It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote the cantata, ‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ a poem in which breathes the very atmosphere of Shakespeare’s town. There are no poetical descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.
‘The Thicket,’ St. Ives. (From a Water Colour by Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)
A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes called, ‘The Green Country,’ is Hemingford Meadow, adjoining St. Ives. It is a level tract of land on the banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of alluvium from the overflowings of the river. In summer it is clothed with gay flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as a skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is a famous skating centre. On the opposite side of the meadow is The Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely picture. This, no doubt, is the scene described in one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s birthday addresses to Tennyson:—
Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.
There through the branches of the glittering trees
The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze
Sends forth methinks a thrill—a conscious thrill
That tells yon meadows by the steaming rill—
Where, o’er the clover waiting for the bees,
The mist shines round the cattle to their knees—
‘Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!’
The meadow leads to what the ‘oldest rustic inhabitant’ calls the ‘First Hemingford,’ or ‘Hemingford Grey.’ The imagination of this same ‘oldest inhabitant’ used to go even beyond the First Hemingford to the Second Hemingford, and then of course came Ultima Thule! The meadow has quite a wide fame among those students of nature who love English grasses in their endless varieties. Owing to the richness of the soil, the luxuriant growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in England. For years the two Hemingfords have been the favourite haunt of a group of landscape painters the chief of whom are the brothers Fraser, two of whose water-colours are reproduced in this book.
Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more advantage than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through Huntingdonshire into East Anglia. It was not, however, near St. Ives, but in another somewhat distant part of Cowslip Country that the gypsies depicted in ‘The Coming of Love’ took an active part in haymaking. But alas! in these times of mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer hope to see such a picture as that painted in the now famous gypsy haymaking song which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth of Rhona Boswell. Moreover, the prosperous gryengroes depicted by Borrow and by the author of ‘The Coming of Love’ have now entirely vanished from the scene. The present generation knows them not. But it is impossible for the student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry to ramble along any part of Cowslip Country, with the fragrance of newly-made hay in his nostrils, without recalling this chant, which I have the kind permission of the editor of the ‘Saturday Review’ (April 19, 1902) to quote:—
Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’ [34]
Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,
Sayin, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it
To lennor and love!’Hark, the sharpenin’ scythes that tingle!
See they come, the farmin’ ryes!
‘Leave the dell,’ they say, ‘an’ pingle!
Never a gorgie, married or single,
Can toss the kas in dell or dingle
Like Romany chies.’
Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’Bees are a-buzzin’ in chaw an’ clover
Stealin’ the honey from sperrits o’ morn,
Shoshus leap in puv an’ cover,
Doves are a-cooin’ like lover to lover,
Larks are awake an’ a-warblin’ over
Their kairs in the corn.
Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’Smell the kas on the baval blowin’!
What is that the gorgies say?
Never a garden rose a-glowin’,
Never a meadow flower a-growin’,
Can match the smell from a Rington mowin’
Of new made hay.All along the river reaches
‘Cheep, cheep, chee!’—from osier an’ sedge;
‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ rings from the beeches;
Every chirikel’s song beseeches
Ryes to larn what lennor teaches
From copse an’ hedge.
Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’Lennor sets ’em singin’ an’ pairin’,
Chirikels all in tree an’ grass,
Farmers say, ‘Them gals are darin’,
Sometimes dukkerin’, sometimes snarin’;
But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin’,’
Toss the kas!Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’
Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,
Sayin’, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it
To lennor and love!’
Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was Slepe, and that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a farmer for five years in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the late forties. When Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, Madox Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the scenery for his famous picture, ‘Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,’ he could present only an imaginary farm.
Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being born in a microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing stories full of local colour and character which, according to friends of D. G. Rossetti, would keep the poet-painter up half the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr. Hake in his account of the origin of ‘Aylwin’ which I have already given. I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe Hall which I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would certainly make a good nucleus for a short story. It is connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement Shorter, in some reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes: “My mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns by inheritance some freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed. At Slepe Hall, a picturesque building, she went to school in girlhood. She remembers Mr. Watts-Dunton, the author of ‘Aylwin,’ who was also born at St. Ives, as a pretty little boy then unknown to fame.”
