scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the
birth-environment as is generally supposed. It would have been of no
avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty canons, peaks,
and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had had a natural
genius for loving and depicting them; and this, undoubtedly, he had,
as we see by the effect upon us of his descriptions. Once read, his
pictures are never forgotten. But it was not merely that the scenery
and atmosphere of Bret Harte's stories are new--the point is that the
social mechanism in which his characters move is also new. And if it
cannot be denied that in temperament his characters are allied to the
characters of Dickens, we must not make too much of this.
Notwithstanding all the freshness and newness of Dickens's characters
they were entirely the slaves of English sanctions. Those
incongruities which gave them their humourous side arose from their
contradicting the English social sanctions around them. But in Bret
Harte's Argonauts we get characters that move entirely outside those
sanctions of civilization with which the reader is familiar. And
this is why the violent contrasts in his stories seem, somehow, to be
better authenticated than do the equally violent contrasts in
Dickens's stories. Bret Harte's characters are amenable to no laws
except the improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is
either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch. And yet
underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep
'law-abidingness' which the late Grant Allen despised as being 'the
Anglo-Saxon characteristic.' To my mind, indeed, there is nothing so
new, fresh, and piquant in the fiction of my time as Bret Harte's
pictures of the mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right
outside all the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own
peculiar instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.
We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from the old
sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good deal of that
natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was surrendered by
the first human compact in order to secure its substitute, civil
liberty. We get vivid pictures of the racial qualities which enable
the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots and flourish in almost every
square mile of the New World that lies in the temperate zone. Let a
group of this great race of universal squatters be the dwellers in
Roaring Camp, or a party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a 'no
man's land,' or even a gang of mutineers from the Bounty, it is all
one as regards their methods as squatters. The moment that the
mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they improvise a code of laws
something like the camp laws of Bret Harte's Argonauts, and the code
on the whole works well.
Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence
of the presentation, Bret Harte's pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in
these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature. And
again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are
what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more
sought after. This accounts in a large measure for the growing
interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if
there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of
Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
Bret Harte's stories give the reader a sense of the open air second
only to Borrow's own pictures. And if I am right in thinking that
the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this
also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
And now what about his power of creating new characters--not
characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters? Well, here
one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret
Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens. Dickens,
of course, used a larger canvas--gave himself more room to depict his
subjects.
If Bret Harte's scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may
it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories
and not long novels? For it is very difficult in a short story to
secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to
nature--the last perfection of imaginative art.
All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection.
In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having
the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as
in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from
the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature. The
shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence
the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of
course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from
which a long novel may be free."
Chapter XIX
WALES
[Picture: Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd]
IT is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr.
Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described
by Dr. Hake in 'The New Day.' I can best show the impression that Alpine
scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of 'The Coming of
Love.' But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two
should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted
'Aylwin' as the representative Welsh novel. And this is not surprising,
because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton's
passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born
upon her soil. The 'Arvon' edition is thus dedicated:--
"To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my very dear friend, this
edition of 'Aylwin' is affectionately inscribed.
It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read the
proofs of 'Aylwin'--used to read them in the beautiful land the story
endeavours to depict--that the wish came to me to inscribe it to you,
whose paraphrases of 'The Lament of Llywarch Hen,' 'The Lament of
Urien,' and 'The Song of the Graves' have so entirely caught the old
music of Kymric romance.
When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that 'love of the wind'
which is such a fascinating characteristic of the Snowdonian girls I
had only to recall that poetic triumph, your paraphrase of Taliesin's
'Song of the Wind'--
Oh, most beautiful One!
In the wood and in the mead,
How he fares in his speed!
And over the land,
Without foot, without hand,
Without fear of old age,
Or Destiny's rage.
* * *
His banner he flings
O'er the earth as he springs
On his way, but unseen
Are its folds; and his mien,
Rough or fair, is not shown,
And his face is unknown.
Had I anticipated that 'Aylwin' would achieve a great success among
the very people for whom I wrote it, I should without hesitation have
asked you to accept the dedication at that time. But I felt that it
would seem like endeavouring to take a worldly advantage of your
friendship to ask your permission to do this--to ask you to stand
literary sponsor, as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the
great Kymric race with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so
grandly associated. For although my heart had the true 'Kymric
beat'--if love of Wales may be taken as an indication of that
'beat'--the privilege of having been born on the sacred soil of the
Druids could not be claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital
presentation of that organic detail, which is the first requisite in
all true imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting.
You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that 'Aylwin' would win
the hearts of your countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your
generous nature; I knew also if I may say it, your affection for me.
How could I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the
kind thought?
But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there is, if I
am to accept the words of another Welsh writer, 'scarcely any home in
Wales where a well-thumbed copy of "Aylwin" is not to be found,' and
now that thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as
I know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the story
of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time has come
when I may look for the pleasure of associating your name with the
book.
[Picture: Moel Siabod and the River Lledr]
Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne is not an
idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the characteristics
of the race to which you belong--know it far too well to dream of
asking that question. There are not many people, I think, who know
the Kymric race so intimately as I do; and I have said on a previous
occasion what I fully meant and mean, that, although I have seen a
good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways
at the top of them all. They combine, as I think, the poetry, the
music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the
other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity
of the very different race to which they are so closely linked by
circumstance--the race whom it is the fashion to call the
Anglo-Saxon. And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who
knows them as you and I do can fail to be struck by it continually.
Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found
her--affectionate, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and brave. And I
only wish that my power to do justice to her and to the country that
gave her birth had been more adequate. There are, however, writers
now among you whose pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can hold
their own with almost anything in contemporary fiction; and to them I
look for better work than mine in the same rich field. Although I am
familiar with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe, in
their wildest and most beautiful recesses, no hill scenery has for me
the peculiar witchery of that around Eryri. And what race in Europe
has a history so poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours? That
such a country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such
an atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is
with me a matter of fervid faith."
As to the descriptions of North Wales in 'Aylwin,' they are now almost
classic; especially the descriptions of the Swallow Falls and the Fairy
Glen. Long before 'Aylwin' was published, Welsh readers had been
delighted with the 'Athenaeum' article containing the description of Mr.
Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon
at break of day.
Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not finer than
the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the nobly symbolic
conclusion of 'Aylwin':--
"We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard,
and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn
Ddu'r Arddu. And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers' Llyn and
the echoes to be heard there. She then took me to another famous
sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five
thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers' Anvil. While we
lingered here Winnie gave me as many-anecdotes and legends of this
stone as would fill a little volume. But suddenly she stopped.
'Look!' she said, pointing to the sunset. 'I have seen that sight
only once before. I was with Sinfi. She called it "The Dukkeripen
of the Trushul."'
The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on
the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films
floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a
ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire. A
horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell
upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from
the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment
a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold. But what
Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where
the sun had now sunk behind the horizon. Shooting up from the cliffs
where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of
clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose."
It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell
took on the morning when the search for Winifred began was a source of
speculation, notably in 'Notes and Queries.' Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with
this point in the preface to the twenty-second edition:--
"Nothing," he says, "in regard to 'Aylwin' has given me so much
pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh
friends and my Romany friends. I little thought, when I wrote it,
that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it
would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so
well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent
and famous 'Gypsy Smith,' and described by him as 'the most
trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language,
containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy
girl.'
Since the first appearance of the book there have been many
interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals,
upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of
Snowdon.
A very picturesque letter appeared in 'Notes and Queries' on May 3,
1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a query by E. W., which I will
give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer's
ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen,
late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that
taken by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent
spectacle that was seen by them:--
'The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was
entirely gone. So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense
a prospect, I have never beheld since. For the first and only time
in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and
Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland
and Ireland. The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth
walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for
even a briefer view than that.'
Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer says:--
'Only from Glaslyn would the description in "Aylwin" of y Wyddfa
standing out against the sky "as narrow and as steep as the sides of
an acorn" be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of
Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance
of the mountain. We must suppose the action of the story to have
taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on
Snowdon.'
[Picture: Snowdon and Glaslyn]
With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself
all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli
in the same number of 'Notes and Queries':--
'None of us are very likely to succeed in "placing" this llyn,
because the author of "Aylwin," taking a privilege of romance often
taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks
in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story. It may be,
indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a
rough translation of the gipsies' name for it, the "Knockers" being
gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence "Coblynau"--goblins. If so, the
name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure
the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide. In any case, the only
point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps
llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture),
is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the
actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes
something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake.
The "Knockers," it must be remembered, usually depend upon the
existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings
where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the
curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the
Snowdon chapters of "Aylwin."'"
In 'Aylwin' Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his readers little
pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:--
"The peasants and farmers all knew me. 'Sut mae dy galon? (How is
thy heart?)' they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met
them. 'How is my heart, indeed!' I would sigh as I went on my way.
Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in
the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who
knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country.
Never a trace of Winifred could I find.
At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to
Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach
the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that
morning."
His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the following
description of the little Welsh girl and her fascinating lisp:--
"'Would you like to come in our garden? It's such a nice garden.'
I could resist her no longer. That voice would have drawn me had she
spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin. To
describe it would of course be impossible. The novelty of her
accent, the way in which she gave the 'h' in 'which,' 'what,' and
'when,' the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me
as the timbre of her voice. And let me say here, once for all, that
when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the
English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions
were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives;
but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair. I found that to use
colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible
without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.
Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book
will go out to the world. While a story-teller may reproduce, by
means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish
accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to
represent Welsh accent."
Chapter XX
IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE
BUT the interesting subjects touched upon in the last four chapters have
led me far from the subject of 'The Renascence of Wonder.' In its
biographical sketch of Mr. Watts-Dunton the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica'
says: "Imaginative glamour and mysticism are prominent characteristics
both of 'The Coming of Love' and 'Aylwin,' and the novel in particular
has had its share in restoring the charms of pure romance to the favour
of the general public." This is high praise, but I hope to show that it
is deserved. When it was announced that a work of prose fiction was
about to be published by the critic of the 'Athenaeum,' what did Mr.
Watts-Dunton's readers expect? I think they expected something as unlike
what the story turned out to be as it is possible to imagine. They
expected a story built up of a discursive sequence of new and profound
generalizations upon life and literature expressed in brilliant
picturesque prose such as had been the delight of my boyhood in Ireland;
they expected to be fascinated more than ever by that 'easy authoritative
greatness and comprehensiveness of style' with which they had been
familiar for long; they expected also that subtle irony after the fashion
of Fielding, which suggests so much between the lines, that humour which
had been an especial joy to me in scores of articles signed by the
writer's style as indubitably as if they had been signed by his name. I
think everybody cherished this expectation: everybody took it for granted
that heaps of those 'intellectual nuggets' about which Minto talked would
smother the writer as a story-teller, that the book as literature would
be admirable--but as a novel a failure. Great as was Mr. Watts-Dunton's
esoteric reputation, I believe that many of the booksellers declined (as
the author had prophesied that they would decline) to subscribe for the
book. They expected it to fail as a marketable novel--to fail in that
'artistic convincement' of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself so often
written. What neither I nor any one else save those who, like Mr.
Swinburne, had read the story in manuscript, did expect, was a story so
poetic, so unworldly, and so romantic that it might have been written by
a young Celt--a love story of intense passion, which yet by some magic
art was as convincingly realistic as any one of those 'flat-footed'
sermon-stories which the late W. E. Henley was wont to deride.
In fact, from this point of view 'Aylwin' is a curiosity of literature.
