swinburne and one for Mr. Watts-Dunton; and the
two poets were present at that memorable representation. Long before the
appointed day there was on the Continent, from Paris to St. Petersburg,
an unprecedented demand for seats; for it was felt that this was the most
interesting dramatic event that had occurred for fifty years.
Consequently the editor of the ‘Athenæum’ for once invited his chief
literary contributor to fill the post which the dramatic editor of the
paper, Mr. Joseph Knight, generously yielded to him for the occasion, and
the following article appeared:—
“Paris, November 23, 1882.
“I felt that the revival, at the Theatre Français, of ‘Le Roi
s’Amuse,’ on the fiftieth anniversary of its original production,
must be one of the most interesting literary events of our time, and
so I found it to be. Victor Hugo was there, sitting with his arms
folded across his breast, calm but happy, in a stage box. He
expressed himself satisfied and even delighted with the acting. The
poet’s appearance was fuller of vitality and more Olympian than ever.
Between the acts he left the theatre and walked about in the square,
leaning on the arm of his illustrious poet friend and family
connection, Auguste Vacquerie, to whose kindness I was indebted for a
seat in the fauteuils d’orchestre, which otherwise I should have
found to be quite unattainable, so unprecedented was the demand for
places. It is said that a thousand francs were given for a seat.
Never before was seen, even in a French theatre, an audience so
brilliant and so illustrious. I did not, however, see any English
face I knew save that of Mr. Swinburne, who at the end of the third
act might have been seen talking to Hugo in his box. Among the most
appreciative and enthusiastic of those who assisted at the
representation was the French poet, who perhaps in the nineteenth
century stands next to Hugo for intellectual massiveness, M. Leconte
de Lisle. And I should say that every French poet and indeed every
man of eminence was there.
Considering the extraordinary nature of the piece, the cast was
perhaps as satisfactory as could have been hoped for. Fond as is M.
Hugo of spectacular effects, and even of coups de théâtre, no other
dramatist gives so little attention as he to the idiosyncrasies of
actors. It is easy to imagine that Shakespeare in writing his lines
was not always unmindful of an actor like Burbage. But in depicting
Triboulet, Hugo must have thought as little about the specialities of
Ligier, who took the part on the first night in 1832, as of the
future Got, who was to take it on the second night in 1882. And the
same may be said of Blanche in relation to the two actresses who
successively took that part. This is, I think, exactly the way in
which a dramatist should work. The contrary method is not more
ruinous to drama as a literary form than to the actor’s art. To
write up to an actor’s style destroys all true character-drawing;
also it ends by writing up to the actor’s mere manner, who from that
moment is, as an artist, doomed. On the whole, the performance
wanted more glow and animal spirits. The François I of M.
Mounet-Sully was full of verve, but this actor’s voice is so
exceedingly rich and emotional that the king seemed more poetic, and
hence more sympathetic to the audience, than was consistent with a
character who in a sense is held up as the villain of the piece. The
true villain, here, however, as in ‘Torquemada,’ ‘Notre Dame de
Paris,’ ‘Les Misérables,’ and, indeed, in all Hugo’s characteristic
works, is not an individual at all, but Circumstance. Circumstance
placed Francis, a young and pleasure-loving king, over a licentious
court. Circumstance gave him a court jester with a temper which, to
say the least of it, was peculiar for such times as those.
Circumstance, acting through the agency of certain dissolute
courtiers, thrust into the king’s very bedroom the girl whom he loved
and who belonged to a class from whom he had been taught to expect
subservience of every kind. The tragic mischief of the rape follows
almost as a necessary consequence. Add to this the fact that
Circumstance contrives that the girl Maguelonne, instead of aiding
her more conscientious brother in killing the disguised king at the
bidding of ‘the client who pays,’ falls unexpectedly in love with
him; while Circumstance also contrives that Blanche shall be there
ready at the very spot at the very moment where and when she is
imperatively wanted as a substituted victim;—and you get the entire
motif of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’—man enmeshed in a web of circumstance, the
motif of ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ the motif of ‘Torquemada,’ and, in a
certain deep sense, perhaps the proper motif in romantic drama. For
when the vis matrix of classic drama, the supernatural interference
of conscious Destiny, was no longer available to the artist,
something akin to it—something nobler and more powerful than the
stage villain—was found to be necessary to save tragedy from sinking
into melodrama. And this explains so many of the complexities of
Shakespeare.
In the dramas of Victor Hugo, however, the romantic temper has
advanced quite as far as it ought to advance not only in the use of
Circumstance as the final cause of the tragic mischief, but in the
use of the grotesque in alliance with the terrible. The greatest
masters of the terrible-grotesque till we get to the German
romanticists were the English dramatists of the sixteenth and the
early portion of the seventeenth century, and of course by far the
greatest among these was Shakespeare. For the production of the
effect in question there is nothing comparable to the scenes in
‘Lear’ between the king and the fool—scenes which seem very early in
his life to have struck Hugo more than anything else in literature.
Outside the Elizabethan dramatists, however, there can be no doubt
that (leaving out of the discussion the great German masters in this
line) Hugo is the greatest worker in the terrible-grotesque that has
appeared since Burns. I need only point to Quasimodo and Triboulet
and compare them not merely with such attempts in this line as those
of writers like Beddoes, but even with the magnificent work of Mr.
Browning, who though far more subtle than Hugo is without his
sublimity and amazing power over chiaroscuro. Now, the most
remarkable feature of the revival of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ and that which
made me above all other reasons desirous to see it, was that the
character of Triboulet was to be rendered by an actor of rare and
splendid genius, but who, educated in the genteel comedy of modern
France and also in the social subtleties of Molière, seemed the last
man in Paris to give that peculiar expression of the romantic temper
which I have called the terrible-grotesque.
That M. Got’s success in a part so absolutely unsuited to him should
have been as great as it was is, in my judgment, the crowning success
of his life. It is as though Thackeray, after completing ‘Philip,’
had set himself to write a romance in the style of ‘Notre Dame de
Paris,’ and succeeded in the attempt. Yet the success of M. Got was
relative only, I think. The Triboulet was not the Triboulet of the
reader’s own imaginings, but an admirable Triboulet of the Comédie
Française. Perhaps, however, the truth is that there is not an actor
in Europe who could adequately render such a character as Triboulet.
This is what I mean: all great actors are divisible into two groups,
which are by temperament and endowment the exact opposites of each
other. There are those who, like Garrick, producing their effects by
means of a self-dominance and a conservation of energy akin to that
of Goethe in poetry, are able to render a character, coldly indeed,
but with matchless verisimilitude in its every nuance. And there are
those who, like Edmund Kean and Robson, ‘live’ in the character so
entirely that self-dominance and conservation of energy are not
possible, and who, whensoever the situation becomes very intense,
work miracles of representation by sheer imaginative abandon, but do
so at the expense of that delicacy of light and shade in the entire
conception which is the great quest of the actor as an artist. And
if it should be found that in order to render Triboulet there is
requisite for the more intense crises of the piece the abandon of
Kean and Robson, and at the same time, for the carrying on of the
play, the calm, self-conscious staying power of Garrick, the
conclusion will be obvious that Triboulet is essentially an unactable
character. I will illustrate this by an instance. The reader will
remember that in the third act of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ Triboulet’s
daughter Blanche, after having been violated by the king at the
Louvre, rushes into the antechamber, where stands her father
surrounded by the group of sneering courtiers who, unknown both to
the king and to Triboulet, have abducted her during the night and set
her in the king’s way. When the girl tells her father of the
terrible wrong that has been done to her, he passes at once from the
mood of sardonic defiance which was natural to him into a state of
passion so terrible that a sudden and magical effect is produced: the
conventional walls between him, the poor despised court jester, and
the courtiers, are suddenly overthrown by the unexpected operation of
one of those great human instincts which make the whole world kin:—
TRIBOULET (faisant trois pas, et balayant du geste tous les seigneurs
inter dits).
Allez-vous-en d’ici!
Et, si le roi François par malheur se hasarde
A passer près d’ici, (à Monsieur de Vermandois) vous êtes de sa
garde,
Dites-lui de ne pas entrer,—que je suis là.
M. DE PIENNE. On n’a jamais rien vu de fou comme cela.
M. DE GORDES (lui faisant signe de se retirer). Aux fous comme aux
enfants on cède quelque chose.
Veillons pourtant, de peur d’accident.
[Ils sortent.
TRIBOULET (s’asseyant sur le fauteuil du roi et relevant sa fille.)
Allons, cause.
Dis-moi tout. (Il se retourne, et, apercevant Monsieur de Cossé, qui
est resté, il se lève à demi en lui montrant la porte). M’avez-vous
en tendu, monseigneur?
M. DE COSSÉ (tout en se retirant comme subjugué par l’ascendant du
bouffon). Ces fous, cela se croit tout permis, en honneur!
[Il sort.
Now in reading ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ startling as is the situation, it
does not seem exaggerated, for Victor Hugo’s lines are adequate in
simple passion to effect the dramatic work, and the reader feels that
Triboulet was wrought up to the state of exaltation to which the
lines give expression, that nothing could resist him, and that the
proud courtiers must in truth have cowered before him in the manner
here indicated by the dramatist. In literature the artist does not
actualize; he suggests, and leaves the reader’s imagination free.
But an actor has to actualize this state of exaltation—he has to
bring the physical condition answering to the emotional condition
before the eyes of the spectator; and if he fails to display as much
of the ‘fine frenzy’ of passion as is requisite to cow and overawe a
group of cynical worldlings, the situation becomes forced and
unnatural, inasmuch as they are overawed without a sufficient cause.
That an actor like Robson could and would have risen to such an
occasion no one will doubt who ever saw him (for he was the very
incarnation of the romantic temper), but then the exhaustion would
have been so great that it would have been impossible for him to go
on bearing the entire weight of this long play as M. Got does. The
actor requires, as I say, the abandon characteristic of one kind of
histrionic art together with the staying power characteristic of
another. Now, admirable as is M. Got in this and in all scenes of
‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ he does not pass into such a condition of exalted
passion as makes the retirement of the courtiers seem probable. For
artistic perfection there was nothing in the entire representation
that surpassed the scenes between Saltabadil and Maguelonne in the
hovel on the banks of the Seine. It would be difficult, indeed, to
decide which was the more admirable, the Saltabadil of M. Febvre or
the Maguelonne of Jeanne Samary.
AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS
NOVEMBER 22, 1882
Poet of pity and scourge of sceptred crime—
Titan of light, with scarce the gods for peers—
What thoughts come to thee through the mist of years,
There sitting calm, master of Fate and Time?
Homage from every tongue, from every clime,
In place of gibes, fills now thy satiate ears.
Mine own heart swells, mine eyelids prick with tears
In very pride of thee, old man sublime!
And thou, the mother who bore him, beauteous France,
Round whose fair limbs what web of sorrow is spun!—
I see thee lift thy tear-stained countenance—
Victress by many a victory he hath won;
I hear thy voice o’er winds of Fate and Chance
Say to the conquered world: ‘Behold my son!’
I may mention here that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always shown the greatest
admiration of the actor’s art and the greatest interest in actors and
actresses. He has affirmed that ‘the one great art in which women are as
essential as men—the one great art in which their place can never be
supplied by men—is in the acted drama, which the Greeks held in such high
esteem that Æschylus and Sophocles acted as stage managers and
show-masters, although the stage mask dispensed with much of the
necessity of calling in the aid of women.’
‘Great as is the importance of female poets,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘men
are so rich in endowment, that literature would be a worthy expression of
the human mind if there had been no Sappho and no Emily Brontë—no Mrs.
Browning—no Christina Rossetti. Great as is the importance of female
novelists, men again are so rich in endowment that literature would be a
worthy expression of the human mind if there had been no Georges Sand, no
Jane Austen, no Charlotte Brontë, no George Eliot, no Mrs. Gaskell, no
Mrs. Craigie. As to painting and music, up to now women have not been
notable workers in either of these departments, notwithstanding Rosa
Bonheur and one or two others. But, to say nothing of France, what in
England would have been the acted drama, whether in prose or verse,
without Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Hermann Vezin, Adelaide Neilson, Miss Glyn, in
tragedy; without Mrs. Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Julia Neilson, Ellen
Terry, Irene Vanbrugh and Ada Rehan in comedy?’
People who run down actresses should say at once that the acted drama is
not one of the fine arts at all. Mr. Watts-Dunton has often expressed
the opinion that there is in England a great waste of histrionic
endowment among women, owing to the ignorant prejudice against the stage
which even now is prevalent in England. ‘An enormous waste of force,’
says he, ‘there is, of course, in other departments of intellectual
activity, but nothing like the waste of latent histrionic powers among
Englishwomen.’ And he supplies many examples of this which have come
under his own observation, among which I can mention only one.
‘Some years ago,’ he said to me, ‘I was invited to go to see the
performance of a French play given by the pupils of a fashionable school
in the West End of London. Apart from the admirable French accent of the
girls I was struck by the acting of two or three performers who showed
some latent dramatic talent. I have always taken an interest in amateur
dramatic performances, for a reason that Lady Archibald Campbell in one
of her writings has well discussed, namely, that what the amateur actor
or actress may lack in knowledge of stage traditions he or she will
sometimes more than make up for by the sweet flexibility and abandon of
nature. The amateur will often achieve that rarest of all artistic
excellencies, whether in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, or
histrionics—naïveté: a quality which in poetry is seen in its perfection
in the finest of the writings of Coleridge; in acting, it is perhaps seen
in its perfection in Duse. Now, on the occasion to which I refer, one of
these schoolgirl actresses achieved, as I thought, and as others thought
with me, this rare and perfect flower of histrionics; and when I came to
know her I found that she joined wide culture and an immense knowledge of
Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Molière with an innate gift for
rendering them. In any other society than that of England she would have
gone on the stage as a matter of course, but the fatal prejudice about
social position prevented her from following the vocation that Nature
intended for her. Since then I have seen two or three such cases, not so
striking as this one, but striking enough to make me angry with
Philistinism.’
With this sympathy for histrionic art, it is not at all surprising that
Mr. Watts-Dunton took the greatest interest in the open-air plays
organized by Lady Archibald Campbell at Coombe. I have seen a brilliant
description of these plays by him which ought to have been presented to
the public years ago. It forms, I believe, a long chapter of an
unpublished novel. Turning over the pages of Davenport Adams’s
‘Dictionary of the Drama,’ which every lover of the theatre must regret
he did not live to complete, I come accidentally upon these words: “One
of the most recently printed epilogues is that which Theodore
Watts-Dunton wrote for an amateur performance of Banville’s ‘Le Baiser’
at Coombe, Surrey, in August, 1889.” And this reminds me that I ought to
quote this famous epilogue here; for Professor Strong in his review of
‘The Coming of Love’ in ‘Literature’ speaks of the amazing command over
metre and colour and story displayed in the poem. It is, I believe, the
only poem in the English language in which an elaborate story is fully
told by poetic suggestion instead of direct statement.
A REMINISCENCE OF THE OPEN-AIR PLAYS.
Epilogue for the open-air performance of Banville’s ‘Le Baiser, in
which Lady Archibald Campbell took the part of ‘Pierrot’ and Miss
Annie Schletter the part of the ‘Fairy.’—Coombe, August 9, 1889.
TO PIERROT IN LOVE
The Clown whose kisses turned a Crone to a Fairy-queen
What dost thou here in Love’s enchanted wood,
Pierrot, who once wert safe as clown and thief—
Held safe by love of fun and wine and food—
From her who follows love of Woman, Grief—
Her who of old stalked over Eden-grass
Behind Love’s baby-feet—whose shadow threw
On every brook, as on a magic glass,
Prophetic shapes of what should come to pass
When tears got mixt with Paradisal dew?
Kisses are loved but for the lips that kiss:
Thine have restored a princess to her throne,
Breaking the spell which barred from fairy bliss
A fay, and shrank her to a wrinkled crone;
But, if thou dream’st that thou from Pantomime
Shalt clasp an angel of the mystic moon,
Clasp her on banks of Love’s own rose and thyme,
While woodland warblers ring the nuptial-chime—
Bottom to thee were but a week buffoon.
When yonder fairy, long ago, was told
The spell which caught her in malign eclipse,
Turning her radiant body foul and old,
Would yield to some knight-errant’s virgin lips,
And when, through many a weary day and night,
She, wondering who the paladin would be
Whose kiss should charm her from her grievous plight,
Pictured a-many princely heroes bright,
Dost thou suppose she ever pictured thee?
’Tis true the mischief of the foeman’s charm
Yielded to thee—to that first kiss of thine.
We saw her tremble—lift a rose-wreath arm,
Which late, all veined and shrivelled, made her pine;
We saw her fingers rise and touch her cheek,
As if the morning breeze across the wood,
Which lately seemed to strike so chill and bleak
Through all the wasted body, bent and weak,
Were light and music now within her blood.
’Tis true thy kiss made all her form expand—
Made all the skin grow smooth and pure as pearl,
Till there she stood, tender, yet tall and grand,
A queen of Faery, yet a lovesome girl,
Within whose eyes—whose wide, new-litten eyes—
New-litten by thy kiss’s re-creation—
Expectant joy that yet was wild surprise
Made all her flesh like light of summer skies
When dawn lies dreaming of the morn’s carnation.
But when thou saw’st the breaking of the spell
Within whose grip of might her soul had pined,
Like some sweet butterfly that breaks the cell
In which its purple pinions slept confined,
And when thou heard’st the strains of elfin song
Her sisters sang from rainbow cars above her—
Didst thou suppose that she, though prisoned long,
And freed at last by thee from all the wrong,
Must for that kiss take Harlequin for lover?
Hearken, sweet fool! Though Banville carried thee
To lawns where love and song still share the sward
Beyond the golden river few can see,
And fewer still, in these grey days, can ford;
And though he bade the wings of Passion fan
Thy face, till every line grows bright and human,
Feathered thy spirit’s wing for wider span,
And fired thee with the fire that comes to man
When first he plucks the rose of Nature, Woman;
And though our actress gives thee that sweet gaze
Where spirit and matter mingle in liquid blue—
That face, where pity through the frolic plays—
That form, whose lines of light Love’s pencil drew—
That voice whose music seems a new caress
Whenever passion makes a new transition
From key to key of joy or quaint distress—
That sigh, when, now, thy fairy’s loveliness
Leaves thee alone to mourn Love’s vanished vision:
Still art thou Pierrot—naught but Pierrot ever;
For is not this the very word of Fate:
‘No mortal, clown or king, shall e’er dissever
His present glory from his past estate’?
Yet be thou wise and dry those foolish tears;
The clown’s first kiss was needed, not the clown,
By her, who, fired by hopes and chilled by fears,
Sought but a kiss like thine for years on years:
Be wise, I say, and wander back to town.
Recurring to the Marston gatherings, I reproduce here, from the same
unpublished story to which I have already alluded, the following
interesting account of them and of other social reunions of the like
kind.
“Many of those who have reached life’s meridian, or passed it, will
remember the sudden rise, a quarter of a century ago, of Rossetti,
Swinburne, and William Morris—poets who seemed for a time to threaten
the ascendency of Tennyson himself. Between this galaxy and the
latest generation of poets there rose, culminated, and apparently
set, another—the group which it was the foolish fashion to call ‘the
pre-Raphaelite poets,’ some of whom yielded, or professed to yield,
to the influence of Rossetti, some to that of William Morris, and
some to that of Swinburne. Round them all, however, there was the
aura of Baudelaire or else of Gautier. These—though, as in all such
cases, nature had really made them very unlike each other—formed
themselves into a set, or rather a sect, and tried apparently to
become as much like each other as possible, by studying French
models, selecting subjects more or less in harmony with the French
temper, getting up their books after the fashion that was as much
approved then as contemporary fashions in books are approved now, and
by various other means. They had certain places of meeting, where
they held high converse with themselves. One of these was the
hospitable house, in Fitzroy Square, of the beloved and venerable
painter, Mr. Madox Brown, whose face, as he sat smiling upon his
Eisteddfod, radiating benevolence and encouragement to the unfledged
bards he loved, was a picture which must be cherished in many a
grateful memory now. Another was the equally hospitable house, in
the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, where reigned the dramatist,
Westland Marston, and where his blind poet-boy Philip lived. Here
O’Shaughnessy would come with a glow of triumph on his face, which
indicated clearly enough what he was carrying in his pocket—something
connecting him with the divine Théophile—a letter from the Gallic
Olympus perhaps, or a presentation copy sent from the very top of the
Gallic Parnassus. It was on one of these occasions that Rossetti
satirically advised one of the cenacle to quit so poor a language as
that of Shakespeare and write entirely in French, which language
Morris immediately defined as ‘nosey Latin.’ It is a pity that some
literary veteran does not give his reminiscences of those Marston
nights, or rather Marston mornings, for the symposium began at about
twelve and went on till nearly six—those famous gatherings of poets,
actors, and painters, enlinking the days of Macready, Phelps, Miss
Glyn, Robert Browning, Dante Rossetti, and R. H. Horne, with the days
of poets, actors, and painters like Mr. Swinburne, Morris, and Mr.
Irving. Yet these pre-Raphaelite bards had another joy surpassing
even that of the Chalk Farm symposium, that of assisting at those
literary and artistic feasts which Rossetti used occasionally to give
at Cheyne Walk. Generosity and geniality incarnate was the
mysterious poet-painter to those he loved; and if the budding bard
yearned for sympathy, as he mostly does, he could get quite as much
as he deserved, and more, at 16 Cheyne Walk. To say that any artist
could take a deeper interest in the work of a friend than in his own
seems bold, yet it could be said of Rossetti. The mean rivalries of
the literary character that so often make men experienced in the
world shrink away from it, found no place in that great heart. To
hear him recite in his musical voice the sonnet or lyric of some
unknown bard or bardling—recite it in such a way as to lend the lines
the light and music of his own marvellous genius, while the bard or
bardling listened with head bowed low, so that the flush on his cheek
and the moisture in his eye should not be seen—this was an experience
that did indeed make the bardic life ‘worth living.’”
Chapter X
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Thou knowest that island, far away and lone,
Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
In spray of music and the breezes shake
O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
While that sweet music echoes like a moan
In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake,
Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore,
Struck golden song, as from the strand of Day:
For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay—
Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core,
Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
Around thy lovely island evermore.
I am now brought to a portion of my study which may well give me
pause—the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti. The latest
remarks upon them are, I think, the best; they are by Mr. A. C. Benson in
his monograph on Rossetti in the ‘English Men of Letters’:—
“It would be impossible to exaggerate the value of his friendship for
Rossetti. Mr. Watts-Dunton understood him, sympathized with him, and
with self-denying and unobtrusive delicacy shielded him, so far as
any one can be shielded, from the rough contact of the world. It was
for a long time hoped that Mr. Watts-Dunton would give the memoir of
his great friend to the world, but there is such a thing as knowing a
man too well to be his biographer. It is, however, an open secret
that a vivid sketch of Rossetti’s personality has been given to the
world in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s well-known romance ‘Aylwin,’ where the
artist D’Arcy is drawn from Rossetti. . . . Though singularly
independent in judgment, it is clear that, at all events in the later
years of his life, Rossetti’s taste was, unconsciously, considerably
affected by the critical preferences of Mr. Watts-Dunton. I have
heard it said by one {139} who knew them both well that it was often
enough for Mr. Watts-Dunton to express a strong opinion for Rossetti
to adopt it as his own, even though he might have combated it for the
moment. . . .
At the end of each part [of ‘Rose Mary’] comes a curious lyrical
outburst called the Beryl-songs, the chant of the imprisoned spirits,
which are intended to weld the poem together and to supply
connections. It is said that Mr. Watts-Dunton, when he first read
the poem in proof, said to Rossetti that the drift was too intricate
for an ordinary reader. Rossetti took this to heart, and wrote the
Beryl-songs to bridge the gaps; Mr. Watts-Dunton, on being shown
them, very rightly disapproved, and said humorously that they turned
a fine ballad into a bastard opera. Rossetti, who was ill at the
time, was so much disconcerted and upset at the criticism, that Mr.
Watts-Dunton modified his judgment, and the interludes were printed.
But at a later day Rossetti himself came round to the opinion that
they were inappropriate. They are curiously wrought, rhapsodical,
irregular songs, with fantastic rhymes, and were better away. . . .
Then he began to settle down into the production of the single-figure
pictures, of which Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote that ‘apart from any
question of technical shortcomings, one of Rossetti’s strongest
claims to the attention of posterity was that of having invented, in
the three-quarter length pictures painted from one face, a type of
female beauty which was akin to none other, which was entirely new,
in short—and which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion,
unaided by complex dramatic design, was unique in the art of the
world.”
[Picture: Pandora. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at ‘The Pines’]
It is well known that Rossetti wished his life—if written at all—to be
written by Mr. Watts-Dunton, unless his brother should undertake it. It
is also well known that the brother himself wished it, but pressure of
other matters prevented Mr. Watts-Dunton from undertaking it. I expected
difficulties in approaching with regard to the delicate subject of his
relations with Rossetti, but I was not prepared to find them so great as
they have proved to be. When I wrote to him and asked him whether the
portrait of D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’ was to be accepted as a portrait of
Rossetti, and when I asked him to furnish me with some materials and
facts to form the basis of this chapter, I received from him the
following letter:—
“MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,—I have never myself affirmed that D’Arcy was to
be taken as an actual portrait of Rossetti. Even if I thought that a
portrait of him could be given in any form of imaginative literature,
I have views of my own as to the propriety of giving actual portraits
of men with whom a novelist or poet has been brought into contact.
It is quite impossible for an imaginative writer to avoid the
imperious suggestions of his memory when he is conceiving a
character. Thousands of times in a year does one come across
critical remarks upon the prototypes of the characters of such great
novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot,
George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and the rest. And I believe that
every one of these writers would confess that his prominent
characters were suggested to him by living individuals or by
individuals who figure in history—but suggested only. And as to the
ethics of so dealing with friends and acquaintances I have also views
of my own. These are easily stated. The closer the imaginative
writer gets to the portrait of a friend, or even of an acquaintance,
the more careful must he be to set his subject in a genial and even a
generous light. It would be a terrible thing if every man who has
been a notable figure in life were to be represented as this or that
at the sweet will of everybody who has known him. Generous
treatment, I say, is demanded of every writer who makes use of the
facets of character that have struck him in his intercourse with
friend or acquaintance. I will give you an instance of this. When I
drew De Castro in ‘Aylwin’ I made use of my knowledge of a certain
individual. Now this individual, although a man of quite
extraordinary talents, brilliance, and personal charm, bore not a
very good name, because he was driven to live upon his wits. He had
endowments so great and so various that I cannot conceive any line of
life in which he was not fitted to excel—but it was his irreparable
misfortune to have been trained to no business and no profession, and
to have been thrown upon the world without means, and without useful
family connections. Such a man must either sink beneath the oceanic
waves of London life, or he must make a struggle to live upon his
wits. This individual made that struggle—he struck out with a vigour
that, as far as I know, was without example in London society. He
got to know, and to know intimately, men like Ruskin, G. F. Watts, D.
G. Rossetti, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, William Morris, Mr. Swinburne, Sir
Edward Burne Jones, Cruikshank, and I know not what important people
besides. When he was first brought into touch with the painters, he
knew nothing whatever of art; in two or three years, as I have heard
Rossetti say, he was a splendid ‘connoisseur.’ If he had been
brought up as a lawyer he must have risen to the top of the
profession. If he had been brought up as an actor he must, as I have
heard a dramatist say, have risen to the top. But from his very
first appearance in London he was driven to live upon his wits. And
here let me say that this man, who was a bitter unfriend of my own,
because I was compelled to stand in the way of certain dealings of
his, but whom I really could have liked if he had not been obliged to
live upon his wits at the expense of certain friends of mine, formed
the acquaintance of the great men I have enumerated, not so much from
worldly motives, as I believe, as from real admiration. But being
driven to live upon his wits, he had not sufficient moral strength to
afford a conscience, and the queerest stories were told—some of them
true enough—of his dealings with those great men. Whistler’s
anecdotes of him at one period set many a table in a roar; and yet so
winsome was the man that after a time he became as intimate with
Whistler as ever. If he had possessed a private income, and if that
income had been carefully settled upon him, I believe he would have
been one of the most honest of men; I know he would have been one of
the most generous. His conduct to the late Treffry Dunn, from whom
he could not have expected the least return except that of gratitude,
was proof enough of his generosity. Of course to make use of so
strange a character as this was a great temptation to me when I wrote
‘Aylwin.’ But in what has been called my ‘thumb-nail portrait of
him,’ I treated the peccadilloes attributed to him in a playful and
jocose way. It would have been quite wrong to have painted otherwise
than in playful colours a character like this. Like every other man
and woman in this world, he left behind him people who believed in
him and loved him. It would have been cruel to wound these, and
unfair to the man; and yet because I gave only a slight suggestion of
his sublime quackery and supreme blarney, a writer who also knew
something about him, but of course not a thousandth part of what I
knew, said that I had tried my hand at depicting him in ‘Aylwin,’ but
with no great success. As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to
give a portrait of him: I simply used certain facets of his character
to work out my story, and then dismissed him. On the other hand,
where the character of a friend or acquaintance is noble, the
imagination can work more freely—as in the case of Philip Aylwin,
Cyril Aylwin, Wilderspin, Rhona Boswell, Winifred Wynne, Sinfi
Lovell. And as to Rossetti, whom I have been charged by certain
critics with having idealized in my picture of D’Arcy, all I have to
say on that point is this—that if the noble and fascinating qualities
which Rossetti showed had been leavened with mean ones I should not,
in introducing his character into a story, have considered it right
or fair or generous to dwell upon those mean ones. But as a matter
of fact, during my whole intercourse with him he displayed no such
qualities. The D’Arcy that I have painted is not one whit nobler,
more magnanimous, wide-minded, and generous, than was D. G. Rossetti.
As I have said on several occasions, he could and did take as deep an
interest in a friend’s work as in his own. And to benefit a friend
was the greatest pleasure he had in life. I loved the man so deeply
that I should never have introduced D’Arcy into the novel had it not
been in the hope of silencing the misrepresentations of him that
began as soon as ever Rossetti was laid in the grave at Birchington,
by depicting his character in colours as true as they were
sympathetic. It has been the grievous fate of Rossetti to be the
victim of an amount of detraction which is simply amazing and
inscrutable. I cannot in the least understand why this is so. It is
the great sorrow of my life. There is a fatality of detraction about
his name which in its unreasonableness would be grotesque were it not
heartrending. It would turn my natural optimism about mankind into
pessimism were it not that another dear friend of mine—a man of equal
nobility of character, and almost of equal genius, has escaped
calumny altogether—William Morris. This matter is a painful puzzle
to me. The only great man of my time who seems to have shared
something of Rossetti’s fate, is Lord Tennyson. There seems to be a
general desire to belittle him, to exaggerate such angularities as
were his, and to speak of that almost childlike simplicity of
character which was an ineffable charm in him as springing from
boorishness and almost from loutishness. On the other hand, another
great genius, Browning, for whom I had and have the greatest
admiration, seems to be as fortunate as Morris in escaping the
detractor. But I am wandering from Rossetti. I do not feel any
impulse to write reminiscences of him. Too much has been written
about him already—of late a great deal too much. The only thing
written about him that has given me comfort—I may say joy, is this—it
has been written by a man who knew him before I did, who knew him at
the time he lost his wife. Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A., has declared that
in Rossetti’s relations with his wife there was nothing whatever upon
which his conscience might reasonably trouble him. I do not remember
the exact words, but this was the substance of them. Mr. Val Prinsep
is a man of the highest standing, and he knew Rossetti intimately,
and he has declared in print that Rossetti could have had no qualms
of conscience in regard to his relations with his wife. This, I say,
is a source of great comfort to me and to all who loved Rossetti.
That he was whimsical, fanciful, and at times most troublesome to his
friends, no one knows better than I do.
No one, I say, is more competent to speak of the whims and the
fancies and the troublesomeness of Rossetti than I am; and yet I say
that he was one of the noblest-hearted men of his time, and
lovable—most lovable.”
It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of day upon the painful
subject of the “Buchanan affair.” Indeed, I have often thought it is a
great pity that it is not allowed to die out. The only reason why it is
still kept alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is
impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s nervous illness, about which so
much has been said. I remember seeing in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s essay on
Congreve in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia’ a definition of envy as the
‘literary leprosy.’ This phrase has often been quoted in reference to
the case of Buchanan, and also in reference to a recent and much more
ghastly case between two intimate friends. Now, with all deference to
Mr. Watts-Dunton, I cannot accept it as a right and fair definition. It
is a fact no doubt that the struggle in the world of art—whether poetry,
music, painting, sculpture, or the drama—is unlike that of the mere
strivers after wealth and position, inasmuch as to praise one man’s
artistic work is in a certain way to set it up against the work of
another. Still, one can realize, without referring to Disraeli’s
‘Curiosities of Literature,’ that envy is much too vigorous in the
artistic life. Now, whatever may have been the good qualities of
Buchanan—and I know he had many good qualities—it seems unfortunately to
be true that he was afflicted with this terrible disease of envy. There
can be no question that what incited him to write the notorious article
in the ‘Contemporary Review’ entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ was
simply envy—envy and nothing else. It was during the time that Rossetti
was suffering most dreadfully from the mental disturbance which seems
really to have originated in this attack and the cognate attacks which
appeared in certain other magazines, that the intimacy between Mr.
Watts-Dunton and Rossetti was formed and cemented. And it is to this
period that Mr. William Rossetti alludes in the following words: “‘Watts
is a hero of friendship’ was, according to Mr. Caine, one of my brother’s
last utterances, easy enough to be credited.”
That he deserved these words I think none will deny; and that the
friendship sprang from the depths of the nature of a man to whom the word
‘friendship’ meant not what it generally means now, a languid sentiment,
but what it meant in Shakespeare’s time, a deep passion, is shown by what
some deem the finest lines Mr. Watts-Dunton ever wrote—I mean those lines
which he puts into the mouth of Shakespeare’s Friend in ‘Christmas at the
Mermaid,’ lines part of which have been admirably turned into Latin by
Mr. E. D. Stone, {147} and published by him in the second volume of that
felicitous series of Latin translations,’ Florilegium Latinum’:—
‘MR. W. H.’
To sing the nation’s song or do the deed
That crowns with richer light the motherland,
Or lend her strength of arm in hour of need
When fangs of foes shine fierce on every hand,
Is joy to him whose joy is working well—
Is goal and guerdon too, though never fame.
Should find a thrill of music in his name;
Yea, goal and guerdon too, though Scorn should aim
Her arrows at his soul’s high citadel.
But if the fates withhold the joy from me
To do the deed that widens England’s day,
Or join that song of Freedom’s jubilee
Begun when England started on her way—
Withhold from me the hero’s glorious power
To strike with song or sword for her, the mother,
And give that sacred guerdon to another,
Him will I hail as my more noble brother—
Him will I love for his diviner dower.
Enough for me who have our Shakspeare’s love
To see a poet win the poet’s goal,
For Will is he; enough and far above
All other prizes to make rich my soul.
Ben names my numbers golden. Since they tell
A tale of him who in his peerless prime
Fled us ere yet one shadowy film of time
Could dim the lustre of that brow sublime,
Golden my numbers are: Ben praiseth well.
It seems to me to be needful to bear in mind these lines, and the
extremely close intimacy between these two poet-friends in order to be
able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of Buchanan in the
following sonnet if, as some writers think, Buchanan was meant:—
THE OCTOPUS OF THE GOLDEN ISLES
‘WHAT! WILL THEY EVEN STRIKE AT ME?’
Round many an Isle of Song, in seas serene,
With many a swimmer strove the poet-boy,
Yet strove in love: their strength, I say, was joy
To him, my friend—dear friend of godlike mien!
But soon he felt beneath the billowy green
A monster moving—moving to destroy:
Limb after limb became the tortured toy
Of coils that clung and lips that stung unseen.
“And canst thou strike ev’n me?” the swimmer said,
As rose above the waves the deadly eyes,
Arms flecked with mouths that kissed in hellish wise,
Quivering in hate around a hateful head.—
I saw him fight old Envy’s sorceries:
I saw him sink: the man I loved is dead!
Here we get something quite new in satire—something in which poetry,
fancy, hatred, and contempt, are mingled. The sonnet appeared first in
the ‘Athenæum,’ and afterwards in ‘The Coming of Love.’ If Buchanan or
any special individual was meant, I doubt whether any man has a moral
right to speak about another man in such terms as these.
All the friends of Rossetti have remarked upon the extraordinary
influence exercised upon him by Mr. Watts-Dunton. Lady Mount Temple, a
great friend of the painter-poet, used to tell how when she was in his
studio and found him in a state of great dejection, as was so frequently
the case, she would notice that Rossetti’s face would suddenly brighten
up on hearing a light footfall in the hall—the footfall of his friend,
who had entered with his latch-key—and how from that moment Rossetti
would be another man. Rossetti’s own relatives have recorded the same
influence. I have often thought that the most touching thing in Mr. W.
M. Rossetti’s beautiful monograph of his brother is the following extract
from his aged mother’s diary at Birchington-on-Sea, when the poet is
dying:—
‘March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down; Gabriel rallied
marvellously.
This is the last cheerful item which it is allowed me to record
concerning my brother; I am glad that it stands associated with the
name of Theodore Watts.’
Here is another excerpt from the brother’s diary:—
‘Gabriel had, just before Shields entered the drawing-room for me,
given two violent cries, and had a convulsive fit, very sharp and
distorting the face, followed by collapse. All this passed without
my personal cognizance. He died 9.31 p.m.; the others—Watts, mother,
Christina, and nurse, in room; Caine and Shields in and out; Watts at
Gabriel’s right side, partly supporting him.’
That Mr. Watts-Dunton’s influence over Rossetti extended even to his art
as a poet is shown by Mr. Benson’s words already quoted. I must also
quote the testimony of Mr. Hall Caine, who says, in his ‘Recollections’:—
“Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’ influence in his critical
estimates; and the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I
knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical
criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
me, printed in Chapter VIII of this volume, will show. I had a
striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I
had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius
of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read
out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem ‘Cloud
Confines.’ As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently
was very fond of it himself. But he surprised me by saying that he
should not print it. On my asking him why, he said:
‘Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
without it.’
‘Well, but you like it yourself,’ said I.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but in a question of gain or loss to a poem I
feel that Watts must be right.’
And the poem appeared in ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ without the stanza in
question.”
Here is another beautiful passage from Mr. Hall Caine’s ‘Recollections’—a
passage which speaks as much for the writer as for the object of his
enthusiasm:—
“As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him and
beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other.
No light matter it must have been to lay aside one’s own
long-cherished life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti’s
closest friend and brother, at a moment like the present, when he
imagined the world to be conspiring against him; but through these
evil days, and long after them, down to his death, the friend that
clung closer than a brother was with him, as he himself said, to
protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert, to interest and inspire
him—asking, meantime, no better reward than the knowledge that a
noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted out of sorrow.
Among the world’s great men the greatest are sometimes those whose
names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish aims have
been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others as to
leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal
distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price
that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy
their renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the
fine spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of
friendship. Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:
‘Watts is a hero of friendship’; and indeed, he has displayed his
capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that
part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes
by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the
gainer. If in the end it should appear that he has in his own person
done less than might have been hoped for from one possessed of his
splendid gifts, let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a
quite incalculable degree, and influenced for good, several of the
foremost among those who in their turn have influenced the age. As
Rossetti’s faithful friend and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John
Marshall, has often declared, there were periods when Rossetti’s very
life may be said to have hung upon Mr. Watts’ power to cheer and
soothe.”
This anecdote is also told by Mr. Caine:—
“Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited
thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem ‘Rose
Mary,’ as well as two lyrics published at the time in ‘The
Fortnightly Review’; but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent
assaults of criticism, that he seemed definitely to lay aside all
hope of producing further poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of
the delusion that he had for ever lost all power of doing so. It is
an interesting fact, well known in his own literary circle, that his
taking up poetry afresh was the result of a fortuitous occurrence.
After one of his most serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing
off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which
in an invalid’s mind usually gather about his own too absorbing
personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite solicitation,
to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The outcome was an effort so
feeble as to be all but unrecognizable as the work of the author of
the sonnets of ‘The House of Life,’ but, with more shrewdness and
friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished
measureless praise upon it and urged the poet to renewed exertion.
One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and
this exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine,
with the result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his old
dexterity and mastery of hand. The artifice had succeeded beyond
every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the twofold end of
improving the invalid’s health by preventing his brooding over
unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished
works. Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce
Rossetti to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by
challenging the poet’s ability to compose in the simple, direct, and
emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad proper, as
distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which
he had hitherto worked in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this
second artifice practised upon him was that he wrote ‘The White Ship’
and afterwards ‘The King’s Tragedy.’
Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of
poetic composition, and had recovered a healthy tone of body, before
he became conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further
amusing fact that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet
which, in view of the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose
judgment he reposed, had encouraged him to renewed effort. The
sonnet was bad: the critic knew it was bad, and had from the first
hour of its production kept it carefully out of sight, and was now
more than ever unwilling to show it. Eventually, however, by reason
of ceaseless importunity, he returned it to its author, who, upon
reading it, cried: ‘You fraud! You said this sonnet was good, and
it’s the worst I ever wrote!’ ‘The worst ever written would perhaps
be a truer criticism,’ was the reply, as the studio resounded with a
hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the flames. It would
appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large portion of the
contents of the volume of 1881.”
Mr. William Rossetti is ever eager to testify to the beneficent effect of
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s intimacy upon his brother; and quite lately Madox
Brown’s grandson, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who, from his connection with
the Rossetti family, speaks with great authority, wrote: ‘In 1873 came
Mr. Theodore Watts, without whose practical friendship and advice, and
without whose literary aids and sustenance, life would have been from
thenceforth an impracticable affair for Rossetti.’ Mr. Hueffer speaks of
the great change that came over Rossetti’s work when he wrote ‘The King’s
Tragedy’ and ‘The White Ship’:—
“It should be pointed out that ‘The White Ship’ was one of Rossetti’s
last works, and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narration,
under the advice of Mr. Theodore Watts. In this he was undoubtedly
on the right track, and the ‘rhymed chronicles’ might have
disappeared had Rossetti lived long enough to revise the poem as
sedulously as he did his earlier work, and to revise it with the
knowledge of narrative-technique that the greater part of the poem
shows was coming to be his.”
It was impossible for a man of genius to live so secluded a life as
Rossetti lived at Cheyne Walk and at Kelmscott for several years, without
wild, unauthenticated stories getting about concerning him. Among other
things Rossetti, whose courtesy and charm of manner were, I believe,
proverbial, was now charged with a rudeness, or rather boorishness like
that which with equal injustice, apparently, is now being attributed to
Tennyson. Stories got into print about his rude bearing towards people,
sometimes towards ladies of the most exalted position. And these
apocryphal and disparaging legends would no doubt have been still more
numerous and still more offensive, had it not been for the influence of
his watchful and powerful friend. Here is an interesting letter which
Rossetti addressed to the ‘World,’ and which shows the close relations
between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton:—
“16 CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA, S.W.
December 28, 1878.
My attention has been directed to the following paragraph which has
appeared in the newspapers: ‘A very disagreeable story is told about
a neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s, whose works are not exhibited to the
vulgar herd; the Princess Louise in her zeal therefore, graciously
sought them at the artist’s studio, but was rebuffed by a ‘Not at
home’ and an intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
princesses. I trust it is not true,’ continues the writer of the
paragraph, ‘that so medievally minded a gentleman is really a
stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that dignified
obedience,’ etc.
The story is certainly disagreeable enough; but if I am pointed out
as the ‘near neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s’ who rebuffed, in this rude
fashion, the Princess Louise, I can only say that it is a canard
devoid of the smallest nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has
never called upon me, and I know of only two occasions when she has
expressed a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke
to me upon the subject, but I was at that time engaged upon an
important work, and the delays thence arising caused the matter to
slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject till last summer,
when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the Princess, in conversation,
had mentioned my name to him, and that he had then assured her that I
should feel ‘honoured and charmed to see her,’ and suggested her
making an appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as
one of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had she
called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in that
‘generous loyalty’ which is due, not more to her exalted position,
than to her well-known charm of character and artistic gifts. It is
true that I do not run after great people on account of their mere
social position, but I am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man
who could rebuff the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
D. G. ROSSETTI.”
At the very juncture in question Lord Lorne was suddenly and unexpectedly
appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
Highness did not return until Rossetti’s health had somewhat suddenly
broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most
intimate friends.
My account of the friendship between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti would
not be complete without the poem entitled, ‘A Grave by the Sea,’ which I
think may be placed beside Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ Shelley’s ‘Adonais,’
Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis,’ and Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale,’ as one of
the noblest elegies in our literature:—
A GRAVE BY THE SEA
I
Yon sightless poet {157} whom thou leav’st behind,
Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,
Above the grave he feels but cannot see,
Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,
Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?
Ah no!—For all his sobs, he seems to me
Less lonely standing there, and nearer thee,
Than I—less lonely, nearer—standing blind!
Free from the day, and piercing Life’s disguise
That needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,
His inner eyes may see thee as thou art
In Memory’s land—see thee beneath the skies
Lit by thy brow—by those beloved eyes,
While I stand by him in a world apart.
II
I stand like her who on the glittering Rhine
Saw that strange swan which drew a faëry boat
Where shone a knight whose radiant forehead smote
Her soul with light and made her blue eyes shine
For many a day with sights that seemed divine,
Till that false swan returned and arched his throat
In pride, and called him, and she saw him float
Adown the stream: I stand like her and pine.
I stand like her, for she, and only she,
Might know my loneliness for want of thee.
Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,
Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,
And then, departing like a vision thence,
Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.
III
Last night Death whispered: ‘Death is but the name
Man gives the Power which lends him life and light,
And then, returning past the coast of night,
Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.
What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaim
The sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?
Art thou not vanished—vanished from my sight—
Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?
With Nature dumb, save for the billows’ moan,
Engirt by men I love, yet desolate—
Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,
King’d by my sorrow, made by grief so great
That man’s voice murmurs like an insect’s drone—
What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?
IV
Last night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,
Flickering with blazon of the human story—
Time’s fen-flame over Death’s dark territory—
Will leave no trail, no sign of Life’s aggression.
Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,
Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.
Since Life is only Death’s frail feudatory,
How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?’
I answered thus: ‘If Friendship’s isle of palm
Is but a vision, every loveliest leaf,
Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calm
This soul of mine in this most fiery grief?
If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,
What balm in knowing that Love is Death’s—what balm?’
V
Yea, thus I boldly answered Death—even I
Who have for boon—who have for deathless dower—
Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,
Filling with music earth and sea and sky:
‘O Death,’ I said, ‘not Love, but thou shalt die;
For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,
And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,
Death striking Love but strikes to deify.’
Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,
For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,
And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;
And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,
I watched—I listened for that voice of thine,
Though Reason said: ‘Nor voice nor face can come.’
BIRCHINGTON,
EASTERTIDE, 1882.
Mr. Watts-Dunton has written many magnificent sonnets, but the sonnet in
this sequence beginning—
Last night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,’
is, I think, the finest of them all. The imaginative conception packed
into these fourteen lines is cosmic in its sweep. In the metrical scheme
the feminine rhymes of the octave play a very important part. They
suggest pathetic suspense, mystery, yearning, hope, fear; they ask, they
wonder, they falter. But in the sestet the words of destiny are calmly
and coldly pronounced, and every rhyme clinches the voice of doom, until
the uttermost deep of despair is sounded in the iterated cry of the last
line. The craftsmanship throughout is masterly. There is, indeed, one
line which is not unworthy of being ranked with the great lines of
English poetry:
Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session.
Here by a bold use of the simple verb ‘strikes’ a whole poem is hammered
into six words. As to the interesting question of feminine rhymes, while
I admit that they should never be used without an emotional mandate, I
think that here it is overwhelming.
* * * * *
I have tried to show the beauty of the friendship between these two rare
spirits by means of other testimony than my own, for although I have been
granted the honour of knowing Rossetti’s ‘friend of friends,’ I missed
the equal honour of knowing Rossetti, save through that ‘friend of
friends.’ But to know Mr. Watts-Dunton seems almost like knowing
Rossetti, for when at The Pines he begins to recall those golden hours
when the poets used to hold converse, the soul of Rossetti seems to come
back from the land of shadows, as his friend depicts his winsome ways,
his nobility of heart, his generous interest in the work of others, that
lovableness of nature and charm of personality which, if we are to
believe Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, worked, in some degree, ill for the poet.
Mr. Hueffer, who, as a family connection, may be supposed to represent
the family tradition about ‘Gabriel,’ has some striking and pregnant
words upon the injurious effect of Rossetti’s being brought so much into
contact with admirers from the time when Mr. Meredith and Mr. Swinburne
were his housemates at Cheyne Walk. “Then came the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’
poets like Philip Marston, O’Shaughnessy, and ‘B. V.’ Afterwards there
came a whole host of young men like Mr. William Sharp, who were serious
admirers, and to-day are in their places or are dead or forgotten; and
others again who came for the ‘pickings.’ They were all more or less
enthusiasts.”
[Picture: ‘The Green Dining Room,’ 16 Cheyne Walk. (From a Painting by
Dunn, at ‘The Pines.’)]
Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902), says:
“With regard to the green room in which Winifred took her first
breakfast at ‘Hurstcote,’ I am a little in confusion. It seems to me
more like the green dining-room in Cheyne Walk, decorated with
antique mirrors, which was painted by Dunn, showing Rossetti reading
his poems aloud. This is the only portrait of Rossetti that really
calls up the man before me. As Mr. Watts-Dunton is the owner of
Dunn’s drawing, and as so many people want to see what Rossetti’s
famous Chelsea house was like inside, it is a pity he does not give
it as a frontispiece to some future edition of ‘Aylwin.’
Unfortunately, Mr. G. F. Watts’s picture, now in the National
Portrait Gallery, was never finished, and I never saw upon Rossetti’s
face the dull, heavy expression which that portrait wears. I think
the poet told me that he had given the painter only one or two
sittings. As to the photographs, none of them is really
satisfactory.”
I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of the famous
‘Green Dining Room’ at 16 Cheyne Walk, to which Mr. Hake refers. Mr.
Hake also writes in the same article: “With regard to the two circular
mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy
Grail, ‘in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt,’ I do not
remember seeing these there. But they are evidently the mirrors
decorated with copies by Dunn of the lost Holy Grail frescoes once
existing on the walls of the Union Reading-Room at Oxford. These
beautiful decorations I have seen at ‘The Pines,’ but not elsewhere.” I
am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of one of
these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has generously permitted to
be specially taken for this book.
[Picture: One of the Carved Mirrors at ‘The Pines,’ decorated with Dunn’s
copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the Oxford Union]
And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake’s fascinating book of
poetry, ‘The New Day,’ which must live, if only for its reminiscences of
the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:—
THE NEW DAY
I
In the unbroken silence of the mind
Thoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,
And life is back among the days behind—
The spectral days of that lamented love—
Days whose romance can never be repeated.
The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,
We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,
His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.
These vanished hours, where are they stored away?
Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?
Its utterances are swallowed up in day;
The gabled house, the mighty master gone.
Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall—
What dreams he of the days we there recall?
II
O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
From Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.
How often did we trace the nestling Thames
From humblest waters on his course of might,
Down where the weir the bursting current stems—
There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand
Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
Triumphal labours of the day to be.
The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’
The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.
III
Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rill
Still calls the flowers upon its misty bank
To stoop into the stream and drink their fill.
And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,
Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,
Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.
Slowly a loosened weed another meets;
They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.
We are here surely if the world, forgot,
Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;
We are here surely at this witching spot,—
Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.
A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,
It is as if a play pervaded all.
IV
Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,
With many a speaking vision on the wall,
The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,
Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl—
’Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,
Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,
And Art grew fragrant in the glow of spring
With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.
Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,
Fed by the waters of the forest stream;
Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,
Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;
Or else was mingled the rough billow’s glee
With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.
V
Remember how we roamed the Channel’s shore,
And read aloud our verses, each in turn,
While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,
And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.
Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to capture
The potent word that makes a thought abiding,
And wings it upward to its place of rapture,
While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.
Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonder
That art knew not the mighty reverie
That moves earth’s spirit and her orb asunder,
While ocean’s depths, even, seem a shallow sea.
Yet with rare genius could his hand impart
His own far-searching poesy to art.
The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all. It makes
me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the
fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with
him a new atmosphere—the salt atmosphere which envelops ‘Mother Carey’s
Chicken,’ and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna. And yet
perhaps the description of
‘The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming’
is equally fascinating.
Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush,
has in his sonnet ‘The Shadow on the Window Blind,’ made Kelmscott Manor
and the poetic life lived there still more memorable:—
Within this thicket’s every leafy lair
A song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,
Though red behind their nests the moon has swum—
But still I see that shadow writing there!—
Poet, behind yon casement’s ruddy square,
Whose shadow tells me why you do not come—
Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,
Flying and singing through thine inch of air—
Come thither, where on grass and flower and leaf
Gleams Nature’s scripture, putting Man’s to shame:
‘Thy day,’ she says, ‘is all too rich and brief—
Thy game of life too wonderful a game—
To give to Art entirely or in chief:
Drink of these dews—sweeter than wine of Fame.’
‘Aylwin,’ too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and
Kelmscott.
The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk,
has been declared by one of Rossetti’s most intimate friends to be
marvellously graphic and true:—
“On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after
threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and
pictures upon easels, I found D’Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa.
Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in
no mood to meet strangers. However, he sprang up and introduced me
to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a
peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one
of Mr. D’Arcy’s chief buyers. This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.
He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a
stranger somewhat disconcerted him.
After he was gone D’Arcy said: ‘A good fellow! One of my most
important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are
going to be friends, I hope.’
‘He seems very fond of pictures,’ I said.
‘A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.’
A little while after this gentleman’s departure, in came De Castro,
who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in
his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his
manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly
twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to
begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been
there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently
his métier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker.
Talk was his stock-in-trade.
The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept
pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going,
but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose
to go, but on getting a sign from D’Arcy that he wished me to stay I
sat down again. At last D’Arcy said:
‘You had better go now, De Castro—you have kept that hansom outside
for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still
daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with
him alone.’
De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left
us.
D’Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that
became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing
abstractedly at the fireplace.
‘Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other
night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things.
I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can’t sleep
is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he
seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant.
I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.’
Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the
servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not,
I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous
evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I
walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and
so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I
was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the
eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon
astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My
curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature.
He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me
to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and
explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees,
including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall.
Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of
black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to
be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I
approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness,
to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the
garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such
as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens.
Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.
My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned
to the house I found that D’Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at
work in the studio.
After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:
‘No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie. Every man has one side
of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals
which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they
can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of
men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing.
I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of
enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of
a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep
me for hours from being bored.’
‘And children,’ I said—‘do you like children?’
‘Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—until they become
self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their charm
goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young
girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal? What
makes you sigh?’
My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ‘Prince of
the Mist’ on Snowdon. And I said to myself, ‘How he would have been
fascinated by a sight like that!’
My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I
then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since
then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the
view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were
at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal
as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of
repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it
would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic
fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid
movements—so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be
merely fancy, in him became wit. Beneath the coruscations of this
wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.
His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but
here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his
other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a
humourist of the first order; every ‘jeu d’esprit’ seemed to leap
from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man
like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.
While he was talking he kept on painting.”
Chapter XII
WILLIAM MORRIS
IT is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris.
In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s ‘Athenæum’
monographs is the one upon him. Between these two there was an intimacy
of the closest kind—from 1873 to the day of the poet’s death. This, no
doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic power, accounts for the
extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend. I have heard more
than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs
of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this
fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything
else that has been published about him. It is a grievous loss to
literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of
Morris is scarcely likely to write one. Morris, when he was busy in
Queen’s Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the
gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox
Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton
were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint
occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti’s death.
[Picture: Kelmscott Manor. (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)]
When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote ‘Aylwin’ he did not contemplate that the
Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott
Manor. The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters
were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and
D’Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti. Morris’s passion for
angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and
this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s life were spent at Kelmscott. Treffry Dunn’s portrait of
him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at
Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the
picture.
Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting
facts with regard to ‘Hurstcote Manor’ and Morris:—
“Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom
I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to
in ‘Aylwin’ (chap. lx. book xv.) as the ‘enthusiastic angler’ who
used to go down to ‘Hurstcote’ to fish. At that time this fine old
seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of
Rossetti and Morris. Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of
Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who,
with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris’s will. The series of
‘large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams’ supporting
the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the
ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls—a
peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after
dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would
go to the attics to listen to them.
With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with
low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved
oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the
description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful
‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro
dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name). I
wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr.
Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and
which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads
by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded
tapestry—so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull
grey texture’—depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the
tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same
pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the
‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in
her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening
and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same
famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and
the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more
beautiful woman—Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently
placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on
a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”
Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott,
was Morris’s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine
Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South
Kensington Museum—a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of
the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died
prematurely. Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s anecdotes of the causeries at
Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that
it is a pity they have never been recorded in print. Middleton was one
of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s collaborators in the ninth edition of the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ to which he contributed the article on ‘Rome,’
one of the finest essays in that work.
Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his
work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he
ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the
‘Athenæum.’ And the poet, might well say this, for those who have
studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon ‘Sigurd,’
‘The House of the Wolfings,’ ‘The Roots of the Mountains,’ ‘The
Glittering Plain,’ ‘The Well at the World’s End,’ ‘The Tale of Beowulf,’
‘News from Nowhere,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ will be inclined to put them at
the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s purely critical work. The ‘Quarterly
Review,’ in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations
between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable
article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of
English Literature.’ I record these facts, not in order to depreciate
the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going
to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s monograph in the ‘Athenæum.’
The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death:—
“Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries,
that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is
to us all—that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may
easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s
final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel
means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The
thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the
thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest
form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the
mortal coil—would have been intolerable almost. For among the
thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief,
that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment,
and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, ‘Enjoy.’
Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of
wealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two
daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to
understand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom
were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the
very salt of the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she
touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée
affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted
Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy
of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and
carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as
when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the
man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his
sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne
with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This
beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous
powers were at their best—and died without pain. The scheme of life
and death does not seem so much awry, after all.
At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the
little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned
out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a
subject he rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death.
The conversation ended with these words of his: ‘I have enjoyed my
life—few men more so—and death in any case is sure.’”
It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
reflections upon the wear and tear of genius:—
“It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death
was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the
imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the
peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea.
‘Look at Gladstone,’ he would say, ‘look at those wise owls your
chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for
work? It is rust that kills men, not work.’ No doubt he was right
in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded
to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the ‘dry light of
intelligence,’ a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without
any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion
of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt
it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey
pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of ‘the thinking machine’
only, but of the whole man—the whole ‘genial’ nature of the
worker—his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of
lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the
part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence
when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and
presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is
overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for
its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitæ.
We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its
amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand
such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is
his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning
till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had
produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem
like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the
Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in
our time; think, I say, of the collating of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ with
the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man,
and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing
the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the
nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a
considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the
entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in
many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last
few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three
words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt
with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than
in his remarks upon Morris’s translation of the Odyssey:—
“Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris’s translation;
yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric
qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other
poets—are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully
combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek
hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the
Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the
Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can
be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of
Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking
with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the
entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured
the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase,
and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay
frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote. . . . Morris’s translation of
the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an
almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a
glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the
modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet.
But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely
original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The
Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ etc. And
then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is,
of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the ‘Saga
Library.’ Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a
work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the
language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so
concrete as to make each Saga an English poem—for poem each one is,
if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not
metre is the first requisite of a poem.”
In connection with William Morris, readers of ‘The Coming of Love’ will
recall the touching words in the ‘Prefatory Note’:—
“Had it not been for the intervention of matters of a peculiarly
absorbing kind—matters which caused me to delay the task of
collecting these verses—I should have been the most favoured man who
ever brought out a volume of poems, for they would have been printed
by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press. As that projected edition
of his was largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the
subscribers is, I am told, required from me. Among the friends who
saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of
his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he
would die—myself. To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a
point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must
die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to
think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to
come upon us. And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my
verses in one of Mr. Lane’s inviting little volumes will be dimmed
and marred by the thought that Morris’s name also might have been,
and is not, on the imprint.”
As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of ‘The Coming of
Love’ is an instance of that artistic conscientiousness which up to a
certain point is of inestimable value to the poet, but after that point
is reached, baffles him. The poem had been read in fragments and deeply
admired by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved.
Certain fragments of it had appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ and other
journals, but the publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing
to the fact that certain portions of it had been lent and lost. Morris
not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an édition de luxe
of the book, but he actually took the trouble to get a full list of
subscribers, and insisted upon allowing the author a magnificent royalty.
Nothing, however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book
until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the
generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then, when the
book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which robbed us of one
of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. And even after
Morris’s death the poet’s executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis
and the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were willing
and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems should be
brought out. Subsequently, when a large portion of the lost poems was
found, the volume was published by Mr. John Lane. This anecdote alone
explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is never tired of dwelling upon the
nobility of Morris’s nature, and upon his generosity in small things as
well as in large.
Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject is the
following. When Morris published his first volume in the Kelmscott
Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy of the book. He also
sent him a presentation copy of the second and third. But knowing how
small was the profit at this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott
Press, Mr. Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these
presentation copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest
against such extravagance. Mrs. Morris assured him that it would be
perfectly useless to do so. But when the edition of Keats was coming
out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to grapple with the matter, and one
Sunday afternoon when he was at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:
‘Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber to the Keats, and
I give my commission for it in the presence of witnesses. I am a paying
subscriber to the Keats.’
‘All right, old chap, you’re a subscriber.’
In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the Keats; and
when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the following Sunday
afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had been made. Morris laughed.
‘All right, there’s no mistake—that is my presentation copy of Keats.’
But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was being
discussed—the marvellous Chaucer with Burne-Jones’s illustrations—Mr.
Watts-Dunton knew that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and
probably sunk, and he said to Morris:
‘Now, Morris, I’m going to talk to you seriously about the Chaucer. I
know that it’s going to be a dead loss to you, and I do really and
seriously hope that you do not contemplate anything so wild as to send me
a presentation copy of that book. You know my affection for you, and you
know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me pain to
accept it.’
‘Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to stay my hand, for,
between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some money over it; but the
Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned Jones and I are going to join
in the presentation of a copy to Algernon Swinburne.’
After this Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mind was set at rest, as he told Mrs.
Morris. But when Mr. Swinburne’s copy reached ‘The Pines’ it was
accompanied by another one—‘Theodore Watts-Dunton from William Morris.’
Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr. Watts-Dunton also
tells. Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess a copy of ‘The Golden Legend,’
bought the Kelmscott edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris
this. Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.
‘What! Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of mine! Why I thought he did
not care for black letter reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy
of every book I brought out.’
And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent to ‘The
Pines,’ one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for Mr. Swinburne.
Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles,’ tells
this amusing story:—
“Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled into seeing and hearing
the great poet-singer Stead, whose rhythms have had such a great
effect upon the ‘art poetic,’ the author of ‘The Perfect Cure,’ and
‘It’s Daddy this and Daddy that,’ and other brilliant lyrics. A
friend with whom Morris had been spending the evening, and who had
been talking about poetic energy and poetic art in relation to the
chilly reception accorded to ‘Sigurd,’ persuaded him—much against his
will—to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr. Stead, whose performance
consisted of singing a song, the burden of which was ‘I’m a perfect
cure!’ while he leaped up into the air without bending his legs and
twirled round like a dervish. ‘What made you bring me to see this
damned tomfoolery?’ Morris grumbled; and on being told that it was to
give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest, without poetic
art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way out. If Morris
were now alive—and all England will sigh, ‘Ah, would he were!’—he
would confess, with his customary emphasis, that the poet had nothing
of the slightest importance to learn, even from the rhythms of Mr.
Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses that were beyond
the powers of the ‘Great Vance.’”
Chapter XIII
THE ‘EXAMINER’
LONG before Mr. Watts-Dunton printed a line, he was a prominent figure in
the literary and artistic sets in London; but, as Mr. Hake has said, it
was merely as a conversationalist that he was known. His conversation
was described by Rossetti as being like that of no other person moving in
literary circles, because he was always enunciating new views in
phrasings so polished that, to use Rossetti’s words, his improvized
locutions were as perfect as ‘fitted jewels.’ Those who have been
privileged to listen to his table-talk will attest the felicity of the
image. Seldom has so great a critic had so fine an audience. Rossetti
often lamented that Theodore Watts’ spoken criticism had never been taken
down in shorthand. For a long time various editors who had met him at
Rossetti’s, at Madox Brown’s, at Westland Marston’s, at Whistler’s
breakfasts, and at the late Lord Houghton’s, endeavoured to persuade him
to make practical use in criticism of the ideas that flowed in a
continuous stream from his lips. But, as Rossetti used to affirm, he was
the one man of his time who, with immense literary equipment, was without
literary ambition. This peculiarity of his was eloquently described by
the late Dr. Gordon Hake in his ‘New Day’:—
You say you care not for the people’s praise,
That poetry is its own recompense;
You care not for the wreath, the dusty bays,
Given to the whirling wind and hurried hence.
The first editor who secured Theodore Watts, after repeated efforts to do
so, was the late Professor Minto, and this only came about because during
his editorship of the ‘Examiner’ both he and Watts resided in Danes Inn,
and were constantly seeing each other.
It was Minto who afterwards declared that “the articles in the ‘Examiner’
and the ‘Athenæum’ are goldmines, in which we others are apt to dig
unconsciously without remembering that the nuggets are Theodore Watts’s,
who is too lazy to peg out his claim.” The first article by him that
appeared in Minto’s paper attracted great attention and roused great
curiosity. This indeed is not surprising, for, as I found when I read
it, it was as remarkable for pregnancy of thought and of style as the
latest and ripest of his essays. A friend of his, belonging to the set
in which he moved, who remembers the appearance of this article, has been
kind enough to tell me the following anecdote in connection with it. The
contributors to the paper at that time consisted of Minto, Dr Garnett,
Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, ‘Scholar’ Williams, Comyns Carr, Walter Pollock,
Duffield (the translator of ‘Don Quixote’), Professor Sully, Dr. Marston,
William Bell Scott, William Black, and many other able writers. On the
evening of the day when Theodore Watts’s first article appeared, there
was a party at the house of William Bell Scott in Chelsea, and every one
was asking who this new contributor was. It was one of the conditions
under which the article was written that its authorship was to be kept a
secret. Bell Scott, who took a great interest in the ‘Examiner,’ was
especially inquisitive about the new writer. After having in vain tried
to get from Minto the name of the writer, he went up to Watts, and said:
“I would give almost anything to know who the writer is who appears in
the ‘Examiner’ for the first time today.” “What makes you inquire about
it?” said Watts. “What is the interest attaching to the writer of such
fantastic stuff as that? Surely it is the most mannered writing that has
appeared in the ‘Examiner’ for a long time!” Then, turning to Minto, he
said: “I can’t think, Minto, what made you print it at all.” Scott, who
had a most exalted opinion of Watts as a critic, was considerably abashed
at this, and began to endeavour to withdraw some of his enthusiastic
remarks. This set Minto laughing aloud, and thus the secret got out.
From that hour Watts became the most noticeable writer among a group of
critics who were all noticeable. Week after week there appeared in this
historic paper criticism as fine as had ever appeared in it in the time
of Leigh Hunt, and as brilliant as had appeared in it in the time of
Fonblanque. At this time Minto used to entertain his contributors on
Monday evening in the room over the publisher’s office in the Strand, and
I have been told by one who was frequently there that these smoking
symposia were among the most brilliant in London. One can well imagine
this when one remembers the names of those who used to attend the
meetings.
It was through the ‘Examiner’ that Watts formed that friendship with
William Black which his biographer, Sir Wemyss Reid, alludes to. Between
these two there was one subject on which they were especially in
sympathy—their knowledge and love of nature. At that time Black was
immensely popular. In personal appearance there was, I am told, a
superficial resemblance between the two, and they were constantly being
mistaken for each other; and yet, when they were side by side, it was
evident that the large, dark moustache and the black eyes were almost the
only points of resemblance between them.
It was at the then famous house in Gower Street of Mr. Justin McCarthy
that Black and Mr. Watts-Dunton first met. Speaking as an Irishman of a
younger but not, I fear, of so genial a generation, I hear tantalizing
accounts of the popular gatherings at the home of the most charming and
the most distinguished Irishman of letters in the London of that time,
where so many young men of my own country were welcomed as warmly as
though they had not yet to win their spurs. No one speaks more
enthusiastically of the McCarthy family than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who seems
to have been on terms of friendship with them almost as soon as he
settled in London. Mr. Watts-Dunton was always a lover of McCarthy’s
novels, but on his first visit to Gower Street Mr. McCarthy was, as
usual, full of the subject not of his own novels, but of another man’s.
He urged his new friend to read ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ almost
forcing him to take the book away with him, which he did: this was the
way in which Mr. Watts-Dunton became for the first time acquainted with a
story which he always avers is the only book that has ever revived the
rich rustic humour of Shakespeare’s early comedies. A perfect household
of loving natures, warm Irish hearts, bright Irish intellects, cultivated
and rare, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s testimony, was that little
family in Gower Street. I think he will pardon me for repeating one
quaint little story about himself and Black in connection with this first
visit to the McCarthys. On entering the room Mr. Watts-Dunton was much
struck with what appeared to be real musical genius in a bright-eyed
little lady who was delighting the party with her music. This was at the
period in his own life which Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his ‘music-mad
period.’ And after a time he got talking with the lady. He was a little
surprised that he was at once invited by the musical lady to go to a
gathering at her house. But he was as much pleased as surprised to be so
welcomed, and incontinently accepted the invitation. It never entered
his mind that he had been mistaken for another man, until the other man
entered the room and came up to the lady. She, on her part, began to
look in an embarrassed way from one to the other of the two swarthy,
black-moustached gentlemen. She had mistaken Mr. Watts-Dunton for
William Black, with whom her acquaintance was but slight. The
contretemps caused much amusement when the husband of the lady, an
eminent novelist, who knew Mr. Watts-Dunton well, introduced him to his
wife. I do not know what was the end of the comedy, but no doubt it was
a satisfactory one. It could not be otherwise among such people as
Justin McCarthy would be likely to gather round him.
At that time, to quote the words of the same friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton,
Watts used frequently to meet at Bell Scott’s and Rossetti’s Professor
Appleton, the editor of the ‘Academy.’ The points upon which these two
touched were as unlike the points upon which Watts and William Black
touched as could possibly be. They were both students of Hegel; and when
they met, Appleton, who had Hegel on the brain, invariably drew Watts
aside for a long private talk. People used to leave them alone, on
account of the remoteness of the subject that attracted the two. Watts
had now made up his mind that he would devote himself to literature, and,
indeed, his articles in the ‘Examiner’ showed that he had only to do so
to achieve a great success. Appleton rarely left Watts without saying,
“I do wish you would write for the ‘Academy.’ I want you to let me send
you all the books on the transcendentalists that come to the ‘Academy,’
and let me have articles giving the pith of them at short intervals.”
This invitation to furnish the ‘Academy’ with a couple of columns
condensing the spirit of many books about subjects upon which only a
handful of people in England were competent to write, seemed to Watts a
grotesque request, seeing that he was at this very time the leading
writer on the ‘Examiner,’ and was being constantly approached by other
editors. It was consequently the subject of many a joke between Minto,
William Black, Watts, and the others present at the famous ‘Examiner’
gatherings. After a while Mr. Norman MacColl, who was then the editor of
the ‘Athenæum,’ invited Watts to take an important part in the reviewing
for the ‘Athenæum.’ At first he told the editor that there were two
obstacles to his accepting the invitation—one was that the work that he
was invited to do was largely done by his friend Marston, and that,
although he would like to join him, he scarcely saw his way, on account
of the ‘Examiner,’ which was ready to take all the work he could produce.
On opening the matter to Dr Marston, that admirably endowed writer would
not hear of Watts’s considering him in the matter. The ‘Athenæum’ was
then, as now, the leading literary organ in Europe, and the editor’s
offer was, of course, a very tempting one, and Watts was determined to
tell Minto about it. And this he did.
“Now, Minto,” he said, “it rests entirely with you whether I shall write
in the ‘Athenæum’ or not.” Minto, between whom and Watts there was a
deep affection, made the following reply:
“My dear Theodore, I need not say that it will not be a good day for the
‘Examiner’ when you join the ‘Athenæum.’ The ‘Examiner’ is a struggling
paper which could not live without being subsidized by Peter Taylor, and
it is not four months ago since Leicester Warren said to me that he and
all the other readers of the ‘Examiner’ looked eagerly for the ‘T. W.’ at
the foot of a literary article. The ‘Athenæum’ is both a powerful and a
wealthy paper. In short, it will injure the ‘Examiner’ when your name is
associated with the ‘Athenæum.’ But to be the leading voice of such a
paper as that is just what you ought to be, and I cannot help advising
you to entertain MacColl’s proposal.”
In consequence of this Mr. Watts-Dunton closed with Mr. MacColl’s offer,
and his first article in the ‘Athenæum’ appeared on July 8, 1876.
Chapter XIV
THE ‘ATHENÆUM’
AS the first review which Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed to the ‘Athenæum’
has been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any other
of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire. It has the
additional interest, I believe, of being the most rapidly executed piece
of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton ever achieved. Mr. MacColl,
having secured the new writer, tried to find a book for him, and failed,
until Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him whether he intended to give an article
upon Skelton’s ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ.’ The editor said that
he had not thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that,
if Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to him. As the
article was wanted on the following day, it was dictated as fast as the
amanuensis—not a shorthand writer—could take it down.
It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one of his
great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays on Victor
Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as any:—
‘Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun?
Here, at least, is the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ squeezed into one volume.
Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which,
as far as we remember, is this. The library of the Indian kings was
composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to
remove it. But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading
much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said:
‘Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of
both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin,
which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard
to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze ’em!’ The Brahmin,
understanding well what the order to ‘squeeze ’em’ meant (for he was
a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little
flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words
and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work,
aided by many scribes—striking out all the idle words from every book
in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted it
was found that ten camels could carry that library without ruffling a
hair. And therefore the Brahmin was appointed ‘Grand Squeezer’ of
the realm. Ages after this, another prince, who loved reading much
and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand Squeezer of
his time and said: ‘Thy duties are neglected, O Grand Squeezer! Thy
life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.’ Thereupon the Grand
Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and squeezed and
squeezed till the whole library became at last a load that a foal
would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book, a tiny
volume, containing four maxims. Yet the wisdom in the last library
was the wisdom in the first.
The appearance of Mr. Skelton’s condensation of the ‘Noctes
Ambrosianæ’ reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn warning
we always find it our duty to administer to those who show a
propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship—the warning
that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying
for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary
be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by
itself. Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension
to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call ‘the writing
fellows,’ for adding to the camel’s burden, instead of distributing
the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected
squeezers. We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that
almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints,
while nobody reads, and, to judge from the ‘spelling bees,’ nobody
even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a ‘writing animal’ is
on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself. This
is the alarming thing. Where are we to find so many squeezers? Nay,
in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer’s
every book. Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle
squeezer—what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than that
he should squeeze ‘Frederick the Great’—that enormous, rank and
pungent ‘haggis’ from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would
flow of ‘oniony liquid’ that compared with it the famous
‘haggis-deluge’ of the ‘Noctes’ which nearly drowned in gravy
‘Christopher,’ ‘the Shepherd,’ and ‘Tickler’ in Ambrose’s parlour,
would be, both for quantity and flavour, but ‘a beaker full of the
sweet South’? Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what
would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to
the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson—the mighty
Christopher, who for about thirty years literally talked in type upon
every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of
which he had none; whose ‘words, words, words’ are, indeed, as
Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, ‘as the rush of mighty waters’?
What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to
guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, ‘if what is said be not to the
purpose, a single word is already too much.’
Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations
upon the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ.’ He loves the memory of the fine old
Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that
are too timid of grip. In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot
overdo it. There are certain parts we should have especially liked
squeezed away; and among these—will Mr. Skelton pardon us?—are the
‘amazingly humourous’ ones, such as the ‘opening of the haggis,’
which, Mr. Skelton tells us, ‘manifests the humour of conception as
well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been
surpassed by the greatest masters’; ‘the amazing humour’ of which
consists in the Shepherd’s sticking his supper knife into a ‘haggis’
(a sheep’s paunch filled with the ‘pluck’ minced, with suet, onions,
salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy
that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save
themselves from being drowned in it! In truth, Mr. Skelton should
have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the
Professor’s twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining,
omit everything ‘amazingly humourous,’ he will be the best
Wilson-squeezer imaginable.
Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be. The ‘Noctes’ are
dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to save them, squeezes away all the
political events—so important once, so unimportant now—all the
foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in
them. He eliminates all the critiques upon all those ‘greatest
poems’ and those ‘greatest novels of the age’ written by
Christopher’s friends—friends so famous once, so peacefully forgotten
now. And he has left what he calls the ‘Comedy of the Noctes
Ambrosianæ,’ i.e. ‘that portion of the work which deals with or
presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and
character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it
which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of
literary, artistic, or political interest only.’ And, although Mr.
Skelton uses thus the word ‘comedy’ in its older and wider meaning,
it is evident that it is as an ‘amazing humourist’ that he would
present to our generation the great Christopher North. And
assuredly, at this the ‘delighted spirit’ of Christopher smiles
delightedly in Hades. For, however the ‘Comic Muse’ may pout upon
hearing from Mr. Skelton that ‘the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” belong to
her,’ it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson’s life was to
cultivate her—was to be an ‘amazing humourist,’ in short. It is
clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he
most of all affected, that which we call technically ‘Rabelaisian.’
To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of
the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all
his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds
hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot. His personality was
enormous. He had more of that demonic element—of which since
Goethe’s time we have heard so much—than any man in Scotland.
Everybody seems to have been dominated by him. De Quincey, with a
finer intellect than even his own—and that is using strong
language—looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master. It is
positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey’s ‘Autobiographic
Sketches,’ to come again and again upon the naïve refrain: ‘I think
so, so does Professor Wilson.’ Gigantic as was the egotism of the
Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism
of Christopher North. In this, as in everything else, he was the
opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter
Scott. Scott’s desire was to create eccentric humourous characters,
but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself. Wilson’s great
ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your
superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create. He would
like the universe to himself. If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if
you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that
character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a
smile: ‘Don’t you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I—John Wilson?’ He
always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler
were John Wilson—as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather,
what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered. This
determination to be a humourous character it was—and no lack of
literary ambition—that caused him to squander his astonishing powers
in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man,
lament.
Many articles in ‘Blackwood’—notably the one upon Shakspeare’s four
great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge’s
poetry—show that his insight into the principles of literary art was
true and deep—far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this
inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form,
nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature
show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or
review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his
merits.
Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to
ask us, on our oath, why Wilson’s fourteen volumes of brilliant,
eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund
state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the
‘Coverley’ papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review
articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we
fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that
mere elaborated intellectual ‘humour’ has the seeds of dissolution in
it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live;
and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a
humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian.
But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what
precise meaning we attach to the word ‘Rabelaisian’—though the
subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.
Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will
venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of
temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic
humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist—the
comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of
mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits,
with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the
almighty joke of the Cosmos—a mood which in literature is rarer than
in life—rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common and
characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.
Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For
this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save
in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the
Shakspeares, the Molières, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles,
the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots—upon whom the rich
tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and
yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.
Among these—to whom to create is everything—Sterne would perhaps have
been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and never
read Rabelais; while Dickens’s growth was a development from
Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr.
Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously
tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in
Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying
the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters.
Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor
could do that. But, strip the ‘Shepherd’s’ talk of its Scottish
accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose
rush in the ‘Recreations’ and the ‘Essays’ we are so familiar with.
While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of
De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to
be purposely destroyed, and the ‘Opium-Eater’ becomes a fantastic
creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.
The ‘amazing humour’ of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it
Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine
Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the ‘writing fellows’ at all.
We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our
time. One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a
pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with
a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of
our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be
found—where he ought to be found—at Stratford-on-Avon. This is
interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there
were Rabelaisians, even among the ‘writing fellows,’ before Rabelais;
the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all
we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of
getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, ‘in a duck-pond drowned
him,’ he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very
first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say
nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the ‘Birds’ alone puts
Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But
when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: ‘Let
down the curtain; the farce is done,’ they were prophetic as regards
the literary Rabelaisians—prophetic in this, that no writer has since
thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood—the mood, that is, of the
cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of
meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle has
fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped upon
several; for the great Curé divides his qualities among his followers
impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in the
‘Paradise of Fruits,’ from which every other fruit in the garden drew
its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits with
stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the cosmic
humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half
stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits—the love of
life—the fine passion for victuals and drink—has fallen to several
more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of ‘John Buncle’; to
Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the ‘Jolly Beggars’), to
John Skinner, the author of ‘Tullochgorum.’ Shakspeare, having
everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as
Cervantism. Some of the scenes in ‘Henry the Fourth’ and ‘Henry the
Fifth’ are rich with it. So is ‘Twelfth Night,’ to go no further.
Dickens’s Rabelaisianism stopped with ‘Pickwick.’ If Hood’s gastric
fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the
greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are
right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into
Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief.
Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and
this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour
becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the
harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by
imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated
animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we
ask the reader—who may very likely have been to an undergraduates’
wine-party, or to a medical students’ revel, or who may have read the
‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’—we seriously and earnestly ask him whether, among
all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is
anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.
And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say
to Mr. Skelton—for we believed in Professor Wilson once—it breaks our
heart to say that Wilson’s Rabelaisianism is nothing but
jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In
reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have
felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains.
We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if
those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if
they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their
ghostly liquor!’
Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of
the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do
not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the
friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who
runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue
that all creatures know, ‘I live, I live, I live!’ But, whatever
might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring
about the literary cheerfulness of the ‘Noctes’ that, notwithstanding
all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at
heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real
Wilson is the Wilson of the ‘Isle of Palms,’ ‘The City of the
Plague,’ of the ‘Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,’ of the ‘Lights and
Shadows of Scottish Life,’ Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of
Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that ‘almost the only
passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler
sympathies of our nature—tender compassion—confiding affection, and
gentleness and sorrow.’
He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a
good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney
army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been—Mr. Skelton
inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us
to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say
decidedly, he was not.
Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain
sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us
that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same
elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so
is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest,
and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is
humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the
little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous,
the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary
skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more
telling his wit. Now, Wilson’s intellect was exceedingly and
wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many
a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of
those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds
from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay.”
No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and
saw the author of it. Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and
indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry
between the ‘Athenæum’ and the ‘Academy.’
“You belong to us,” said Appleton. “The ‘Academy’ is the proper place
for you. You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have
Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy’s camp.”
“And shall I tell you why I have joined the ‘Athenæum’ in place of the
‘Academy’?” said Watts; “it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you
did not.”
“For months and months I have been urging you to write in the ‘Academy,’”
said Appleton.
“That is true, no doubt,” said Watts, “but while MacColl offered me an
important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you
invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon
metaphysics. It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late. If to join
the ‘Athenæum’ is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a
Philistine am I.”
* * * * *
I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then
called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends
afterwards. Shirley, in his ‘Reminiscences’ of Rossetti, like most of
his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the
poet-painter. I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides
cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a
genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays. I have heard him say more than
once that Skelton’s style had a certain charm for him, and he could not
understand why Skelton’s position is not as great as it deserves to be.
‘Scotsmen,’ he said, ‘often complain that English critics are slow to do
them justice. This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol’s
life. He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering
under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile
Club. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the
idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in
the great literary cockpit of London. To say the truth, the Scottish
cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can
more than take care of himself. For my part, with the exception of
Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish,
Scottish, or Welsh. But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had
been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an
enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been
more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was
liked.’
As will be seen further on, before the review of the ‘Comedy of the
Noctes Ambrosianæ’ appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the
‘Athenæum’ an article on ‘The Art of Interviewing.’ From this time
forward he became the chief critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ and for nearly a
quarter of a century—that is to say, until he published ‘The Coming of
Love,’ when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any
kind—he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of
which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound
generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the
phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic
style—a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in
an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.
As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness
upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his
creative work is of the closest kind. Indeed, it has been said by
Rossetti that ‘the subtle and original generalizations upon the first
principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to
him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own
poetry.’ The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets.
Rossetti used humourously to call him ‘The Symposiarch,’ and no doubt the
influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at
Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr.
Marston’s, Madox Brown’s, and Mrs. Procter’s, may be traced in his
writings. For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic
of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of
spontaneous conversation overheard. Its variety of manner, as well as of
subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism. In it
are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation,
irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily
mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit. To
the ‘Athenæum’ he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as
‘The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,’ ‘The Troubadours and Trouvères,’
‘The Children of the Open Air,’ ‘The Gypsies,’ ‘Cosmic Humour,’ ‘The
Effect of Evolution upon Literature.’ And although the most complete and
most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the
vast ocean of the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ and the ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica,’ there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is
proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, that
contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian
minister, to the ‘Rivista d’ Italia.’ In this article she makes frequent
allusions to the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and quotes freely from them.
Rossetti once said that ‘the reason why Theodore Watts was so little
known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as
eagerly as other men sought fame’; but although his indifference to
literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts
of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his
influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be
profound.
There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves
untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates. His treatise in the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ on ‘Poetry’ is alone sufficient to show how
deep has been his study of poetic principles. The essay on the ‘Sonnet,’
too, which appeared in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ is admitted by critics
of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject. It
has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl
Leutzner in his treatise, ‘Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.’
The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the ‘Athenæum’ are
admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B.
Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the ‘Idler.’ The
allusion to the ‘smart slaters’ will be sufficient to indicate the
approximate date of the interview.
“Having read your treatise on poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica,’ which, it is said, has been an influence in every
European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned
in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of
comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his
time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English
poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the
present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are
really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in
sympathy with the poetry of the present hour.”
“I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic. To say
the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque
misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.
Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I
was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in
which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are
so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same
misconception seems to be spreading in England—attacks which the
smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing
men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers.”
“It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the
newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd.”
“I do not believe in answering attacks. The public, as I say, knows
that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm
to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer
does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I
have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of
letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations
upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a
review. It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one’s
excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful
criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike
reviewing than mine. Yet it has one good quality, I think—it is
never unkindly. I never will take a book for review unless I can say
something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour.”
“Then you never practise the smart ‘slating’ which certain would-be
critics indulge in?”
“Never! In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give
pain to a young writer. In the next place, this ‘smart slating,’ as
you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world.
Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as
many miles of such smart ‘slating’ as could be achieved by any six of
the smart slaters. A charming phrase of yours, ‘smart slaters’! But
I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my
time—men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to
mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they
hold such work in contempt. Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for
instance. Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day
of his valuable life are wasted on ‘leader’ writing, but there is in
any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be
achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he!
going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.
Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.
While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by
making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little
spiteful brow, Grant Allen’s good-natured sayings have the very wit
that the unlucky sweater and ‘slater’ is trying for. Read what he
said about William Watson, and see how kind he is. Compare his
geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. Again, take
Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters
in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the
scurrility of the smart writers. But it was not, I suppose, of such
as they that you came to talk about. You are asking me whether I am
in sympathy with the younger writers of my time. My answer is that I
cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.
In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of
them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal
friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work
and their aims. No doubt there are some points in which they and I
agree to differ.”
“And what about our contemporary novelists? Perhaps you do not give
attention to fiction?”
“Give attention to novels! Why, if I did not, I should not give
attention to literature at all. In a true and deep sense all pure
literature is fiction—to use an extremely inadequate and misleading
word as a substitute for the right phrase, ‘imaginative
representation.’ ‘The Iliad,’ ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘The Æneid,’ ‘The
Divina Commedia,’ are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as
certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our
writers. The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old
Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and
the mustard-seed. A time which has given birth to such novelists as
many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time
for the English novel. Criticism will have to recognize, and at
once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of
the ‘literature of power,’ and if criticism does not so recognize it,
so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow
in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I
have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing
boy—it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for
the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be
stretched to fit the muscles as they swell.”
“I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent
critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?”
“Well, there I am a ‘galled jade’ that must needs ‘wince’ a little.
No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not
yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my
writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity. The chief
argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any
scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed
with the journal’s own authority—and the same applies, of course, to
the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious. With regard
to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to
be always on his guard against it. An editor cannot read all the
books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary
world. When Jones asks him for Brown’s book for review, the editor
cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up
irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes
in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones’s name,
but that of the journal.
In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but
not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great
injustice may flow from this. I myself have more than once heard a
good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted
the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the
work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry
fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything.”
Now that the day of the ‘smart slaters’ is over, it is interesting to
read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the
article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the
‘Athenæum,’ spoke of its record and its triumphs:—
“The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every
line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through
its columns. Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that
the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is
difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the
editorial ‘we.’ But with regard to the general public, the reader of
a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of
the ‘we,’ and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an
author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men
ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. These were the
views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the
best writers of our time there can be no doubt. Some very
illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them. On a
certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne
Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having
accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced
himself, and told how he had stood ‘dividing the swift mind’ as to
whether he could or could not offer the man his hand. ‘I think I
should have offered him mine,’ said Rossetti, ‘although no one
detests his offence more than I do.’ And then the conversation ran
upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old
friends could not shake hands. ‘There is one kind of miscreant,’
said Rossetti, ‘whom you have forgotten to name—a miscreant who in
kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an
anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when
he knows it to be good. That is the man who should never defile my
hand by his touch. By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I
must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste
bread and salt with him. I would quietly get up and go.’ Tennyson,
on afterwards being told this story, said, ‘And who would not do the
same? Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege—sacrilege against
art.’ Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume
of the ‘Athenæum’ worked on the great principle that the critic’s
primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art
and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by. Their
pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his
coadjutors; and from its commencement the ‘Athenæum’ has striven to
avoid slashing and smart writing. A difficult thing to avoid, no
doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar
slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever. Of all
forms of writing, the founders of the ‘Athenæum’ held the shallow,
smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable. And
here again the views of the ‘Athenæum’ have remained unchanged. The
critic who works ‘without a conscience or an aim’ knows only too well
that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses
of human nature—the love that people have of seeing each other
attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself.
For although man has a strong instinct for admiration—else had he
never reached his present position in the conscious world—he has,
running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct—the
instinct for contempt. A reviewer’s ridicule poured upon a writer
titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority. It is by
pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist
hopes to kill two birds with one stone—to gratify his own malignity
and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so.
Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is
far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all. Many
brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever,
have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart
saying. One of these writers—the greatest wit of the nineteenth
century—used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered
his own prodigious powers of wit, ‘I will engage in six lessons to
teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks
it worth his while to learn.’ And the ‘Athenæum,’ at the time when
Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same
thing. The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and
among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching.”
Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a
kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor
should ‘come down a cropper’ over some matter of fact, and open the door
to troublesome correspondence. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the
mysterious ‘we’ must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the
authority of the oracle? When a contributor ‘comes down a cropper,’
although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor
cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of
the ‘Saturday Review’ under Cook) refuse to insert a correction. Now, as
Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, ‘the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy
does it feel in setting other intelligences right.’ I have been told
that it was a tradition in the office of the ‘Examiner,’ and also in the
office of the ‘Athenæum,’ that Theodore Watts had not only never been
known to ‘come down a cropper,’ but had never given the ‘critical gnats’
a chance of pretending that he had to. One day, however, in an article
on Frederick Tennyson’s poems, speaking of the position that the poet
Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with
the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr.
Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith—the same Smith whom ‘Z’
(the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the ‘Athenæum’—had been
admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer
had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith’s with the metaphors of
Shakespeare. The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next
Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great
man:—
‘Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson’s poems,
which was published in your last number, please say where I have
compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?
HERBERT SPENCER.’
The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor
had at last ‘come down a cropper,’ sent a proof of Spencer’s note to Mr.
Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any
editorial comment at all. Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last
‘come down a cropper,’ this would have been the wisest plan. But he
returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following
footnote added to it:—
“It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the
magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in
literary art—an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original
in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature
may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from
their ranks—and it is many years since we had the pleasure of reading
it. Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in which
he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as ‘I speared him
with a jest,’ etc. Our only object, however, in alluding to the
subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the
hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as this—
—My drooping sails
Flap idly ’gainst the mast of my intent;
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should grate the golden isles—
had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and
favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer.”
Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, ‘Of course
the article was Theodore Watts’s. I had forgotten entirely what I had
said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.’
If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of
critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which
distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings, I think I should select this
bland postscript to Spencer’s letter.
Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton
always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson. It
occurred in connection with ‘Kidnapped.’ I will quote here Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the
‘Athenæum’ review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson’s works. The
playful allusion to the ‘Athenæum’s’ kindness is very characteristic:—
“Of Stevenson’s sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could
quote many instances; but let one suffice. When ‘Kidnapped’
appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of
giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we
refused to be scared from making certain strictures. It occurred to
us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic
detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really
vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts.
From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of
two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to
weld into one. We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of
Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer,
anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power
is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story
on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding
one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the
villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him
and sending him off to the plantations. The ‘Athenæum,’ whose
kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small,
has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its
usual kind and gentle way. This aroused the wrath of the
Stevensonians. Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the
author of ‘Kidnapped’ himself a charming letter.’
This letter appears in Stevenson’s ‘Letters,’ and by the courtesy of Mr.
Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it
here:—
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.
DEAR MR. WATTS,—The sight of the last ‘Athenæum’ reminds me of you,
and of my debt now too long due. I wish to thank you for your notice
of ‘Kidnapped’; and that not because it was kind, though for that
also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before
now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers. A critic
like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity,
and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance,
surely not in vain.
What you say of the two parts in ‘Kidnapped’ was felt by no one more
painfully than by myself. I began it, partly as a lark, partly as a
pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from
the canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the
cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old
friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back
door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to
me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a
man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private
means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist’s
proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden:
the days of professional literature very hard. Yet I do not so far
deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing
my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality
to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my ‘Kidnapped’ was doomed,
while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the
thing it is.
And now to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight
on board the ‘Covenant,’ I think it literal. David and Alan had
every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good
conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first
attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have
taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms
and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.
The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever
ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not;
still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would
perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.—I am, dear Mr.
Watts, your very sincere admirer,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson, of his
personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and Stevenson, on
his part, in conversation never failed to speak of himself, as in this
letter he subscribes himself, as Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sincere admirer. But
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s admiration of Stevenson’s work was more tempered with
judgment than was the admiration of some critics, who afterwards, when he
became too successful, disparaged him. Greatly as he admired ‘Kidnapped’
and ‘Catriona,’ there were certain of Stevenson’s works for which his
admiration was qualified, and certain others for which he had no
admiration at all. His strictures upon the story which seems to have
been at first the main source of Stevenson’s popularity, ‘Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde,’ were much resented at the time by those insincere and fickle
worshippers to whom I have already alluded. Yet these strictures are
surely full of wisdom, and they specially show that wide sweep over the
entire field of literature which is characteristic of all his criticism.
As they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will quote
them here:—
“Take the little story ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ the laudatory
criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like
the comet’s tail in relation to the comet. On its appearance as a
story, a ‘shilling shocker’ for the railway bookstalls, the critic’s
attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred
qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the
world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to
its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing.
But when it is offered as a classic—and this is really how it is
offered—it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different
kind. It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having
a like motive—stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest
literature—as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke to
the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible being—stories
whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest kind.
It is many years since, in writing of the ‘Parables of Buddhaghosha,’
it was our business to treat at length of the grand idea of man’s
dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been
embodied. We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsène
Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life’s road, sees on a
lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards—when sin has
soiled him—finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own
sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely modern
story of Edgar Poe, ‘William Wilson,’ up to the earliest allegories
upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by
gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart
of the ‘Great Man, Mankind.’ We traced the idea, as far as our
knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and
found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive—from the
ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all motives—had
been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that did honour
to literary art. Manu, after telling us that ‘single is each man
born into the world—single dies,’ implores each one to ‘collect
virtue,’ in order that after death he may be met by the virtuous part
of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in traversing ‘that
gloom which is so hard to be traversed.’ Fine as this is, it is
surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since versified by Sir
Edwin Arnold)—the story of the wicked king who met after death a
frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her to be only a
part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own evil deeds.
And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in Arda Viraf, in
which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid pleasant trees whose
fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of his own dual nature, a
beautiful maiden, who says to him, ‘O youth, I am thine own actions.’
And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in
which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it
deserves. It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous
tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery—a story of astonishing
brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man’s
soul is effected not by psychological development, and not by the
‘awful alchemy’ of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the
previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed
new drug.
If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De
Quincey’s ‘Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ it tells
poorly for Stevenson’s sense of humour. If it is meant as a serious
allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same
motive with which most literatures have been enriched. That a story
so coarse should have met with the plaudits that ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde’ met with at the time of its publication—that it should now be
quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while
all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are
ignored—what does it mean? Is it a sign that the ‘shrinkage of the
world,’ the ‘solidarity of civilisation,’ making the record of each
day’s doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our
public writers? Is it that they not only have no time to think, but
no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour? Is it
that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon
them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and
turn to it for convenient illustration? That Stevenson should have
been impelled to write the story shows what the ‘Suicide Club’ had
already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a
charm to ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped,’ there was that morbid
strain which is so often associated with physical disease.
Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all
writers since Chaucer—Walter Scott—Stevenson might have been in the
ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who
do their best to make life hideous. It must be remembered that he
was a critic first and a creator afterwards. He himself tells us how
critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to
writing himself. No one really understood better than he Hesiod’s
fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a
forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares. No one understood
better than he Joubert’s saying, ‘Fiction has no business to exist
unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one aim
is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere
frightful reality.’ And for the most part he succeeded in keeping
down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a
crazy body.
Save in such great mistakes as ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ and a few
other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert’s excellent maxim. But
Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter—right by
instinct. He alone is always a delight. If all art is dedicated to
joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious
problem than how to make men happy, then the ‘Waverley Novels’ are
among the most precious things in the literature of the world.”
Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always speaks warmly
is Browning. Among the many good anecdotes I have heard him relate in
this connection, I will give one. I do not think that he would object to
my doing so.
“It is one of my misfortunes,” said he, “to be not fully worthy (to
use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning’s poetry.
Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative
and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements
in a general way not pleasing to my ear. When a certain book of his
came out—I forget which—it devolved upon me to review it. Certain
eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I
expressed my irritation in something very like chaff. A close friend
of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself—in fact, Mr.
Swinburne—chided me for it, and I feel that he was right. On the
afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal
Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began
talking about the review. Lowell, I found, was delighted with
it—said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had
appeared for many years. ‘But,’ said he, ‘You’re a brave man to be
here where Browning always comes.’ Then, looking round the room, he
said: ‘Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side
opposite to us. Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!’
‘Slip away!’ I said, ‘to avoid Browning! You don’t know him as well
as I do, after all! Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if
we stand here for a minute or two. Miss Browning, whose eyes are
looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak
to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me.
And then you will see her turn her head to Browning’s ear and tell
him something. And then Browning will come straight across to me and
be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing
that be possible.’
‘No, I don’t believe it.’
‘If you were not such a Boston Puritan,’ I said, ‘I would ask you
what will you bet that I am wrong.’
No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied, Miss
Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn and whisper
in Browning’s ear, and Browning did come straight across the room to
us; and this is what he said, speaking to me before he spoke to the
illustrious American—a thing which on any other occasion he would
scarcely have done:
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you’re not going to put me off with generalities any
longer. You promised to write and tell me when you could come to
luncheon. You have never done so—you will never do so, unless I fix
you with a distinct day. Will you come to-morrow?’
‘I shall be delighted,’ I said. And he turned to Lowell and
exchanged a few friendly words with him.
After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: ‘Well, this is
wonderful. You would have won the bet. How do you explain it?’
‘I explain it by Browning’s greatness of soul and heart. His
position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative
review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him. But
he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson,
Jowett, and others. He wishes to make it quite apparent that he
feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.’”
After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to turn to
the bound volume of my ‘Athenæum’ and read the article on ‘Ferishtah’s
Fancies,’ which I imagine must have been the review in question. This is
what I read:—
‘The poems in this volume can only be described as
parable-poems—parable-poems, not in the sense that they are capable
of being read as parables (as is said to be the case with the
‘Rubá’iyát’ of Omar Khayyàm), but parable-poems in the sense that
they must be read as parables, or they show no artistic raison d’être
at all.
Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem? It
is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the
young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall. Or rather, it is to
imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda,
and set the preacher strumming a gypsy’s tambourine. Though in the
pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so
absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses
it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere
with that entire abandon—that emotional freedom—which seems necessary
to the very existence of song. Indeed, if poetry must, like
Wordsworth’s ideal John Bull, ‘be free or die’; if she must know no
law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of ‘L’art pour l’art’
declares); if she must not even seem to know _that_ (as the doctrine
of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it apparently in
tricksy sport alone—how can she—‘the singing maid with pictures in
her eyes’—mount the pulpit, read the text, and deliver the sermon?
In European literature how many parable poems should we find where
the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly strife? But
we discussed all this in speaking of prose parables, comparing the
stories of the Prodigal Son and Kiságotamí with even such perfect
parable poetry as that of Jami. We said then what we reiterate now:
that to sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius
of a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order—a genius
rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a certain
Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot in
floriculture. Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental fancies, and
being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy with a certain
fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar with the
Persian story we allude to, the famous story of ‘Poetry and
Cabbages.’ Still, we will record it here for a certain learned
society.
The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers,
and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages. So the
Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tûba Tree (whose fruit becomes
flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to
another, ‘The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well
be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon;
for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in
colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they
are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so
very intent upon cabbages.’ So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit
on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers
out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words
of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven. So
bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer—for not only has
Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the
poet—
Breathe a stream of otto and balm,
Which through a woof of living music blown
Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?
—so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the
angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and
perfumed words upon the petals. And this was how the Angels of the
Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of ‘Poetry and
Cabbages.’
But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is
nothing less than the celestial charactery of heaven, and is
consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very few—that is to
say, the eyes of those mortals who are ‘of the race of Israfel.’ To
common eyes—the eyes of the ordinary human cabbage-grower—what,
indeed, is that angelic caligraphy with which the petals of the
flowers are ornamented? Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful
veins and scents and colours.
But who are ‘of the race of Israfel’? Not the prosemen, certainly,
as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher’s idle
nonsense about the ‘Alphabet of the Angels’ in his ‘Ædipus
Egyptiacus.’ Are they, then, the poets? This is indeed a solemn
query. ‘If,’ says Feridun, ‘the mottoes that adorn the bowers of
Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall
be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of
hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?’
One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel—the
parable-poet—the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as reasoned
conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized in
concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic
form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it
that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the
colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of
these, and to be as inseparable from them as the ‘morning breath’ of
the Sabæan rose is inalienable from the innermost petals—‘the subtle
odour of the rose’s heart,’ which no mere chemistry of man, but only
the morning breeze, can steal.”
It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous for Mr.
Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and we have only to contrast it—or its
richness and its rareness—with the naïve, simple, unadorned style of
‘Aylwin’ to realize how wide is the range of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a master
of the fine shades of literary expression.
Chapter XV
THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER
AND now begins the most difficult and the most responsible part of my
task—the selection of one typical essay from the vast number of essays
expressing more or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to
all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work. I can, of course, give only one, for
already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions far beyond
those originally intended for it. Naturally, I thought at first that I
would select one of the superb articles on Victor Hugo’s works, such for
instance as ‘La Legénde des Siècles,’ or that profound one on ‘La
Religion des Religion.’ But, after a while, when I had got the essay
typed and ready for inclusion, I changed my mind. I thought that one of
those wonderful essays upon Oriental subjects which had called forth
writings like those of Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better.
Finally, I decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full
of profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible, that it
was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the Bible in Europe
and in America. Mr. Watts-Dunton has often been urged to reprint this
essay as a brief text-book for scholastic use, but he has never done so.
It will be noted by readers of ‘Aylwin’ that even so far back as the
publication of this article in the ‘Athenæum ‘, in 1877, Mr.
Watts-Dunton—to judge from the allusion in it to ‘Nin-ki-gal, the Queen
of Death’—seems to have begun to draw upon Philip Aylwin’s ‘Veiled
Queen’:—
“There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive
subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western
literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform
failure of these attempts. At the time that Sternhold was ‘bringing’
the Psalms into ‘fine Englysh meter’ for Henry the Eighth and Edward
the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for
their own monarchs—notably Clement Marot for Francis the First. And
it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any
importance having been entered against it. This is astonishing, for
the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a
sacred book. Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come,
and a literary journal may be its proper medium.
