The heart-thought of this hook being the peculiar doctrine in Philip
Aylwin's _Veiled Queen_, and the effect of it upon the fortunes
of the hero and the other characters, the name 'The Renascence of
Wonder' was the first that came to my mind when confronting the
difficult question of finding a name for a book that is at once a
love-story and an expression of a creed. But eventually I decided,
and I think from the worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply
the name of the hero.
The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed did
not escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame
Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which
she made in the Rivista d' Italia, gave great attention to its
central idea: so did M. Maurice Muret, in the _Journal des
Débats_; so did M. Henri Jacottet in _La Semaine Littéraire_.
Mr. Baker, again, in his recently published work on fiction,
described _Aylwin_ as 'an imaginative romance of modern days,
the moral idea of which is man's attitude in face of the unknown,'
or, as the writer puts it, 'the renascence of wonder.' With regard to
the phrase itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of
Aylwin--the twenty-second edition--I made the following brief reply
to certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England
and on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The
Renascence of Wonder,'
Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man
which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties
of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of
Rossetti. The phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates
that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not
man only but the entire world of conscious life--the impulse of
acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all
the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to
confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of
my life has been the reading of _The Veiled Queen_, your
father's hook of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder
in the mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great
picture symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip
Aylwin's vignette. Since the original writing of Aylwin, many years
ago, I have enlarged upon its central idea in the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_ and in the introductory essay to the third volume of
Chambers's _Cyclopædia of English Literature_, and in other
places. Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal
discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention
to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable
discourse upon the 'Renascence of Wonder in Religion.' I am tempted
to quote some of his words:--
Amongst the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt
Fund, there is one of which part was already known to have occurred
in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It runs as follows:--'Let
not him that seeketh cease from his search until he find, and when
he finds he shall wonder: wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and
when he reaches the kingdom he shall have rest.'...We believe that
Butler was one of the first to share in the Renascence of Wonder,
which was the renascence of religion....Men saw once more the
marvel of the universe and the romance of man's destiny. They
became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the
lifelong struggle of the soul, of the power of the unseen.
The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately be used as a
motto for _Aylwin_ and also for its sequel _The Coming of
Love: Rhona Boswells Story_.