and 'The Coming of Love' which interests me more deeply. Some of
those who have been specially attracted towards Sinfi Lovell have had
misgivings, I find, as to whether she is not an idealization, an
impossible Romany chi, and some of those who have been specially
attracted towards Rhona Boswell have had the same misgivings as to
her.
One of the great racial specialities of the Romany is the superiority
of the women to the men. For it is not merely in intelligence, in
imagination, in command over language, in comparative breadth of view
regarding the Gorgio world that the Romany women (in Great Britain,
at least) leave the men far behind. In everything that goes to make
nobility of character this superiority is equally noticeable. To
imagine a gypsy hero is, I will confess, rather difficult. Not that
the average male gypsy is without a certain amount of courage, but it
soon gives way, and, in a conflict between a gypsy and an Englishman,
it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped the virility
of Romany stamina.
Although some of our most notable prize-fighters have been gypsies,
it used to be well known, in times when the ring was fashionable,
that a gypsy could not always be relied upon to 'take punishment'
with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly,
perhaps, because his more highly-strung nervous system makes him more
sensitive to pain.
The courage of a gypsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a
proverb; nothing seems to daunt it. This superiority of the women to
the men extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift
of music for which the gypsies as a race are noticeable. With regard
to music, however, even in Eastern Europe (Russia alone excepted),
where gypsy music is so universal that, according to some writers,
every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men, and
not, in general, the women, who excel. Those, however, who knew
Sinfi Lovell may think with me that this state of things may simply
be the result of opportunity and training."
Chapter XXVI
'THE COMING OF LOVE'
IN my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English
Literature' I devoted most of my space to 'The Coming of Love.' I put
the two great romantic poems 'The Coming of Love' and 'Christmas at the
"Mermaid"' far above everything he has done. I think I see both in the
conception and in the execution of these poems the promise of
immortality--if immortality can be predicted of any poems of our time.
In reading them one remembers in a flash Mr. Watts-Dunton's own noble
words about the poetic impulse:--
"In order to produce poetry the soul must for the time being have
reached that state of exaltation, that state of freedom from
self-consciousness, depicted in the lines--
I started once, or seemed to start, in pain
Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,
As when a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek.
Whatsoever may be the poet's 'knowledge of his art,' into this mood
he must always pass before he can write a truly poetic line. For,
notwithstanding all that we have said and are going to say upon
poetry as a fine art, it is in the deepest sense of the word an
'inspiration' indeed. No man can write a line of genuine poetry
without having been 'born again' (or, as the true rendering of the
text says, 'born from above'); and then the mastery over those
highest reaches of form which are beyond the ken of the mere
versifier comes to him as a result of the change. Hence, with all
Mrs. Browning's metrical blemishes, the splendour of her metrical
triumphs at her best.
For what is the deep distinction between poet and proseman? A writer
may be many things besides a poet; he may be a warrior like
AEschylus, a man of business like Shakespeare, a courtier like
Chaucer, or a cosmopolitan philosopher like Goethe; but the moment
the poetic mood is upon him all the trappings of the world with which
for years he may perhaps have been clothing his soul--the world's
knowingness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition--fall away,
and the man becomes an inspired child again, with ears attuned to
nothing but the whispers of those spirits from the Golden Age, who,
according to Hesiod, haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such
a man produces may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not
so greatly as it delights and astonishes himself. His passages of
pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his
own eyes while he writes; his sublime passages overawe no soul so
imperiously as his own; his humour draws no laughter so rich or so
deep as that stirred within his own breast.
It might almost be said, indeed, that Sincerity and Conscience, the
two angels that bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic dream,
bring him also the deepest, truest delight of form. It might almost
be said that by aid of sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled
to see more clearly than other men the eternal limits of his own
art--to see with Sophocles that nothing, not even poetry itself, is
of any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil,
unless it is in the deepest and highest sense good, unless it comes
linking us all together by closer bonds of sympathy and pity,
strengthening us to fight the foes with whom fate and even nature,
the mother who bore us, sometimes seem in league--to see with Milton
that the high quality of man's soul which in English is expressed by
the word virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized,
greater than all the rhythms of all the tongues that have been spoken
since Babel--and to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the
high passion which in England is called love is lovelier than all
art, lovelier than all the marble Mercuries that 'await the chisel of
the sculptor' in all the marble hills."
The reason why the criticism of the hour does not always give Mr.
Watts-Dunton the place accorded to him by his great contemporaries is not
any lack of generosity: it arises from the unprecedented, not to say
eccentric, way in which his poetry has reached the public. In this
respect alone, apart from its great originality, 'The Coming of Love' is
a curiosity of literature. I know nothing in the least like the history
of this poem. It was written, circulated in manuscript among the very
elite of English letters, and indeed partly published in the 'Athenaeum,'
very nearly a quarter of a century ago. I have before alluded to Mrs.
Chandler Moulton's introduction to Philip Bourke Marston's poems, where
she says that it was Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry which won for him the
friendship of Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Yet for lustre
after lustre it was persistently withheld from the public; cenacle after
poetic cenacle rose, prospered and faded away, and still this poet, who
was talked of by all the poets and called 'the friend of all the poets,'
kept his work back until he had passed middle age. Then, at last, owing
I believe to the energetic efforts of Mr. John Lane, who had been urging
the matter for something like five years, he launched a volume which
seized upon the public taste and won a very great success so far as sales
go. It is now in its sixth edition. There can be no doubt whatever that
if the book had appeared, as it ought to have appeared, at the time it
was written, critics would have classed the poet among his compeers and
he would have come down to the present generation, as Swinburne has come
down, as a classic. But, as I have said, it is not in the least
surprising that, notwithstanding Rossetti's intense admiration of the
poem, notwithstanding the fact that Morris intended to print it at the
Kelmscott Press, and notwithstanding the fact that Swinburne, in
dedicating the collected edition of his works to Mr. Watts-Dunton,
addresses him as a poet of the greatest authority--it is only the true
critics who see in the right perspective a poet who has so perversely
neglected his chances. If his time of recognition has not yet fully
come, this generation is not to blame. The poet can blame only himself,
although to judge by Rossetti's words, and by the following lines from
Dr. Hake's 'New Day,' he is indifferent to that:--
You tell me life is all too rich and brief,
Too various, too delectable a game,
To give to art, entirely or in chief;
And love of Nature quells the thirst for fame.
The 'parable poet' then goes on to give voice to the opinion, not only of
himself, but of most of the great poets of the mid-Victorian epoch:--
You who in youth the cone-paved forest sought,
Musing until the pines to musing fell;
You who by river-path the witchery caught
Of waters moving under stress of spell;
You who the seas of metaphysics crossed,
And yet returned to art's consoling haven--
Returned from whence so many souls are lost,
With wisdom's seal upon your forehead graven--
Well may you now abandon learning's seat,
And work the ore all seek, not many find;
No sign-post need you to direct your feet,
You draw no riches from another's mind.
Hail Nature's coming; bygone be the past;
Hail her New Day; it breaks for man at last.
Fulfil the new-born dream of Poesy!
Give her your life in full, she turns from less--
Your life in full--like those who did not die,
Though death holds all they sang in dark duress.
You, knowing Nature to the throbbing core,
You can her wordless prophecies rehearse.
The murmers others heard her heart outpour
Swell to an anthem in your richer verse.
If wider vision brings a wider scope
For art, and depths profounder for emotion,
Yours be the song whose master-tones shall ope
A new poetic heaven o'er earth and ocean.
The New Day comes apace; its virgin fame
Be yours, to fan the fiery soul to flame.
Indeed, he has often said to me: 'There is a tide in the affairs of men,
and I did not throw myself upon my little tide until it was too late, and
I am not going to repine now.' For my part, I have been a student of
English poetry all my life--it is my chief subject of study--and I
predict that when poetic imagination is again perceived to be the supreme
poetic gift, Mr. Watts-Dunton's genius will be acclaimed. In respect of
imaginative power, apart from the other poetic qualities--'the power of
seeing a dramatic situation and flashing it upon the physical senses of
the listener,' none of his contemporaries have surpassed him.
I have said in print more than once that I, a Celt myself, can see more
Celtic glamour in his poetry than in many of the Celtic poets of our
time. And, if we are to judge by the vogue of 'The Coming of Love' and
'Aylwin' in Wales, the Welsh people seem to see it very clearly. Take,
for instance, the sonnet called 'The Mirrored Stars' again, given on page
29. It is impossible for Celtic glamour to go further than this; and yet
it is rarely noted by critics in discussing the Celtic note in poetry.
