I am able to give a reproduction of another of Rossetti’s beautiful studies which has never been published, but which has been very much talked about. Many who have seen it at ‘The Pines’ agree with the late Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest of all his female faces. It is thus described by Mr. William Sharp: “The drawing, which, for the sake of a name, I will call ‘Forced Music,’ represents a nude half-figure of a girl playing on a mediæval stringed instrument elaborately ornamented. The face is of a type unlike that of any other of the artist’s subjects, and extraordinarily beautiful.”
I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of the girl in the version of the picture here reproduced, are by Dunn. These two exquisite drawings were made from the same girl, who never sat for any other pictures. Her face has been described as being unlike that of any other of Rossetti’s models and yet combining the charm of them all.
I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any personal description of him. For my part I do not sympathize with this extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one’s personal characteristics described in print. What is there so dreadful or so sacred in mere print? The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter there was ‘a great gulf fixed.’ Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr. Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of friends or strangers, remarks—delicate enough, no doubt—are made about them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in ever so small a degree. Not so very long ago I remained in a room after Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it. Straightway there were the freest remarks about him, not in the least unkind, but free. Some did not expect to see so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences, described his dark-brown eyes as ‘green’—through a printer’s error, no doubt. Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his absent friend, Mr. Swinburne—and so on, and so on. Now, what is the difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation? Merely that the printed report reaches a wider—a little wider—audience. That is all. I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in the papers. Some energetic gentleman—possibly some one living in the neighbourhood—took the following ‘Kodak’ of him. It appeared in ‘M.A.P.’ and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could be painted. In years to come, when he and I and the ‘Kodaker’ are dead, it may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written about him:—
“Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance. For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and thick moustache are partially shot with grey. But he looks not a day over forty-five. Generally he carries a book. Often, however, he turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits. For—it will be news to lie-abeds of the district—Wimbledon Common is lively with rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until the moon rises again. To him, morning, although he has seen more sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious pageant. This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet, novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour.”
The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to the sea-side. One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his country places, such as Boar’s Hill.
I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the famous Master of Balliol. I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton’s intellectual powers and various accomplishments. There was no one, I have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem. That air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett’s friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr. Watts-Dunton.
Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were these visits with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett’s house, where he had the opportunity of meeting some of the most prominent men of the time. He has described the Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to them. I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of December 22, 1894.
“It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the poet of ‘Atalanta’ and the student of Plato and translator of Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no common strength. They took expeditions into the country together, and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at Jowett’s quiet autumnal retreat at Boar’s Hill. The Master of Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself the admiration of men of poetic genius. To say which poet admired and loved him most deeply—Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr. Swinburne—would be difficult. He seemed to join their hands all round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett. He was always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his verses as in telling him what he liked. And although the poets of our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to straightforward men like Jowett. That Jowett’s judgment in artistic matters, and especially in poetry, was borné no one knew better than himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would otherwise have been allowed to him. For, notwithstanding the Oxford epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary knowledge. He was fond of quoting Hallam’s words that without an exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction; and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge, he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion. They are not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble and most truly lovable. The kind of restraint in social intercourse resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett’s taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for talking’s sake. If a proper and right response to a friend’s remark chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or uneducated man. It is, however, extremely difficult to write reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett. In order to bring out one of Jowett’s pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism.”
Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits that the two friends used to pay to Jowett’s rural retreat at Boar’s Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian. The two poets used to spend the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master to Boar’s Hill. Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry will remember the following sonnets:—
THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR’S
HILL
To A. C. S.
I
One after one they go; and glade and heath,
Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers
They made so dear, are haunted by the hours
Once musical of those who sleep beneath;
One after one does Sorrow’s every wreath
Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,
And Love and Memory from each loss of ours
Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield
The friend with whom we walk through mead and field
To-day as on that day when last we parted,
Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?
Love shapes a presence out of Memory’s dream,
A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.II
Can he be dead? We walk through flowery ways
From Boar’s Hill down to Oxford, fain to know
What nugget-gold, in drift of Time’s long flow,
The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;
He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,
Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,
Still talks of Plato while the scene below
Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.Can he be dead? He shares our homeward walk,
And by the river you arrest the talk
To see the sun transfigure ere he sets
The boatmen’s children shining in the wherry
And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,
Making the clumsy craft an angel’s ferry.III
The river crossed, we walk ’neath glowing skies
Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air—
Fading as colour after colour dies:
We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise—
Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
We win the scholar’s nest—his simple fare
Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.
Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew
The poet’s heart of gold that gives the spell!
Can he be dead? Your heart being drawn to him,
How shall ev’n Death make that dear presence dim
For you who loved him—us who loved him well?
Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill. Not the least interesting among the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith. Mr. William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton. Speaking of Swinburne’s championship, in the ‘Spectator,’ of Meredith’s first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the ‘Pall Mall Magazine,’ of December 1901, says:—
“Among those who read and considered” [Meredith’s work] “was another young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . . If the letter signed ‘A. C. Swinburne’ had not appeared, another signed ‘Theodore Watts’ would have been published, to the like effect. It was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion.”
The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum’ on ‘Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth.’ After this appeared articles appreciative of Meredith’s prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others. But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who led the way. The most touching of all the testimonies of love and admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr Watts-Dunton, or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed to him on his seventy-fourth birthday. It appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of February 15, 1902:—
TO GEORGE MEREDITH
(ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)This time, dear friend—this time my birthday greeting
Comes heavy of funeral tears—I think of you,
And say, ‘’Tis evening with him—that is true—
But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;
Still he is spared—while Spring and Winter, meeting,
Clasp hands around the roots ’neath frozen dew—
To see the ‘Joy of Earth’ break forth anew,
And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.’Love’s remnant melts and melts; but, if our days
Are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, still,
Still Winter has a sun—a sun whose rays
Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,
And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,
Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.
The allusion to ‘funeral tears’ was caused by one of the greatest bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years, namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the ‘Athenæum.’ I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often heard Mr. Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration the fine charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and style of his conversation.
But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of ‘The Pines’ Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.
I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between the external facets of Tennyson’s character and the ‘abysmal deeps’ of his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet’s son, is the only man living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet. Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy. So long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his seventy-first birthday. It attracted much attention, and although it was not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to another:—
To Alfred Tennyson, on his publishing, in his seventy-first year, the most richly various volume of English verse that has appeared in his own century.
Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs
Whose magic waters to a flood expand,
Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,
The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.
From honeyed flowers,—from balm of zephyr-wings,—
From fiery blood of gems, [286] through all the land,
The river draws;—then, in one rainbow-band,
Ten leagues of nectar o’er the ocean flings.Rich with the riches of a poet’s years,
Stained in all colours of Man’s destiny,
So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears
The misty main, and, taking now the sea,
Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears
The ashen billows of Eternity.
Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a garden party, and they fraternized at once. Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth. One point in which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the ‘Table Talk’) or with Mr. Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson’s ear was defective at the very first. He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield. As an illustration of Tennyson’s sensibility to the most delicate nuances of metrical music, I remember at one of those charming ‘symposia’ at ‘The Pines,’ hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of this. It referred to the two sonnets upon ‘The Omnipotence of Love’ in the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love.’ These sonnets appeared in an article called ‘The New Hero’ in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ in 1883. Mr. Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article reached him. The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets. Tennyson, who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge. The line was this:—
And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.
Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially praised by two other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris, to whom the sonnet had been read in manuscript. Tennyson’s criticism was that there were too many sibilants in the line, and that although, other things being equal, ‘scents’ might be more accurate than ‘scent,’ this was a case where the claims of music ought to be dominant over other claims. The present Lord Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they were right, and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting ‘scent’ in place of ‘scents.’
Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson’s sensibility to criticism was the result, not of imperious egotism, but of a kind of morbid modesty. Tennyson used to say that “to whatsoever exalted position a poet might reach, he was not ‘born to the purple,’ and that if the poet’s mind was especially plastic he could never shake off the reminiscence of the time when he was nobody.”
On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the summer-house at Aldworth to read to him ‘Becket,’ then in manuscript. Although another visitor, whom he esteemed very highly, both as a poet and an old friend, was staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer to read the play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone. And this no doubt was because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism. Freedom of criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr. Watts-Dunton is the most outspoken on the subject of the poet’s art. The entire morning was absorbed in the reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘the remarks upon poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made the fortune of any critic.’
On the subject of what has been called Tennyson’s gaucherie and rudeness to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax very indignant. ‘There was to me,’ he said, ‘the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson’s bluntness. I would there were a leaven of Tennyson’s single-mindedness in the society of the present day.’