A great living savant has characterized the Bible as ‘a collection of
the rude imaginings of Syria,’ ‘the worn-out old bottle of Judaism
into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.’ The
great savant was angry when he said so. The ‘new wine’ of science is
a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets
from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much
intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless. But whatever may
become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have
passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of
Chaldæa,—the ‘old bottle’ is going to be older yet,—the Bible is
going to be eternal. For that which decides the vitality of any book
is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul—not the
knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the
universe, unseen as well as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just
that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always
assume—that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as this—that
of a noble humility before a God such as He ‘in whose great Hand we
stand.’ This is why—like Alexander’s mirror—like that most precious
‘Cup of Jemshîd,’ imagined by the Persians—the Bible reflects to-day,
and will reflect for ever, every wave of human emotion, every passing
event of human life—reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great
and simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was written.
Coming from the Vernunft of Man, it goes straight to the Vernunft.
This is the kind of literature that never does die: a fact which the
world has discovered long ago. For the Bible is Europe’s one book.
And with regard to Asia, as far back as the time of Chrysostom it
could have been read in languages Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian,
Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan; now it can be read in every
language, and in almost every dialect, under the sun.
And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms.
Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful;
the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible
to sing so badly. It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I
should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should
find it in their hearts to sing Marot’s Psalms when they might have
sung David’s—that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable
jig, ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation’; and that Anthony,
King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, ‘Stand
up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.’ For, although it is given to the
very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the
ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar
convolution.
In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the
English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in
various incarnations, are fastidious.
When Lord Macaulay’s tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating
the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British
Museum to study us through our books—what volume can he take as the
representative one—what book, above all others, can the ghostly
librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into
the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure
in the earth? We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the
English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the
Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most
exalted and its most abject phases. That in the same volume can be
found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the
grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of
Brady and Tate—masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous
is an inspired bard—would be adequate evidence that the Church using
it must be a British Church—that British, most British, must be the
public tolerating it.
‘By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy
Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and
Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver
us.’
Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in
such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music
are so mysteriously blended—blended so divinely that the man who can
utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch
close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from
some of us. Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that
could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said:—‘More than any
race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and
energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is
their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration
as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.’ And now listen to
this:—
When we, our wearied limbs to rest,
Sat down by proud Euphrates’ stream,
We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,
And Zion was our mournful theme.
Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have
thus degraded the words: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat
down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’ For, to achieve such
platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the
‘Hopkins element,’ an element which is quite an insular birthright of
ours, a characteristic which came over with the ‘White Horse,’—that
‘dull and greasy coarseness of taste’ which distinguishes the British
mind from all others; that ‘ächtbrittische Beschränktheit,’ which
Heine speaks of in his tender way. The Scottish version is rough,
but Brady and Tate’s inanities are worse than Rous’s roughness.
Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and
the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it
come? It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking
the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end,
and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set
the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for
generations:—‘What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental,
difference between English literature—and all other Western
literatures—Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?’ The simple
truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been
bipartite as now—has always been, as now, half sublime and half
homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired
by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk
schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such
of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them.
For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has
been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction
of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he
is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty. When St.
Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins,
a heathen then, in possession of the soil.
There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says.
The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous,
much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by
nature none of the Hebraic style. But, somehow, here is the
difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is
born of taste—though le style c’est la race; and though the
Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone;
yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of
many years—just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows
not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him—so may
the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil be
Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years. The
result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their
deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the
Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes
when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in
parts of Raleigh’s ‘History of the World,’ in Jeremy Taylor’s
sermons, in Hall’s ‘Contemplations,’ and other such books of the
seventeenth century.
The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined. To
define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life. When we
say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean
that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or
unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or
conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental.
It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or
grace—manner is conscious power or grace. But the Great Style, both
in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace
in one.
And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression
of a national temper? Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does.
Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive
with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness
of the Aryan mind—not, certainly, to those who, though producing
Æschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians, but
to the descendants of Shem,—the only gentleman among all the sons of
Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the face of
God and live, can see not much else. The Great Style, in a word, is
Semitic. It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic. For though two
of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt, plentiful
enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the most part.
The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as compared with
Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high reach of ethical
writing as even that noble and well-known passage from Manu,
beginning, ‘Single is each man born into the world, single he dies,’
etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared with the
ethical parts of Scripture. The Persians have the grace always, the
power often, but the unconsciousness almost never. We might perhaps
say that there were those in Egypt once who came near to the great
ideal. That description of the abode of ‘Nin-ki-gal,’ the Queen of
Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British Museum, is
nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite. Conscious power and
conscious grace are Hellenic, of course. That there is a deal of
unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons
by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how
artificial he seems. And note that, afterwards, when he who
approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the
Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the
Nile. It is to the Latin races—some of them—that has filtered
Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has
been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain,
but straight from the Hebrew.
What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have—unconsciousness;
often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalité.
Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too. The Hopkins
element,—the dull and stupid homeliness,—the coarse grotesque, mingle
with and mar its finest effects. Over it all the atmosphere is that
of pantomime—singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner’s libretti.
Even that great final conflict between gods and men and the swarming
brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the Völu-seeress,
when from Yötunland they come and storm the very gates of
Asgard;—even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar
picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and
digesting the universe to chaos. But, out of the twenty-three
thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no
one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist
to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement. This is why
style in literature is virtue. Like royalty, the Great Style ‘can do
no wrong.’
Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far
the largest endowment. They wanted another element, in short, not
the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that
of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live;
as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold—two of the finest and most delicate
minds of modern times—can testify.
But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before
the Bishops’ Bible or Coverdale’s Bible; long before even Aldhelm’s
time—Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon
mind. From the time when Cædmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep
beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the
Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic.
Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was
steeped had been Hebraism at second hand—that of the Vulgate
mainly—till Tyndale’s time, or rather till the present Authorized
Version of the Bible appeared in 1611. ‘There is no book,’ says
Selden, ‘so translated as the Bible for the purpose. If I translate
a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into
French-English. “Il fait froid,” I say, ’tis cold, not it makes
cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into
English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that
language is kept.’
And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal
accuracy—importation of Hebraisms—was not of itself enough to produce
a translation in the Great Style—a translation such as this, which,
as Coleridge says, makes us think that ‘the translators themselves
were inspired.’ To reproduce the Great Style of the original in a
Western idiom, the happiest combination of circumstances was
necessary. The temper of the people receiving must, notwithstanding
all differences of habitation and civilization, be elementally in
harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it must be poetic
rather than ratiocinative. Society must not be too complex—its tone
must not be too knowing and self-glorifying. The accepted psychology
of the time must not be the psychology of the scalpel—the metaphysics
must not be the metaphysics of newspaper cynicism; above all,
enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered synonymous terms.
Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the faintest suspicion
of nineteenth century flavour. That this is the kind of national
temper necessary to such a work might have been demonstrated by an
argument a priori. It was the temper of the English nation when the
Bible was translated. That noble heroism—born of faith in God and
belief in the high duties of man—which we have lost for the hour—was
in the very atmosphere that hung over the island. And style in real
life, which now, as a consequence of our loss, does not exist at all
among Englishmen, and only among a very few Englishwomen—having given
place in all classes to manner—flourished then in all its charm. And
in literature it was the same: not even the euphuism imported from
Spain could really destroy or even seriously damage the then national
sense of style.
Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what
must that be? Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do
all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and
yet must be free from any soupçon of that ‘artifice,’ in the
‘abandonment’ of which, says an Arabian historian, ‘true art alone
lies.’ For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art,
the Semites show but small conception, even in Job. It was too
sacred for that—drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.
But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation
of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical
prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic
and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be
chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon;
just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even
ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion. It
must be neither verse nor prose, it seems. It must be a new movement
altogether. The musical movement of the English Bible is a new
movement; let us call it ‘Bible Rhythm.’ And the movement was
devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. Thanks to
Difficulty—thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls ‘Hebrew
phrase and English phrase,’ the translators fashioned, or rather,
Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor
wholly the other—a movement which, for music, for variety, splendour,
sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English poetic
art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern world—a
movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself—but a form in
which ‘artifice’ is really ‘abandoned’ at last. This rhythm it is to
which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book, and
which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches perhaps
being in the Psalms—this rhythm it is which the Hopkinses and Rouses
have—improved! It would not be well to be too technical here, yet
the matter is of the greatest literary importance just now, and it is
necessary to explain clearly what we mean.
Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is
technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the
fulfilment of expectation. In rhymed verse this is obvious: having
familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet’s rhymes, we
take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to
this arrangement. In blank verse the law of expectation is less
apparent. Yet it is none the less operative. Having familiarized
ourselves with the poet’s rhythm, having found that iambic foot
succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun
to grow monotonous, variations occur—trochaic, anapæstic,
dactylic—according to the law which governs the ear of this
individual poet;—we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals
these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are
fulfilled. And our delight is augmented if also our expectations
with regard to cæsuric effects are realized in the same proportions.
Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has
an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say,
to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence,—we expect
that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard
to the initial foot of any sequence,—there must be, not far ahead,
that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses
have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader
shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights. And when
this expectation of cæsuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified
in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which
obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final
third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result.
In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from
poetry is in the recognition of law. The more obvious and formulated
is the law,—nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian,—the more pleasure
it gives to the uncultivated ear. This is why uneducated people may
delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is
why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in
such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom. But, as the ear
becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law
should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law itself
may become a tyranny and a burden. He who will read Shakespeare’s
plays chronologically, as far as that is practicable, from ‘Love’s
Labour’s Lost’ to the ‘Tempest,’ will have no difficulty in seeing
precisely what we mean. In literature, as in social life, the
progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is
lawful. Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are a recognized
music apart from a recognized law—‘artifice’ so completely abandoned
that we forget we are in the realm of art—pauses so divinely set that
they seem to be ‘wood-notes wild,’ though all the while they are, and
must be, governed by a mysterious law too subtly sweet to be
formulated; and all kind of beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs
of the metricist, but beauties that are unexpected. There is a
metre, to be sure, but it is that of the ‘moving music which is
life’; it is the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of
him who speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the
passions which are passing into the words. And if this is so in
other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where ‘the
flaming steeds of song,’ though really kept strongly in hand, seem to
run reinless as ‘the wild horses of the wind’?”
Chapter XVI
A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR
THE reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of
what I may call ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ essays gave me so much trouble
that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay
typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism dealing with what he calls ‘the
laws of cause and effect in literary art’ it naturally occurred to me to
write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two. In response to my
letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection
for a friend took entire precedence of his own work:—
“MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,—The selections from my critiques must really be
left entirely to yourself. They are to illustrate your own critical
judgment upon my work, and not mine. Overwhelmed as I am with
avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge into
the countless columns of the ‘Athenæum,’ in quest of articles of mine
which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden at the
present moment. I can think of only one article which I should
specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in part—not on
account of any merit in it which I can recall, but because it was the
means of bringing me into contact with one of the most delightful men
and one of the most splendidly equipped writers of our time, whose
sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond measure. A few days after
the article appeared, the then editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ Mr. MacColl,
the dear friend with whom I was associated for more than twenty
years, showed me a letter that he had received from Traill. It was
an extremely kind letter. Among the many generous things that Traill
said was this—that it was just the kind of review article which makes
the author regret that he had not seen it before his book appeared.
I wrote to Traill in acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not
until a good while after this that we met at the Incorporated
Authors’ Society dinner. At the table where I was sitting, and
immediately opposite me, sat a gentleman whose countenance,
especially when it was illuminated by conversation with his friends,
perfectly charmed me. Although there was not the smallest regularity
in his features, the expression was so genial and so winsome that I
had some difficulty in persuading myself that it was not a beautiful
face after all, and his smile was really quite irresistible. The
contrast between his black eyebrows and whiskers and the white hair
upon his head gave him a peculiarly picturesque appearance. Another
thing I noticed was a boyish kind of lisp, which somehow, I could not
say why, gave to the man an added charm. I did not know it was
Traill, but after the dinner was over, when I was saying to myself,
‘That is a man I should like to know,’ a friend who sat next him—I
forget who it was—brought him round to me and introduced him as ‘Mr.
Traill.’ ‘You and I ought to know each other,’ he said, ‘for,
besides having many tastes in common, we live near each other.’ And
then I found that he lived near the ‘Northumberland Arms,’ between
Putney and Barnes. I think that he must have seen how greatly I was
drawn to him, for he called at The Pines in a few days—I think,
indeed, it was the very next day—and then began a friendship the
memory of which gives me intense pleasure, and yet pleasure not
unmixed with pain, when I recall his comparatively early and sudden
death. I used to go to his gatherings, and it was there that I first
met several interesting men that I had not known before. One of
them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney Low, then the editor of the ‘St.
James’s Gazette.’ And I also used to meet there interesting men whom
I had known before, such as the late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose ‘Light
of Asia,’ and other such works, I had reviewed in the ‘Athenæum.’ I
do not hesitate for a moment to say that Traill was a man of genius.
Had he lived fifty years earlier, such a writer as he who wrote ‘The
New Lucian,’ ‘Recaptured Rhymes,’ ‘Saturday Songs,’ ‘The Canaanitish
Press’ and ‘Israelitish Questions,’ ‘the Life of Sterne,’ and the
brilliant articles in the ‘Saturday Review’ and the ‘Pall Mall
Gazette,’ would have made an unforgettable mark in literature. But
there is no room for anybody now—no room for anybody but the very,
very few. When he was about starting ‘Literature,’ he wrote to me,
and a gratifying letter it was. He said that, although he had no
desire to wean me from the ‘Athenæum,’ he should be delighted to
receive anything from me when I chanced to be able to spare him
something. It was always an aspiration of mine to send something to
a paper edited by so important a literary figure—a paper, let me say,
that had a finer, sweeter tone than any other paper of my time—I
mean, that tone of fine geniality upon which I have often commented,
that tone without which, ‘there can be no true criticism.’ A certain
statesman of our own period, who had pursued literature with success,
used to say (alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead),
that the besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of
gentlemanlike feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all
the other educated classes. This might have been so then, but,
through the influence mainly of ‘Literature’ and H. D. Traill, it is
not so now. Many people have speculated as to why a literary
journal, edited by such a man, and borne into the literary arena on
the doughty back of the ‘Times,’ did not succeed. I have a theory of
my own upon that subject. Although Traill’s hands were so full of
all kinds of journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is
a mistake to suppose that his own journal was badly edited. It was
well edited, and it had a splendid staff, but several things were
against it. It confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as
I remember, give its attention to much else. Its price was sixpence;
but its chief cause of failure was what I may call its ‘personal
appearance.’ If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor
at the beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the
first quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper
or a magazine. When the ‘Saturday Review’ was started, its personal
appearance—something quite new then—did almost as much for it as the
brilliant writing. It was the same with the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ when
it started. Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a
great deal in clothes. Now, as I told Traill when we were talking
about this, ‘Literature’ in appearance seemed an uninviting cross
between the ‘Law Times’ and ‘The Lancet’—it seemed difficult to
connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a
business-like looking sheet as that. Traill laughed, but ended by
saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of
mine. Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died
only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten. I should
be sorry indeed to think that. All that I can say is that for a book
such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about
Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as
any that Traill’s own delightful whimsical imagination could have
pictured.”
Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s wishes, and I do this with the
more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on
Sterne and the imaginative work—the theory of absolute humour exemplified
in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article. It was a
review of Traill’s ‘Sterne,’ in the ‘English Men of Letters,’ and it
appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of November 18, 1882. I will quote the
greater part of it:—
“Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated
writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and
Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while
Addison as a humorist is not even talked about. In gauging the
quality of poetry—in finding for any poet his proper place in the
poetic heavens—there is always uncertainty and difficulty. With
humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily
in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous
relations, and that the quality of every man’s humour depends upon
the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable. If,
for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities
deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his
relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey
to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and
the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and
the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent. Again, if
a man’s sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is
confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between
individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is
surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt—according, at least, to
the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according
to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon
in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the
Philistine only. If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree)
Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer’s sense of the incongruous
is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill
calls ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ he is indeed a humourist, and
in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily
of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of
the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to
apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest
and deepest incongruities possible. And it will be found that these
harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very ‘order of the
universe’ itself and the mind of man. In certain temperaments the
eternal incongruities between man’s mind and the scheme of the
universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and
Novalis; but to other temperaments—to a Rabelais or Sterne, for
instance—the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder,
turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most
temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some ‘paradis
artificiel.’ Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is
that of ‘human intercourse,’ if he has no sense of this much deeper
irony—the irony of man’s intercourse with the universal harmony
itself—he cannot be ranked with the very greatest. Of this irony in
the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive,
while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment. Of Swift and Carlyle it
might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible
apprehension of it. And if we should find that this quality exists
in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ how high, then, must we not place Sterne! And
if we should find that Cervantes deals with the ‘irony of human
intercourse’ merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity,
terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne? Why
is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is
based so melancholy? Because it only sees the farce from the human
point of view. The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a
soul deeply conscious of man’s ludicrous futility in his relations to
his fellow-man. But while the futilities of ‘Don Quixote’ are tragic
because terrene, the futilities of ‘Tristram Shandy’ are comic
because they are derived from the order of things. It is the great
humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock
at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the
constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram’s nose. And if
Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end
a benevolent king; and hence all is well.
While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a
humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne
under a classification. In Sterne’s writings every kind of humour is
to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must
have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as
Addison’s, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare’s. In loving
sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by
Sterne in his ‘fat, foolish scullion.’ Lower than the Dogberry type
there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to
whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph. While
the news of Bobby’s death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen,
suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must
follow such a sad calamity to the ‘fat, foolish scullion,’ scrubbing
her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of
her own life, and consequently to the wail that ‘Bobby is certainly
dead’ her soul merely answers as she scrubs, ‘So am not I.’ In four
words that scullion lives for ever.
Sterne’s humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian,
Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for
such a Proteus? So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at
first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing
its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the
method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can
work. Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed
the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of
Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate
between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on
the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne’s
natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or
Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the
humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation. But
the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly
shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which
he pretended to be. And after all this is the important question as
regards Sterne. Lamb’s critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly
seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own ‘self-pleasing
quaintness.’ When any form of art departs in any way from
symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it
is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic?
That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we
feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the
artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust. In the
humourous portions of Sterne’s work there is, probably, not a page,
however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and
therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an
offence. . . .
‘Yorickism’ is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of
the humour of Swift. One recognizes that the universe is rich in
things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the
universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate. One recognizes
that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and
(because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that
there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as
a man. The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in
the temperament—the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of
Apemantus. And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to
say which fate is more terrible, Swift’s or Carlyle’s—that of the man
whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing
intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious,
conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot.
It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick.
It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in
a roar, or of him who, in the words of the ‘cadet of the house of
Keppoch,’ was ‘sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick,
a very great favourite of the gentlemen.’ Sterne, like Jaques and
Hamlet, deals with ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ but what he
specially recognizes is a deeper irony still—the irony of man’s
intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the
intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical
being—the irony, in short, of man’s position amid these natural
conditions of life and death. It is in the apprehension of this
anomaly—a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature—that
Sterne’s strength lies.
Man, the ‘fool of nature,’ prouder than Lucifer himself, yet ‘bounded
in a nutshell,’ brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more
account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little
‘beastie’ whose house is ruined by the ploughshare—here is, indeed, a
creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at and
to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter! There is
nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because
they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is
nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a
horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the
grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed,
so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared
with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are
fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist. That
Sterne’s donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain
natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he
should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of
certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in
it no material for humoristic treatment. To render him absurd you
must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back
panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human
cook. Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is
tried by human standards. But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey
who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and
cooked the macaroons. All other humour is thin compared with this.
Besides, it never grows old. It is difficult, no doubt, to think
that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the
kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no
advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre. Certainly up to the
present moment the anomaly of man’s position upon the planet is not
lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and
development. On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in
speaking of Thoreau. If man was a strange and anomalous ‘piece of
work’ as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a ‘piece of
work’ does he appear now! He has the knack of advancing and leaving
the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it? By the fact of his
being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions.
A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal
kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once
supposed) from any ‘inner yearning’ for progress, but because it was
pushed on by overmastering circumstances. An ungulate becomes the
giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and
yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to
leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve. But
man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of
harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the
other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips
them so completely that he forgets he is one of them. If Uncle
Toby’s progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the
fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to
buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain
Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of
the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is
the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.
And while Sterne’s abiding sense of the struggle between man’s
spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical nature accounts
for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour, it greatly accounts
for his indecencies too. Sterne had that instinct for idealizing
women, and the entire relations between the sexes which accompanies
the poetic temperament. To such natures the spiritual side of sexual
relations is ever present; and as a consequence of this the animal
side never loses with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was
enveloped in their boyish days. Not that we are going to justify
Sterne’s indecencies. Coleridge’s remark that the pleasure Sterne
got from his double entendre was akin to ‘that trembling daring with
which a child touches a hot teapot because it has been forbidden,’
partly explains, but it does not excuse, Sterne’s transgressions
herein. The fact seems to be that if we divide love into the passion
of love, the sentiment of love, and the appetite of love, and inquire
which of these was really known to Sterne, we shall come to what will
seem to most readers the paradoxical conclusion that it was the
sentiment only. There is abundant proof of this. In the ‘Letter to
the Earl of —,’ printed by his daughter, after dilating upon the
manner in which the writing of the ‘Sentimental Journey’ has worn out
both his spirits and body, he says: ‘I might indeed solace myself
with my wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been
a sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the
contrary. The world has imagined because I wrote “Tristram Shandy”
that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.’ Upon this
passage Mr. Traill has the pertinent remark: ‘The connubial
affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently,
opposed to the sentimental emotions—as the lower to the higher. To
indulge the former is to be “Shandian,” that is to say, coarse and
carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend
one’s days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex
indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.’ Now, to men of
this kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious
double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more animal
temperament. The incongruity between the ideal and the actual
relations brings poignant distress at first, and afterwards a sense
of irresistible absurdity. Originally the fascination of repulsion,
it becomes the fascination of attraction, and it is not at all
fanciful to say that in Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne
(quite unconsciously to himself perhaps) realized to his own mind
those two opposite sides of man’s nature whose conflict in some form
or another was ever present to Sterne’s mind. And, as we say, it has
a deep relation to the kind of humour with which Sterne was so richly
endowed. After one of his most sentimental flights, wherein the
spiritual side of man is absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a
sudden revulsion (which at first was entirely natural, if even
self-conscious afterwards). The incongruity of all this sentiment
with man’s actual condition as an animal strikes him with
irresistible force, and he says to man, ‘What right have you in that
galley after all—you who came into the world in this extremely
unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency of functions which
are if possible more unspiritual and more absurd still?’
No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with sexual
matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but rather
far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of this great
and eternal incongruity of man’s existence—the conflict of a
spiritual nature and such aspirations as man’s with conditions
entirely physical. And perhaps the only truly philosophical
definition of the word ‘indecency’ would be this: ‘A painful and
shocking contrast of man’s spiritual with his physical nature.’ When
Hamlet, with his finger on Yorick’s skull, declares that his ‘gorge
rises at it,’ and asks if Alexander’s skull ‘smelt so,’ he shocks us
as deeply in a serious way as Sterne in his allusion to the winding
up of the clock shocks us in a humourous way, and to express the
sensation they each give there is, perhaps, no word but ‘indecent.’”
I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the metaphysical
meaning of humour. In order to show what are his opinions upon wit, I
think I shall do well to turn from the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and to quote
from the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ a few sentences upon wit, and upon the
distinction between comedy and farce. For the obvious reason that the
‘Athenæum’ articles are buried in oblivion, and the ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica’ articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it is from the
former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of the most important
parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work are to be found in the ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica.’ Perhaps, however, I had better introduce my citations by
saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s connection with that work.
The story of the way in which he came to write in the ‘Encyclopædia’ has
been often told by Prof. Minto. At the time when the ninth edition was
started, he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and
were seeing each other constantly. When Minto was writing his articles
upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that Baynes would be
delighted to get work from him. But at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton had
got more critical work in hand than he wanted, and besides he had already
a novel and a body of poetry ready for the press, and wished to confine
his energies to creative work. Besides this, he felt, as he declared,
that he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike
pedestrian style of an encyclopædia. But when the most important
treatise in the literary department of the work—the treatise on
Poetry—was wanted, a peculiar difficulty in selecting the writer was
felt. The article in the previous edition had been written by David
Macbeth Moir, famous under the name of ‘Delta’ as the author of ‘The
Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.’ Moir’s article was intelligent enough,
but quite inadequate to such a work as the publishers of the
‘Encyclopædia’ aspired to make. A history of Poetry was, of course,
quite impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the
principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as exemplified by
the poetry of the great literatures. It was decided, according to
Minto’s account, that there were but three men, that is to say,
Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Theodore Watts, who could produce this
special kind of work, the other critics being entirely given up to the
historic method of criticism. The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes
went to London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and
explaining exactly what was wanted.
I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier choice.
Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on ‘The Coming of Love’ in the ‘Saturday
Review’ has written very luminously upon this subject. He tells us that,
wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant fragment,
owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the space that could be
given to it. The truth is that the essay is but the introduction to an
exhaustive discussion of what the writer believes to be the most
important event in the history of all poetry—the event discussed under
the name of ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ The introduction to the third
volume of the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English
Literature’ is but a bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings upon
this subject. It has been said over and over again that since the best
critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our literature to
equal this treatise on Poetry. It has been exhaustively discussed in
England, America, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, where it
has been compared to the critical system of Goethe. Those who have not
read it will be surprised to hear that it is not confined to the
formulating of generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent
passages on human life and human conduct.
It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist, Vanbrugh, that
Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous distinction between comedy
and farce:—
“In order to find and fix Vanbrugh’s place among English comic
dramatists, an examination of the very basis of the comedy of
repartee inaugurated by Etheredge would be necessary, and, of course,
such an examination would be impossible here. It is chiefly as a
humourist, however, that he demands attention.
Given the humorous temperament—the temperament which impels a man to
get his enjoyment by watching the harlequinade of life, and
contrasting it with his own ideal standard of good sense, which the
harlequinade seems to him to mock and challenge—given this
temperament, then the quality of its humourous growth depends of
course on the quality of the intellectual forces by means of which
the temperament gains expression. Hence it is very likely that in
original endowment of humour, as distinguished from wit, Vanbrugh was
superior to Congreve. And this is saying a great deal: for, while
Congreve’s wit has always been made much of, it has, since Macaulay’s
time, been the fashion among critics to do less than justice to his
humour—a humour which, in such scenes as that in ‘Love for Love,’
where Sir Sampson Legend discourses upon the human appetites and
functions, moves beyond the humour of convention and passes into
natural humour. It is, however, in spontaneity, in a kind of lawless
merriment, almost Aristophanic in its verve, that Vanbrugh’s humour
seems so deep and so fine, seems indeed to spring from a fountain
deeper and finer and rarer than Congreve’s. A comedy of wit, like
every other drama, is a story told by action and dialogue, but to
tell a story lucidly and rapidly by means of repartee is exceedingly
difficult, not but that it is easy enough to produce repartee. But
in comic dialogue the difficulty is to move rapidly and yet keep up
the brilliant ball-throwing demanded in this form; and without
lucidity and rapidity no drama, whether of repartee or of character,
can live. Etheredge, the father of the comedy of repartee, has at
length had justice done to him by Mr. Gosse. Not only could
Etheredge tell a story by means of repartee alone: he could produce a
tableau too; so could Congreve, and so also could Vanbrugh; but
often—far too often—Vanbrugh’s tableau is reached, not by fair means,
as in the tableau of Congreve, but by a surrendering of probability,
by a sacrifice of artistic fusion, by an inartistic mingling of
comedy and farce, such as Congreve never indulges in. Jeremy Collier
was perfectly right, therefore, in his strictures upon the farcical
improbabilities of the ‘Relapse.’ So farcical indeed are the
tableaux in that play that the broader portions of it were (as Mr.
Swinburne discovered) adapted by Voltaire and acted at Sceaux as a
farce. Had we space here to contrast the ‘Relapse’ with the ‘Way of
the World,’ we should very likely come upon a distinction between
comedy and farce such as has never yet been drawn. We should find
that farce is not comedy with a broadened grin—Thalia with her girdle
loose and run wild—as the critics seem to assume. We should find
that the difference between the two is not one of degree at all, but
rather one of kind, and that mere breadth of fun has nothing to do
with the question. No doubt the fun of comedy may be as broad as
that of farce, as is shown indeed by the celebrated Dogberry scenes
in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ and by the scene in ‘Love for Love’
between Sir Sampson Legend and his son, alluded to above; but here,
as in every other department of art, all depends upon the quality of
the imaginative belief that the artist seeks to arrest and secure.
Of comedy the breath of life is dramatic illusion. Of farce the
breath of life is mock illusion. Comedy, whether broad or genteel,
pretends that its mimicry is real. Farce, whether broad or genteel,
makes no such pretence, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up
between itself and the audience, says, ‘My acting is all sham, and
you know it.’ Now, while Vanbrugh was apt too often to forget this
the fundamental difference between comedy and farce, Congreve never
forgot it, Wycherly rarely. Not that there should be in any literary
form any arbitrary laws. There is no arbitrary law declaring that
comedy shall not be mingled with farce, and yet the fact is that in
vital drama they cannot be so mingled. The very laws of their
existence are in conflict with each other, so much so that where one
lives the other must die, as we see in the drama of our own day. The
fact seems to be that probability of incident, logical sequence of
cause and effect, are as necessary to comedy as they are to tragedy,
while farce would stifle in such an air. Rather, it would be
poisoned by it, just as comedy is poisoned by what farce flourishes
on; that is to say, inconsequence of reasoning—topsy-turvy logic.
Born in the fairy country of topsy-turvy, the logic of farce would be
illogical if it were not upside-down. So with coincidence, with
improbable accumulation of convenient events—farce can no more exist
without these than comedy can exist with them. Hence we affirm that
Jeremy Collier’s strictures on the farcical adulterations of the
‘Relapse’ pierce more deeply into Vanbrugh’s art than do the
criticisms of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt. In other words, perhaps the
same lack of fusion which mars Vanbrugh’s architectural ideas mars
also his comedy.”
Without for a moment wishing to institute comparisons between the merit
of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary articles and the merit of other literary
articles by other contemporary writers, I may at least say that between
his articles and theirs the difference is not one of degree, it is one of
kind. Theirs are compact, business-like compressions of facts admirably
fitted for an Encyclopædia. No attempt is made to formulate
generalizations upon the principles of literary art, and this must be
said in their praise—they are faultless as articles in a book of
reference. But no student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work who turns over the
pages of an article in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ can fail after
reading a few sentences to recognize the author. Generalizations, hints
of daring theories, novel and startling speculations, graze each other’s
heels, until one is dazzled by the display of intellectual brilliance.
That his essays are out of place in an Encyclopædia may be true, but they
seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating idiosyncrasy
upon their coldly impersonal environment.
Chapter XVII
‘THE LIFE POETIC’
[Picture: ‘The Pines.’ (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)]
I have been allowed to enrich this volume with photographs of ‘The Pines’
and of some of the exquisite works of art therein. But it is unfortunate
for me that I am not allowed to touch upon what are the most important
relations of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life—important though so many of them
are. I mean his intimacy with the poet whose name is now beyond doubt
far above any other name in the contemporary world of letters. I do not
sympathize with the hyper-sensitiveness of eminent men with regard to
privacy. The inner chamber of what Rossetti calls the ‘House of Life’
should be kept sacred. But Rossetti’s own case shows how impossible it
is in these days to keep those recesses inviolable. The fierce light
that beats upon men of genius grows fiercer and fiercer every day, and it
cannot be quenched. This was one of my arguments when I first answered
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own objection to the appearance of this monograph.
The times have changed since he was a young man. Then publicity was
shunned like a plague by poets and by painters. If such men wish the
light to be true as well as fierce, they must allow their friends to
illuminate their ‘House of Life’ by the lamp of truth. If Rossetti
during his lifetime had allowed one of his friends who knew the secrets
of his ‘House of Life’ to write about him, we might have been spared
those canards about him and the wife he loved which were rife shortly
after his death. Byron’s reluctance to take payment for his poetry was
not a more belated relic of an old quixotism than is this dying passion
for privacy. Publicity may be an evil, but it is an inevitable evil, and
great men must not let the wasps and the gadflies monopolize its uses.
It may be a reminiscence of an older and a nobler social temper, the
temper under the influence of which Rossetti in 1870 said that he felt
abashed because a paragraph had appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ announcing the
fact that a book from him was forthcoming. But that temper has gone by
for ever. We live now in very different times. Scores upon scores of
unauthorized and absolutely false paragraphs about eminent men are
published, especially about these two friends who have lived their poetic
life together for more than a quarter of a century. Only the other day I
saw in a newspaper an offensive descriptive caricature of Mr. Swinburne,
of his dress, etc. It is interesting to recall the fact that mendacious
journalism was the cause of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s very first contribution to
the ‘Athenæum,’ before he wrote any reviews at all. At that time the
offenders seem to have been chiefly Americans. The article was not a
review, but a letter signed ‘Z,’ entitled ‘The Art of Interviewing,’ and
it appeared in the ‘Athenæum,’ of March 11, 1876. As it shows the great
Swinburne myth in the making, I will reproduce this merry little skit:—
“‘Alas! there is none of us without his skeleton-closet,’ said a
great writer to one who was congratulating him upon having reached
the goal for which he had, from the first, set out. ‘My skeleton
bears the dreadful name of “American Interviewer.” Pity me!’ ‘Is he
an American with a diary in his pocket?’ was the terrified question
always put by another man of genius, whenever you proposed
introducing a stranger to him. But this was in those ingenuous
Parker-Willisian days when the ‘Interviewer’ merely invented the
dialogue—not the entire dramatic action—not the interview itself.
Primitive times! since when the ‘Interviewer’ has developed indeed!
His dramatic inspiration now is trammelled by none of those foolish
and arbitrary conditions which—whether his scene of action was at the
‘Blue Posts’ with Thackeray, or in the North with Scottish
lords—vexed and bounded the noble soul of the great patriarch of the
tribe. Uncribbed, uncabined, unconfined, the ‘Interviewer’ now
invents, not merely the dialogue, but the ‘situation,’ the place, the
time—the interview itself. Every dramatist has his favourite
character—Sophocles had his; Shakspeare had his; Schiller had his;
the ‘Interviewer’ has his. Mr. Swinburne has, for the last two or
three years, been—for some reason which it might not be difficult to
explain—the ‘Interviewer’s’ special favourite. Moreover, the
accounts of the interviews with him are always livelier than any
others, inasmuch as they are accompanied by brilliant fancy-sketches
of his personal appearance—sketches which, if they should not gratify
him exactly, would at least astonish him; and it is surely something
to be even astonished in these days. Some time ago, for instance, an
American lady journalist, connected with a ‘Western newspaper,’ made
her appearance in London, and expressed many ‘great desires,’ the
greatest of all her ‘desires’ being to know the author of ‘Atalanta,’
or, if she could not know him, at least to ‘see him.’
The Fates, however, were not kind to the lady. The author of
‘Atalanta’ had quitted London. She did not see him, therefore—not
with her bodily eyes could she see him. Yet this did not at all
prevent her from ‘interviewing’ him. Why should it? The ‘soul hath
eyes and ears’ as well as the body—especially if the soul is an
American soul, with a mission to ‘interview.’ There soon appeared in
the lady’s Western newspaper a graphic account of one of the most
interesting interviews with this poet that has ever yet been
recorded. Mr. Swinburne—though at the time in Scotland—‘called’ upon
the lady at her rooms in London; but, notwithstanding this unexampled
feat of courtesy, he seems to have found no favour in the lady’s
eyes. She ‘misliked him for his complexion.’ Evidently it was
nothing but good-breeding that prevented her from telling the bard,
on the spot, that he was physically an unlovely bard. His manners,
too, were but so-so; and the Western lady was shocked and disgusted,
as well she might be. In the midst of his conversation, for example,
he called out frantically for ‘pen and ink.’ He had become suddenly
and painfully ‘afflated.’ When furnished with pen and ink he began
furiously writing a poem, beating the table with his left hand and
stamping the floor with both feet as he did so. Then, without saying
a word, he put on his hat and rushed from the room like a madman!
This account was copied into other newspapers and into the magazines.
It is, in fact, a piece of genuine history now, and will form
valuable material for some future biographer of the poet. The
stubborn shapelessness of facts has always distressed the
artistically-minded historian. But let the American ‘Interviewer’ go
on developing thus, and we may look for History’s becoming far more
artistic and symmetrical in future. The above is but one out of many
instances of the art of interviewing.”
It is all very well to say that irresponsible statements of this kind are
not in the true sense of the word believed by readers; they create an
atmosphere of false mist which destroys altogether the picture of the
poet’s life which one would like to preserve. And I really think that it
would have been better if I or some one else among the friends of the
poets had been allowed to write more freely about the beautiful and
intellectual life at ‘The Pines.’ But I am forbidden to do this, as the
following passage in a letter which I have received from Mr. Watts-Dunton
will show:
“I cannot have anything about our life at ‘The Pines’ put into print,
but I will grant you permission to give a few reproductions of the
interesting works of art here, for many of them may have a legitimate
interest for the public on account of their historic value, as having
come to me from the magician of art, Rossetti. And I assure you that
this is a concession which I have denied to very many applicants,
both among friends and others.”
[Picture: A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Lacquer Cabinet]
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s allusion to the Rossetti mementoes requires a word of
explanation. Rossetti, it seems, was very fond of surprising his friends
by unexpected tokens of generosity. I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say
that during the week when he was moving into ‘The Pines,’ he spent as
usual Wednesday night at 16 Cheyne Walk, and he and Rossetti sat talking
into the small hours. Next morning after breakfast he strolled across to
Whistler’s house to have a talk with the ever-interesting painter, and
this resulted in his getting home two hours later than usual. On
reaching the new house he saw a waggon standing in front of it. He did
not understand this, for the furniture from the previous residence had
been all removed. He went up to the waggon, and was surprised to find it
full of furniture of a choice kind. But there was no need for him to
give much time to an examination of the furniture, for he found he was
familiar with every piece of it. It had come straight from Rossetti’s
house, having been secretly packed and sent off by Dunn on the previous
day. Some of the choicest things at ‘The Pines’ came in this way. Not a
word had Rossetti said about this generous little trick on the night
before. The superb Chinese cabinet, a photograph of which appears in
this book, belonged to Rossetti. It seems that on a certain occasion
Frederick Sandys, or some one else, told Rossetti that the clever but
ne’er-do-well artist, George Chapman, had bought of a sea-captain,
trading in Chinese waters, a wonderful piece of lacquer work of the
finest period—before the Manchu pig-tail time. The captain had bought it
of a Frenchman who had aided in looting the Imperial Palace. Rossetti,
of course, could not rest until he had seen it, and when he had seen it,
he could not rest until he had bought it of Chapman; and it was taken
across to 16 Cheyne Walk, where it was greatly admired. The captain had
barbarously mutilated it at the top in order to make it fit in his cabin,
and it remained in that condition for some years. Afterwards Rossetti
gave it to Mr. Watts-Dunton, who got it restored and made up by the
wonderful amateur carver, the late Mr. T. Keynes, who did the carving on
the painted cabinet also photographed for this book. There is a long and
interesting story in connection with this piece of Chinese lacquer, but I
have no room to tell it here.
* * * * *
[Picture: Summer at ‘The Pines’—I]
All I am allowed to say about the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
Mr. Swinburne is that the friendship began in 1872, that it soon
developed into the closest intimacy, not only with the poet himself, but
with all his family. In 1879 the two friends became house-mates at ‘The
Pines,’ Putney Hill, and since then they have never been separated, for
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s visits to the Continent, notably those with the late
Dr. Hake recorded in ‘The New Day,’ took place just before this time.
The two poets thenceforth lived together, worked together; saw their
common friends together, and travelled together. In 1882, after the
death of Rossetti they went to the Channel Islands, staying at St.
Peter’s Port, Guernsey, for some little time, and then at Petit Bot Bay.
Their swims in this beautiful bay Mr. Watts-Dunton commemorated in two of
the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love’:—
NATURE’S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
(A MORNING SWIM OFF GUERNSEY WITH A FRIEND)
As if the Spring’s fresh groves should change and shake
To dark green woods of Orient terebinth,
Then break to bloom of England’s hyacinth,
So ’neath us change the waves, rising to take
Each kiss of colour from each cloud and flake
Round many a rocky hall and labyrinth,
Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,
Show how the sea’s fine rage dares make and break.
Young with the youth the sea’s embrace can lend,
Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,
Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,
Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,
Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend
Over the magic wonders of the world
THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE’S FRAGRANCY
(THE TIRING-ROOM IN THE ROCKS)
These are the ‘Coloured Caves’ the sea-maid built;
Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,
For she must fly at every tide’s return,
And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.
Outside behold the bay, each headland gilt
With morning’s gold; far off the foam-wreaths burn
Like fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearn
Up sand more soft than Avon’s sacred silt.
And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,
From lips of may or rose or eglantine,
Comes with the language of a breath benign,
Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,
Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,
Like scent of sea-weed rich of morn and brine.
The two friends afterwards went to Sark. A curious incident occurred
during their stay in the island. The two poet-swimmers received a
bravado challenge from ‘Orion’ Horne, who was also a famous swimmer, to
swim with him round the whole island of Sark! I need hardly say that the
absurd challenge was not accepted.
During the cruise Mr. Swinburne conceived and afterwards wrote some
glorious poetry. In the same year the two friends went to Paris, as I
have already mentioned, to assist at the Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse.’
Since then their love of the English coasts and the waters which wash
them, seems to have kept them in England. For two consecutive years they
went to Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast, for bathing. It was there that
Mr. Swinburne wrote some of his East Anglian poems, and it was there that
Mr. Watts-Dunton conceived the East coast parts of ‘Aylwin.’ It was
during one of these visits that Mr. Swinburne first made the acquaintance
of Grant Allen, who had long been an intimate friend of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s. The two, indeed, were drawn together by the fact that
they both enjoyed science as much as they enjoyed literature. It was a
very interesting meeting, as Grant Allen had long been one of Swinburne’s
most ardent admirers, and his social charm, his intellectual sweep and
brilliance, made a great impression on the poet. Since then their visits
to the sea have been confined to parts of the English Channel, such as
Eastbourne, where they were near neighbours of Rossetti’s friends, Lord
and Lady Mount Temple, between whom and Mr. Watts-Dunton there had been
an affectionate intimacy for many years—but more notably Lancing, whither
they went for three consecutive years. For several years they stayed
during their holiday with Lady Mary Gordon, an aunt of Mr. Swinburne’s,
at ‘The Orchard,’ Niton Bay, Isle of Wight. During the hot summer of
1904 they were lucky enough to escape to Cromer, where the temperature
was something like twenty degrees lower than that of London. A curious
incident occurred during this visit to Cromer. One day Mr. Watts-Dunton
took a walk with another friend to ‘Poppy-land,’ where he and Mr.
Swinburne had previously stayed, in order to see there again the
landslips which he has so vividly described in ‘Aylwin.’ While they were
walking from ‘Poppyland’ to the old ruined churchyard called ‘The Garden
of Sleep,’ they sat down for some time in the shade of an empty hut near
the cliff. Coming back Mr. Watts-Dunton said that the cliff there was
very dangerous, and ought to be fenced off, as the fatal land-springs
were beginning to show their work. Two or three weeks after this a
portion of the cliff at that point, weighing many thousands of tons, fell
into the sea, and the hut with it.
[Picture: A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Chinese Divan described in
‘Aylwin’]
A friendship so affectionate and so long as the friendship between these
two poets is perhaps without a parallel in literature. It has been
frequently and beautifully commemorated. When Mr. Swinburne’s noble
poem, ‘By the North Sea,’ was published, it was prefaced by this sonnet:—
TO WALTER THEODORE WATTS
‘WE ARE WHAT SUNS AND WINDS AND WATERS MAKE US.’
Landor.
Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath
The spirit of man fulfilling—these create
That joy wherewith man’s life grown passionate
Gains heart to hear and sense to read and faith
To know the secret word our Mother saith
In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great,
Death as the shadow cast by life on fate,
Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.
Brother, to whom our Mother, as to me,
Is dearer than all dreams of days undone,
This song I give you of the sovereign three
That are, as life and sleep and death are, one:
A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea,
Where nought of man’s endures before the sun.
1882 was a memorable year in the life of Mr. Watts-Dunton. The two most
important volumes of poetry published in that year were dedicated to him.
Rossetti’s ‘Ballads and Sonnets,’ the book which contains the chief work
of his life, bore the following inscription:—
TO
THEODORE WATTS
THE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR ME,
THESE FEW MORE PAGES
ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
A few weeks later Mr. Swinburne’s ‘Tristram of Lyonesse,’ the volume
which contains what I regard as his ripest and richest poetry, was thus
inscribed:—
TO MY BEST FRIEND
THEODORE WATTS
I DEDICATE IN THIS BOOK
THE BEST I HAVE TO GIVE HIM.
Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,
And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,
That twice have made keen April’s clarion sound
Since here we first together saw and heard
Spring’s light reverberate and reiterate word
Shine forth and speak in season. Life stands crowned
Here with the best one thing it ever found,
As of my soul’s best birthdays dawns the third.
There is a friend that as the wise man saith
Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me
Hath time not shown, through days like waves at strife
This truth more sure than all things else but death,
This pearl most perfect found in all the sea
That washes toward your feet these waifs of life.
THE PINES,
_April_, 1882.
But the finest of all these words of affection are perhaps those opening
the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the magnificent Collected Edition of
Mr. Swinburne’s poems issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1904:—
‘To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition
of my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the
occasion.’
Once also Mr. Watts-Dunton dedicated verses of his own to Mr. Swinburne,
to wit, in 1897, when he published that impassioned lyric in praise of a
nobler and larger Imperialism, the ‘Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the
Men of Greater Britain’:—
“TO OUR GREAT CONTEMPORARY WRITER OF
PATRIOTIC POETRY,
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
You and I are old enough to remember the time when, in the world of
letters at least, patriotism was not so fashionable as it is
now—when, indeed, love of England suggested Philistinism rather than
‘sweetness and light.’ Other people, such as Frenchmen, Italians,
Irishmen, Hungarians, Poles, might give voice to a passionate love of
the land of their birth, but not Englishmen. It was very curious, as
I thought then, and as I think now. And at that period love of the
Colonies was, if possible, even more out of fashion than was love of
England; and this temper was not confined to the ‘cultured’ class.
It pervaded society and had an immense influence upon politics. On
one side the Manchester school, religiously hoping that if the
Colonies could be insulted so effectually that they must needs
(unless they abandoned all self-respect) ‘set up for themselves,’ the
same enormous spurt would be given to British trade which occurred
after the birth of the United States, bade the Colonies ‘cut the
painter.’ On the other hand the old Tories and Whigs, with a few
noble exceptions, having never really abandoned the old traditions
respecting the unimportance of all matters outside the parochial
circle of European diplomacy, scarcely knew where the Colonies were
situated on the map.
There was, however, in these islands one person who saw as clearly
then as all see now the infinite importance of the expansion of
England to the true progress of mankind—the Great Lady whose praises
in this regard I have presumed to sing in the opening stanza of these
verses.
I may be wrong, but I, who am, as you know, no courtier, believe from
the bottom of my heart that without the influence of the Queen this
expansion would have been seriously delayed. Directly and indirectly
her influence must needs be enormous, and, as regards this matter, it
has always been exercised—energetically and even eagerly exercised—in
one way. This being my view, I have for years been urging more than
one friend clothed with an authority such as I do not possess to
bring the subject prominently before the people of England at a time
when England’s expansion is a phrase in everybody’s mouth. I have
not succeeded. Let this be my apology for undertaking the task
myself and for inscribing to you, as well as to the men of Greater
Britain, these lines.”
[Picture: Summer at ‘The Pines’—II]
I feel that it is a great privilege to be able to present to my readers
beautiful photogravures and photographs of interiors and pictures and
works of art at ‘The Pines.’ Many of the pictures and other works of art
at ‘The Pines’ are mementoes of a most interesting kind.
Among these is the superb portrait of Madox Brown, at this moment hanging
in the Bradford Exhibition. Madox Brown painted it for the owner. An
interesting story is connected with it. One day, not long after Mr.
Watts-Dunton had become intimate with Madox Brown, the artist told him he
specially wanted his boy Nolly to read to him a story that he had been
writing, and asked him to meet the boy at dinner.
‘Nolly been writing a story!’ exclaimed Mr. Watts-Dunton.
‘I understand your smile,’ said Madox Brown; ‘but you will find it better
than you think.’
At this time Oliver Madox Brown seemed a loose-limbed hobbledehoy, young
enough to be at school. After dinner Oliver began to read the opening
chapters of the story in a not very impressive way, and Mr. Watts-Dunton
suggested that he should take it home and read it at his leisure. This
was agreed to. Pressure of affairs prevented him from taking it up for
some time. At last he did take it up, but he had scarcely read a dozen
pages when he was called away, and he asked a member of his family to
gather up the pages from the sofa and put them into an escritoire. On
his return home at a very late hour he found the lady intently reading
the manuscript, and she declared that she could not go to bed till she
had finished it.
On the next day Mr. Watts-Dunton again took up the manuscript, and was
held spellbound by it. It was a story of passion, of intense love, and
intense hate, told with a crude power that was irresistible.
Mr. Watts-Dunton knew Smith Williams (the reader of Smith, Elder & Co.),
whose name is associated with ‘Jane Eyre.’ He showed it to Williams, who
was greatly struck by it, but pointed out that it terminated in a violent
scene which the novel-reading public of that time would not like, and
asked for a concluding scene less daring. The ending was modified, and
the story, when it appeared, attracted very great attention. Madox Brown
was so grateful to Mr. Watts-Dunton for his services in the matter that
he insisted on expressing his gratitude in some tangible form. Miss Lucy
Madox Brown (afterwards Mrs. W. M. Rossetti) was consulted, and at once
suggested a portrait of the painter, painted by himself. This was done,
and the result was the masterpiece which has been so often exhibited.
From that moment Oliver Madox Brown took his place in the literary world
of his time. The mention of Oliver Madox Brown will remind the older
generation of his friendship with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet,
one of the most pathetic chapters in literary annals.
[Picture: ‘Picture for a Story.’ (Face and Instrument designed by D. G.
Rossetti, background by Dunn.)]
Although Rossetti never fulfilled his intention of illustrating what he
called ‘Watts’s magnificent star sonnet,’ he began what would have been a
superb picture illustrating Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sonnet, ‘The Spirit of the
Rainbow.’ He finished a large charcoal drawing of it, which is thus
described by Mr. William Sharp in his book, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a
Record and a Study’:—
“It represents a female figure standing in a gauzy circle composed of
a rainbow, and on the frame is written the following sonnet (the poem
in question by Mr. Watts-Dunton):
THE WOOD-HAUNTER’S DREAM
The wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:
‘Though meads are sweet when flowers at morn uncurl,
And woods are sweet with nightingale and merle,
Where are the dreams that flush’d thy childish bed?
The Spirit of the Rainbow thou would’st wed!’
I rose, I found her—found a rain-drenched girl
Whose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearl
Coloured the rain above her golden head.
But when I stood by that sweet vision’s side
I saw no more the Rainbow’s lovely stains;
To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyed
The sun showed naught but dripping woods and plains:
‘God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains,’
The wood-sprite laugh’d, ‘Our seeker finds a bride!’
Rossetti meant to have completed the design with the ‘woods and plains’
seen in perspective through the arch; and the composition has an
additional and special interest because it is the artist’s only
successful attempt at the wholly nude—the ‘Spirit’ being extremely
graceful in poise and outline.
* * * * *
I am able to give a reproduction of another of Rossetti’s beautiful
studies which has never been published, but which has been very much
talked about. Many who have seen it at ‘The Pines’ agree with the late
Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest of all
his female faces. It is thus described by Mr. William Sharp: “The
drawing, which, for the sake of a name, I will call ‘Forced Music,’
represents a nude half-figure of a girl playing on a mediæval stringed
instrument elaborately ornamented. The face is of a type unlike that of
any other of the artist’s subjects, and extraordinarily beautiful.”