In order fully to understand 'The Coming of Love' it is necessary to bear
in mind a distinction between the two kinds of poetry upon which Mr.
Watts-Dunton has often dwelt. "There are," he tells us, "but two kinds
of poetry, but two kinds of art--that which interprets, and that which
represents. 'Poetry is apparent pictures of unapparent realities,' says
the Eastern mind through Zoroaster; 'the highest, the only operation of
art is representation (Gestaltung),' says the Western mind through
Goethe. Both are right." Madame Galimberti has called Mr. Watts-Dunton
'the poet of the sunrise': There are richer descriptions of sunrise in
'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' than in any other writer I know. "Few
poets," Mr. Watts-Dunton says, "have been successful in painting a
sunrise, for the simple reason that, save through the bed-curtains, they
do not often see one. They think that all they have to do is to paint a
sunset, which they sometimes do see, and call it a sunrise. They are
entirely mistaken, however; the two phenomena are both like and unlike.
Between the cloud-pageantry of sunrise and of sunset the difference to
the student of Nature is as apparent as is the difference to the poet
between the various forms of his art."
'The Coming of Love' shows that independence of contemporary vogues and
influences which characterizes all Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, whether in
verse or prose, whether in romance or criticism, or in that analysis and
exposition of the natural history of minds about which Sainte Beuve
speaks. It was as a poet that his energies were first exercised, but
this for a long time was known only to his poetical friends. His
criticism came many years afterwards, and, as Rossetti used to say, 'his
critical work consists of generalizations of his own experience in the
poet's workshop.' For many years he was known only in his capacity as a
critic. James Russell Lowell is reported to have said: 'Our ablest
critics hitherto have been 18-carat; Theodore Watts goes nearer the pure
article.' Mr. William Sharp, in his study of Rossetti, says: 'In every
sense of the word the friendship thus begun resulted in the greatest
benefit to the elder writer, the latter having greater faith in Mr.
Watts-Dunton's literary judgment than seems characteristic with so
dominant and individual an intellect as that of Rossetti. Although the
latter knew well the sonnet-literature of Italy and England, and was a
much-practised master of the heart's key himself, I have heard him on
many occasions refer to Theodore Watts as having still more thorough
knowledge on the subject, and as being the most original sonnet-writer
living.'
'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' are vitally connected with the poet's
peculiar critical message. Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin may be regarded
as the embodiment of his philosophy of life. The very popularity of
'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' is apt to make readers forget the
profundity of the philosophical thought upon which they are based,
although this profundity has been indicated by such competent critics as
Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the 'Contemporary Review,' M. Maurice Muret in
the 'Journal des Debats,' and other thoughtful writers. Upon the inner
meaning of the romance and the poem I have, however, ideas of my own to
express, which are not in full accordance with any previous criticisms.
To me it seems that the two cousins, Henry Aylwin of the romance, and
Percy Aylwin of the poem, are phases of a modern Hamlet, a Hamlet who has
travelled past the pathetic superstitions of the old cosmogonies to the
last milestone of doubting hope and questioning fear, a Hamlet who stands
at the portals of the outer darkness, gazing with eyes made wistful by
the loss of a beloved woman. In both the romance and the poem the theme
is love at war with death. Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to the
illustrated edition of 'Aylwin' says:--
"It is a story written as a comment on Love's warfare with
death--written to show that, confronted as man is every moment by
signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel
connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the
unknown country beyond Orion, where the beloved dead are loving us
still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything
else: a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes
intensified when a man has lost--or thinks he has lost--a woman whose
love was the only light of his world--when his soul is torn from his
body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the 'viewless
winds' right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs
beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last
even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter
darkness and loneliness. It was to depict this phase of human
emotion that both 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' were written.
They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer's soul,
sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world--sent out to
find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was,
without knowing it, akin. In 'Aylwin' the problem is symbolized by
the victory of love over sinister circumstance, whereas in the poem
it is symbolized by a mystical dream of 'Natura Benigna.'
In 'The Coming of Love' Percy Aylwin is a poet and a sailor, with such an
absorbing love for the sea that he has no room for any other passion; to
him an imprisoned seabird is a sufferer almost more pitiable than any
imprisoned man, as will be seen by the opening section of the poem,
'Mother Carey's Chicken.' On seeing a storm-petrel in a cage on a
cottage wall near Gypsy Dell, he takes down the cage in order to release
the bird; then, carrying the bird in the cage, he turns to cross a rustic
wooden bridge leading past Gypsy Dell, when he suddenly comes upon a
landsman friend of his, a Romany Rye, who is just parting from a young
gypsy-girl. Gazing at her beauty, Percy stands dazzled and forgets the
petrel. It is symbolical of the inner meaning of the story that the bird
now flies away through the half-open door. From that moment, through the
magic of love, the land to Percy is richer than the sea: this ends the
first phase of the story. The first kiss between the two lovers is thus
described:--
If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,
Is heaven a dream? Is she I claspt a dream?
Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam
And miles of furze shine yellow down the West?
I seem to clasp her still--still on my breast
Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.
I think she kissed these lips, for now they seem
Scarce mine: so hallowed of the lips they pressed.
Yon thicket's breath--can that be eglantine?
Those birds--can they be Morning's choristers?
Can this be Earth? Can these be banks of furze?
Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!
I seem to know them, though this body of mine
Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!
Percy stays with the gypsies, and the gypsy-girl, Rhona, teaches him
Romany. This arouses the jealousy of a gypsy rival--Herne the
'Scollard.' Percy Aylwin's family afterwards succeeds in separating him
from her, and he is again sent to sea. While cruising among the coral
islands he receives the letter from Rhona which paints her character with
unequalled vividness:--
RHONA'S LETTER
On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams
the day
When Herne the Scollard come and
said to me,
He s off, that rye o yourn, gone gentleman
clean away
Till swallow-time; hes left this
letter: see.
In dreams I heerd the bee and
grasshopper,
Like on that mornin, buz in Rington
Hollow,
Shell live till swallow-time and die
then shell mer,
For never will a rye come back to gentleman
her
Wot leaves her till the comin o the
swallow.
All night I heerd them bees and grasshoppers;
All night I smelt the breath o grass and may,
Mixed sweet wi' smells o honey from the furze
Like on that mornin when you went away;
All night I heerd in dreams my daddy laugh
sal,
Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo girl-whole
O Bozzles breed--tans, vardey, greis, tents: waggons: horses
and all--
To see dat tarno rye o hern palall back
Wots left her till the comin o the
swallow.
I woke and went a-walkin on the ice
All white with snow-dust, just like salt
sparklin loon,
And soon beneath the stars I heerd a
vice,
A vice I knowed and often, often shoon; hear
An then I seed a shape as thin as tuv; smoke
I knowed it wur my blessed mammy s spirit
mollo. {403a}
Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love,
He s thinkin on you; don t you go and weep
rove;
You ll see him at the comin o the
swallow.
Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the
grass
When he wur gone, and freeze the songs
brooklets gillies;
There wornt no smell, dear, in the hay
sweetest cas,
And when the summer brought the
water-lilies,
And when the sweet winds waved the wheat
golden giv,
The skies above em seemed as bleak and black
kollo {403b}
As now, when all the world seems frozen snow
yiv.
The months are long, but mammy says you
ll live
By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.
She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver
throat
Will meet the stonechat in the buddin
whin,
And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie song
ull float
From light-green boughs through leaves
a-peepin thin;
The wheat-ear soon ull bring the
willow-wren,
And then the fust fond nightingale ull
follow,
A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen
Still out at sea, the spring is in our
glen;
Come, darlin, wi the comin o the
swallow.
And she wur gone! And then I read the
words
In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;
They made the Christmas sing with summer
birds,
And spring-leaves shine on every frozen
tree;
And when the dawnin kindled Rington
spire,
And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and red
lollo
Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o
fire,
Another night, I sez, has brought him
nigher;
He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
And soon the bull-pups found me on the
Pool--
You know the way they barks to see me
slide--
But when the skatin bors o Rington scool
Comed on, it turned my head to see em
glide.
I seemed to see you twirlin on your
skates,
And somethin made me clap my hans and
hollo;
It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s. cutting
But when I woke-like--Im the gal wot
waits
Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.