One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as Tennyson’s rudeness to women shows how entirely the man was misunderstood. Mrs. Oliphant has stated that Tennyson, in his own house, after listening in silence to an interchange of amiable compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson, said abruptly, ‘What liars you women are!’ ‘I seem to hear,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘Tennyson utter the exclamation—utter it in that tone of humourous playfulness, followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized the rudeness as entirely as Douglas Jerrold’s laugh neutralized the sting of his satire. For such an incident to be cited as instance of Tennyson’s rudeness to women is ludicrous. When I knew him I was, if possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious people. I did not feel that I had any claim to such treatment, for he was, beyond doubt, the greatest literary figure in the world of that time. There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which springs up after a period of laudation.’
The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of stricture upon Tennyson’s work was that, considering his enormous powers as a poet, he seemed deficient in the gift of inventing a story:—“The stanzas beginning, ‘O, that ’twere possible’—the nucleus of ‘Maud’—appeared originally in ‘The Tribute.’ They were the finest lines that Tennyson ever wrote—right away the finest. They suggested some superb story of passion and mystery; and every reader was compelled to make his own guess as to what the story could possibly be. In an evil moment some friend suggested that Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story. A person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson might perhaps have invented an adequate story—might perhaps have invented a dozen adequate stories; but he could not have invented a worse story than the one used by Tennyson in the writing of his monodrama. But think of the poetic riches poured into it!”
I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton once made in regard to ‘The Princess.’ “Shakspeare,” he said, “is the only poet who has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of which is fanciful. The extremely insincere story of ‘The Princess’ is filled with such noble passages of sincere poetry as ‘Tears, idle tears,’ ‘Home they brought her warrior dead,’ etc., passages which unfortunately lose two-thirds of their power through the insincere setting.”
Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the ‘Magazine of Art’ invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write an article upon the portraits of Tennyson. Mr. Watts-Dunton consulted the poet upon this project, and he agreed, promising to aid in the selection of the portraits. The result was two of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been written—in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without a knowledge of these articles no student of Tennyson can be properly equipped. It is tantalizing that they have never been reprinted. Tennyson died before their appearance, and this, of course, added to the general interest felt in them.
After Tennyson’s death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two penetrating essays upon Tennyson in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ one of them being his reminiscences of Tennyson as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a nature-poet in reference to evolution. It will be a great pity if these essays too are not reprinted. Mr. Knowles, the editor, also included Mr. Watts-Dunton among the friends of Tennyson who were invited to write memorial verses on his death for the ‘Nineteenth Century.’ To this series Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one of the several poems upon Tennyson not published in ‘The Coming of Love’ volume, which, I may note in passing, contains ‘What the Silent Voices Said,’ the fine ‘sonnet sequence’ commemorating the burial of Tennyson:—
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
‘The crowd in the abbey was very great.’
Morning Newspaper.
I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold
What others saw not—his lov’d face sublime
Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime
Of Tennyson’s long day that grows not old;
And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;
And, ‘Who art thou,’ the music seemed to chime,
‘To mourn that King of song whose throne is Time?’
Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow’s shame:
‘So great he was, striving in simple strife
With Art alone to lend all beauty life—
So true to Truth he was, whatever came—
So fierce against the false when lies were rife—
That love o’erleapt the golden fence of Fame.’
By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr. Watts-Dunton was one of the few friends of the poet, including Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll, and others, who contributed reminiscences of him to the ‘Life.’ In a few sentences he paints this masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled, ‘Impressions: 1883–1892’ [291]:—
“All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti’s was a peculiarly winning personality, but no one has been in the least able to say why. Nothing is easier, however, than to find the charm of Tennyson. It lay in a great veracity of soul: it lay in a simple single-mindedness, so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of poems as marvellous for exquisite art as for inspiration, you could not have supposed but that all subtleties—even those of poetic art—must be foreign to a nature so simple.
Working in a language like ours—a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art—how can this great, inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?
Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he said—viz. that it was the thing he thought. Behind his uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy of the grand old type. As he stood at the porch of Aldworth meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall far beyond the height of average men, his skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind—as he stood there, no one could mistake him for anything but a great forthright English gentleman. Always a man of an extraordinary beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare indeed for him to part from a guest without urging him to return, and generally with the words, ‘Come whenever you like.’
Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was simply astonishing. His passion for ‘stargazing’ has often been commented upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante, no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that he passed away in the light he so much loved—in a room where there was no artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the full moon, which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in England.
In a country having a composite language such as ours it may be affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of poetry: one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other appealing to the few who are sensitive to the felicitous expression of deep thought and to the true beauties of poetic art.
Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his use of what Dante calls the ‘sieve for noble words’ his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities of thought and of diction in the great passages seem little short of miraculous, and there are so many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.”
I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary friendships would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends. There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting between him and James Russell Lowell. Shortly after Lowell had accepted the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at dinner. During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one. He observed that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the conversation. The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English writers—Dickens, Thackeray, and others. As the dinner wore on, his conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also upon the prominent political men of the previous generation—Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and the like. Then the name of the Alabama came up; the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American), dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the Alabama escape. This diatribe he concluded thus: ‘You know we owe England nothing.’ In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton, manifestly addressing his remarks to him.
These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the first time, he said: “Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong. You owe England a very great deal, for I see you are an American.”
“What do we owe England?” said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.
“You owe England,” he said, “for an infinity of good feeling which you are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans. So kind is the feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English people themselves. They are petted and made much of, until at last it has come to this, that the very fact of a person’s being American is a letter of introduction.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel between the two. After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:
“You were very sharp upon me just now, sir.”
“Not in the least,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “You were making an onslaught on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were addressing your conversation to me.”
“Well,” replied Mr. Lowell, “I will confess that I did address my conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts.”
“That is my little name,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But I really don’t see why that should induce you to address your conversation to me. I suppose it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies. An entire mistake! I have several charming American friends, and I am a great admirer of many of your most eminent writers. But I notice that whensoever an American book is severely handled in the ‘Athenæum,’ the article is attributed to me.”
“I do not think,” said Mr. Lowell, “that you are a lover of my country, but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never wrote.”
And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more confidential.
“Well,” he said, “I will tell you something that, I think, will not be altogether unpleasant to you. When I came to take up my permanent residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about London and Londoners, and I said to him: ‘There is one man whom I very much want to meet.’ ‘You!’ said he, ‘why, you can meet anybody from the royal family downwards. Who is the man you want to meet?’ ‘It is a man in the literary world,’ said I, ‘and I have no doubt you can introduce me to him. It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in the “Athenæum.”’ My friend laughed. ‘Well, it is curious,’ he replied: ‘that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you to. I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures on my writing which I don’t much approve of.’ Does that interest you?” added Mr. Lowell.
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
“Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the ‘Athenæum’ I have read every article you have written?”
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
“Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said to a friend of mine: ‘At last there is a new voice in English criticism?’”
“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton. “But you must first tell me what that article was, for I don’t believe there is one of my countrymen who could do so.”
“That article,” said Lowell, “was an essay upon the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ and it opened with an Oriental anecdote.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that does interest me very much.”
“And I will go further,” said Lowell: “every line you have written in the ‘Athenæum’ has been read by me, and often re-read.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “I confess to being amazed, for I assure you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my name is absolutely unknown. And I must add that I feel honoured, for it is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for some of your critical essays. But still, I don’t quite forgive you for your onslaught upon my poor little island! My sympathies are not strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon in temper. But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way, and I don’t quite forgive you.”
The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.
“Won’t you come to see me,” said Lowell, “at the Embassy?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Then you ought to know!” said Lowell. “Another proof of the stout sufficiency of the English temper—not to know where the American Embassy is! It is in Lowndes Square.” Then he named the number.
“Why,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the Swinburne family—a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the open air at I don’t know what age of life—something like eighty. She was a friend of Turner’s, and is the possessor of some of Turner’s finest works.”
“So you actually go next door, and don’t know where the American Embassy is! A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English temper! However, as you come next door, won’t you come and see me?”
“I shall be delighted,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton; “but I am perfectly sure you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man.”
“On the contrary,” said Lowell, “I always reserve to myself an hour, from five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette.”
Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution, this hour over a cigarette once a week.
This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling the way in which Lowell’s Anglophobia became milder and milder, ‘fine by degrees and beautifully less,’ until at last it entirely vanished. Then it was followed by something like Anglo-mania. Lowell began to talk with the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways which he would formerly have deprecated. The climax of this revolution was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:
“Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have ceased to be able to follow you. The English ladies are—let us say, charming; English gentlemen are—let us say, charming, or at least some of them. Everything is charming! But there is one thing you cannot say a word for, and that is our detestable climate.”
“And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!” said Lowell. “I positively cannot live out of it.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “you and I will cease to talk about England and John Bull, if you please. I cannot follow you.”