Slepe Hall: Cromwell’s Supposed Residence at St. Ives. (From an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in building lots. It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older house whose cellars remained intact. This was, of course, a tremendous event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to watch the workmen in their task of demolition. In the early stages of this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found, whence Oliver Cromwell’s ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds. But no such secret chamber could be found. When at length the work had proceeded so far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact, Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives, that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the world—
Imposteur à la Mecque et prophète à Mèdine.
Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that, before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel friends, in Slepe Hall cellars. No treasure turned up, but what was found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once christened ‘Cromwell’s wine’ by the local humourist of the town, who was also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much interest as the boys in the exploration. The workmen, of course, at once began knocking off the bottles’ necks and drinking the wine, and were soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell’s wine and perhaps imbibed some of the Cromwellian spirit and pluck. Consequently the young urchins carried off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called ‘Oliver’s Tree,’ and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink. The wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous—elder wine. Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was, he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell’s elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, ‘I was never even excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being drunk on Oliver Cromwell’s elder-wine.’ The wine was probably about a century old.
I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time than is usual. He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly biology, and also art and music. As has been said in the notice of him in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ he is one of the few contemporary poets with a scientific knowledge of music. Owing to his father’s passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the lower animals.
Upon the subject of “the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase, ‘the dumb animals,’” Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often been eloquent about ‘those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could direct it to trace out any given name in the company.’
“Of course,” he says, “the ‘lower animals’ are no more dumb than we are. With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape from isolation—to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing—which is a great factor of progress. With them, as with us, each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what these signs and sounds shall be. Those among us who have gone at all underneath conventional thought and conventional expression—those who have penetrated underneath conventional feeling—know that neither thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all. The voice cannot do it, as we see by comparing one language with another. Wordsworth calls language the incarnation of thought. But the mere fact of there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this. If there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream of, the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd. Soul cannot communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when you can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a ‘lower animal,’ interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with them as it is with men. Nay, with some temperaments and in some moods, the communication is far, far closer. ‘When I am assailed with heavy tribulation,’ said Luther, ‘I rush out among my pigs rather than remain alone by myself.’ And there is no creature that does not at some points sympathize with man. People have laughed at Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used to lavish his endearments. Neither I nor my companion had a pet passion for leeches. Erskine probably knew leeches better than we, for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of which they know nothing. Like most dog lovers, we had no special love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge. ‘I wish women would purr when they are pleased,’ said Horne Tooke to Rogers once.”
One of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the nooks of old England and ‘ould Ireland’; I have a propensity for ‘dawdling and dandering’ among them whenever the occasion arises, and I am yielding to it here.
Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of brochures upon the surrounding villages. One of these, called ‘St. Ives and the Printing Press,’ has greatly interested me, for it reveals the wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural districts lies ready for the picking up. I am tempted to quote from this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell’s time the temper which produced Cromwell has remained. During the time when at Cambridge George Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen’s, revolted against the discipline and the doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed. The house whence issued these fulminations was the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street, now pulled down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father, having remained during all this time a printing office. Mr. Norris gives a very picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the house, with its pointed roof, ‘king posts’ and panelling, reminding one of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices. Mr. Norris also tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the ‘Crown Inn,’ that William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens. According to Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor. A curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to Lamb, and inspired some of Elia’s most delightful touches of humour. This poem of Dyer’s opens thus:—
Though much I love th’ Æolian lyre,
Whose varying sounds beguil’d my youthful day,
And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
In fabled groves, among th’ Aonian choir:
Yet more on native fields, thro’ milder skies,
Nature’s mysterious harmonies delight:
There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
What is the moon’s pale orb that cheer’d the lonesome night?
I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
No purple Venus round my Hammond’s bow’r,
No blue-ey’d graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
The king of gods here rains no golden show’r,
Nor have these lips e’er sipt Castilian dews.