Comin seemed ringin in the
Christmas-chime;
Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,
In beads o frost along the nets o rime,
Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;
And when the pups began to bark and
play,
And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock
and wallow
Among the snow and fling it up like
spray,
I says to them, You know who rote to say
He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o
December
Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o
spring
Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups,
remember;
If not--for me no singin birds ull sing:
No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale cuckoo
Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, {404} over hill and
hollow:
Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail,
Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale,
For her wot waits the comin o the
swallow.
Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your mine own
han
To that fine rawni rowin on the river; lady
I ll never call that lady a chovihan witch
Nor yit a mumply gorgie--I'll forgive miserable Gentile
her.
Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife.
Come back--or, say the word, and I will
follow
Your footfalls round the world: Ill
leave this life
(Ive flung away a-ready that ere
knife)--
I m dyin for the comin o the swallow.
Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very moment when
'the Schollard,' maddened by the discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy
that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the
river-bank. Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle
on the other side without being able to go to Rhona's assistance. But
the girl hurls her antagonist into the water, and he is drowned. There
are other witnesses--the stars, whose reflected light, according to a
gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man
sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the deed. For a Romany
woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty is death. Nevertheless, Rhona
marries Percy. I will quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in
the tent at dawn:--
The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
The tent's mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.
I hear the earliest anvil's tingling clink
From Jasper's forge; the cattle on the leas
Begin to low. She's waking by degrees:
Sleep's rosy fetters melt, but link by link.
What dream is hers? Her eyelids shake with tears;
The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
"You'll never leave me now? There is but you;
I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
'The Dukkeripen o' stars comes ever true.'"
She rises, startled by a wandering bee
Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree--
Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,
Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl--
The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
And says, 'This bride of yours, I know her well,
And so do all the birds in all the bowers
Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
See, on the curtain of the morning haze
The Future's finger writes of happy days.'
Rhona, half-hidden by 'the branches of the hawthorn tree,' stretches up
to kiss the white and green May buds overhanging the bridal tent, while
Percy Aylwin stands at the tent's mouth and looks at her:--
Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings
Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
From Rhona's eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,
Kissing the buds for 'luck o' love' it brings,
While from the dingle grass the skylark springs
And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?
[He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches
apart, and clasps her in his arms.
Can she here, covering with her childish kisses
These pearly buds--can she so soft, so tender,
So shaped for clasping--dowered of all love-blisses--
Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
An angel storming hell, through death's abysses,
Where never a sight could fright or power could bend her?
But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the lovers are on
the river she reads the scripture of the stars. I must give here the
sonnet quoted on page 29:--
The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,
And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
We rowed--we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
An angel's, yet with woman's dearer wiles;
But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
What shaped those shadows like another boat
Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
We wept--we kissed--while starry fingers wrote,
And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in which Percy
confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its menace. The stars write in the
river:--
Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is strong.
Percy reads the rune and answers:--
I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
In Heav'n that wove this net of life for men?
Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth--
King that can do no wrong!
Ah! Night seems opening! There, above the skies,
Who sits upon that central sun for throne
Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?
Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes
Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
Of infinite light, 'tis Love that stands immortal,
The King of Kings.
The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering Rhona's secret,
secretly slay her. Percy, having returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to
find her grave. Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona
should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into
the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called 'Natura Maligna,'
which has been much discussed by the critics:--
The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
By glacier-brink she stood--by cataract-spray--
When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
And if a footprint shone at break of day,
My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
''Tis hers whose hand God's mightier hand doth hold.'
I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
When lo, she stood! . . . God made her let me pass,
Then felled the bridge! . . . Oh, there in sallow light,
There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
And all my wondrous days as in a glass.
This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry.
Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the 'Athenaeum' of
February 5, 1881: "Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a
Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali ('the malignant') or
Parvati ('the mountaineer'). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus
shriek to God in the delirium of their fear."
Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while
New Year's morning is breaking:--
Through Fate's mysterious warp another weft
Of days is cast; and see! Time's star-built throne,
From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
Of all that was its music--stand alone,
Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
Impatient of the leaden minutes left--
The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
Barren and foolish, and I cry, 'No grain,
No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!'
And yet I cannot join the dead--and live.
Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
In England, heedless of the knells they ring
To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
Each to the other ere you say adieu!--
I seem to hear their chimes--the chimes we knew
In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
Greeting a New Year's Day as bright of wing
As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.
If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
Could bring the past and make it live again,
Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears--
And with the past bring her I weep in vain--
Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.
[The clouds move away and show the
stars in dazzling brightness.
Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove--
They bring the mighty Mother's new-year greeting:
'All save great Nature is a vision fleeting'--
So says the scripture of those orbs above.
'All, all,' I cry, 'except man's dower of love!--
Love is no child of Nature's mystic cheating!'
And yet it comes again, the old desire
To read what yonder constellations write
On river and ocean--secrets of the night--
To feel again the spirit's wondering fire
Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
To catch the master-note of Nature's lyre.
New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
By Fate and Death, 'Nature is ever young,
Clad in new riches, as each morning's gold
Blooms o'er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;
The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
Of Youth's fresh runners in the lists of Time.
Arise, and drink the wine of Nature's light!'
Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of
'The Promise of the Sunrise' and the revelation of 'Natura Benigna':--
Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
'Sorrow,' I said, 'has made me old, my dear;
'Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
Beneath my load a seraph's neck might bow,
Vigils like mine would blanch an angel's hair.'
Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes--
I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.
And now 'Natura Benigna' reveals to him her mystic consolation:--
What power is this? What witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven--most wild, most sweet--
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
Mother, 'tis I, reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
This is not the pathetic fallacy. It is the poetic interpretation of the
latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that
the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard
only by the poet's finer ear.
The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's poetry, both in subject and in form. The originality of
any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in
new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the
language. In 'The Coming of Love' the poet has invented a new poetic
form. Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the
disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel,
and of the prose play. In Tennyson's 'Maud' and in Mr. Watts-Dunton's
other lyrical drama, "Christmas at the 'Mermaid,'" the special functions
of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form. The
story is told by brief pictures. In 'The Coming of Love' this method
reaches its perfection. Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets,
are used according to an inner law of the poet's mind. The exaltation of
these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being
summarized in bare prose. The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is
revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions. In Dante's 'Vita Nuova' a
method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind
of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante's poems are all
sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in 'The
Coming of Love.' Here the very 'rhyme-colour' and the subtle variety of
vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical
composition. Wagner's music is the only modern art-form which is
comparable with the metrical architecture of 'The Coming of Love,' and
"Christmas at the 'Mermaid.'" No one can fully understand the rhythmic
triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated
in his treatise on Poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica'--a theory
which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of
music, is still developing. Both these lyrical dramas ought to be
carefully studied by all students of English metres.
The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an
extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry. It is
remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in
Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under
such conditions. Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her
portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry.
But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson's Maud,
the difference is startling. Maud does not tingle with personality. She
is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of 'creamy English
girls.' Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality.
One makes pictures of her in one's brain--pictures that never become
blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic
heroines. How much of this is due to the poetic form? Could Rhona have
lived so intensely in a novel or a play? I do not think so. At any
rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel,
and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is
well worth the study of critics and craftsmen. Mr. Kernahan has called
attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative. Perhaps this
defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose
like that of the opening of 'Aylwin,' which would lead the imagination
insensibly from one situation or mood to another.
In connection with the opening sonnets of 'The Coming of Love,' a very
interesting point of criticism presents itself. These sonnets, in which
Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket
lighthouse, appeared in the 'Athenaeum' a week after Mr. Swinburne and he
returned from a visit to the Channel Islands. They record a real
incident. Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the 'English
Illustrated Magazine' his version of the story, a splendid specimen of
his sonorous rhythms.
Mr. Watts-Dunton's version of the story may interest the reader:--
LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
(THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)
Amid the Channel's wiles and deep decoys,
Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney,
But there she pined. 'The bustling world,' said she,
'Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.'
The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
Had winds for sponsor--one proud rock for nurse,
Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
The cold bright sea was hers for universe
Till o'er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.
But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:--
Her lover's boat was out; her ears were dinned
With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
That shook the troubled sun's red canopy.
Even while she prayed the storm's high revelry
Woke petrel, gull--all revellers winged and finned--
And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
'My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,'
The Mother sang. 'Thy sea-boy waged no strife
With Hatred's poison, gangrened Envy's knife--
With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!'
Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature
than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends. It seems
impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other's work or
ever have known each other well. The point which I wish to emphasize is
that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers,
they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every
day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the
evening in each other's society; and yet when they sit down at their
desks they may be as far asunder as the poles. From this we may perhaps
infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this
one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.
Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem. I
may mention that the other day I came across a little book called
'Authors that have Influenced me,' and found that Mr. Rider Haggard
instanced the opening section of 'The Coming of Love,' 'Mother Carey's
Chicken,' as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than
all others. I think this is a compliment, for the originality of
invention displayed in 'King Solomon's Mines' and 'She' sets Rider
Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr.
Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and
also good is a rare achievement.
I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to
Mr. Watts-Dunton's miscellaneous sonnets. Some of them have had a great
vogue: for instance, 'John the Pilgrim.' Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton's
sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.,
as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the
subject. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in
this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister
power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature's
mockery by the mirage:--
Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
Claspt in a silvery river's winding maze:
'Water, water! Blessed be God!' he says,
And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles
The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.
'God heard me not,' says he, 'blessed be God!'
And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand,
Heav'n's outer coast where waiting angels stand,
He looks below: 'Farewell, thou hooded clod,
Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
God heard my prayer for life--blessed be God!'
[Picture: 'John the Pilgrim.' (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)]
This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic
in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled,
or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious
faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet. The rhymes in
this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer's luck, good and
ill. To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have
been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of
'chamomiles' and 'isles,' 'chamomiles' giving the picture of the flowers,
and 'isles' giving the false vision of the mirage. The same thing is
notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, 'The Bedouin Child'
(see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified. Without
the fortunate rhyme-words 'pashas,' 'camel-maws,' and 'claws' in the
octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.
The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry and that of Coleridge has
been frequently discussed. It has the same romantic glamour and often
the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the
music of the ravishing octosyllabics of 'Christabel.' This at least I
know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,--he owns the true wizard of
romance as master. I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me
quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and
his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the
author as follows: 'The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive
analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through
volumes of essays and not so paint him. There is Coleridge! But whence
the source of your story--if anything of such aptness could have been
other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu--I cannot tell. It is new
to me.'
After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the
reader with the 'pure amber' itself:--
I see thee pine like her in golden story
Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
The gates thrown open--saw the sunbeams play,
With only a web 'tween her and summer's glory;
Who, when that web--so frail, so transitory,
It broke before her breath--had fallen away,
Saw other webs and others rise for aye
Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.
Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine--
That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh--
Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
Could thy rare spirit's wings have pierced the mesh
Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
But lets the poet see how heav'n can shine.
Here again the verbal parsimony is notable. I defy any one to find
anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony.
There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet. Every word is
cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning.
The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising
imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a
sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall. Metrical students
will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a
part in the suspensive music.
I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as
one of the wisest, done by the editor of the 'Athenaeum,' was that of
printing Rhona's letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at
the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the
poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona. It certainly showed immense
confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great
success. The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George
Meredith: "I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that. When I
read her love-letter in the 'Athenaeum,' I had the regret that the
dialect might cause its banishment from literature. Reading the whole
poem through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate. We are the
richer for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed."
And, discussing 'The Coming of Love,' Meredith wrote: 'I will not speak
of the tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the
dexterity which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of
the work.' Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry is
so consummate that it is concealed from the reader. There is no sense of
difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice. Yet the metrical structure
of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest.
'Rhona's Love Letter' is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern,
each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of
a sonnet. But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naive,
unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether,
and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour
are produced by the most elaborate art.
I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry. There
can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not
merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the
deeper quality of imaginative energy. By 'the most original poet' I do
not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what
I mean. Poe's 'Raven' is more 'original' than Shelley's 'Epipsychidion,'
but it is not so great. In my article on Blake in Chambers's
'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' I pointed out that there are greater
poets than Blake (or Donne) but none more original. There are many poets
who possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual
matching of common ideas with common metaphors. But few poets have the
rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also
the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty. Now Mr.
Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift. He uses the symbol to suggest ideas
which cannot be suggested otherwise. His theory of the universe is
optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads. He sees
the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as
benignant. Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the
two great sonnets, 'Natura Maligna' and 'Natura Benigna,' which I have
already quoted.
* * * * *
All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell. Upon
this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the
introduction to the later editions of the poem:--
"But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio
readers seem to be most sceptical. The humourous endowment of most
races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the
men than among the women. But among the Romanies the women seem to
have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.
A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with
my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit
and the humourous charm that you attribute to them? My answer to
this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome's delightful book,
'Gypsy Folk-Tales.' Speaking of the Romany chi's incomparable
piquancy, he says:--
'I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale
impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with "a lot
o' real tip-top gentry"; and "Reia," she said to me afterwards, "I'll
tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We'd pulled up to put the
brake on, and there was a puro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and
looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard. I could see he'd
his eye upon me. And home he'd go, that old hedgehog, to his wife,
and 'Missus,' he'd say, 'what d'ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal
just now in a coach and four horses'; and 'Dabla,' she'd say,
'sawkumni 'as varde kenaw'" ['Bless us! every one now keeps a
carriage'].'
Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell,
I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome,
that it might well have been she. Although there is as great a
difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English
girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between
the humour of all gypsy girls. No three girls could possibly be more
unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr.
Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the
fanciful humour of them all. The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak
for itself in these pages--where, however, the passionate and tragic
side of her character and her story dominates everything."
Chapter XXVII
"CHRISTMAS AT THE 'MERMAID'"
SECOND in importance to 'The Coming of Love' among Mr. Watts-Dunton's
poems is the poem I have already mentioned--the poem which Mr. Swinburne
has described as 'a great lyrical epic'--"Christmas at the 'Mermaid.'"
The originality of this wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of
'The Coming of Love.' No other writer would have dreamed of depicting
the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a golden skeleton in the
form of one of the burnt Incas, called up by 'the righteous sea,' and
squatting grimly at the prow of Medina's flag-ship. Here we get 'The
Renascence of Wonder' indeed. Some Aylwinians put it at the head of all
his writings. The exploit of David Gwynn is accepted by Motley and
others as historic, but it needed the co-operation of the Golden Skeleton
to lift his narrative into the highest heaven of poetry. Extremely
unlike 'The Coming of Love' as it is in construction, it is built on the
same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with 'The Coming of
Love' the remarks I have made upon a desideratum in poetic art--that is
to say, it is cast in a form which gives as much scope to the dramatic
instinct at work as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from
the restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped. The poem
was written, or mainly written, during one of those visits which, as I
have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to pay to Stratford-on-Avon.
The scene is laid, however, in London, at that famous 'Mermaid' tavern
which haunts the dreams of all English poets:--
"With the exception of Shakespeare, who has quitted London for good,
in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has
lately rebuilt, all the members of the 'Mermaid' Club are assembled
at the 'Mermaid' Tavern. At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson
dealing out wassail from a large bowl. At the other end sits
Raleigh, and at Raleigh's right hand, the guest he had brought with
him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man,
whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada
before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or
false, given him in the low countries a great reputation, the echo of
which had reached England. Raleigh's desire was to excite the public
enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and
generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already
become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice
spirits as those associated with the 'Mermaid' club."
It opens with a chorus:--
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
Then Ben Jonson rises, fills the cup with wassail and drinks to
Shakespeare, and thus comments upon his absence:--
That he, the star of revel, bright-eyed Will,
With life at golden summit, fled the town
And took from Thames that light to dwindle down
O'er Stratford farms, doth make me marvel still.
Then he calls upon Shakespeare's most intimate friend--the mysterious Mr.
W. H. of the sonnets--to give them reminiscences of Shakespeare with a
special reference to the memorable evening when he arrived at Stratford
on quitting London for good and all.
To the sixth edition of the poem Mr. Watts-Dunton prefixed the following
remarks, and I give them here because they throw light upon his view of
Shakespeare's friend:--
"Since the appearance of this volume, there has been a great deal of
acute and learned discussion as to the identity of that mysterious
'friend' of Shakespeare, to whom so many of the sonnets are
addressed. But everything that has been said upon the subject seems
to fortify me in the opinion that 'no critic has been able to
identify' that friend. Southampton seems at first to fit into the
sacred place; so does Pembroke at first. But, after a while, true
and unbiassed criticism rejects them both. I therefore feel more
than ever justified in 'imagining the friend for myself.' And this,
at least, I know, that to have been the friend of Shakespeare, a man
must needs have been a lover of nature;--he must have been a lover of
England, too. And upon these two points, and upon another--the
movement of a soul dominated by friendship as a passion--I have tried
to show Shakespeare's probable influence upon his 'friend of
friends.' It would have been a mistake, however, to cast the sonnets
in the same metrical mould as Shakespeare's."
