But the interesting subjects touched upon in the last four chapters have led me far from the subject of ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ In its biographical sketch of Mr. Watts-Dunton the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ says: “Imaginative glamour and mysticism are prominent characteristics both of ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Aylwin,’ and the novel in particular has had its share in restoring the charms of pure romance to the favour of the general public.” This is high praise, but I hope to show that it is deserved. When it was announced that a work of prose fiction was about to be published by the critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ what did Mr. Watts-Dunton’s readers expect? I think they expected something as unlike what the story turned out to be as it is possible to imagine. They expected a story built up of a discursive sequence of new and profound generalizations upon life and literature expressed in brilliant picturesque prose such as had been the delight of my boyhood in Ireland; they expected to be fascinated more than ever by that ‘easy authoritative greatness and comprehensiveness of style’ with which they had been familiar for long; they expected also that subtle irony after the fashion of Fielding, which suggests so much between the lines, that humour which had been an especial joy to me in scores of articles signed by the writer’s style as indubitably as if they had been signed by his name. I think everybody cherished this expectation: everybody took it for granted that heaps of those ‘intellectual nuggets’ about which Minto talked would smother the writer as a story-teller, that the book as literature would be admirable—but as a novel a failure. Great as was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s esoteric reputation, I believe that many of the booksellers declined (as the author had prophesied that they would decline) to subscribe for the book. They expected it to fail as a marketable novel—to fail in that ‘artistic convincement’ of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself so often written. What neither I nor any one else save those who, like Mr. Swinburne, had read the story in manuscript, did expect, was a story so poetic, so unworldly, and so romantic that it might have been written by a young Celt—a love story of intense passion, which yet by some magic art was as convincingly realistic as any one of those ‘flat-footed’ sermon-stories which the late W. E. Henley was wont to deride.
In fact, from this point of view ‘Aylwin’ is a curiosity of literature. The truth seems to be, however, that, as one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s most intimate friends has said, its style represents one facet only of Watts-Dunton’s character. Like most of us, he has a dual existence—one half of him is the romantic youth, Henry Aylwin, the other half is the world-wise philosopher of the ‘Athenæum.’ This other half of him lives in the style of another story altogether, where the creator of Henry Aylwin takes up the very different role of a man of the world. Now I have views of my own upon this duality. I think that if the brilliant worldly writing of the mass of his work be examined, it will be found to be a ‘shot’ texture scintillating with various hues where sometimes repressed passion and sometimes mysticism and dreams are constantly shining through the glossy silk of the style. Sometimes from the smooth, even flow of the criticisms gleams of a passion far more intense than anything in ‘Aylwin’ will flash out. I will cite a passage in his critical writings wherein he discusses the inadequacy of language to express the deepest passion:—
“As compared with sculpture and painting the great infirmity of poetry, as an ‘imitation’ of nature, is of course that the medium is always and of necessity words—even when no words could, in the dramatic situation, have been spoken. It is not only Homer who is obliged sometimes to forget that passion when at white heat is never voluble, is scarcely even articulate; the dramatists also are obliged to forget that in love and in hate, at their tensest, words seem weak and foolish when compared with the silent and satisfying triumph and glory of deeds, such as the plastic arts can render. This becomes manifest enough when we compare the Niobe group or the Laocoon group, or the great dramatic paintings of the modern world, with even the finest efforts of dramatic poetry, such as the speech of Andromache to Hector, or the speech of Priam to Achilles; nay, such as even the cries of Cassandra in the ‘Agamemnon,’ or the wailings of Lear over the dead Cordelia. Even when writing the words uttered by Œdipus, as the terrible truth breaks in upon his soul, Sophocles must have felt that, in the holiest chambers of sorrow and in the highest agonies of suffering reigns that awful silence which not poetry, but painting sometimes, and sculpture always, can render. What human sounds could render the agony of Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as we see them in the sculptor’s rendering? Not articulate speech at all; not words, but wails. It is the same with hate; it is the same with love. We are not speaking merely of the unpacking of the heart in which the angry warriors of the ‘Ilaid’ indulge. Even such subtle writing as that of Æschylus and Sophocles falls below the work of the painter. Hate, though voluble perhaps as Clytæmnestra’s when hate is at that red-heat glow which the poet can render, changes in a moment whenever that redness has been fanned into hatred’s own last complexion—whiteness as of iron at the melting-point—when the heart has grown far too big to be ‘unpacked’ at all, and even the bitter epigrams of hate’s own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier’s snap before he fleshes his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as she springs before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish for a soul to which language at its tensest has become idle play. But this is just what cannot be rendered by an art whose medium consists solely of words.”
Could any one reading this passage doubt that the real work of the writer was to write poetry and not criticism?
But this makes it necessary for me to say a word upon the question of the style of ‘Aylwin’—a question that has often been discussed. The fascination of the story is largely due to the magnetism of its style. And yet how undecorated, not to say how plain, the style in the more level passages often is! When the story was first written the style glittered with literary ornament. But the author deliberately struck out many of the poetic passages. Coleridge tells us that an imaginative work should be written in a simple style, and that the more imaginative the work the simpler the style should be. I often think of these words when I labour in the sweat of my brow to read the word-twisting of precious writers! It is then that I think of ‘Aylwin,’ for ‘Aylwin’ stands alone in its power of carrying the reader away to climes of new and rare beauty peopled by characters as new and as rare. It was clearly Mr. Watts-Dunton’s idea that what such a story needed was mastery over ‘artistic convincement.’ He has more than once commented on the acuteness of Edgar Poe’s remark that in the expression of true passion there is always something of the ‘homely.’ ‘Aylwin’ is one long unbroken cry of passion, mostly in a ‘homely key,’ but this ‘homely key’ is left for loftier keys whenever the proper time for the change comes. In beginning to write, the author seems to have felt that ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ and the quest of beauty, although adequately expressed in the poetry of the newest romantic school—that of Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne—had only found its way into imaginative prose through the highly elaborate technique of his friend, George Meredith. He seems to have felt that the great imaginative prose writers of the time, Thackeray, Dickens, and Charles Reade, were in a certain sense Philistines of genius who had done but little to bring beauty, romance and culture into prose fiction. And as to Meredith, though a true child of romanticism who never did and never could breathe the air of Philistia, he had adopted a style too self-conscious and rich in literary qualities to touch that great English pulse that beats outside the walls of the Palace of Art.