In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his own country. There never was a stauncher American than James Russell Lowell. Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed man. Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to Lowell. Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest sonnets. It appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ after Lowell’s death, and it has been frequently reprinted in the United States. It now appears in ‘The Coming of Love.’ It was addressed ‘To Britain and America: On the Death of James Russell Lowell,’
Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
Your fathers drew, for Freedom’s pioneers,
Your English speech, your dower of English blood—
Ye ask to-day, in sorrow’s holiest mood,
When all save love seems film—ye ask in tears—
‘How shall we honour him whose name endears
The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?’Your hands he joined—those fratricidal hands,
Once trembling, each, to seize a brother’s throat:
How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
Between you still?—Keep Love’s bright sails afloat
For Lowell’s sake, where once ye strove and smote
On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.
This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile. Apart from his intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey, Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans. Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during several years they saw each other nearly every day. That was before Whistler’s genius had received full recognition. I may recall that during a certain controversy concerning Whistler’s animosity against the Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the ‘Times’ of August 12, 1903:—
“In the ‘Times’ of to-day Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., says: ‘I was on friendly terms with Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never heard him at any time testify animosity against the Academy or its members.’
My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty years, but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so intimate that during part of this period we met almost every day. Indeed, at one time we were jointly engaged on a weekly periodical called ‘Piccadilly,’ for which Du Maurier designed the cover, and for which Whistler furnished his very first lithographs, by the valuable aid of Mr. T. Way. During that time there were not many days when he failed to ‘testify animosity’ against the Academy and its members. To say the truth, the testifications on this subject by ‘Jimmy,’ as he was then called, were a little afflictive to his friends. Whether he was right or wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified to express an opinion.
May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my admiration of your New York Correspondent’s amazingly vivid portrait of one of the most vivid personalities of our time? It is a masterpiece. . . . ”
When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most appreciative estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for the ‘Athenæum.’ I am tempted to quote it nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with American literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words of mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards Americans:—
“As a personality Bret Harte seems to have exercised a great charm over his intimate friends, and I am not in the least surprised at his being a favourite. It is many years since I last saw him. I think it must have been at a club dinner given by William Black; but I have a very vivid remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have been more than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred to me that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles Dickens, might have been an admirable actor. On that account the following incident is worth recording. A friend of mine, an American poet, who at that time was living in London, brought him to my chambers, and did me the honour of introducing me to him. Bret Harte had read something about the London music-halls, and proposed that we should all three take a drive round the town and see something of them. At that time these places took a very different position in public estimation from what they appear to be doing now. People then considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very inane, as, indeed, they were, and were shy about going to them. I hope they have improved now, for they seem to have become quite fashionable. Our first visit was to the Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one or two songs that gave the audience immense delight—some comic, some more comic from being sentimental-maudlin. And we saw one or two shapeless women in tights. Then we went to the ‘Oxford,’ and saw something on exactly the same lines. In fact, the performers seemed to be the same as those we had just been seeing. Then we went to other places of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to the distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women seemed to be finding so amusing. At that time, indeed, the almost only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the theatres was that at Evans’s supper-rooms, where, under the auspices of the famous Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh rarebit while listening to the ‘Chough and Crow’ and ‘The Men of Harlech,’ given admirably by choir-boys. Years passed before I saw Bret Harte again. I met him at a little breakfast party, and he amused those who sat near him by giving an account of what he had seen at the music-halls—an account so graphic that I think a fine actor was lost in him. He not only vivified every incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every performer in a peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the humour of it. His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ fame. This proved to me what a genius he had for accurate observation, and also what a remarkable memory for the details of a scene. His death has touched English people very deeply.
It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte—easy to say that he was a disciple of Dickens—easy to say that in richness, massiveness, and variety he fell far short of his great and beloved master. No one was so ready to say all this and more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte himself. For of all the writers of his time he was perhaps the most modest, the most unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where he believed honour to be due.
But the comparison between the English and American story-tellers must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of the latter. If Dickens showed great superiority to Bret Harte on one side of the imaginative writer’s equipment, there were, I must think, other sides of that equipment on which the superiority was Bret Harte’s.
Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of universal criticism Bret Harte’s reputation will be found to be of the usual ephemeral kind. It is, of course, impossible to speak on such matters with anything like confidence. But it does seem to me that Bret Harte’s reputation is more likely than is generally supposed to ripen into what we call fame. For in his short stories—in the best of them, at least—there is a certain note quite indescribable by any adjective—a note which is, I believe, always to be felt in the literature that survives. The charge of not being original is far too frequently brought against the imaginative writers of America. What do we mean by ‘originality’? Scott did not invent the historic method. Dickens simply carried the method of Smollett further, and with wider range. Thackeray is admittedly the nineteenth century Fielding. Perhaps, indeed, there is but one absolutely original writer of prose fiction of the nineteenth century—Nathaniel Hawthorne. By original I mean simply original. I do not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his epoch. But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a fiction in which the material world and the spiritual world were not merely brought into touch, but were positively intermingled one with the other.
Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material for literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly fascinating kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it adequately. This is what I mean: in the wonderful history of the nineteenth century there are no more picturesque figures than those goldseekers—those ‘Argonauts’ of the Pacific slope—who in 1848 and 1849 showed the world what grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call ‘the Anglo-Saxon race.’ The Australian gold-diggers of 1851 who followed them, although they were picturesque and sturdy too, were not exactly of the strain of the original Argonauts. The romance of the thing had been in some degree worn away. The land of the Golden Fleece had degenerated into a Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Moreover, the Tom Tiddler’s Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a comparatively easy distance from the Antipodean centre of civilization. ‘Canvas Town’ could easily be reached from Sydney. But to reach the Golden Fleece sought by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer had before him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind. Every Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of gold. He must either trek overland—that is to say, over those vast prairies and then over those vast mountain chains which to men of the time of Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up the limitless ‘far West’ regions which only a few pioneers had dared to cross—or else he must take a journey, equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy vessel in which he could get a passage. It follows that for an adventurer to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece at all implied in itself that grit which adventurers of the Anglo-Saxon type are generally supposed to show in a special degree. What kind of men these Argonauts were, and what kind of life they led, the people of the Eastern states of America and the people of England had for years been trying to gather from newspaper reports and other sources; but had it not been for the genius of Bret Harte this most picturesque chapter of nineteenth-century history would have been obliterated and forgotten. Thanks to the admirable American writer whom England had the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many years, those wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the Sierra Nevada are as familiar to us as is Dickens’s London. Surely those who talk of Bret Harte as being ‘Dickens among the Californian pines’ do not consider what their words imply. It is true, no doubt, that there was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens and the temperament of Bret Harte. They both held the same principles of imaginative art, they both felt that the function of the artist is to aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him beautiful ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called realism which lowers man in his aspirations—which calls before man’s imagination degrading pictures of his ‘animal origin’—is to do him a disservice. For man has still a long journey before he reaches the goal. Yet though they were both by instinct idealists as regards character-drawing, they both sought to give their ideals a local habitation and a name by surrounding those ideals with vividly painted real accessories, as real as those of the ugliest realist.
With regard to Bret Harte’s Argonauts and the romantic scenery in which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a bold thing to say whether Dickens could or could not have painted them, and whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or would not have been as good as Bret Harte’s pictures. But Dickens never did paint these Argonauts; he never had the chance of painting them. Bret Harte did paint them, and succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens succeeded in painting certain classes of London life. Now, assuredly, I should have never dreamt of instituting a comparison of this kind between two of the most delightful writers and the most delightful men that have lived in my time had not critics been doing so to the disparagement of one of them. But if one of these writers must be set up against another, I feel that something should be said upon the other side of the question—I feel that something should be said on those points where the American had the advantage. Take the question of atmosphere, for instance. Let us not forget how enormously important is atmosphere in any imaginative picture of life. Without going so far as to say that atmosphere is as important, or nearly as important, as character, let me ask, What was it that captured the readers of ‘Robinson Crusoe’? Was it the character of Defoe’s hero, or was it the scenery and the atmosphere in which he placed him? Again, see what an important part scenery and atmosphere played in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ in ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ in ‘Marmion,’ and in ‘Waverley.’ And surely it was the atmosphere of Byron’s ‘Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair,’ that mainly gave these poems their vogue. And, in a certain sense, it may be said that Dickens gave to his readers a new atmosphere, for he was the first to explore what was something new to the reading world—the great surging low-life of London and the life of the lower stratum of its middle class. It seems that the pure novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and picturesque atmosphere. It was natural for England to look to American writers to enrich English literature with a new imaginative atmosphere, and she did not look in vain. But, notwithstanding all that had been done by writers like Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and others to bring American atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave us an atmosphere that was American and yet as new as though the above-mentioned writers had never written. He had the advantage of depicting a scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his predecessors as it was unlike everything else in the world. It is doubtful whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as the mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and Canada.