Shakspeare's friend thus records what Shakespeare had told him about his
return to Stratford:--
As down the bank he strolled through evening dew,
Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves
Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,
And all his happy childhood came to view;
He saw a child watching the birds that flew
Above a willow, through whose musky leaves
A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves
That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.
These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling
From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,
With power beyond all power of things beholden
Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk
Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,
And closed him in from all but willow musk.
And then a child beneath a silver sallow--
A child who loved the swans, the moorhen's 'cheep'--
Angled for bream where river holes were deep--
For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,
Or ate the 'fairy cheeses' of the mallow,
And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep
Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep
In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;
And then a child to whom the water-fairies
Sent fish to 'bite' from Avon's holes and shelves,
A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,
The flower-sprites sent the bees and 'sunshine elves';
Then, in the shifting vision's sweet vagaries,
He saw two lovers walking by themselves--
Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain
Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy
Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,
Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain--
Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain
By sudden silence, 'lest his plaint should cloy'--
Knew when the skylark's changing note of joy
Saith, 'Now will I return to earth again'--
Knew every warning of the blackbird's shriek,
And every promise of his joyful song--
Knew what the magpie's chuckle fain would speak;
And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,
Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,
Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.
He heard her say, 'The birds attest our troth!'
Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may
Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray
Round summer's royal field of golden cloth
Shines o'er the buttercups like snowy froth,
And that sweet skylark on his azure way,
And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:
'We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.'
And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory,
River and church, grows rosier with our story!
This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,
Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!
They breathe--o'er mead and stream they breathe--the blessing.
'We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!'
When Mr. 'W. H.' sits down, the friend and brother of another great poet,
Christopher Marlowe, who had been sitting moody and silent, oppressed by
thoughts of the dead man, many of whose unfriends were at the gathering,
recites these lines 'On Seeing Kit Marlowe Slain at Deptford':--
'Tis Marlowe falls! That last lunge rent asunder
Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe's life,
Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heaven at strife,
Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!
Heav'n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,
If Fate's hand guided yonder villain's knife
Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife
With dower of poets--song and love and wonder.
Or was it Chance? Shakspeare, who art supreme
O'er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe's sight
To pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height
Where man and men and gods and all that seem
Are Nature's mutterings in her changeful dream--
Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!
After they have all drunk in silence to the memory of Marlowe, Marlowe's
friend speaks:--
Where'er thou art, 'dead Shepherd,' look on me;
The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,
He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;
Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!
Then Raleigh rises, and the great business of the evening begins with the
following splendid chorus:--
RALEIGH
(Turning to David Gwynn)
Wherever billows foam
The Briton fights at home:
His hearth is built of water--
CHORUS
Water blue and green;
RALEIGH
There's never a wave of ocean
The wind can set in motion
That shall not own our England--
CHORUS
Own our England queen. {427}
RALEIGH
The guest I bring to-night
Had many a goodly fight
On seas the Don hath found--
CHORUS
Hath found for English sails;
RALEIGH
And once he dealt a blow
Against the Don to show
What mighty hearts can move--
CHORUS
Can move in leafy Wales.
RALEIGH
Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,
Who hast a heart akin
To England's own brave hearts--
CHORUS
Brave hearts where'er they beat;
RALEIGH
Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,
And tell the Mermaid how
A galley-slave struck hard--
CHORUS
Struck hard the Spanish fleet.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
Upon being thus called forth the old sea-dog rises, and tells a wonderful
story indeed, the 'story of how he and the Golden Skeleton crippled the
Great Armada sailing out':--
'A galley lie' they called my tale; but he
Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales:
The man, I say, who helped to keep you free
Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.
Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,
Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,
Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire
Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire--
Stands asking here Truth's one reward, belief!
And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,
This tale of mine--shall tell, in future days,
How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled
For England when she moved in perilous ways;
But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung
From loins of men whose ghosts have still the sea--
Doth England--she who loves the loudest tongue--
Remember mariners whose deeds are sung
By waves where flowed their blood to keep her free?
I see--I see ev'n now--those ships of Spain
Gathered in Tagus' mouth to make the spring;
I feel the cursed oar, I toil again,
And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys sing;
And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,
Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing out--
Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,
Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,
Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.
And one we call the 'Princess,' one the 'Royal,'
'Diana' one; but 'tis the fell 'Basana'
Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,
Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;
For by their help Hope whispers me that I--
Whom ten hours' daily travail at a stretch
Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die--
May strike once more where flags of England fly,
Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.
True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:
Again I feel the lash that tears my back;
Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,
Answered by boatswain's laugh and scourge's crack;
Again I feel the pang when trying to choke
Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread
Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,
They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;
Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.
By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,
And mighty waves assault our trembling galley
With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,
And soldiers cry, 'What saint shall bid her rally?'
Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore
The Dons to free them from the metal tether
By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;
Some shout, in answer to the billows' roar,
'The Dons and we will drink brine-wine together.'
'Bring up the slave,' I hear the captain cry,
'Who sank the golden galleon "El Dorado,"
The dog can steer.'
'Here sits the dog,' quoth I,
'Who sank the ship of Commodore Medrado!'
With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,
Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:
'Hearken, thou pirate--bold Medrado's bane!--
Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain,
If thou canst take the galley through this sea.'
'Ay! ay!' quoth I. The fools unlock me straight!
And then 'tis I give orders to the Don,
Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,
Whose winning game I know hath just begun.
I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak
Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night
Oh then I see beneath the galley's beak
A glow like Spanish _auto's_ ruddy reek--
Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!
A skeleton, but yet with living eyes--
A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold--
Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,
And round his brow, of high imperial mould,
A burning circle seems to shake and shine,
Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,
Throwing a radiance o'er the foam-lit brine:
''Tis God's Revenge,' methinks. 'Heaven sends for sign
That bony shape--that Inca's diadem.'
At first the sign is only seen of me,
But well I know that God's Revenge hath come
To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,
And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous foam.
Quoth I, 'How fierce soever be the levin
Spain's hand can hurl--made mightier still for wrong
By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven--
Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven--
Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is strong.'
'The dog can steer,' I laugh; 'yea, Drake's men know
How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.'
Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,
Some 'neath the hatches, some beside the slaves,
And bid them stack their muskets all in piles
Beside the foremast, covered by a sail,
The captives guess my plan--I see their smiles
As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,
Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and pale.
I say, they guess my plan--to send beneath
The soldiers to the benches where the slaves
Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth--
Hate's nails and teeth more keen than Spanish glaives,
Then wait until the tempest's waxing might
Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,
Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite
The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,
Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.
Past Ferrol Bay each galley 'gins to stoop,
Shuddering before the Biscay demon's breath.
Down goes a prow--down goes a gaudy poop:
'The Don's "Diana" bears the Don to death,'
Quoth I, 'and see the "Princess" plunge and wallow
Down purple trough, o'er snowy crest of foam:
See! see! the "Royal," how she tries to follow
By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,
Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to roam.'
Now, three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;
The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,
Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,
Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,
Each rower murmuring o'er my whispered plan,
Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,
'Rise, every man, to tear to death his man--
Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,
When God's Revenge sings loud to ocean's lyre.'
Taller the spectre grows 'mid ocean's din;
The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:
I give the sign: the slaves cry, 'Ho for Gwynn!'
'Teach them,' quoth I, 'the way we grip in Wales.'
And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,
I win the key--let loose a storm of slaves:
'When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,'
They cry; 'sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,
Or drink to England's Queen in foaming waves.'
We leap adown the hatches; in the dark
We stab the Dons at random, till I see
A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,
Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be
A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:
Then, lo: a bony shape with lifted hands--
A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,
O'ertopping groans, o'ertopping Ocean's quire--
A skeleton with Inca's diadem stands!
It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,
Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,
When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,
Sniffing man's flesh at roast for Christ His sake.
The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;
They cross their foreheads, but they dare not speak.
Anon the spectre, when the strife is o'er,
Melts from the dark, then glimmers as before,
Burning upon the conquered galley's beak.