Mrs. Craigie has lately declared that at the present moment all the most worthy English novelists, with the exception of Mr. Thomas Hardy, are distinguished disciples of Mr. George Meredith. But to belong to ‘the mock Meredithians’ is not a matter of very great glory. No one adores the work of Mr. Meredith more than I do, though my admiration is not without a certain leaven of distress at his literary self-consciousness. I say this with all reverence. Great as Meredith is, he would be greater still if, when he is delivering his priceless gifts to us, he would bear in mind that immortal injunction in ‘King Henry the Fourth’—‘I prithee now, deliver them like a man of this world.’ I can imagine how the great humourist must smile when the dolt, who once found ‘obscurity’ in his most lucid passages, praises him for the defects of his qualities, and calls upon all other writers to write Meredithese.
To be a classic—to be immortal—it is necessary for an imaginative writer to deliver his message like ‘a man of this world.’ Shakespeare himself, occasionally, will seem to forget this, but only occasionally, and we never think of it when falling down in worship before the shrine of the greatest imaginative writer that has ever lived. Dr. Johnson said that all work which lives is without eccentricity. Now, entranced as I have been, ever since I was a boy, by Meredith’s incomparable romances, I long to set my imagination free of Meredith and fly away with his characters, as I can fly away with the characters of the classic imaginative writers from Homer down to Sir Walter Scott. But I seldom succeed. Now and then I escape from the obsession of the picture of the great writer seated in his chalet with the summer sunshine gleaming round his picturesque head, but illuminating also all too vividly his inkstand, and his paper and his pens; but only now and then, and not for long. If it had pleased Nature to give him less intellectual activity, less humour and wit and literary brilliance, I feel sure that he would have lived more securely as an English classic. I adore him, I say, and although I do not know him personally, I love him. We all love him: and when I am in a very charitable mood, I can even forgive him for having begotten the ‘mock Meredithians.’ As to those who, without a spark of his humourous imagination and supple intellect can manage to mimic his style, if they only knew what a torture their word-twisting is to the galled reviewer who wants to get on, and to know what on earth they have got to tell him, I think they would display a little more mercy, and even for pity’s sake deliver their gifts like ‘men of this world.’
In ‘Aylwin’ Mr. Watts-Dunton seems to have determined to be as romantic and as beautiful as the romanticists in poetry had ever dared to be, and yet by aid of a simplicity and a naïveté of diction of which his critical writings had shown no sign, to carry his beautiful dreams into Philistia itself. Never was there a bolder enterprise, and never was there a greater success. That ‘Aylwin’ would appeal strongly to imaginative minds was certain, for it was written by ‘the most widely cultivated writer in the English belles lettres of our time.’ But the strange thing is that a story so full of romance, poetry, and beauty, should also appeal to other minds.
I am no believer in mere popularity, and I confess that when books come before me for review I cannot help casting a suspicious eye upon any story by any of the very popular novelists of the day. But it is necessary to explain why the most poetical romance written within the last century is also one of the most popular. It was in part owing to its simplicity of diction, its naïveté of utterance, and its freedom from superfluous literary ornamentation. I do not as a rule like using a foreign word when an English word will do the same work, but neither ‘artlessness,’ ‘candour’ nor ‘simplicity’ seem to express the unique charm of the style of ‘Aylwin,’ so completely as does the word ‘naïveté.’ It was by naïveté, I believe, that he carried the Renascence of Wonder into quarters which his great brothers in the Romantic movement could never reach.
For such a writer as he, the critic steeped in all the latest subtleties of the style of to-day, and indeed the originator of many of these subtleties, the intimate friend of such superb and elaborate literary artists as Tennyson, Browning, George Meredith, Rossetti and Swinburne, it must have been inconceivably difficult to write the ‘working portions’ of his narrative in a style as unbookish at times as if he had written in the pre-Meredithian epoch. Having set out to convince his readers of the truth of what he was telling them, he determined to sacrifice all literary ‘self-indulgence’ to that end. I do not recollect that any critic, when the book came out, noted this. But if ‘Aylwin’ had been a French book published in France, the naïve style adopted by the autobiographer would have been recognized by the critics as the crowning proof of the author’s dramatic genius. Whenever the style seems most to suggest the pre-Meredithian writers, it is because the story is an autobiography and because the hero lived in pre-Meredithian times. Difficult as was Thackeray’s tour de force in ‘Esmond,’ it was nothing to the tour de force of ‘Aylwin.’ The tale is told ‘as though inspired by the very spirit of youth’ because the hero was a youth when he told it. It is hard to imagine a writer past the meridian of life being able to write a story ‘more flushed with the glory and the passion and the wonder of youth than any other in English fiction.’
It should be noted that whenever the incidents become especially tragic or romantic or weird or poetic, the ‘homeliness’ of the style goes—the style at once rises to the occasion, it becomes not only rich, but too rich for prose. I have now and then heard certain word-twisters of second-hand Meredithese speak of the ‘baldness’ of the style of ‘Aylwin.’ Roll fifty of these word-twisters into one, and let that one write a sentence or two of such prose as this, published at the time that ‘Aylwin’ was written. It occurs in a passage on the greatest of all rich writers, Shakespeare:—
“In the quality of richness Shakespeare stood quite alone till the publication of ‘Endymion.’ Till then it was ‘Eclipse first—the rest nowhere.’ When we think of Shakespeare, it is his richness more than even his higher qualities that we think of first. In reading him, we feel at every turn that we have come upon a mind as rich as Marlowe’s Moor, who
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearls, like pebble-stones.Nay, he is richer still; he can, by merely looking at the ‘pebble-stones,’ turn them into pearls for himself, like the changeling child recovered from the gnomes in the Rosicrucian story. His riches burden him. And no wonder: it is stiff flying with the ruby hills of Badakhshân on your back. Nevertheless, so strong are the wings of his imagination, so lordly is his intellect, that he can carry them all; he could carry, it would seem, every gem in Golconda—every gem in every planet from here to Neptune—and yet win his goal. Now, in the matter of richness this is the great difference between him and Keats, the wings of whose imagination, aërial at starting, and only iridescent like the sails of a dragon-fly, seem to change as he goes—become overcharged with beauty, in fact—abloom ‘with splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings.’ Or, rather, it may be said that he seems to start sometimes with Shakespeare’s own eagle-pinions, which, as he mounts, catch and retain colour after colour from the earth below, till, heavy with beauty as the drooping wings of a golden pheasant, they fly low and level at last over the earth they cannot leave for its loveliness, not even for the holiness of the skies.”