* * * * *
I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of the girl in
the version of the picture here reproduced, are by Dunn. These two
exquisite drawings were made from the same girl, who never sat for any
other pictures. Her face has been described as being unlike that of any
other of Rossetti’s models and yet combining the charm of them all.
* * * * *
I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any
personal description of him. For my part I do not sympathize with this
extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one’s personal
characteristics described in print. What is there so dreadful or so
sacred in mere print? The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I
think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter
there was ‘a great gulf fixed.’ Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr.
Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of
friends or strangers, remarks—delicate enough, no doubt—are made about
them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in
ever so small a degree. Not so very long ago I remained in a room after
Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it. Straightway there were the freest remarks
about him, not in the least unkind, but free. Some did not expect to see
so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him
to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences,
described his dark-brown eyes as ‘green’—through a printer’s error, no
doubt. Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his
absent friend, Mr. Swinburne—and so on, and so on. Now, what is the
difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation?
Merely that the printed report reaches a wider—a little wider—audience.
That is all. I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition
to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in
the papers. Some energetic gentleman—possibly some one living in the
neighbourhood—took the following ‘Kodak’ of him. It appeared in ‘M.A.P.’
and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could be
painted. In years to come, when he and I and the ‘Kodaker’ are dead, it
may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written
about him:—
“Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn
lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin
has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he
loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes
and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance.
For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and
thick moustache are partially shot with grey. But he looks not a day
over forty-five. Generally he carries a book. Often, however, he
turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits. For—it will be
news to lie-abeds of the district—Wimbledon Common is lively with
rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere
the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until
the moon rises again. To him, morning, although he has seen more
sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious
pageant. This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore
Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet,
novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour.”
The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to
the sea-side. One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late
Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his
country places, such as Boar’s Hill.
I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the
famous Master of Balliol. I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great
admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
intellectual powers and various accomplishments. There was no one, I
have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem. That
air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett’s
friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr.
Watts-Dunton.
Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were these visits
with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett’s house, where he had the opportunity of
meeting some of the most prominent men of the time. He has described the
Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to
them. I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which
appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of December 22, 1894.
“It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the
poet of ‘Atalanta’ and the student of Plato and translator of
Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no
common strength. They took expeditions into the country together,
and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at
Jowett’s quiet autumnal retreat at Boar’s Hill. The Master of
Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself
the admiration of men of poetic genius. To say which poet admired
and loved him most deeply—Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr.
Swinburne—would be difficult. He seemed to join their hands all
round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of
the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett. He was
always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his
verses as in telling him what he liked. And although the poets of
our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times
past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after
all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are
poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to
straightforward men like Jowett. That Jowett’s judgment in artistic
matters, and especially in poetry, was borné no one knew better than
himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical
subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and
this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would
otherwise have been allowed to him. For, notwithstanding the Oxford
epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be
more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary
knowledge. He was fond of quoting Hallam’s words that without an
exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction;
and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge,
he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion. They are
not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to
secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the
Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a
great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble
and most truly lovable. The kind of restraint in social intercourse
resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as
his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett’s
taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the
peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for
talking’s sake. If a proper and right response to a friend’s remark
chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to
deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to
be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of
keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or
uneducated man. It is, however, extremely difficult to write
reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett. In order to bring out
one of Jowett’s pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it
has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and
then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism.”
Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits
that the two friends used to pay to Jowett’s rural retreat at Boar’s
Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the
riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian. The two poets used to spend
the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master
to Boar’s Hill. Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry will remember
the following sonnets:—
THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR’S HILL
To A. C. S.
I
One after one they go; and glade and heath,
Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers
They made so dear, are haunted by the hours
Once musical of those who sleep beneath;
One after one does Sorrow’s every wreath
Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,
And Love and Memory from each loss of ours
Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.
Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield
The friend with whom we walk through mead and field
To-day as on that day when last we parted,
Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?
Love shapes a presence out of Memory’s dream,
A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.
II
Can he be dead? We walk through flowery ways
From Boar’s Hill down to Oxford, fain to know
What nugget-gold, in drift of Time’s long flow,
The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;
He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,
Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,
Still talks of Plato while the scene below
Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.
Can he be dead? He shares our homeward walk,
And by the river you arrest the talk
To see the sun transfigure ere he sets
The boatmen’s children shining in the wherry
And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,
Making the clumsy craft an angel’s ferry.
III
The river crossed, we walk ’neath glowing skies
Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air—
Fading as colour after colour dies:
We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise—
Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
We win the scholar’s nest—his simple fare
Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.
Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.
Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew
The poet’s heart of gold that gives the spell!
Can he be dead? Your heart being drawn to him,
How shall ev’n Death make that dear presence dim
For you who loved him—us who loved him well?
Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill. Not the least interesting among
the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious
contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith. Mr.
William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the
intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton.
Speaking of Swinburne’s championship, in the ‘Spectator,’ of Meredith’s
first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the ‘Pall Mall
Magazine,’ of December 1901, says:—
“Among those who read and considered” [Meredith’s work] “was another
young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the
most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . . If
the letter signed ‘A. C. Swinburne’ had not appeared, another signed
‘Theodore Watts’ would have been published, to the like effect. It
was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith,
A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion.”
The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the
article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum’ on ‘Poems and Lyrics of the
Joy of Earth.’ After this appeared articles appreciative of Meredith’s
prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others. But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton
who led the way. The most touching of all the testimonies of love and
admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr Watts-Dunton, or
indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed to him on
his seventy-fourth birthday. It appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of
February 15, 1902:—
TO GEORGE MEREDITH
(ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)
This time, dear friend—this time my birthday greeting
Comes heavy of funeral tears—I think of you,
And say, ‘’Tis evening with him—that is true—
But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;
Still he is spared—while Spring and Winter, meeting,
Clasp hands around the roots ’neath frozen dew—
To see the ‘Joy of Earth’ break forth anew,
And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.’
Love’s remnant melts and melts; but, if our days
Are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, still,
Still Winter has a sun—a sun whose rays
Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,
And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,
Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.
The allusion to ‘funeral tears’ was caused by one of the greatest
bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years,
namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the ‘Athenæum.’
I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often heard Mr.
Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration the fine
charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and style of
his conversation.
But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of
‘The Pines’ Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.
I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of
Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between
the external facets of Tennyson’s character and the ‘abysmal deeps’ of
his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet’s son, is the only man
living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet.
Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries
nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy. So
long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his
seventy-first birthday. It attracted much attention, and although it was
not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well
he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to
another:—
TO ALFRED TENNYSON, ON HIS PUBLISHING, IN HIS SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR, THE
MOST RICHLY VARIOUS VOLUME OF ENGLISH VERSE THAT HAS APPEARED IN HIS
OWN CENTURY.
Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs
Whose magic waters to a flood expand,
Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,
The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.
From honeyed flowers,—from balm of zephyr-wings,—
From fiery blood of gems, {286} through all the land,
The river draws;—then, in one rainbow-band,
Ten leagues of nectar o’er the ocean flings.
Rich with the riches of a poet’s years,
Stained in all colours of Man’s destiny,
So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears
The misty main, and, taking now the sea,
Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears
The ashen billows of Eternity.
Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a
garden party, and they fraternized at once. Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open
invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this
invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth. One point in
which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the ‘Table Talk’) or with Mr.
Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson’s ear was defective at the very
first. He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show
a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the
demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of
poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best
occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield. As an
illustration of Tennyson’s sensibility to the most delicate nuances of
metrical music, I remember at one of those charming ‘symposia’ at ‘The
Pines,’ hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English
poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of
this. It referred to the two sonnets upon ‘The Omnipotence of Love’ in
the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of ‘Aylwin’
and ‘The Coming of Love.’ These sonnets appeared in an article called
‘The New Hero’ in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ in 1883. Mr.
Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article
reached him. The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the
son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high
position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to
his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets. Tennyson,
who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in
criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of
the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge. The line was
this:—
And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.
Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially praised by two
other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris, to whom the sonnet
had been read in manuscript. Tennyson’s criticism was that there were
too many sibilants in the line, and that although, other things being
equal, ‘scents’ might be more accurate than ‘scent,’ this was a case
where the claims of music ought to be dominant over other claims. The
present Lord Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they were right,
and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting ‘scent’ in place
of ‘scents.’
Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson’s sensibility to
criticism was the result, not of imperious egotism, but of a kind of
morbid modesty. Tennyson used to say that “to whatsoever exalted
position a poet might reach, he was not ‘born to the purple,’ and that if
the poet’s mind was especially plastic he could never shake off the
reminiscence of the time when he was nobody.”
On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the
summer-house at Aldworth to read to him ‘Becket,’ then in manuscript.
Although another visitor, whom he esteemed very highly, both as a poet
and an old friend, was staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer
to read the play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone. And this no doubt was
because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism. Freedom of
criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr. Watts-Dunton is the
most outspoken on the subject of the poet’s art. The entire morning was
absorbed in the reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘the remarks upon
poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made the
fortune of any critic.’
On the subject of what has been called Tennyson’s gaucherie and rudeness
to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax very indignant. ‘There was to
me,’ he said, ‘the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson’s bluntness.
I would there were a leaven of Tennyson’s single-mindedness in the
society of the present day.’
One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as Tennyson’s rudeness to
women shows how entirely the man was misunderstood. Mrs. Oliphant has
stated that Tennyson, in his own house, after listening in silence to an
interchange of amiable compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson,
said abruptly, ‘What liars you women are!’ ‘I seem to hear,’ said Mr.
Watts-Dunton, ‘Tennyson utter the exclamation—utter it in that tone of
humourous playfulness, followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized
the rudeness as entirely as Douglas Jerrold’s laugh neutralized the sting
of his satire. For such an incident to be cited as instance of
Tennyson’s rudeness to women is ludicrous. When I knew him I was, if
possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me
with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious
people. I did not feel that I had any claim to such treatment, for he
was, beyond doubt, the greatest literary figure in the world of that
time. There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which
springs up after a period of laudation.’
The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of stricture
upon Tennyson’s work was that, considering his enormous powers as a poet,
he seemed deficient in the gift of inventing a story:—“The stanzas
beginning, ‘O, that ’twere possible’—the nucleus of ‘Maud’—appeared
originally in ‘The Tribute.’ They were the finest lines that Tennyson
ever wrote—right away the finest. They suggested some superb story of
passion and mystery; and every reader was compelled to make his own guess
as to what the story could possibly be. In an evil moment some friend
suggested that Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story.
A person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson might
perhaps have invented an adequate story—might perhaps have invented a
dozen adequate stories; but he could not have invented a worse story than
the one used by Tennyson in the writing of his monodrama. But think of
the poetic riches poured into it!”
I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton once made
in regard to ‘The Princess.’ “Shakspeare,” he said, “is the only poet
who has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of which
is fanciful. The extremely insincere story of ‘The Princess’ is filled
with such noble passages of sincere poetry as ‘Tears, idle tears,’ ‘Home
they brought her warrior dead,’ etc., passages which unfortunately lose
two-thirds of their power through the insincere setting.”
Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the ‘Magazine of Art’
invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write an article upon the portraits of
Tennyson. Mr. Watts-Dunton consulted the poet upon this project, and he
agreed, promising to aid in the selection of the portraits. The result
was two of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been
written—in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without a knowledge of
these articles no student of Tennyson can be properly equipped. It is
tantalizing that they have never been reprinted. Tennyson died before
their appearance, and this, of course, added to the general interest felt
in them.
After Tennyson’s death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two penetrating essays upon
Tennyson in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ one of them being his reminiscences
of Tennyson as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a
nature-poet in reference to evolution. It will be a great pity if these
essays too are not reprinted. Mr. Knowles, the editor, also included Mr.
Watts-Dunton among the friends of Tennyson who were invited to write
memorial verses on his death for the ‘Nineteenth Century.’ To this
series Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one of
the several poems upon Tennyson not published in ‘The Coming of Love’
volume, which, I may note in passing, contains ‘What the Silent Voices
Said,’ the fine ‘sonnet sequence’ commemorating the burial of Tennyson:—
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
‘THE CROWD IN THE ABBEY WAS VERY GREAT.’
Morning Newspaper.
I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold
What others saw not—his lov’d face sublime
Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime
Of Tennyson’s long day that grows not old;
And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;
And, ‘Who art thou,’ the music seemed to chime,
‘To mourn that King of song whose throne is Time?’
Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.
Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow’s shame:
‘So great he was, striving in simple strife
With Art alone to lend all beauty life—
So true to Truth he was, whatever came—
So fierce against the false when lies were rife—
That love o’erleapt the golden fence of Fame.’
By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr. Watts-Dunton was one
of the few friends of the poet, including Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T.
Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll, and others, who contributed
reminiscences of him to the ‘Life.’ In a few sentences he paints this
masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled, ‘Impressions: 1883–1892’
{291}:—
“All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti’s was a peculiarly winning
personality, but no one has been in the least able to say why.
Nothing is easier, however, than to find the charm of Tennyson. It
lay in a great veracity of soul: it lay in a simple
single-mindedness, so childlike that, unless you had known him to be
the undoubted author of poems as marvellous for exquisite art as for
inspiration, you could not have supposed but that all subtleties—even
those of poetic art—must be foreign to a nature so simple.
Working in a language like ours—a language which has to be moulded
into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art—how can this great,
inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The
Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of
Fair Women’?
Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he said—viz.
that it was the thing he thought. Behind his uncompromising
directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy of the grand
old type. As he stood at the porch of Aldworth meeting a guest or
bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall far beyond the height of
average men, his skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind—as
he stood there, no one could mistake him for anything but a great
forthright English gentleman. Always a man of an extraordinary
beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the beauty of old age to
a degree rarely seen. He was the most hospitable of men. It was
very rare indeed for him to part from a guest without urging him to
return, and generally with the words, ‘Come whenever you like.’
Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was simply
astonishing. His passion for ‘stargazing’ has often been commented
upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante, no poet in any land has
so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the
lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a
thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he
persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding
lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong,
and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that
he passed away in the light he so much loved—in a room where there
was no artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light
of the full moon, which somehow seems to shine more brightly at
Aldworth than anywhere else in England.
In a country having a composite language such as ours it may be
affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of poetry:
one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other appealing to the
few who are sensitive to the felicitous expression of deep thought
and to the true beauties of poetic art.
Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his use of
what Dante calls the ‘sieve for noble words’ his skill transcends
that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities
of thought and of diction in the great passages seem little short of
miraculous, and there are so many that it is easy to understand why
he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore.
That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will
take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’
with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of
Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603
with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version
of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. Next
to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two
great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace
public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps,
Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything
like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular
and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.”
Chapter XVIII
AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS
I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary friendships
would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends.
There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting
between him and James Russell Lowell. Shortly after Lowell had accepted
the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at
dinner. During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the
conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one. He observed
that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the
conversation. The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English
writers—Dickens, Thackeray, and others. As the dinner wore on, his
conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was
equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also
upon the prominent political men of the previous generation—Palmerston,
Lord John Russell, and the like. Then the name of the Alabama came up;
the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American),
dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the
Alabama escape. This diatribe he concluded thus: ‘You know we owe
England nothing.’ In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton,
manifestly addressing his remarks to him.
These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at
last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the
first time, he said: “Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong. You owe
England a very great deal, for I see you are an American.”
“What do we owe England?” said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now
began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.
“You owe England,” he said, “for an infinity of good feeling which you
are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans. So kind is the
feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the
middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English
people themselves. They are petted and made much of, until at last it
has come to this, that the very fact of a person’s being American is a
letter of introduction.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so
penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause
in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel
between the two. After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his
chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:
“You were very sharp upon me just now, sir.”
“Not in the least,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “You were making an onslaught
on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were
addressing your conversation to me.”
“Well,” replied Mr. Lowell, “I will confess that I did address my
conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts.”
“That is my little name,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But I really don’t see
why that should induce you to address your conversation to me. I suppose
it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American
newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies. An
entire mistake! I have several charming American friends, and I am a
great admirer of many of your most eminent writers. But I notice that
whensoever an American book is severely handled in the ‘Athenæum,’ the
article is attributed to me.”
“I do not think,” said Mr. Lowell, “that you are a lover of my country,
but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never
wrote.”
And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more
confidential.
“Well,” he said, “I will tell you something that, I think, will not be
altogether unpleasant to you. When I came to take up my permanent
residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine
about London and Londoners, and I said to him: ‘There is one man whom I
very much want to meet.’ ‘You!’ said he, ‘why, you can meet anybody from
the royal family downwards. Who is the man you want to meet?’ ‘It is a
man in the literary world,’ said I, ‘and I have no doubt you can
introduce me to him. It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in
the “Athenæum.”’ My friend laughed. ‘Well, it is curious,’ he replied:
‘that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you
to. I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures
on my writing which I don’t much approve of.’ Does that interest you?”
added Mr. Lowell.
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
“Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the
‘Athenæum’ I have read every article you have written?”
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
“Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said
to a friend of mine: ‘At last there is a new voice in English
criticism?’”
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But you must first tell me what
that article was, for I don’t believe there is one of my countrymen who
could do so.”
“That article,” said Lowell, “was an essay upon the ‘Comedy of the Noctes
Ambrosianæ,’ and it opened with an Oriental anecdote.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that does interest me very much.”
“And I will go further,” said Lowell: “every line you have written in the
‘Athenæum’ has been read by me, and often re-read.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “I confess to being amazed, for I assure
you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my
name is absolutely unknown. And I must add that I feel honoured, for it
is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for
some of your critical essays. But still, I don’t quite forgive you for
your onslaught upon my poor little island! My sympathies are not
strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic
than Anglo-Saxon in temper. But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way,
and I don’t quite forgive you.”
The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.
“Won’t you come to see me,” said Lowell, “at the Embassy?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Then you ought to know!” said Lowell. “Another proof of the stout
sufficiency of the English temper—not to know where the American Embassy
is! It is in Lowndes Square.” Then he named the number.
“Why,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt
of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the
Swinburne family—a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the
open air at I don’t know what age of life—something like eighty. She was
a friend of Turner’s, and is the possessor of some of Turner’s finest
works.”
“So you actually go next door, and don’t know where the American Embassy
is! A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English
temper! However, as you come next door, won’t you come and see me?”
“I shall be delighted,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton; “but I am perfectly sure
you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man.”
“On the contrary,” said Lowell, “I always reserve to myself an hour, from
five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette.”
Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an
hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution,
this hour over a cigarette once a week.
This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling
the way in which Lowell’s Anglophobia became milder and milder, ‘fine by
degrees and beautifully less,’ until at last it entirely vanished. Then
it was followed by something like Anglo-mania. Lowell began to talk with
the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways
which he would formerly have deprecated. The climax of this revolution
was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:
“Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have
ceased to be able to follow you. The English ladies are—let us say,
charming; English gentlemen are—let us say, charming, or at least some of
them. Everything is charming! But there is one thing you cannot say a
word for, and that is our detestable climate.”
“And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!” said
Lowell. “I positively cannot live out of it.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “you and I will cease to talk about
England and John Bull, if you please. I cannot follow you.”
In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with
all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his
own country. There never was a stauncher American than James Russell
Lowell. Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed
man. Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling
between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to
Lowell. Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest
sonnets. It appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ after Lowell’s death, and it has
been frequently reprinted in the United States. It now appears in ‘The
Coming of Love.’ It was addressed ‘To Britain and America: On the Death
of James Russell Lowell,’
Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
Your fathers drew, for Freedom’s pioneers,
Your English speech, your dower of English blood—
Ye ask to-day, in sorrow’s holiest mood,
When all save love seems film—ye ask in tears—
‘How shall we honour him whose name endears
The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?’
Your hands he joined—those fratricidal hands,
Once trembling, each, to seize a brother’s throat:
How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
Between you still?—Keep Love’s bright sails afloat
For Lowell’s sake, where once ye strove and smote
On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.
This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings
towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile. Apart from his
intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence
Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most
cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey,
Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans.
Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during
several years they saw each other nearly every day. That was before
Whistler’s genius had received full recognition. I may recall that
during a certain controversy concerning Whistler’s animosity against the
Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the
‘Times’ of August 12, 1903:—
“In the ‘Times’ of to-day Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., says: ‘I was on
friendly terms with Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never
heard him at any time testify animosity against the Academy or its
members.’
My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty years,
but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so intimate
that during part of this period we met almost every day. Indeed, at
one time we were jointly engaged on a weekly periodical called
‘Piccadilly,’ for which Du Maurier designed the cover, and for which
Whistler furnished his very first lithographs, by the valuable aid of
Mr. T. Way. During that time there were not many days when he failed
to ‘testify animosity’ against the Academy and its members. To say
the truth, the testifications on this subject by ‘Jimmy,’ as he was
then called, were a little afflictive to his friends. Whether he was
right or wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified
to express an opinion.
May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my admiration of
your New York Correspondent’s amazingly vivid portrait of one of the
most vivid personalities of our time? It is a masterpiece. . . . ”
When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most appreciative
estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for the ‘Athenæum.’ I
am tempted to quote it nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with
American literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words
of mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards Americans:—
“As a personality Bret Harte seems to have exercised a great charm
over his intimate friends, and I am not in the least surprised at his
being a favourite. It is many years since I last saw him. I think
it must have been at a club dinner given by William Black; but I have
a very vivid remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have
been more than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred
to me that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles
Dickens, might have been an admirable actor. On that account the
following incident is worth recording. A friend of mine, an American
poet, who at that time was living in London, brought him to my
chambers, and did me the honour of introducing me to him. Bret Harte
had read something about the London music-halls, and proposed that we
should all three take a drive round the town and see something of
them. At that time these places took a very different position in
public estimation from what they appear to be doing now. People then
considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very inane, as,
indeed, they were, and were shy about going to them. I hope they
have improved now, for they seem to have become quite fashionable.
Our first visit was to the Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one
or two songs that gave the audience immense delight—some comic, some
more comic from being sentimental-maudlin. And we saw one or two
shapeless women in tights. Then we went to the ‘Oxford,’ and saw
something on exactly the same lines. In fact, the performers seemed
to be the same as those we had just been seeing. Then we went to
other places of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to
the distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women
seemed to be finding so amusing. At that time, indeed, the almost
only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the theatres was
that at Evans’s supper-rooms, where, under the auspices of the famous
Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh rarebit while listening to the
‘Chough and Crow’ and ‘The Men of Harlech,’ given admirably by
choir-boys. Years passed before I saw Bret Harte again. I met him
at a little breakfast party, and he amused those who sat near him by
giving an account of what he had seen at the music-halls—an account
so graphic that I think a fine actor was lost in him. He not only
vivified every incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every
performer in a peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the
humour of it. His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson
of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ fame. This proved to me what a genius he had for
accurate observation, and also what a remarkable memory for the
details of a scene. His death has touched English people very
deeply.
* * * * *
It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte—easy to say that he was a
disciple of Dickens—easy to say that in richness, massiveness, and
variety he fell far short of his great and beloved master. No one
was so ready to say all this and more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte
himself. For of all the writers of his time he was perhaps the most
modest, the most unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where
he believed honour to be due.
But the comparison between the English and American story-tellers
must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of the latter. If
Dickens showed great superiority to Bret Harte on one side of the
imaginative writer’s equipment, there were, I must think, other sides
of that equipment on which the superiority was Bret Harte’s.
Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of
universal criticism Bret Harte’s reputation will be found to be of
the usual ephemeral kind. It is, of course, impossible to speak on
such matters with anything like confidence. But it does seem to me
that Bret Harte’s reputation is more likely than is generally
supposed to ripen into what we call fame. For in his short
stories—in the best of them, at least—there is a certain note quite
indescribable by any adjective—a note which is, I believe, always to
be felt in the literature that survives. The charge of not being
original is far too frequently brought against the imaginative
writers of America. What do we mean by ‘originality’? Scott did not
invent the historic method. Dickens simply carried the method of
Smollett further, and with wider range. Thackeray is admittedly the
nineteenth century Fielding. Perhaps, indeed, there is but one
absolutely original writer of prose fiction of the nineteenth
century—Nathaniel Hawthorne. By original I mean simply original. I
do not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his epoch.
But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a fiction in which
the material world and the spiritual world were not merely brought
into touch, but were positively intermingled one with the other.
Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material for
literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly fascinating
kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it adequately. This
is what I mean: in the wonderful history of the nineteenth century
there are no more picturesque figures than those goldseekers—those
‘Argonauts’ of the Pacific slope—who in 1848 and 1849 showed the
world what grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call
‘the Anglo-Saxon race.’ The Australian gold-diggers of 1851 who
followed them, although they were picturesque and sturdy too, were
not exactly of the strain of the original Argonauts. The romance of
the thing had been in some degree worn away. The land of the Golden
Fleece had degenerated into a Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Moreover, the
Tom Tiddler’s Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a comparatively
easy distance from the Antipodean centre of civilization. ‘Canvas
Town’ could easily be reached from Sydney. But to reach the Golden
Fleece sought by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer
had before him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind. Every
Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of gold.
He must either trek overland—that is to say, over those vast prairies
and then over those vast mountain chains which to men of the time of
Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up the limitless ‘far West’ regions
which only a few pioneers had dared to cross—or else he must take a
journey, equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy vessel
in which he could get a passage. It follows that for an adventurer
to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece at all implied
in itself that grit which adventurers of the Anglo-Saxon type are
generally supposed to show in a special degree. What kind of men
these Argonauts were, and what kind of life they led, the people of
the Eastern states of America and the people of England had for years
been trying to gather from newspaper reports and other sources; but
had it not been for the genius of Bret Harte this most picturesque
chapter of nineteenth-century history would have been obliterated and
forgotten. Thanks to the admirable American writer whom England had
the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many years, those
wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the Sierra Nevada are
as familiar to us as is Dickens’s London. Surely those who talk of
Bret Harte as being ‘Dickens among the Californian pines’ do not
consider what their words imply. It is true, no doubt, that there
was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens and the
temperament of Bret Harte. They both held the same principles of
imaginative art, they both felt that the function of the artist is to
aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him beautiful
ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called realism
which lowers man in his aspirations—which calls before man’s
imagination degrading pictures of his ‘animal origin’—is to do him a
disservice. For man has still a long journey before he reaches the
goal. Yet though they were both by instinct idealists as regards
character-drawing, they both sought to give their ideals a local
habitation and a name by surrounding those ideals with vividly
painted real accessories, as real as those of the ugliest realist.
With regard to Bret Harte’s Argonauts and the romantic scenery in
which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a bold thing to
say whether Dickens could or could not have painted them, and
whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or would not have
been as good as Bret Harte’s pictures. But Dickens never did paint
these Argonauts; he never had the chance of painting them. Bret
Harte did paint them, and succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens
succeeded in painting certain classes of London life. Now,
assuredly, I should have never dreamt of instituting a comparison of
this kind between two of the most delightful writers and the most
delightful men that have lived in my time had not critics been doing
so to the disparagement of one of them. But if one of these writers
must be set up against another, I feel that something should be said
upon the other side of the question—I feel that something should be
said on those points where the American had the advantage. Take the
question of atmosphere, for instance. Let us not forget how
enormously important is atmosphere in any imaginative picture of
life. Without going so far as to say that atmosphere is as
important, or nearly as important, as character, let me ask, What was
it that captured the readers of ‘Robinson Crusoe’? Was it the
character of Defoe’s hero, or was it the scenery and the atmosphere
in which he placed him? Again, see what an important part scenery
and atmosphere played in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ in ‘The Lady
of the Lake,’ in ‘Marmion,’ and in ‘Waverley.’ And surely it was the
atmosphere of Byron’s ‘Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The
Corsair,’ that mainly gave these poems their vogue. And, in a
certain sense, it may be said that Dickens gave to his readers a new
atmosphere, for he was the first to explore what was something new to
the reading world—the great surging low-life of London and the life
of the lower stratum of its middle class. It seems that the pure
novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and picturesque
atmosphere. It was natural for England to look to American writers
to enrich English literature with a new imaginative atmosphere, and
she did not look in vain. But, notwithstanding all that had been
done by writers like Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and
others to bring American atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave
us an atmosphere that was American and yet as new as though the
above-mentioned writers had never written. He had the advantage of
depicting a scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his
predecessors as it was unlike everything else in the world. It is
doubtful whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as
the mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and
Canada.
Every one is born with an instinct for loving some particular kind of
scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the
birth-environment as is generally supposed. It would have been of no
avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty canons, peaks,
and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had had a natural
genius for loving and depicting them; and this, undoubtedly, he had,
as we see by the effect upon us of his descriptions. Once read, his
pictures are never forgotten. But it was not merely that the scenery
and atmosphere of Bret Harte’s stories are new—the point is that the
social mechanism in which his characters move is also new. And if it
cannot be denied that in temperament his characters are allied to the
characters of Dickens, we must not make too much of this.
Notwithstanding all the freshness and newness of Dickens’s characters
they were entirely the slaves of English sanctions. Those
incongruities which gave them their humourous side arose from their
contradicting the English social sanctions around them. But in Bret
Harte’s Argonauts we get characters that move entirely outside those
sanctions of civilization with which the reader is familiar. And
this is why the violent contrasts in his stories seem, somehow, to be
better authenticated than do the equally violent contrasts in
Dickens’s stories. Bret Harte’s characters are amenable to no laws
except the improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is
either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch. And yet
underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep
‘law-abidingness’ which the late Grant Allen despised as being ‘the
Anglo-Saxon characteristic.’ To my mind, indeed, there is nothing so
new, fresh, and piquant in the fiction of my time as Bret Harte’s
pictures of the mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right
outside all the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own
peculiar instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.
We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from the old
sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good deal of that
natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was surrendered by
the first human compact in order to secure its substitute, civil
liberty. We get vivid pictures of the racial qualities which enable
the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots and flourish in almost every
square mile of the New World that lies in the temperate zone. Let a
group of this great race of universal squatters be the dwellers in
Roaring Camp, or a party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a ‘no
man’s land,’ or even a gang of mutineers from the Bounty, it is all
one as regards their methods as squatters. The moment that the
mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they improvise a code of laws
something like the camp laws of Bret Harte’s Argonauts, and the code
on the whole works well.
Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence
of the presentation, Bret Harte’s pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in
these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature. And
again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are
what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more
sought after. This accounts in a large measure for the growing
interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if
there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of
Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
Bret Harte’s stories give the reader a sense of the open air second
only to Borrow’s own pictures. And if I am right in thinking that
the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this
also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
And now what about his power of creating new characters—not
characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters? Well, here
one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret
Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens. Dickens,
of course, used a larger canvas—gave himself more room to depict his
subjects.
If Bret Harte’s scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may
it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories
and not long novels? For it is very difficult in a short story to
secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to
nature—the last perfection of imaginative art.
All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection.
In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having
the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as
in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from
the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature. The
shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence
the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of
course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from
which a long novel may be free.”
Chapter XIX
WALES
[Picture: Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd]
IT is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr.
Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described
by Dr. Hake in ‘The New Day.’ I can best show the impression that Alpine
scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of ‘The Coming of
Love.’ But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two
should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted
‘Aylwin’ as the representative Welsh novel. And this is not surprising,
because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born
upon her soil. The ‘Arvon’ edition is thus dedicated:—
“To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my very dear friend, this
edition of ‘Aylwin’ is affectionately inscribed.
It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read the
proofs of ‘Aylwin’—used to read them in the beautiful land the story
endeavours to depict—that the wish came to me to inscribe it to you,
whose paraphrases of ‘The Lament of Llywarch Hën,’ ‘The Lament of
Urien,’ and ‘The Song of the Graves’ have so entirely caught the old
music of Kymric romance.
When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that ‘love of the wind’
which is such a fascinating characteristic of the Snowdonian girls I
had only to recall that poetic triumph, your paraphrase of Taliesin’s
‘Song of the Wind’—
Oh, most beautiful One!
In the wood and in the mead,
How he fares in his speed!
And over the land,
Without foot, without hand,
Without fear of old age,
Or Destiny’s rage.
* * *
His banner he flings
O’er the earth as he springs
On his way, but unseen
Are its folds; and his mien,
Rough or fair, is not shown,
And his face is unknown.
Had I anticipated that ‘Aylwin’ would achieve a great success among
the very people for whom I wrote it, I should without hesitation have
asked you to accept the dedication at that time. But I felt that it
would seem like endeavouring to take a worldly advantage of your
friendship to ask your permission to do this—to ask you to stand
literary sponsor, as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the
great Kymric race with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so
grandly associated. For although my heart had the true ‘Kymric
beat’—if love of Wales may be taken as an indication of that
‘beat’—the privilege of having been born on the sacred soil of the
Druids could not be claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital
presentation of that organic detail, which is the first requisite in
all true imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting.
You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that ‘Aylwin’ would win
the hearts of your countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your
generous nature; I knew also if I may say it, your affection for me.
How could I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the
kind thought?
But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there is, if I
am to accept the words of another Welsh writer, ‘scarcely any home in
Wales where a well-thumbed copy of “Aylwin” is not to be found,’ and
now that thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as
I know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the story
of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time has come
when I may look for the pleasure of associating your name with the
book.
[Picture: Moel Siabod and the River Lledr]
Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne is not an
idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the characteristics
of the race to which you belong—know it far too well to dream of
asking that question. There are not many people, I think, who know
the Kymric race so intimately as I do; and I have said on a previous
occasion what I fully meant and mean, that, although I have seen a
good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways
at the top of them all. They combine, as I think, the poetry, the
music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the
other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity
of the very different race to which they are so closely linked by
circumstance—the race whom it is the fashion to call the Anglo-Saxon.
And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who knows them as you
and I do can fail to be struck by it continually. Winifred Wynne I
meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found her—affectionate,
warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and brave. And I only wish that my
power to do justice to her and to the country that gave her birth had
been more adequate. There are, however, writers now among you whose
pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can hold their own with
almost anything in contemporary fiction; and to them I look for
better work than mine in the same rich field. Although I am familiar
with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe, in their
wildest and most beautiful recesses, no hill scenery has for me the
peculiar witchery of that around Eryri. And what race in Europe has
a history so poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours? That
such a country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such
an atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is
with me a matter of fervid faith.”
As to the descriptions of North Wales in ‘Aylwin,’ they are now almost
classic; especially the descriptions of the Swallow Falls and the Fairy
Glen. Long before ‘Aylwin’ was published, Welsh readers had been
delighted with the ‘Athenæum’ article containing the description of Mr.
Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon
at break of day.
Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not finer than
the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the nobly symbolic
conclusion of ‘Aylwin’:—
“We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard,
and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn
Ddu’r Arddu. And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers’ Llyn and
the echoes to be heard there. She then took me to another famous
sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five
thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers’ Anvil. While we
lingered here Winnie gave me as many-anecdotes and legends of this
stone as would fill a little volume. But suddenly she stopped.
‘Look!’ she said, pointing to the sunset. ‘I have seen that sight
only once before. I was with Sinfi. She called it “The Dukkeripen
of the Trúshul.”’
The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on
the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films
floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a
ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire. A
horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell
upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from
the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment
a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold. But what
Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where
the sun had now sunk behind the horizon. Shooting up from the cliffs
where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of
clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.”
It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell
took on the morning when the search for Winifred began was a source of
speculation, notably in ‘Notes and Queries.’ Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with
this point in the preface to the twenty-second edition:—
“Nothing,” he says, “in regard to ‘Aylwin’ has given me so much
pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh
friends and my Romany friends. I little thought, when I wrote it,
that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it
would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so
well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent
and famous ‘Gypsy Smith,’ and described by him as ‘the most
trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language,
containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy
girl.’
Since the first appearance of the book there have been many
interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals,
upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of
Snowdon.
A very picturesque letter appeared in ‘Notes and Queries’ on May 3,
1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a query by E. W., which I will
give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer’s
ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen,
late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that
taken by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent
spectacle that was seen by them:—
‘The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was
entirely gone. So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense
a prospect, I have never beheld since. For the first and only time
in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and
Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland
and Ireland. The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth
walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for
even a briefer view than that.’
Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer says:—
‘Only from Glaslyn would the description in “Aylwin” of y Wyddfa
standing out against the sky “as narrow and as steep as the sides of
an acorn” be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of
Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance
of the mountain. We must suppose the action of the story to have
taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on
Snowdon.’
[Picture: Snowdon and Glaslyn]
With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself
all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli
in the same number of ‘Notes and Queries’:—
‘None of us are very likely to succeed in “placing” this llyn,
because the author of “Aylwin,” taking a privilege of romance often
taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks
in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story. It may be,
indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a
rough translation of the gipsies’ name for it, the “Knockers” being
gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence “Coblynau”—goblins. If so, the
name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure
the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide. In any case, the only
point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps
llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture),
is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the
actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes
something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake.
The “Knockers,” it must be remembered, usually depend upon the
existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings
where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the
curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the
Snowdon chapters of “Aylwin.”’”
In ‘Aylwin’ Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his readers little
pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:—
“The peasants and farmers all knew me. ‘Sut mae dy galon? (How is
thy heart?)’ they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met
them. ‘How is my heart, indeed!’ I would sigh as I went on my way.
Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in
the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who
knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country.
Never a trace of Winifred could I find.
At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to
Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach
the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that
morning.”
His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the following
description of the little Welsh girl and her fascinating lisp:—
“‘Would you like to come in our garden? It’s such a nice garden.’
I could resist her no longer. That voice would have drawn me had she
spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin. To
describe it would of course be impossible. The novelty of her
accent, the way in which she gave the ‘h’ in ‘which,’ ‘what,’ and
‘when,’ the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me
as the timbre of her voice. And let me say here, once for all, that
when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the
English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions
were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives;
but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair. I found that to use
colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible
without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.
Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book
will go out to the world. While a story-teller may reproduce, by
means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish
accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to
represent Welsh accent.”
Chapter XX
IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE
BUT the interesting subjects touched upon in the last four chapters have
led me far from the subject of ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ In its
biographical sketch of Mr. Watts-Dunton the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’
says: “Imaginative glamour and mysticism are prominent characteristics
both of ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Aylwin,’ and the novel in particular
has had its share in restoring the charms of pure romance to the favour
of the general public.” This is high praise, but I hope to show that it
is deserved. When it was announced that a work of prose fiction was
about to be published by the critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ what did Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s readers expect? I think they expected something as unlike
what the story turned out to be as it is possible to imagine. They
expected a story built up of a discursive sequence of new and profound
generalizations upon life and literature expressed in brilliant
picturesque prose such as had been the delight of my boyhood in Ireland;
they expected to be fascinated more than ever by that ‘easy authoritative
greatness and comprehensiveness of style’ with which they had been
familiar for long; they expected also that subtle irony after the fashion
of Fielding, which suggests so much between the lines, that humour which
had been an especial joy to me in scores of articles signed by the
writer’s style as indubitably as if they had been signed by his name. I
think everybody cherished this expectation: everybody took it for granted
that heaps of those ‘intellectual nuggets’ about which Minto talked would
smother the writer as a story-teller, that the book as literature would
be admirable—but as a novel a failure. Great as was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
esoteric reputation, I believe that many of the booksellers declined (as
the author had prophesied that they would decline) to subscribe for the
book. They expected it to fail as a marketable novel—to fail in that
‘artistic convincement’ of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself so often
written. What neither I nor any one else save those who, like Mr.
Swinburne, had read the story in manuscript, did expect, was a story so
poetic, so unworldly, and so romantic that it might have been written by
a young Celt—a love story of intense passion, which yet by some magic art
was as convincingly realistic as any one of those ‘flat-footed’
sermon-stories which the late W. E. Henley was wont to deride.
In fact, from this point of view ‘Aylwin’ is a curiosity of literature.
The truth seems to be, however, that, as one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s most
intimate friends has said, its style represents one facet only of
Watts-Dunton’s character. Like most of us, he has a dual existence—one
half of him is the romantic youth, Henry Aylwin, the other half is the
world-wise philosopher of the ‘Athenæum.’ This other half of him lives
in the style of another story altogether, where the creator of Henry
Aylwin takes up the very different role of a man of the world. Now I
have views of my own upon this duality. I think that if the brilliant
worldly writing of the mass of his work be examined, it will be found to
be a ‘shot’ texture scintillating with various hues where sometimes
repressed passion and sometimes mysticism and dreams are constantly
shining through the glossy silk of the style. Sometimes from the smooth,
even flow of the criticisms gleams of a passion far more intense than
anything in ‘Aylwin’ will flash out. I will cite a passage in his
critical writings wherein he discusses the inadequacy of language to
express the deepest passion:—
“As compared with sculpture and painting the great infirmity of
poetry, as an ‘imitation’ of nature, is of course that the medium is
always and of necessity words—even when no words could, in the
dramatic situation, have been spoken. It is not only Homer who is
obliged sometimes to forget that passion when at white heat is never
voluble, is scarcely even articulate; the dramatists also are obliged
to forget that in love and in hate, at their tensest, words seem weak
and foolish when compared with the silent and satisfying triumph and
glory of deeds, such as the plastic arts can render. This becomes
manifest enough when we compare the Niobe group or the Laocoon group,
or the great dramatic paintings of the modern world, with even the
finest efforts of dramatic poetry, such as the speech of Andromache
to Hector, or the speech of Priam to Achilles; nay, such as even the
cries of Cassandra in the ‘Agamemnon,’ or the wailings of Lear over
the dead Cordelia. Even when writing the words uttered by Œdipus, as
the terrible truth breaks in upon his soul, Sophocles must have felt
that, in the holiest chambers of sorrow and in the highest agonies of
suffering reigns that awful silence which not poetry, but painting
sometimes, and sculpture always, can render. What human sounds could
render the agony of Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as we see them in
the sculptor’s rendering? Not articulate speech at all; not words,
but wails. It is the same with hate; it is the same with love. We
are not speaking merely of the unpacking of the heart in which the
angry warriors of the ‘Ilaid’ indulge. Even such subtle writing as
that of Æschylus and Sophocles falls below the work of the painter.
Hate, though voluble perhaps as Clytæmnestra’s when hate is at that
red-heat glow which the poet can render, changes in a moment whenever
that redness has been fanned into hatred’s own last
complexion—whiteness as of iron at the melting-point—when the heart
has grown far too big to be ‘unpacked’ at all, and even the bitter
epigrams of hate’s own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier’s snap
before he fleshes his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as
she springs before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish
for a soul to which language at its tensest has become idle play.
But this is just what cannot be rendered by an art whose medium
consists solely of words.”
Could any one reading this passage doubt that the real work of the writer
was to write poetry and not criticism?
But this makes it necessary for me to say a word upon the question of the
style of ‘Aylwin’—a question that has often been discussed. The
fascination of the story is largely due to the magnetism of its style.
And yet how undecorated, not to say how plain, the style in the more
level passages often is! When the story was first written the style
glittered with literary ornament. But the author deliberately struck out
many of the poetic passages. Coleridge tells us that an imaginative work
should be written in a simple style, and that the more imaginative the
work the simpler the style should be. I often think of these words when
I labour in the sweat of my brow to read the word-twisting of precious
writers! It is then that I think of ‘Aylwin,’ for ‘Aylwin’ stands alone
in its power of carrying the reader away to climes of new and rare beauty
peopled by characters as new and as rare. It was clearly Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s idea that what such a story needed was mastery over
‘artistic convincement.’ He has more than once commented on the
acuteness of Edgar Poe’s remark that in the expression of true passion
there is always something of the ‘homely.’ ‘Aylwin’ is one long unbroken
cry of passion, mostly in a ‘homely key,’ but this ‘homely key’ is left
for loftier keys whenever the proper time for the change comes. In
beginning to write, the author seems to have felt that ‘The Renascence of
Wonder’ and the quest of beauty, although adequately expressed in the
poetry of the newest romantic school—that of Rossetti, Morris, and
Swinburne—had only found its way into imaginative prose through the
highly elaborate technique of his friend, George Meredith. He seems to
have felt that the great imaginative prose writers of the time,
Thackeray, Dickens, and Charles Reade, were in a certain sense
Philistines of genius who had done but little to bring beauty, romance
and culture into prose fiction. And as to Meredith, though a true child
of romanticism who never did and never could breathe the air of
Philistia, he had adopted a style too self-conscious and rich in literary
qualities to touch that great English pulse that beats outside the walls
of the Palace of Art.
Mrs. Craigie has lately declared that at the present moment all the most
worthy English novelists, with the exception of Mr. Thomas Hardy, are
distinguished disciples of Mr. George Meredith. But to belong to ‘the
mock Meredithians’ is not a matter of very great glory. No one adores
the work of Mr. Meredith more than I do, though my admiration is not
without a certain leaven of distress at his literary self-consciousness.
I say this with all reverence. Great as Meredith is, he would be greater
still if, when he is delivering his priceless gifts to us, he would bear
in mind that immortal injunction in ‘King Henry the Fourth’—‘I prithee
now, deliver them like a man of this world.’ I can imagine how the great
humourist must smile when the dolt, who once found ‘obscurity’ in his
most lucid passages, praises him for the defects of his qualities, and
calls upon all other writers to write Meredithese.
To be a classic—to be immortal—it is necessary for an imaginative writer
to deliver his message like ‘a man of this world.’ Shakespeare himself,
occasionally, will seem to forget this, but only occasionally, and we
never think of it when falling down in worship before the shrine of the
greatest imaginative writer that has ever lived. Dr. Johnson said that
all work which lives is without eccentricity. Now, entranced as I have
been, ever since I was a boy, by Meredith’s incomparable romances, I long
to set my imagination free of Meredith and fly away with his characters,
as I can fly away with the characters of the classic imaginative writers
from Homer down to Sir Walter Scott. But I seldom succeed. Now and then
I escape from the obsession of the picture of the great writer seated in
his chalet with the summer sunshine gleaming round his picturesque head,
but illuminating also all too vividly his inkstand, and his paper and his
pens; but only now and then, and not for long. If it had pleased Nature
to give him less intellectual activity, less humour and wit and literary
brilliance, I feel sure that he would have lived more securely as an
English classic. I adore him, I say, and although I do not know him
personally, I love him. We all love him: and when I am in a very
charitable mood, I can even forgive him for having begotten the ‘mock
Meredithians.’ As to those who, without a spark of his humourous
imagination and supple intellect can manage to mimic his style, if they
only knew what a torture their word-twisting is to the galled reviewer
who wants to get on, and to know what on earth they have got to tell him,
I think they would display a little more mercy, and even for pity’s sake
deliver their gifts like ‘men of this world.’
In ‘Aylwin’ Mr. Watts-Dunton seems to have determined to be as romantic
and as beautiful as the romanticists in poetry had ever dared to be, and
yet by aid of a simplicity and a naïveté of diction of which his critical
writings had shown no sign, to carry his beautiful dreams into Philistia
itself. Never was there a bolder enterprise, and never was there a
greater success. That ‘Aylwin’ would appeal strongly to imaginative
minds was certain, for it was written by ‘the most widely cultivated
writer in the English belles lettres of our time.’ But the strange thing
is that a story so full of romance, poetry, and beauty, should also
appeal to other minds.
I am no believer in mere popularity, and I confess that when books come
before me for review I cannot help casting a suspicious eye upon any
story by any of the very popular novelists of the day. But it is
necessary to explain why the most poetical romance written within the
last century is also one of the most popular. It was in part owing to
its simplicity of diction, its naïveté of utterance, and its freedom from
superfluous literary ornamentation. I do not as a rule like using a
foreign word when an English word will do the same work, but neither
‘artlessness,’ ‘candour’ nor ‘simplicity’ seem to express the unique
charm of the style of ‘Aylwin,’ so completely as does the word ‘naïveté.’
It was by naïveté, I believe, that he carried the Renascence of Wonder
into quarters which his great brothers in the Romantic movement could
never reach.
For such a writer as he, the critic steeped in all the latest subtleties
of the style of to-day, and indeed the originator of many of these
subtleties, the intimate friend of such superb and elaborate literary
artists as Tennyson, Browning, George Meredith, Rossetti and Swinburne,
it must have been inconceivably difficult to write the ‘working portions’
of his narrative in a style as unbookish at times as if he had written in
the pre-Meredithian epoch. Having set out to convince his readers of the
truth of what he was telling them, he determined to sacrifice all
literary ‘self-indulgence’ to that end. I do not recollect that any
critic, when the book came out, noted this. But if ‘Aylwin’ had been a
French book published in France, the naïve style adopted by the
autobiographer would have been recognized by the critics as the crowning
proof of the author’s dramatic genius. Whenever the style seems most to
suggest the pre-Meredithian writers, it is because the story is an
autobiography and because the hero lived in pre-Meredithian times.
Difficult as was Thackeray’s tour de force in ‘Esmond,’ it was nothing to
the tour de force of ‘Aylwin.’ The tale is told ‘as though inspired by
the very spirit of youth’ because the hero was a youth when he told it.
It is hard to imagine a writer past the meridian of life being able to
write a story ‘more flushed with the glory and the passion and the wonder
of youth than any other in English fiction.’
It should be noted that whenever the incidents become especially tragic
or romantic or weird or poetic, the ‘homeliness’ of the style goes—the
style at once rises to the occasion, it becomes not only rich, but too
rich for prose. I have now and then heard certain word-twisters of
second-hand Meredithese speak of the ‘baldness’ of the style of ‘Aylwin.’
Roll fifty of these word-twisters into one, and let that one write a
sentence or two of such prose as this, published at the time that
‘Aylwin’ was written. It occurs in a passage on the greatest of all rich
writers, Shakespeare:—
“In the quality of richness Shakespeare stood quite alone till the
publication of ‘Endymion.’ Till then it was ‘Eclipse first—the rest
nowhere.’ When we think of Shakespeare, it is his richness more than
even his higher qualities that we think of first. In reading him, we
feel at every turn that we have come upon a mind as rich as Marlowe’s
Moor, who
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearls, like pebble-stones.
Nay, he is richer still; he can, by merely looking at the
‘pebble-stones,’ turn them into pearls for himself, like the
changeling child recovered from the gnomes in the Rosicrucian story.
His riches burden him. And no wonder: it is stiff flying with the
ruby hills of Badakhshân on your back. Nevertheless, so strong are
the wings of his imagination, so lordly is his intellect, that he can
carry them all; he could carry, it would seem, every gem in
Golconda—every gem in every planet from here to Neptune—and yet win
his goal. Now, in the matter of richness this is the great
difference between him and Keats, the wings of whose imagination,
aërial at starting, and only iridescent like the sails of a
dragon-fly, seem to change as he goes—become overcharged with beauty,
in fact—abloom ‘with splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth’s
deep-damasked wings.’ Or, rather, it may be said that he seems to
start sometimes with Shakespeare’s own eagle-pinions, which, as he
mounts, catch and retain colour after colour from the earth below,
till, heavy with beauty as the drooping wings of a golden pheasant,
they fly low and level at last over the earth they cannot leave for
its loveliness, not even for the holiness of the skies.”
I will give a few instances of passages in ‘Aylwin’ quite as rich as
this. One shall be from that scene in which Winifred unconsciously
reveals to her lover that her father has stolen the jewelled cross and
brought his own father’s curse upon her beloved head:—
“Winifred picked up the sea weed and made a necklace of it, in the
old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.
‘Isn’t it a lovely colour?’ she said, as it glistened in the
moonlight. ‘Isn’t it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it
were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?’
‘It is as red as the reddest ruby,’ I replied, putting out my hand
and grasping the slippery substance.
‘Would you believe,’ said Winnie, ‘that I never saw a ruby in my
life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.’
‘Why do you want particularly to know?’
‘Because,’ said Winifred, ‘my father, when he wished me to come out
for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.’
‘Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred—how very odd!’
‘Yes,’ said Winifred, ‘and he talked about diamonds too.’
‘THE CURSE!’ I murmured, and clasped her to my breast. ‘Kiss me,
Winifred!’
There had come a bite of sudden fire at my heart, and I shuddered
with a dreadful knowledge, like the captain of an unarmed ship, who,
while the unconscious landsmen on board are gaily scrutinizing a sail
that like a speck has appeared on the horizon, shudders with the
knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells,
and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit.
As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from
Winifred’s bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over
a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand
sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my hair began to
stir.”
