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 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and the

'Athenaeum' 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 'Encyclopaedia 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

'Encyclopaedia,' 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 'Athenaeum' (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 'Athenaeum,' etc., have found their way

into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has

contributed to the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 'Chambers's

Encyclopaedia,' 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 'Athenaeum,' 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 'Athenaeum' 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

'Athenaeum,' begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naive

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 'Athenaeum' and in the

Ninth Edition of the 'Encyclopaedia 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 'Athenaeum.' 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 'Cyclopaedia 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 'Athenaeum' 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 'Encyclopaedia 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

'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' the 'Athenaeum,' 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 'Athenaeum.' 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 'Athenaeum' 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 'Encyclopaedia 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 'Cyclopaedia 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 naive 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 AEschylus 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 Stael, 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 'Cyclopaedia 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 'Salaman' and 'Absal' of Jami),

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 'Cyclopaedia 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

Debats' 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 'Athenaeum,' 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 a la Mecque et prophete a Medine.

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' AEolian 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 AEschylus

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 daedal 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 Encyclopaedia, '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 Archaeology, 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 'encyclopaedic 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 Archaeological 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 manoeuvres 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 'Athenaeum,' that as a mere child he

contributed to its pages. When he was a boy he read the 'Athenaeum,'

which his father took in regularly. One day he caught a correspondent of

the 'Athenaeum'--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 "Athenaeum."' '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 'Athenaeum.'

* * * * *

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 encyclopaedia.' 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 'Encyclopaedia 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

'Athenaeum.' 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

litterateur. 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 'Athenaeum,'

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