The truth seems to be, however, that, as one of Mr. Watts-Dunton's most
intimate friends has said, its style represents one facet only of
Watts-Dunton's character. Like most of us, he has a dual existence--one
half of him is the romantic youth, Henry Aylwin, the other half is the
world-wise philosopher of the 'Athenaeum.' This other half of him lives
in the style of another story altogether, where the creator of Henry
Aylwin takes up the very different role of a man of the world. Now I
have views of my own upon this duality. I think that if the brilliant
worldly writing of the mass of his work be examined, it will be found to
be a 'shot' texture scintillating with various hues where sometimes
repressed passion and sometimes mysticism and dreams are constantly
shining through the glossy silk of the style. Sometimes from the smooth,
even flow of the criticisms gleams of a passion far more intense than
anything in 'Aylwin' will flash out. I will cite a passage in his
critical writings wherein he discusses the inadequacy of language to
express the deepest passion:--
"As compared with sculpture and painting the great infirmity of
poetry, as an 'imitation' of nature, is of course that the medium is
always and of necessity words--even when no words could, in the
dramatic situation, have been spoken. It is not only Homer who is
obliged sometimes to forget that passion when at white heat is never
voluble, is scarcely even articulate; the dramatists also are obliged
to forget that in love and in hate, at their tensest, words seem weak
and foolish when compared with the silent and satisfying triumph and
glory of deeds, such as the plastic arts can render. This becomes
manifest enough when we compare the Niobe group or the Laocoon group,
or the great dramatic paintings of the modern world, with even the
finest efforts of dramatic poetry, such as the speech of Andromache
to Hector, or the speech of Priam to Achilles; nay, such as even the
cries of Cassandra in the 'Agamemnon,' or the wailings of Lear over
the dead Cordelia. Even when writing the words uttered by OEdipus,
as the terrible truth breaks in upon his soul, Sophocles must have
felt that, in the holiest chambers of sorrow and in the highest
agonies of suffering reigns that awful silence which not poetry, but
painting sometimes, and sculpture always, can render. What human
sounds could render the agony of Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as
we see them in the sculptor's rendering? Not articulate speech at
all; not words, but wails. It is the same with hate; it is the same
with love. We are not speaking merely of the unpacking of the heart
in which the angry warriors of the 'Ilaid' indulge. Even such subtle
writing as that of AEschylus and Sophocles falls below the work of
the painter. Hate, though voluble perhaps as Clytaemnestra's when
hate is at that red-heat glow which the poet can render, changes in a
moment whenever that redness has been fanned into hatred's own last
complexion--whiteness as of iron at the melting-point--when the heart
has grown far too big to be 'unpacked' at all, and even the bitter
epigrams of hate's own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier's snap
before he fleshes his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as
she springs before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish
for a soul to which language at its tensest has become idle play.
But this is just what cannot be rendered by an art whose medium
consists solely of words."
Could any one reading this passage doubt that the real work of the writer
was to write poetry and not criticism?
But this makes it necessary for me to say a word upon the question of the
style of 'Aylwin'--a question that has often been discussed. The
fascination of the story is largely due to the magnetism of its style.
And yet how undecorated, not to say how plain, the style in the more
level passages often is! When the story was first written the style
glittered with literary ornament. But the author deliberately struck out
many of the poetic passages. Coleridge tells us that an imaginative work
should be written in a simple style, and that the more imaginative the
work the simpler the style should be. I often think of these words when
I labour in the sweat of my brow to read the word-twisting of precious
writers! It is then that I think of 'Aylwin,' for 'Aylwin' stands alone
in its power of carrying the reader away to climes of new and rare beauty
peopled by characters as new and as rare. It was clearly Mr.
Watts-Dunton's idea that what such a story needed was mastery over
'artistic convincement.' He has more than once commented on the
acuteness of Edgar Poe's remark that in the expression of true passion
there is always something of the 'homely.' 'Aylwin' is one long unbroken
cry of passion, mostly in a 'homely key,' but this 'homely key' is left
for loftier keys whenever the proper time for the change comes. In
beginning to write, the author seems to have felt that 'The Renascence of
Wonder' and the quest of beauty, although adequately expressed in the
poetry of the newest romantic school--that of Rossetti, Morris, and
Swinburne--had only found its way into imaginative prose through the
highly elaborate technique of his friend, George Meredith. He seems to
have felt that the great imaginative prose writers of the time,
Thackeray, Dickens, and Charles Reade, were in a certain sense
Philistines of genius who had done but little to bring beauty, romance
and culture into prose fiction. And as to Meredith, though a true child
of romanticism who never did and never could breathe the air of
Philistia, he had adopted a style too self-conscious and rich in literary
qualities to touch that great English pulse that beats outside the walls
of the Palace of Art.
Mrs. Craigie has lately declared that at the present moment all the most
worthy English novelists, with the exception of Mr. Thomas Hardy, are
distinguished disciples of Mr. George Meredith. But to belong to 'the
mock Meredithians' is not a matter of very great glory. No one adores
the work of Mr. Meredith more than I do, though my admiration is not
without a certain leaven of distress at his literary self-consciousness.
I say this with all reverence. Great as Meredith is, he would be greater
still if, when he is delivering his priceless gifts to us, he would bear
in mind that immortal injunction in 'King Henry the Fourth'--'I prithee
now, deliver them like a man of this world.' I can imagine how the great
humourist must smile when the dolt, who once found 'obscurity' in his
most lucid passages, praises him for the defects of his qualities, and
calls upon all other writers to write Meredithese.
To be a classic--to be immortal--it is necessary for an imaginative
writer to deliver his message like 'a man of this world.' Shakespeare
himself, occasionally, will seem to forget this, but only occasionally,
and we never think of it when falling down in worship before the shrine
of the greatest imaginative writer that has ever lived. Dr. Johnson said
that all work which lives is without eccentricity. Now, entranced as I
have been, ever since I was a boy, by Meredith's incomparable romances, I
long to set my imagination free of Meredith and fly away with his
characters, as I can fly away with the characters of the classic
imaginative writers from Homer down to Sir Walter Scott. But I seldom
succeed. Now and then I escape from the obsession of the picture of the
great writer seated in his chalet with the summer sunshine gleaming round
his picturesque head, but illuminating also all too vividly his inkstand,
and his paper and his pens; but only now and then, and not for long. If
it had pleased Nature to give him less intellectual activity, less humour
and wit and literary brilliance, I feel sure that he would have lived
more securely as an English classic. I adore him, I say, and although I
do not know him personally, I love him. We all love him: and when I am
in a very charitable mood, I can even forgive him for having begotten the
'mock Meredithians.' As to those who, without a spark of his humourous
imagination and supple intellect can manage to mimic his style, if they
only knew what a torture their word-twisting is to the galled reviewer
who wants to get on, and to know what on earth they have got to tell him,
I think they would display a little more mercy, and even for pity's sake
deliver their gifts like 'men of this world.'
In 'Aylwin' Mr. Watts-Dunton seems to have determined to be as romantic
and as beautiful as the romanticists in poetry had ever dared to be, and
yet by aid of a simplicity and a naivete of diction of which his critical
writings had shown no sign, to carry his beautiful dreams into Philistia
itself. Never was there a bolder enterprise, and never was there a
greater success. That 'Aylwin' would appeal strongly to imaginative
minds was certain, for it was written by 'the most widely cultivated
writer in the English belles lettres of our time.' But the strange thing
is that a story so full of romance, poetry, and beauty, should also
appeal to other minds.
I am no believer in mere popularity, and I confess that when books come
before me for review I cannot help casting a suspicious eye upon any
story by any of the very popular novelists of the day. But it is
necessary to explain why the most poetical romance written within the
last century is also one of the most popular. It was in part owing to
its simplicity of diction, its naivete of utterance, and its freedom from
superfluous literary ornamentation. I do not as a rule like using a
foreign word when an English word will do the same work, but neither
'artlessness,' 'candour' nor 'simplicity' seem to express the unique
charm of the style of 'Aylwin,' so completely as does the word 'naivete.'
It was by naivete, I believe, that he carried the Renascence of Wonder
into quarters which his great brothers in the Romantic movement could
never reach.
For such a writer as he, the critic steeped in all the latest subtleties
of the style of to-day, and indeed the originator of many of these
subtleties, the intimate friend of such superb and elaborate literary
artists as Tennyson, Browning, George Meredith, Rossetti and Swinburne,
it must have been inconceivably difficult to write the 'working portions'
of his narrative in a style as unbookish at times as if he had written in
the pre-Meredithian epoch. Having set out to convince his readers of the
truth of what he was telling them, he determined to sacrifice all
literary 'self-indulgence' to that end. I do not recollect that any
critic, when the book came out, noted this. But if 'Aylwin' had been a
French book published in France, the naive style adopted by the
autobiographer would have been recognized by the critics as the crowning
proof of the author's dramatic genius. Whenever the style seems most to
suggest the pre-Meredithian writers, it is because the story is an
autobiography and because the hero lived in pre-Meredithian times.
Difficult as was Thackeray's tour de force in 'Esmond,' it was nothing to
the tour de force of 'Aylwin.' The tale is told 'as though inspired by
the very spirit of youth' because the hero was a youth when he told it.
It is hard to imagine a writer past the meridian of life being able to
write a story 'more flushed with the glory and the passion and the wonder
of youth than any other in English fiction.'
It should be noted that whenever the incidents become especially tragic
or romantic or weird or poetic, the 'homeliness' of the style goes--the
style at once rises to the occasion, it becomes not only rich, but too
rich for prose. I have now and then heard certain word-twisters of
second-hand Meredithese speak of the 'baldness' of the style of 'Aylwin.'
Roll fifty of these word-twisters into one, and let that one write a
sentence or two of such prose as this, published at the time that
'Aylwin' was written. It occurs in a passage on the greatest of all rich
writers, Shakespeare:--
"In the quality of richness Shakespeare stood quite alone till the
publication of 'Endymion.' Till then it was 'Eclipse first--the rest
nowhere.' When we think of Shakespeare, it is his richness more than
even his higher qualities that we think of first. In reading him, we
feel at every turn that we have come upon a mind as rich as Marlowe's
Moor, who
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearls, like pebble-stones.
Nay, he is richer still; he can, by merely looking at the
'pebble-stones,' turn them into pearls for himself, like the
changeling child recovered from the gnomes in the Rosicrucian story.
His riches burden him. And no wonder: it is stiff flying with the
ruby hills of Badakhshan on your back. Nevertheless, so strong are
the wings of his imagination, so lordly is his intellect, that he can
carry them all; he could carry, it would seem, every gem in
Golconda--every gem in every planet from here to Neptune--and yet win
his goal. Now, in the matter of richness this is the great
difference between him and Keats, the wings of whose imagination,
aerial at starting, and only iridescent like the sails of a
dragon-fly, seem to change as he goes--become overcharged with
beauty, in fact--abloom 'with splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth's
deep-damasked wings.' Or, rather, it may be said that he seems to
start sometimes with Shakespeare's own eagle-pinions, which, as he
mounts, catch and retain colour after colour from the earth below,
till, heavy with beauty as the drooping wings of a golden pheasant,
they fly low and level at last over the earth they cannot leave for
its loveliness, not even for the holiness of the skies."
I will give a few instances of passages in 'Aylwin' quite as rich as
this. One shall be from that scene in which Winifred unconsciously
reveals to her lover that her father has stolen the jewelled cross and
brought his own father's curse upon her beloved head:--
"Winifred picked up the sea weed and made a necklace of it, in the
old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.
'Isn't it a lovely colour?' she said, as it glistened in the
moonlight. 'Isn't it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it
were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?'
'It is as red as the reddest ruby,' I replied, putting out my hand
and grasping the slippery substance.
'Would you believe,' said Winnie, 'that I never saw a ruby in my
life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.'
'Why do you want particularly to know?'
'Because,' said Winifred, 'my father, when he wished me to come out
for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.'
'Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred--how very odd!'
'Yes,' said Winifred, 'and he talked about diamonds too.'
'THE CURSE!' I murmured, and clasped her to my breast. 'Kiss me,
Winifred!'
There had come a bite of sudden fire at my heart, and I shuddered
with a dreadful knowledge, like the captain of an unarmed ship, who,
while the unconscious landsmen on board are gaily scrutinizing a sail
that like a speck has appeared on the horizon, shudders with the
knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells,
and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit.
As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from
Winifred's bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over
a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand
sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my hair began to
stir."