Another instance occurs in Wilderspin’s ornate description of his great
picture, ‘Faith and Love’:—
“‘Imagine yourself standing in an Egyptian city, where innumerable
lamps of every hue are shining. It is one of the great lamp-fêtes of
Sais, which all Egypt has come to see. There, in honour of the
feast, sits a tall woman, covered by a veil. But the painting is so
wonderful, Mr. Aylwin, that, though you see a woman’s face expressed
behind the veil—though you see the warm flesh-tints and the light of
the eyes through the aërial film—you cannot judge of the character of
the face—you cannot see whether it is that of woman in her noblest,
or woman in her basest, type. The eyes sparkle, but you cannot say
whether they sparkle with malignity or benevolence—whether they are
fired with what Philip Aylwin calls “the love-light of the seventh
heaven,” or are threatening with “the hungry flames of the seventh
hell!” There she sits in front of a portico, while, asleep, with
folded wings, is crouched on one side of her the figure of Love, with
rosy feathers, and on the other the figure of Faith, with plumage of
a deep azure. Over her head, on the portico, are written the
words:—“I am all that hath been, is, and shall be, and no mortal hath
uncovered my veil.” The tinted lights falling on the group are shed,
you see, from the rainbow-coloured lamps of Sais, which are
countless. But in spite of all these lamps, Mr. Aylwin, no mortal
can see the face behind that veil. And why? Those who alone could
uplift it, the figures folded with wings—Faith and Love—are fast
asleep, at the great Queen’s feet. When Faith and Love are sleeping
there, what are the many-coloured lamps of science!—of what use are
they to the famished soul of man?’
‘A striking idea!’ I exclaimed.
‘Your father’s,’ replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that
one might have imagined my father’s spectre stood before him. ‘It
symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and
the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the
predella beneath the picture “Faith and Love.” Now look at the
picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,’ he continued, as though it were upon an
easel before me. ‘You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the
architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the sea. In the
light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax tapers, a procession is
moving through the streets. You see Isis, as Pelagia, advancing
between two ranks, one of joyous maidens in snow white garments,
adorned with wreaths, and scattering from their bosoms all kinds of
dewy flowers; the other of youths, playing upon pipes and flutes
mixed with men with shaven shining crowns, playing upon sistra of
brass, silver, and gold. Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her
breast by a tasselled knot,—an azure-coloured tunic bordered with
silver stars,—and an upper garment of the colour of the moon at
moon-rise. Her head is crowned with a chaplet of sea-flowers, and
round her throat is a necklace of seaweeds, wet still with sea-water,
and shimmering with all the shifting hues of the sea. On either side
of her stand the awakened angels, uplifting from her face a veil
whose folds flow soft as water over her shoulders and over the wings
of Faith and Love. A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip
Aylwin gave to the world!’”
Another instance I take from that scene in the crypt whither Aylwin had
been drawn against his will by the ancestral impulses in his blood to
replace the jewelled cross upon the breast of his father:—
“Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt.
The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an
influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and
nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated,
until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences.
Scarcely had this mood passed before a sensation came upon me of
being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized
me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It
was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in
the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words,
harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here
assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by
the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an
ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the
features of my father; at another, those of Tom Wynne; at another the
leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril’s studio.
“‘It is an illusion,’ I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; ‘it
is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain
and an exhausted stomach.’ Yet it disturbed me as much as if my
reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be
fighting towards my father’s coffin as a dreamer fights against a
nightmare, and at last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish
bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and
I was in darkness. As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious
state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of
phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the
‘Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,’ scattering seeds over the earth below.
At the pyramid’s base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading
with the Queen of Death:
What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!
I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached
the coffin resting on a stone table. I found, on examining it, that
although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the
violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the
screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free. Then I paused; for
to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the
blood’s inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and
induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a
giant. Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff’s story, which
at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and
the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between
Winnie’s father and mine seemed to hang in the air—a fascinating
mirage of ghastly horror . . .
At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed
the lid violently on one side . . .
The ‘sweet odours and divers kinds of spices’ of the Jewish embalmer
rose like a gust of incense—rose and spread through the crypt like
the sweet breath of a newborn blessing, till the air of the
charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable
sweetness. Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any
sensuous influence so soothed my soul.
While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and
myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of
the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality
seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.
I opened my eyes. I looked into the coffin. The face (which had
been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine. ‘Fenella
Stanley!’ I cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon
my father’s brow that self-same message which the passions of a
thousand Romany ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait
hung in the picture-gallery. And the rubies and diamonds and beryls
of the cross as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the
opened lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an
indescribable reflex hue of quivering rose.
Beneath his head I placed the silver casket: I hung the hair-chain
round his neck: I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his
love and the parchment scroll.
Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed. I knew not what or why.
But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to
heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine. Then I
rose, and laying my hand upon my father’s cold brow, I said: ‘You
have forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long
agony. They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling
against itself. You, who suffered so much—who know so well those
flames burning at the heart’s core—those flames before which all the
forces of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and
wind—you have forgiven me. You who knew the meaning of the wild word
Love—you have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like yourself.
You have forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the despoiler of your
tomb: you have removed the curse, and his child—his innocent child—is
free.’ . . .
I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so
buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked
myself: ‘Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse? Do I
really believe that my restoring the amulet has removed it? Have I
really come to this?’
Throughout all these proceedings—yes, even amidst that prayer to
Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father—had my
reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before
described.”
My last instance shall be from D’Arcy’s letter, in which he records the
marvellous events that led to his meeting with Winifred:—
“And now, my dear Aylwin, having acted as a somewhat prosaic reporter
of these wonderful events, I should like to conclude my letter with a
word or two about what took place when I parted from you in the
streets of London. I saw then that your sufferings had been very
great, and since that time they must have been tenfold greater. And
now I rejoice to think that, of all the men in this world who have
ever loved, you, through this very suffering, have been the most
fortunate. As Job’s faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been
tried by the power which you call ‘circumstance’ and which Wilderspin
calls ‘the spiritual world.’ All that death has to teach the mind
and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she
you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms. I, alas!
have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a
beloved mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as
the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows
what the word ‘love’ really means. I have never been a reader of
philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries
have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to
Death—about the final beneficence of Death—that ‘reasonable moderator
and equipoise of justice,’ as Sir Thomas Browne calls him. Equipoise
of justice indeed! He who can read with tolerance such words as
these must have known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman
as you and I understand it. The Elizabethans are full of this
nonsense; but where does Shakespeare, with all his immense
philosophical power, ever show this temper of acquiescence? All his
impeachments of Death have the deep ring of personal
feeling—dramatist though he was. But, what I am going to ask you is,
How shall the modern materialist, who you think is to dominate the
Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow—how shall he
confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down? When Moschus
lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh
birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long,
unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern
materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long
before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath
Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile. Your bitter
experience made you ask materialism, What comfort is there in being
told that death is the very nursery of new life, and that our heirs
are our very selves, if when you take leave of her who was and is
your world it is ‘Vale, vale, in æternum vale’?”
These quotations may be taken as specimens of the passages of decorated
writing which the author, in order to get closer to the imagination of
the reader, mercilessly struck out in proof. Whether he did wisely or
unwisely in striking them out is an interesting question for criticism.
But certainly the reader has only to go through the book with this
criticism in his mind, and he will see that when the story passes into
such lofty speculation as that of the opening sentences of the book, or
into some equally lofty mood of the love passion, the style becomes not
only full of literary qualities, but almost over-full; it becomes a style
which can best be described in his own words about richness of style
which I have quoted from the ‘Athenæum.’ I do not doubt that Mr.
Watts-Dunton was quite right in acting upon Coleridge’s theory; for,
notwithstanding the ‘fairy-like beauty’ of the story it is as convincing
as a story told upon a prosaic subject by Defoe. In fact, it would be
hard to name any novel wherein those laws of means and ends in art which
Mr. Watts-Dunton has formulated in the ‘Athenæum’ are more fully observed
than in ‘Aylwin.’
Madame Galimberti says in the ‘Rivista d’Italia’:—“‘Aylwin’ was begun in
verse, and was written in prose only when the plot, taking, so to say,
the poet by the hand, showed the necessity of a form more in keeping with
the nature of the work; and in ‘The Coming of Love,’ in which the facts
are condensed so as to give full relief to the philosophical motive, the
result is, in my opinion, more perfect.” {339} My remarks upon ‘The
Coming of Love’ will show that I agree with the accomplished wife of the
Italian Minister in placing it above ‘Aylwin’ as a satisfactory work of
art, but that is because I consider ‘The Coming of Love’ the most
important as well as the most original poem that has been published for
many years.
Madame Galimberti touches here upon a very important subject for the
literary student. I may say for myself that I have invariably spoken of
‘Aylwin’ as a poem, and I have done so deliberately. Indeed, I think the
fact that it is a poem is at once its strength and its weakness. It does
not come under the critical canons that are applied to a prose novel or
romance. As a prose novel its one defect is that the quest for mere
beauty is pushed too far; lovely picture follows lovely picture until the
novel reader is inclined at last to cry, ‘Hold, enough!’
In one of his essays on Morris, Mr. Watts-Dunton asks, ‘What is poetic
prose?’ And then follows a passage which must always be borne in mind
when criticizing ‘Aylwin.’
“On no subject in literary criticism,” says he, “has there been a
more persistent misconception than upon this. What is called poetic
prose is generally rhetorical prose, and between rhetoric and poetry
there is a great difference. Poetical prose, we take it, is that
kind of prose which above all other kinds holds in suspense the
essential qualities of poetry. If ‘eloquence is heard and poetry
overheard,’ where shall be placed the tremendous perorations of De
Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin?
Grand and beautiful are such periods as these, no doubt, but prose to
be truly poetical must move far away from them. It must, in a word,
have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except
metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet’s object is
to arouse in the listener an expectancy of cæsuric effects, the great
goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite
direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned
diction that are the poet’s vehicle, but at the same time to avoid
the expectancy of metrical bars. The moment that the regular bars
assert themselves and lead the reader’s ears to expect other bars of
the like kind, sincerity ends.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has given us the best of all canons for
answering the question, ‘What is a poem as distinguished from other forms
of imaginative literature?’ In his essay on Poetry he says:—
“Owing to the fact that the word _ποιητής_ (first used to designate
the poetic artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle seems to have
assumed that the indispensable basis of poetry is invention. He
appears to have thought that a poet is a poet more on account of the
composition of the action than on account of the composition of his
verses. Indeed, he said as much as this. Of epic poetry he declared
emphatically that it produces its imitations either by mere
articulate words or by metre superadded. This is to widen the
definition of poetry so as to include all imaginative literature, and
Plato seems to have given an equally wide meaning to the word
_ποίησις_. Only, while Aristotle considered _ποίησις_ to be an
imitation of the facts of nature, Plato considered it to be an
imitation of the dreams of man. Aristotle ignored, and Plato
slighted, the importance of versification (though Plato on one
occasion admitted that he who did not know rhythm could be called
neither musician nor poet). It is impossible to discuss here the
question whether an imaginative work in which the method is entirely
concrete and the expression entirely emotional, while the form is
unmetrical, is or is not entitled to be called a poem. That there
may be a kind of unmetrical narrative so poetic in motive, so
concrete in diction, so emotional in treatment, as to escape
altogether from those critical canons usually applied to prose, we
shall see when, in discussing the epic, we come to touch upon the
Northern sagas.
“Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted against the dictum
that substance, and not form, is the indispensable basis of poetry
was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the arrangement
of words is really a very fine piece of literary criticism. In his
acute remarks upon the arrangement of the words in the sixteenth book
of the Odyssey, as compared with that in the story of Gyges by
Herodotus, was perhaps first enunciated clearly the doctrine that
poetry is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristotelian theory
as to invention, however, dominated all criticism after as well as
before Dionysius. When Bacon came to discuss the subject (and
afterwards), the only division between the poetical critics was
perhaps between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato as to
what poetry should, and what it should not, imitate. It is curious
to speculate as to what would have been the result had the poets
followed the critics in this matter. Perhaps there are critics of a
very high rank who would class as poems romances so concrete in
method and diction, and so full of poetic energy, as ‘Wuthering
Heights’ and ‘Jane Eyre,’ where we get absolutely all that Aristotle
requires for a poem.”
Now, if this be so in regard to those great romances, it must be still
more so with regard to ‘Aylwin,’ where beauty and nothing but beauty
seems to be the be-all and the end-all of the work.
[Picture: Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff. (From an Oil
Painting at ‘The Pines.’)]
As ‘Aylwin’ was begun in metre, it would be very interesting to know on
what lines the metre was constructed. Readers of ‘Aylwin’ have been
struck with the music of the opening sentences, which are given as an
extract from Philip Aylwin’s book, ‘The Veiled Queen’:—
“Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea
know the sea’s prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy
between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They
know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual
world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and
answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing
tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea,
and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim
sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a
shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it;
when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire,
then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let
loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told
him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when
beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle
as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels,
as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near
at hand, or, at least, not far off.”
Many a reader will echo the words of a writer in ‘Notes and Queries,’ who
says that this passage has haunted him since first he read it: I know it
haunted me after I read it. But I wonder how many critics have read this
passage in connection with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s metrical studies which have
been carried on in the ‘Athenæum’ during more than a quarter of a
century. They are closely connected with what he has said upon Bible
rhythm in his article upon the Psalms, which I have already quoted, and
in many other essays. Mr. Watts-Dunton, acknowledged to be a great
authority on metrical subjects, has for years been declaring that we are
on the verge of a new kind of metrical art altogether—a metrical art in
which the emotions govern the metrical undulations. And I take the above
passage and the following to be examples of what the movement in ‘Aylwin’
would have been if he had not abandoned the project of writing the story
in metre:—
“Then quoth the Ka’dee, laughing until his grinders appeared:
‘Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest,
thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this
story of thine—this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen
was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses
have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for
thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable
fountain of tears.’
Quoth Ja’afar, bowing low his head: ‘Bold is the donkey-driver, O
Ka’dee! and bold the Ka’dee who dares say what he will believe, what
disbelieve—not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah—not knowing in
any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer.’”
Break these passages up into irregular lines, and you get a new metre of
a very emotional kind, governed as to length by the sense pause. Mr.
Watts-Dunton has been arguing for many years that English verse is, as
Coleridge long ago pointed out, properly governed by the number of
accents and not by the number of syllables in a line, and that this
accentual system is governed, or should be governed, by emotion. It is a
singular thing, by the bye, that writer after writer of late has been
arguing over and over again Mr. Watts-Dunton’s arguments, and seems to be
saying a new thing by using the word ‘stress’ for ‘accent.’ ‘Stress’ may
or may not be a better word than ‘accent,’ the word used by Coleridge,
and after him by Mr. Watts-Dunton, but the idea conveyed is one and the
same. I, for my part, believe that rare as new ideas may be in creative
work, they are still rarer in criticism.
Chapter XXI
THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION
AND now a word upon the imaginative power of ‘Aylwin.’ Very much has
been written both in England and on the Continent concerning the source
of the peculiar kind of ‘imaginative vividness’ shown in the story. The
rushing narrative, as has been said, ‘is so fused in its molten stream
that it seems one sentence, and it carries the reader irresistibly along
through pictures of beauty and mystery till he becomes breathless.’ The
truth is, however, that the mere method of the evolution of the story has
a great deal more to do with this than is at first apparent. Upon this
artistic method very little has been written save what I myself said when
it first appeared. If the unequalled grip of the story upon the reader
had been secured by methods as primitive, as unconscious as those of
‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights,’ I should estimate the pure,
unadulterated imaginative force at work even more highly than I now do.
But, as a critic, I must always inquire whether or not a writer’s
imaginative vision is strengthened by constructive power. I must take
into account the aid that the imagination of the writer has received from
his mere self-conscious artistic skill. Now it is not to praise
‘Aylwin,’ but, I fear, to disparage it in a certain sense to say that the
power of the scenes owes much to the mere artistic method, amounting at
times to subtlety. I have heard the greatest of living poets mention
‘Tom Jones,’ ‘Waverley,’ and ‘Aylwin’ as three great novels whose
reception by the outside public has been endorsed by criticism. One of
the signs of Scott’s unique genius was the way in which he invented and
carried to perfection the method of moving towards the dénouement by
dialogue as much as by narrative. This gave a source of new brilliance
to prose fiction, and it was certainly one of the most effective causes
of the enormous success of ‘Waverley.’ This masterpiece opens, it will
be remembered, in distinct imitation of the method of Fielding, but soon
broke into the new dramatic method with which Scott’s name is associated.
But in ‘Waverley’ Scott had not yet begun to use the dramatic method so
freely as to sacrifice the very different qualities imported into the
novel by Fielding, whose method was epic rather than dramatic. I think
Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself somewhere commented upon this, and said that
Scott carried the dramatic method quite as far as it could go without
making the story suffer from that kind of stageyness and artificial
brightness which is fatal to the novel. Scott’s disciple, Dumas, a more
brilliant writer of dialogue than Scott himself, but not so true a one,
carried the dramatic method too far and opened the way to mimics, who
carried it further still. In ‘Aylwin,’ the blending of the two methods,
the epic and the dramatic, is so skilfully done as to draw all the
advantages that can be drawn from both; and this skill must be an
enormous aid to the imaginative vision—an aid which Charlotte and Emily
Brontë had to dispense with: but it is in the arrangement of the material
on self-conscious constructive principles that I am chiefly thinking when
I compare the imaginative vision in ‘Aylwin’ with that in ‘Jane Eyre’ and
‘Wuthering Heights.’ On the whole, no one seems to have studied ‘Aylwin’
from all points of view with so much insight as Madame Galimberti, unless
it be M. Jacottet in ‘La Semaine Littéraire.’ Mr. Watts-Dunton in one of
his essays has himself remarked that nine-tenths of the interest of any
dramatic situation are lost if before approaching it the reader has not
been made to feel an interest in the characters, as Fielding makes us
feel an interest in Tom and Sophia long before they utter a word—indeed,
long before they are introduced at all. This is true, no doubt, and the
contemporary method of beginning a story like the opening of a play with
long dialogues between characters that are strangers to the reader, is
one among the many signs that, so far as securing illusion goes, there is
a real retrogression in fictive art. A play, of course, must open in
this way, but in an acted play the characters come bodily before the
audience as real flesh and blood. They come surrounded by real
accessories. They win our sympathy or else our dislike as soon as we see
them and hear them speak. The dramatic scenes between Jane Eyre and
Rochester would miss half their effect were it not for the picture of
Jane as a child. In ‘Aylwin,’ by the time that there is any introduction
of dramatic dialogue the atmosphere of the story has enveloped us: we
have become so deeply in love with the two children that the most
commonplace words from their lips would have seemed charged with beauty.
This kind of perfection of the novelist’s art, in these days when stories
are written to pass through magazines and newspapers, seemed impossible
till ‘Aylwin’ appeared. It is curious to speculate as to what would have
been the success of the opening chapters of ‘Aylwin’ if an instalment of
the story had first made its appearance in a magazine.
One of the most remarkable features of ‘Aylwin’ is that in spite of the
strength and originality of the mere story and in spite of the fact that
the book is fundamentally the expression of a creed, the character
painting does not in the least suffer from these facts. Striking and new
as the story is, there is nothing mechanical about the structure. The
characters are not, to use a well known phrase of the author’s,
‘plot-ridden’ in the least degree, as are the characters of the great
masters of the plot-novel, Lytton, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, to
mention only those who are no longer with us. Perhaps in order to show
what I mean I ought to go a little into detail here. In ‘Man and Wife,’
for instance, Collins, with his eye only upon his plot, makes the
heroine, a lady whose delicacy of mind and nobility of character are
continually dwelt upon, not only by the author but by a sagacious man of
the world like Sir Peter, who afterwards marries her, succumb to the
animal advances of a brute like Geoffrey. Many instances of the same
sacrifice of everything to plot occur in most of Collins’s other stories,
and as to the ‘long arm of coincidence’ he not only avails himself of
that arm whenever it is convenient to do so, but he positively revels in
his slavery to it. In ‘Armadale,’ for instance, besides scores of
monstrous improbabilities, such as the ship ‘La Grace de Dieu’ coming to
Scotland expressly that Allan Armadale should board her and have a dream
upon her, and such as Midwinter’s being by accident brought into touch
with Allan in a remote village in Devonshire when he was upon the eve of
death, we find coincidences which are not of the smallest use, introduced
simply because the author loves coincidences—such as that of making a
family connection of Armadale’s rescue Miss Gwilt from drowning and get
drowned himself, and thus bring about the devolution of the property upon
Allan Armadale—an entirely superfluous coincidence, for the working power
of this incident could have been secured in countless other ways. ‘No
Name’ bristles with coincidences, such as that most impudent one where
the heroine is at the point of death by destitution, and the one man who
loves her and who had just returned to England passes down the obscure
and squalid street he had never seen before at the very moment when she
is sinking. It is the same with Bulwer Lytton’s novels. In ‘Night and
Morning,’ for instance, people are tossed against each other in London,
the country, or Paris at every moment whensoever the story demands it.
As to Gawtry, one of the few really original villains in modern fiction,
as soon as the story opens we expect him to turn up every moment like a
jack in-the-box; we expect him to meet the hero in the most unlikely
places, and to meet every other character in the same way. Let his
presence be required, and we know that he will certainly turn up to put
things right. But in ‘Aylwin,’ which has been well called by a French
critic, ‘a novel without a villain,’ where sinister circumstance takes
the place of the villain, there is not a single improbable coincidence;
everything flows from a few simple causes, such as the effect upon an
English patrician of love baffled by all kinds of fantastic antagonisms,
the influence of the doctrines of the dead father upon the minds of
several individuals, and the influence of the impact of the characters
upon each other. Another thing to note is that in spite of the strange,
new scenes in which the characters move, they all display that ‘softness
of touch’ upon which the author has himself written so eloquently in one
of his articles in the ‘Athenæum.’ I must find room to quote his words
on this interesting subject:—
“The secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be
this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from
universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader’s
imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this
they achieve by making the portrait seem to be drawn from particular
and peculiar traits instead of from generalities, and especially by
hiding away all purposes—æsthetic, ethic, or political.
One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome softness of
touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary
work with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the
work of the portrait painter there does seem a true analogy as
regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of
characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general
public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it
to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown
upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to
have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a
perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two
great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison
and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger or the two
Shandys, or Corporal Trim, would have ruined the portraits so
completely that they would never have come down to us. Close upon
Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is
painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is limned with
those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of
Dickens. After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it be Mrs.
Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding
to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists
follow Mrs. Gaskell.”
Read in the light of these remarks the characters in ‘Aylwin’ become
still more interesting to the critic. Observe how soft is the touch of
the writer compared with that of a novelist of real though eccentric
genius, Charles Reade. Now and again in Reade’s portraits we get
softness, as in the painting of the delightful Mrs. Dodd and her
daughter, but it is very rare. The contrast between him and Mr.
Watts-Dunton in this regard is most conspicuously seen in their treatment
of members of what are called the upper classes. No doubt Reade does
occasionally catch (what Charles Dickens never catches) that unconscious
accent of high breeding which Thackeray, with all his yearning to catch
it, scarcely ever could catch, save perhaps, in such a character as Lord
Kew, but which Disraeli catches perfectly in St. Aldegonde.
On the appearance of ‘Aylwin’ it was amusing to see how puzzled many of
the critics were when they came to talk about the various classes in
which the various figures moved. How could a man give pictures of
gypsies in their tents, East Enders in their slums, Bohemian painters in
their studios, aristocrats in their country houses, and all of them with
equal vividness? But vividness is not always truth. Some wondered
whether the gypsies were true, when ‘up and spake’ the famous Tarno Rye
himself, Groome, the greatest authority on gypsies in the world, and said
they were true to the life. Following him, ‘up and spake’ Gypsy Smith,
and proclaimed them to be ‘the only pictures of the gypsies that were
true.’ Some wondered whether the painters and Bohemians were rightly
painted, when ‘up and spake’ Mr. Hake—more intimately acquainted with
them than any living man left save W. M. Rossetti and Mr. Sharp—and said
the pictures were as true as photographs. But before I pass on I must
devote a few parenthetical words to the most curious thing connected with
this matter. Not even the most captious critic, as far as I remember,
ventured to challenge the manners of the patricians who play such an
important part in the story. The Aylwin family, as Madame Galimberti has
hinted, belonged to the only patriciate which either Landor or Disraeli
recognized: the old landed untitled gentry. The best delineator of this
class is, of course, Whyte Melville. But those who have read Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon Byron in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English
Literature’ will understand how thoroughly he too has studied this most
interesting class. The hero himself, in spite of all his eccentricity
and in spite of all his Bohemianism, is a patrician—a patrician to the
very marrow. ‘There is not throughout Aylwin’s narrative—a narrative
running to something under 200,000 words—a single wrong note.’ This
opinion I heard expressed by a very eminent writer, who from his own
birth and environment can speak with authority. The way in which Henry
Aylwin as a child is made to feel that his hob-a-nobbing on equal terms
with the ragamuffin of the sands cannot really degrade an English
gentleman; the way in which Henry Aylwin, the hobbledehoy, is made to
feel that he cannot be lowered by living with gypsies, or by marrying the
daughter of ‘the drunken organist who violated my father’s tomb’; the way
in which he says that ‘if society rejects him and his wife, he shall
reject society’;—all this shows a mastery over ‘softness of touch’ in
depicting this kind of character such as not even Whyte Melville has
equalled. Henry Aylwin’s mother, to whom the word trade and plebeianism
were synonymous terms, is the very type of the grande dame, untouched by
the vulgarities of the smart set of her time (for there were vulgar smart
sets then as there were vulgar smart sets in the time of Beau Brummell,
and as there are vulgar smart sets now). Then there is that wonderful
aunt, of whom we see so little but whose influence is so great and so
mischievous. What a type is she of the meaner and more withered branch
of a patrician tree! But the picture of Lord Sleaford is by far the most
vivid portrait of a nobleman that has appeared in any novel since
‘Lothair.’ Thackeray never ‘knocked off’ a nobleman so airily and so
unconsciously as this delightful lordling, whose portrait Mr.
Watts-Dunton has ‘blown’ upon his canvas in the true Gainsborough way. I
wish I could have got permission to give more than a bird’s-eye glance at
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s wide experience of all kinds of life, but I can only
touch upon what the reading public is already familiar with. At one
period of his life—the period during which he and Whistler were brought
together—the period when ‘Piccadilly,’ upon which they were both engaged,
was having its brief run, Mr. Watts-Dunton mixed very largely with what
was then, as now, humourously called ‘Society.’ It has been said that
‘for a few years not even “Dicky Doyle” or Jimmy Whistler went about
quite so much as Theodore Watts.’ I have seen Whistler’s presentation
copy of the first edition of ‘The Gentle Art of Making Enemies’ with this
inscription:—‘To Theodore Watts, the Worldling.’ Below this polite flash
of persiflage the famous butterfly flaunts its elusive wings. But this
was only Whistler’s fun. Mr. Watts-Dunton was never, we may be sure, a
worldling. Still one wonders that the most romantic of poets ever fell
so low as to go into ‘Society’ with a big S. Perhaps it was because,
having studied life among the gypsies, life among the artists, life among
the literary men of the old Bohemia, life among the professional and
scientific classes, he thought he would study the butterflies too.
However, he seems soon to have got satiated, for he suddenly dropped out
of the smart Paradise. I mention this episode because it alone, apart
from the power of his dramatic imagination, is sufficient to show why in
Henry Aylwin he has so successfully painted for us the finest picture
that has ever been painted of a true English gentleman tossed about in
scenes and among people of all sorts and retaining the pristine bloom of
England’s patriciate through it all.
In my essay upon Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English
Literature,’ I made this remark:—“Notwithstanding the vogue of ‘Aylwin,’
there is no doubt that it is on his poems, such as ‘The Coming of Love,’
‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ ‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice,’ ‘John the
Pilgrim,’ ‘The Omnipotence of Love,’ ‘The Three Fausts,’ ‘What the Silent
Voices Said,’ ‘Apollo in Paris,’ ‘The Wood-haunters’ Dream,’ ‘The Octopus
of the Golden Isles,’ ‘The Last Walk with Jowett from Boar’s Hill,’ and
‘Omar Khayyàm,’ that Mr. Watts-Dunton’s future position will mainly
rest.”
I did not say this rashly. But in order to justify my opinion I must
quote somewhat copiously from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon absolute
and relative vision, in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’ It has been well
said that ‘in judging of the seeing power of any work of imagination,
either in prose or in verse, it is now necessary always to try the work
by the critical canons upon absolute and relative vision laid down in
this treatise.’ If we turn to it, we shall find that absolute vision is
defined to be that vision which in its highest dramatic exercise is
unconditioned by the personal temperament of the writer, while relative
vision is defined to be that vision which is more or less conditioned by
the personal temperament of the writer. And then follows a long
discussion of various great imaginative works in which the two kinds of
vision are seen:—
“For the achievement of most imaginative work relative vision will
suffice. If we consider the matter thoroughly, in many forms—which
at first sight might seem to require absolute vision—we shall find
nothing but relative vision at work. Between relative and absolute
vision the difference is this, that the former only enables the
imaginative writer even in its very highest exercise, to make his own
individuality, or else humanity as represented by his own
individuality, live in the imagined situation; the latter enables him
in its highest exercise to make special individual characters other
than the poet’s own live in the imagined situation. In the very
highest reaches of imaginative writing art seems to become art no
longer—it seems to become the very voice of Nature herself. The cry
of Priam when he puts to his lips the hand that slew his son, is not
merely the cry of a bereaved and aged parent; it is the cry of the
individual king of Troy, and expresses above everything else that
most naïve, pathetic, and winsome character. Put the cry into the
mouth of the irascible and passionate Lear, and it would be entirely
out of keeping. While the poet of relative vision, even in its very
highest exercise, can only, when depicting the external world, deal
with the general, the poet of absolute vision can compete with Nature
herself and deal with both general and particular.”
Now, the difference between ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Aylwin’ is this,
that in ‘Aylwin’ the impulse is, or seems to be, lyrical, and therefore
too egoistic for absolute vision to be achieved. Of course, if we are to
take Henry Aylwin in the novel to be an entirely dramatic character, then
that character is so full of vitality that it is one of the most
remarkable instances of purely dramatic imagination that we have had in
modern times. For there is nothing that he says or does that is not
inevitable from the nature of the character placed in the dramatic
situation. Those who are as familiar as I am with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
prose writings outside ‘Aylwin’ find it extremely difficult to identify
the brilliant critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ full of ripe wisdom and sagacity,
with the impassioned boy of the story. Indeed, I should never have
dreamed of identifying the character with the author any more than I
should have thought of identifying Philip Aylwin with the author had it
not been for the fact that Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to one of the
constantly renewed editions of his book, seems to suggest that
identification himself. I have already quoted the striking passage in
the introduction to the later editions of the book in which this
identification seems to be suggested. But, matters being as they are
with regard to the identification of the hero of the prose story with the
author, it is to ‘The Coming of Love’ that we must for the most part turn
for proof that the writer is possessed of absolute vision. Percy Aylwin
and Rhona are there presented in the purely dramatic way, and they give
utterance to their emotions, not only untrammelled by the lyricism of the
dramatist, but untrammelled also, as I have before remarked, by the
exigencies of a conscious dramatic structure. In no poetry of our time
can there be seen more of that absolute vision so lucidly discoursed upon
in the foregoing extract. From her first love-letter Rhona leaps into
life, and she seems to be more elaborately painted not only than any
woman in recent poetry, but any woman in recent literature. Percy Aylwin
lives also with almost equal vitality. I need not give examples of this
here, for later I shall quote freely from the poem in order that the
reader may form his own judgment, unbiassed by the views of myself or any
other critic.
With regard to ‘Aylwin,’ however, apart from the character of the hero,
who is drawn lyrically or dramatically, according, as I have said, to the
evidence that he is or is not the author himself, there are still many
instances of a vision that may be called absolute. Among the many
letters from strangers that reached the author when ‘Aylwin’ first
appeared was one from a person who, like Henry Aylwin, had been made lame
by accident. This gentleman said that he felt sure that the author of
‘Aylwin’ had also been lame, and gave several instances from the story
which had made him come to this conclusion. One was the following:—
“‘Shall we go and get some strawberries?’ she said, as we passed to
the back of the house. ‘They are quite ripe.’
But my countenance fell at this. I was obliged to tell her that I
could not stoop.
‘Ah! but I can, and I will pluck them and give them to you. I should
like to do it. Do let me, there’s a good boy.’
I consented, and hobbled by her side to the verge of the
strawberry-beds. But when I foolishly tried to follow her, I stuck
ignominiously, with my crutches sunk deep in the soft mould of rotten
leaves. Here was a trial for the conquering hero of the coast. I
looked into her face to see if there was not, at last, a laugh upon
it. That cruel human laugh was my only dread. To everything but
ridicule I had hardened myself; but against that I felt helpless.
I looked into her face to see if she was laughing at my lameness.
No: her brows were merely knit with anxiety as to how she might best
relieve me. This surpassingly beautiful child, then, had evidently
accepted me—lameness and all—crutches and all—as a subject of
peculiar interest.
As I slowly approached the child, I could see by her forehead (which
in the sunshine gleamed like a globe of pearl), and especially by her
complexion, that she was uncommonly lovely, and I was afraid lest she
should look down before I got close to her, and so see my crutches
before her eyes encountered my face.”
As a matter of fact, however, the author never had been lame.
The following passages have often been quoted as instances of the way in
which a wonderful situation is realized as thoroughly as if it had been
of the most commonplace kind:—
“And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the
ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this
narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?
The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess
not what I thought, as I went on studying my father’s book, its
strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book
all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days
passed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour
or two, and then returned home and went to bed—but not to sleep. For
me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be
quelled—till the sound of Winnie’s song in the street could be
stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of
bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and, taking out the amulet,
proceeded to examine the facets as I did once before when I heard in
the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father—
‘Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that
materialism is intolerable—is hell itself—to the heart that has known
a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness,
to believe in the word “never”! You will find that you dare not
leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray
of hope.’
And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a
waking dream.
The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a
start of horror, and cried, ‘Whose face?’ Opposite to me there
seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross
upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as if the
pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh—where had I
seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his
bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull
lineaments. But upon the picture of ‘The Sibyl’ in the
portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!
‘It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,’ I exclaimed.
Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.
And then Sinfi Lovell’s voice seemed murmuring in my ears, ‘Fenella
Stanley’s dead and dust, and that’s why she can make you put that
cross in your feyther’s tomb, and she will, she will.’
I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin.
Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and
gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain
that was a pleasure wild and new. I was feeling the facets. But the
tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache were tears of
laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, ‘For good or for
ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.’ . . .
What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing
the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred
symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse—what agonies were
mine as I sat there sobbing the one word ‘Winnie’—could be understood
by myself alone, the latest blossom of the passionate blood that for
generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins. . . .
I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And
while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for
whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were
done)—scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the
executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his
bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella
Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a
hand-valise: ‘Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to
consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a
deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be
impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and close it
again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our
skill. And as burglars’ jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on
our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and
a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the
palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark.’”
But after all I am unable to express any opinion worth expressing upon
the chief point which would decide the question as to whether the
imagination at work in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is lyrical or
dramatic, because I do not know whether, like Henry Aylwin and Percy
Aylwin, the author has a dash of Romany blood in his veins. If he has
not that dash, and I certainly never heard that he has, and neither
Groome’s words in the ‘Bookman’ nor ‘Gypsy Smith’s’ words can be
construed into an expression of opinion on the subject, then I will say
with confidence that his delineation of two English gentleman with an
ancestral Romany strain so like and yet so unlike as Henry Aylwin and
Percy Aylwin could only have been achieved by a wonderful exercise of
absolute vision. It was this that struck the late Grant Allen so
forcibly. On the other hand, if he has that strain, then, as I have said
before, it is not in the story but in the poem that we must look for the
best dramatic character drawing. On this most interesting subject no one
can speak but himself, and he has not spoken. But here is what he has
said upon the similarity and the contrast between Percy and Henry
Aylwin:—
“Certain parts of ‘The Coming of Love’ were written about the same
time as ‘Aylwin.’ The two Aylwins, Henry and Percy, were then very
distinct in my own mind; they are very distinct now. And I confess
that the possibility of their being confounded with each other had
never occurred to me. A certain similarity between the two there
must needs be, seeing that the blood of the same Romany ancestress,
Fenella Stanley, flows in the veins of both. I say there must needs
be this similarity, because the ancestress was Romany. For, without
starting the inquiry here as to whether or not the Romanies as a race
are superior or inferior to all or any of the great European races
among which they move, I will venture to affirm that in the Romanies
the mysterious energy which the evolutionists call ‘the prepotency of
transmission’ in races is specially strong—so strong, indeed, that
evidences of Romany blood in a family may be traced down for several
generations. It is inevitable, therefore, that in each of the
descendants of Fenella Stanley the form taken by the love-passion
should show itself in kindred ways. But the reader who will give a
careful study to the characters of Henry and Percy Aylwin will come
to the conclusion, I think, that the similarity between the two is
observable in one aspect of their characters only. The intensity of
the love-passion in each assumes a spiritualizing and mystical form.”
Chapter XXII
A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES
ONE thing seems clear to me: having fully intended to make Winifred the
heroine of ‘Alwyn’ round whom the main current of interest should
revolve, the author failed to do so. And the reason of his failure is
that Winifred has to succumb to the superior vitality of Sinfi’s
commanding figure. For the purpose of telling the story of Winifred and
bringing out her character he conceived and introduced this splendid
descendant of Fenella Stanley, and then found her, against his will,
growing under his hand until, at last, she pushed his own beloved heroine
off her pedestal, and stood herself for all time. Never did author love
his heroine as Mr. Watts-Dunton loves Winifred, and there is nothing so
curious in all fiction as the way in which he seems at times to resent
Sinfi’s dominance over the Welsh heroine; and this explains what readers
have sometimes said about his ‘unkindness to Sinfi.’
It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the reader’s heroine.
When Madox Brown read the story in manuscript, he became greatly
enamoured of Sinfi, and talked about her constantly. It was the same
with Mr. Swinburne, who says that ‘Aylwin’ is the only novel he ever read
in manuscript, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it in
type. Mr. George Meredith in a letter said:—“I am in love with Sinfi.
Nowhere can fiction give us one to match her, not even the ‘Kriegspiel’
heroine, who touched me to the deeps. Winifred’s infancy has infancy’s
charm. The young woman is taking. But all my heart has gone to Sinfi.
Of course it is part of her character that her destiny should point to
the glooms. The sun comes to me again in her conquering presence. I
could talk of her for hours. The book has this defect,—it leaves in the
mind a cry for a successor.” And the author of ‘Kriegspiel’ himself, F.
H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as the true heroine of the story. “In Sinfi
Lovell,” says he, “Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have scored a magnificent
success had he achieved nothing more than this most splendid
figure—supremely clever but utterly illiterate, eloquent but
ungrammatical, heroic but altogether womanly. Winifred is good, and so
too is Henry Aylwin himself, and so are many of the minor characters (the
mother, for instance, the aunt, and Mrs. Gudgeon), but it is as the
tragedy of Sinfi’s sacrifice that ‘Aylwin’ should take its place in
literature.” Yes, it seems cruel to tell the author this, but Sinfi, and
not Winifred, with all her charm, is evidently the favourite of his
English public. That admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in
the ‘Daily News’ that ‘Sinfi Lovell is one of the most finished studies
of its type and kind in all romantic literature.’
[Picture: Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at ‘The Pines.’)]
I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel Berners. In the first
place, while Sinfi is the crowning type of the Romany chi, Isopel is, as
the author has pointed out, the type of the ‘Anglo-Saxon road girl’ with
a special antagonism to Romany girls. Grand as is the character of
Borrow’s Isopel Berners, she is not in the least like Sinfi Lovell. And
I may add that she is not really like any other of the heroic women who
figure in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s gallery of noble women. It is, however,
interesting here to note that Mr. Watts-Dunton has a special sympathy
with women of this heroic type and a special strength of hand in
delineating them. There is nothing in them of Isopel’s hysterical tears.
Once only does Sinfi, in the nobility of her affection for Aylwin, yield
to weakness. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathy with this kind of woman is
apparent in his eulogy of ‘Shirley’:—
“Note that it is not enough for the ideal English girl to be
beautiful and healthy, brilliant and cultivated, generous and loving:
she must be brave, there must be in her a strain of Valkyrie; she
must be of the high blood of Brynhild, who would have taken Odin
himself by the throat for the man she loved. That is to say, that,
having all the various charms of English women, the ideal English
girl must top them all with that quality which is specially the
English man’s, just as the English hero, the Nelson, the Sydney,
having all the various glories of other heroes, must top them all
with that quality which is specially the English woman’s—tenderness.
What we mean is, that there is a symmetry and a harmony in these
matters; that just as it was an English sailor who said, ‘Kiss me,
Hardy,’ when dying on board the ‘Victory’—just as it was an English
gentleman who on the burning ‘Amazon,’ stood up one windy night,
naked and blistered, to make of himself a living screen between the
flames and his young wife; so it was an Englishwoman who threw her
arms round that fire-screen, and plunged into the sea; and an
Englishwoman who, when bitten by a dog, burnt out the bite from her
beautiful arm with a red-hot poker, and gave special instructions how
she was to be smothered when hydrophobia should set in.”
But Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, in his sonnet, ‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s
Funeral Pyre,’ so powerfully illustrated by Mr. Byam Shaw, has given us
in fourteen lines a picture of feminine courage and stoicism that puts
even Charlotte Brontë’s picture of Shirley in the shade:—
With blue eyes fixed on joy and sorrow past,
Tall Brynhild stands on Sigurd’s funeral pyre;
She stoops to kiss his mouth, though forks of fire
Rise fighting with the reek and wintry blast;
She smiles, though earth and sky are overcast
With shadow of wings that shudder of Asgard’s ire;
She weeps, but not because the gods conspire
To quell her soul and break her heart at last.
“Odin,” she cries, “it is for gods to droop!—
Heroes! we still have man’s all-sheltering tomb,
Where cometh peace at last, whate’er may come:
Fate falters, yea, the very Norns shall stoop
Before man’s courage, naked, bare of hope,
Standing against all Hell and Death and Doom.
Rhona Boswell, too, under all her playful humour, is of this strain, as
we see in that sonnet on ‘Kissing the Maybuds’ in ‘The Coming of Love’
(given on page 406 of this book).
As Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ are in many ways of special interest, I
will for a moment digress from the main current of my argument, and say a
few words about it. Of course as the gypsies figure so largely in this
story, there were very few writers competent to review it from the Romany
point of view. Leland was living when it appeared, but he was residing
on the Continent; moreover, at his age, and engrossed as he was, it was
not likely that he would undertake to review it. There was another
Romany scholar, spoken of with enthusiasm by Groome—I allude to Mr.
Sampson, of Liverpool, who has since edited Borrow’s ‘Romany Rye’ for
Messrs. Methuen, and who is said to know more of Welsh Romany than any
Englishman ever knew before. At that time, however, he was almost
unknown. Finally, there was Groome himself, whose articles in the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ had proclaimed
him to be the greatest living gypsologist. The editor of the ‘Bookman,’
being anxious to get a review of the book from the most competent writer
he could find, secured Groome himself. I can give only a few sentences
from the review. Groome, it will be seen, does not miss the opportunity
of flicking in his usual satirical manner the omniscience of some popular
novelists:—
“Novelty and truth,” he says, “are ‘Aylwin’s’ chief characteristics,
a rare combination nowadays. Our older novelists—those at least
still held in remembrance—wrote only of what they knew, or of what
they had painfully mastered. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
Sterne, Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and
George Eliot belong to the foremost rank of these; for types of the
second or the third may stand Marryat, Lever, Charles Reade, James
Grant, Surtees, Whyte Melville, and Wilkie Collins. But now we have
changed all that; the maximum of achievement seldom rises above
school board nescience. With a few exceptions (one could count them
on the ten fingers) our present-day novelists seem to write only
about things of which they clearly know nothing. One of the most
popular lays the scene of a story in Paris: the Seine there is tidal,
it rolls a murdered corpse upwards. In another work by her a gambler
shoots himself in a cab. ‘I trust,’ cries a friend who has heard the
shot, ‘he has missed.’ ‘No,’ says a second friend, ‘he was a dead
shot.’ Mr. X. writes a realistic novel about betting. It is crammed
with weights, acceptances, and all the rest of it; but, alas! on an
early page a servant girl wins 12_s._ 6_d._ at 7 to 1. Mrs. Y. takes
her heroine to a Scottish deer-forest: it is full of primeval oaks.
Mrs. Z. sends her hero out deerstalking. Following a hill-range, he
sights a stag upon the opposite height, fires at it, and kills his
benefactor, who is strolling below in the glen. And Mr. Ampersand in
his masterpiece shows up the littleness of the Establishment: his
ritualistic church presents the inconceivable conjunction of the Ten
Commandments and a gorgeous rood-screen. I have drawn upon memory
for these six examples, but subscribers to Mudie’s should readily
recognize the books I mean; they have sold by thousands on thousands.
‘Aylwin’ is not such as these. There is much in it of the country,
of open-air life, of mountain scenery, of artistic fellowship, of
Gypsydom; it might be called the novel of the two Bohemias.”
Many readers have expressed the desire to know something about the
prototypes of Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. The following words from
the Introduction to the 20th edition (called the ‘Snowdon Edition’) may
therefore be read with interest:—
“Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I
enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years—during the time
when he lived in Hereford Square. When, some seven or eight years
ago, I brought out an edition of ‘Lavengro,’ I prefaced that
delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Borrow’s gypsy
characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most
remarkable ‘Romany Chi’ that had ever been met with in the part of
East Anglia known to Borrow and myself—Sinfi Lovell. I described her
playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I
contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl
Isopel Berners.
Since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ I have
received very many letters from English and American readers
inquiring whether ‘the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to
“Lavengro” is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of “Aylwin,” and also
whether ‘the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the
same as the Rhona of “The Coming of Love?”’ The evidence of the
reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the
appearance of Rhona’s first letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ where the poem
was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the
sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very
ill,—near her death indeed,—urging me to tell her whether Rhona’s
love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real
gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer
the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the
Sinfi of ‘Aylwin’ and the Sinfi described in my introduction to
‘Lavengro’ are one and the same character—except that the story of
the child Sinfi’s weeping for the ‘poor dead Gorgios’ in the
churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the gypsies,
not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded
to in the now famous sonnet describing ‘the walking lord of gypsy
lore,’ Borrow; by his most intimate friend, Dr. Gordon Hake.
Now that so many of the gryengroes (horse-dealers), who form the
aristocracy of the Romany race, have left England for America, it is
natural enough that to some readers of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of
Love,’ my pictures of Romany life seem a little idealized. The
‘Times,’ in a kindly notice of ‘The Coming of Love,’ said that the
kind of gypsies there depicted are a very interesting people, ‘unless
the author has flattered them unduly.’ Those who best knew the gypsy
women of that period will be the first to aver that I have not
flattered them unduly.”
It is Winifred who shares, not only with Henry Aylwin, but also with the
author himself, that love of the wind which he revealed in the ‘Athenæum’
many years before ‘Aylwin’ was published. I may quote this passage in
praise of the wind as an example of the way in which his imaginative work
and his critical work are often interwoven:—
“There is no surer test of genuine nature instinct than this.
Anybody can love sunshine. No people had less of the nature instinct
than the Romans, but they could enjoy the sun; they even took their
solaria or sun-baths, and gave them to their children. And, if it
may be said that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be
said of the French! None but a born child of the tent could ever
have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written in
‘Les Travailleurs de la Mer,’ as though they were the ministers of
Ahriman. ‘From Ormuzd, not from Ahriman, ye come.’ And here,
indeed, is the difference between the two nationalities. Love of the
wind has made England what she is; dread of the wind has greatly
contributed to make France what she is. The winds are the breathings
of the Great Mother. Under the ‘olden spell’ of dumbness, nature can
yet speak to us by her winds. It is they that express her every
mood, and, if her mood is rough at times, her heart is kind. This is
why the true child of the open-air—never mind how much he may suffer
from the wind—loves it, loves it as much when it comes and ‘takes the
ruffian billows by the top’ to the peril of his life, as when it
comes from the sweet South. In the wind’s most boisterous moods,
such as those so splendidly depicted by Dana in the doubling of Cape
Horn, there is an exhilaration, a fierce delight, in struggling with
it. It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes about the wind,
and that which the wind so loves—the snow.”
Chapter XXIII
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION
AND now as to the real inner meaning of ‘Alwyin,’ about which so much has
been written. “‘Aylwin,’” says Groome, “is a passionate love-story, with
a mystical idée mère. For the entire dramatic action revolves around a
thought that is coming more and more to the front—the difference, namely,
between a materialistic and a spiritualistic cosmogony.” And Dr. Nicoll,
in his essay on “The Significance of ‘Aylwin,’” in the ‘Contemporary
Review,’ says:—
“Every serious student will see at a glance that ‘Aylwin’ is a
concrete expression of the author’s criticism of life and literature,
and even—though this must be said with more reserve—a concrete
expression of his theory of the universe. This theory I will venture
to define as an optimistic confronting of the new cosmogony of growth
on which the author has for long descanted. Throughout all his
writings there is evidence of a mental struggle as severe as George
Eliot’s with that materialistic reading of the universe which seemed
forced upon thinkers when the doctrine of evolution passed from
hypothesis to an accepted theory. Those who have followed Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s writings in the ‘Examiner’ and in the ‘Athenæum’ must
have observed with what passionate eagerness he insisted that
Darwinism, if properly understood, would carry us no nearer to
materialism than did the spiritualistic cosmogonies of old, unless it
could establish abiogenesis against biogenesis. As every experiment
of every biologist has failed to do so, a new spiritualist cosmogony
must be taught.”
And yet the student of ‘Aylwin’ must bear in mind that some critics,
taking the very opposite view, have said that its final teaching is not
meant to be mystical at all, but anti-mystical—that what to Philip Aylwin
and his disciples seems so mystical is all explained by the operation of
natural laws. This theory reminds me of a saying of Goethe’s about the
enigmatic nature of all true and great works of art. I forget the exact
words, but they set me thinking about the chameleon-like iridescence of
great poems and dramas.
* * * * *
With regard to the fountain-head of all the mysticism of the story,
Philip Aylwin, much has been said. Philip is the real protagonist of the
story—he governs, as I have said, the entire dramatic action from his
grave, and illustrates at every point Sinfi Lovell’s saying, ‘You must
dig deep to bury your daddy.’ Everything that occurs seems to be the
result of the father’s speculations, and the effect of them upon other
minds like that of his son and that of Wilderspin.
The appearance of this new epic of spiritual love came at exactly the
right moment—came when a new century was about to dawn which will throw
off the trammels of old modes of thought. While I am writing these lines
Mr. Balfour at the British Association has been expounding what must be
called ‘Aylwinism,’ and (as I shall show in the last chapter of this
book) saying in other words what Henry Aylwin’s father said in ‘The
Veiled Queen.’ In the preface to the edition of ‘Aylwin’ in the ‘World’s
Classics’ the author says:—
“The heart-thought of this book being the peculiar doctrine in Philip
Aylwin’s ‘Veiled Queen,’ and the effect of it upon the fortunes of
the hero and the other characters, the name ‘The Renascence of
Wonder’ was the first that came to my mind when confronting the
difficult question of finding a name for a book that is at once a
love-story and an expression of a creed. But eventually I decided,
and I think from the worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply
the name of the hero.
The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed, did
not escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame
Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which
she made in the ‘Rivista d’Italia,’ gave great attention to its
central idea; so did M. Maurice Muret, in the ‘Journal des Débats’;
so did M. Henri Jacottet in ‘La Semaine Littéraire.’ Mr. Baker,
again, in his recently published ‘Guide to Fiction,’ described
‘Aylwin’ as “an imaginative romance of modern days, the moral idea of
which is man’s attitude in face of the unknown, or, as the writer
puts it, ‘the renascence of wonder.’” With regard to the phrase
itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of ‘Aylwin’—the
twenty-second edition—I made the following brief reply to certain
questions that have been raised by critics both in England and on the
Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, ‘The Renascence of
Wonder,’ ‘is used to express that great revived movement of the soul
of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of
expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of
Rossetti.’
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, ‘The one great event of
my life has been the reading of “The Veiled Queen,” your father’s
book of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the
mind of man.’ And further on he says that his own great picture
symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin’s
vignette. Since the original writing of ‘Aylwin,’ many years ago, I
have enlarged upon its central idea in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’
in the introductory essay to the third volume of ‘Chambers’s
Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ and in other places. Naturally,
therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately
Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has
taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon the ‘Renascence of
Wonder in Religion.’