At the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer’s time, if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general. Filled with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that boyish utterance. It interests me much, because I seem to see in it adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I hope to enrich these pages. I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking advantage of a lucky accident—the accident that a member of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported. In 1854, ‘W. Theodore Watts,’ as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be himself a member—if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just left it—on account of his father’s great local reputation as a man of learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the toast, ‘Science.’ In the ‘Cambridge Chronicle’ of that date the proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely improvized. The subject which he discussed was ‘The Influence of Science upon Modern Civilization’:—
“It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches. Now, of all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most hopeful one for humanity is physical science—that branch of the tree which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present wondrous state of development. I am aware that the assertion that Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person young and inexperienced as myself. It is heterodox; it clashes, for instance, with the venerable superstition of ‘the wisdom of the ancients’—a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my friend Mr. Wright’s old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the point:—
For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men lere.But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy. It is the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong only to individuals. There can be no doubt that, of contemporary individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact. As Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, ‘Those who came first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least experience. Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in arms—chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can supply.
And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity. What, for instance, was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans—what but the wildest Astrology? What schoolboy has not chuckled over the ingenious old Herodotus’s description of the sun being blown out of the heavens? Or again, at old Plutarch’s veracious story of the hedgehogs and the grapes? Nay, there are absurdities enough in such great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters appertaining to the Physical Sciences.
Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence. But theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our day—though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has been proving to us lately—is, as essentially, the day of Science. I might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here—the constitution of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking as the soul of antiquity). Was that scientific? Surely not.
The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was beauty, sensuous beauty. This prevailing passion for the beautiful exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said: it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture. The productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful, and, as such, will never fade and decay, for
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity. Athens was too imaginative and poetical. Sparta was too warlike and barbarous. Rome was too sensual and gross. It had to wait for the steady Teutonic mind—the plodding brains of modern England and modern Germany. That Homer is the father of poetry—that Æschylus is a wonder of sublimity—that Sophocles and Euripides are profound masters of human passion and human pathos—that Aristophanes is an exhaustless fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour—no one in this room, or out of it, is more willing to admit than I am. But is that to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or Aristotle?
The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius. Every right action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius. And this was not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and breathing faith with him. He believed it in his childhood, in his youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of Laocoon, around his giant brain. Well, gentlemen, don’t let us laugh at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a beautiful one, and typical of many great truths. And I have often thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than Socrates. I mean the great man—mankind. He, too, has his good genius and his evil genius. The former we will designate science, the latter we will call superstition. For ages upon ages, superstition has had the sway over him—that evil genius, who blotted out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and substituted all manner of blinding errors—errors which have made him play
Such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries. In a word, the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the fiends.
But, at last, God has permitted man’s long, long experience to be followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient enemy, and clasped the hands of Science—Science, that good genius who makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the ethereal lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns king of the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of Methusaleh into seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human frame, and ranges through its most secret chambers, until at last nothing, save the mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden; who maps out all the nations of the earth; showing how the sable Ethiopian, the dusky Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the intellectual European, are but differently developed exemplars of the same type of manhood, and warning man that he is still his ‘brother’s keeper’ now as in the primeval days of Cain and Abel.
The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his dædal wings up into the starry night, there where ‘God’s name is writ in worlds,’ and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever around the great central sun—‘The Great White Throne of God!’
The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first, as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid mass, ‘without form and void,’ where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages, having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life, to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns, compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian, the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders, the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and the basest work of God—the creation of the thinking, reasoning, sinning animal, Man.
And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand work of developing the divinity within it. I know, indeed, that it is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will decline and vanish, ‘like the civilizations of old.’ But I venture to deny it in toto. From a human point of view, it is utterly impossible. And without going into the question (for I see the time is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern must of necessity be futile and fallacious. And for this reason, that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political life, and come to its own conclusions. So isolated, indeed, was one nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of each other’s existence. A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh, was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for Italy alone. There was no science then to ‘put a girdle round about the earth’ (as Puck says) ‘in forty minutes.’ But now, a new idea brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole habitable globe—from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru. I am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the ruler of the waves. The day may come that will see her sink to a second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe. In spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that will see Russia the dominant power in Europe. The day may come that will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and learning. It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race—that the negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian race is now lording it over the negro. Why not? It would be only equity. But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of nationalities. I speak again of the great man, Mankind—the one indivisible man that Science is making him. He will never retrograde, because ‘matter and mind comprise the universe,’ and matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind—because good must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made? Henceforth his road is onward—onward. Science has helped to give him such a start that nothing shall hold him back—nothing can hold him back—save a fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God.”