I will give a few instances of passages in ‘Aylwin’ quite as rich as this. One shall be from that scene in which Winifred unconsciously reveals to her lover that her father has stolen the jewelled cross and brought his own father’s curse upon her beloved head:—
“Winifred picked up the sea weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.
‘Isn’t it a lovely colour?’ she said, as it glistened in the moonlight. ‘Isn’t it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?’
‘It is as red as the reddest ruby,’ I replied, putting out my hand and grasping the slippery substance.
‘Would you believe,’ said Winnie, ‘that I never saw a ruby in my life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.’
‘Why do you want particularly to know?’
‘Because,’ said Winifred, ‘my father, when he wished me to come out for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.’
‘Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred—how very odd!’
‘Yes,’ said Winifred, ‘and he talked about diamonds too.’
‘The Curse!’ I murmured, and clasped her to my breast. ‘Kiss me, Winifred!’
There had come a bite of sudden fire at my heart, and I shuddered with a dreadful knowledge, like the captain of an unarmed ship, who, while the unconscious landsmen on board are gaily scrutinizing a sail that like a speck has appeared on the horizon, shudders with the knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells, and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit. As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from Winifred’s bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my hair began to stir.”
Another instance occurs in Wilderspin’s ornate description of his great picture, ‘Faith and Love’:—
“‘Imagine yourself standing in an Egyptian city, where innumerable lamps of every hue are shining. It is one of the great lamp-fêtes of Sais, which all Egypt has come to see. There, in honour of the feast, sits a tall woman, covered by a veil. But the painting is so wonderful, Mr. Aylwin, that, though you see a woman’s face expressed behind the veil—though you see the warm flesh-tints and the light of the eyes through the aërial film—you cannot judge of the character of the face—you cannot see whether it is that of woman in her noblest, or woman in her basest, type. The eyes sparkle, but you cannot say whether they sparkle with malignity or benevolence—whether they are fired with what Philip Aylwin calls “the love-light of the seventh heaven,” or are threatening with “the hungry flames of the seventh hell!” There she sits in front of a portico, while, asleep, with folded wings, is crouched on one side of her the figure of Love, with rosy feathers, and on the other the figure of Faith, with plumage of a deep azure. Over her head, on the portico, are written the words:—“I am all that hath been, is, and shall be, and no mortal hath uncovered my veil.” The tinted lights falling on the group are shed, you see, from the rainbow-coloured lamps of Sais, which are countless. But in spite of all these lamps, Mr. Aylwin, no mortal can see the face behind that veil. And why? Those who alone could uplift it, the figures folded with wings—Faith and Love—are fast asleep, at the great Queen’s feet. When Faith and Love are sleeping there, what are the many-coloured lamps of science!—of what use are they to the famished soul of man?’
‘A striking idea!’ I exclaimed.
‘Your father’s,’ replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father’s spectre stood before him. ‘It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture “Faith and Love.” Now look at the picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,’ he continued, as though it were upon an easel before me. ‘You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the sea. In the light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax tapers, a procession is moving through the streets. You see Isis, as Pelagia, advancing between two ranks, one of joyous maidens in snow white garments, adorned with wreaths, and scattering from their bosoms all kinds of dewy flowers; the other of youths, playing upon pipes and flutes mixed with men with shaven shining crowns, playing upon sistra of brass, silver, and gold. Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her breast by a tasselled knot,—an azure-coloured tunic bordered with silver stars,—and an upper garment of the colour of the moon at moon-rise. Her head is crowned with a chaplet of sea-flowers, and round her throat is a necklace of seaweeds, wet still with sea-water, and shimmering with all the shifting hues of the sea. On either side of her stand the awakened angels, uplifting from her face a veil whose folds flow soft as water over her shoulders and over the wings of Faith and Love. A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip Aylwin gave to the world!’”
Another instance I take from that scene in the crypt whither Aylwin had been drawn against his will by the ancestral impulses in his blood to replace the jewelled cross upon the breast of his father:—
“Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt. The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated, until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences. Scarcely had this mood passed before a sensation came upon me of being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words, harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the features of my father; at another, those of Tom Wynne; at another the leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril’s studio.
“‘It is an illusion,’ I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; ‘it is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain and an exhausted stomach.’ Yet it disturbed me as much as if my reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be fighting towards my father’s coffin as a dreamer fights against a nightmare, and at last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and I was in darkness. As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the ‘Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,’ scattering seeds over the earth below. At the pyramid’s base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading with the Queen of Death:
What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached the coffin resting on a stone table. I found, on examining it, that although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free. Then I paused; for to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the blood’s inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a giant. Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff’s story, which at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between Winnie’s father and mine seemed to hang in the air—a fascinating mirage of ghastly horror . . .
At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed the lid violently on one side . . .
The ‘sweet odours and divers kinds of spices’ of the Jewish embalmer rose like a gust of incense—rose and spread through the crypt like the sweet breath of a newborn blessing, till the air of the charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable sweetness. Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any sensuous influence so soothed my soul.
While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.
I opened my eyes. I looked into the coffin. The face (which had been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine. ‘Fenella Stanley!’ I cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon my father’s brow that self-same message which the passions of a thousand Romany ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait hung in the picture-gallery. And the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the opened lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an indescribable reflex hue of quivering rose.
Beneath his head I placed the silver casket: I hung the hair-chain round his neck: I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his love and the parchment scroll.
Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed. I knew not what or why. But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine. Then I rose, and laying my hand upon my father’s cold brow, I said: ‘You have forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long agony. They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling against itself. You, who suffered so much—who know so well those flames burning at the heart’s core—those flames before which all the forces of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and wind—you have forgiven me. You who knew the meaning of the wild word Love—you have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like yourself. You have forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the despoiler of your tomb: you have removed the curse, and his child—his innocent child—is free.’ . . .
I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked myself: ‘Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse? Do I really believe that my restoring the amulet has removed it? Have I really come to this?’
Throughout all these proceedings—yes, even amidst that prayer to Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father—had my reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before described.”
My last instance shall be from D’Arcy’s letter, in which he records the marvellous events that led to his meeting with Winifred:—
“And now, my dear Aylwin, having acted as a somewhat prosaic reporter of these wonderful events, I should like to conclude my letter with a word or two about what took place when I parted from you in the streets of London. I saw then that your sufferings had been very great, and since that time they must have been tenfold greater. And now I rejoice to think that, of all the men in this world who have ever loved, you, through this very suffering, have been the most fortunate. As Job’s faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been tried by the power which you call ‘circumstance’ and which Wilderspin calls ‘the spiritual world.’ All that death has to teach the mind and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms. I, alas! have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a beloved mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows what the word ‘love’ really means. I have never been a reader of philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to Death—about the final beneficence of Death—that ‘reasonable moderator and equipoise of justice,’ as Sir Thomas Browne calls him. Equipoise of justice indeed! He who can read with tolerance such words as these must have known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman as you and I understand it. The Elizabethans are full of this nonsense; but where does Shakespeare, with all his immense philosophical power, ever show this temper of acquiescence? All his impeachments of Death have the deep ring of personal feeling—dramatist though he was. But, what I am going to ask you is, How shall the modern materialist, who you think is to dominate the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow—how shall he confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down? When Moschus lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long, unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile. Your bitter experience made you ask materialism, What comfort is there in being told that death is the very nursery of new life, and that our heirs are our very selves, if when you take leave of her who was and is your world it is ‘Vale, vale, in æternum vale’?”
These quotations may be taken as specimens of the passages of decorated writing which the author, in order to get closer to the imagination of the reader, mercilessly struck out in proof. Whether he did wisely or unwisely in striking them out is an interesting question for criticism.
But certainly the reader has only to go through the book with this criticism in his mind, and he will see that when the story passes into such lofty speculation as that of the opening sentences of the book, or into some equally lofty mood of the love passion, the style becomes not only full of literary qualities, but almost over-full; it becomes a style which can best be described in his own words about richness of style which I have quoted from the ‘Athenæum.’ I do not doubt that Mr. Watts-Dunton was quite right in acting upon Coleridge’s theory; for, notwithstanding the ‘fairy-like beauty’ of the story it is as convincing as a story told upon a prosaic subject by Defoe. In fact, it would be hard to name any novel wherein those laws of means and ends in art which Mr. Watts-Dunton has formulated in the ‘Athenæum’ are more fully observed than in ‘Aylwin.’
Madame Galimberti says in the ‘Rivista d’Italia’:—“‘Aylwin’ was begun in verse, and was written in prose only when the plot, taking, so to say, the poet by the hand, showed the necessity of a form more in keeping with the nature of the work; and in ‘The Coming of Love,’ in which the facts are condensed so as to give full relief to the philosophical motive, the result is, in my opinion, more perfect.” [339] My remarks upon ‘The Coming of Love’ will show that I agree with the accomplished wife of the Italian Minister in placing it above ‘Aylwin’ as a satisfactory work of art, but that is because I consider ‘The Coming of Love’ the most important as well as the most original poem that has been published for many years.
Madame Galimberti touches here upon a very important subject for the literary student. I may say for myself that I have invariably spoken of ‘Aylwin’ as a poem, and I have done so deliberately. Indeed, I think the fact that it is a poem is at once its strength and its weakness. It does not come under the critical canons that are applied to a prose novel or romance. As a prose novel its one defect is that the quest for mere beauty is pushed too far; lovely picture follows lovely picture until the novel reader is inclined at last to cry, ‘Hold, enough!’
In one of his essays on Morris, Mr. Watts-Dunton asks, ‘What is poetic prose?’ And then follows a passage which must always be borne in mind when criticizing ‘Aylwin.’
“On no subject in literary criticism,” says he, “has there been a more persistent misconception than upon this. What is called poetic prose is generally rhetorical prose, and between rhetoric and poetry there is a great difference. Poetical prose, we take it, is that kind of prose which above all other kinds holds in suspense the essential qualities of poetry. If ‘eloquence is heard and poetry overheard,’ where shall be placed the tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin? Grand and beautiful are such periods as these, no doubt, but prose to be truly poetical must move far away from them. It must, in a word, have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet’s object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of cæsuric effects, the great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned diction that are the poet’s vehicle, but at the same time to avoid the expectancy of metrical bars. The moment that the regular bars assert themselves and lead the reader’s ears to expect other bars of the like kind, sincerity ends.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has given us the best of all canons for answering the question, ‘What is a poem as distinguished from other forms of imaginative literature?’ In his essay on Poetry he says:—
“Owing to the fact that the word ποιητής (first used to designate the poetic artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle seems to have assumed that the indispensable basis of poetry is invention. He appears to have thought that a poet is a poet more on account of the composition of the action than on account of the composition of his verses. Indeed, he said as much as this. Of epic poetry he declared emphatically that it produces its imitations either by mere articulate words or by metre superadded. This is to widen the definition of poetry so as to include all imaginative literature, and Plato seems to have given an equally wide meaning to the word ποίησις. Only, while Aristotle considered ποίησις to be an imitation of the facts of nature, Plato considered it to be an imitation of the dreams of man. Aristotle ignored, and Plato slighted, the importance of versification (though Plato on one occasion admitted that he who did not know rhythm could be called neither musician nor poet). It is impossible to discuss here the question whether an imaginative work in which the method is entirely concrete and the expression entirely emotional, while the form is unmetrical, is or is not entitled to be called a poem. That there may be a kind of unmetrical narrative so poetic in motive, so concrete in diction, so emotional in treatment, as to escape altogether from those critical canons usually applied to prose, we shall see when, in discussing the epic, we come to touch upon the Northern sagas.
“Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted against the dictum that substance, and not form, is the indispensable basis of poetry was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the arrangement of words is really a very fine piece of literary criticism. In his acute remarks upon the arrangement of the words in the sixteenth book of the Odyssey, as compared with that in the story of Gyges by Herodotus, was perhaps first enunciated clearly the doctrine that poetry is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristotelian theory as to invention, however, dominated all criticism after as well as before Dionysius. When Bacon came to discuss the subject (and afterwards), the only division between the poetical critics was perhaps between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato as to what poetry should, and what it should not, imitate. It is curious to speculate as to what would have been the result had the poets followed the critics in this matter. Perhaps there are critics of a very high rank who would class as poems romances so concrete in method and diction, and so full of poetic energy, as ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jane Eyre,’ where we get absolutely all that Aristotle requires for a poem.”
Now, if this be so in regard to those great romances, it must be still more so with regard to ‘Aylwin,’ where beauty and nothing but beauty seems to be the be-all and the end-all of the work.
Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff. (From an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
As ‘Aylwin’ was begun in metre, it would be very interesting to know on what lines the metre was constructed. Readers of ‘Aylwin’ have been struck with the music of the opening sentences, which are given as an extract from Philip Aylwin’s book, ‘The Veiled Queen’:—
“Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea know the sea’s prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea, and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it; when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire, then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels, as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near at hand, or, at least, not far off.”
Many a reader will echo the words of a writer in ‘Notes and Queries,’ who says that this passage has haunted him since first he read it: I know it haunted me after I read it. But I wonder how many critics have read this passage in connection with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s metrical studies which have been carried on in the ‘Athenæum’ during more than a quarter of a century. They are closely connected with what he has said upon Bible rhythm in his article upon the Psalms, which I have already quoted, and in many other essays. Mr. Watts-Dunton, acknowledged to be a great authority on metrical subjects, has for years been declaring that we are on the verge of a new kind of metrical art altogether—a metrical art in which the emotions govern the metrical undulations. And I take the above passage and the following to be examples of what the movement in ‘Aylwin’ would have been if he had not abandoned the project of writing the story in metre:—
“Then quoth the Ka’dee, laughing until his grinders appeared: ‘Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest, thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this story of thine—this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.’
Quoth Ja’afar, bowing low his head: ‘Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka’dee! and bold the Ka’dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve—not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah—not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer.’”
Break these passages up into irregular lines, and you get a new metre of a very emotional kind, governed as to length by the sense pause. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been arguing for many years that English verse is, as Coleridge long ago pointed out, properly governed by the number of accents and not by the number of syllables in a line, and that this accentual system is governed, or should be governed, by emotion. It is a singular thing, by the bye, that writer after writer of late has been arguing over and over again Mr. Watts-Dunton’s arguments, and seems to be saying a new thing by using the word ‘stress’ for ‘accent.’ ‘Stress’ may or may not be a better word than ‘accent,’ the word used by Coleridge, and after him by Mr. Watts-Dunton, but the idea conveyed is one and the same. I, for my part, believe that rare as new ideas may be in creative work, they are still rarer in criticism.
And now a word upon the imaginative power of ‘Aylwin.’ Very much has been written both in England and on the Continent concerning the source of the peculiar kind of ‘imaginative vividness’ shown in the story. The rushing narrative, as has been said, ‘is so fused in its molten stream that it seems one sentence, and it carries the reader irresistibly along through pictures of beauty and mystery till he becomes breathless.’ The truth is, however, that the mere method of the evolution of the story has a great deal more to do with this than is at first apparent. Upon this artistic method very little has been written save what I myself said when it first appeared. If the unequalled grip of the story upon the reader had been secured by methods as primitive, as unconscious as those of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights,’ I should estimate the pure, unadulterated imaginative force at work even more highly than I now do. But, as a critic, I must always inquire whether or not a writer’s imaginative vision is strengthened by constructive power. I must take into account the aid that the imagination of the writer has received from his mere self-conscious artistic skill. Now it is not to praise ‘Aylwin,’ but, I fear, to disparage it in a certain sense to say that the power of the scenes owes much to the mere artistic method, amounting at times to subtlety. I have heard the greatest of living poets mention ‘Tom Jones,’ ‘Waverley,’ and ‘Aylwin’ as three great novels whose reception by the outside public has been endorsed by criticism. One of the signs of Scott’s unique genius was the way in which he invented and carried to perfection the method of moving towards the dénouement by dialogue as much as by narrative. This gave a source of new brilliance to prose fiction, and it was certainly one of the most effective causes of the enormous success of ‘Waverley.’ This masterpiece opens, it will be remembered, in distinct imitation of the method of Fielding, but soon broke into the new dramatic method with which Scott’s name is associated. But in ‘Waverley’ Scott had not yet begun to use the dramatic method so freely as to sacrifice the very different qualities imported into the novel by Fielding, whose method was epic rather than dramatic. I think Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself somewhere commented upon this, and said that Scott carried the dramatic method quite as far as it could go without making the story suffer from that kind of stageyness and artificial brightness which is fatal to the novel. Scott’s disciple, Dumas, a more brilliant writer of dialogue than Scott himself, but not so true a one, carried the dramatic method too far and opened the way to mimics, who carried it further still. In ‘Aylwin,’ the blending of the two methods, the epic and the dramatic, is so skilfully done as to draw all the advantages that can be drawn from both; and this skill must be an enormous aid to the imaginative vision—an aid which Charlotte and Emily Brontë had to dispense with: but it is in the arrangement of the material on self-conscious constructive principles that I am chiefly thinking when I compare the imaginative vision in ‘Aylwin’ with that in ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights.’ On the whole, no one seems to have studied ‘Aylwin’ from all points of view with so much insight as Madame Galimberti, unless it be M. Jacottet in ‘La Semaine Littéraire.’ Mr. Watts-Dunton in one of his essays has himself remarked that nine-tenths of the interest of any dramatic situation are lost if before approaching it the reader has not been made to feel an interest in the characters, as Fielding makes us feel an interest in Tom and Sophia long before they utter a word—indeed, long before they are introduced at all. This is true, no doubt, and the contemporary method of beginning a story like the opening of a play with long dialogues between characters that are strangers to the reader, is one among the many signs that, so far as securing illusion goes, there is a real retrogression in fictive art. A play, of course, must open in this way, but in an acted play the characters come bodily before the audience as real flesh and blood. They come surrounded by real accessories. They win our sympathy or else our dislike as soon as we see them and hear them speak. The dramatic scenes between Jane Eyre and Rochester would miss half their effect were it not for the picture of Jane as a child. In ‘Aylwin,’ by the time that there is any introduction of dramatic dialogue the atmosphere of the story has enveloped us: we have become so deeply in love with the two children that the most commonplace words from their lips would have seemed charged with beauty. This kind of perfection of the novelist’s art, in these days when stories are written to pass through magazines and newspapers, seemed impossible till ‘Aylwin’ appeared. It is curious to speculate as to what would have been the success of the opening chapters of ‘Aylwin’ if an instalment of the story had first made its appearance in a magazine.