And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows
The 'Royal' bearing down upon our craft--
Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows
Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.
I take the helm; I put the galley near:
We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.
Amid the 'Royal's' din I laugh to hear
The curse of many a British mutineer,
The crack, crack, crack of boatswain's biting scourge.
'Ye scourge in vain,' quoth I, 'scourging for life
Slaves who shall row no more to save the Don';
For from the 'Royal's' poop, above the strife,
Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!
'What! is it thou, Pirate of "El Dorado"?
He shouts in English tongue. And there, behold!
Stands he, the devil's commodore, Medrado.
'Ay! ay!' quoth I, 'Spain owes me one strappado
For scuttling Philip's ship of stolen gold.'
'I come for that strappado now,' quoth I.
'What means yon thing of burning bones?' he saith.
''Tis God's Revenge cries, "Bloody Spain shall die!"
The king of El Dorado's name is Death.
Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,'
I cry; 'strong hands are stretched to save you now;
Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.'
But when the 'Royal,' captured, rides adrift,
I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.
When all are slain, the tempest's wings have fled,
But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:
Far down the offing glows a spot of red,
My soul knows well it hath that Inca's form.
'It lights,' quoth I, 'the red cross banner of Spain
There on the flagship where Medina sleeps--
Hell's banner, wet with sweat of Indian's pain,
And tears of women yoked to treasure train,
Scarlet of blood for which the New World weeps.'
There on the dark the flagship of the Don
To me seems luminous of the spectre's glow;
But soon an arc of gold, and then the sun,
Rise o'er the reddening billows, proud and slow;
Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,
That take all shifting colours as they shake,
I see the great Armada coil and twist
Miles, miles along the ocean's amethyst,
Like hell's old snake of hate--the winged snake.
And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,
That snake accursed, with wings which swell and puff
Before the slackening horses of the wind,
Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.
'Behold,' quoth I, 'their floating citadels,
The same the priests have vouched for musket-proof,
Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,
That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells--
Yea, sailed from Tagus' mouth, for Christ's behoof.
For Christ's behoof they sailed: see how they go
With that red skeleton to show the way
There sitting on Medina's stem aglow--
A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;
Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse--
Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,
Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,
Their trucks, their flags--behold them, how they pass--
With God's Revenge for figurehead--to Doom!'
Then Ben Jonson, the symposiarch, rises and calls upon Raleigh to tell
the story of the defeat of the Great Armada. I can give only a stanza or
two and the chorus:--
RALEIGH
The choirboys sing the matin song,
When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard's right.
He drives the wing--a huddled throng--
Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.
While galleon hurtles galeasse,
And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,
As scythes cut down the summer grass,
Drake closes on the writhing mass,
Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,
Skimming the waves.
Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,
Running from ship to ship like living things.
With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,
Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.
Through smoke we see their chiefs encased
In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;
And once I see within a waist
Wild English captives ashen-faced,
Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced
In purple weals.
[DAVID GWYNN here leaps up, pale and panting, and
bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from RALEIGH
sits down again.
The Don fights well, but fights not now
The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,
To pluck the gold from off the brow,
Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.
He hunts not now the Indian maid
With bloodhound's bay--Peru's confiding daughter,
Who saw in flowery bower or glade
The stranger's god-like cavalcade,
And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro's trade
Of rape and slaughter.
His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,
Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,
Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,
Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:
Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,
Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:
Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage
Like any wolf that tears his cage!
'Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge
Till set of sun!
Their troops, superfluous as their gold,
Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,
Are packed away in every hold--
Targets of flesh for every English gun--
Till, like Pizarro's halls of blood,
Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,
Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,
Reddening the waves for many a rood,
As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud
Before the wind.
The chief leit-motiv of the poem is the metrical idea that whenever a
stanza ends with the word 'sea,' Ben Jonson and the rest of the jolly
companions break into this superb chorus:--
The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake's strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour--
The sea?
Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven
out to the open sea. He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of
excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but
in quite a different spirit. In Gwynn's fevered imagination the skeleton
which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to
its destruction:--
GWYNN
With towering sterns, with golden stems
That totter in the smoke before their foe,
I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
With death above the billows, death below!
Who leads them down the tempest's path,
From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
All helpless in the wild wind's wrath,
Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
The Skeleton!
At length with toil the cape is passed,
And faster and faster still the billows come
To coil and boil till every mast
Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
That Inca's bony shape burn on the waves,
Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
While Mother Carey, Orkney's witch,
Waves to the Spectre's song her lantern-switch
O'er ocean-graves.
The glimmering crown of Scotland's head
They pass. No foe dares follow but the storm.
The Spectre, like a sunset red,
Illumines mighty Wrath's defiant form,
And makes the dreadful granite peak
Burn o'er the ships with brows of prophecy;
Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
Above the tempest's foam and reek,
More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
'Tyrants, ye die!'
The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
Writes 'God's Revenge' on waves that climb and dash,
Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
Where ships are hurled. It sings amid the crash;
Yea, sings amid the tempest's roar,
Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
And yells of captives chained to oar,
And cries of those who strike for shore,
'Spain's murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
The righteous sea!'
The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted
in anthologies:--
WASSAIL CHORUS
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
RALEIGH
'Tis by Devon's glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright with golden roofs and walls--
El Dorado's rare domain--
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
Where the winter's feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
DRAYTON
'Tis where Avon's wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O'er the river-flags embossed
Rich with flowery runes of frost--
O'er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed--
Strains of olden time.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
SHAKSPEARE'S FRIEND
'Tis, methinks, on any ground
Where our Shakspeare's feet are set.
There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
With his blithest coronet:
Friendship's face he loveth well:
'Tis a countenance whose spell
Sheds a balm o'er every mead and dell
Where we used to fret.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?
HEYWOOD
More than all the pictures, Ben,
Winter weaves by wood or stream,
Christmas loves our London, when
Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam--
Clouds like these, that, curling, take
Forms of faces gone, and wake
Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
London like a dream.
CHORUS
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?
BEN JONSON
Love's old songs shall never die,
Yet the new shall suffer proof;
Love's old drink of Yule brew I,
Wassail for new love's behoof:
Drink the drink I brew, and sing
Till the berried branches swing,
Till our song make all the Mermaid ring--
Yea, from rush to roof.
FINALE
Christmas loves this merry, merry place:--
Christmas saith with fondest face
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
Rare!'
This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of 'The Coming of Love,'
fine as it is, was overshadowed by the wild and romantic poem which lends
its name to the volume. But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his
beautiful series, 'Flowers of Parnassus,' where it was charmingly
illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue considerably.
There is no doubt that for originality, for power, and for music,
"Christmas at the 'Mermaid'" is enough to form the base of any poet's
reputation. It has been enthusiastically praised by some of the foremost
writers of our time. I have permission to print only one of the letters
in its praise which the author received, but that is an important one, as
it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:--
"I have been beginning Christmas, in a way, by reading over the fire
your delightful little 'Christmas at the "Mermaid"' which it was most
kind of you to send. I was carried back right into Armada times by
David Gwynn's vivid story: it seems remarkable that you should have
had the conjuring power to raise up those old years so brightly in
your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers in such
high relief of three dimensions, as one may say.
The absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest
touches of the poem: it throws one into a 'humourous melancholy'--and
we feel him, in some curious way, more than if he had been there."
Chapter XXVIII
CONCLUSION
'ASSUREDLY,' says Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, 'there is no
profession so courageous as that of the pen.' Well, in coming to the end
of my task--a task which has been a labour of love--I wish I could feel
confident that I have not been too courageous--that I have satisfactorily
done what I set out to do. But I have passed my four-hundred and
fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a child's bucket into
a sea of ideas that has no limit. Out of scores upon scores of articles
buried in many periodicals I have been able to give three or four from
the 'Athenaeum,' none from the 'Examiner,' and none out of the
'Nineteenth Century,' 'The Fortnightly Review,' 'Harper's Magazine,' etc.
Still, I have been able to show that a large proportion of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's scattered writings preaches the same peculiar doctrine in
a ratiocinative form which in 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' is
artistically enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest importance
at the present time, when science seems to be revealing a system of the
universe so deeply opposed to the system which in the middle of the last
century seemed to be revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's is making a very deep impression upon the generation to
which I belong. If it should be said that in speaking for the younger
generation I am speaking for a pigmy race (and I sometimes fear that we
are pigmies when I remember the stature of our fathers), I am content to
appeal to one of the older generation, who has spoken words in praise of
Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet, which would demand even my courage to echo.