But I am wandering from the subject of the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street and its connection with printing. The last important book that was ever printed there was a very remarkable one. It was the famous essay on Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that time a curate of the St. Ives Church—a book that was the result of an enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book, moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought. It has passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.
Mrs. Craigie has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the nation. It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than that in which Theodore Watts grew up. Indeed, his early life may be compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of the Mill family. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father was in many respects a very remarkable man. ‘He was,’ says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ‘a naturalist intimately connected with Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert White of the Ouse valley.’ There is, as the ‘Times’ said in its review of ‘Aylwin,’ so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made to identify all the characters. Many of these guesses have been wrong; and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr. Hake, who, in two papers in ‘Notes and Queries’ identified many of the characters. Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father. Mr. Hake, however, tells us that this is not so. Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the author’s uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to say later. I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable account of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father in Mr. Norris’s ‘History of St. Ives’:—
“For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford Abbots. According to the following extracts from ‘The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal’ of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: ‘We record with much regret the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died after an hour’s illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he had been taken after the seizure. Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was called in, but without avail. At the inquest the post-mortem examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions, resulted in syncope. Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of death.
Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the oldest solicitors in the county. He had also devoted much time and study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a well-known figure in the scientific circles of London. He was for years connected with Section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee. He read papers on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles of geology. Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors, and in the Association’s reports upon this subject some of the most interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by Mr. Watts. He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.’
Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the ‘Antiquary’ for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months after his death. It was, however, not by Archæology, but by his geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation. And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison, Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied by Mr. Matton. In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr. Watts at St. Ives. Since his death there have been frequent references to him as a man of ‘encyclopædic general knowledge.’
He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St. Ives have been more liked or more generally respected. His great delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself. On such occasions the present writer has often met him and had many interesting conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science.”
With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mother, the Duntons, although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr. Jessopp in his charming essay, ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.’ This essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, and treating of the Register of Crab House Nunnery. In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother’s to his father’s name, by a deed in Chancery.
I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend) used to tell. When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school library a copy of Wells’s ‘Stories after Nature,’ and read them with great avidity. Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to find, in a number of the ‘Illuminated Magazine,’ a periodical which his father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one of the ‘Stories after Nature’ reprinted with an illustration by the designer and engraver Linton. He said to his father, ‘Why, I have read this story before!’ ‘That is quite impossible,’ said his father, ‘quite impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number of a magazine.’ ‘I have read it before; I know all about it,’ said the boy. ‘As I do not think you untruthful,’ said the father, ‘I think I can explain your hallucination about this matter.’ ‘Do, father,’ said the son. ‘Well,’ said the father, ‘I do not know whether or not you are a poet. But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams. You have told me before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.’ ‘Yes, father, that often occurs.’ ‘Well, the reason for that is this, as you will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things, one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.’ The explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.
The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the father said, ‘Well, Walter, have you read this before?’ ‘Yes,’ said the boy falteringly, ‘unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain, father.’ And so it went on from month to month. When the boy had grown into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells’s ‘Joseph and His Brethren’ and ‘Stories after Nature.’ Rossetti was agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of ‘Joseph and His Brethren,’ he was very familiar with the ‘Stories after Nature.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘they appeared in the “Illuminated Magazine.”’ ‘Who should have thought,’ said Rossetti, ‘that the “Illuminated Magazine” in its moribund days, when Linton took it up, should have got down to St. Ives. Its circulation, I think, was only a few hundreds. Among Linton’s manœuvres for keeping the magazine alive was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells’s “Stories after Nature” without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book form.’ ‘They did then appear in book form first?’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. ‘Yes, but there can’t have been over a hundred or two sold,’ said Rossetti. ‘I discovered it at the British Museum.’ ‘I read it at Cambridge in my school library,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton. It was the startled look on Rossetti’s face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell him the story about his father and the ‘Illuminated Magazine.’