One of the most remarkable features of ‘Aylwin’ is that in spite of the strength and originality of the mere story and in spite of the fact that the book is fundamentally the expression of a creed, the character painting does not in the least suffer from these facts. Striking and new as the story is, there is nothing mechanical about the structure. The characters are not, to use a well known phrase of the author’s, ‘plot-ridden’ in the least degree, as are the characters of the great masters of the plot-novel, Lytton, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, to mention only those who are no longer with us. Perhaps in order to show what I mean I ought to go a little into detail here. In ‘Man and Wife,’ for instance, Collins, with his eye only upon his plot, makes the heroine, a lady whose delicacy of mind and nobility of character are continually dwelt upon, not only by the author but by a sagacious man of the world like Sir Peter, who afterwards marries her, succumb to the animal advances of a brute like Geoffrey. Many instances of the same sacrifice of everything to plot occur in most of Collins’s other stories, and as to the ‘long arm of coincidence’ he not only avails himself of that arm whenever it is convenient to do so, but he positively revels in his slavery to it. In ‘Armadale,’ for instance, besides scores of monstrous improbabilities, such as the ship ‘La Grace de Dieu’ coming to Scotland expressly that Allan Armadale should board her and have a dream upon her, and such as Midwinter’s being by accident brought into touch with Allan in a remote village in Devonshire when he was upon the eve of death, we find coincidences which are not of the smallest use, introduced simply because the author loves coincidences—such as that of making a family connection of Armadale’s rescue Miss Gwilt from drowning and get drowned himself, and thus bring about the devolution of the property upon Allan Armadale—an entirely superfluous coincidence, for the working power of this incident could have been secured in countless other ways. ‘No Name’ bristles with coincidences, such as that most impudent one where the heroine is at the point of death by destitution, and the one man who loves her and who had just returned to England passes down the obscure and squalid street he had never seen before at the very moment when she is sinking. It is the same with Bulwer Lytton’s novels. In ‘Night and Morning,’ for instance, people are tossed against each other in London, the country, or Paris at every moment whensoever the story demands it. As to Gawtry, one of the few really original villains in modern fiction, as soon as the story opens we expect him to turn up every moment like a jack in-the-box; we expect him to meet the hero in the most unlikely places, and to meet every other character in the same way. Let his presence be required, and we know that he will certainly turn up to put things right. But in ‘Aylwin,’ which has been well called by a French critic, ‘a novel without a villain,’ where sinister circumstance takes the place of the villain, there is not a single improbable coincidence; everything flows from a few simple causes, such as the effect upon an English patrician of love baffled by all kinds of fantastic antagonisms, the influence of the doctrines of the dead father upon the minds of several individuals, and the influence of the impact of the characters upon each other. Another thing to note is that in spite of the strange, new scenes in which the characters move, they all display that ‘softness of touch’ upon which the author has himself written so eloquently in one of his articles in the ‘Athenæum.’ I must find room to quote his words on this interesting subject:—
“The secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader’s imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this they achieve by making the portrait seem to be drawn from particular and peculiar traits instead of from generalities, and especially by hiding away all purposes—æsthetic, ethic, or political.
One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome softness of touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary work with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the work of the portrait painter there does seem a true analogy as regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger or the two Shandys, or Corporal Trim, would have ruined the portraits so completely that they would never have come down to us. Close upon Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is limned with those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of Dickens. After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it be Mrs. Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists follow Mrs. Gaskell.”
Read in the light of these remarks the characters in ‘Aylwin’ become still more interesting to the critic. Observe how soft is the touch of the writer compared with that of a novelist of real though eccentric genius, Charles Reade. Now and again in Reade’s portraits we get softness, as in the painting of the delightful Mrs. Dodd and her daughter, but it is very rare. The contrast between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton in this regard is most conspicuously seen in their treatment of members of what are called the upper classes. No doubt Reade does occasionally catch (what Charles Dickens never catches) that unconscious accent of high breeding which Thackeray, with all his yearning to catch it, scarcely ever could catch, save perhaps, in such a character as Lord Kew, but which Disraeli catches perfectly in St. Aldegonde.