I mean Dr. Gordon Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, 'The New Day,'
was published in 1890. It was these remarkable sonnets which moved Frank
Groome to dub Mr. Watts-Dunton 'homo ne quidem unius libri,' a literary
celebrity who had not published a single book. I have already referred
to 'The New Day,' but I have not given an adequate account of this
sonnet-sequence. In their nobility of spirit, their exalted passion of
friendship, their single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not
think they have ever been surpassed. It is a fine proof of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's genius for friendship that he should be able unconsciously
to enlink himself to the souls of his seniors, his coevals and his
juniors, and that there should be between him and the men of three
generations, equal links of equal affection. But I must not lay stress
on the whimsies of chronology and the humours of the calendar, for all
Mr. Watts-Dunton's friends are young, and the youngest of them, Mr.
George Meredith, is the oldest. The youthfulness of 'The New Day' makes
it hard to believe that it was written by a septuagenarian. The
dedication is full of the fine candour of a romantic boy:--
"To 'W. T. W.,' the friend who has gone with me through the study of
Nature, accompanied me to her loveliest places at home and in other
lands, and shared with me the reward she reserves for her ministers
and interpreters, I dedicate this book."
The following sonnet on 'Friendship' expresses a very rare mood and a
very high ideal:--
Friendship is love's full beauty unalloyed
With passion that may waste in selfishness,
Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:
Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.
It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound
With cheery look that makes a winter bright;
It saves the hope from falling to the ground,
And turns the restless pillow towards the light.
To be another's in his dearest want,
At struggle with a thousand racking throes,
When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant
Is that which friendship's soothing hand bestows:
How joyful to be joined in such a love,--
We two,--may it portend the days above!
The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine order. Many
English and American critics have highly praised them, but not too
highly. This venerable 'parable poet' did not belong to my generation.
Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton's generation. His day was the day
before yesterday, and yet he wrote these sonnets when he was past
seventy, not to glorify himself, but to glorify his friend. They are one
long impassioned appeal to that friend to come forward and take his place
among his peers. The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of
the most bewildering enigmas of literature. I have already quoted what
Gordon Hake says about the man who when the 'New Day' was written had not
published a single book.
With regard to the unity binding together all Mr. Watts-Dunton's
writings, I can, at least, as I have shown in the Introduction, speak
with the authority of a careful student of them. With the exception of
the late Professor Strong, who when 'The Coming of Love' appeared, spoke
out so boldly upon this subject in 'Literature,' I doubt if anyone has
studied those writings more carefully than I have; and yet the difficulty
of discovering the one or two quotable essays which more than the others
expound and amplify their central doctrine has been so great that I am
dubious as to whether, in the press of my other work, I have achieved my
aim as satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by
another--especially by Professor Strong, had he not died before he could
write his promised essay upon the inner thought of 'Aylwinism' in the
'Cyclopaedia of English Literature.' But, even if I have failed
adequately to expound the gospel of 'Aylwinism,' it is undeniable that,
since the publication of 'Aylwin' (whether as a result of that
publication or not), there has been an amazing growth of what may be
called the transcendental cosmogony of 'Aylwinism.'
Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of 'Aylwin'--the
'Arvon' illustrated edition--says:--
"When 'Aylwin' was in type, the author, getting alarmed at its great
length, somewhat mercilessly slashed into it to shorten it, and the
more didactic parts of the book went first. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has
restored one or two of these excised passages, notably one in which
he summarizes his well-known views of the 'great Renascence of
Wonder, which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth.' In one of these passages he
has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour's speculations at the recent
meeting of the British Association."
Something like the same remark was made in the 'Athenaeum' of September
3, 1904:--
"The writer has restored certain didactic passages of the story which
were eliminated before the publication of the book, owing to its
great length. Though the teaching of the book is complete without
the restorations, it seems a pity that they were ever struck out,
because they appear to have anticipated the striking remarks of Mr.
Balfour at the British Association the other day, to say nothing of
the utterances of certain scientific writers who have been discussing
the transcendental side of Nature."
The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and 'The Athenaeum' refer are
excerpts from 'The Veiled Queen,' by Aylwin's father. The first of these
comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called 'The Revolving Cage of
Circumstance' and runs thus:--
"'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth
and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in
Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of
the nineteenth.
The warring of the two impulses governing man--the impulse of wonder
and the impulse of acceptance--will occupy all the energies of the
next century.
The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy
has to come back--has to triumph--before the morning of the final
emancipation of man can dawn.
But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those
in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism, which at
this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of
evolution, will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists
are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not
the creature of organism--is a something outside the material world,
a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal
expression.
The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the
testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold,
when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell him that
"the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony
of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests
of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can
neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the
excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the
materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical,
lightless, colourless, soundless--a phantasmagoric show--a deceptive
series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not,
according to the organism upon which they fall.'
These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about
'the Omnipotence of Love,' which showed, beyond doubt, that if my
father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very
original poet."
The second restored excerpt from 'The Veiled Queen' comes in at the end
of the chapter called 'The Magic of Snowdon,' and runs thus:--
"I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy
expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer,
Ferridoddin:--
With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies--
that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the
Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of
the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of
my life, 'The Veiled Queen.'
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
'The omnipotence of love--its power of knitting together the entire
universe--is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just
after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The
Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins
about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these
Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
Ilyas the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
'Neath wings of Death--'mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help--"Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."
The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;
'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
"Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land."
"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings
A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:"
A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.
'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial
film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of
love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no
real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly
be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic
element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards
Sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such
as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune
of universal love and beauty.'"
With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has said that
the method of depicting the power of love in them is sublime. 'The Slave
girl's Progress to Paradise,' however, is equally powerful and equally
original. The feeling in the 'Bedouin Child' and in 'The Slave Girl's
Progress to Paradise' is exactly like that which inspires 'The Coming of
Love.' When Percy sees Rhona's message in the sunrise he exclaims:--
But now--not all the starry Virtues seven
Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.
And morning says, 'Love hath such godlike might
That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
Were quelled by doom, Love's high-creative leaven
Could light new worlds.' If, then, this Lord of Fate,
When death calls in the stars, can re-create,
Is it a madman's dream that Love can show
Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
And build again my heaven?
The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately affirmed in
the words of 'The Spirit of the Sunrise,' addressed to the bereaved
poet:--
Though Love be mocked by Death's obscene derision,
Love still is Nature's truth and Death her lie;
Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
To taste the fell destroyer's crowning spite
That blasts the soul with life's most cruel sight,
Corruption's hand at work in Life's transition:
This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
Her body's image pictured in thy brain;
The flowers above her weave the only shroud
Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
Rhona! Behold the vision!
Some may call this too mystical--some may dislike it on other
accounts--but few will dream of questioning its absolute originality.
Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour's to which the passages
quoted from 'The Veiled Queen' have been compared. In his presidential
address to the British Association, entitled, 'Reflections suggested by
the New Theory of Matter,' he said:--
"We claim to found all our scientific opinions on experience: and the
experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is
our sense of perception of that universe. That is experience; and in
this region of belief there is no other. Yet the conclusions which
thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all
appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is
based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it
to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from
anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and
nature compels us to employ.
Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply the
premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the physical world.
It is they which tell us there is a physical world; it is on their
authority that we learn its character. But in order of causation
they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our orders of
sense. What we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen,
but on our eyes. What we hear depends, not merely on what there is
to hear, but on our ears."
I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any idea that
is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is afterwards accepted as
a simple truth. One of the reviewers of 'Aylwin' was much amused by the
description of the hero's emotions when he stood in the lower room of
Mrs. Gudgeon's cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by Winifred's
corpse, stretched upon a squalid mattress:--
"At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and
died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become
conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before
me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of
brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the
walls,--it was these which seemed to have life--a terrible life--and
to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the
triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still speaking,
but for a time I heard no sound--my senses could receive no
impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet
living matter around me. Not an object there that did not seem
charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates."
'Fancy,' said the reviewer, 'any man out of Bedlam feeling as if dead
matter were alive!'
Well, apart from the psychological subtlety of this passage, our critic
must have been startled by the declaration lately made by a sane man of
science, that there is no such thing as dead matter--and that every
particle of what is called dead matter is alive and shedding an aura
around it!