Another instance occurs in Wilderspin's ornate description of his great
picture, 'Faith and Love':--
"'Imagine yourself standing in an Egyptian city, where innumerable
lamps of every hue are shining. It is one of the great lamp-fetes of
Sais, which all Egypt has come to see. There, in honour of the
feast, sits a tall woman, covered by a veil. But the painting is so
wonderful, Mr. Aylwin, that, though you see a woman's face expressed
behind the veil--though you see the warm flesh-tints and the light of
the eyes through the aerial film--you cannot judge of the character
of the face--you cannot see whether it is that of woman in her
noblest, or woman in her basest, type. The eyes sparkle, but you
cannot say whether they sparkle with malignity or
benevolence--whether they are fired with what Philip Aylwin calls
"the love-light of the seventh heaven," or are threatening with "the
hungry flames of the seventh hell!" There she sits in front of a
portico, while, asleep, with folded wings, is crouched on one side of
her the figure of Love, with rosy feathers, and on the other the
figure of Faith, with plumage of a deep azure. Over her head, on the
portico, are written the words:--"I am all that hath been, is, and
shall be, and no mortal hath uncovered my veil." The tinted lights
falling on the group are shed, you see, from the rainbow-coloured
lamps of Sais, which are countless. But in spite of all these lamps,
Mr. Aylwin, no mortal can see the face behind that veil. And why?
Those who alone could uplift it, the figures folded with wings--Faith
and Love--are fast asleep, at the great Queen's feet. When Faith and
Love are sleeping there, what are the many-coloured lamps of
science!--of what use are they to the famished soul of man?'
'A striking idea!' I exclaimed.
'Your father's,' replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that
one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It
symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and
the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the
predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the
picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, as though it were upon an
easel before me. 'You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the
architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the sea. In the
light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax tapers, a procession is
moving through the streets. You see Isis, as Pelagia, advancing
between two ranks, one of joyous maidens in snow white garments,
adorned with wreaths, and scattering from their bosoms all kinds of
dewy flowers; the other of youths, playing upon pipes and flutes
mixed with men with shaven shining crowns, playing upon sistra of
brass, silver, and gold. Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her
breast by a tasselled knot,--an azure-coloured tunic bordered with
silver stars,--and an upper garment of the colour of the moon at
moon-rise. Her head is crowned with a chaplet of sea-flowers, and
round her throat is a necklace of seaweeds, wet still with sea-water,
and shimmering with all the shifting hues of the sea. On either side
of her stand the awakened angels, uplifting from her face a veil
whose folds flow soft as water over her shoulders and over the wings
of Faith and Love. A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip
Aylwin gave to the world!'"
Another instance I take from that scene in the crypt whither Aylwin had
been drawn against his will by the ancestral impulses in his blood to
replace the jewelled cross upon the breast of his father:--
"Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt.
The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an
influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and
nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated,
until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences.
Scarcely had this mood passed before a sensation came upon me of
being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized
me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It
was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in
the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words,
harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here
assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by
the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an
ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the
features of my father; at another, those of Tom Wynne; at another the
leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio.
"'It is an illusion,' I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; 'it
is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain
and an exhausted stomach.' Yet it disturbed me as much as if my
reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be
fighting towards my father's coffin as a dreamer fights against a
nightmare, and at last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish
bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and
I was in darkness. As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious
state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of
phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the
'Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,' scattering seeds over the earth below.
At the pyramid's base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading
with the Queen of Death:
What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!
I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached
the coffin resting on a stone table. I found, on examining it, that
although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the
violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the
screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free. Then I paused; for
to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the
blood's inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and
induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a
giant. Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff's story, which
at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and
the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between
Winnie's father and mine seemed to hang in the air--a fascinating
mirage of ghastly horror . . .
At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed
the lid violently on one side . . .
The 'sweet odours and divers kinds of spices' of the Jewish embalmer
rose like a gust of incense--rose and spread through the crypt like
the sweet breath of a newborn blessing, till the air of the
charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable
sweetness. Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any
sensuous influence so soothed my soul.
While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and
myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of
the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality
seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.
I opened my eyes. I looked into the coffin. The face (which had
been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine. 'Fenella
Stanley!' I cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon
my father's brow that self-same message which the passions of a
thousand Romany ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait
hung in the picture-gallery. And the rubies and diamonds and beryls
of the cross as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the
opened lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an
indescribable reflex hue of quivering rose.
Beneath his head I placed the silver casket: I hung the hair-chain
round his neck: I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his
love and the parchment scroll.
Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed. I knew not what or why.
But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to
heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine. Then I
rose, and laying my hand upon my father's cold brow, I said: 'You
have forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long
agony. They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling
against itself. You, who suffered so much--who know so well those
flames burning at the heart's core--those flames before which all the
forces of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and
wind--you have forgiven me. You who knew the meaning of the wild
word Love--you have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like
yourself. You have forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the
despoiler of your tomb: you have removed the curse, and his
child--his innocent child--is free.' . . .
I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so
buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked
myself: 'Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse? Do I
really believe that my restoring the amulet has removed it? Have I
really come to this?'
Throughout all these proceedings--yes, even amidst that prayer to
Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father--had my
reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before
described."
My last instance shall be from D'Arcy's letter, in which he records the
marvellous events that led to his meeting with Winifred:--
"And now, my dear Aylwin, having acted as a somewhat prosaic reporter
of these wonderful events, I should like to conclude my letter with a
word or two about what took place when I parted from you in the
streets of London. I saw then that your sufferings had been very
great, and since that time they must have been tenfold greater. And
now I rejoice to think that, of all the men in this world who have
ever loved, you, through this very suffering, have been the most
fortunate. As Job's faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been
tried by the power which you call 'circumstance' and which Wilderspin
calls 'the spiritual world.' All that death has to teach the mind
and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she
you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms. I, alas!
have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a
beloved mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as
the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows
what the word 'love' really means. I have never been a reader of
philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries
have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to
Death--about the final beneficence of Death--that 'reasonable
moderator and equipoise of justice,' as Sir Thomas Browne calls him.
Equipoise of justice indeed! He who can read with tolerance such
words as these must have known nothing of the true passion of love
for a woman as you and I understand it. The Elizabethans are full of
this nonsense; but where does Shakespeare, with all his immense
philosophical power, ever show this temper of acquiescence? All his
impeachments of Death have the deep ring of personal
feeling--dramatist though he was. But, what I am going to ask you
is, How shall the modern materialist, who you think is to dominate
the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow--how shall he
confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down? When Moschus
lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh
birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long,
unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern
materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long
before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath
Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile. Your bitter
experience made you ask materialism, What comfort is there in being
told that death is the very nursery of new life, and that our heirs
are our very selves, if when you take leave of her who was and is
your world it is 'Vale, vale, in aeternum vale'?"
These quotations may be taken as specimens of the passages of decorated
writing which the author, in order to get closer to the imagination of
the reader, mercilessly struck out in proof. Whether he did wisely or
unwisely in striking them out is an interesting question for criticism.
But certainly the reader has only to go through the book with this
criticism in his mind, and he will see that when the story passes into
such lofty speculation as that of the opening sentences of the book, or
into some equally lofty mood of the love passion, the style becomes not
only full of literary qualities, but almost over-full; it becomes a style
which can best be described in his own words about richness of style
which I have quoted from the 'Athenaeum.' I do not doubt that Mr.
Watts-Dunton was quite right in acting upon Coleridge's theory; for,
notwithstanding the 'fairy-like beauty' of the story it is as convincing
as a story told upon a prosaic subject by Defoe. In fact, it would be
hard to name any novel wherein those laws of means and ends in art which
Mr. Watts-Dunton has formulated in the 'Athenaeum' are more fully
observed than in 'Aylwin.'
Madame Galimberti says in the 'Rivista d'Italia':--"'Aylwin' was begun in
verse, and was written in prose only when the plot, taking, so to say,
the poet by the hand, showed the necessity of a form more in keeping with
the nature of the work; and in 'The Coming of Love,' in which the facts
are condensed so as to give full relief to the philosophical motive, the
result is, in my opinion, more perfect." {339} My remarks upon 'The
Coming of Love' will show that I agree with the accomplished wife of the
Italian Minister in placing it above 'Aylwin' as a satisfactory work of
art, but that is because I consider 'The Coming of Love' the most
important as well as the most original poem that has been published for
many years.
Madame Galimberti touches here upon a very important subject for the
literary student. I may say for myself that I have invariably spoken of
'Aylwin' as a poem, and I have done so deliberately. Indeed, I think the
fact that it is a poem is at once its strength and its weakness. It does
not come under the critical canons that are applied to a prose novel or
romance. As a prose novel its one defect is that the quest for mere
beauty is pushed too far; lovely picture follows lovely picture until the
novel reader is inclined at last to cry, 'Hold, enough!'
In one of his essays on Morris, Mr. Watts-Dunton asks, 'What is poetic
prose?' And then follows a passage which must always be borne in mind
when criticizing 'Aylwin.'
"On no subject in literary criticism," says he, "has there been a
more persistent misconception than upon this. What is called poetic
prose is generally rhetorical prose, and between rhetoric and poetry
there is a great difference. Poetical prose, we take it, is that
kind of prose which above all other kinds holds in suspense the
essential qualities of poetry. If 'eloquence is heard and poetry
overheard,' where shall be placed the tremendous perorations of De
Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin?
Grand and beautiful are such periods as these, no doubt, but prose to
be truly poetical must move far away from them. It must, in a word,
have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except
metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet's object is
to arouse in the listener an expectancy of caesuric effects, the
great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite
direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned
diction that are the poet's vehicle, but at the same time to avoid
the expectancy of metrical bars. The moment that the regular bars
assert themselves and lead the reader's ears to expect other bars of
the like kind, sincerity ends."
Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has given us the best of all canons for
answering the question, 'What is a poem as distinguished from other forms
of imaginative literature?' In his essay on Poetry he says:--
"Owing to the fact that the word (first used to designate the poetic
artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle seems to have assumed
that the indispensable basis of poetry is invention. He appears to
have thought that a poet is a poet more on account of the composition
of the action than on account of the composition of his verses.
Indeed, he said as much as this. Of epic poetry he declared
emphatically that it produces its imitations either by mere
articulate words or by metre superadded. This is to widen the
definition of poetry so as to include all imaginative literature, and
Plato seems to have given an equally wide meaning to the word. Only,
while Aristotle considered to be an imitation of the facts of nature,
Plato considered it to be an imitation of the dreams of man.
Aristotle ignored, and Plato slighted, the importance of
versification (though Plato on one occasion admitted that he who did
not know rhythm could be called neither musician nor poet). It is
impossible to discuss here the question whether an imaginative work
in which the method is entirely concrete and the expression entirely
emotional, while the form is unmetrical, is or is not entitled to be
called a poem. That there may be a kind of unmetrical narrative so
poetic in motive, so concrete in diction, so emotional in treatment,
as to escape altogether from those critical canons usually applied to
prose, we shall see when, in discussing the epic, we come to touch
upon the Northern sagas.
"Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted against the dictum
that substance, and not form, is the indispensable basis of poetry
was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the arrangement
of words is really a very fine piece of literary criticism. In his
acute remarks upon the arrangement of the words in the sixteenth book
of the Odyssey, as compared with that in the story of Gyges by
Herodotus, was perhaps first enunciated clearly the doctrine that
poetry is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristotelian theory
as to invention, however, dominated all criticism after as well as
before Dionysius. When Bacon came to discuss the subject (and
afterwards), the only division between the poetical critics was
perhaps between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato as to
what poetry should, and what it should not, imitate. It is curious
to speculate as to what would have been the result had the poets
followed the critics in this matter. Perhaps there are critics of a
very high rank who would class as poems romances so concrete in
method and diction, and so full of poetic energy, as 'Wuthering
Heights' and 'Jane Eyre,' where we get absolutely all that Aristotle
requires for a poem."
Now, if this be so in regard to those great romances, it must be still
more so with regard to 'Aylwin,' where beauty and nothing but beauty
seems to be the be-all and the end-all of the work.
[Picture: Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff. (From an Oil
Painting at 'The Pines.')]