On the appearance of ‘Aylwin’ it was amusing to see how puzzled many of the critics were when they came to talk about the various classes in which the various figures moved. How could a man give pictures of gypsies in their tents, East Enders in their slums, Bohemian painters in their studios, aristocrats in their country houses, and all of them with equal vividness? But vividness is not always truth. Some wondered whether the gypsies were true, when ‘up and spake’ the famous Tarno Rye himself, Groome, the greatest authority on gypsies in the world, and said they were true to the life. Following him, ‘up and spake’ Gypsy Smith, and proclaimed them to be ‘the only pictures of the gypsies that were true.’ Some wondered whether the painters and Bohemians were rightly painted, when ‘up and spake’ Mr. Hake—more intimately acquainted with them than any living man left save W. M. Rossetti and Mr. Sharp—and said the pictures were as true as photographs. But before I pass on I must devote a few parenthetical words to the most curious thing connected with this matter. Not even the most captious critic, as far as I remember, ventured to challenge the manners of the patricians who play such an important part in the story. The Aylwin family, as Madame Galimberti has hinted, belonged to the only patriciate which either Landor or Disraeli recognized: the old landed untitled gentry. The best delineator of this class is, of course, Whyte Melville. But those who have read Mr. Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon Byron in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’ will understand how thoroughly he too has studied this most interesting class. The hero himself, in spite of all his eccentricity and in spite of all his Bohemianism, is a patrician—a patrician to the very marrow. ‘There is not throughout Aylwin’s narrative—a narrative running to something under 200,000 words—a single wrong note.’ This opinion I heard expressed by a very eminent writer, who from his own birth and environment can speak with authority. The way in which Henry Aylwin as a child is made to feel that his hob-a-nobbing on equal terms with the ragamuffin of the sands cannot really degrade an English gentleman; the way in which Henry Aylwin, the hobbledehoy, is made to feel that he cannot be lowered by living with gypsies, or by marrying the daughter of ‘the drunken organist who violated my father’s tomb’; the way in which he says that ‘if society rejects him and his wife, he shall reject society’;—all this shows a mastery over ‘softness of touch’ in depicting this kind of character such as not even Whyte Melville has equalled. Henry Aylwin’s mother, to whom the word trade and plebeianism were synonymous terms, is the very type of the grande dame, untouched by the vulgarities of the smart set of her time (for there were vulgar smart sets then as there were vulgar smart sets in the time of Beau Brummell, and as there are vulgar smart sets now). Then there is that wonderful aunt, of whom we see so little but whose influence is so great and so mischievous. What a type is she of the meaner and more withered branch of a patrician tree! But the picture of Lord Sleaford is by far the most vivid portrait of a nobleman that has appeared in any novel since ‘Lothair.’ Thackeray never ‘knocked off’ a nobleman so airily and so unconsciously as this delightful lordling, whose portrait Mr. Watts-Dunton has ‘blown’ upon his canvas in the true Gainsborough way. I wish I could have got permission to give more than a bird’s-eye glance at Mr. Watts-Dunton’s wide experience of all kinds of life, but I can only touch upon what the reading public is already familiar with. At one period of his life—the period during which he and Whistler were brought together—the period when ‘Piccadilly,’ upon which they were both engaged, was having its brief run, Mr. Watts-Dunton mixed very largely with what was then, as now, humourously called ‘Society.’ It has been said that ‘for a few years not even “Dicky Doyle” or Jimmy Whistler went about quite so much as Theodore Watts.’ I have seen Whistler’s presentation copy of the first edition of ‘The Gentle Art of Making Enemies’ with this inscription:—‘To Theodore Watts, the Worldling.’ Below this polite flash of persiflage the famous butterfly flaunts its elusive wings. But this was only Whistler’s fun. Mr. Watts-Dunton was never, we may be sure, a worldling. Still one wonders that the most romantic of poets ever fell so low as to go into ‘Society’ with a big S. Perhaps it was because, having studied life among the gypsies, life among the artists, life among the literary men of the old Bohemia, life among the professional and scientific classes, he thought he would study the butterflies too. However, he seems soon to have got satiated, for he suddenly dropped out of the smart Paradise. I mention this episode because it alone, apart from the power of his dramatic imagination, is sufficient to show why in Henry Aylwin he has so successfully painted for us the finest picture that has ever been painted of a true English gentleman tossed about in scenes and among people of all sorts and retaining the pristine bloom of England’s patriciate through it all.
In my essay upon Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ I made this remark:—“Notwithstanding the vogue of ‘Aylwin,’ there is no doubt that it is on his poems, such as ‘The Coming of Love,’ ‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ ‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice,’ ‘John the Pilgrim,’ ‘The Omnipotence of Love,’ ‘The Three Fausts,’ ‘What the Silent Voices Said,’ ‘Apollo in Paris,’ ‘The Wood-haunters’ Dream,’ ‘The Octopus of the Golden Isles,’ ‘The Last Walk with Jowett from Boar’s Hill,’ and ‘Omar Khayyàm,’ that Mr. Watts-Dunton’s future position will mainly rest.”
I did not say this rashly. But in order to justify my opinion I must quote somewhat copiously from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon absolute and relative vision, in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’ It has been well said that ‘in judging of the seeing power of any work of imagination, either in prose or in verse, it is now necessary always to try the work by the critical canons upon absolute and relative vision laid down in this treatise.’ If we turn to it, we shall find that absolute vision is defined to be that vision which in its highest dramatic exercise is unconditioned by the personal temperament of the writer, while relative vision is defined to be that vision which is more or less conditioned by the personal temperament of the writer. And then follows a long discussion of various great imaginative works in which the two kinds of vision are seen:—
“For the achievement of most imaginative work relative vision will suffice. If we consider the matter thoroughly, in many forms—which at first sight might seem to require absolute vision—we shall find nothing but relative vision at work. Between relative and absolute vision the difference is this, that the former only enables the imaginative writer even in its very highest exercise, to make his own individuality, or else humanity as represented by his own individuality, live in the imagined situation; the latter enables him in its highest exercise to make special individual characters other than the poet’s own live in the imagined situation. In the very highest reaches of imaginative writing art seems to become art no longer—it seems to become the very voice of Nature herself. The cry of Priam when he puts to his lips the hand that slew his son, is not merely the cry of a bereaved and aged parent; it is the cry of the individual king of Troy, and expresses above everything else that most naïve, pathetic, and winsome character. Put the cry into the mouth of the irascible and passionate Lear, and it would be entirely out of keeping. While the poet of relative vision, even in its very highest exercise, can only, when depicting the external world, deal with the general, the poet of absolute vision can compete with Nature herself and deal with both general and particular.”