Mr. Watts-Dunton then quotes Dr. Nicoll’s remarks upon the Logia recently
discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund. He shows how men came to
see ‘once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man’s
destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural,
of the lifelong struggle of soul, of the power of the unseen.’
“The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately be used as a
motto for ‘Aylwin’ and also for its sequel ‘The Coming of Love: Rhona
Boswell’s Story.’”
When ‘Aylwin’ first appeared, the editor of a well-known journal sent
it to me for review. I read it: never shall I forget that reading.
I was in Ireland at the time—an Irish Wedding Guest at an Irish
Wedding. Now an Irish Wedding is more joyous than any novel, and
Irish girls are lovelier than any romance. A duel between Life and
Literature! Picture it! Behold the Irish Wedding Guest spell-bound
by a story-teller as cunning as ‘The Ancient Mariner’ himself! He
heareth the bridal music, but Aylwin continueth his tale: he cannot
choose but hear, until ‘The Curse’ of the ‘The Moonlight Cross’ of
the Gnostics is finally expiated, and Aylwin and Winnie see in the
soul of the sunset ‘The Dukkeripen of the Trushùl,’ the blessed Cross
of Rose and Gold. Amid the ‘merry din’ of the Irish Wedding Feast
the Irish Wedding Guest read and wrote. And among other lyrical
things, he said that ‘since Shakespeare created Ophelia there has
been nothing in literature so moving, so pathetic, so unimaginably
sorrowful as the madness of Winnie Wynne.’ And he also said that
“the majority of readers will delight in ‘Aylwin’ as the most
wonderful of love stories, but as the years go by an ever increasing
number will find in it the germ of a new religion, a clarified
spiritualism, free from charlatanry, a solace and a consolation for
the soul amid the bludgeonings of circumstance and the cruelties of
fate.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton, when I told him that I was going to write this book,
urged me to moderate my praise and to call into action the critical power
that he was good enough to say that I possessed. He especially asked me
not to repeat the above words, the warmth of which, he said, might be
misconstrued; but the courage of my opinions I will exercise so long as I
write at all. The ‘newspaper cynics’ that once were and perhaps still
are strong, I have always defied and always will defy. I am glad to see
that there is one point of likeness between us of the younger generation
and the great one to which Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious friends
belong. We are not afraid and we are not ashamed of being enthusiastic.
This, also, I hope, will be a note of the twentieth century.
No doubt mine was a bold prophecy to utter in a rapid review of a
romance, but time has shown that it was not a rash one. The truth is
that the real vogue of ‘Aylwin’ as a message to the soul is only
beginning. Five years have elapsed since the publication of ‘Aylwin,’
and during that time it has, I think, passed into twenty-four editions in
England alone, the latest of all these editions being the beautiful
‘Arvon Edition,’ not to speak of the vast issue in sixpenny form.
I will now quote the words of a very accomplished scholar and critic upon
the inner meaning of ‘Aylwin’ generally. They appeared in the ‘Saturday
Review’ of October 1904, and they show that the interest in the book, so
far from waning, is increasing:—
“Public taste has for once made a lucky shot, and we are only too
pleased to be able to put an item to the credit of an account in
taste, where the balance is so heavily on the wrong side. How
‘Aylwin’ ever came to be a popular success is hard indeed to
understand. We cannot wonder at the doubts of a popular reception
confessed to by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his dedication of the latest
edition to Mr. Ernest Rhys. How did a book, notable for its poetry
and subtlety of thought, come to appeal to an English public? That
it should have a vogue in Wales was natural; Welsh patriotism would
assure a certain success, though by itself it could not indeed have
made the book the household word it has now become throughout all
Wales. And undoubtedly its Welsh reception has been the more
intelligent; it has been welcomed there for the qualities that most
deserved a welcome; while in England we fear that in many quarters it
has rather been welcomed in spite of them. The average English man
and woman do not like mystery and distrust poetry. They have little
sympathy with the ‘renascence of wonder,’ which some new passages
unfold to us in the Arvon edition, passages originally omitted for
fear of excessive length and now restored from the MS. We are glad
to have them, for they illustrate further the intellectual motive of
the book. We are of those who do not care to take ‘Aylwin’ merely as
a novel.”
These words remind me of two reviews of ‘Aylwin,’ one by Mr. W. P. Ryan,
a fellow-countryman of mine, which was published when ‘Aylwin’ first
appeared, the other by an eminent French writer.
“The salient impression on the reader is that he is looking full into
deep reaches of life and spirituality rather than temporary pursuits
and mundane ambitions. In this regard, in its freedom from
littleness, its breadth of life, its exaltation of mood, its sense of
serene issues that do not pass with the changing fashions of a
generation, the book is almost epic.
But ‘Aylwin’ has yet other sides. It is a vital and seizing story.
The girl-heroine is a beautiful presentment, and the struggle with
destiny, when, believing in the efficacy of a mystic’s curse she
loses her reason, and flies from poignantly idyllic life to harrowing
life, her stricken lover in her wake, is nearly Greek in its
intensity and pathos. The long, long quest through the mountain
magic of Wales, the wandering spheres of Romany-land, and the
art-reaches of London, could only be made real and convincing by
triumphant art. A less expert pioneer would enlarge his effects in
details that would dissipate their magic; Mr. Watts-Dunton knows that
one inspired touch is worth many uninspired chapters, as Shakespeare
knew that ‘she should have died hereafter.’
Death came on her like an untimely frost,
Upon the fairest flower of all the field.
or
Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
is worth an afternoon of emphasis, a night of mystical elaboration.
Incidentally, the Celtic and Romany types of character reveal their
essence. Here, too, the author preserves the artistic unities.
Delightful as one realizes these characters to be, full-blooded
personalities though they are, it is still their spirit, and through
it the larger spirit of their race, that shines clearest. Their
story is all realistic, and yet it leaves the flavour of a fairy tale
of Regeneration. At first sight one is inclined to speak of their
beautiful kinship with Nature; but the truth is that Nature and they
together are seen with spiritual eyes; that they and Nature are
different but kindred embodiments of the underlying, all-extending,
universal soul; that Henry’s love, and Winnie’s rapture, and
Snowdon’s magic, and Sinfi’s crwth, and the little song of y Wydffa,
and the glorious mountain dawn are but drops and notes in a melodic
mystic ocean, of which the farthest stars and the deepest loves are
kindred and inevitable parts—parts of a whole, of whose ministry we
hardly know the elements, yet are cognisant that our highest joy is
to feel in radiant moments that we, too, are part of the harmony. In
idyll, despair or tragedy, the beauty of ‘Aylwin’ is that always the
song of the divine in humanity is beneath it. Everything merges into
one consistent, artistically suggested, spiritual conception of life;
love tried, tortured, finally rewarded as the supreme force utilized
to drive home the intolerable negation and atrophy of materialism; in
Henry’s gnostic father, in the scientific Henry himself, the Romany
Sinfi, Winnie whose nature is a song, Wilderspin who believes that
his model is a heavenly visitant with an immaterial body, D’Arcy who
stands for Rossetti, the end is the same; and the striking trait is
the felicity with which so many dissimilar personalities, while
playing the drama of divergent actuality to the full, yet realize and
illustrate, without apparent manipulation by the author, the one
abiding spiritual unity.
In execution, ‘Aylwin’ is far above the accomplished English
novel-work of latter years; as a conception of life it surely
transcends all. The ‘schools’ we have known: the realistic, the
romantic, the quasi-historical, the local, seem but parts of the
whole when their motives are measured with the idea that permeates
this novel. They take drear or gallant roads through limited lands;
it rises like a stately hill from which a world is clearer, above and
beyond whose limits there are visions, Voices, and the verities.”
With equal eloquence M. Jacottet on the same day wrote about “Aylwin” in
‘La Semaine Littéraire’:—
“The central idea of this poetic book is that of love stronger than
death, love elevating the soul to a mystical conception of the
universe. It is a singular fact that at the moment when England,
intoxicated with her successes, seems to have no room for thought
except with regard to her fleet and her commerce, and allows herself
to be dazzled by dreams of universal empire, the book in vogue should
be Mr. Watts-Dunton’s romance—the most idealistic, the farthest
removed from the modern Anglo-Saxon conception of life that he could
possibly conceive. But this fact has often been observable in
literary history. Is not the true charm of letters that of giving to
the soul respite from the brutalities of contemporary events?”
Chapter XXIV
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR
THE character of Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin’ stands as entirely alone among
humourous characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs.
Partridge. In my own review of ‘Aylwin’ I thus noted the entirely new
kind of humour which characterizes it:—“To one aspect of this book we
have not yet alluded, namely, its humour. Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the
drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is inimitable,
with her quaint saying: ‘I shall die a-larfin’, they say in Primrose
Court, and so I shall—unless I die a-crying.’” Few critics have done
justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the ‘Times’ said: ‘In Mrs. Gudgeon, one
of his characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what
seems to be a new comic figure,’ and the ‘Saturday Review’ singled her
out as being the triumph of the book”. Could she really have been a real
character? Could there ever have existed in the London of the
mid-Victorian period a real flesh and blood costermonger so rich in
humour that her very name sheds a glow of laughter over every page in
which it appears? According to Mr. Hake, she was suggested by a real
woman, and this makes me almost lament my arrival in London too late to
make her acquaintance. “With regard to the most original character of
the story,” says Mr. Hake, “those who knew Clement’s Inn, where I myself
once resided, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify
Mrs. Gudgeon, who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market.
Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper. At one time, I
believe—but I am not certain about this—she kept a stall on the Surrey
side of Waterloo Bridge, and it might have been there that, as I have
been told, her portrait was drawn for a specified number of early
breakfasts by an unfortunate artist who sank very low, but had real
ability. Her constant phrase was ‘I shall die o’-laughin’—I know I
shall!’ On account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her
inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an
Irishwoman. But she was not; she was cockney to the marrow. Recluse as
Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different,
and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way
such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her
impudence, and I may say insolence, Mrs. Gudgeon was a great favourite
with the police, who were the constant butts of her chaff.” {383} But,
of course, this interesting costermonger could have only suggested our
unique Mrs. Gudgeon.
She shows that it is possible to paint a low-class humourist as rich in
the new cosmic humour as any one of Dickens’s is rich in the old terrene
humour, and yet without one Dickensian touch. The difficulty of
achieving this feat is manifested every day, both in novels and on the
stage. Until Mrs. Gudgeon appeared I thought that Dickens had made it as
impossible for another writer to paint humourous pictures of low-class
London women as Swinburne has made it impossible for another poet to
write in anapæsts. But there is in all that Mrs. Gudgeon says or does a
profundity of humour so much deeper than the humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it
wins her a separate niche in our gallery of humourous women. The chief
cause of the delight which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she illustrates
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of absolute humour as distinguished from
relative humour—a theory which delighted me in those boyish days in
Ireland, to which I have already alluded. I have read his words on this
theme so often that I think I could repeat them as fluently as a nursery
rhyme. In their original form I remember that the word ‘caricature’ took
the place of the phrase ‘relative humour.’ I do not think there is
anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings so suggestive and so profound,
and to find in reading ‘Aylwin’ that they were suggested to him by a real
living character was exhilarating indeed.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of humour is one of his most original
generalizations, and it is vitally related both to his theory of poetry
and to his generalization of generalizations, ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’
I think Mrs. Gudgeon is a cockney Anacharsis in petticoats. The Scythian
philosopher, it will be remembered, when jesters were taken to him, could
not be made to smile, but afterwards, when a monkey was brought to him,
broke out into a fit of laughter and said, ‘Now this is laughable by
nature, the other by art.’ I will now quote the essay on absolute and
relative humour:—
“Anarcharsis, who found the humour of Nature alone laughable, was the
absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, who
only finds food for laughter in the distortions of so-called
humourous art. The quality which I have called absolute humour is
popularly supposed to be the characteristic and special temper of the
English. The bustling, money grubbing, rank-worshipping British
slave of convention claims to be the absolute humourist! It is very
amusing. The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the
temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of ‘contentment with things as
they be,’ who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the
sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his ‘thick
rotundity of belly,’ good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace
by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon
the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature’s largess, the
exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet rains
and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side.
Between this and relative humour how wide is the gulf!
That an apprehension of incongruity is the basis of both relative and
absolute humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of
relative humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the
normal, in the case of absolute humour it is the sweet incongruity of
the normal itself. Relative humour laughs at the breach of the
accustomed laws of nature and the conventional laws of man, which
laws it accepts as final. Absolute humour (comparing them
unconsciously with some ideal standard of its own, or with that ideal
or noumenal or spiritual world behind the cosmic show) sees the
incongruity of those very laws themselves—laws which are the relative
humourist’s standard. Absolute humour, in a word, is based on
metaphysics—relative humour on experience. A child can become a
relative humourist by adding a line or two to the nose of Wellington,
or by reversing the nose of the Venus de Medici. The absolute
humourist has so long been saying to himself, ‘What a whimsical idea
is the human nose!’ that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the
child’s laughter on seeing it turned upside down. So with convention
and its codes of etiquette—from the pompous harlequinade of
royalty—the ineffable gingerbread of an aristocracy of names without
office or culture, down to the Draconian laws of Philistia and
bourgeois respectability; whatever is a breach of the local laws of
the game of social life, whether the laws be those of a village
pothouse or of Mayfair; whether it displays an ignorance of matters
of familiar knowledge, these are the quarry of the relative
humourist. The absolute humourist, on the other hand, as we see in
the greatest masters of absolute humour, is so perpetually
overwhelmed with the irony of the entire game, cosmic and human, from
the droll little conventions of the village pothouse to those of
London, of Paris, of New York, of Pekin—up to the apparently
meaningless dance of the planets round the sun—up again to that
greater and more meaningless waltz of suns round the centre—he is so
delighted with the delicious foolishness of wisdom, the conceited
ignorance of knowledge, the grotesqueness even of the standard of
beauty itself; above all, with the whim of the absolute humourist
Nature, amusing herself, not merely with her monkeys, her flamingoes,
her penguins, her dromedaries, but with these more whimsical
creatures still—these ‘bipeds’ which, though ‘featherless’ are proved
to be not ‘plucked fowls’; these proud, high-thinking
organisms—stomachs with heads, arms, and legs as useful
appendages—these countless little ‘me’s,’ so all alike and yet so
unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be _the_ me, the only
true original me, round whom all other _me’s_ revolve—so overwhelmed
is the absolute humourist with the whim of all this—with the
incongruity, that is, of the normal itself—with the ‘almighty joke’
of the Cosmos as it is—that he sees nothing ‘funny’ in departures
from laws which to him are in themselves the very quintessence of
fun. And he laughs the laugh of Rabelais and of Sterne; for he feels
that behind this rich incongruous show there must be a beneficent
Showman. He knows that although at the top of the constellation sits
Circumstance, Harlequin and King, bowelless and blind, shaking his
starry cap and bells, there sits far above even Harlequin himself
another Being greater than he—a Being who because he has given us the
delight of laughter must be good, and who in the end will somewhere
set all these incongruities right—who will, some day, show us the
meaning of that which now seems so meaningless. With Charles Lamb he
feels, in short, that humour ‘does not go out with life’; and in
answer to Elia’s question, ‘Can a ghost laugh?’ he says, ‘Assuredly,
if there be ghosts at all,’ for he is as unable as Soame Jenyns
himself to imagine that even the seraphim can be perfectly happy
without a perception of the ludicrous.
If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the
relative humourist, his type is not Dickens or Cruikshank, but
Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter
from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could
have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really
is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of
the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial
source of amusement to the absolute humourist he gets to love. Mere
representation, therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of
art. Exaggeration offends him. Nothing to him is so rich as the
real. He pronounces Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’ or the public-house
scene in ‘Silas Marner’ to be more humourous than the trial scene in
‘Pickwick.’ Wilkie’s realism he finds more humourous than the
funniest cartoon in the funniest comic journal. And this mood is as
much opposed to satire as to relative humour. Of all moods the
rarest and the finest—requiring, indeed, such a ‘blessed mixing of
the juices’ as nature cannot every day achieve—it is the mood of each
one of those fatal ‘Paradis Artificiels,’ the seeking of which has
devastated the human race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of Villon; of
Walter Mapes in the following verse:—
Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”
Now it is because Mrs. Gudgeon is the very type of the absolute
humourist as defined in this magnificent fugue of prose, and the only
example of absolute humour which has appeared in prose fiction, that
she is to me a fount of esoteric and fastidious joy. If I were asked
what character in ‘Aylwin’ shows the most unmistakable genius, I
should reply, ‘Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs. Gudgeon!’”
Chapter XXV
GORGIOS AND ROMANIES
THE publication of ‘The Coming of Love’ in book form preceded that of
‘Aylwin’ by about a year, but it had been appearing piecemeal in the
‘Athenæum’ since 1882.
“So far as regards Rhona Boswell’s story,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton,
“‘The Coming of Love’ is a sequel to ‘Aylwin.’ If the allusions to
Rhona’s lover, Percy Aylwin, in the prose story have been, in some
degree, misunderstood by some readers—if there is any danger of Henry
Aylwin, the hero of the novel, being confounded with Percy Aylwin,
the hero of this poem—it only shows how difficult it is for the poet
or the novelist (who must needs see his characters from the concave
side only) to realize that it is the convex side only which he can
present to his reader.
The fact is that the motive of ‘Aylwin’—dealing only as it does with
that which is elemental and unchangeable in man—is of so entirely
poetic a nature that I began to write it in verse. After a while,
however, I found that a story of so many incidents and complications
as the one that was growing under my hand could only be told in
prose. This was before I had written any prose at all—yes, it is so
long ago as that. And when, afterwards, I began to write criticism,
I had (for certain reasons—important then, but of no importance now)
abandoned the idea of offering the novel to the outside public at
all. Among my friends it had been widely read, both in manuscript
and in type.
But with regard to Romany women, Henry Aylwin’s feeling towards them
was the very opposite of Percy’s. When, in speaking of George Borrow
some years ago, I made the remark that between Englishmen of a
certain type and gypsy women there is an extraordinary physical
attraction—an attraction which did not exist between Borrow and the
gypsy women with whom he was brought into contact—I was thinking
specially of the character depicted here under the name of Percy
Aylwin. And I asked then the question—Supposing Borrow to have been
physically drawn with much power towards any woman, could she
possibly have been Romany? Would she not rather have been of the
Scandinavian type?—would she not have been what he used to call a
‘Brynhild’? From many conversations with him on this subject, I
think she must necessarily have been a tall blonde of the type of
Isopel Berners—who, by-the-by, was much more a portrait of a splendid
East-Anglian road-girl than is generally imagined. And I think,
besides, that Borrow’s sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon type may account
for the fact that, notwithstanding his love of the free and easy
economies of life among the better class of Gryengroes, his gypsy
women are all what have been called ‘scenic characters.’
When he comes to delineate a heroine, she is the superb Isopel
Berners—that is to say, she is physically (and indeed mentally, too),
the very opposite of the Romany chi. It was here, as I happen to
know, that Borrow’s sympathies were with Henry Aylwin far more than
with Percy Aylwin.
The type of the Romany chi, though very delightful to Henry Aylwin as
regards companionship, had no physical attractions for him, otherwise
the witchery of the girl here called Rhona Boswell, whom he knew as a
child long before Percy Aylwin knew her, must surely have eclipsed
such charms as Winifred Wynne or any other winsome ‘Gorgie’ could
possess. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have been
impossible for Percy Aylwin to be brought closely and long in contact
with a Romany girl like Sinfi Lovell and remain untouched by those
unique physical attractions of hers—attractions that made her
universally admired by the best judges of female beauty as being the
most splendid ‘face-model’ of her time, and as being in form the
grandest woman ever seen in the studios—attractions that upon Henry
Aylwin seem to have made almost no impression.
There is no accounting for this, as there is no accounting for
anything connected with the mysterious witchery of sex. And again,
the strong inscrutable way in which some gypsy girls are drawn
towards a ‘Tarno Rye’ (as a young English gentleman is called), is
quite inexplicable. Some have thought—and Borrow was one of
them—that it may arise from that infirmity of the Romany Chal which
causes the girls to ‘take their own part’ without appealing to their
men-companions for aid—that lack of masculine chivalry among the men
of their own race.
And now for a word or two upon a matter in connection with ‘Aylwin’
and ‘The Coming of Love’ which interests me more deeply. Some of
those who have been specially attracted towards Sinfi Lovell have had
misgivings, I find, as to whether she is not an idealization, an
impossible Romany chi, and some of those who have been specially
attracted towards Rhona Boswell have had the same misgivings as to
her.
One of the great racial specialities of the Romany is the superiority
of the women to the men. For it is not merely in intelligence, in
imagination, in command over language, in comparative breadth of view
regarding the Gorgio world that the Romany women (in Great Britain,
at least) leave the men far behind. In everything that goes to make
nobility of character this superiority is equally noticeable. To
imagine a gypsy hero is, I will confess, rather difficult. Not that
the average male gypsy is without a certain amount of courage, but it
soon gives way, and, in a conflict between a gypsy and an Englishman,
it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped the virility
of Romany stamina.
Although some of our most notable prize-fighters have been gypsies,
it used to be well known, in times when the ring was fashionable,
that a gypsy could not always be relied upon to ‘take punishment’
with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly,
perhaps, because his more highly-strung nervous system makes him more
sensitive to pain.
The courage of a gypsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a
proverb; nothing seems to daunt it. This superiority of the women to
the men extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift
of music for which the gypsies as a race are noticeable. With regard
to music, however, even in Eastern Europe (Russia alone excepted),
where gypsy music is so universal that, according to some writers,
every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men, and
not, in general, the women, who excel. Those, however, who knew
Sinfi Lovell may think with me that this state of things may simply
be the result of opportunity and training.”
Chapter XXVI
‘THE COMING OF LOVE’
IN my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English
Literature’ I devoted most of my space to ‘The Coming of Love.’ I put
the two great romantic poems ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Christmas at the
“Mermaid”’ far above everything he has done. I think I see both in the
conception and in the execution of these poems the promise of
immortality—if immortality can be predicted of any poems of our time. In
reading them one remembers in a flash Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own noble words
about the poetic impulse:—
“In order to produce poetry the soul must for the time being have
reached that state of exaltation, that state of freedom from
self-consciousness, depicted in the lines—
I started once, or seemed to start, in pain
Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,
As when a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek.
Whatsoever may be the poet’s ‘knowledge of his art,’ into this mood
he must always pass before he can write a truly poetic line. For,
notwithstanding all that we have said and are going to say upon
poetry as a fine art, it is in the deepest sense of the word an
‘inspiration’ indeed. No man can write a line of genuine poetry
without having been ‘born again’ (or, as the true rendering of the
text says, ‘born from above’); and then the mastery over those
highest reaches of form which are beyond the ken of the mere
versifier comes to him as a result of the change. Hence, with all
Mrs. Browning’s metrical blemishes, the splendour of her metrical
triumphs at her best.
For what is the deep distinction between poet and proseman? A writer
may be many things besides a poet; he may be a warrior like Æschylus,
a man of business like Shakespeare, a courtier like Chaucer, or a
cosmopolitan philosopher like Goethe; but the moment the poetic mood
is upon him all the trappings of the world with which for years he
may perhaps have been clothing his soul—the world’s knowingness, its
cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition—fall away, and the man
becomes an inspired child again, with ears attuned to nothing but the
whispers of those spirits from the Golden Age, who, according to
Hesiod, haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such a man
produces may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not so
greatly as it delights and astonishes himself. His passages of
pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his
own eyes while he writes; his sublime passages overawe no soul so
imperiously as his own; his humour draws no laughter so rich or so
deep as that stirred within his own breast.
It might almost be said, indeed, that Sincerity and Conscience, the
two angels that bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic dream,
bring him also the deepest, truest delight of form. It might almost
be said that by aid of sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled
to see more clearly than other men the eternal limits of his own
art—to see with Sophocles that nothing, not even poetry itself, is of
any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil, unless
it is in the deepest and highest sense good, unless it comes linking
us all together by closer bonds of sympathy and pity, strengthening
us to fight the foes with whom fate and even nature, the mother who
bore us, sometimes seem in league—to see with Milton that the high
quality of man’s soul which in English is expressed by the word
virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized, greater than
all the rhythms of all the tongues that have been spoken since
Babel—and to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the high
passion which in England is called love is lovelier than all art,
lovelier than all the marble Mercuries that ‘await the chisel of the
sculptor’ in all the marble hills.”
The reason why the criticism of the hour does not always give Mr.
Watts-Dunton the place accorded to him by his great contemporaries is not
any lack of generosity: it arises from the unprecedented, not to say
eccentric, way in which his poetry has reached the public. In this
respect alone, apart from its great originality, ‘The Coming of Love’ is
a curiosity of literature. I know nothing in the least like the history
of this poem. It was written, circulated in manuscript among the very
elite of English letters, and indeed partly published in the ‘Athenæum,’
very nearly a quarter of a century ago. I have before alluded to Mrs.
Chandler Moulton’s introduction to Philip Bourke Marston’s poems, where
she says that it was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry which won for him the
friendship of Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Yet for lustre
after lustre it was persistently withheld from the public; cenacle after
poetic cenacle rose, prospered and faded away, and still this poet, who
was talked of by all the poets and called ‘the friend of all the poets,’
kept his work back until he had passed middle age. Then, at last, owing
I believe to the energetic efforts of Mr. John Lane, who had been urging
the matter for something like five years, he launched a volume which
seized upon the public taste and won a very great success so far as sales
go. It is now in its sixth edition. There can be no doubt whatever that
if the book had appeared, as it ought to have appeared, at the time it
was written, critics would have classed the poet among his compeers and
he would have come down to the present generation, as Swinburne has come
down, as a classic. But, as I have said, it is not in the least
surprising that, notwithstanding Rossetti’s intense admiration of the
poem, notwithstanding the fact that Morris intended to print it at the
Kelmscott Press, and notwithstanding the fact that Swinburne, in
dedicating the collected edition of his works to Mr. Watts-Dunton,
addresses him as a poet of the greatest authority—it is only the true
critics who see in the right perspective a poet who has so perversely
neglected his chances. If his time of recognition has not yet fully
come, this generation is not to blame. The poet can blame only himself,
although to judge by Rossetti’s words, and by the following lines from
Dr. Hake’s ‘New Day,’ he is indifferent to that:—
You tell me life is all too rich and brief,
Too various, too delectable a game,
To give to art, entirely or in chief;
And love of Nature quells the thirst for fame.
The ‘parable poet’ then goes on to give voice to the opinion, not only of
himself, but of most of the great poets of the mid-Victorian epoch:—
You who in youth the cone-paved forest sought,
Musing until the pines to musing fell;
You who by river-path the witchery caught
Of waters moving under stress of spell;
You who the seas of metaphysics crossed,
And yet returned to art’s consoling haven—
Returned from whence so many souls are lost,
With wisdom’s seal upon your forehead graven—
Well may you now abandon learning’s seat,
And work the ore all seek, not many find;
No sign-post need you to direct your feet,
You draw no riches from another’s mind.
Hail Nature’s coming; bygone be the past;
Hail her New Day; it breaks for man at last.
Fulfil the new-born dream of Poesy!
Give her your life in full, she turns from less—
Your life in full—like those who did not die,
Though death holds all they sang in dark duress.
You, knowing Nature to the throbbing core,
You can her wordless prophecies rehearse.
The murmers others heard her heart outpour
Swell to an anthem in your richer verse.
If wider vision brings a wider scope
For art, and depths profounder for emotion,
Yours be the song whose master-tones shall ope
A new poetic heaven o’er earth and ocean.
The New Day comes apace; its virgin fame
Be yours, to fan the fiery soul to flame.
Indeed, he has often said to me: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,
and I did not throw myself upon my little tide until it was too late, and
I am not going to repine now.’ For my part, I have been a student of
English poetry all my life—it is my chief subject of study—and I predict
that when poetic imagination is again perceived to be the supreme poetic
gift, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s genius will be acclaimed. In respect of
imaginative power, apart from the other poetic qualities—‘the power of
seeing a dramatic situation and flashing it upon the physical senses of
the listener,’ none of his contemporaries have surpassed him.
I have said in print more than once that I, a Celt myself, can see more
Celtic glamour in his poetry than in many of the Celtic poets of our
time. And, if we are to judge by the vogue of ‘The Coming of Love’ and
‘Aylwin’ in Wales, the Welsh people seem to see it very clearly. Take,
for instance, the sonnet called ‘The Mirrored Stars’ again, given on page
29. It is impossible for Celtic glamour to go further than this; and yet
it is rarely noted by critics in discussing the Celtic note in poetry.
In order fully to understand ‘The Coming of Love’ it is necessary to bear
in mind a distinction between the two kinds of poetry upon which Mr.
Watts-Dunton has often dwelt. “There are,” he tells us, “but two kinds
of poetry, but two kinds of art—that which interprets, and that which
represents. ‘Poetry is apparent pictures of unapparent realities,’ says
the Eastern mind through Zoroaster; ‘the highest, the only operation of
art is representation (Gestaltung),’ says the Western mind through
Goethe. Both are right.” Madame Galimberti has called Mr. Watts-Dunton
‘the poet of the sunrise’: There are richer descriptions of sunrise in
‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ than in any other writer I know. “Few
poets,” Mr. Watts-Dunton says, “have been successful in painting a
sunrise, for the simple reason that, save through the bed-curtains, they
do not often see one. They think that all they have to do is to paint a
sunset, which they sometimes do see, and call it a sunrise. They are
entirely mistaken, however; the two phenomena are both like and unlike.
Between the cloud-pageantry of sunrise and of sunset the difference to
the student of Nature is as apparent as is the difference to the poet
between the various forms of his art.”
‘The Coming of Love’ shows that independence of contemporary vogues and
influences which characterizes all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, whether in
verse or prose, whether in romance or criticism, or in that analysis and
exposition of the natural history of minds about which Sainte Beuve
speaks. It was as a poet that his energies were first exercised, but
this for a long time was known only to his poetical friends. His
criticism came many years afterwards, and, as Rossetti used to say, ‘his
critical work consists of generalizations of his own experience in the
poet’s workshop.’ For many years he was known only in his capacity as a
critic. James Russell Lowell is reported to have said: ‘Our ablest
critics hitherto have been 18-carat; Theodore Watts goes nearer the pure
article.’ Mr. William Sharp, in his study of Rossetti, says: ‘In every
sense of the word the friendship thus begun resulted in the greatest
benefit to the elder writer, the latter having greater faith in Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s literary judgment than seems characteristic with so
dominant and individual an intellect as that of Rossetti. Although the
latter knew well the sonnet-literature of Italy and England, and was a
much-practised master of the heart’s key himself, I have heard him on
many occasions refer to Theodore Watts as having still more thorough
knowledge on the subject, and as being the most original sonnet-writer
living.’
‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ are vitally connected with the poet’s
peculiar critical message. Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin may be regarded
as the embodiment of his philosophy of life. The very popularity of
‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is apt to make readers forget the
profundity of the philosophical thought upon which they are based,
although this profundity has been indicated by such competent critics as
Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the ‘Contemporary Review,’ M. Maurice Muret in
the ‘Journal des Débats,’ and other thoughtful writers. Upon the inner
meaning of the romance and the poem I have, however, ideas of my own to
express, which are not in full accordance with any previous criticisms.
To me it seems that the two cousins, Henry Aylwin of the romance, and
Percy Aylwin of the poem, are phases of a modern Hamlet, a Hamlet who has
travelled past the pathetic superstitions of the old cosmogonies to the
last milestone of doubting hope and questioning fear, a Hamlet who stands
at the portals of the outer darkness, gazing with eyes made wistful by
the loss of a beloved woman. In both the romance and the poem the theme
is love at war with death. Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to the
illustrated edition of ‘Aylwin’ says:—
“It is a story written as a comment on Love’s warfare with
death—written to show that, confronted as man is every moment by
signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel
connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the
unknown country beyond Orion, where the beloved dead are loving us
still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything
else: a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes
intensified when a man has lost—or thinks he has lost—a woman whose
love was the only light of his world—when his soul is torn from his
body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the ‘viewless
winds’ right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs
beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last
even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter
darkness and loneliness. It was to depict this phase of human
emotion that both ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ were written.
They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer’s soul,
sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world—sent out to
find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was,
without knowing it, akin. In ‘Aylwin’ the problem is symbolized by
the victory of love over sinister circumstance, whereas in the poem
it is symbolized by a mystical dream of ‘Natura Benigna.’
In ‘The Coming of Love’ Percy Aylwin is a poet and a sailor, with such an
absorbing love for the sea that he has no room for any other passion; to
him an imprisoned seabird is a sufferer almost more pitiable than any
imprisoned man, as will be seen by the opening section of the poem,
‘Mother Carey’s Chicken.’ On seeing a storm-petrel in a cage on a
cottage wall near Gypsy Dell, he takes down the cage in order to release
the bird; then, carrying the bird in the cage, he turns to cross a rustic
wooden bridge leading past Gypsy Dell, when he suddenly comes upon a
landsman friend of his, a Romany Rye, who is just parting from a young
gypsy-girl. Gazing at her beauty, Percy stands dazzled and forgets the
petrel. It is symbolical of the inner meaning of the story that the bird
now flies away through the half-open door. From that moment, through the
magic of love, the land to Percy is richer than the sea: this ends the
first phase of the story. The first kiss between the two lovers is thus
described:—
If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,
Is heaven a dream? Is she I claspt a dream?
Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam
And miles of furze shine yellow down the West?
I seem to clasp her still—still on my breast
Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.
I think she kissed these lips, for now they seem
Scarce mine: so hallowed of the lips they pressed.
Yon thicket’s breath—can that be eglantine?
Those birds—can they be Morning’s choristers?
Can this be Earth? Can these be banks of furze?
Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!
I seem to know them, though this body of mine
Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!
Percy stays with the gypsies, and the gypsy-girl, Rhona, teaches him
Romany. This arouses the jealousy of a gypsy rival—Herne the ‘Scollard.’
Percy Aylwin’s family afterwards succeeds in separating him from her, and
he is again sent to sea. While cruising among the coral islands he
receives the letter from Rhona which paints her character with unequalled
vividness:—
RHONA’S LETTER
On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams
the day
When Herne the Scollard come and
said to me,
He s off, that rye o yourn, gone gentleman
clean away
Till swallow-time; hes left this
letter: see.
In dreams I heerd the bee and
grasshopper,
Like on that mornin, buz in Rington
Hollow,
Shell live till swallow-time and die
then shell mer,
For never will a rye come back to gentleman
her
Wot leaves her till the comin o the
swallow.
All night I heerd them bees and grasshoppers;
All night I smelt the breath o grass and may,
Mixed sweet wi’ smells o honey from the furze
Like on that mornin when you went away;
All night I heerd in dreams my daddy laugh
sal,
Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo girl-whole
O Bozzles breed—tans, vardey, greis, and tents: waggons: horses
all—
To see dat tarno rye o hern palall back
Wots left her till the comin o the
swallow.
I woke and went a-walkin on the ice
All white with snow-dust, just like salt
sparklin loon,
And soon beneath the stars I heerd a
vice,
A vice I knowed and often, often shoon; hear
An then I seed a shape as thin as tuv; smoke
I knowed it wur my blessed mammy s spirit
mollo. {403a}
Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love,
He s thinkin on you; don t you go and weep
rove;
You ll see him at the comin o the
swallow.
Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the
grass
When he wur gone, and freeze the songs
brooklets gillies;
There wornt no smell, dear, in the hay
sweetest cas,
And when the summer brought the
water-lilies,
And when the sweet winds waved the wheat
golden giv,
The skies above em seemed as bleak and black
kollo {403b}
As now, when all the world seems frozen snow
yiv.
The months are long, but mammy says you
ll live
By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.
She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver
throat
Will meet the stonechat in the buddin
whin,
And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie song
ull float
From light-green boughs through leaves
a-peepin thin;
The wheat-ear soon ull bring the
willow-wren,
And then the fust fond nightingale ull
follow,
A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen
Still out at sea, the spring is in our
glen;
Come, darlin, wi the comin o the
swallow.
And she wur gone! And then I read the
words
In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;
They made the Christmas sing with summer
birds,
And spring-leaves shine on every frozen
tree;
And when the dawnin kindled Rington
spire,
And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and red
lollo
Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o
fire,
Another night, I sez, has brought him
nigher;
He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
And soon the bull-pups found me on the
Pool—
You know the way they barks to see me
slide—
But when the skatin bors o Rington scool
Comed on, it turned my head to see em
glide.
I seemed to see you twirlin on your
skates,
And somethin made me clap my hans and
hollo;
It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s. cutting
But when I woke-like—Im the gal wot
waits
Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.
Comin seemed ringin in the
Christmas-chime;
Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,
In beads o frost along the nets o rime,
Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;
And when the pups began to bark and
play,
And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock
and wallow
Among the snow and fling it up like
spray,
I says to them, You know who rote to say
He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o
December
Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o
spring
Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups,
remember;
If not—for me no singin birds ull sing:
No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale cuckoo
Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, {404} over hill and
hollow:
Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail,
Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale,
For her wot waits the comin o the
swallow.
Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your mine own
han
To that fine rawni rowin on the river; lady
I ll never call that lady a chovihan witch
Nor yit a mumply gorgie—I’ll forgive miserable Gentile
her.
Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife.
Come back—or, say the word, and I will
follow
Your footfalls round the world: Ill
leave this life
(Ive flung away a-ready that ere knife)—
I m dyin for the comin o the swallow.
Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very moment when
‘the Schollard,’ maddened by the discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy
that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the
river-bank. Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle
on the other side without being able to go to Rhona’s assistance. But
the girl hurls her antagonist into the water, and he is drowned. There
are other witnesses—the stars, whose reflected light, according to a
gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man
sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the deed. For a Romany
woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty is death. Nevertheless, Rhona
marries Percy. I will quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in
the tent at dawn:—
The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
The tent’s mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.
I hear the earliest anvil’s tingling clink
From Jasper’s forge; the cattle on the leas
Begin to low. She’s waking by degrees:
Sleep’s rosy fetters melt, but link by link.
What dream is hers? Her eyelids shake with tears;
The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
“You’ll never leave me now? There is but you;
I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
‘The Dukkeripen o’ stars comes ever true.’”
She rises, startled by a wandering bee
Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree—
Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,
Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl—
The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
And says, ‘This bride of yours, I know her well,
And so do all the birds in all the bowers
Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
See, on the curtain of the morning haze
The Future’s finger writes of happy days.’
Rhona, half-hidden by ‘the branches of the hawthorn tree,’ stretches up
to kiss the white and green May buds overhanging the bridal tent, while
Percy Aylwin stands at the tent’s mouth and looks at her:—
Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings
Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
From Rhona’s eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,
Kissing the buds for ‘luck o’ love’ it brings,
While from the dingle grass the skylark springs
And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?
[He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches
apart, and clasps her in his arms.
Can she here, covering with her childish kisses
These pearly buds—can she so soft, so tender,
So shaped for clasping—dowered of all love-blisses—
Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
An angel storming hell, through death’s abysses,
Where never a sight could fright or power could bend her?
But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the lovers are on
the river she reads the scripture of the stars. I must give here the
sonnet quoted on page 29:—
The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,
And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
An angel’s, yet with woman’s dearer wiles;
But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
What shaped those shadows like another boat
Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,
And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in which Percy
confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its menace. The stars write in the
river:—
Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is strong.
Percy reads the rune and answers:—
I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
In Heav’n that wove this net of life for men?
Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth—
King that can do no wrong!
Ah! Night seems opening! There, above the skies,
Who sits upon that central sun for throne
Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?
Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes
Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
Of infinite light, ’tis Love that stands immortal,
The King of Kings.
The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering Rhona’s secret,
secretly slay her. Percy, having returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to
find her grave. Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona
should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into
the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called ‘Natura Maligna,’
which has been much discussed by the critics:—
The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
By glacier-brink she stood—by cataract-spray—
When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
And if a footprint shone at break of day,
My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
‘’Tis hers whose hand God’s mightier hand doth hold.’
I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
When lo, she stood! . . . God made her let me pass,
Then felled the bridge! . . . Oh, there in sallow light,
There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
And all my wondrous days as in a glass.
This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry.
Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the ‘Athenæum’ of February
5, 1881: “Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu
Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali (‘the malignant’) or Parvati
(‘the mountaineer’). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek
to God in the delirium of their fear.”
Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while
New Year’s morning is breaking:—
Through Fate’s mysterious warp another weft
Of days is cast; and see! Time’s star-built throne,
From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
Of all that was its music—stand alone,
Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
Impatient of the leaden minutes left—
The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
Barren and foolish, and I cry, ‘No grain,
No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!’
And yet I cannot join the dead—and live.
Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
In England, heedless of the knells they ring
To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
Each to the other ere you say adieu!—
I seem to hear their chimes—the chimes we knew
In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
Greeting a New Year’s Day as bright of wing
As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.
If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
Could bring the past and make it live again,
Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears—
And with the past bring her I weep in vain—
Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.
[The clouds move away and show the
stars in dazzling brightness.
Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove—
They bring the mighty Mother’s new-year greeting:
‘All save great Nature is a vision fleeting’—
So says the scripture of those orbs above.
‘All, all,’ I cry, ‘except man’s dower of love!—
Love is no child of Nature’s mystic cheating!’
And yet it comes again, the old desire
To read what yonder constellations write
On river and ocean—secrets of the night—
To feel again the spirit’s wondering fire
Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
To catch the master-note of Nature’s lyre.
New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
By Fate and Death, ‘Nature is ever young,
Clad in new riches, as each morning’s gold
Blooms o’er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;
The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
Of Youth’s fresh runners in the lists of Time.
Arise, and drink the wine of Nature’s light!’
Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of
‘The Promise of the Sunrise’ and the revelation of ‘Natura Benigna’:—
Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
‘Sorrow,’ I said, ‘has made me old, my dear;
’Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
Beneath my load a seraph’s neck might bow,
Vigils like mine would blanch an angel’s hair.’
Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes—
I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.
And now ‘Natura Benigna’ reveals to him her mystic consolation:—
What power is this? What witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
Mother, ’tis I, reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
This is not the pathetic fallacy. It is the poetic interpretation of the
latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that
the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard
only by the poet’s finer ear.
The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s poetry, both in subject and in form. The originality of
any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in
new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the
language. In ‘The Coming of Love’ the poet has invented a new poetic
form. Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the
disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel,
and of the prose play. In Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ and in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
other lyrical drama, “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” the special functions
of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form. The
story is told by brief pictures. In ‘The Coming of Love’ this method
reaches its perfection. Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets,
are used according to an inner law of the poet’s mind. The exaltation of
these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being
summarized in bare prose. The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is
revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions. In Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ a
method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind
of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante’s poems are all
sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in ‘The
Coming of Love.’ Here the very ‘rhyme-colour’ and the subtle variety of
vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical
composition. Wagner’s music is the only modern art-form which is
comparable with the metrical architecture of ‘The Coming of Love,’ and
“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’” No one can fully understand the rhythmic
triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr.
Watts-Dunton’s theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated
in his treatise on Poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’—a theory which
shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of
music, is still developing. Both these lyrical dramas ought to be
carefully studied by all students of English metres.
The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an
extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry. It is
remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in
Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under
such conditions. Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her
portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry.
But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson’s Maud,
the difference is startling. Maud does not tingle with personality. She
is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of ‘creamy English
girls.’ Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality.
One makes pictures of her in one’s brain—pictures that never become
blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic
heroines. How much of this is due to the poetic form? Could Rhona have
lived so intensely in a novel or a play? I do not think so. At any
rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel,
and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is
well worth the study of critics and craftsmen. Mr. Kernahan has called
attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative. Perhaps this
defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose
like that of the opening of ‘Aylwin,’ which would lead the imagination
insensibly from one situation or mood to another.
In connection with the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love,’ a very
interesting point of criticism presents itself. These sonnets, in which
Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket
lighthouse, appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ a week after Mr. Swinburne and he
returned from a visit to the Channel Islands. They record a real
incident. Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the ‘English
Illustrated Magazine’ his version of the story, a splendid specimen of
his sonorous rhythms.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s version of the story may interest the reader:—
LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
(THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)
Amid the Channel’s wiles and deep decoys,
Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney,
But there she pined. ‘The bustling world,’ said she,
‘Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.’
The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
Had winds for sponsor—one proud rock for nurse,
Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
The cold bright sea was hers for universe
Till o’er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.
But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:—
Her lover’s boat was out; her ears were dinned
With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
That shook the troubled sun’s red canopy.
Even while she prayed the storm’s high revelry
Woke petrel, gull—all revellers winged and finned—
And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
‘My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,’
The Mother sang. ‘Thy sea-boy waged no strife
With Hatred’s poison, gangrened Envy’s knife—
With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!’
Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature
than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends. It seems
impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other’s work or
ever have known each other well. The point which I wish to emphasize is
that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers,
they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every
day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the
evening in each other’s society; and yet when they sit down at their
desks they may be as far asunder as the poles. From this we may perhaps
infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this
one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.
Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem. I
may mention that the other day I came across a little book called
‘Authors that have Influenced me,’ and found that Mr. Rider Haggard
instanced the opening section of ‘The Coming of Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s
Chicken,’ as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than
all others. I think this is a compliment, for the originality of
invention displayed in ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and ‘She’ sets Rider
Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr.
Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and
also good is a rare achievement.
I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s miscellaneous sonnets. Some of them have had a great
vogue: for instance, ‘John the Pilgrim.’ Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.,
as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the
subject. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in
this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister
power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature’s
mockery by the mirage:—
Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
Claspt in a silvery river’s winding maze:
‘Water, water! Blessed be God!’ he says,
And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles
The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.
‘God heard me not,’ says he, ‘blessed be God!’
And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand,
Heav’n’s outer coast where waiting angels stand,
He looks below: ‘Farewell, thou hooded clod,
Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
God heard my prayer for life—blessed be God!’
[Picture: ‘John the Pilgrim.’ (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)]
This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic
in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled,
or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious
faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet. The rhymes in
this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer’s luck, good and
ill. To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have
been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of
‘chamomiles’ and ‘isles,’ ‘chamomiles’ giving the picture of the flowers,
and ‘isles’ giving the false vision of the mirage. The same thing is
notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, ‘The Bedouin Child’
(see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified. Without
the fortunate rhyme-words ‘pashas,’ ‘camel-maws,’ and ‘claws’ in the
octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.
The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry and that of Coleridge has
been frequently discussed. It has the same romantic glamour and often
the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the
music of the ravishing octosyllabics of ‘Christabel.’ This at least I
know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,—he owns the true wizard of
romance as master. I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me
quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and
his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the
author as follows: ‘The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive
analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through
volumes of essays and not so paint him. There is Coleridge! But whence
the source of your story—if anything of such aptness could have been
other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu—I cannot tell. It is new to
me.’
After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the
reader with the ‘pure amber’ itself:—
I see thee pine like her in golden story
Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
The gates thrown open—saw the sunbeams play,
With only a web ’tween her and summer’s glory;
Who, when that web—so frail, so transitory,
It broke before her breath—had fallen away,
Saw other webs and others rise for aye
Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.
Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine—
That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh—
Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
Could thy rare spirit’s wings have pierced the mesh
Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
But lets the poet see how heav’n can shine.
Here again the verbal parsimony is notable. I defy any one to find
anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony.
There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet. Every word is
cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning.
The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising
imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a
sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall. Metrical students
will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a
part in the suspensive music.
I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as
one of the wisest, done by the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ was that of
printing Rhona’s letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at
the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the
poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona. It certainly showed immense
confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great
success. The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George
Meredith: “I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that. When I
read her love-letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ I had the regret that the dialect
might cause its banishment from literature. Reading the whole poem
through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate. We are the richer
for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed.” And,
discussing ‘The Coming of Love,’ Meredith wrote: ‘I will not speak of the
tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the dexterity
which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of the work.’
Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry is so
consummate that it is concealed from the reader. There is no sense of
difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice. Yet the metrical structure
of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest.
‘Rhona’s Love Letter’ is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern,
each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of
a sonnet. But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naïve,
unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether,
and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour
are produced by the most elaborate art.
I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry. There
can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not
merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the
deeper quality of imaginative energy. By ‘the most original poet’ I do
not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what
I mean. Poe’s ‘Raven’ is more ‘original’ than Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion,’
but it is not so great. In my article on Blake in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia
of English Literature,’ I pointed out that there are greater poets than
Blake (or Donne) but none more original. There are many poets who
possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual
matching of common ideas with common metaphors. But few poets have the
rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also
the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty. Now Mr.
Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift. He uses the symbol to suggest ideas
which cannot be suggested otherwise. His theory of the universe is
optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads. He sees
the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as
benignant. Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the
two great sonnets, ‘Natura Maligna’ and ‘Natura Benigna,’ which I have
already quoted.
* * * * *
All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell. Upon
this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the
introduction to the later editions of the poem:—
“But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio
readers seem to be most sceptical. The humourous endowment of most
races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the
men than among the women. But among the Romanies the women seem to
have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.
A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with
my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit
and the humourous charm that you attribute to them? My answer to
this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome’s delightful book,
‘Gypsy Folk-Tales.’ Speaking of the Romany chi’s incomparable
piquancy, he says:—
‘I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale
impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with “a lot
o’ real tip-top gentry”; and “Reia,” she said to me afterwards, “I’ll
tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We’d pulled up to put the
brake on, and there was a púro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and
looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard. I could see he’d
his eye upon me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife,
and ‘Missus,’ he’d say, ‘what d’ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal
just now in a coach and four horses’; and ‘Dabla,’ she’d say,
‘sawkumni ’as varde kenaw’” [‘Bless us! every one now keeps a
carriage’].’
Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell,
I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome,
that it might well have been she. Although there is as great a
difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English
girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between
the humour of all gypsy girls. No three girls could possibly be more
unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr.
Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the
fanciful humour of them all. The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak
for itself in these pages—where, however, the passionate and tragic
side of her character and her story dominates everything.”
Chapter XXVII
“CHRISTMAS AT THE ‘MERMAID’”
SECOND in importance to ‘The Coming of Love’ among Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
poems is the poem I have already mentioned—the poem which Mr. Swinburne
has described as ‘a great lyrical epic’—“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’”
The originality of this wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of
‘The Coming of Love.’ No other writer would have dreamed of depicting
the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a golden skeleton in the
form of one of the burnt Incas, called up by ‘the righteous sea,’ and
squatting grimly at the prow of Medina’s flag-ship. Here we get ‘The
Renascence of Wonder’ indeed. Some Aylwinians put it at the head of all
his writings. The exploit of David Gwynn is accepted by Motley and
others as historic, but it needed the co-operation of the Golden Skeleton
to lift his narrative into the highest heaven of poetry. Extremely
unlike ‘The Coming of Love’ as it is in construction, it is built on the
same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with ‘The Coming of
Love’ the remarks I have made upon a desideratum in poetic art—that is to
say, it is cast in a form which gives as much scope to the dramatic
instinct at work as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from
the restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped. The poem
was written, or mainly written, during one of those visits which, as I
have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to pay to Stratford-on-Avon.
The scene is laid, however, in London, at that famous ‘Mermaid’ tavern
which haunts the dreams of all English poets:—
“With the exception of Shakespeare, who has quitted London for good,
in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has
lately rebuilt, all the members of the ‘Mermaid’ Club are assembled
at the ‘Mermaid’ Tavern. At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson
dealing out wassail from a large bowl. At the other end sits
Raleigh, and at Raleigh’s right hand, the guest he had brought with
him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man,
whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada
before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or
false, given him in the low countries a great reputation, the echo of
which had reached England. Raleigh’s desire was to excite the public
enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and
generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already
become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice
spirits as those associated with the ‘Mermaid’ club.”
It opens with a chorus:—
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
Then Ben Jonson rises, fills the cup with wassail and drinks to
Shakespeare, and thus comments upon his absence:—
That he, the star of revel, bright-eyed Will,
With life at golden summit, fled the town
And took from Thames that light to dwindle down
O’er Stratford farms, doth make me marvel still.
Then he calls upon Shakespeare’s most intimate friend—the mysterious Mr.
W. H. of the sonnets—to give them reminiscences of Shakespeare with a
special reference to the memorable evening when he arrived at Stratford
on quitting London for good and all.