Every one is born with an instinct for loving some particular kind of scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the birth-environment as is generally supposed. It would have been of no avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty canons, peaks, and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had had a natural genius for loving and depicting them; and this, undoubtedly, he had, as we see by the effect upon us of his descriptions. Once read, his pictures are never forgotten. But it was not merely that the scenery and atmosphere of Bret Harte’s stories are new—the point is that the social mechanism in which his characters move is also new. And if it cannot be denied that in temperament his characters are allied to the characters of Dickens, we must not make too much of this. Notwithstanding all the freshness and newness of Dickens’s characters they were entirely the slaves of English sanctions. Those incongruities which gave them their humourous side arose from their contradicting the English social sanctions around them. But in Bret Harte’s Argonauts we get characters that move entirely outside those sanctions of civilization with which the reader is familiar. And this is why the violent contrasts in his stories seem, somehow, to be better authenticated than do the equally violent contrasts in Dickens’s stories. Bret Harte’s characters are amenable to no laws except the improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch. And yet underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep ‘law-abidingness’ which the late Grant Allen despised as being ‘the Anglo-Saxon characteristic.’ To my mind, indeed, there is nothing so new, fresh, and piquant in the fiction of my time as Bret Harte’s pictures of the mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right outside all the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own peculiar instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.
We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from the old sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good deal of that natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was surrendered by the first human compact in order to secure its substitute, civil liberty. We get vivid pictures of the racial qualities which enable the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots and flourish in almost every square mile of the New World that lies in the temperate zone. Let a group of this great race of universal squatters be the dwellers in Roaring Camp, or a party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a ‘no man’s land,’ or even a gang of mutineers from the Bounty, it is all one as regards their methods as squatters. The moment that the mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they improvise a code of laws something like the camp laws of Bret Harte’s Argonauts, and the code on the whole works well.
Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence of the presentation, Bret Harte’s pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature. And again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more sought after. This accounts in a large measure for the growing interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
Bret Harte’s stories give the reader a sense of the open air second only to Borrow’s own pictures. And if I am right in thinking that the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
And now what about his power of creating new characters—not characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters? Well, here one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens. Dickens, of course, used a larger canvas—gave himself more room to depict his subjects.
If Bret Harte’s scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories and not long novels? For it is very difficult in a short story to secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to nature—the last perfection of imaginative art.
All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection. In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature. The shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from which a long novel may be free.”
Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd
It is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr. Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described by Dr. Hake in ‘The New Day.’ I can best show the impression that Alpine scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of ‘The Coming of Love.’ But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted ‘Aylwin’ as the representative Welsh novel. And this is not surprising, because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born upon her soil. The ‘Arvon’ edition is thus dedicated:—
“To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my very dear friend, this edition of ‘Aylwin’ is affectionately inscribed.
It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read the proofs of ‘Aylwin’—used to read them in the beautiful land the story endeavours to depict—that the wish came to me to inscribe it to you, whose paraphrases of ‘The Lament of Llywarch Hën,’ ‘The Lament of Urien,’ and ‘The Song of the Graves’ have so entirely caught the old music of Kymric romance.
When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that ‘love of the wind’ which is such a fascinating characteristic of the Snowdonian girls I had only to recall that poetic triumph, your paraphrase of Taliesin’s ‘Song of the Wind’—
Oh, most beautiful One!
In the wood and in the mead,
How he fares in his speed!
And over the land,
Without foot, without hand,
Without fear of old age,
Or Destiny’s rage.* * *
His banner he flings
O’er the earth as he springs
On his way, but unseen
Are its folds; and his mien,
Rough or fair, is not shown,
And his face is unknown.Had I anticipated that ‘Aylwin’ would achieve a great success among the very people for whom I wrote it, I should without hesitation have asked you to accept the dedication at that time. But I felt that it would seem like endeavouring to take a worldly advantage of your friendship to ask your permission to do this—to ask you to stand literary sponsor, as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the great Kymric race with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so grandly associated. For although my heart had the true ‘Kymric beat’—if love of Wales may be taken as an indication of that ‘beat’—the privilege of having been born on the sacred soil of the Druids could not be claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital presentation of that organic detail, which is the first requisite in all true imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting. You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that ‘Aylwin’ would win the hearts of your countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your generous nature; I knew also if I may say it, your affection for me. How could I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the kind thought?