Had the mass of Mr. Watts-Dunton's scattered writings been collected into
volumes, or had a representative selection from them been made, their
unity as to central idea with his imaginative work, and also the
importance of that central idea, would have been brought prominently
forward, and then there would have been no danger of his contribution to
the latest movement--the anti-materialistic movement--of English thought
and English feeling being left unrecognized. Lost such teachings as his
never could have been, for, as Minto said years ago, their colour tinges
a great deal of the literature of our time. The influence of the
'Athenaeum,' not only in England, but also in America and on the
Continent, was always very great--and very great of course must have been
the influence of the writer who for a quarter of a century spoke in it
with such emphasis. Therefore, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had himself collected
or selected his essays, or if he had allowed any of his friends to
collect or select them, this book of mine would not have been written,
for more competent hands would have undertaken the task. But a study of
work which, originally issued in fragments, now lies buried 'full fathom
five' in the columns of various journals, could, I felt, be undertaken
only by a cadet of letters like myself. There are many of us younger men
who express views about Mr. Watts-Dunton's work which startle at times
those who are unfamiliar with it. And I, coming forward for the moment
as their spokesman, have long had the desire to justify the faith that is
in us, and in the wide and still widening audience his imaginative work
has won. But I doubt if I should have undertaken it had I realized the
magnitude of the task. For it must be remembered that the articles,
called 'reviews,' are for the most part as unlike reviews as they can
well be. No matter what may have been the book placed at the head of the
article, it was used merely as an opportunity for the writer to pour
forth generalizations upon literature and life, or upon the latest
scientific speculations, or upon the latest reverie of philosophy, in a
stream, often a torrent, coruscating with brilliancies, and alive with
interwoven colours like that of the river in the mountains of Kaf
described in his birthday sonnet to Tennyson. Take, for instance, that
great essay on the Psalms which I have used as the key-note of this
study. The book at the head of the review was not, as might have been
supposed, a discourse learned, or philosophical, or emotional, upon the
Psalms--but a little unpretentious metrical version of the Psalms by Lord
Lorne. Only a clear-sighted and daring editor would have printed such an
article as a review. But I doubt if there ever was a more prescient
journalist than he who sat in the editorial chair at that time. A man of
scholarly accomplishments and literary taste, he knew that an article
such as this would be a huge success; would resound through the world of
letters. The article, I believe, was more talked about in literary
circles than any book that had come out during that month.
Again, take that definition of humour which I seized upon (page 384) to
illustrate my exposition of that wonderful character in 'Aylwin'--Mrs.
Gudgeon, a definition that seems, as one writer has said, to make all
other talk about humour cheap and jejune. It is in a review of an
extremely futile history of humour. Now let the reader consider the
difficult task before a writer in my position--the task of searching for
a few among the innumerable half-remembered points of interest that turn
up in the most unexpected places. Of course, if the space allotted to me
by my publishers had been unlimited, and if my time had been unlimited, I
should have been able to give so large a number of excerpts from the
articles as to make my selection really representative of what has been
called the "modern Sufism of 'Aylwin.'" But in this regard my publishers
have already been as liberal and as patient as possible. After all, the
best, as well as the easiest way, to show that 'Aylwin,' and 'The Coming
of Love,' are but the imaginative expression of a poetic religion
familiar to the readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton's criticism for twenty-five
years, is to quote an illuminating passage upon the subject from one of
the articles in the 'Athenaeum.' Moreover, I shall thus escape what I
confess I dread--the sight of my own prose at the end of my book in
juxtaposition to the prose of a past master of English style:--
"The time has not yet arrived for poetry to utilize even the results
of science; such results as are offered to her are dust and ashes.
Happily, however, nothing in science is permanent save mathematics.
As a great man of science has said, 'everything is provisional.' Dr.
Erasmus Darwin, following the science of his day, wrote a long poem
on the 'Loves of the Plants,' by no means a foolish poem, though it
gave rise to the 'Loves of the Triangles,' and though his grandson
afterwards discovered that the plants do not love each other at all,
but, on the contrary, hate each other furiously--'struggle for life'
with each other, 'survive' against each other--just as though they
were good men and 'Christians.' But if a poet were to set about
writing a poem on the 'Hates of the Plants,' nothing is more likely
than that, before he could finish it, Mr. Darwin will have discovered
that the plants do love after all; just as--after it was a settled
thing that the red tooth and claw did all the business of
progression--he delighted us by discovering that there was another
factor which had done half the work--the enormous and very proper
admiration which the females have had for the males from the very
earliest forms upwards. In such a case, the 'Hates of the Plants'
would have become 'inadequate.' Already, indeed, there are faint
signs of the physicists beginning to find out that neither we nor the
plants hate each other quite so much as they thought, and that Nature
is not quite so bad as she seems. 'She is an AEolian harp,' says
Novalis, 'a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher
strings within us.' And after all there are higher strings within us
just as real as those which have caused us to 'survive,' and poetry
is right in ignoring 'interpretations,' and giving us 'Earthly
Paradises' instead. She must wait, it seems; or rather, if this
aspiring 'century' will keep thrusting these unlovely results of
science before her eyes, she must treat them as the beautiful girl
Kisagotami treated the ugly pile of charcoal. A certain rich man
woke up one morning and found that all his enormous wealth was turned
to a huge heap of charcoal. A friend who called upon him in his
misery, suspecting how the case really stood, gave him certain
advice, which he thus acted upon. 'The Thuthe, following his
friend's instructions, spread some mats in the bazaar, and, piling
them upon a large heap of his property which was turned into
charcoal, pretended to be selling it. Some people, seeing it, said,
"Why does he sell charcoal?" Just at this time a young girl, named
Kisagotami, who was worthy to be owner of the property, and who,
having lost both her parents, was in a wretched condition, happened
to come to the bazaar on some business. When she saw the heap, she
said, "My lord Thuthe, all the people sell clothes, tobacco, oil,
honey, and treacle; how is it that you pile up gold and silver for
sale?" The Thuthe said, "Madam, give me that gold and silver."
Kisagotami, taking up a handful of it, brought it to him. What the
young girl had in her hand no sooner touched the Thuthe's hand than
it became gold and silver.'"
I cannot find a clearer note for the close of this book than that which
sounds in one of the latest and one of the finest of Mr. Watts-Dunton's
sonnets. It was composed on the last night of the Nineteenth Century, a
century which will be associated with many of the dear friends Mr.
Watts-Dunton has lost, and, as I must think, associated also with
himself. The lines have a very special charm for me, because they show
the turn which the poet's noble optimism has taken; they show that faith
in my own generation which for so many years has illumined his work, and
which has endeared him to us all. I wish I could be as hopeful as this
nineteenth century poet with regard to the poets who will carry the torch
of imagination and romance through the twentieth century; but whether or
not there are any poets among us who are destined to bring in the Golden
Fleece, it is good to see 'the Poet of the Sunrise' setting the trumpet
of optimism to his lips, and heralding so cheerily the coming of the new
argonauts:--
THE ARGONAUTS OF THE NEW AGE
THE POET
[In starlight, listening to the chimes in the
distance, which sound clear through the
leafless trees.
Say, will new heroes win the 'Fleece,' ye spheres
Who--whether around some King of Suns ye roll
Or move right onward to some destined goal
In Night's vast heart--know what Great Morning nears?
THE STARS
Since Love's Star rose have nineteen hundred years
Written such runes on Time's remorseless scroll,
Impeaching Earth's proud birth, the human soul,
That we, the bright-browed stars, grow dim with tears.
Did those dear poets you loved win Light's release?
What 'ship of Hope' shall sail to such a world?
[The night passes, and morning breaks
gorgeously over the tree top.
THE POET
Ye fade, ye stars, ye fade with night's decease!
Above yon ruby rim of clouds empearled--
There, through the rosy flags of morn unfurled--
I see young heroes bring Light's 'Golden Fleece.'
* * * * *
THE END
Index
Abbey, Edwin, 122, 301
Abershaw, Jerry, 100
Abiogenesis, 373
Absolute humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
Accent, English verse governed by, 344
Acceptance, instinct of, 14; Horace as poet of, 15
Acton, Lord, place given 'Aylwin' by, 5
Actors, two types of, 127
Actresses, English prejudice against, 131
Adams, Davenport, 132
Addison, 'softness of touch' in portraiture, 350
'Adonais,' 157
'AEneid,' 208
AEschylus, reference to, 15, 45, 324
'Agamemnon,' 323