To the sixth edition of the poem Mr. Watts-Dunton prefixed the following
remarks, and I give them here because they throw light upon his view of
Shakespeare’s friend:—
“Since the appearance of this volume, there has been a great deal of
acute and learned discussion as to the identity of that mysterious
‘friend’ of Shakespeare, to whom so many of the sonnets are
addressed. But everything that has been said upon the subject seems
to fortify me in the opinion that ‘no critic has been able to
identify’ that friend. Southampton seems at first to fit into the
sacred place; so does Pembroke at first. But, after a while, true
and unbiassed criticism rejects them both. I therefore feel more
than ever justified in ‘imagining the friend for myself.’ And this,
at least, I know, that to have been the friend of Shakespeare, a man
must needs have been a lover of nature;—he must have been a lover of
England, too. And upon these two points, and upon another—the
movement of a soul dominated by friendship as a passion—I have tried
to show Shakespeare’s probable influence upon his ‘friend of
friends.’ It would have been a mistake, however, to cast the sonnets
in the same metrical mould as Shakespeare’s.”
Shakspeare’s friend thus records what Shakespeare had told him about his
return to Stratford:—
As down the bank he strolled through evening dew,
Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves
Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,
And all his happy childhood came to view;
He saw a child watching the birds that flew
Above a willow, through whose musky leaves
A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves
That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.
These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling
From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,
With power beyond all power of things beholden
Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk
Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,
And closed him in from all but willow musk.
And then a child beneath a silver sallow—
A child who loved the swans, the moorhen’s ‘cheep’—
Angled for bream where river holes were deep—
For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,
Or ate the ‘fairy cheeses’ of the mallow,
And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep
Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep
In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;
And then a child to whom the water-fairies
Sent fish to ‘bite’ from Avon’s holes and shelves,
A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,
The flower-sprites sent the bees and ‘sunshine elves’;
Then, in the shifting vision’s sweet vagaries,
He saw two lovers walking by themselves—
Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain
Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy
Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,
Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain—
Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain
By sudden silence, ‘lest his plaint should cloy’—
Knew when the skylark’s changing note of joy
Saith, ‘Now will I return to earth again’—
Knew every warning of the blackbird’s shriek,
And every promise of his joyful song—
Knew what the magpie’s chuckle fain would speak;
And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,
Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,
Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.
He heard her say, ‘The birds attest our troth!’
Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may
Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray
Round summer’s royal field of golden cloth
Shines o’er the buttercups like snowy froth,
And that sweet skylark on his azure way,
And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:
‘We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.’
And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory,
River and church, grows rosier with our story!
This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,
Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!
They breathe—o’er mead and stream they breathe—the blessing.
‘We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!’
When Mr. ‘W. H.’ sits down, the friend and brother of another great poet,
Christopher Marlowe, who had been sitting moody and silent, oppressed by
thoughts of the dead man, many of whose unfriends were at the gathering,
recites these lines ‘On Seeing Kit Marlowe Slain at Deptford’:—
’Tis Marlowe falls! That last lunge rent asunder
Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe’s life,
Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heaven at strife,
Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!
Heav’n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,
If Fate’s hand guided yonder villain’s knife
Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife
With dower of poets—song and love and wonder.
Or was it Chance? Shakspeare, who art supreme
O’er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe’s sight
To pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height
Where man and men and gods and all that seem
Are Nature’s mutterings in her changeful dream—
Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!
After they have all drunk in silence to the memory of Marlowe, Marlowe’s
friend speaks:—
Where’er thou art, ‘dead Shepherd,’ look on me;
The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,
He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;
Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!
Then Raleigh rises, and the great business of the evening begins with the
following splendid chorus:—
RALEIGH
(Turning to David Gwynn)
Wherever billows foam
The Briton fights at home:
His hearth is built of water—
CHORUS
Water blue and green;
RALEIGH
There’s never a wave of ocean
The wind can set in motion
That shall not own our England—
CHORUS
Own our England queen. {427}
RALEIGH
The guest I bring to-night
Had many a goodly fight
On seas the Don hath found—
CHORUS
Hath found for English sails;
RALEIGH
And once he dealt a blow
Against the Don to show
What mighty hearts can move—
CHORUS
Can move in leafy Wales.
RALEIGH
Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,
Who hast a heart akin
To England’s own brave hearts—
CHORUS
Brave hearts where’er they beat;
RALEIGH
Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,
And tell the Mermaid how
A galley-slave struck hard—
CHORUS
Struck hard the Spanish fleet.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
Upon being thus called forth the old sea-dog rises, and tells a wonderful
story indeed, the ‘story of how he and the Golden Skeleton crippled the
Great Armada sailing out’:—
‘A galley lie’ they called my tale; but he
Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales:
The man, I say, who helped to keep you free
Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.
Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,
Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,
Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire
Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire—
Stands asking here Truth’s one reward, belief!
And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,
This tale of mine—shall tell, in future days,
How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled
For England when she moved in perilous ways;
But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung
From loins of men whose ghosts have still the sea—
Doth England—she who loves the loudest tongue—
Remember mariners whose deeds are sung
By waves where flowed their blood to keep her free?
I see—I see ev’n now—those ships of Spain
Gathered in Tagus’ mouth to make the spring;
I feel the cursed oar, I toil again,
And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys sing;
And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,
Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing out—
Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,
Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,
Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.
And one we call the ‘Princess,’ one the ‘Royal,’
‘Diana’ one; but ’tis the fell ‘Basana’
Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,
Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;
For by their help Hope whispers me that I—
Whom ten hours’ daily travail at a stretch
Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die—
May strike once more where flags of England fly,
Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.
True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:
Again I feel the lash that tears my back;
Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,
Answered by boatswain’s laugh and scourge’s crack;
Again I feel the pang when trying to choke
Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread
Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,
They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;
Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.
By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,
And mighty waves assault our trembling galley
With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,
And soldiers cry, ‘What saint shall bid her rally?’
Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore
The Dons to free them from the metal tether
By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;
Some shout, in answer to the billows’ roar,
‘The Dons and we will drink brine-wine together.’
‘Bring up the slave,’ I hear the captain cry,
‘Who sank the golden galleon “El Dorado,”
The dog can steer.’
‘Here sits the dog,’ quoth I,
‘Who sank the ship of Commodore Medrado!’
With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,
Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:
‘Hearken, thou pirate—bold Medrado’s bane!—
Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain,
If thou canst take the galley through this sea.’
‘Ay! ay!’ quoth I. The fools unlock me straight!
And then ’tis I give orders to the Don,
Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,
Whose winning game I know hath just begun.
I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak
Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night
Oh then I see beneath the galley’s beak
A glow like Spanish _auto’s_ ruddy reek—
Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!
A skeleton, but yet with living eyes—
A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold—
Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,
And round his brow, of high imperial mould,
A burning circle seems to shake and shine,
Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,
Throwing a radiance o’er the foam-lit brine:
‘’Tis God’s Revenge,’ methinks. ‘Heaven sends for sign
That bony shape—that Inca’s diadem.’
At first the sign is only seen of me,
But well I know that God’s Revenge hath come
To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,
And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous foam.
Quoth I, ‘How fierce soever be the levin
Spain’s hand can hurl—made mightier still for wrong
By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven—
Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven—
Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is strong.’
‘The dog can steer,’ I laugh; ‘yea, Drake’s men know
How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.’
Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,
Some ’neath the hatches, some beside the slaves,
And bid them stack their muskets all in piles
Beside the foremast, covered by a sail,
The captives guess my plan—I see their smiles
As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,
Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and pale.
I say, they guess my plan—to send beneath
The soldiers to the benches where the slaves
Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth—
Hate’s nails and teeth more keen than Spanish glaives,
Then wait until the tempest’s waxing might
Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,
Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite
The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,
Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.
Past Ferrol Bay each galley ’gins to stoop,
Shuddering before the Biscay demon’s breath.
Down goes a prow—down goes a gaudy poop:
‘The Don’s “Diana” bears the Don to death,’
Quoth I, ‘and see the “Princess” plunge and wallow
Down purple trough, o’er snowy crest of foam:
See! see! the “Royal,” how she tries to follow
By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,
Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to roam.’
Now, three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;
The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,
Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,
Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,
Each rower murmuring o’er my whispered plan,
Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,
‘Rise, every man, to tear to death his man—
Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,
When God’s Revenge sings loud to ocean’s lyre.’
Taller the spectre grows ’mid ocean’s din;
The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:
I give the sign: the slaves cry, ‘Ho for Gwynn!’
‘Teach them,’ quoth I, ‘the way we grip in Wales.’
And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,
I win the key—let loose a storm of slaves:
‘When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,’
They cry; ‘sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,
Or drink to England’s Queen in foaming waves.’
We leap adown the hatches; in the dark
We stab the Dons at random, till I see
A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,
Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be
A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:
Then, lo: a bony shape with lifted hands—
A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,
O’ertopping groans, o’ertopping Ocean’s quire—
A skeleton with Inca’s diadem stands!
It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,
Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,
When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,
Sniffing man’s flesh at roast for Christ His sake.
The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;
They cross their foreheads, but they dare not speak.
Anon the spectre, when the strife is o’er,
Melts from the dark, then glimmers as before,
Burning upon the conquered galley’s beak.
And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows
The ‘Royal’ bearing down upon our craft—
Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows
Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.
I take the helm; I put the galley near:
We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.
Amid the ‘Royal’s’ din I laugh to hear
The curse of many a British mutineer,
The crack, crack, crack of boatswain’s biting scourge.
‘Ye scourge in vain,’ quoth I, ‘scourging for life
Slaves who shall row no more to save the Don’;
For from the ‘Royal’s’ poop, above the strife,
Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!
‘What! is it thou, Pirate of “El Dorado”?
He shouts in English tongue. And there, behold!
Stands he, the devil’s commodore, Medrado.
‘Ay! ay!’ quoth I, ‘Spain owes me one strappado
For scuttling Philip’s ship of stolen gold.’
‘I come for that strappado now,’ quoth I.
‘What means yon thing of burning bones?’ he saith.
‘’Tis God’s Revenge cries, “Bloody Spain shall die!”
The king of El Dorado’s name is Death.
Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,’
I cry; ‘strong hands are stretched to save you now;
Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.’
But when the ‘Royal,’ captured, rides adrift,
I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.
When all are slain, the tempest’s wings have fled,
But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:
Far down the offing glows a spot of red,
My soul knows well it hath that Inca’s form.
‘It lights,’ quoth I, ‘the red cross banner of Spain
There on the flagship where Medina sleeps—
Hell’s banner, wet with sweat of Indian’s pain,
And tears of women yoked to treasure train,
Scarlet of blood for which the New World weeps.’
There on the dark the flagship of the Don
To me seems luminous of the spectre’s glow;
But soon an arc of gold, and then the sun,
Rise o’er the reddening billows, proud and slow;
Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,
That take all shifting colours as they shake,
I see the great Armada coil and twist
Miles, miles along the ocean’s amethyst,
Like hell’s old snake of hate—the winged snake.
And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,
That snake accursed, with wings which swell and puff
Before the slackening horses of the wind,
Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.
‘Behold,’ quoth I, ‘their floating citadels,
The same the priests have vouched for musket-proof,
Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,
That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells—
Yea, sailed from Tagus’ mouth, for Christ’s behoof.
For Christ’s behoof they sailed: see how they go
With that red skeleton to show the way
There sitting on Medina’s stem aglow—
A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;
Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse—
Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,
Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,
Their trucks, their flags—behold them, how they pass—
With God’s Revenge for figurehead—to Doom!’
Then Ben Jonson, the symposiarch, rises and calls upon Raleigh to tell
the story of the defeat of the Great Armada. I can give only a stanza or
two and the chorus:—
RALEIGH
The choirboys sing the matin song,
When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard’s right.
He drives the wing—a huddled throng—
Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.
While galleon hurtles galeasse,
And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,
As scythes cut down the summer grass,
Drake closes on the writhing mass,
Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,
Skimming the waves.
Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,
Running from ship to ship like living things.
With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,
Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.
Through smoke we see their chiefs encased
In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;
And once I see within a waist
Wild English captives ashen-faced,
Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced
In purple weals.
[DAVID GWYNN here leaps up, pale and panting, and
bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from RALEIGH
sits down again.
The Don fights well, but fights not now
The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,
To pluck the gold from off the brow,
Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.
He hunts not now the Indian maid
With bloodhound’s bay—Peru’s confiding daughter,
Who saw in flowery bower or glade
The stranger’s god-like cavalcade,
And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro’s trade
Of rape and slaughter.
His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,
Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,
Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,
Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:
Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,
Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:
Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage
Like any wolf that tears his cage!
’Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge
Till set of sun!
Their troops, superfluous as their gold,
Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,
Are packed away in every hold—
Targets of flesh for every English gun—
Till, like Pizarro’s halls of blood,
Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,
Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,
Reddening the waves for many a rood,
As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud
Before the wind.
The chief leit-motiv of the poem is the metrical idea that whenever a
stanza ends with the word ‘sea,’ Ben Jonson and the rest of the jolly
companions break into this superb chorus:—
The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake’s strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?
Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven
out to the open sea. He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of
excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but
in quite a different spirit. In Gwynn’s fevered imagination the skeleton
which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to
its destruction:—
GWYNN
With towering sterns, with golden stems
That totter in the smoke before their foe,
I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
With death above the billows, death below!
Who leads them down the tempest’s path,
From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
All helpless in the wild wind’s wrath,
Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
The Skeleton!
At length with toil the cape is passed,
And faster and faster still the billows come
To coil and boil till every mast
Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
That Inca’s bony shape burn on the waves,
Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
While Mother Carey, Orkney’s witch,
Waves to the Spectre’s song her lantern-switch
O’er ocean-graves.
The glimmering crown of Scotland’s head
They pass. No foe dares follow but the storm.
The Spectre, like a sunset red,
Illumines mighty Wrath’s defiant form,
And makes the dreadful granite peak
Burn o’er the ships with brows of prophecy;
Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
Above the tempest’s foam and reek,
More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
‘Tyrants, ye die!’
The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
Writes ‘God’s Revenge’ on waves that climb and dash,
Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
Where ships are hurled. It sings amid the crash;
Yea, sings amid the tempest’s roar,
Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
And yells of captives chained to oar,
And cries of those who strike for shore,
‘Spain’s murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
The righteous sea!’
The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted
in anthologies:—
WASSAIL CHORUS
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
RALEIGH
’Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright with golden roofs and walls—
El Dorado’s rare domain—
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
DRAYTON
’Tis where Avon’s wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O’er the river-flags embossed
Rich with flowery runes of frost—
O’er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed—
Strains of olden time.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
SHAKSPEARE’S FRIEND
’Tis, methinks, on any ground
Where our Shakspeare’s feet are set.
There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
With his blithest coronet:
Friendship’s face he loveth well:
’Tis a countenance whose spell
Sheds a balm o’er every mead and dell
Where we used to fret.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?
HEYWOOD
More than all the pictures, Ben,
Winter weaves by wood or stream,
Christmas loves our London, when
Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam—
Clouds like these, that, curling, take
Forms of faces gone, and wake
Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
London like a dream.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?
BEN JONSON
Love’s old songs shall never die,
Yet the new shall suffer proof;
Love’s old drink of Yule brew I,
Wassail for new love’s behoof:
Drink the drink I brew, and sing
Till the berried branches swing,
Till our song make all the Mermaid ring—
Yea, from rush to roof.
FINALE
Christmas loves this merry, merry place:—
Christmas saith with fondest face
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
Rare!’
This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of ‘The Coming of Love,’
fine as it is, was overshadowed by the wild and romantic poem which lends
its name to the volume. But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his
beautiful series, ‘Flowers of Parnassus,’ where it was charmingly
illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue considerably.
There is no doubt that for originality, for power, and for music,
“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid’” is enough to form the base of any poet’s
reputation. It has been enthusiastically praised by some of the foremost
writers of our time. I have permission to print only one of the letters
in its praise which the author received, but that is an important one, as
it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:—
“I have been beginning Christmas, in a way, by reading over the fire
your delightful little ‘Christmas at the “Mermaid”’ which it was most
kind of you to send. I was carried back right into Armada times by
David Gwynn’s vivid story: it seems remarkable that you should have
had the conjuring power to raise up those old years so brightly in
your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers in such
high relief of three dimensions, as one may say.
The absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest
touches of the poem: it throws one into a ‘humourous melancholy’—and
we feel him, in some curious way, more than if he had been there.”
Chapter XXVIII
CONCLUSION
‘ASSUREDLY,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, ‘there is no
profession so courageous as that of the pen.’ Well, in coming to the end
of my task—a task which has been a labour of love—I wish I could feel
confident that I have not been too courageous—that I have satisfactorily
done what I set out to do. But I have passed my four-hundred and
fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a child’s bucket into
a sea of ideas that has no limit. Out of scores upon scores of articles
buried in many periodicals I have been able to give three or four from
the ‘Athenæum,’ none from the ‘Examiner,’ and none out of the ‘Nineteenth
Century,’ ‘The Fortnightly Review,’ ‘Harper’s Magazine,’ etc. Still, I
have been able to show that a large proportion of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
scattered writings preaches the same peculiar doctrine in a ratiocinative
form which in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is artistically
enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest importance at the
present time, when science seems to be revealing a system of the universe
so deeply opposed to the system which in the middle of the last century
seemed to be revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s is
making a very deep impression upon the generation to which I belong. If
it should be said that in speaking for the younger generation I am
speaking for a pigmy race (and I sometimes fear that we are pigmies when
I remember the stature of our fathers), I am content to appeal to one of
the older generation, who has spoken words in praise of Mr. Watts-Dunton
as a poet, which would demand even my courage to echo. I mean Dr. Gordon
Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, ‘The New Day,’ was published in
1890. It was these remarkable sonnets which moved Frank Groome to dub
Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘homo ne quidem unius libri,’ a literary celebrity who
had not published a single book. I have already referred to ‘The New
Day,’ but I have not given an adequate account of this sonnet-sequence.
In their nobility of spirit, their exalted passion of friendship, their
single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not think they have ever
been surpassed. It is a fine proof of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s genius for
friendship that he should be able unconsciously to enlink himself to the
souls of his seniors, his coevals and his juniors, and that there should
be between him and the men of three generations, equal links of equal
affection. But I must not lay stress on the whimsies of chronology and
the humours of the calendar, for all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friends are
young, and the youngest of them, Mr. George Meredith, is the oldest. The
youthfulness of ‘The New Day’ makes it hard to believe that it was
written by a septuagenarian. The dedication is full of the fine candour
of a romantic boy:—
“To ‘W. T. W.,’ the friend who has gone with me through the study of
Nature, accompanied me to her loveliest places at home and in other
lands, and shared with me the reward she reserves for her ministers
and interpreters, I dedicate this book.”
The following sonnet on ‘Friendship’ expresses a very rare mood and a
very high ideal:—
Friendship is love’s full beauty unalloyed
With passion that may waste in selfishness,
Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:
Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.
It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound
With cheery look that makes a winter bright;
It saves the hope from falling to the ground,
And turns the restless pillow towards the light.
To be another’s in his dearest want,
At struggle with a thousand racking throes,
When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant
Is that which friendship’s soothing hand bestows:
How joyful to be joined in such a love,—
We two,—may it portend the days above!
The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine order. Many
English and American critics have highly praised them, but not too
highly. This venerable ‘parable poet’ did not belong to my generation.
Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s generation. His day was the day
before yesterday, and yet he wrote these sonnets when he was past
seventy, not to glorify himself, but to glorify his friend. They are one
long impassioned appeal to that friend to come forward and take his place
among his peers. The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of
the most bewildering enigmas of literature. I have already quoted what
Gordon Hake says about the man who when the ‘New Day’ was written had not
published a single book.
With regard to the unity binding together all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
writings, I can, at least, as I have shown in the Introduction, speak
with the authority of a careful student of them. With the exception of
the late Professor Strong, who when ‘The Coming of Love’ appeared, spoke
out so boldly upon this subject in ‘Literature,’ I doubt if anyone has
studied those writings more carefully than I have; and yet the difficulty
of discovering the one or two quotable essays which more than the others
expound and amplify their central doctrine has been so great that I am
dubious as to whether, in the press of my other work, I have achieved my
aim as satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by
another—especially by Professor Strong, had he not died before he could
write his promised essay upon the inner thought of ‘Aylwinism’ in the
‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ But, even if I have failed
adequately to expound the gospel of ‘Aylwinism,’ it is undeniable that,
since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ (whether as a result of that
publication or not), there has been an amazing growth of what may be
called the transcendental cosmogony of ‘Aylwinism.’
Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of ‘Aylwin’—the
‘Arvon’ illustrated edition—says:—
“When ‘Aylwin’ was in type, the author, getting alarmed at its great
length, somewhat mercilessly slashed into it to shorten it, and the
more didactic parts of the book went first. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has
restored one or two of these excised passages, notably one in which
he summarizes his well-known views of the ‘great Renascence of
Wonder, which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth.’ In one of these passages he
has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour’s speculations at the recent
meeting of the British Association.”
Something like the same remark was made in the ‘Athenæum’ of September 3,
1904:—
“The writer has restored certain didactic passages of the story which
were eliminated before the publication of the book, owing to its
great length. Though the teaching of the book is complete without
the restorations, it seems a pity that they were ever struck out,
because they appear to have anticipated the striking remarks of Mr.
Balfour at the British Association the other day, to say nothing of
the utterances of certain scientific writers who have been discussing
the transcendental side of Nature.”
The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and ‘The Athenæum’ refer are
excerpts from ‘The Veiled Queen,’ by Aylwin’s father. The first of these
comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called ‘The Revolving Cage of
Circumstance’ and runs thus:—
“‘The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth
and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in
Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of
the nineteenth.
The warring of the two impulses governing man—the impulse of wonder
and the impulse of acceptance—will occupy all the energies of the
next century.
The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy
has to come back—has to triumph—before the morning of the final
emancipation of man can dawn.
But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those
in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism, which at
this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of
evolution, will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists
are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not
the creature of organism—is a something outside the material world, a
something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal
expression.
The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the
testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold,
when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell him that
“the principle of all certitude” is not and cannot be the testimony
of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests
of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can
neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the
excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the
materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical,
lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive
series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not,
according to the organism upon which they fall.’
These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about
‘the Omnipotence of Love,’ which showed, beyond doubt, that if my
father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very
original poet.”
The second restored excerpt from ‘The Veiled Queen’ comes in at the end
of the chapter called ‘The Magic of Snowdon,’ and runs thus:—
“I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy
expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer,
Ferridoddin:—
With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies—
that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the
Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of
the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of
my life, ‘The Veiled Queen.’
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
‘The omnipotence of love—its power of knitting together the entire
universe—is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just
after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called “The
Bedouin Child,” dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins
about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these
Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
Ilyàs the prophet, lingering ’neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child’s heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
’Neath wings of Death—’mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
“Poor child, plead on,” the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help—“Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father’s eyes.”
The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures’ claws;
’Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o’er the moonlit sand,
“Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death’s, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land.”
“Nay,” saith a Voice, “the wind of Azraeel’s wings
A child’s sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:”
A camel’s bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
Filling the Bedouin’s brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.
‘Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but “the superficial
film” of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of
love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no
real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly
be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic
element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards
Sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such
as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune
of universal love and beauty.’”
With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has said that
the method of depicting the power of love in them is sublime. ‘The Slave
girl’s Progress to Paradise,’ however, is equally powerful and equally
original. The feeling in the ‘Bedouin Child’ and in ‘The Slave Girl’s
Progress to Paradise’ is exactly like that which inspires ‘The Coming of
Love.’ When Percy sees Rhona’s message in the sunrise he exclaims:—
But now—not all the starry Virtues seven
Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.
And morning says, ‘Love hath such godlike might
That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
Were quelled by doom, Love’s high-creative leaven
Could light new worlds.’ If, then, this Lord of Fate,
When death calls in the stars, can re-create,
Is it a madman’s dream that Love can show
Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
And build again my heaven?
The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately affirmed in
the words of ‘The Spirit of the Sunrise,’ addressed to the bereaved
poet:—
Though Love be mocked by Death’s obscene derision,
Love still is Nature’s truth and Death her lie;
Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
To taste the fell destroyer’s crowning spite
That blasts the soul with life’s most cruel sight,
Corruption’s hand at work in Life’s transition:
This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
Her body’s image pictured in thy brain;
The flowers above her weave the only shroud
Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
Rhona! Behold the vision!
Some may call this too mystical—some may dislike it on other accounts—but
few will dream of questioning its absolute originality.
Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour’s to which the passages
quoted from ‘The Veiled Queen’ have been compared. In his presidential
address to the British Association, entitled, ‘Reflections suggested by
the New Theory of Matter,’ he said:—
“We claim to found all our scientific opinions on experience: and the
experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is
our sense of perception of that universe. That is experience; and in
this region of belief there is no other. Yet the conclusions which
thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all
appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is
based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it
to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from
anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and
nature compels us to employ.
Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply the
premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the physical world.
It is they which tell us there is a physical world; it is on their
authority that we learn its character. But in order of causation
they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our orders of
sense. What we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen,
but on our eyes. What we hear depends, not merely on what there is
to hear, but on our ears.”
I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any idea that
is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is afterwards accepted as
a simple truth. One of the reviewers of ‘Aylwin’ was much amused by the
description of the hero’s emotions when he stood in the lower room of
Mrs. Gudgeon’s cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by Winifred’s
corpse, stretched upon a squalid mattress:—
“At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and
died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become
conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before
me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of
brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the
walls,—it was these which seemed to have life—a terrible life—and to
be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the
triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still speaking,
but for a time I heard no sound—my senses could receive no
impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet
living matter around me. Not an object there that did not seem
charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates.”
‘Fancy,’ said the reviewer, ‘any man out of Bedlam feeling as if dead
matter were alive!’
Well, apart from the psychological subtlety of this passage, our critic
must have been startled by the declaration lately made by a sane man of
science, that there is no such thing as dead matter—and that every
particle of what is called dead matter is alive and shedding an aura
around it!
Had the mass of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s scattered writings been collected into
volumes, or had a representative selection from them been made, their
unity as to central idea with his imaginative work, and also the
importance of that central idea, would have been brought prominently
forward, and then there would have been no danger of his contribution to
the latest movement—the anti-materialistic movement—of English thought
and English feeling being left unrecognized. Lost such teachings as his
never could have been, for, as Minto said years ago, their colour tinges
a great deal of the literature of our time. The influence of the
‘Athenæum,’ not only in England, but also in America and on the
Continent, was always very great—and very great of course must have been
the influence of the writer who for a quarter of a century spoke in it
with such emphasis. Therefore, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had himself collected
or selected his essays, or if he had allowed any of his friends to
collect or select them, this book of mine would not have been written,
for more competent hands would have undertaken the task. But a study of
work which, originally issued in fragments, now lies buried ‘full fathom
five’ in the columns of various journals, could, I felt, be undertaken
only by a cadet of letters like myself. There are many of us younger men
who express views about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work which startle at times
those who are unfamiliar with it. And I, coming forward for the moment
as their spokesman, have long had the desire to justify the faith that is
in us, and in the wide and still widening audience his imaginative work
has won. But I doubt if I should have undertaken it had I realized the
magnitude of the task. For it must be remembered that the articles,
called ‘reviews,’ are for the most part as unlike reviews as they can
well be. No matter what may have been the book placed at the head of the
article, it was used merely as an opportunity for the writer to pour
forth generalizations upon literature and life, or upon the latest
scientific speculations, or upon the latest reverie of philosophy, in a
stream, often a torrent, coruscating with brilliancies, and alive with
interwoven colours like that of the river in the mountains of Kaf
described in his birthday sonnet to Tennyson. Take, for instance, that
great essay on the Psalms which I have used as the key-note of this
study. The book at the head of the review was not, as might have been
supposed, a discourse learned, or philosophical, or emotional, upon the
Psalms—but a little unpretentious metrical version of the Psalms by Lord
Lorne. Only a clear-sighted and daring editor would have printed such an
article as a review. But I doubt if there ever was a more prescient
journalist than he who sat in the editorial chair at that time. A man of
scholarly accomplishments and literary taste, he knew that an article
such as this would be a huge success; would resound through the world of
letters. The article, I believe, was more talked about in literary
circles than any book that had come out during that month.
Again, take that definition of humour which I seized upon (page 384) to
illustrate my exposition of that wonderful character in ‘Aylwin’—Mrs.
Gudgeon, a definition that seems, as one writer has said, to make all
other talk about humour cheap and jejune. It is in a review of an
extremely futile history of humour. Now let the reader consider the
difficult task before a writer in my position—the task of searching for a
few among the innumerable half-remembered points of interest that turn up
in the most unexpected places. Of course, if the space allotted to me by
my publishers had been unlimited, and if my time had been unlimited, I
should have been able to give so large a number of excerpts from the
articles as to make my selection really representative of what has been
called the “modern Sufism of ‘Aylwin.’” But in this regard my publishers
have already been as liberal and as patient as possible. After all, the
best, as well as the easiest way, to show that ‘Aylwin,’ and ‘The Coming
of Love,’ are but the imaginative expression of a poetic religion
familiar to the readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism for twenty-five
years, is to quote an illuminating passage upon the subject from one of
the articles in the ‘Athenæum.’ Moreover, I shall thus escape what I
confess I dread—the sight of my own prose at the end of my book in
juxtaposition to the prose of a past master of English style:—
“The time has not yet arrived for poetry to utilize even the results
of science; such results as are offered to her are dust and ashes.
Happily, however, nothing in science is permanent save mathematics.
As a great man of science has said, ‘everything is provisional.’ Dr.
Erasmus Darwin, following the science of his day, wrote a long poem
on the ‘Loves of the Plants,’ by no means a foolish poem, though it
gave rise to the ‘Loves of the Triangles,’ and though his grandson
afterwards discovered that the plants do not love each other at all,
but, on the contrary, hate each other furiously—‘struggle for life’
with each other, ‘survive’ against each other—just as though they
were good men and ‘Christians.’ But if a poet were to set about
writing a poem on the ‘Hates of the Plants,’ nothing is more likely
than that, before he could finish it, Mr. Darwin will have discovered
that the plants do love after all; just as—after it was a settled
thing that the red tooth and claw did all the business of
progression—he delighted us by discovering that there was another
factor which had done half the work—the enormous and very proper
admiration which the females have had for the males from the very
earliest forms upwards. In such a case, the ‘Hates of the Plants’
would have become ‘inadequate.’ Already, indeed, there are faint
signs of the physicists beginning to find out that neither we nor the
plants hate each other quite so much as they thought, and that Nature
is not quite so bad as she seems. ‘She is an Æolian harp,’ says
Novalis, ‘a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher
strings within us.’ And after all there are higher strings within us
just as real as those which have caused us to ‘survive,’ and poetry
is right in ignoring ‘interpretations,’ and giving us ‘Earthly
Paradises’ instead. She must wait, it seems; or rather, if this
aspiring ‘century’ will keep thrusting these unlovely results of
science before her eyes, she must treat them as the beautiful girl
Kisāgotamī treated the ugly pile of charcoal. A certain rich man
woke up one morning and found that all his enormous wealth was turned
to a huge heap of charcoal. A friend who called upon him in his
misery, suspecting how the case really stood, gave him certain
advice, which he thus acted upon. ‘The Thuthe, following his
friend’s instructions, spread some mats in the bazaar, and, piling
them upon a large heap of his property which was turned into
charcoal, pretended to be selling it. Some people, seeing it, said,
“Why does he sell charcoal?” Just at this time a young girl, named
Kisāgotamī, who was worthy to be owner of the property, and who,
having lost both her parents, was in a wretched condition, happened
to come to the bazaar on some business. When she saw the heap, she
said, “My lord Thuthe, all the people sell clothes, tobacco, oil,
honey, and treacle; how is it that you pile up gold and silver for
sale?” The Thuthe said, “Madam, give me that gold and silver.”
Kisāgotamī, taking up a handful of it, brought it to him. What the
young girl had in her hand no sooner touched the Thuthe’s hand than
it became gold and silver.’”
I cannot find a clearer note for the close of this book than that which
sounds in one of the latest and one of the finest of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
sonnets. It was composed on the last night of the Nineteenth Century, a
century which will be associated with many of the dear friends Mr.
Watts-Dunton has lost, and, as I must think, associated also with
himself. The lines have a very special charm for me, because they show
the turn which the poet’s noble optimism has taken; they show that faith
in my own generation which for so many years has illumined his work, and
which has endeared him to us all. I wish I could be as hopeful as this
nineteenth century poet with regard to the poets who will carry the torch
of imagination and romance through the twentieth century; but whether or
not there are any poets among us who are destined to bring in the Golden
Fleece, it is good to see ‘the Poet of the Sunrise’ setting the trumpet
of optimism to his lips, and heralding so cheerily the coming of the new
argonauts:—
THE ARGONAUTS OF THE NEW AGE
THE POET
[In starlight, listening to the chimes in the
distance, which sound clear through the
leafless trees.
Say, will new heroes win the ‘Fleece,’ ye spheres
Who—whether around some King of Suns ye roll
Or move right onward to some destined goal
In Night’s vast heart—know what Great Morning nears?
THE STARS
Since Love’s Star rose have nineteen hundred years
Written such runes on Time’s remorseless scroll,
Impeaching Earth’s proud birth, the human soul,
That we, the bright-browed stars, grow dim with tears.
Did those dear poets you loved win Light’s release?
What ‘ship of Hope’ shall sail to such a world?
[The night passes, and morning breaks
gorgeously over the tree top.
THE POET
Ye fade, ye stars, ye fade with night’s decease!
Above yon ruby rim of clouds empearled—
There, through the rosy flags of morn unfurled—
I see young heroes bring Light’s ‘Golden Fleece.’
* * * * *
THE END
Index
Abbey, Edwin, 122, 301
Abershaw, Jerry, 100
Abiogenesis, 373
Absolute humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
Accent, English verse governed by, 344
Acceptance, instinct of, 14; Horace as poet of, 15
Acton, Lord, place given ‘Aylwin’ by, 5
Actors, two types of, 127
Actresses, English prejudice against, 131
Adams, Davenport, 132
Addison, ‘softness of touch’ in portraiture, 350
‘Adonais,’ 157
‘Æneid,’ 208
Æschylus, reference to, 15, 45, 324
‘Agamemnon,’ 323
Alabama, Lowell and, 295
Aldworth, 286, 293
Allen, Grant, 207, 269, 309, 361
Allingham, William, 213
Ambition v. Nature-Worship, 103
America, Watts-Dunton’s friends in, 295; his feelings towards, 297, 301
Anacharsis, 384
Anapæsts, Swinburne and, 383
Anglomania and Anglophobia, Lowell’s, 299
Anglo-Saxon, law-abidingness of, 309; conception of life, 381
Animals, man’s sympathy with 38–9, 82–86
‘Anne Boleyn,’ Watts-Dunton’s criticism of Lilian Adelaide Neilson’s
acting in, 117
Anonymity in criticism, 209
Anthropology, 14
Apemantus, 250
Appleton, Prof., Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—met at Bell Scott’s and
Rossetti’s; Hegel on the brain; asks Watts to write for ‘Academy,’ 187;
wants him to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns, 188; in a
rage; Watts explains why he has gone into enemy’s camp, 201; a
Philistine, 202
‘Arda Viraf,’ 219
‘Argonauts of the New Age,’ 457
Argyll, Duchess of: see Louise, Princess
Argyll, Duke of, 291: see Lorne, Marquis of
Aristocrats, in ‘Aylwin,’ 351
Aristotle, unities of, 18; 177; 340, 341
Armada, 423
‘Armadale,’ 348
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 219, 228
Arnold, Matthew, ‘The Scholar Gypsy,’ Borrow’s criticism of, 108; Rhona
Boswell and, 114; 157
Artifice, 239
Athenæum, 1–4; editor of, 10; seventieth birthday of, 210–213; influence
of, 452; Watts-Dunton’s connection with, 6, 173, 188, 212–27, 315, 418,
454
Augustanism, 15, 16; pyramid of, 23
Austen, Jane, 367
‘Australia’s Mother,’ 4
‘Ave Atque Vale,’ 157
Avon, River, Watts-Dunton’s love for, 31
‘AYLWIN,’ Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, 2; popularity of, 7;
principles of romantic art expressed in, 8; Justin McCarthy’s opinion of,
9; ‘Renascence of Wonder,’ original title of, 11; attempted
identification of characters in, 50, 88; ‘Veiled Queen,’ dominating
influence of author, 56; Cyril Aylwin, identification with A. E. Watts,
87; genesis of, 89; nervous phases in, 90; D’Arcy, identification with
Rossetti, 139, 140–45; description of Rossetti in, 165–169; landslip in,
270; Welsh acceptation of, 312–318; Snowdon ascent, 317; ‘Encyc. Brit.’
on, 321; naïveté in style of, 328; youthfulness of, 328; richness in
style, 330–38; Galimberti, Mme., criticism of, 338; ‘Athenæum’ canons
observed in, 338, 343; begun in metre, 342; critical analysis of,
345–362; ‘softness of touch’ in portraiture, 351; love-passion, 362;
Swinburne on, 363; Meredith on, 364; Groome on, 367; novel of the two
Bohemias, 368; editions of, 368, 377; enigmatic nature of, 373; Dr.
Nicoll on, 375; Celtic element in, 378; Jacottet on, 380; two heroines
of, 363; spirituality of, 372, 375, 378, 380; inner meaning of, 372–81;
heart-thought of contained in the ‘Veiled Queen,’ 374; ‘Saturday Review’
on, 377; motive of, 389, ‘Arvon’ edition, restoration of excised
passages, 445–50; modern Sufism of, 454; quotations from, 330, 331, 333,
336
Aylwin, Cyril, 168
Aylwin, Henry, at 16 Cheyne Walk, 165; autobiographical element in, 322,
356; see ‘Aylwin’; his mother, 352
Aylwin, Philip: see Watts, J. O.
Aylwin, Percy, contrasted with Henry Aylwin, 361; the part he plays in
the ‘Coming of Love,’ 401–11; autobiographical element in—see description
of Swinburne swimming, 268
Aylwinism, Mr. Balfour and, 373, 446, 450; growth of, 445
* * * * *
Bacon, 43
Badakhshân, ruby hills of, 329
Balfour, A. J., Aylwinism and, 373, 446, 450
Ballads, old, wonder in, 16
‘Ballads and Sonnets,’ Rossetti’s, 271
Balliol, Jowett’s dinner parties at, 280
Balzac, 18
Banville, his ‘Le Baiser,’ 133
Basevi, 95
Bateson, Mary, her paper on Crab House Nunnery, 53
Baudelaire, 135
Baynes, invites Watts to write for ‘Encyc. Brit.,’ 256–7
Beddoes, 126
‘Bedouin Child, The,’ 448
‘Belfast News-Letter,’ 4
‘Belle Dame Sans Merci, La,’ wonder and mystery of, 19
Bell, Mackenzie: on Watts-Dunton’s study of music: see ‘Poets and Poetry
of the Century,’ 38: also ‘Shadow on the Window Blind’
‘Bells, The,’ Watts on, 119
Benson, A. C, his monograph on Rossetti, 138–40
Berners, Isopel, 364, 369
Beryl-Songs, in ‘Rose Mary,’ 139–40
Betts Bey, 85
Bible, The, Watts-Dunton’s essay on, 228–41
Bible Rhythm, 238
Biogenesis, 373
Bird, Dr., 306
Birdwood, Sir George, 409
Bisset, animal trainer, 38
Black, William, 119; Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 185; their
resemblance to each other, 185; an amusing mistake, 186
Blackstone, 23, 309
Blank verse, 239
Boar’s Hill, 282
Bodleian, 282
Body, its functions—humour of, 387
Bognor, 91
Bohemians, in ‘Aylwin,’ 351
Bohemias, Novel of the Two, ‘Aylwin’ as, 368
Borrow, George, 10; method of learning languages, 58; Watts-Dunton’s
description of, 95–106, 108–16; characteristics of, 99–106, 368; his
gypsy women scenic characters, 390; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—his
first meeting with, 95; his shyness, 99; Watts attacks it; tries Bamfylde
Moore Carew; then tries beer, the British bruiser, philology, Ambrose
Gwinett, etc., 100; a stroll in Richmond Park; visit to ‘Bald-Faced
Stag’; Jerry Abershaw’s sword; his gigantic green umbrella, 101–2; tries
Whittlesea Mere; Borrow’s surprise; vipers of Norman Cross; Romanies and
vipers, 104; disclaims taint of printers’ ink; ‘Who are you?’ 105; an
East Midlander; the Shales Mare, 106; Cromer sea best for swimming;
rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, 106; goes to a gypsy camp;
talks about Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gypsy,’ 108; resolves to try it on
gypsy woman; watches hawk and magpie, 109; meets Perpinia Boswell; ‘the
popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,’ 110; Rhona Boswell, girl of the dragon
flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to smoke, 112; description of Rhona,
113; the Devil’s Needles; reads Glanville’s story; Rhona bored by Arnold,
114; hatred of tobacco, 115; last sight of Borrow on Waterloo Bridge,
115; sonnet on, 116
Boswell, Perpinia, 110–12
BOSWELL, RHONA, her ‘Haymaking Song,’ 33–5; her prototype, first meeting
with, 63; description from ‘Aylwin,’ 64; East Anglia and ‘Cowslip Land’
linked by, 72, 108; description of in unpublished romance, 110–15; her
beauty, 113; courageous nature of, 366, 406; presented dramatically, 356;
type of English heroine, 366; Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ compared with, 413;
George Meredith on, 418; humour of, 421; ‘Rhona’s Letter,’ 402–5;
rhyme-pattern of same, 419
Boswell, Sylvester, 110
Bounty, mutineers of, 310
Boxhill, Meredith’s house at, 283
Bracegirdle, Mrs., 131
‘Breath of Avon: To English-speaking Pilgrims on Shakespeare’s Birthday,’
31
British Association, 373, 445, 450
Brontë, Charlotte and Emily, Nature instinct of, 97; novels of, 346, 367
Brown, Charles Brockden, 308
Brown, Lucy Madox: see Rossetti, Mrs. W. M.
Brown, Madox, 10, 12, 35, 170; his Eisteddfod, 136; portrait of, story
connected with, 274
Brown, Oliver Madox, 274–6
Browne, Sir Thomas, 337
Browning, Robert, 4; compared with Victor Hugo, 126; 144; Watts-Dunton’s
reminiscences of:—chaffs him in ‘Athenæum’; chided by Swinburne, 222,
sees him at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him to slip away;
bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell astonished at his
magnanimity, 222–23; the review in question, ‘Ferishtah’s Fancies,’
223–26
Brynhild, 365
‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s Funeral Pyre,’ 366
Buchanan, Robert, his attacks on Rossetti, 145–6; Watts-Dunton’s
impeachment of, 148
‘Buddhaghosha,’ Parables of, 218
Buddhism, 14
Bull, John, 224, 299, 300
Burbage, 124
Burgin, G. B., his interview with Watts-Dunton, 205
Burns, Robert, 38
Butler, Bishop, share in Renascence of Wonder, 22
‘B.V.,’ 161
‘Byles the Butcher,’ 215–16
Byron, 307
‘By the North Sea,’ 271
* * * * *
Caine, Hall, Rossetti ‘Recollections’ by, 150, 151–4
Calderon, 219
Cam, Ouse and, 79
‘Cambridge Chronicle,’ 51
Cambridge University, 1; George Dyer, Frend, Hammond and, 40; Prince of
Wales at, 67
Campbell, Lady Archibald, open-air plays organized by, 132
Capri girl, Rhona Boswell like, 110
Carew, Bamfylde Moore, 99
Carlyle, Thomas, River Ouse, libellous description of, 27, 28; his heresy
of ‘work,’ 68–71; ‘Frederick the Great,’ Watts-Dunton on, 192
Carr, Comyns, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
Casket Lighthouse, girl in—poems by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 413
Cathay, pyramid of, 25
‘Catriona,’ 217
‘Caught in the Ebbing Tide,’ 82
Cavendish, Ada, 118
‘Celebrities of the Century,’ memoir of Watts-Dunton in, 4
Celtic temper, ‘Aylwin,’ 313–15; 378; 398
Cervantes, Watts-Dunton on, 197, 246–52; 382
Chalk Farm, Westland Marston’s theatrical reunions at, 117; Parnassians
at, 135
‘Chambers’s Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ Watts-Dunton’s ‘Renascence
of Wonder’ article, 13, 20, 25; 173; Douglas, James, article on
Watts-Dunton by, 393
‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ article on Watts-Dunton in, 1; Watts-Dunton’s
contributions to, 2; Sonnet, Watts-Dunton’s essay on, 205
Chamisso, 119
Channel Islands, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 268–9
Chapman, George, 267
Chaucer, his place in English poetry, 15, 43, 294, 394
Chelsea, Rossetti’s residence at, 137, 155, 161, 162, 165
Cheyne Walk, 16: see Chelsea
‘Children of the Open Air,’ 96, 97, 98, 116
Children, Rossetti on, 168
Chinese Cabinet, Rossetti’s, 267
‘Christabel,’ wonder and mystery of, 19; quotation from, 20
Christmas, ‘The Pines’ and, 93, 94; Rosicrucian, 94
“Christmas Tree at ‘The Pines,’ The,” 94
“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” 32; metrical construction of, 422;
Watts-Dunton’s preface to sixth edition, 424; written at
Stratford-on-Avon, 423; opening chorus, 423; description of Shakespeare’s
return to Stratford-on-Avon, 425–26; quotations from, 423–40; chief
leit-motiv of, 436; Wassail Chorus, 438; ‘The Golden Skeleton,’ 428–34,
436–37; Raleigh and the Armada, 434–36; letter from Thomas Hardy about,
440–41
Circumstance, as villain, 125, 349; as humourist, 248; as harlequin, 387
Civilization, definition of, 71
Climate, English, Lowell on, 300
Clive, Kitty, 131
Cockerell, Sydney C., 179
Coincidence, long arm of, 348
Cole, Herbert, 440
Coleridge, S. T., 19, 20, 38; Watts-Dunton’s poetry, kinship to, 417,
419; 324, 338; on accent in verse, 344
Coleridge, Watts-Dunton’s Sonnet to, 417; Meredith’s opinion of same, 417
Collaboration, 415
Collier, Jeremy, 259
Collier, John P., 55
Collins, Wilkie, fiction of, 348, 367
Colonies, Watts-Dunton on, 273
Colvin, Sidney, 216
Comédie Française: see Théâtre Française
Comedy: and Farce, distinction between, 258; of repartee, 259
‘COMING OF LOVE, THE’: Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, 2; popularity
of, 7; principles of Romantic Art explained in, 8; humour in, 24;
locality of Gypsy Song, 33; publication of, 178, 389; history of, 395;
inner meaning of, 400; form of, 411; opening sonnets, incident connected
with, 413; quotations from, 402–11, 450; references to, 5, 361, 376
Common Prayer, Book of, 231
Congreve, his wit and humour, 258–60
Convincement, artistic, 325
Coombe, open-air plays at, 132
Cooper, Fenimore, 306
Corkran, Miss, 118, 278
Corneille, 132
Cosmic humour, 204
Cosmogony, New, 9; see Renascence of Wonder, 373
Cosmos, joke of, 386
Cowper, W., 38
Cowslip Country, Watts-Dunton’s association with, 27, 32
Craigie, Mrs., intellectual energy of the provinces asserted by, 50; 325
Criticism, anonymity in, 209, 210; new ideas in, 344
Cromer, 106; Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, 270
Cromwell, Oliver, Slepe Hall, supposed residence at, 35; his elder wine,
36–7
Cruikshank, 387
‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’: see ‘Chambers’s Cyclopædia’
* * * * *
‘Daddy this and Daddy that, It’s,’ 181
Dana, 371
Dante, 208, 293, 412, 418
D’Arcy (see Rossetti, D. G.), character in ‘Aylwin’ originally ‘Gordon’
(Gordon Hake), 91; Rossetti as prototype of, 91–2, 139, 140–45, 165, 336
Darwin, Charles, 52, 97, 373, 455
Darwin, Erasmus, 455
Death, Pain and, 173
‘Débats, Journal des,’ 27, 374, 400
De Castro, 141–43, 166: see Howell, C. A.
Decorative renascence, 16
Deerfoot, the Indian, race won at Cambridge by, 65
‘Defence of Guinevere,’ 177
Defoe, 307, 367
De Lisle, Leconte, 124
‘Demon Lover, The,’ wonder and mystery expressed by, 19
Dénouement in fiction, dialogue and, 346
De Quincey, 175, 197, 220, 340
Dereham, Borrow as, 95
Destiny, in drama, 125
Devil’s Needles, 113
Dialect in poetry—Meredith on Rhona Boswell’s letters, 418
Dialogue in fiction, 346
Dichtung, Wahrheit and, in ‘Aylwin,’ 50
Dickens, Lowell’s strictures on, 295; 325; hardness of touch in
portraiture, 350; 367, 384, 387
‘Dickens returns on Christmas Day,’ 93
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on the sibilant in poetry, 287; substance and
form in poetry, 341
Disraeli, ‘softness of touch’ in St. Aldegonde, 351; 353
‘Divina Commedia,’ 208
‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ Watts-Dunton’s criticism of, 218
Dogs, telepathy and, 82–6
Döppelganger idea, 30
Drama, surprise in, 120; famous actors and actresses, 117; table talk
about ‘The Bells’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 119: see Actors, Actresses,
Æschylus, Banville, Burbage, Comedy and Farce, Congreve, Etheredge, Ford,
Garrick, Got, Hamlet, Hugo, Kean, Marlowe, Robson, Shakspeare, Sophocles,
Cyril Tourneur, Vanbrugh, Webster, Wells, Wycherley
Dramatic method in fiction, 346
Drayton, 438
Drury Lane, ragged girl in, 93
Dryden, the first great poet of ‘acceptance,’ 25
Du Chaillu, 52
Duffield, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
Dukkeripen, The Lovers’, 73
Dumas, 346
Du Maurier, 301
Dunn, Treffry, De Castro’s conduct to, 143; Watts-Dunton’s portrait
painted by, 171; drawings by, 161, 277
Dunton, family of, 53
Dyer, George, St. Ives and, 40, 41
* * * * *
‘Earthly Paradise, The,’ 177
East Anglia, gypsies of, 63; Omar Khayyàm and, 79; 72–85; Watts-Dunton’s
poem on, 82–5; road-girls in, 390
Eastbourne, Swinburne and Watts visit, 270
East Enders, in ‘Aylwin,’ 351
Eliot, George, 372
Ellis, F. S., 179
Emerson, 8
‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ Watts-Dunton’s connection with, 1, 2, 4, 6,
205, 256; his Essay on Poetry, 340, 393; on Vanbrugh, 258
‘Encyclopædia, Chambers’s’: see ‘Chambers’s Encyc.’
England, its beloved dingles, 69–70; Borrow and, 102; love of the wind
and, 370
‘English Illustrated Magazine,’ 287
Epic method in fiction, 346
Erckmann-Chatrian, ‘Juif Polonais’ by, 119
Erskine, his pet leeches, 39
‘Esmond,’ 328
Etheredge, 259
‘Examiner,’ contributors to, 184; Watts-Dunton’s articles in, 184
* * * * *
‘Fairy Glen,’ 315
‘Faith and Love,’ Wilderspin’s picture, 331
Falstaff, 382
Farce, comedy and, distinction between, 258
Farringford, 286
‘Father Christmas in Famine Street,’ 92
Febvre, as Saltabadil, 129
Fens, the, description of, 62
Feridun, 225
‘Ferishtah’s Fancies,’ Watts’s review of, 223
Ferridoddin, 447
Fiction, genius at work in, 7; importance of, 208; beauty in, 221;
atmosphere in, 308; ‘artistic convincement’ in, 325; methods of, 345 et
seq.; epic and dramatic methods in, 346; ‘softness of touch’ in, 349 et
seq.