As 'Aylwin' was begun in metre, it would be very interesting to know on
what lines the metre was constructed. Readers of 'Aylwin' have been
struck with the music of the opening sentences, which are given as an
extract from Philip Aylwin's book, 'The Veiled Queen':--
"Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea
know the sea's prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy
between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They
know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual
world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and
answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing
tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea,
and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim
sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a
shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it;
when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire,
then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let
loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told
him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when
beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle
as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels,
as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near
at hand, or, at least, not far off."
Many a reader will echo the words of a writer in 'Notes and Queries,' who
says that this passage has haunted him since first he read it: I know it
haunted me after I read it. But I wonder how many critics have read this
passage in connection with Mr. Watts-Dunton's metrical studies which have
been carried on in the 'Athenaeum' during more than a quarter of a
century. They are closely connected with what he has said upon Bible
rhythm in his article upon the Psalms, which I have already quoted, and
in many other essays. Mr. Watts-Dunton, acknowledged to be a great
authority on metrical subjects, has for years been declaring that we are
on the verge of a new kind of metrical art altogether--a metrical art in
which the emotions govern the metrical undulations. And I take the above
passage and the following to be examples of what the movement in 'Aylwin'
would have been if he had not abandoned the project of writing the story
in metre:--
"Then quoth the Ka'dee, laughing until his grinders appeared:
'Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest,
thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this
story of thine--this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast
seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal
witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah,
refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow
and unquenchable fountain of tears.'
Quoth Ja'afar, bowing low his head: 'Bold is the donkey-driver, O
Ka'dee! and bold the Ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what
disbelieve--not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah--not knowing in
any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer.'"
Break these passages up into irregular lines, and you get a new metre of
a very emotional kind, governed as to length by the sense pause. Mr.
Watts-Dunton has been arguing for many years that English verse is, as
Coleridge long ago pointed out, properly governed by the number of
accents and not by the number of syllables in a line, and that this
accentual system is governed, or should be governed, by emotion. It is a
singular thing, by the bye, that writer after writer of late has been
arguing over and over again Mr. Watts-Dunton's arguments, and seems to be
saying a new thing by using the word 'stress' for 'accent.' 'Stress' may
or may not be a better word than 'accent,' the word used by Coleridge,
and after him by Mr. Watts-Dunton, but the idea conveyed is one and the
same. I, for my part, believe that rare as new ideas may be in creative
work, they are still rarer in criticism.
Chapter XXI
THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION
AND now a word upon the imaginative power of 'Aylwin.' Very much has
been written both in England and on the Continent concerning the source
of the peculiar kind of 'imaginative vividness' shown in the story. The
rushing narrative, as has been said, 'is so fused in its molten stream
that it seems one sentence, and it carries the reader irresistibly along
through pictures of beauty and mystery till he becomes breathless.' The
truth is, however, that the mere method of the evolution of the story has
a great deal more to do with this than is at first apparent. Upon this
artistic method very little has been written save what I myself said when
it first appeared. If the unequalled grip of the story upon the reader
had been secured by methods as primitive, as unconscious as those of
'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights,' I should estimate the pure,
unadulterated imaginative force at work even more highly than I now do.
But, as a critic, I must always inquire whether or not a writer's
imaginative vision is strengthened by constructive power. I must take
into account the aid that the imagination of the writer has received from
his mere self-conscious artistic skill. Now it is not to praise
'Aylwin,' but, I fear, to disparage it in a certain sense to say that the
power of the scenes owes much to the mere artistic method, amounting at
times to subtlety. I have heard the greatest of living poets mention
'Tom Jones,' 'Waverley,' and 'Aylwin' as three great novels whose
reception by the outside public has been endorsed by criticism. One of
the signs of Scott's unique genius was the way in which he invented and
carried to perfection the method of moving towards the denouement by
dialogue as much as by narrative. This gave a source of new brilliance
to prose fiction, and it was certainly one of the most effective causes
of the enormous success of 'Waverley.' This masterpiece opens, it will
be remembered, in distinct imitation of the method of Fielding, but soon
broke into the new dramatic method with which Scott's name is associated.
But in 'Waverley' Scott had not yet begun to use the dramatic method so
freely as to sacrifice the very different qualities imported into the
novel by Fielding, whose method was epic rather than dramatic. I think
Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself somewhere commented upon this, and said that
Scott carried the dramatic method quite as far as it could go without
making the story suffer from that kind of stageyness and artificial
brightness which is fatal to the novel. Scott's disciple, Dumas, a more
brilliant writer of dialogue than Scott himself, but not so true a one,
carried the dramatic method too far and opened the way to mimics, who
carried it further still. In 'Aylwin,' the blending of the two methods,
the epic and the dramatic, is so skilfully done as to draw all the
advantages that can be drawn from both; and this skill must be an
enormous aid to the imaginative vision--an aid which Charlotte and Emily
Bronte had to dispense with: but it is in the arrangement of the material
on self-conscious constructive principles that I am chiefly thinking when
I compare the imaginative vision in 'Aylwin' with that in 'Jane Eyre' and
'Wuthering Heights.' On the whole, no one seems to have studied 'Aylwin'
from all points of view with so much insight as Madame Galimberti, unless
it be M. Jacottet in 'La Semaine Litteraire.' Mr. Watts-Dunton in one of
his essays has himself remarked that nine-tenths of the interest of any
dramatic situation are lost if before approaching it the reader has not
been made to feel an interest in the characters, as Fielding makes us
feel an interest in Tom and Sophia long before they utter a word--indeed,
long before they are introduced at all. This is true, no doubt, and the
contemporary method of beginning a story like the opening of a play with
long dialogues between characters that are strangers to the reader, is
one among the many signs that, so far as securing illusion goes, there is
a real retrogression in fictive art. A play, of course, must open in
this way, but in an acted play the characters come bodily before the
audience as real flesh and blood. They come surrounded by real
accessories. They win our sympathy or else our dislike as soon as we see
them and hear them speak. The dramatic scenes between Jane Eyre and
Rochester would miss half their effect were it not for the picture of
Jane as a child. In 'Aylwin,' by the time that there is any introduction
of dramatic dialogue the atmosphere of the story has enveloped us: we
have become so deeply in love with the two children that the most
commonplace words from their lips would have seemed charged with beauty.
This kind of perfection of the novelist's art, in these days when stories
are written to pass through magazines and newspapers, seemed impossible
till 'Aylwin' appeared. It is curious to speculate as to what would have
been the success of the opening chapters of 'Aylwin' if an instalment of
the story had first made its appearance in a magazine.
One of the most remarkable features of 'Aylwin' is that in spite of the
strength and originality of the mere story and in spite of the fact that
the book is fundamentally the expression of a creed, the character
painting does not in the least suffer from these facts. Striking and new
as the story is, there is nothing mechanical about the structure. The
characters are not, to use a well known phrase of the author's,
'plot-ridden' in the least degree, as are the characters of the great
masters of the plot-novel, Lytton, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, to
mention only those who are no longer with us. Perhaps in order to show
what I mean I ought to go a little into detail here. In 'Man and Wife,'
for instance, Collins, with his eye only upon his plot, makes the
heroine, a lady whose delicacy of mind and nobility of character are
continually dwelt upon, not only by the author but by a sagacious man of
the world like Sir Peter, who afterwards marries her, succumb to the
animal advances of a brute like Geoffrey. Many instances of the same
sacrifice of everything to plot occur in most of Collins's other stories,
and as to the 'long arm of coincidence' he not only avails himself of
that arm whenever it is convenient to do so, but he positively revels in
his slavery to it. In 'Armadale,' for instance, besides scores of
monstrous improbabilities, such as the ship 'La Grace de Dieu' coming to
Scotland expressly that Allan Armadale should board her and have a dream
upon her, and such as Midwinter's being by accident brought into touch
with Allan in a remote village in Devonshire when he was upon the eve of
death, we find coincidences which are not of the smallest use, introduced
simply because the author loves coincidences--such as that of making a
family connection of Armadale's rescue Miss Gwilt from drowning and get
drowned himself, and thus bring about the devolution of the property upon
Allan Armadale--an entirely superfluous coincidence, for the working
power of this incident could have been secured in countless other ways.
'No Name' bristles with coincidences, such as that most impudent one
where the heroine is at the point of death by destitution, and the one
man who loves her and who had just returned to England passes down the
obscure and squalid street he had never seen before at the very moment
when she is sinking. It is the same with Bulwer Lytton's novels. In
'Night and Morning,' for instance, people are tossed against each other
in London, the country, or Paris at every moment whensoever the story
demands it. As to Gawtry, one of the few really original villains in
modern fiction, as soon as the story opens we expect him to turn up every
moment like a jack in-the-box; we expect him to meet the hero in the most
unlikely places, and to meet every other character in the same way. Let
his presence be required, and we know that he will certainly turn up to
put things right. But in 'Aylwin,' which has been well called by a
French critic, 'a novel without a villain,' where sinister circumstance
takes the place of the villain, there is not a single improbable
coincidence; everything flows from a few simple causes, such as the
effect upon an English patrician of love baffled by all kinds of
fantastic antagonisms, the influence of the doctrines of the dead father
upon the minds of several individuals, and the influence of the impact of
the characters upon each other. Another thing to note is that in spite
of the strange, new scenes in which the characters move, they all display
that 'softness of touch' upon which the author has himself written so
eloquently in one of his articles in the 'Athenaeum.' I must find room
to quote his words on this interesting subject:--
"The secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be
this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from
universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader's
imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this
they achieve by making the portrait seem to be drawn from particular
and peculiar traits instead of from generalities, and especially by
hiding away all purposes--aesthetic, ethic, or political.
One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome softness of
touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary
work with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the
work of the portrait painter there does seem a true analogy as
regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of
characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general
public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it
to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown
upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to
have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a
perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two
great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison
and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger or the two
Shandys, or Corporal Trim, would have ruined the portraits so
completely that they would never have come down to us. Close upon
Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is
painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is limned with
those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of
Dickens. After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it be Mrs.
Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding
to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists
follow Mrs. Gaskell."
Read in the light of these remarks the characters in 'Aylwin' become
still more interesting to the critic. Observe how soft is the touch of
the writer compared with that of a novelist of real though eccentric
genius, Charles Reade. Now and again in Reade's portraits we get
softness, as in the painting of the delightful Mrs. Dodd and her
daughter, but it is very rare. The contrast between him and Mr.
Watts-Dunton in this regard is most conspicuously seen in their treatment
of members of what are called the upper classes. No doubt Reade does
occasionally catch (what Charles Dickens never catches) that unconscious
accent of high breeding which Thackeray, with all his yearning to catch
it, scarcely ever could catch, save perhaps, in such a character as Lord
Kew, but which Disraeli catches perfectly in St. Aldegonde.
On the appearance of 'Aylwin' it was amusing to see how puzzled many of
the critics were when they came to talk about the various classes in
which the various figures moved. How could a man give pictures of
gypsies in their tents, East Enders in their slums, Bohemian painters in
their studios, aristocrats in their country houses, and all of them with
equal vividness? But vividness is not always truth. Some wondered
whether the gypsies were true, when 'up and spake' the famous Tarno Rye
himself, Groome, the greatest authority on gypsies in the world, and said
they were true to the life. Following him, 'up and spake' Gypsy Smith,
and proclaimed them to be 'the only pictures of the gypsies that were
true.' Some wondered whether the painters and Bohemians were rightly
painted, when 'up and spake' Mr. Hake--more intimately acquainted with
them than any living man left save W. M. Rossetti and Mr. Sharp--and said
the pictures were as true as photographs. But before I pass on I must
devote a few parenthetical words to the most curious thing connected with
this matter. Not even the most captious critic, as far as I remember,
ventured to challenge the manners of the patricians who play such an
important part in the story. The Aylwin family, as Madame Galimberti has
hinted, belonged to the only patriciate which either Landor or Disraeli
recognized: the old landed untitled gentry. The best delineator of this
class is, of course, Whyte Melville. But those who have read Mr.