It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to express himself in literature rather early. But it will be new to many, and especially to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ that as a mere child he contributed to its pages. When he was a boy he read the ‘Athenæum,’ which his father took in regularly. One day he caught a correspondent of the ‘Athenæum’—no less a person than John P. Collier—tripping on a point of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance. He had stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father’s books. He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing the blunder with youthful scorn. In due time the correction was noted in the Literary Gossip of the journal. Soon after, his father had occasion to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he said, ‘Walter, have you been marking this book?’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘But you know I object?’ ‘Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.’ ‘Why,’ said his father, ‘somebody has been writing about this very passage to the “Athenæum.”’ ‘Yes, father,’ replied the boy, red and ungrammatical with proud confusion, ‘it was me.’ ‘You!’ cried his astonished father, ‘you!’ And thus the matter was explained. Mr. Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his first contribution to the ‘Athenæum.’
Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton, it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando Watts. His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism. As I have already pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero. The importance of this character in ‘Aylwin’ is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find that the character of Philip is its motive power. After his death, everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams, his fantasies and his whims. This effect of making a man dominate from his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there they leave it. What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls ‘the tragic mischief’ of the drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of ‘The Veiled Queen.’ There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an interest. He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish, and German. And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover of the acted drama. One of his stories in connection with acting is this. A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and sometimes Cromwell’s Barn. Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on returning home after the performance said, ‘I have seen a little actor who is a real genius. He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund Kean’s acting. I shall go and see him every night. And he went. The actor’s name was Robson. When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon. He went to the theatre and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so impressed him down at St. Ives. From that time he followed Robson to whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known figure among the playgoers of the Olympic. He always contended that Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time. Mr. Hake seems to have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in London:—
“He was,” says Mr. Hake, “a man of extraordinary learning in the academic sense of the word, and he possessed still more extraordinary general knowledge. He lived for many years the strangest kind of hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts. His two great passions were philology and occultism, but he also took great interest in rubbings from brass monuments. He knew more, I think, of those strange writers discussed in Vaughan’s ‘Hours with the Mystics’ than any other person—including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he managed to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the physical sciences, especially astronomy. He seemed to be learning languages up to almost the last year of his life. His method of learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow—that is to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died, it is said that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among his books. He used to express great contempt for Borrow’s method of learning languages from dictionaries only. I do not think that any one connected with literature—with the sole exception of Mr. Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G. Latham—knew so much of him as I did. His personal appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin, as described in the novel. Although he never wrote poetry, he translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese poets. I remember that he was an extraordinary admirer of Shelley. His knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists was a link between him and Mr. Swinburne.
At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum reading room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed to know anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he spoke to me it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should disturb the other readers, which in his eyes would have been a heinous offence. For very many years he had been extremely well known to the second-hand booksellers, for he was a constant purchaser of their wares. He was a great pedestrian, and, being very much attached to the north of London, would take long, slow tramps ten miles out in the direction of Highgate, Wood Green, etc. I have a very distinct recollection of calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living close to him in Percy Circus. Books were piled up from floor to ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember where to find every book and what there was in it. It is a singular fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him ‘the scholar.’ How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the north of London where ‘the scholar’ was taking his chop and bottle of Beaune. He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of ‘Aylwin,’ and myself. But at Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines, when and where my father and I used to meet him. His memory was so powerful that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part. He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life. He always reminded me of Charles Lamb’s description of George Dyer.
Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent to touch upon his inner life. He was a still greater recluse than the ‘Philip Aylwin’ of the novel. I think I am right in saying that he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of age. Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these studies that he sympathized with the author of ‘Aylwin’s’ friend, the late Lord de Tabley. I remember one story of his peculiarities which will give an idea of the kind of man he was. He had a brother, Mr. William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him in every way—strikingly good-looking, with great charm of manner and savoir faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of British military and naval exploits—where he was really learned. Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until at last he got to be called the ‘walking encyclopædia.’ The result was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned brother. This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories as to what people had said to him on this subject.” [60]
Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of one of his stories. I may add that the editor of ‘Notes and Queries,’ Mr. Joseph Knight, knew James Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he ‘can testify to the truth’ of Mr. Hake’s ‘portraiture.’
Although an East Midlander by birth it seems to have been to East Anglia that Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathies were most strongly drawn. It was there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it was to East Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.
On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the Hemingford side already described, the country, though not so lovely as the western side, is at first fairly attractive; but it becomes less and less so as it nears the Fens. The Fens, however, would seem to have a charm of their own, and Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness that could hardly be surpassed. It was here as a boy that he made friends with the Gryengroes—that superior variety of the Romanies which Borrow had known years before. These gypsies used to bring their Welsh ponies to England and sell them at the fairs. I must now go back for some years in order to enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic description of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country, which appeared in ‘Great Thoughts’ in 1903.