Fielding, 305, 321, 347; ‘softness of touch’ in, 350, 367
Findlay, 52
FitzGerald, Edward, 79; Watts-Dunton’s Omarian poems, 80–1
Fitzroy Square, Madox Brown’s symposia at, 136–7
Flaubert, 89
‘Fleshly School of Poetry,’ 145–46
‘Florilegium Latinum,’ 147
Fonblanque, Albany, 185
Ford, spirit of wonder in, 16
‘Fortnightly Review,’ 442
Foxglove bells, fairies and, 74
France, Anatole, irony of, 204
France, dread of the wind, 370
Fraser, the brothers, water-colour drawings by, 33
Freedom, modern, 71
French Revolution, its relation to the Renascence of Wonder, 13
Frend, William, revolt against English Church, 40
Friendship, passion of, 146–48; sonnet (Dr. Gordon Hake), 444
* * * * *
Gainsborough, ‘softness of touch’ in portraits by, 350
Galimberti, Alice, her appreciation of Watts-Dunton’s work, 204, 338,
339, 347
Gamp, Mrs., 384
‘Garden of Sleep,’ 270
Garnett, Dr., his views on ‘Renascence of Wonder,’ 11; contributions to
‘Examiner,’ 184
Garrick, David, 127
Gaskell, Mrs., softness of touch, 350
Gautier, Théophile, 135, 136
Gawtry, in ‘Night and Morning,’ 349
Gelert, 82–5
Genius, wear and tear of, 175
Gentility, 25, 109
‘Gentle Art of Making Enemies,’ 353
German music, fascination of, 89
German romanticists, the terrible-grotesque in, 126
Gestaltung, Goethe on, 398
Ghost, laughter of, 387
Gladstone, 175
Glamour, Celtic, 313–15; 378
‘Glittering Plain,’ 173
Glyn, Miss, 118, 136
God as beneficent Showman, 387
Goethe, his critical system, Watts-Dunton’s treatise on Poetry compared
to, 257; his theory as to enigmatic nature of great works of art, 373,
394; Gestaltung in art, 398
‘Golden Hand, The,’ 73
‘Gordon,’ Dr. G. Hake as, 91, 95
Gordon, Lady Mary, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton’s visits to, 270
Gorgios and Romanies, 389
Gosse, Edmund, contributes to ‘Examiner,’ 184; his study of Etheredge,
259
Got, M., Watts on his acting in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ 127
Grande dame, Aylwin’s mother as type of, 352
Grant, James, 367
‘Graphic,’ 100
‘Grave by the Sea, A,’ 157
‘Great Thoughts,’ 61
Grecian Saloon, Robson at, 57
Greek mind, the, 44
Green Dining Room at 16 Cheyne Walk, 161
Groome, F. H., account of J. K. Watts by, 50; intimacy with Watts-Dunton,
68; Watts-Dunton and the gypsies, 72; Watts-Dunton’s obituary notice of,
79; on gypsies in ‘Aylwin,’ 351; ‘Kriegspiel,’ 364; his review of
‘Aylwin,’ 367, 372; gypsy humour—anecdote, 420
Grotesque, the terrible-, in art, 126
Gryengroes: see Gypsies
‘GUDGEON, MRS.,’ humour of, 382–84, 388; prototype of, 383
‘Guide to Fiction,’ Baker’s, 374
Gwinett, Ambrose, 99
Gwynn, David, 423
‘Gypsy Folk-tales,’ 420
‘Gypsy Heather,’ 75
Gypsies, Watts-Dunton’s acquaintance with, 61, 67; superstitions of, 101;
‘prepotency of transmission’ in, 362; in ‘Aylwin,’ Groome on, 367;
‘Aylwin,’ gypsy characters of, 368; ‘Times’ on, 370; superiority of gypsy
women to men, 392; characteristics of same, 390; music, 392; humour of,
420
* * * * *
Hacker, Arthur, A.R.A., illustration of ‘John the Pilgrim’ by, 415
Haggard, Rider, telepathy and dumb animals, 82; Watts-Dunton’s influence
on writings of, 415
Haggis, the stabbing of, 193
Hake, Gordon, 12; ‘Aylwin,’ connection with, 90; physician to Rossetti,
90–91; his view of Rossetti’s melancholia and remorse—cock and bull
stories about ill-treatment of his wife, 91; physician to Lady Ripon, 90;
Borrow and Watts-Dunton introduced by, 95; poems connected with
Watts-Dunton, 92; ‘The New Day’ (see that title)
Hake, Thomas St. E., author’s gratitude for assistance from, 10; 11, 12;
‘Notes and Queries,’ papers on ‘Aylwin’ by, 50; J. O. Watts identified
with Philip Aylwin by, 51, 56; account of J. O. Watts by, 57; A. E.
Watts, description by, 88; ‘Aylwin,’ genesis of, account by, 89; account
of his father’s relations with Rossetti, 90–91; Hurstcote and Cheyne
Walk, ‘green dining room,’ identified by, 161; William Morris, facts
concerning, given by, 171
Hallam, Henry, 281
‘Hamlet,’ 293
Hammond, John, 40–1
‘Hand and Soul,’ 172
Hardy, Thomas, 27, 186, 325; letter from, 440–41
‘Harper’s Magazine,’ 122, 442
Harte, Bret, 301; Watts-Dunton’s estimate of, 302–11; histrionic gifts,
302; meeting with; drive round London music-halls, 303; ‘Holborn,’
‘Oxford’; Evans’s supper-rooms; Paddy Green; meets him again at
breakfast; a fine actor lost, 303
Hartley, on sexual shame, 255
Hawk and magpie, Borrow and, 109
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 305
‘Haymaking Song,’ 34
Hazlitt, W., 261
Hegel, 187
Heine, 232
Heminge and Condell, 293
Hemingford Grey, 33
Hemingford Meadow, description, 32, 33
Henley, W. E., 284, 322
Herder, 19
Herkomer, Prof. H., 100
Herne, the ‘Scollard,’ 402, 405
Herodotus, 340
Hero, English type of, 365
‘Hero, New,’ The, 287
Heroines, ‘Aylwin,’ a story with two, 363
Hesiod, 221, 394
Heywood, 439
Higginson, Col., 301
Hodgson, Earl, 30
Homer, 177, 208, 323, 355
Hood, Thomas, 1
Hopkins, John, 233
Horne, R. H., 137; challenge to Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 269
Hotei, Japanese god of contentment, 385
‘House of the Wolfings,’ 173
Houssaye, Arsène, 218
Houghton, Lord, 183
Howell, Charles Augustus, prototype of De Castro, q.v.
Hueffer, Dr. F., Wagner exponent, 89; Watts-Dunton’s intimacy with, 89
Hueffer, Ford Madox, testimony to the friendship of Watts-Dunton and
Rossetti, 154
Hugo, Victor, ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ 123–30; Watts-Dunton’s sonnet to, 129;
dread of the wind, 370
Humboldt, 45
Humour, Watts-Dunton’s definition of, 196; absolute and relative, 16, 23,
384; cosmic, 204; renascence of wonder in, 242; metaphysical meaning of,
246–55
Hunt, Holman, 19
Hunt, Leigh, 261
Hunt, Rev. J., 49
* * * * *
‘Idler,’ interview with Watts-Dunton in, 205
‘Illuminated Magazine,’ 55
Imagination, lyrical and dramatic, in ‘Aylwin,’ 356–61
Imaginative power in ‘Aylwin,’ 345
Imaginative representation, 208, 398
Imperialism, 273
Incongruity, basis of humour, 385
Indecency, definition of, 255
Ingelow, Jean, 369
Interviewing, skit on, 263
Ireland, hero-worship in, 3
Irony, Anatole France’s, 204; in human intercourse, 251
Irving, Sir Henry, 118, 137
Isis, 332
Isle of Wight, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, 270
* * * * *
Jacottet, Henri, 347, 374, 380
Jámi, 21
‘Jane Eyre,’ 342, 345
Japanese, race development of, 14
Jaques, 250
‘Jason,’ 177
Jefferson, Joseph, 121
Jeffrey, Francis, 2
Jenyns, Soame, 387
Jerrold, Douglas, 1, 53, 289
Jessopp, Dr., ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,’ reference to Dunton
family in, 53
Jewish-Arabian Renascence: see Renascence
‘John the Pilgrim,’ 416
Johnson, Dr., 326
Jolly-doggism, 199
Jones, Sir Edward Burne, 180
Jonson, Ben, 423
‘Joseph and His Brethren,’ 55
Joubert, 221
‘Journal des Débats,’ 27, 374
Journalism, mendacious, 263
Jowett, Benjamin, Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 279; pen portrait of,
280; see ‘Last Walk from Boar’s Hill,’ 282
‘Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain,’ 31
‘Juif-Polonais,’ 119
* * * * *
Kaf, mountains of, 286, 453
Kean, Edmund, 121, 127
Keats, John, spirit of wonder in poetry of, 19, 293; richness of style,
329
Kelmscott Manor, Rossetti’s residence at, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165;
identification of Hurstcote with, 170; causeries at, 173
Kelmscott Press, 178, 181
Kernahan, Coulson, 56, 413
Kew, Lord, Thackeray’s, 351
Keynes, T., 267
Khayyàm, Omar, ‘Toast to,’ 79, 81; Sonnet on, 81; ‘The Pines,’ Groome
and, 79
‘Kidnapped,’ Watts-Dunton’s review of, 215; letter from Stevenson
concerning same, 216
‘King Lear,’ 126, 323, 355
Kisāgotamī, 456
‘Kissing the May Buds,’ 406
Knight, Joseph, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 60; as dramatic critic,
122, 123
Knowles, James, 290: see also ‘Nineteenth Century’
‘Kriegspiel,’ 364
‘Kubla Khan,’ wonder and mystery of, 19, 20
Kymric note, in ‘Aylwin,’ 313–15
* * * * *
Lamb, Charles, 41, 59, 250, 387
Lancing, Swinburne and Watts visit, 270
Landor, 271, 352
Landslips at Cromer, 270
Lane, John, wishes to compile bibliography of Watts-Dunton’s articles, 6;
publication of ‘Coming of Love,’ 396; 440
Lang, Andrew, critical work of, 207; 415
Language, inadequacy of, 323
‘Language of Nature’s Fragrancy,’ 269
Laocoon, 323
‘Last Walk from Boar’s Hill, The,’ 282
Latham, Dr. R. G., acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 58
‘Lavengro,’ 368
‘Lear, King,’ 126, 323, 355
Le Gallienne, R., 1
Leighton, Lord, 172
Leslie, G. D., 301
Leutzner, Dr. Karl, 205
Lever, 367
Lewis, Leopold, 119
Ligier, as Triboulet in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ 124
Lineham, 95
Litany, 231
‘Literature,’ 132, 244, 245
‘Literature of power,’ 208
‘Liverpool Mercury,’ article on ‘Aylwin,’ 12
Livingstone, J. K. Watts’s friendship with, 52
Llyn Coblynau, 317
London, Watts-Dunton’s life in, 87 et seq.; its low-class women,
humourous pictures of, 383
Lorne, Marquis of, 453: see Argyll, Duke of
‘Lothair,’ 353
Louise, Princess (Duchess of Argyll), Rossetti’s alleged rudeness to, 156
‘Love brings Warning of Natura Maligna,’ 414
‘Love for Love,’ 258, 260
‘Love is Enough,’ 177
Love-passion in ‘Aylwin,’ 362
‘Lovers of Gudrun,’ written in twelve hours, 176
‘Loves of the Plants,’ 455
‘Loves of the Triangles,’ 455
Lovell, Sinfi, Nature instinct of, 97; ‘Amazonian Sinfi,’ 107; true
representation of gypsy girl, 317; Meredith’s praise of, 363; Groome on,
364; Richard Whiteing on, 364; dominating character of, 363, 365;
prototype of, 368–9; beauty of, 391
Low, Sidney, 244
Lowell, James Russell, 222; Watts-Dunton’s critical work, appreciation
of, 399; sonnet on the death of, 300; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences
of:—meets him at dinner, 295; he attacks England; directs diatribe at
Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel, 296; recognition; cites Watts’s first
article, 298; his anglophobia turns into anglomania, 299; likes English
climate, 300
Lowestoft, 106
Luther, his pigs, 39
‘Lycidas,’ 3, 157
Lyell (geologist), 45; J. K. Watts’s acquaintance with, 50, 52
Lytton, Bulwer, novels of, 349
* * * * *
McCarthy, Justin, ‘Aylwin,’ criticism of, 9; hospitality of, 186
MacColl, Norman, invites Watts-Dunton to write for ‘Athenæum,’ 188; 243,
418
Macready, 136
Macrocosm, microcosm and, 26, 27, 35
‘Madame Bovary,’ 89
Madonna, by Parmigiano, 172
‘Magazine of Art,’ 290
Magpie, hawk and, 109
Maguelonne, Jeanne Samary as, 129
Man, final emancipation of, 47: see also Renascence of Wonder,
‘Aylwinism.’
‘Man and Wife,’ 348
Manchester School, 273
‘Mankind, the Great Man,’ 46
Manns, August, Crystal Palace Concerts conducted by, 89
Manu, 219
‘M.A.P.,’ 278
Mapes, Walter, 388
Marcianus, 104
Marlowe, Christopher, spirit of wonder in poetry of, 16; 329; friend of,
426
Marot, Clement, 229
Marryat, 367
Marshall, John, medical adviser to Rossetti, 152
Marston, Dr. Westland:—symposia at Chalk Farm; famous actors and
actresses, 117; table talk about ‘The Bells’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 119;
on staff of ‘Examiner,’ 184; the sub-Swinburnians at the Marston
Mornings; the divine Théophile; the Gallic Parnassus, 136
Marston, Philip Bourke, Louise Chandler Moulton’s memoir of, 4, 10, 157;
Oliver Madox Brown’s friendship with, 276
Martin, Sir Theodore, 156
Matter, dead, 411, 452; new theory of, 451
Meredith, George, 6; Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 283, 284; literary
style of, 325, 328; Watts-Dunton’s Sonnet on Coleridge, opinion of, 417;
‘Coming of Love,’ opinion of, 418
‘Meredith, ‘To George, Sonnet, 284
Meredithians, mock, 325
‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ 293
Methuen, A. M. S., 216
Metrical art, new, 343, 344, 412
Microcosm, of St. Ives, 26–7; 35; characters in the, 50–60
Middleton, Dr. J. H., his friendship with Morris, 172; ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica,’ collaboration in, 173
Mill, John Stuart, education of, Watts-Dunton’s early education compared
with, 50
Miller, Joaquin, 301
Milton, John, 3; period of wonder in poetry ended with, 25; 157; 293
Minto, Prof., 10; Watts-Dunton’s connection with ‘Examiner’ and, 184–88,
256; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—neighbours in Danes Inn; editing
‘Examiner’; secures Watts; first article appears; Bell Scott’s party;
Scott wants to know name of new writer, 184; Watts slates himself, 185;
Minto’s Monday evening symposia, 185
Molière, 126, 132
Montaigne—value of leisure—quotation, 68
Morley, John, 27
Morris, Mrs., Rossetti’s picture painted from, 172; reference to, 179,
180
Morris, William, ‘Quarterly Review’ article on, 16; ‘Chambers’s
Cyclopædia,’ article on, 173; ‘Odyssey,’ his translation of, 176;
Watts-Dunton’s criticism of poems by, 176; intimacy with Watts-Dunton,
170; Watts-Dunton’s monograph on, 170, 173–77; indifference to criticism,
173; anecdotes of, 179–82; generosity of, 179; death of, 178–79;
Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; ‘nosey
Latin,’ 136; Wednesday evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston,
Madox Brown and Morris, 170; at Kelmscott, 170; passion for angling, 171;
snoring of young owls, 171; causeries at Kelmscott, 173; the only reviews
he read, 173; the little carpetless room, 175; writes 750 lines in twelve
hours, 176; the crib on his desk, 177; offers to bring out an
édition-de-luxe of Watts’s poems; gets subscribers; a magnificent
royalty, 179; presentation copies; extravagant generosity; ‘All right,
old chap’; ‘Ned Jones and I,’ 180; ‘Algernon pay £10 for a book of
mine!’, 181; disgusted with Stead, the music hall singer and dancer;
‘damned tomfoolery,’ 181
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 4, 301
Mounet-Sully, as François I in Le Roi s’Amuse, 125
‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ 260
Murchison, 45, 50, 52
‘Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,’ 220
Muret, Maurice, 374, 400
Music, Watts-Dunton’s knowledge of, 38, 89
Myers, F. W. H., 291
* * * * *
‘Natura Benigna,’ 97; the keynote of ‘Aylwinism,’ 411
‘Natura Maligna,’ 408; Sir George Birdwood on, 409
Natura Mystica, 73
‘Nature’s Fountain of Youth,’ 268
Nature, ‘Poetic Interpretation of,’ 204; as humourist, 386
Nature-worship, Shintoism, 14, 97; ambition and, 103
‘Nature-worshippers,’ Dictionary for, 68
Neilson, Julia, 117
Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton’s criticism of her acting, 117–18
Nelson, 365
‘New Day, The,’ 92, 107, 162–64, 312, 396, 443
New Year, sonnets on morning of, 409
‘News from Nowhere,’ 173
‘Nibelungenlied,’ 176
Nicol, John, 202
Nicoll, Dr. Robertson, 5; collection of Watts-Dunton’s essays suggested
by, 6, 22; “Significance of ‘Aylwin,’” essay by, 372; Renascence of
Wonder in Religion, articles on, 22, 375, 445
Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton’s appreciation of, 117
‘Night and Morning,’ 349
‘Nineteenth Century,’ 290, 291, 442
‘Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death,’ 235
Niobe, 323
Niton Bay, 270
‘Noctes Ambrosianæ, Comedy of,’ Watts-Dunton’s review of, 190–201;
Lowell’s opinion of same, 298
Norman Cross, vipers of, 104
Norris, H. E., ‘History of St. Ives’ (reference to), 25, 40, 51; River
Ouse, praise of, 28, 29, 30
North, Christopher: see Wilson, Professor
‘Northern Farmer,’ 387
Norwich horse fair, 106
‘Notes and Queries,’ 50, 51, 56, 57, 88, 161, 171, 316, 317, 318
‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ 125
Novalis, 247, 455
Novel, importance of, 208; of manners, 308; see Fiction.
Novelists, absurdities of popular, 367
Nutt, Alfred, 6
* * * * *
‘Octopus of the Golden Isles,’ 148
‘Odyssey,’ Morris’s translation of, 176; 208; 341
‘Œdipus Egyptiacus,’ 226
Olympic, Robson at, 57
Omar, Caliph, 69
Omar Khayyàm Club, 81
Omarian Poems, Watts-Dunton’s, 78, 79, 80, 81
‘Omnipotence of Love.’ The, 287
‘Orchard, The,’ Niton Bay, 270
O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, ‘Marston Nights,’ presence at, 136; 161
Ouse, River, poems on, 28, 29, 30; Carlyle’s libel of, 28–9
Owen, Harry, 317
Oxford Union, Rossetti’s lost frescoes at, 162
* * * * *
Pain and Death, 173
Palgrave, F. T., 291
‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ 245
Palmerston, 295
Pamphlet literature, 99
‘Pandora,’ Rossetti’s, 21
‘Pantheism’: Dr. Hunt’s book, 49
Parable poetry, 224
Paradis artificiel, 248, 388
Paragraph-mongers, Rossetti and, 155
Parmigiano, Madonna by, 172
Parsimony, verbal, 418
Partridge, Mrs., 382
Patrick, Dr. David, 5
Penn, William, St. Ives, his death there, 41
‘Perfect Cure,’ The, 181
‘Peter Schlemihl,’ 119
Petit Bot Bay, 31, 268
Phelps, 136
Philistia, romance carried into, 327; 386
Philistinism, actresses and, 132
‘Piccadilly,’ Watts-Dunton writes for, 301, 353
‘Pickwick,’ trial scene in, 387
‘Pines, The,’ residence of Watts-Dunton and Swinburne: Christmas at,
93–4; 262 et seq.; works of art at, 266
Plato, 341
Plot-ridden, ‘Aylwin’ not, 348
Poe, Edgar Allan, on ‘homely’ note in fiction, 325; ‘The Raven,’
originality of, 419
‘Poems by the Way,’ 173, 177
Poetic prose: see Prose
_ποιήσις_, 341
_ποιητής_, 340
Poetry, wonder element in, 15, 25; English Romantic School, 17; humour
in, question of, 24; parables in, 224; blank verse, 239; popular and
artistic, 293; Watts-Dunton’s Essay on, 340, 354, 393; Herodotus, Plato,
Aristotle, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Bacon on, 340, 341; difference
between prose and, 339; rhetoric and, 340; poetic impulse, 393; sincerity
and, conscience in, 394; imagination in, 397; Zoroaster’s definition of,
398; originality in, 419
‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ Mackenzie Bell’s study of Watts-Dunton
in, 38
Pollock, Walter, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
Pope, Alexander, periwig poetry of, 25
‘Poppyland,’ Watts-Dunton visits, 270
Portraiture, ethics of, 141, 143
‘Prayer to the Winds,’ 81
Pre-Raphaelite movement, definition of, 16; poets, 160–61
Priam, 355
Primitive poetry, 15
Prinsep, Val, his vindication of Rossetti, 145
Printers’ ink, taint of, 105
Priory Barn, Robson at 57
Prize-fighters, gypsy, 392
‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice,’ 94
Prose, poetic, 339: difference between poetry and, 339; see also
‘Aylwin,’ Bible Rhythm, Common Prayer, Book of Litany; Manu; Ruskin
Psalms, Watts-Dunton on, 228–41
Publicity, evils of, 262
Purnell, Thomas, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 59
* * * * *
‘Quarterly Review,’ on Renascence of Wonder, 16–17; on friendship between
Morris and Watts-Dunton, 173
Queen Katherine, Watts’s sonnet on Ellen Terry as, 122
Quickly, Mrs., 382
* * * * *
Rabelais, 196–200, 387
Racine, 132
Rainbow, The Spirit of the, 101
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 423; on ‘command of the sea,’ 427
Rappel, Le, 123
Reade Charles, 325, 348; hardness of touch, 351
Rehan, Ada, 131
Reid, Sir Wemyss, 185
‘Relapse, The,’ 259
Relative humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
Religion, Renascence of Wonder in, 375; poetic, 455
‘Reminiscence of Open-Air Plays,’ Epilogue, 133
Renascence, decorative, connection with pre-Raphaelite movement, 16
Renascence, Jewish-Arabian, connection with instinct of wonder, 14
Renascence of religion, 22
Renascence of Wonder, exemplified in ‘Aylwin,’ 2; origin of phrase, 11;
meaning of phrase, 13, 17, 374; Garnett on, 11, French Revolution, cause
of, 13; pre-Raphaelite movement, connection with, 16; Watts-Dunton’s
article on, 20, 25; in Philistia, 327, 328; in religion, 22, 375; ‘Coming
of Love, The,’ the most powerful expression of, 25; Watts-Dunton’s
Treatise on Poetry, 257; ‘Aylwin,’ passages on, 446; foreign critics on,
374; 9, 325
Repartee, comedy of, 259
Representation, imaginative, 398
Rhetoric, Poetry and, 340
RHONA BOSWELL, see Boswell.
‘Rhona’s Letter,’ 402
Rhyme colour, 412
Rhys, Ernest, ‘Aylwin’ dedicated to, 312; ‘Song of the Wind,’ paraphrase
by; 313; 377
Rhythm, 239, 412: see Bible Rhythm
Richardson, 367
Richmond Park, Borrow in, 100
Ripon, Lady, 91
‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 121
‘Rivista d’Italia’: see Galimberti, Madame
‘Robinson Crusoe,’ 307
Robinson, F. W., 12
Robson, actor, J. O. Watts’s admiration for, 57; 127, 129
Rogers, S., 39
‘Roi s’Amuse, Le,’ 123
Romanies, Gorgios and, 389; see Gypsies
Romantic movement, 16–25
‘Romany Rye,’ 367
‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 293
‘Roots of the Mountains,’ 173
‘Rose Mary,’ Watts-Dunton’s advice to Rossetti concerning, 139
Rosicrucian Christmas, 94
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1, 2; Watts-Dunton on, 17, 18, 19, 21; ‘Spirit
of Wonder’ expressed by, 18, 19; ‘Pandora,’ 21; Poems of, lack of humour
in, 24; ‘Watts’s magnificent Star Sonnet,’ his appreciation of, 29; Omar
Khayyàm, translation discovered by, 79; his insomnia; Dr. Hake as his
physician; grief for his wife’s death; his melancholia; cock-and-bull
stories as to his treatment of his wife; their origin; wild and whirling
words; 90–91; stay at Roehampton, 91; Cheyne Walk reunions, 137;
Watts-Dunton, affection for, 138–69; Watts-Dunton’s influence on, 139,
140, 149, 150, 154; type of female beauty invented by, 140; dies in
Watts-Dunton’s arms, 150; illness of, anecdote concerning, 153; Watts
Dunton’s elegy on, 157; Cheyne Walk green dining-room, description, 161;
Watts-Dunton’s description of his house, 165–69; his wit and humour, 169;
‘Spirit of the Rainbow,’ illustration to, 276; references to, 9, 10, 27,
35, 262, 263; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—at Marston symposia; the
Gallic Parnassians; he advises the bardlings to write in French, 136;
interest in work of others; reciting a bardling’s sonnet, 137; wishes
Watts to write his life, 140; letter to author about Rossetti, 140;
Charles Augustus Howell (De Castro), Rossetti’s opinion of, 142; portrait
as D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’; not idealized; ethics of portraiture of friend;
amazing detraction of, 144; too much written about him, 145; relations
with his wife; Val Prinsep’s testimony, 145; ‘lovable—most lovable,’ 145;
a pious fraud, 153; alleged rudeness to Princess Louise, 155; attitude to
a disgraced friend, 210; the dishonest critic; ‘By God, if I met such a
man,’ 211; a generous gift, 267; dislike of publicity; abashed by an
‘Athenæum’ paragraph, 263
Rossetti, W. M., 149, 154
Rossetti, Mrs. W. M., 275
Rous, 232
Ruskin, 340
Russell, Lord John, 295
Ryan, W. P., 378
* * * * *
‘Salaman’ and ‘Absal’ of Jámi, 21
Saltabadil, Febvre as, 129
St. Aldegonde, Disraeli’s ‘softness of touch’ in, 351
St. Francis of Assisi, 38
St. Ives, birthplace of Watts-Dunton, 26; old Saxon name for, 35; George
Dyer and, 40–41; printing press at, 40; Union Book Club, Watts-Dunton’s
speech at, 42; History of, 51; East Anglian sympathies of, 78
St. Peter’s Port, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 268
Sainte-Beuve, Watts-Dunton compared to, 2; 399
Saïs, 331
Samary, Jeanne, as Maguelonne, 129
Sampson, Mr., Romany scholar, 367
Sancho Panza, 382
Sandys, Frederick, 267
Sark, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton’s visit to, 269
‘Saturday Review,’ 34, 245, 257, 382
Savile Club, 202
Schiller, 221
‘Scholar Gypsy, The,’ 108
Schopenhauer, 247
Science, man’s good genius, 47–9
Science, Watts-Dunton’s speech on, 42–9
Scott, Sir Walter, his humour, 195; tribute to, 220, 221, 307; 346;
‘softness of touch’ in portraiture, 350; 367
Scott, William Bell, anecdote of, 184
‘Scullion, Sterne’s fat, foolish,’ 249
‘Semaine Littéraire, La,’ 347, 374, 380
Sex, witchery of, 391
‘Shadow on the Window Blind,’ 164: first printed in Mackenzie Bell’s
Study of Watts-Dunton in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ q.v.
Shakespeare, spirit of wonder in, 16; 126; 186; 293; richness in style,
328; 355; 382; 394
‘Shales mare,’ 106
Shandys, the two, 350
Sharp, William, 29; scenery and atmosphere of ‘Aylwin,’ 72, 75; 276, 284;
influence of Watts-Dunton on Rossetti, 399
Shaw, Byam, ‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s Funeral Pyre,’ illustration of, 366
Shaw, Dr. Norton, intimacy with J. K. Watts, 52
Shelley, 157; 293; ‘Epipsychidion,’ 419
Shintoism, 14
Shirley: see Skelton, Sir John
Shirley Essays, 202
‘Shirley,’ Watts-Dunton’s criticism of, 365
Shorter, Clement, his connection with Slepe Hall, 35
Sibilant, in poetry, 286–88
Siddons, Mrs., 131
Sidestrand, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 269
Sidney, Sir Philip, 365
‘Sigurd,’ 173, 176; 366
‘Silas Marner,’ public-house scene in, 387
Sinfi Lovell, see Lovell
Skeleton, the Golden, 422 et seq.
Skelton, Sir John, his ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ Watts-Dunton’s
review of, 190–201; Rossetti ‘Reminiscences,’ 202; Watts-Dunton’s
friendship with, 202
Sleaford, Lord, 353
Slepe Hall, Clement Shorter’s connection with, 35; story told in
connection with, 36
Sly, Christopher, 388
Smalley, G. W., his article on Whistler, 302
Smart set, 353
‘Smart slating,’ Watts-Dunton on, 207
Smetham, James: see Wilderspin
Smith, Alexander, 44; Herbert Spencer and, 213
Smith, Gypsy, 351
Smith, Sydney, 43, 196
Smollett, 304, 367
Snowdon, 315
Socrates, 45
‘Softness of touch’ in fiction, 350
Sonnet, The, Essay on, reference to, 205
Sophocles, 323, 394
Sothern, 118
Spencer, Herbert, Alexander Smith and, ‘Athenæum’ anecdote, 212–14
Spenser, Edmund, Spirit of Wonder in poetry of, 16
Spirit of Place, 26
‘Spirit of the Sunrise,’ 450
Sport, 65–67; definition of, 68
Sports, field, 65
Squeezing of books, 191
Staël, Madame de, her struggle against tradition of 18th century, 18
Stanley, Fenella, 362, 363
Stead, William Morris and, 181
Stedman, Clarence, his remarks on ‘The Coming of Love,’ 4, 10, 301
Sterne, his humour, 246–55; his indecencies, 253; his ‘softness of
touch,’ 350; 367, 387
Sternhold, 229
Stevenson, R. L., 10; Watts-Dunton’s criticism of ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ 215–21; letter from, 216
Stillman, Mrs., Rossetti’s picture painted from, 172
Stone, E. D., “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” Latin translation by, 147
‘Stories after Nature,’ Wells’s, 53–55
Stourbridge Fair, 65
Strand, the symposium in the, 185
Stratford-on-Avon, Watts-Dunton’s poems on, 31, 32; see also “Christmas
at the ‘Mermaid,’” 423
Stress in poetry, 344
Strong, Prof. A. S., references to, 1, 5, 132; article on ‘The Coming of
Love,’ 444; 445
Style, le, c’est la race, 233
Style, the Great, 234
Sufism, 449; in ‘Aylwin,’ 454
‘Suicide Club, The,’ 220
Sully, Professor, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
Sunrise, Poet of the, 398
Sunsets, in the Fens, 62
Surtees, 367
Swallow Falls, 315
Swift, his humour the opposite of Sterne’s, 250
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 58;
intercourse and friendship with Watts-Dunton, 89, 268–74; ‘Jubilee
Greeting’ dedicated to, 273; partly identified with Percy Aylwin, see
description of his swimming, 268; 279–84; at Théâtre Française, 124;
dedications to Watts-Dunton, 271, 272; offensive newspaper caricatures
of, 263; championship of Meredith, 284; on ‘Tom Jones,’ ‘Waverley,’
‘Aylwin,’ 346; on ‘Aylwin,’ 363; references to, 1, 12, 27, 117, 123, 139,
147, 157, 170, 180, 181, 184, 328, 413; ANECDOTES OF:—chambers in Great
James St., 89; never a playgoer, 117; life at ‘The Pines,’ 262 et seq.;
the great Swinburne myth, 263; the American lady journalist, 264; an
imaginary interview, 265; an unlovely bard; painfully ‘afflated’; method
of composition; ‘stamping with both feet,’ 265; friendship with Watts
began in 1872, 268; inseparable since; housemates at ‘The Pines’; visit
to Channel Islands; swimming in Petit Bot Bay, 268; Sark; ‘Orion’ Horne’s
bravado challenge, 269; visits Paris for Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’
269; swimming at Sidestrand; meets Grant Allen, 269; visits Eastbourne,
Lancing, Isle of Wight, Cromer, 270; visits to Jowett; Jowett’s
admiration of Watts, 279; Balliol dinner parties, 280; at the Bodleian,
282; great novels which are popular, 273
Swinburne, Miss, 299
Symons, Arthur, ‘Coming of Love,’ article on, 257
* * * * *
Table-Talk, Watts-Dunton’s, Rossetti on, 183
Tabley, Lord de, 277
Taine, 232
‘Tale of Beowulf,’ 173
Taliesin, ‘Song of the Wind,’ 313
Talk on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘A, 116
Tarno Rye, 351, 391
Tate and Brady, 232
Telepathy, dogs and, 82–6
Temple, Lord and Lady Mount, 270
Tenderness, in English hero, 365
‘Tennyson, Alfred, Birthday Address,’ 32
‘Tennyson, Alfred,’ sonnet to, 286
Tennyson, Lord, 4, 32, 144; dishonest criticism, opinion of, 211;
Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 285; Watts-Dunton’s criticism of and
essays on, 289, 290; ‘Memoir,’ Watts-Dunton’s contribution, 291;
anecdotes concerning, 287–89; ‘The Princess,’ defects of, 290; portraits
of, Watts-Dunton’s articles on, 290; ‘Maud,’ compared with Rhona Boswell,
413; WATTS-DUNTON AND:—sympathy between him and, 285; sonnet on birthday,
286; meeting at garden party; open invitation to Aldworth and
Farringford; his ear not defective, 286; sensibility to delicate metrical
nuances, 287; challenges a sibilant in a sonnet, 287; ‘scent’ better than
‘scents,’ 287; his morbid modesty, 288; a poet is not born to the purple,
288; reading ‘Becket’ in summer-house; desired free criticism, 288;
alleged rudeness to women, 289; detraction of, 289; could not invent a
story, 289; the nucleus of ‘Maud,’ 289
Terry, Ellen, Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 117, 121; sonnet on, 122
Thackeray, 295, 305, 325, 328; ‘softness of touch,’ 350–53
Théâtre Française, Swinburne and Watts at, 123–29
Thicket, The, St. Ives, 30, 32
Thoreau, teaching of, 69; love of wind, 371; 442
Thuthe, the, Kisāgotámī and, 455–6
‘Thyrsis,’ 157
Tieck, 19
‘Times,’ 89, 245, 301, 370
‘Toast to Omar Khayyám,’ 79
Tooke, Horne, 39
‘T. P.’s Weekly,’ 89
‘Torquemada,’ motif of, 125
Tourneur, Cyril, ‘spirit of wonder’ in, 16
Traill, H. D., his criticism, 207; Watts-Dunton’s meeting with, 243;
review of his ‘Sterne,’ 246–55; his letter to MacColl, 243; meets him at
dinner, 243; picturesque appearance; boyish lisp; calls at ‘The Pines’;
interesting figures at his gatherings; ‘a man of genius’; asks Watts to
write for ‘Literature’; his geniality as an editor, 244; why ‘Literature’
failed, 245
‘Travailleurs de la Mer, Les,’ 370
‘Treasure Island,’ 220
Triboulet, Got as, 124–29
‘Tribute, The,’ 289
‘Tristram of Lyonesse,’ dedicated to Watts-Dunton, 272
Troubadours and Trouvères, The, 204
Trus’hul, the Romany Cross, 101
Turner, 299
Twentieth Century, Cosmogony of, 373
* * * * *
Ukko, the Sky God, 73
‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ rustic humour of, 186
‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,’ 53
* * * * *
Vacquerie, Auguste, ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ produced by, 123
Vanbrugh, Irene, 131
Vanbrugh, Watts-Dunton’s article on, 258
Vance, the Great, 182
Vaughan, his ‘Hours with the Mystics,’ 58
‘Veiled Queen, The,’ 57, 229, 374, 375
Vernunft of Man, the Bible and the, 230
Verse, English, accent in, 344
Vezin, Hermann, 118; Mrs., 131
Victoria, Queen, Watts-Dunton’s tribute to, 274
Villain in Hugo’s novels, 125; ‘Aylwin,’ a novel without a, 349
Villon, 388
Virgil, wonder in, 15; 208
Vision, absolute and relative, 354; in ‘Aylwin,’ 357 et seq.
‘Vita Nuova,’ 412
‘Volsunga Saga,’ 176
Voltaire, 259
* * * * *
Wagner, 89, 412
Wahrheit and Dichtung, in ‘Aylwin,’ 50
Wales, Watts-Dunton’s sympathy with, 312; popularity of ‘Aylwin’ in, 314;
descriptions of, 315, 317, 318; Welsh accent, 319–20
Wales, Prince of, anecdote of, 67
Warburton, 69
‘Wassail Chorus,’ 438
Waterloo Bridge, Borrow on, 115
‘Water of the Wondrous Isles,’ 181
Watson, William, Grant Allen on, 207
Watts, A. E., Watts-Dunton’s brother, articled as solicitor, 72; Cyril
Aylwin, identification with, 87; his humour, 88; death, 89
Watts, G. F., Rossetti’s portrait by, 161
Watts, James Orlando, Watts-Dunton’s uncle, identity of character with
Philip Aylwin, 51, 56–60
Watts, J. K., Watts-Dunton’s father, account of, 50, 53; scientific
celebrities, intimacy with, 50–53; scientific reputation of, 52
Watts, William K., description of, 160
WATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE, memoirs of, 4; monograph on, reply to author’s
suggestion to write, 6, 7; plan of same, 9; description of, 278–9;
Boyhood:—birthplace, 26; Cromwell’s elder wine, 37; Cambridge
school-days, 37, 66; St. Ives Union Book Club, speech delivered at, 15,
42–49; family of Dunton, 53; father and son—the double brain, 53–5; as
child critic, 55; interest in sport and athletics, 65; Deerfoot and the
Prince of Wales, 67; period of Nature study, 67; articled to solicitor,
72; Life in London:—solicitor’s practice, 88; life at Sydenham, 89;
London Society, 89, 353; interest in slum-life, 92; connection with
theatrical world, 117–35; Characteristics:—Love of animals, 38, 39,
82–85; interest in poor, 92–4; conversational powers, 183; genius for
friendship, 443; indifference to fame, 3, 183, 204; habit of early
rising, 279; influence, 1, 2, 22, 452; dual personality, 322, 356; music,
love of, 38, 89; natural science, proficiency in, 38; optimism, 9, 457;
identification with Henry Aylwin, 356; Romany blood in, 361;
Writings:—‘Academy,’ invitation to write for, 187; ‘Athenæum,’ invitation
to write for, 188, 202; contributions to, 1, 55, 170, 173, 189–201, 204;
his treatise on Sonnet—Dr. Karl Leutzner on, 205; critical principles,
205; ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ articles, 1, 2, 4, 6, 205, 256, 257–8;
difference between prose and poetry, 339; 340, 393; poetic style, 323;
‘Examiner’ articles, 184; see also Minto; Critical Work:—Swinburne’s
opinion of, 1; character of, 8, 205–208; critical and creative work,
relation between, 203; critical and imaginative work interwoven, 370;
School of Criticism founded, 4; Essays on Tennyson, 290; Lowell on, 399;
Dramatic Criticism:—119, 120, 121, 123–30; Poetry:—2, 4, 15, 393–441;
Rossetti on, 399; Prose Writings:—character of, 2, 321–25, 327–92, 350,
453; richness of style, 329, 330, 331, 333, 336; unity of his writings,
445; American friends of, 295–311; Gypsies, description of first meeting
with, 61; Friends, Reminiscences of:—APPLETON, PROF: at Bell Scott’s and
Rossetti’s; Hegel on the brain; asks Watts to write for ‘Academy,’ 187;
wants him to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns, 188; in a
rage; Watts explains why he has gone into enemy’s camp, 201; a
Philistine, 202; BLACK, WILLIAM: resemblance to Watts, 185; meeting at
Justin McCarthy’s, 186; Watts mistaken for Black, 186; BORROW, GEORGE:
his first meeting with, 95; his shyness, 99; Watts attacks it; tries
Bamfylde Moore Carew; then tries beer, the British bruiser, philology,
Ambrose Gwinett, etc., 100; a stroll in Richmond Park; visit to
‘Bald-faced Stag’; Jerry Abershaw’s sword; his gigantic green umbrella,
101–102; tries Whittlesea Mere; Borrow’s surprise; vipers of Norman
Cross; Romanies and vipers, 104; disclaims taint of printers’ ink; ‘Who
are you?’ 105; an East Midlander; the Shales Mare, 106; Cromer sea best
for swimming; rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, 106; goes to a
gypsy camp; talks about Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gypsy,’ 108; resolves
to try it on gypsy woman; watches hawk and magpie, 109; meets Perpinia
Boswell; ‘the popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,’ 110; Rhona Boswell, girl
of the dragon flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to smoke, 112;
description of Rhona, 113; the Devil’s Needles; reads Glanville’s story;
Rhona bored by Arnold, 114; hatred of tobacco, 115; last sight of Borrow
on Waterloo Bridge, 115; sonnet on, 116; BROWN, MADOX: 10, 12, 35, 136,
170; anecdote about portrait of, 274; BROWN, OLIVER MADOX: his novel,
274–6; BROWNING: Watts chaffs him in ‘Athenæum’; chided by Swinburne,
222; 223–27; sees him at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him
to slip away; bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell astonished
at his magnanimity, 222–23; the review in question, ‘Ferishtah’s
Fancies,’ 223–26; GROOME, FRANK: a luncheon at ‘The Pines,’ 79; ‘Old
Fitz’; patted on the head by, 79; see also 50, 68, 72, 285, 351, 364,
367, 372, 420; HAKE, GORDON: Introduces Borrow, 95; see ‘New Day’;
physician to Rossetti and to Lady Ripon, 90–91; HARTE, BRET: Watts’s
estimate of, 302–11; histrionic gifts, 302; meeting with; drive round
London music halls, 303; ‘Holborn,’ ‘Oxford’; Evans’s supper-rooms; Paddy
Green; meets him again at breakfast; a fine actor lost, 303; LOWELL,
JAMES RUSSELL: meets him at dinner, 295; he attacks England; directs
diatribe at Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel, 296; recognition; cites
Watts’s first article, 298; his anglophobia turns into anglomania, 299;
likes English climate, 300; MARSTON, WESTLAND: symposia at Chalk Farm;
famous actors and actresses, 117; table talk about ‘The Bells’ and ‘Rip
Van Winkle,’ 119; on staff of ‘Examiner,’ 184; the sub-Swinburnians at
the Marston mornings; the divine Théophile; the Gallic Parnassus, 136;
MEREDITH, GEORGE: 6, 283, 284, 325, 328, 417, 418; MINTO, PROF.:
neighbours in Danes Inn; editing ‘Examiner’; secures Watts; first article
appears; Bell Scott’s party; Scott wants to know name of new writer, 184;
Watts slates himself, 185; Minto’s Monday evening symposia, 185; MORRIS,
WILLIAM: Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; ‘nosey Latin,’ 136; Wednesday
evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston, Madox Brown and Morris,
170; at Kelmscott, 170; passion for angling, 171; snoring of young owls,
171; causeries at Kelmscott, 173; the only reviews he read, 173; the
little carpetless room, 175; writes 750 lines in twelve hours, 176; the
crib on his desk, 177; offers to bring out an édition-de-luxe of Watts’s
poems; gets subscribers; a magnificent royalty, 179; presentation copies;
extravagant generosity; ‘All right, old chap’; ‘Ned Jones and I,’ 180;
‘Algernon pay £10 for a book of mine!’ 181; disgusted with Stead, the
music-hall singer and dancer; ‘damned tomfoolery,’ 181; ROSSETTI, DANTE
GABRIEL: at Marston symposia; the Gallic Parnassians; he advises the
bardlings to write in French, 136; interest in work of others; reciting a
bardling’s sonnet, 137; wishes Watts to write his life, 140; Swinburne on
Watts’s influence over, 139; letter to author about Rossetti, 140;
Charles Augustus Howell (De Castro), Rossetti’s opinion of, 142; portrait
as D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’; not idealized; ethics of portraiture of friend;
amazing detraction of, 144; too much written about him, 145; relations
with his wife; Val Prinsep’s testimony, 145; ‘lovable, most lovable,’
145; dies in Watts’s arms, 150; a pious fraud, 153; alleged rudeness to
Princess Louise, 155; described in ‘Aylwin,’ 165–9; his wit and humour,
169; attitude to a disgraced friend, 210; the dishonest critic; ‘By God,
if I met such a man,’ 211; a generous gift, 267; dislike of publicity;
abashed by an ‘Athenæum’ paragraph, 263; SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES:
James Orlando Watts and, 58; chambers in Great James Street, 89; life at
‘The Pines,’ 262 et seq.; offensive newspaper caricature of, 263; the
great Swinburne myth, 263; the American lady journalist, 264; an
imaginary interview, 265; an unlovely bard; painfully ‘afflated’; method
of composition; ‘stamping with both feet,’ 265; friendship with Watts
began in 1872, 268; inseparable since; housemates at ‘The Pines’; visit
to Channel Islands; swimming in Petit Bot Bay, 268; Sark; ‘Orion’ Horne’s
bravado challenge, 269; visits Paris for Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’
269; swimming at Sidestrand; meets Grant Allen, 269; visits Eastbourne,
Lancing, Isle of Wight, Cromer, 270; sonnet to Watts, 271; dedicates
‘Tristram of Lyonesse’ to Watts, 272; also Collected Edition of Poems,
272; visits to Jowett; Jowett’s admiration of Watts, 279; Balliol dinner
parties, 280; at the Bodleian, 282; great novels which are popular, 273;
champions Meredith, 284; TENNYSON, ALFRED: friendship with, 285; sympathy
between him and, 285; sonnet on birthday, 286; meeting at garden party;
open invitation to Aldworth and Farringford; his ear not defective, 286;
sensibility to delicate metrical nuances, 287; challenges a sibilant in a
sonnet, 287; ‘scent’ better than ‘scents,’ 287; his morbid modesty, 288;
a poet is not born to the purple, 288; reading ‘Becket’ in summer-house;
desired free criticism, 288; alleged rudeness to women, 289; detraction
of, 289; could not invent a story, 289; the nucleus of ‘Maud,’ 289; his
articles on portraits of, 290; TRAILL, H. D.: reviews his ‘Sterne’; his
letter to MacColl, 243; meets him at dinner, 243; picturesque appearance;
boyish lisp; calls at ‘The Pines’; interesting figures at his gatherings;
‘a man of genius’; asks Watts to write for ‘Literature’; his geniality as
an editor, 244; why ‘Literature’ failed, 245; WHISTLER, J. MCNEILL: Cyril
Aylwin not a portrait of, 88; anecdotes of De Castro, 142; neighbour of
Rossetti, 156; close friendship with Watts, 301; hostility to Royal
Academy, 301–2; his first lithographs, 301–2; engaged with Watts on
‘Piccadilly,’ 301, 353; ‘To Theodore Watts, the Worldling,’ 353
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, Swinburne’s sonnets to, 271, 272
‘Waverley,’ Swinburne on; its new dramatic method; cause of its success;
imitated by Dumas, 346
Way, T., Whistler’s first lithographs, 301, 302
Webster, ‘Spirit of Wonder’ in, 16
‘Well at the World’s End,’ 173
Wells, Charles, 53–55
‘Westminster Abbey, In’ (Burial of Tennyson), 291
‘W. H. Mr.,’ 424–26
‘What the Silent Voices said,’ 291
Whewell, intimacy with J. K. Watts, 52
Whistler, J. McNeill:—Cyril Aylwin not a portrait of, 88; anecdotes of De
Castro, 142; neighbour of Rossetti, 156; close friendship with Watts,
301; his first lithographs, 301–2; hostility to Royal Academy, 301–2;
engaged with Watts on ‘Piccadilly,’ 301, 353; ‘To Theodore Watts, the
Worldling,’ 353
White, Gilbert, 50
Whiteing, Richard, 364
‘White Ship, The,’ 153, 154
Whittlesea Mere, 104
Whyte-Melville, 352, 367
Wilderspin, 331: see Smetham, James
Wilkie, his realism, humour of, 387
Williams,’ Scholar,’ contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
Williams, Smith, 275
‘William Wilson,’ 219
Willis, Parker, 264
Wilson, Professor, Watts-Dunton’s essay on his ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ,’
190–201
Wimbledon Common, Borrow and, 101; Watts-Dunton and, 279
Wind, love of the, Thoreau’s, 370, 371
Women, as actresses, 131; heroic type of, 365
Wonder: see Renascence of Wonder; old and new, 15; Bible as great book
of, 228; place in race development, 14
‘Wood-Haunter’s Dream, The,’ 276
Wordsworth, William, definition of language, 39; his ideal John Bull, 224
Word-twisting, 325, 327
Work, heresy of, 68
‘World,’ The, Rossetti’s letter to, 155
‘World’s Classics,’ edition of ‘Aylwin’ in, 374
‘Wuthering Heights,’ 342, 345
Wynne, Winifred, character of, 314, 315, 363; love of the wind, 371
* * * * *
Yarmouth, 106
Yorickism, 250
* * * * *
Zoroaster, heresy of work, 68; definition of poetry, 398
* * * * *
* * * * *
Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
FOOTNOTES
{1} ‘Studies in Prose.’
{2} ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ vol. x., p. 581.
{34} The meanings of the gypsy words are:
baval wind
chaw grass
chirikels birds
dukkerin’ fortune-telling
farmin’ ryes farmers
gals girls
ghyllie song
ghyllie song
gorgie Gentile woman
gorgies Gentiles
kairs homes
kas hay
kas-kairin’ haymaking
kem sun
lennor summer
puv field
Romany chies gypsy girls
Shoshus hares
{60} ‘Notes and Queries,’ August 2, 1902.
{73a} Among the gypsies of all countries the happiest possible
‘Dukkeripen’ (i.e. prophetic symbol of Natura Mystica) is a hand-shaped
golden cloud floating in the sky. It is singular that the same idea is
found among races entirely disconnected with them—the Finns, for
instance, with whom Ukko, the ‘sky god,’ or ‘angel of the sunrise,’ was
called the ‘golden king’ and ‘leader of the clouds,’ and his Golden Hand
was more powerful than all the army of Death. The ‘Golden Hand’ is
sometimes called the Lover’s Dukkeripen.
{73b} Good-luck.
{74} Child.
{76} Pretty mouth.
{82} A famous swimming dog belonging to the writer.
{88} ‘Notes and Queries,’ June 7, 1902.
{112} Bosom.
{139} I think I am not far wrong in saying that he whom Mr. Benson heard
make this remark was a more illustrious poet than even D. G. Rossetti,
the greatest poet indeed of the latter half of the nineteenth century,
the author of ‘Erechtheus’ and ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’
{147} As Mr. Swinburne has pronounced Mr. Stone’s translation to be in
itself so fine as to be almost a work of genius, I will quote it here:—
Θειος ἀοιδός
Felix, qui potuit gentem illustrare canendo,
quique decus patriae claris virtutibus addit
succurritque laboranti, tutamque periclis
eruit, hostilesque minas avertit acerbo
dente lacessitae; bene, quicquid fecerit audax,
explevisse iuvat: metam tenet ille quadrigis,
praemia victor habet, quamvis tuba vivida famae
ignoret titulos, vel si flammante sagitta
oppugnet Livor quam mens sibi muniit arcem.
quod si fata mihi virtutis gaudia tantae
invideant, nec fas Anglorum extendere fines
latius, et nitidae primordia libertatis,
Anglia cui praecepit iter, cantare poetae;
si numeris laudare meam vel marte Parentem
non mihi contingat, nec Divom adsumere vires
atque inconcessos sibi vindicet alter honores,
dignior ille mihi frater, quem iure saluto—
illum divino praestantem numine amabo.
{157} Philip Bourke Marston.
{286} According to a Mohammedan tradition, the mountains of Kaf are
entirely composed of gems, whose reflected splendours colour the sky.
{291} ‘Tennyson: A Memoir,’ by his son (1897), vol. ii. p. 479.
{339} “Tanto è vero, che ‘Aylwin’ fu cominciato a scrivere in versi, e
mutato di forma soltanto quando l’intreccio, in certo modo prendendo la
mano al poeta, rese necessario un genere di sua natura meno astretto alla
rappresentazione di scorcio; e che l’Avvento d’amore, ove le circostanze
di fatto sono condensate in modo da dar pieno risalto al motivo
filosofico, riesce una cosa, a mio credere, più perfetta.”
{383} ‘Notes and Queries,’ June 7, 1902.
{403a} Mostly pronounced ‘mullo,’ but sometimes in the East Midlands
‘mollo.’
{403b} Mostly pronounced ‘kaulo,’ but sometimes in the East Midlands
‘kollo.’
{404} The gypsies are great observers of the cuckoo, and call certain
spring winds ‘cuckoo storms,’ because they bring over the cuckoo earlier
than usual.
{427} ‘England is a country that can never be conquered while the
Sovereign thereof has the command of the sea.’—RALEIGH.
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