Watts-Dunton's remarks upon Byron in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English
Literature' will understand how thoroughly he too has studied this most
interesting class. The hero himself, in spite of all his eccentricity
and in spite of all his Bohemianism, is a patrician--a patrician to the
very marrow. 'There is not throughout Aylwin's narrative--a narrative
running to something under 200,000 words--a single wrong note.' This
opinion I heard expressed by a very eminent writer, who from his own
birth and environment can speak with authority. The way in which Henry
Aylwin as a child is made to feel that his hob-a-nobbing on equal terms
with the ragamuffin of the sands cannot really degrade an English
gentleman; the way in which Henry Aylwin, the hobbledehoy, is made to
feel that he cannot be lowered by living with gypsies, or by marrying the
daughter of 'the drunken organist who violated my father's tomb'; the way
in which he says that 'if society rejects him and his wife, he shall
reject society';--all this shows a mastery over 'softness of touch' in
depicting this kind of character such as not even Whyte Melville has
equalled. Henry Aylwin's mother, to whom the word trade and plebeianism
were synonymous terms, is the very type of the grande dame, untouched by
the vulgarities of the smart set of her time (for there were vulgar smart
sets then as there were vulgar smart sets in the time of Beau Brummell,
and as there are vulgar smart sets now). Then there is that wonderful
aunt, of whom we see so little but whose influence is so great and so
mischievous. What a type is she of the meaner and more withered branch
of a patrician tree! But the picture of Lord Sleaford is by far the most
vivid portrait of a nobleman that has appeared in any novel since
'Lothair.' Thackeray never 'knocked off' a nobleman so airily and so
unconsciously as this delightful lordling, whose portrait Mr.
Watts-Dunton has 'blown' upon his canvas in the true Gainsborough way. I
wish I could have got permission to give more than a bird's-eye glance at
Mr. Watts-Dunton's wide experience of all kinds of life, but I can only
touch upon what the reading public is already familiar with. At one
period of his life--the period during which he and Whistler were brought
together--the period when 'Piccadilly,' upon which they were both
engaged, was having its brief run, Mr. Watts-Dunton mixed very largely
with what was then, as now, humourously called 'Society.' It has been
said that 'for a few years not even "Dicky Doyle" or Jimmy Whistler went
about quite so much as Theodore Watts.' I have seen Whistler's
presentation copy of the first edition of 'The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies' with this inscription:--'To Theodore Watts, the Worldling.'
Below this polite flash of persiflage the famous butterfly flaunts its
elusive wings. But this was only Whistler's fun. Mr. Watts-Dunton was
never, we may be sure, a worldling. Still one wonders that the most
romantic of poets ever fell so low as to go into 'Society' with a big S.
Perhaps it was because, having studied life among the gypsies, life among
the artists, life among the literary men of the old Bohemia, life among
the professional and scientific classes, he thought he would study the
butterflies too. However, he seems soon to have got satiated, for he
suddenly dropped out of the smart Paradise. I mention this episode
because it alone, apart from the power of his dramatic imagination, is
sufficient to show why in Henry Aylwin he has so successfully painted for
us the finest picture that has ever been painted of a true English
gentleman tossed about in scenes and among people of all sorts and
retaining the pristine bloom of England's patriciate through it all.
In my essay upon Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English
Literature,' I made this remark:--"Notwithstanding the vogue of 'Aylwin,'
there is no doubt that it is on his poems, such as 'The Coming of Love,'
'Christmas at the Mermaid,' 'Prophetic Pictures at Venice,' 'John the
Pilgrim,' 'The Omnipotence of Love,' 'The Three Fausts,' 'What the Silent
Voices Said,' 'Apollo in Paris,' 'The Wood-haunters' Dream,' 'The Octopus
of the Golden Isles,' 'The Last Walk with Jowett from Boar's Hill,' and
'Omar Khayyam,' that Mr. Watts-Dunton's future position will mainly
rest."
I did not say this rashly. But in order to justify my opinion I must
quote somewhat copiously from Mr. Watts-Dunton's remarks upon absolute
and relative vision, in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.' It has been well
said that 'in judging of the seeing power of any work of imagination,
either in prose or in verse, it is now necessary always to try the work
by the critical canons upon absolute and relative vision laid down in
this treatise.' If we turn to it, we shall find that absolute vision is
defined to be that vision which in its highest dramatic exercise is
unconditioned by the personal temperament of the writer, while relative
vision is defined to be that vision which is more or less conditioned by
the personal temperament of the writer. And then follows a long
discussion of various great imaginative works in which the two kinds of
vision are seen:--
"For the achievement of most imaginative work relative vision will
suffice. If we consider the matter thoroughly, in many forms--which
at first sight might seem to require absolute vision--we shall find
nothing but relative vision at work. Between relative and absolute
vision the difference is this, that the former only enables the
imaginative writer even in its very highest exercise, to make his own
individuality, or else humanity as represented by his own
individuality, live in the imagined situation; the latter enables him
in its highest exercise to make special individual characters other
than the poet's own live in the imagined situation. In the very
highest reaches of imaginative writing art seems to become art no
longer--it seems to become the very voice of Nature herself. The cry
of Priam when he puts to his lips the hand that slew his son, is not
merely the cry of a bereaved and aged parent; it is the cry of the
individual king of Troy, and expresses above everything else that
most naive, pathetic, and winsome character. Put the cry into the
mouth of the irascible and passionate Lear, and it would be entirely
out of keeping. While the poet of relative vision, even in its very
highest exercise, can only, when depicting the external world, deal
with the general, the poet of absolute vision can compete with Nature
herself and deal with both general and particular."
Now, the difference between 'The Coming of Love' and 'Aylwin' is this,
that in 'Aylwin' the impulse is, or seems to be, lyrical, and therefore
too egoistic for absolute vision to be achieved. Of course, if we are to
take Henry Aylwin in the novel to be an entirely dramatic character, then
that character is so full of vitality that it is one of the most
remarkable instances of purely dramatic imagination that we have had in
modern times. For there is nothing that he says or does that is not
inevitable from the nature of the character placed in the dramatic
situation. Those who are as familiar as I am with Mr. Watts-Dunton's
prose writings outside 'Aylwin' find it extremely difficult to identify
the brilliant critic of the 'Athenaeum,' full of ripe wisdom and
sagacity, with the impassioned boy of the story. Indeed, I should never
have dreamed of identifying the character with the author any more than I
should have thought of identifying Philip Aylwin with the author had it
not been for the fact that Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to one of the
constantly renewed editions of his book, seems to suggest that
identification himself. I have already quoted the striking passage in
the introduction to the later editions of the book in which this
identification seems to be suggested. But, matters being as they are
with regard to the identification of the hero of the prose story with the
author, it is to 'The Coming of Love' that we must for the most part turn
for proof that the writer is possessed of absolute vision. Percy Aylwin
and Rhona are there presented in the purely dramatic way, and they give
utterance to their emotions, not only untrammelled by the lyricism of the
dramatist, but untrammelled also, as I have before remarked, by the
exigencies of a conscious dramatic structure. In no poetry of our time
can there be seen more of that absolute vision so lucidly discoursed upon
in the foregoing extract. From her first love-letter Rhona leaps into
life, and she seems to be more elaborately painted not only than any
woman in recent poetry, but any woman in recent literature. Percy Aylwin
lives also with almost equal vitality. I need not give examples of this
here, for later I shall quote freely from the poem in order that the
reader may form his own judgment, unbiassed by the views of myself or any
other critic.
With regard to 'Aylwin,' however, apart from the character of the hero,
who is drawn lyrically or dramatically, according, as I have said, to the
evidence that he is or is not the author himself, there are still many
instances of a vision that may be called absolute. Among the many
letters from strangers that reached the author when 'Aylwin' first
appeared was one from a person who, like Henry Aylwin, had been made lame
by accident. This gentleman said that he felt sure that the author of
'Aylwin' had also been lame, and gave several instances from the story
which had made him come to this conclusion. One was the following:--
"'Shall we go and get some strawberries?' she said, as we passed to
the back of the house. 'They are quite ripe.'
But my countenance fell at this. I was obliged to tell her that I
could not stoop.
'Ah! but I can, and I will pluck them and give them to you. I should
like to do it. Do let me, there's a good boy.'
I consented, and hobbled by her side to the verge of the
strawberry-beds. But when I foolishly tried to follow her, I stuck
ignominiously, with my crutches sunk deep in the soft mould of rotten
leaves. Here was a trial for the conquering hero of the coast. I
looked into her face to see if there was not, at last, a laugh upon
it. That cruel human laugh was my only dread. To everything but
ridicule I had hardened myself; but against that I felt helpless.
I looked into her face to see if she was laughing at my lameness.
No: her brows were merely knit with anxiety as to how she might best
relieve me. This surpassingly beautiful child, then, had evidently
accepted me--lameness and all--crutches and all--as a subject of
peculiar interest.
As I slowly approached the child, I could see by her forehead (which
in the sunshine gleamed like a globe of pearl), and especially by her
complexion, that she was uncommonly lovely, and I was afraid lest she
should look down before I got close to her, and so see my crutches
before her eyes encountered my face."
As a matter of fact, however, the author never had been lame.
The following passages have often been quoted as instances of the way in
which a wonderful situation is realized as thoroughly as if it had been
of the most commonplace kind:--
"And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the
ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this
narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?
The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess
not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its
strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book
all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days
passed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour
or two, and then returned home and went to bed--but not to sleep.
For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be
quelled--till the sound of Winnie's song in the street could be
stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of
bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and, taking out the amulet,
proceeded to examine the facets as I did once before when I heard in
the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father--
'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that
materialism is intolerable--is hell itself--to the heart that has
known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal,
madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you dare
not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a
ray of hope.'
And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a
waking dream.
The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a
start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there
seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross
upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as if the
pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh--where had I
seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his
bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull
lineaments. But upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the
portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!
'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,' I exclaimed.
Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.
And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed murmuring in my ears, 'Fenella
Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that
cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'
I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin.
Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and
gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain
that was a pleasure wild and new. I was feeling the facets. But the
tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache were tears of
laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, 'For good or for
ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.' . . .
What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing
the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred
symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse--what agonies were
mine as I sat there sobbing the one word 'Winnie'--could be
understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the passionate
blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins.
. . .
I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And
while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for
whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were
done)--scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the
executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his
bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella
Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a
hand-valise: 'Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to
consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a
deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be
impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and close it
again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our
skill. And as burglars' jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on
our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and
a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the
palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark.'"
But after all I am unable to express any opinion worth expressing upon
the chief point which would decide the question as to whether the
imagination at work in 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' is lyrical or
dramatic, because I do not know whether, like Henry Aylwin and Percy
Aylwin, the author has a dash of Romany blood in his veins. If he has
not that dash, and I certainly never heard that he has, and neither
Groome's words in the 'Bookman' nor 'Gypsy Smith's' words can be
construed into an expression of opinion on the subject, then I will say
with confidence that his delineation of two English gentleman with an
ancestral Romany strain so like and yet so unlike as Henry Aylwin and
Percy Aylwin could only have been achieved by a wonderful exercise of
absolute vision. It was this that struck the late Grant Allen so
forcibly. On the other hand, if he has that strain, then, as I have said
before, it is not in the story but in the poem that we must look for the
best dramatic character drawing. On this most interesting subject no one
can speak but himself, and he has not spoken. But here is what he has
said upon the similarity and the contrast between Percy and Henry
Aylwin:--
"Certain parts of 'The Coming of Love' were written about the same
time as 'Aylwin.' The two Aylwins, Henry and Percy, were then very
distinct in my own mind; they are very distinct now. And I confess
that the possibility of their being confounded with each other had
never occurred to me. A certain similarity between the two there
must needs be, seeing that the blood of the same Romany ancestress,
Fenella Stanley, flows in the veins of both. I say there must needs
be this similarity, because the ancestress was Romany. For, without
starting the inquiry here as to whether or not the Romanies as a race
are superior or inferior to all or any of the great European races
among which they move, I will venture to affirm that in the Romanies
the mysterious energy which the evolutionists call 'the prepotency of
transmission' in races is specially strong--so strong, indeed, that
evidences of Romany blood in a family may be traced down for several
generations. It is inevitable, therefore, that in each of the
descendants of Fenella Stanley the form taken by the love-passion
should show itself in kindred ways. But the reader who will give a
careful study to the characters of Henry and Percy Aylwin will come
to the conclusion, I think, that the similarity between the two is
observable in one aspect of their characters only. The intensity of
the love-passion in each assumes a spiritualizing and mystical form."