“I shall never forget my earliest recollections of them. My father used sometimes to drive in a dogcart to see friends of his through about twelve miles of Fen country, and he used to take me with him. Let me say that the Fen country is much more striking than is generally supposed. Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are divided by dykes; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles. This gives an importance to the skies such as is observed nowhere else except on the open sea. The flashing opalescent radiance of the sea is apt to challenge the riches of the sky, and in a certain degree tends to neutralize it; but in the Fen country the level, monotonous greenery of the crops in summer, and, in autumn and winter, the vast expanse of black earth, make the dome of the sky, by contrast, so bright and glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams and suggests a roof of rainbows; and in cloudy weather it seems almost the only living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more magical still. And as to sunsets, I do not know of any, either by land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen country. The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal to do with it. The sun frequently sets in a pageantry of gauzy vapour of every colour, quite indescribable.
The first evening that I took one of these drives, while I was watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps of twitch-grass, set burning by the farm-labourers, which stretched right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the dogcart and pointed to a ruddy fire glowing, flickering, and smoking in an angle where a green grassy drove-way met the dark-looking high-road some yards ahead. And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about. ‘The gypsies!’ I said, in the greatest state of exultation, which soon fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle and saw a lot of these dusky people running and leaping like wild things towards the dog-cart. ‘Will they kill us, father?’ I said. ‘Kill us? No,’ he said, laughing; ‘they are friends of mine. They’ve only come to lead the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at it.’ They came flocking up. So far from the mare starting, as she would have done at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose with their tawny but well-shaped fingers, and caressing her neck. Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw. When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was fascinated by the charm of the picture. Outside the tents in front of the fire, over which a kettle was suspended from an upright iron bar, which I afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was spread a large dazzling white table-cloth, covered with white crockery, among which glittered a goodly number of silver spoons. I afterwards learnt that to possess good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons, was as ‘passionate a desire in the Romany chi as in the most ambitious farmer’s wife in the Fen country.’ It was from this little incident that my intimacy with the gypsies dated. I associated much with them in after life, and I have had more experiences among them than I have yet had an opportunity of recording in print.”
This pretty gypsy girl was the prototype, I believe, of the famous Rhona Boswell herself.
It must of course have been after the meeting with Rhona in the East Midlands—supposing always that we are allowed to identify the novelist with the hero, a bold supposition—that Mr. Watts-Dunton again came across her—this time in East Anglia. Whether this is so or not, I must give this picture of her from ‘Aylwin’:—
“It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie’s friend, Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl. Graylingham Wood and Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of a superior kind of Gypsies called Gryengroes, that is to say, horse-dealers. Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales. Compared with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona’s limbs were always on the move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions. Her laugh seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most Gypsy girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona’s laughter was a sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards, when she grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her. It seemed to emanate, not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame. If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor, some miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of flowers that she had been weaving for herself. This induced Winnie to weave for herself a coronet of seaweeds, and an entire morning was passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.”