But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there is, if I am to accept the words of another Welsh writer, ‘scarcely any home in Wales where a well-thumbed copy of “Aylwin” is not to be found,’ and now that thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as I know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the story of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time has come when I may look for the pleasure of associating your name with the book.
Moel Siabod and the River Lledr
Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne is not an idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the characteristics of the race to which you belong—know it far too well to dream of asking that question. There are not many people, I think, who know the Kymric race so intimately as I do; and I have said on a previous occasion what I fully meant and mean, that, although I have seen a good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways at the top of them all. They combine, as I think, the poetry, the music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity of the very different race to which they are so closely linked by circumstance—the race whom it is the fashion to call the Anglo-Saxon. And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who knows them as you and I do can fail to be struck by it continually. Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found her—affectionate, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and brave. And I only wish that my power to do justice to her and to the country that gave her birth had been more adequate. There are, however, writers now among you whose pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can hold their own with almost anything in contemporary fiction; and to them I look for better work than mine in the same rich field. Although I am familiar with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe, in their wildest and most beautiful recesses, no hill scenery has for me the peculiar witchery of that around Eryri. And what race in Europe has a history so poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours? That such a country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such an atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is with me a matter of fervid faith.”
As to the descriptions of North Wales in ‘Aylwin,’ they are now almost classic; especially the descriptions of the Swallow Falls and the Fairy Glen. Long before ‘Aylwin’ was published, Welsh readers had been delighted with the ‘Athenæum’ article containing the description of Mr. Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon at break of day.
Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not finer than the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the nobly symbolic conclusion of ‘Aylwin’:—
“We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard, and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn Ddu’r Arddu. And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers’ Llyn and the echoes to be heard there. She then took me to another famous sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers’ Anvil. While we lingered here Winnie gave me as many-anecdotes and legends of this stone as would fill a little volume. But suddenly she stopped.
‘Look!’ she said, pointing to the sunset. ‘I have seen that sight only once before. I was with Sinfi. She called it “The Dukkeripen of the Trúshul.”’
The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire. A horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold. But what Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where the sun had now sunk behind the horizon. Shooting up from the cliffs where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.”
It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell took on the morning when the search for Winifred began was a source of speculation, notably in ‘Notes and Queries.’ Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with this point in the preface to the twenty-second edition:—
“Nothing,” he says, “in regard to ‘Aylwin’ has given me so much pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh friends and my Romany friends. I little thought, when I wrote it, that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent and famous ‘Gypsy Smith,’ and described by him as ‘the most trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language, containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy girl.’
Since the first appearance of the book there have been many interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals, upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of Snowdon.
A very picturesque letter appeared in ‘Notes and Queries’ on May 3, 1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a query by E. W., which I will give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer’s ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen, late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that taken by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent spectacle that was seen by them:—
‘The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was entirely gone. So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense a prospect, I have never beheld since. For the first and only time in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland and Ireland. The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for even a briefer view than that.’
Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer says:—
‘Only from Glaslyn would the description in “Aylwin” of y Wyddfa standing out against the sky “as narrow and as steep as the sides of an acorn” be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance of the mountain. We must suppose the action of the story to have taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on Snowdon.’
With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli in the same number of ‘Notes and Queries’:—
‘None of us are very likely to succeed in “placing” this llyn, because the author of “Aylwin,” taking a privilege of romance often taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story. It may be, indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a rough translation of the gipsies’ name for it, the “Knockers” being gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence “Coblynau”—goblins. If so, the name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide. In any case, the only point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture), is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake. The “Knockers,” it must be remembered, usually depend upon the existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the Snowdon chapters of “Aylwin.”’”
In ‘Aylwin’ Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his readers little pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:—
“The peasants and farmers all knew me. ‘Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)’ they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them. ‘How is my heart, indeed!’ I would sigh as I went on my way.
Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country. Never a trace of Winifred could I find.
At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning.”
His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the following description of the little Welsh girl and her fascinating lisp:—
“‘Would you like to come in our garden? It’s such a nice garden.’
I could resist her no longer. That voice would have drawn me had she spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin. To describe it would of course be impossible. The novelty of her accent, the way in which she gave the ‘h’ in ‘which,’ ‘what,’ and ‘when,’ the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me as the timbre of her voice. And let me say here, once for all, that when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives; but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair. I found that to use colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.
Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book will go out to the world. While a story-teller may reproduce, by means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to represent Welsh accent.”