Chapter XXII
A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES
ONE thing seems clear to me: having fully intended to make Winifred the
heroine of 'Alwyn' round whom the main current of interest should
revolve, the author failed to do so. And the reason of his failure is
that Winifred has to succumb to the superior vitality of Sinfi's
commanding figure. For the purpose of telling the story of Winifred and
bringing out her character he conceived and introduced this splendid
descendant of Fenella Stanley, and then found her, against his will,
growing under his hand until, at last, she pushed his own beloved heroine
off her pedestal, and stood herself for all time. Never did author love
his heroine as Mr. Watts-Dunton loves Winifred, and there is nothing so
curious in all fiction as the way in which he seems at times to resent
Sinfi's dominance over the Welsh heroine; and this explains what readers
have sometimes said about his 'unkindness to Sinfi.'
It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the reader's heroine.
When Madox Brown read the story in manuscript, he became greatly
enamoured of Sinfi, and talked about her constantly. It was the same
with Mr. Swinburne, who says that 'Aylwin' is the only novel he ever read
in manuscript, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it in
type. Mr. George Meredith in a letter said:--"I am in love with Sinfi.
Nowhere can fiction give us one to match her, not even the 'Kriegspiel'
heroine, who touched me to the deeps. Winifred's infancy has infancy's
charm. The young woman is taking. But all my heart has gone to Sinfi.
Of course it is part of her character that her destiny should point to
the glooms. The sun comes to me again in her conquering presence. I
could talk of her for hours. The book has this defect,--it leaves in the
mind a cry for a successor." And the author of 'Kriegspiel' himself, F.
H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as the true heroine of the story. "In Sinfi
Lovell," says he, "Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have scored a magnificent
success had he achieved nothing more than this most splendid
figure--supremely clever but utterly illiterate, eloquent but
ungrammatical, heroic but altogether womanly. Winifred is good, and so
too is Henry Aylwin himself, and so are many of the minor characters (the
mother, for instance, the aunt, and Mrs. Gudgeon), but it is as the
tragedy of Sinfi's sacrifice that 'Aylwin' should take its place in
literature." Yes, it seems cruel to tell the author this, but Sinfi, and
not Winifred, with all her charm, is evidently the favourite of his
English public. That admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in
the 'Daily News' that 'Sinfi Lovell is one of the most finished studies
of its type and kind in all romantic literature.'
[Picture: Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at 'The Pines.')]
I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel Berners. In the first
place, while Sinfi is the crowning type of the Romany chi, Isopel is, as
the author has pointed out, the type of the 'Anglo-Saxon road girl' with
a special antagonism to Romany girls. Grand as is the character of
Borrow's Isopel Berners, she is not in the least like Sinfi Lovell. And
I may add that she is not really like any other of the heroic women who
figure in Mr. Watts-Dunton's gallery of noble women. It is, however,
interesting here to note that Mr. Watts-Dunton has a special sympathy
with women of this heroic type and a special strength of hand in
delineating them. There is nothing in them of Isopel's hysterical tears.
Once only does Sinfi, in the nobility of her affection for Aylwin, yield
to weakness. Mr. Watts-Dunton's sympathy with this kind of woman is
apparent in his eulogy of 'Shirley':--
"Note that it is not enough for the ideal English girl to be
beautiful and healthy, brilliant and cultivated, generous and loving:
she must be brave, there must be in her a strain of Valkyrie; she
must be of the high blood of Brynhild, who would have taken Odin
himself by the throat for the man she loved. That is to say, that,
having all the various charms of English women, the ideal English
girl must top them all with that quality which is specially the
English man's, just as the English hero, the Nelson, the Sydney,
having all the various glories of other heroes, must top them all
with that quality which is specially the English woman's--tenderness.
What we mean is, that there is a symmetry and a harmony in these
matters; that just as it was an English sailor who said, 'Kiss me,
Hardy,' when dying on board the 'Victory'--just as it was an English
gentleman who on the burning 'Amazon,' stood up one windy night,
naked and blistered, to make of himself a living screen between the
flames and his young wife; so it was an Englishwoman who threw her
arms round that fire-screen, and plunged into the sea; and an
Englishwoman who, when bitten by a dog, burnt out the bite from her
beautiful arm with a red-hot poker, and gave special instructions how
she was to be smothered when hydrophobia should set in."
But Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, in his sonnet, 'Brynhild on Sigurd's
Funeral Pyre,' so powerfully illustrated by Mr. Byam Shaw, has given us
in fourteen lines a picture of feminine courage and stoicism that puts
even Charlotte Bronte's picture of Shirley in the shade:--
With blue eyes fixed on joy and sorrow past,
Tall Brynhild stands on Sigurd's funeral pyre;
She stoops to kiss his mouth, though forks of fire
Rise fighting with the reek and wintry blast;
She smiles, though earth and sky are overcast
With shadow of wings that shudder of Asgard's ire;
She weeps, but not because the gods conspire
To quell her soul and break her heart at last.
"Odin," she cries, "it is for gods to droop!--
Heroes! we still have man's all-sheltering tomb,
Where cometh peace at last, whate'er may come:
Fate falters, yea, the very Norns shall stoop
Before man's courage, naked, bare of hope,
Standing against all Hell and Death and Doom.
Rhona Boswell, too, under all her playful humour, is of this strain, as
we see in that sonnet on 'Kissing the Maybuds' in 'The Coming of Love'
(given on page 406 of this book).
As Groome's remarks upon 'Aylwin' are in many ways of special interest, I
will for a moment digress from the main current of my argument, and say a
few words about it. Of course as the gypsies figure so largely in this
story, there were very few writers competent to review it from the Romany
point of view. Leland was living when it appeared, but he was residing
on the Continent; moreover, at his age, and engrossed as he was, it was
not likely that he would undertake to review it. There was another
Romany scholar, spoken of with enthusiasm by Groome--I allude to Mr.
Sampson, of Liverpool, who has since edited Borrow's 'Romany Rye' for
Messrs. Methuen, and who is said to know more of Welsh Romany than any
Englishman ever knew before. At that time, however, he was almost
unknown. Finally, there was Groome himself, whose articles in the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' had proclaimed
him to be the greatest living gypsologist. The editor of the 'Bookman,'
being anxious to get a review of the book from the most competent writer
he could find, secured Groome himself. I can give only a few sentences
from the review. Groome, it will be seen, does not miss the opportunity
of flicking in his usual satirical manner the omniscience of some popular
novelists:--
"Novelty and truth," he says, "are 'Aylwin's' chief characteristics,
a rare combination nowadays. Our older novelists--those at least
still held in remembrance--wrote only of what they knew, or of what
they had painfully mastered. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
Sterne, Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, and
George Eliot belong to the foremost rank of these; for types of the
second or the third may stand Marryat, Lever, Charles Reade, James
Grant, Surtees, Whyte Melville, and Wilkie Collins. But now we have
changed all that; the maximum of achievement seldom rises above
school board nescience. With a few exceptions (one could count them
on the ten fingers) our present-day novelists seem to write only
about things of which they clearly know nothing. One of the most
popular lays the scene of a story in Paris: the Seine there is tidal,
it rolls a murdered corpse upwards. In another work by her a gambler
shoots himself in a cab. 'I trust,' cries a friend who has heard the
shot, 'he has missed.' 'No,' says a second friend, 'he was a dead
shot.' Mr. X. writes a realistic novel about betting. It is crammed
with weights, acceptances, and all the rest of it; but, alas! on an
early page a servant girl wins 12_s._ 6_d._ at 7 to 1. Mrs. Y. takes
her heroine to a Scottish deer-forest: it is full of primeval oaks.
Mrs. Z. sends her hero out deerstalking. Following a hill-range, he
sights a stag upon the opposite height, fires at it, and kills his
benefactor, who is strolling below in the glen. And Mr. Ampersand in
his masterpiece shows up the littleness of the Establishment: his
ritualistic church presents the inconceivable conjunction of the Ten
Commandments and a gorgeous rood-screen. I have drawn upon memory
for these six examples, but subscribers to Mudie's should readily
recognize the books I mean; they have sold by thousands on thousands.
'Aylwin' is not such as these. There is much in it of the country,
of open-air life, of mountain scenery, of artistic fellowship, of
Gypsydom; it might be called the novel of the two Bohemias."
Many readers have expressed the desire to know something about the
prototypes of Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. The following words from
the Introduction to the 20th edition (called the 'Snowdon Edition') may
therefore be read with interest:--
"Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I
enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years--during the time
when he lived in Hereford Square. When, some seven or eight years
ago, I brought out an edition of 'Lavengro,' I prefaced that
delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Borrow's gypsy
characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most
remarkable 'Romany Chi' that had ever been met with in the part of
East Anglia known to Borrow and myself--Sinfi Lovell. I described
her playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I
contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl
Isopel Berners.
Since the publication of 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' I have
received very many letters from English and American readers
inquiring whether 'the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to
"Lavengro" is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of "Aylwin," and also
whether 'the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the
same as the Rhona of "The Coming of Love?"' The evidence of the
reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the
appearance of Rhona's first letter in the 'Athenaeum,' where the poem
was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the
sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very
ill,--near her death indeed,--urging me to tell her whether Rhona's
love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real
gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer
the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the
Sinfi of 'Aylwin' and the Sinfi described in my introduction to
'Lavengro' are one and the same character--except that the story of
the child Sinfi's weeping for the 'poor dead Gorgios' in the
churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the gypsies,
not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded
to in the now famous sonnet describing 'the walking lord of gypsy
lore,' Borrow; by his most intimate friend, Dr. Gordon Hake.
Now that so many of the gryengroes (horse-dealers), who form the
aristocracy of the Romany race, have left England for America, it is
natural enough that to some readers of 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of
Love,' my pictures of Romany life seem a little idealized. The
'Times,' in a kindly notice of 'The Coming of Love,' said that the
kind of gypsies there depicted are a very interesting people, 'unless
the author has flattered them unduly.' Those who best knew the gypsy
women of that period will be the first to aver that I have not
flattered them unduly."
It is Winifred who shares, not only with Henry Aylwin, but also with the
author himself, that love of the wind which he revealed in the
'Athenaeum' many years before 'Aylwin' was published. I may quote this
passage in praise of the wind as an example of the way in which his
imaginative work and his critical work are often interwoven:--
"There is no surer test of genuine nature instinct than this.
Anybody can love sunshine. No people had less of the nature instinct
than the Romans, but they could enjoy the sun; they even took their
solaria or sun-baths, and gave them to their children. And, if it
may be said that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be
said of the French! None but a born child of the tent could ever
have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written in
'Les Travailleurs de la Mer,' as though they were the ministers of
Ahriman. 'From Ormuzd, not from Ahriman, ye come.' And here,
indeed, is the difference between the two nationalities. Love of the
wind has made England what she is; dread of the wind has greatly
contributed to make France what she is. The winds are the breathings
of the Great Mother. Under the 'olden spell' of dumbness, nature can
yet speak to us by her winds. It is they that express her every
mood, and, if her mood is rough at times, her heart is kind. This is
why the true child of the open-air--never mind how much he may suffer
from the wind--loves it, loves it as much when it comes and 'takes
the ruffian billows by the top' to the peril of his life, as when it
comes from the sweet South. In the wind's most boisterous moods,
such as those so splendidly depicted by Dana in the doubling of Cape
Horn, there is an exhilaration, a fierce delight, in struggling with
it. It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes about the wind,
and that which the wind so loves--the snow."
Chapter XXIII
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION
AND now as to the real inner meaning of 'Alwyin,' about which so much has
been written. "'Aylwin,'" says Groome, "is a passionate love-story, with
a mystical idee mere. For the entire dramatic action revolves around a
thought that is coming more and more to the front--the difference,
namely, between a materialistic and a spiritualistic cosmogony." And Dr.