It was at this period that, like so many young Englishmen who were his contemporaries, he gave attention to field sports, and took interest in that athleticism which, to judge from Wilkie Collins’s scathing pictures, was quite as rampant and absurd then as it is in our own time. It was then too that he acquired that familiarity with the figures prominent in the ring which startles one in his reminiscences of George Borrow. But it will scarcely interest the readers of this book to dwell long upon this subject. Nor have I time to repeat the humorous stories I have heard him tell about the queer characters who could then be met at St. Ives Fair (said to have been the largest cattle fair in England), and at another favourite resort of his, Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge. Stourbridge Fair still exists, but its glory was departing when Mr. Watts-Dunton was familiar with it; and now, possibly, it has departed for ever. Of Cambridge and the entire county he tells many anecdotes. Here is a specimen:—
Once in the early sixties he and his brother and some friends were greatly exercised by the news that Deerfoot, the famous American Indian runner in whom Borrow took such an interest, was to run at Cambridge against the English champion. When the day came, they drove to Cambridge in a dog-cart from St. Ives, about a dozen miles. The race took place in a field called Fenner’s Ground, much used by cricketers. This is how, as far as I can recall the words, he tells the anecdote:—
“The place was crammed with all sorts of young men—’varsity men and others. There were not many young farmers or squires or yeomen within a radius of a good many miles that did not put in an appearance on that occasion. The Indian won easily, and at the conclusion of the race there was a frantic rush to get near him and shake his hand. The rush was so wild and so insensate that it irritated me more than I should at the present moment consider it possible to be irritated. But I ought to say that at that time of my life I had developed into a strangely imperious little chap. I had been over-indulged—not at home, but at the Cambridge school to which I had been sent—and spoilt. This seems odd, but it’s true. It was the boys who spoilt me in a curious way—a way which will not be understood by those who went to public schools like Eton, where the fagging principle would have stood in the way of the development of the curious relation between me and my fellow-pupils which I am alluding to. There is an inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct in the genus homo which causes boys, without in the least knowing why, to select one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and spoil him, almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which is so valuable in the social struggle for life that follows school-days. This kind of emperor I had been at that school. It indicated no sort of real superiority on my part; for I learnt that immediately after I had left the vacant post it was filled by another boy—filled for an equally inscrutable reason. The result of it was that I became (as I often think when I recall those days) the most masterful young urchin that ever lived. If I had not been so, I could not have got into a fury at being jostled by a good-humoured crowd. My brother, who had not been so spoilt at school, was very different, and kept urging me to keep my temper. ‘It’s capital fun,’ he said; ‘look at this blue-eyed young chap jostling and being jostled close to us. He’s fond of a hustle, and no mistake. That’s the kind of chap I should like to know’; and he indicated a young ’varsity man of whose elbow at that moment I was unpleasantly conscious, and who seemed to be in a state of delight at other elbows being pushed into his ribs. I soon perceived that certain men whom he was with seemed angry, not on their own account, but on account of this youth of the laughing lips and blue eyes. As they were trying to make a ring round him, ‘Hanged if it isn’t the Prince!’ said my brother. ‘And look how he takes it! Surely you can stand what he stands!’ It was, in fact, the Prince of Wales, who had come to see the American runner. I needed only two or three years of buffeting with the great life outside the schoolroom to lose all my imperiousness and learn the essential lesson of give-and-take.”
For a time Mr. Watts-Dunton wavered about being articled to his father as a solicitor. His love of the woods and fields was too great at that time for him to find life in a solicitor’s office at all tolerable. Moreover, it would seem that he who had been so precocious a student, and who had lived in books, felt a temporary revulsion from them, and an irresistible impulse to study Nature apart from books, to study her face to face. And it was at this time that, as the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ remarks, he ‘moved much among the East Anglian gypsies, of whose superstitions and folklore he made a careful study.’ But of this period of his life I have but little knowledge. Judging from Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ in the ‘Bookman,’ he alone had Mr. Watts-Dunton’s full confidence in the matter. So great was his desire to pore over the book of nature, there appears to have been some likelihood, perhaps I ought to say some danger, of his feeling the impulse which had taken George Borrow away from civilization. He seems, besides, to have shared with the Greeks and with Montaigne a belief in the value of leisure. It was at this period, to judge from his writings, that he exclaimed with Montaigne, ‘Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.’ I suppose, however, that this was the time when he composed that unpublished ‘Dictionary for Nature-worshippers,’ from which he often used to quote in the ‘Athenæum.’ There is nothing in his writings so characteristic as those definitions. Work and Sport are thus defined: ‘Work: that activity of mind or body which exhausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or health to the individual. Sport: that activity of mind or body which, in exhausting the vital forces, yields pleasure and health to the individual. The activity, however severe, of a born artist at his easel, of a born poet at his rhymings, of a born carpenter at his plane, is sport. The activity, however slight, of the born artist or poet at the merchant’s desk, is work. Hence, to work is not to pray. We have called the heresy of Work modern because it is the characteristic one of our time; but, alas! like all heresies, it is old. It was preached by Zoroaster in almost Mr. Carlyle’s words when Concord itself was in the woods and ere Chelsea was.’