Now, the difference between ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Aylwin’ is this, that in ‘Aylwin’ the impulse is, or seems to be, lyrical, and therefore too egoistic for absolute vision to be achieved. Of course, if we are to take Henry Aylwin in the novel to be an entirely dramatic character, then that character is so full of vitality that it is one of the most remarkable instances of purely dramatic imagination that we have had in modern times. For there is nothing that he says or does that is not inevitable from the nature of the character placed in the dramatic situation. Those who are as familiar as I am with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s prose writings outside ‘Aylwin’ find it extremely difficult to identify the brilliant critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ full of ripe wisdom and sagacity, with the impassioned boy of the story. Indeed, I should never have dreamed of identifying the character with the author any more than I should have thought of identifying Philip Aylwin with the author had it not been for the fact that Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to one of the constantly renewed editions of his book, seems to suggest that identification himself. I have already quoted the striking passage in the introduction to the later editions of the book in which this identification seems to be suggested. But, matters being as they are with regard to the identification of the hero of the prose story with the author, it is to ‘The Coming of Love’ that we must for the most part turn for proof that the writer is possessed of absolute vision. Percy Aylwin and Rhona are there presented in the purely dramatic way, and they give utterance to their emotions, not only untrammelled by the lyricism of the dramatist, but untrammelled also, as I have before remarked, by the exigencies of a conscious dramatic structure. In no poetry of our time can there be seen more of that absolute vision so lucidly discoursed upon in the foregoing extract. From her first love-letter Rhona leaps into life, and she seems to be more elaborately painted not only than any woman in recent poetry, but any woman in recent literature. Percy Aylwin lives also with almost equal vitality. I need not give examples of this here, for later I shall quote freely from the poem in order that the reader may form his own judgment, unbiassed by the views of myself or any other critic.
With regard to ‘Aylwin,’ however, apart from the character of the hero, who is drawn lyrically or dramatically, according, as I have said, to the evidence that he is or is not the author himself, there are still many instances of a vision that may be called absolute. Among the many letters from strangers that reached the author when ‘Aylwin’ first appeared was one from a person who, like Henry Aylwin, had been made lame by accident. This gentleman said that he felt sure that the author of ‘Aylwin’ had also been lame, and gave several instances from the story which had made him come to this conclusion. One was the following:—
“‘Shall we go and get some strawberries?’ she said, as we passed to the back of the house. ‘They are quite ripe.’
But my countenance fell at this. I was obliged to tell her that I could not stoop.
‘Ah! but I can, and I will pluck them and give them to you. I should like to do it. Do let me, there’s a good boy.’
I consented, and hobbled by her side to the verge of the strawberry-beds. But when I foolishly tried to follow her, I stuck ignominiously, with my crutches sunk deep in the soft mould of rotten leaves. Here was a trial for the conquering hero of the coast. I looked into her face to see if there was not, at last, a laugh upon it. That cruel human laugh was my only dread. To everything but ridicule I had hardened myself; but against that I felt helpless.
I looked into her face to see if she was laughing at my lameness. No: her brows were merely knit with anxiety as to how she might best relieve me. This surpassingly beautiful child, then, had evidently accepted me—lameness and all—crutches and all—as a subject of peculiar interest.
As I slowly approached the child, I could see by her forehead (which in the sunshine gleamed like a globe of pearl), and especially by her complexion, that she was uncommonly lovely, and I was afraid lest she should look down before I got close to her, and so see my crutches before her eyes encountered my face.”
As a matter of fact, however, the author never had been lame.
The following passages have often been quoted as instances of the way in which a wonderful situation is realized as thoroughly as if it had been of the most commonplace kind:—
“And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?
The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my father’s book, its strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days passed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two, and then returned home and went to bed—but not to sleep. For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be quelled—till the sound of Winnie’s song in the street could be stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and, taking out the amulet, proceeded to examine the facets as I did once before when I heard in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father—
‘Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that materialism is intolerable—is hell itself—to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word “never”! You will find that you dare not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope.’
And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a waking dream.
The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a start of horror, and cried, ‘Whose face?’ Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as if the pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh—where had I seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But upon the picture of ‘The Sibyl’ in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!
‘It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,’ I exclaimed.
Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.
And then Sinfi Lovell’s voice seemed murmuring in my ears, ‘Fenella Stanley’s dead and dust, and that’s why she can make you put that cross in your feyther’s tomb, and she will, she will.’
I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin. Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new. I was feeling the facets. But the tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache were tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, ‘For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.’ . . .
What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse—what agonies were mine as I sat there sobbing the one word ‘Winnie’—could be understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the passionate blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins. . . .
I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were done)—scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a hand-valise: ‘Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and close it again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our skill. And as burglars’ jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark.’”
But after all I am unable to express any opinion worth expressing upon the chief point which would decide the question as to whether the imagination at work in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is lyrical or dramatic, because I do not know whether, like Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin, the author has a dash of Romany blood in his veins. If he has not that dash, and I certainly never heard that he has, and neither Groome’s words in the ‘Bookman’ nor ‘Gypsy Smith’s’ words can be construed into an expression of opinion on the subject, then I will say with confidence that his delineation of two English gentleman with an ancestral Romany strain so like and yet so unlike as Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin could only have been achieved by a wonderful exercise of absolute vision. It was this that struck the late Grant Allen so forcibly. On the other hand, if he has that strain, then, as I have said before, it is not in the story but in the poem that we must look for the best dramatic character drawing. On this most interesting subject no one can speak but himself, and he has not spoken. But here is what he has said upon the similarity and the contrast between Percy and Henry Aylwin:—
“Certain parts of ‘The Coming of Love’ were written about the same time as ‘Aylwin.’ The two Aylwins, Henry and Percy, were then very distinct in my own mind; they are very distinct now. And I confess that the possibility of their being confounded with each other had never occurred to me. A certain similarity between the two there must needs be, seeing that the blood of the same Romany ancestress, Fenella Stanley, flows in the veins of both. I say there must needs be this similarity, because the ancestress was Romany. For, without starting the inquiry here as to whether or not the Romanies as a race are superior or inferior to all or any of the great European races among which they move, I will venture to affirm that in the Romanies the mysterious energy which the evolutionists call ‘the prepotency of transmission’ in races is specially strong—so strong, indeed, that evidences of Romany blood in a family may be traced down for several generations. It is inevitable, therefore, that in each of the descendants of Fenella Stanley the form taken by the love-passion should show itself in kindred ways. But the reader who will give a careful study to the characters of Henry and Percy Aylwin will come to the conclusion, I think, that the similarity between the two is observable in one aspect of their characters only. The intensity of the love-passion in each assumes a spiritualizing and mystical form.”