Nicoll, in his essay on "The Significance of 'Aylwin,'" in the
'Contemporary Review,' says:--
"Every serious student will see at a glance that 'Aylwin' is a
concrete expression of the author's criticism of life and literature,
and even--though this must be said with more reserve--a concrete
expression of his theory of the universe. This theory I will venture
to define as an optimistic confronting of the new cosmogony of growth
on which the author has for long descanted. Throughout all his
writings there is evidence of a mental struggle as severe as George
Eliot's with that materialistic reading of the universe which seemed
forced upon thinkers when the doctrine of evolution passed from
hypothesis to an accepted theory. Those who have followed Mr.
Watts-Dunton's writings in the 'Examiner' and in the 'Athenaeum' must
have observed with what passionate eagerness he insisted that
Darwinism, if properly understood, would carry us no nearer to
materialism than did the spiritualistic cosmogonies of old, unless it
could establish abiogenesis against biogenesis. As every experiment
of every biologist has failed to do so, a new spiritualist cosmogony
must be taught."
And yet the student of 'Aylwin' must bear in mind that some critics,
taking the very opposite view, have said that its final teaching is not
meant to be mystical at all, but anti-mystical--that what to Philip
Aylwin and his disciples seems so mystical is all explained by the
operation of natural laws. This theory reminds me of a saying of
Goethe's about the enigmatic nature of all true and great works of art.
I forget the exact words, but they set me thinking about the
chameleon-like iridescence of great poems and dramas.
* * * * *
With regard to the fountain-head of all the mysticism of the story,
Philip Aylwin, much has been said. Philip is the real protagonist of the
story--he governs, as I have said, the entire dramatic action from his
grave, and illustrates at every point Sinfi Lovell's saying, 'You must
dig deep to bury your daddy.' Everything that occurs seems to be the
result of the father's speculations, and the effect of them upon other
minds like that of his son and that of Wilderspin.
The appearance of this new epic of spiritual love came at exactly the
right moment--came when a new century was about to dawn which will throw
off the trammels of old modes of thought. While I am writing these lines
Mr. Balfour at the British Association has been expounding what must be
called 'Aylwinism,' and (as I shall show in the last chapter of this
book) saying in other words what Henry Aylwin's father said in 'The
Veiled Queen.' In the preface to the edition of 'Aylwin' in the 'World's
Classics' the author says:--
"The heart-thought of this book being the peculiar doctrine in Philip
Aylwin's 'Veiled Queen,' and the effect of it upon the fortunes of
the hero and the other characters, the name 'The Renascence of
Wonder' was the first that came to my mind when confronting the
difficult question of finding a name for a book that is at once a
love-story and an expression of a creed. But eventually I decided,
and I think from the worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply
the name of the hero.
The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed, did
not escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame
Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which
she made in the 'Rivista d'Italia,' gave great attention to its
central idea; so did M. Maurice Muret, in the 'Journal des Debats';
so did M. Henri Jacottet in 'La Semaine Litteraire.' Mr. Baker,
again, in his recently published 'Guide to Fiction,' described
'Aylwin' as "an imaginative romance of modern days, the moral idea of
which is man's attitude in face of the unknown, or, as the writer
puts it, 'the renascence of wonder.'" With regard to the phrase
itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of 'Aylwin'--the
twenty-second edition--I made the following brief reply to certain
questions that have been raised by critics both in England and on the
Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The Renascence of
Wonder,' 'is used to express that great revived movement of the soul
of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of
expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of
Rossetti.'
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of
my life has been the reading of "The Veiled Queen," your father's
book of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the
mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great picture
symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin's
vignette. Since the original writing of 'Aylwin,' many years ago, I
have enlarged upon its central idea in the 'Encyclopaedia
Britannica,' in the introductory essay to the third volume of
'Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' and in other places.
Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed.
Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the
phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon
the 'Renascence of Wonder in Religion.'
Mr. Watts-Dunton then quotes Dr. Nicoll's remarks upon the Logia recently
discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund. He shows how men came to
see 'once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man's
destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural,
of the lifelong struggle of soul, of the power of the unseen.'
"The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately be used as a
motto for 'Aylwin' and also for its sequel 'The Coming of Love: Rhona
Boswell's Story.'"
When 'Aylwin' first appeared, the editor of a well-known journal sent
it to me for review. I read it: never shall I forget that reading.
I was in Ireland at the time--an Irish Wedding Guest at an Irish
Wedding. Now an Irish Wedding is more joyous than any novel, and
Irish girls are lovelier than any romance. A duel between Life and
Literature! Picture it! Behold the Irish Wedding Guest spell-bound
by a story-teller as cunning as 'The Ancient Mariner' himself! He
heareth the bridal music, but Aylwin continueth his tale: he cannot
choose but hear, until 'The Curse' of the 'The Moonlight Cross' of
the Gnostics is finally expiated, and Aylwin and Winnie see in the
soul of the sunset 'The Dukkeripen of the Trushul,' the blessed Cross
of Rose and Gold. Amid the 'merry din' of the Irish Wedding Feast
the Irish Wedding Guest read and wrote. And among other lyrical
things, he said that 'since Shakespeare created Ophelia there has
been nothing in literature so moving, so pathetic, so unimaginably
sorrowful as the madness of Winnie Wynne.' And he also said that
"the majority of readers will delight in 'Aylwin' as the most
wonderful of love stories, but as the years go by an ever increasing
number will find in it the germ of a new religion, a clarified
spiritualism, free from charlatanry, a solace and a consolation for
the soul amid the bludgeonings of circumstance and the cruelties of
fate."
Mr. Watts-Dunton, when I told him that I was going to write this book,
urged me to moderate my praise and to call into action the critical power
that he was good enough to say that I possessed. He especially asked me
not to repeat the above words, the warmth of which, he said, might be
misconstrued; but the courage of my opinions I will exercise so long as I
write at all. The 'newspaper cynics' that once were and perhaps still
are strong, I have always defied and always will defy. I am glad to see
that there is one point of likeness between us of the younger generation
and the great one to which Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious friends
belong. We are not afraid and we are not ashamed of being enthusiastic.
This, also, I hope, will be a note of the twentieth century.
No doubt mine was a bold prophecy to utter in a rapid review of a
romance, but time has shown that it was not a rash one. The truth is
that the real vogue of 'Aylwin' as a message to the soul is only
beginning. Five years have elapsed since the publication of 'Aylwin,'
and during that time it has, I think, passed into twenty-four editions in
England alone, the latest of all these editions being the beautiful
'Arvon Edition,' not to speak of the vast issue in sixpenny form.
I will now quote the words of a very accomplished scholar and critic upon
the inner meaning of 'Aylwin' generally. They appeared in the 'Saturday
Review' of October 1904, and they show that the interest in the book, so
far from waning, is increasing:--
"Public taste has for once made a lucky shot, and we are only too
pleased to be able to put an item to the credit of an account in
taste, where the balance is so heavily on the wrong side. How
'Aylwin' ever came to be a popular success is hard indeed to
understand. We cannot wonder at the doubts of a popular reception
confessed to by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his dedication of the latest
edition to Mr. Ernest Rhys. How did a book, notable for its poetry
and subtlety of thought, come to appeal to an English public? That
it should have a vogue in Wales was natural; Welsh patriotism would
assure a certain success, though by itself it could not indeed have
made the book the household word it has now become throughout all
Wales. And undoubtedly its Welsh reception has been the more
intelligent; it has been welcomed there for the qualities that most
deserved a welcome; while in England we fear that in many quarters it
has rather been welcomed in spite of them. The average English man
and woman do not like mystery and distrust poetry. They have little
sympathy with the 'renascence of wonder,' which some new passages
unfold to us in the Arvon edition, passages originally omitted for
fear of excessive length and now restored from the MS. We are glad
to have them, for they illustrate further the intellectual motive of
the book. We are of those who do not care to take 'Aylwin' merely as
a novel."
These words remind me of two reviews of 'Aylwin,' one by Mr. W. P. Ryan,
a fellow-countryman of mine, which was published when 'Aylwin' first
appeared, the other by an eminent French writer.
"The salient impression on the reader is that he is looking full into
deep reaches of life and spirituality rather than temporary pursuits
and mundane ambitions. In this regard, in its freedom from
littleness, its breadth of life, its exaltation of mood, its sense of
serene issues that do not pass with the changing fashions of a
generation, the book is almost epic.
But 'Aylwin' has yet other sides. It is a vital and seizing story.
The girl-heroine is a beautiful presentment, and the struggle with
destiny, when, believing in the efficacy of a mystic's curse she
loses her reason, and flies from poignantly idyllic life to harrowing
life, her stricken lover in her wake, is nearly Greek in its
intensity and pathos. The long, long quest through the mountain
magic of Wales, the wandering spheres of Romany-land, and the
art-reaches of London, could only be made real and convincing by
triumphant art. A less expert pioneer would enlarge his effects in
details that would dissipate their magic; Mr. Watts-Dunton knows that
one inspired touch is worth many uninspired chapters, as Shakespeare
knew that 'she should have died hereafter.'
Death came on her like an untimely frost,
Upon the fairest flower of all the field.
or
Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
is worth an afternoon of emphasis, a night of mystical elaboration.
Incidentally, the Celtic and Romany types of character reveal their
essence. Here, too, the author preserves the artistic unities.
Delightful as one realizes these characters to be, full-blooded
personalities though they are, it is still their spirit, and through
it the larger spirit of their race, that shines clearest. Their
story is all realistic, and yet it leaves the flavour of a fairy tale
of Regeneration. At first sight one is inclined to speak of their
beautiful kinship with Nature; but the truth is that Nature and they
together are seen with spiritual eyes; that they and Nature are
different but kindred embodiments of the underlying, all-extending,
universal soul; that Henry's love, and Winnie's rapture, and
Snowdon's magic, and Sinfi's crwth, and the little song of y Wydffa,
and the glorious mountain dawn are but drops and notes in a melodic
mystic ocean, of which the farthest stars and the deepest loves are
kindred and inevitable parts--parts of a whole, of whose ministry we
hardly know the elements, yet are cognisant that our highest joy is
to feel in radiant moments that we, too, are part of the harmony. In
idyll, despair or tragedy, the beauty of 'Aylwin' is that always the
song of the divine in humanity is beneath it. Everything merges into
one consistent, artistically suggested, spiritual conception of life;
love tried, tortured, finally rewarded as the supreme force utilized
to drive home the intolerable negation and atrophy of materialism; in
Henry's gnostic father, in the scientific Henry himself, the Romany
Sinfi, Winnie whose nature is a song, Wilderspin who believes that
his model is a heavenly visitant with an immaterial body, D'Arcy who
stands for Rossetti, the end is the same; and the striking trait is
the felicity with which so many dissimilar personalities, while
playing the drama of divergent actuality to the full, yet realize and
illustrate, without apparent manipulation by the author, the one
abiding spiritual unity.
In execution, 'Aylwin' is far above the accomplished English
novel-work of latter years; as a conception of life it surely
transcends all. The 'schools' we have known: the realistic, the
romantic, the quasi-historical, the local, seem but parts of the
whole when their motives are measured with the idea that permeates
this novel. They take drear or gallant roads through limited lands;
it rises like a stately hill from which a world is clearer, above and
beyond whose limits there are visions, Voices, and the verities."
With equal eloquence M. Jacottet on the same day wrote about "Aylwin" in
'La Semaine Litteraire':--
"The central idea of this poetic book is that of love stronger than
death, love elevating the soul to a mystical conception of the
universe. It is a singular fact that at the moment when England,
intoxicated with her successes, seems to have no room for thought
except with regard to her fleet and her commerce, and allows herself
to be dazzled by dreams of universal empire, the book in vogue should
be Mr. Watts-Dunton's romance--the most idealistic, the farthest
removed from the modern Anglo-Saxon conception of life that he could
possibly conceive. But this fact has often been observable in
literary history. Is not the true charm of letters that of giving to
the soul respite from the brutalities of contemporary events?"