‘Evening Dreams with the Poets.’ (From an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
In one of his books Mr. Watts-Dunton writes with great eloquence upon this subject:—
“How hateful is the word ‘experience’ in the mouth of the littérateur. They all seem to think that this universe exists to educate them, and that they should write books about it. They never look on a sunrise without thinking what an experience it is; how it is educating them for bookmaking. It is this that so often turns the true Nature-worshipper away from books altogether, that makes him bless with what at times seems such malicious fervour those two great benefactors of the human race, Caliph Omar and Warburton’s cook.
In Thoreau there was an almost perpetual warring of the Nature instinct with the Humanity instinct. And, to say the truth, the number is smaller than even Nature-worshippers themselves are aware—those in whom there is not that warring of these two great primal instincts. For six or eight months at a time there are many, perhaps, who could revel in ‘utter solitude,’ as companionship with Nature is called; with no minster clock to tell them the time of day, but, instead, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle in the morning, the shifting of the shadows at noon, and the cawing of rooks going home at sunset. But then to these, there comes suddenly, and without the smallest warning, a half-recognized but secretly sweet pleasure in looking at the smooth high-road, and thinking that it leads to the city—a beating of the heart at the sound of the distant railway-whistle, as the train winds its way, like a vast gliding snake, to the whirlpool they have left.
In order to realize the folly of the modern Carlylean heresy of work, it is necessary to realize fully how infinitely rich is Nature, and how generous, and consequently what a sacred duty as well as wise resolve it is that, before he ‘returns unto the ground,’ man should drink deeply while he may at the fountain of Life. Let it be enough for the Nature-worshipper to know that he, at least, has been blessed. Suppose he were to preach in London or Paris or New York against this bastard civilization, and expatiate on Nature’s largess, of which it robs us? Suppose he were to say to people to whom opinion is the breath of life, ‘What is it that this civilization of yours can give you by way of compensation for that of which it robs you? Is it your art? Is it your literature? Is it your music? Is it your science?’ Suppose, for instance, he were to say to the collector of Claudes, or Turners, or David Coxes: ‘Your possessions are precious undoubtedly, but what are even they when set against the tamest and quietest sunrise, in the tamest and quietest district of Cambridge or Lincoln, in this tame and quiet month, when, over the treeless flat you may see, and for nothing, purple bar after purple bar trembling along the grey, as the cows lift up their heads from the sheet of silver mist in which they are lying? How can you really enjoy your Turners, you who have never seen a sunrise in your lives?’ Or suppose he were to say to the opera-goer: ‘Those notes of your favourite soprano were superb indeed; and superb they ought to be to keep you in the opera-house on a June night, when all over the south of England a thousand thickets, warm with the perfumed breath of the summer night, are musical with the gurgle of the nightingales.’ Thoreau preached after this fashion, and was deservedly laughed at for his pains.
Yet it is not a little singular that this heresy of the sacredness of work should be most flourishing at the very time when the sophism on which it was originally built is exploded; the sophism, we mean, that Nature herself is the result of Work, whereas she is the result of growth. One would have thought that this was the very time for recognizing what the sophism had blinded us to, that Nature’s permanent temper—whatever may be said of this or that mood of hers—is the temper of Sport, that her pet abhorrence, which is said to be a vacuum, is really Work. We see this clearly enough in what are called the lower animals—whether it be a tiger or a gazelle, a ferret or a coney, a bat or a butterfly—the final cause of the existence of every conscious thing is that it should sport. It has no other use than that. For this end it was that ‘the great Vishnu yearned to create a world.’ Yet over the toiling and moiling world sits Moloch Work; while those whose hearts are withering up with hatred of him are told by certain writers to fall down before him and pretend to love.
The worker of the mischief is, of course, civilization in excess, or rather, civilization in wrong directions. For this word, too, has to be newly defined in the Dictionary before mentioned, where you will find it thus given:—Civilization: a widening and enriching of human life. Bastard or Modern Western Civilization: the art of inventing fictitious wants and working to supply them. In bastard civilization life becomes poorer and poorer, paltrier and paltrier, till at last life goes out of fashion altogether, and is supplanted by work. True freedom is more remote from us than ever. For modern Freedom is thus defined: the exchange of the slavery of feudality for the slavery of opinion. Thoreau realized this, and tried to preach men back to common-sense and Nature. Here was his mistake—in trying to preach. No man ever yet had the Nature-instinct preached into him.”