Chapter XXIV
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR
THE character of Mrs. Gudgeon in 'Aylwin' stands as entirely alone among
humourous characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs.
Partridge. In my own review of 'Aylwin' I thus noted the entirely new
kind of humour which characterizes it:--"To one aspect of this book we
have not yet alluded, namely, its humour. Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the
drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is inimitable,
with her quaint saying: 'I shall die a-larfin', they say in Primrose
Court, and so I shall--unless I die a-crying.'" Few critics have done
justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the 'Times' said: 'In Mrs. Gudgeon, one
of his characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what
seems to be a new comic figure,' and the 'Saturday Review' singled her
out as being the triumph of the book". Could she really have been a real
character? Could there ever have existed in the London of the
mid-Victorian period a real flesh and blood costermonger so rich in
humour that her very name sheds a glow of laughter over every page in
which it appears? According to Mr. Hake, she was suggested by a real
woman, and this makes me almost lament my arrival in London too late to
make her acquaintance. "With regard to the most original character of
the story," says Mr. Hake, "those who knew Clement's Inn, where I myself
once resided, and Lincoln's Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify
Mrs. Gudgeon, who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market.
Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper. At one time, I
believe--but I am not certain about this--she kept a stall on the Surrey
side of Waterloo Bridge, and it might have been there that, as I have
been told, her portrait was drawn for a specified number of early
breakfasts by an unfortunate artist who sank very low, but had real
ability. Her constant phrase was 'I shall die o'-laughin'--I know I
shall!' On account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her
inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an
Irishwoman. But she was not; she was cockney to the marrow. Recluse as
Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different,
and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way
such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her
impudence, and I may say insolence, Mrs. Gudgeon was a great favourite
with the police, who were the constant butts of her chaff." {383} But,
of course, this interesting costermonger could have only suggested our
unique Mrs. Gudgeon.
She shows that it is possible to paint a low-class humourist as rich in
the new cosmic humour as any one of Dickens's is rich in the old terrene
humour, and yet without one Dickensian touch. The difficulty of
achieving this feat is manifested every day, both in novels and on the
stage. Until Mrs. Gudgeon appeared I thought that Dickens had made it as
impossible for another writer to paint humourous pictures of low-class
London women as Swinburne has made it impossible for another poet to
write in anapaests. But there is in all that Mrs. Gudgeon says or does a
profundity of humour so much deeper than the humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it
wins her a separate niche in our gallery of humourous women. The chief
cause of the delight which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she illustrates
Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of absolute humour as distinguished from
relative humour--a theory which delighted me in those boyish days in
Ireland, to which I have already alluded. I have read his words on this
theme so often that I think I could repeat them as fluently as a nursery
rhyme. In their original form I remember that the word 'caricature' took
the place of the phrase 'relative humour.' I do not think there is
anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings so suggestive and so profound,
and to find in reading 'Aylwin' that they were suggested to him by a real
living character was exhilarating indeed.
Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of humour is one of his most original
generalizations, and it is vitally related both to his theory of poetry
and to his generalization of generalizations, 'The Renascence of Wonder.'
I think Mrs. Gudgeon is a cockney Anacharsis in petticoats. The Scythian
philosopher, it will be remembered, when jesters were taken to him, could
not be made to smile, but afterwards, when a monkey was brought to him,
broke out into a fit of laughter and said, 'Now this is laughable by
nature, the other by art.' I will now quote the essay on absolute and
relative humour:--
"Anarcharsis, who found the humour of Nature alone laughable, was the
absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, who
only finds food for laughter in the distortions of so-called
humourous art. The quality which I have called absolute humour is
popularly supposed to be the characteristic and special temper of the
English. The bustling, money grubbing, rank-worshipping British
slave of convention claims to be the absolute humourist! It is very
amusing. The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the
temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of 'contentment with things as
they be,' who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the
sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his 'thick
rotundity of belly,' good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace
by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon
the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature's largess, the
exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet rains
and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side.
Between this and relative humour how wide is the gulf!
That an apprehension of incongruity is the basis of both relative and
absolute humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of
relative humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the
normal, in the case of absolute humour it is the sweet incongruity of
the normal itself. Relative humour laughs at the breach of the
accustomed laws of nature and the conventional laws of man, which
laws it accepts as final. Absolute humour (comparing them
unconsciously with some ideal standard of its own, or with that ideal
or noumenal or spiritual world behind the cosmic show) sees the
incongruity of those very laws themselves--laws which are the
relative humourist's standard. Absolute humour, in a word, is based
on metaphysics--relative humour on experience. A child can become a
relative humourist by adding a line or two to the nose of Wellington,
or by reversing the nose of the Venus de Medici. The absolute
humourist has so long been saying to himself, 'What a whimsical idea
is the human nose!' that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the
child's laughter on seeing it turned upside down. So with convention
and its codes of etiquette--from the pompous harlequinade of
royalty--the ineffable gingerbread of an aristocracy of names without
office or culture, down to the Draconian laws of Philistia and
bourgeois respectability; whatever is a breach of the local laws of
the game of social life, whether the laws be those of a village
pothouse or of Mayfair; whether it displays an ignorance of matters
of familiar knowledge, these are the quarry of the relative
humourist. The absolute humourist, on the other hand, as we see in
the greatest masters of absolute humour, is so perpetually
overwhelmed with the irony of the entire game, cosmic and human, from
the droll little conventions of the village pothouse to those of
London, of Paris, of New York, of Pekin--up to the apparently
meaningless dance of the planets round the sun--up again to that
greater and more meaningless waltz of suns round the centre--he is so
delighted with the delicious foolishness of wisdom, the conceited
ignorance of knowledge, the grotesqueness even of the standard of
beauty itself; above all, with the whim of the absolute humourist
Nature, amusing herself, not merely with her monkeys, her flamingoes,
her penguins, her dromedaries, but with these more whimsical
creatures still--these 'bipeds' which, though 'featherless' are
proved to be not 'plucked fowls'; these proud, high-thinking
organisms--stomachs with heads, arms, and legs as useful
appendages--these countless little 'me's,' so all alike and yet so
unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be _the_ me, the only
true original me, round whom all other _me's_ revolve--so overwhelmed
is the absolute humourist with the whim of all this--with the
incongruity, that is, of the normal itself--with the 'almighty joke'
of the Cosmos as it is--that he sees nothing 'funny' in departures
from laws which to him are in themselves the very quintessence of
fun. And he laughs the laugh of Rabelais and of Sterne; for he feels
that behind this rich incongruous show there must be a beneficent
Showman. He knows that although at the top of the constellation sits
Circumstance, Harlequin and King, bowelless and blind, shaking his
starry cap and bells, there sits far above even Harlequin himself
another Being greater than he--a Being who because he has given us
the delight of laughter must be good, and who in the end will
somewhere set all these incongruities right--who will, some day, show
us the meaning of that which now seems so meaningless. With Charles
Lamb he feels, in short, that humour 'does not go out with life'; and
in answer to Elia's question, 'Can a ghost laugh?' he says,
'Assuredly, if there be ghosts at all,' for he is as unable as Soame
Jenyns himself to imagine that even the seraphim can be perfectly
happy without a perception of the ludicrous.
If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the
relative humourist, his type is not Dickens or Cruikshank, but
Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter
from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could
have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really
is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of
the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial
source of amusement to the absolute humourist he gets to love. Mere
representation, therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of
art. Exaggeration offends him. Nothing to him is so rich as the
real. He pronounces Tennyson's 'Northern Farmer' or the public-house
scene in 'Silas Marner' to be more humourous than the trial scene in
'Pickwick.' Wilkie's realism he finds more humourous than the
funniest cartoon in the funniest comic journal. And this mood is as
much opposed to satire as to relative humour. Of all moods the
rarest and the finest--requiring, indeed, such a 'blessed mixing of
the juices' as nature cannot every day achieve--it is the mood of
each one of those fatal 'Paradis Artificiels,' the seeking of which
has devastated the human race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of
Villon; of Walter Mapes in the following verse:--
Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
Deus sit propitius huic potatori."
Now it is because Mrs. Gudgeon is the very type of the absolute
humourist as defined in this magnificent fugue of prose, and the only
example of absolute humour which has appeared in prose fiction, that
she is to me a fount of esoteric and fastidious joy. If I were asked
what character in 'Aylwin' shows the most unmistakable genius, I
should reply, 'Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs. Gudgeon!'"
Chapter XXV
GORGIOS AND ROMANIES
THE publication of 'The Coming of Love' in book form preceded that of
'Aylwin' by about a year, but it had been appearing piecemeal in the
'Athenaeum' since 1882.
"So far as regards Rhona Boswell's story," says Mr. Watts-Dunton,
"'The Coming of Love' is a sequel to 'Aylwin.' If the allusions to
Rhona's lover, Percy Aylwin, in the prose story have been, in some
degree, misunderstood by some readers--if there is any danger of
Henry Aylwin, the hero of the novel, being confounded with Percy
Aylwin, the hero of this poem--it only shows how difficult it is for
the poet or the novelist (who must needs see his characters from the
concave side only) to realize that it is the convex side only which
he can present to his reader.
The fact is that the motive of 'Aylwin'--dealing only as it does with
that which is elemental and unchangeable in man--is of so entirely
poetic a nature that I began to write it in verse. After a while,
however, I found that a story of so many incidents and complications
as the one that was growing under my hand could only be told in
prose. This was before I had written any prose at all--yes, it is so
long ago as that. And when, afterwards, I began to write criticism,
I had (for certain reasons--important then, but of no importance now)
abandoned the idea of offering the novel to the outside public at
all. Among my friends it had been widely read, both in manuscript
and in type.
But with regard to Romany women, Henry Aylwin's feeling towards them
was the very opposite of Percy's. When, in speaking of George Borrow
some years ago, I made the remark that between Englishmen of a
certain type and gypsy women there is an extraordinary physical
attraction--an attraction which did not exist between Borrow and the
gypsy women with whom he was brought into contact--I was thinking
specially of the character depicted here under the name of Percy
Aylwin. And I asked then the question--Supposing Borrow to have been
physically drawn with much power towards any woman, could she
possibly have been Romany? Would she not rather have been of the
Scandinavian type?--would she not have been what he used to call a
'Brynhild'? From many conversations with him on this subject, I
think she must necessarily have been a tall blonde of the type of
Isopel Berners--who, by-the-by, was much more a portrait of a
splendid East-Anglian road-girl than is generally imagined. And I
think, besides, that Borrow's sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon type may
account for the fact that, notwithstanding his love of the free and
easy economies of life among the better class of Gryengroes, his
gypsy women are all what have been called 'scenic characters.'
When he comes to delineate a heroine, she is the superb Isopel
Berners--that is to say, she is physically (and indeed mentally,
too), the very opposite of the Romany chi. It was here, as I happen
to know, that Borrow's sympathies were with Henry Aylwin far more
than with Percy Aylwin.
The type of the Romany chi, though very delightful to Henry Aylwin as
regards companionship, had no physical attractions for him, otherwise
the witchery of the girl here called Rhona Boswell, whom he knew as a
child long before Percy Aylwin knew her, must surely have eclipsed
such charms as Winifred Wynne or any other winsome 'Gorgie' could
possess. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have been
impossible for Percy Aylwin to be brought closely and long in contact
with a Romany girl like Sinfi Lovell and remain untouched by those
unique physical attractions of hers--attractions that made her
universally admired by the best judges of female beauty as being the
most splendid 'face-model' of her time, and as being in form the
grandest woman ever seen in the studios--attractions that upon Henry
Aylwin seem to have made almost no impression.
There is no accounting for this, as there is no accounting for
anything connected with the mysterious witchery of sex. And again,
the strong inscrutable way in which some gypsy girls are drawn
towards a 'Tarno Rye' (as a young English gentleman is called), is
quite inexplicable. Some have thought--and Borrow was one of
them--that it may arise from that infirmity of the Romany Chal which
causes the girls to 'take their own part' without appealing to their
men-companions for aid--that lack of masculine chivalry among the men
of their own race.