One thing seems clear to me: having fully intended to make Winifred the heroine of ‘Alwyn’ round whom the main current of interest should revolve, the author failed to do so. And the reason of his failure is that Winifred has to succumb to the superior vitality of Sinfi’s commanding figure. For the purpose of telling the story of Winifred and bringing out her character he conceived and introduced this splendid descendant of Fenella Stanley, and then found her, against his will, growing under his hand until, at last, she pushed his own beloved heroine off her pedestal, and stood herself for all time. Never did author love his heroine as Mr. Watts-Dunton loves Winifred, and there is nothing so curious in all fiction as the way in which he seems at times to resent Sinfi’s dominance over the Welsh heroine; and this explains what readers have sometimes said about his ‘unkindness to Sinfi.’
It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the reader’s heroine. When Madox Brown read the story in manuscript, he became greatly enamoured of Sinfi, and talked about her constantly. It was the same with Mr. Swinburne, who says that ‘Aylwin’ is the only novel he ever read in manuscript, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it in type. Mr. George Meredith in a letter said:—“I am in love with Sinfi. Nowhere can fiction give us one to match her, not even the ‘Kriegspiel’ heroine, who touched me to the deeps. Winifred’s infancy has infancy’s charm. The young woman is taking. But all my heart has gone to Sinfi. Of course it is part of her character that her destiny should point to the glooms. The sun comes to me again in her conquering presence. I could talk of her for hours. The book has this defect,—it leaves in the mind a cry for a successor.” And the author of ‘Kriegspiel’ himself, F. H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as the true heroine of the story. “In Sinfi Lovell,” says he, “Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have scored a magnificent success had he achieved nothing more than this most splendid figure—supremely clever but utterly illiterate, eloquent but ungrammatical, heroic but altogether womanly. Winifred is good, and so too is Henry Aylwin himself, and so are many of the minor characters (the mother, for instance, the aunt, and Mrs. Gudgeon), but it is as the tragedy of Sinfi’s sacrifice that ‘Aylwin’ should take its place in literature.” Yes, it seems cruel to tell the author this, but Sinfi, and not Winifred, with all her charm, is evidently the favourite of his English public. That admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in the ‘Daily News’ that ‘Sinfi Lovell is one of the most finished studies of its type and kind in all romantic literature.’
Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel Berners. In the first place, while Sinfi is the crowning type of the Romany chi, Isopel is, as the author has pointed out, the type of the ‘Anglo-Saxon road girl’ with a special antagonism to Romany girls. Grand as is the character of Borrow’s Isopel Berners, she is not in the least like Sinfi Lovell. And I may add that she is not really like any other of the heroic women who figure in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s gallery of noble women. It is, however, interesting here to note that Mr. Watts-Dunton has a special sympathy with women of this heroic type and a special strength of hand in delineating them. There is nothing in them of Isopel’s hysterical tears. Once only does Sinfi, in the nobility of her affection for Aylwin, yield to weakness. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathy with this kind of woman is apparent in his eulogy of ‘Shirley’:—
“Note that it is not enough for the ideal English girl to be beautiful and healthy, brilliant and cultivated, generous and loving: she must be brave, there must be in her a strain of Valkyrie; she must be of the high blood of Brynhild, who would have taken Odin himself by the throat for the man she loved. That is to say, that, having all the various charms of English women, the ideal English girl must top them all with that quality which is specially the English man’s, just as the English hero, the Nelson, the Sydney, having all the various glories of other heroes, must top them all with that quality which is specially the English woman’s—tenderness. What we mean is, that there is a symmetry and a harmony in these matters; that just as it was an English sailor who said, ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ when dying on board the ‘Victory’—just as it was an English gentleman who on the burning ‘Amazon,’ stood up one windy night, naked and blistered, to make of himself a living screen between the flames and his young wife; so it was an Englishwoman who threw her arms round that fire-screen, and plunged into the sea; and an Englishwoman who, when bitten by a dog, burnt out the bite from her beautiful arm with a red-hot poker, and gave special instructions how she was to be smothered when hydrophobia should set in.”
But Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, in his sonnet, ‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s Funeral Pyre,’ so powerfully illustrated by Mr. Byam Shaw, has given us in fourteen lines a picture of feminine courage and stoicism that puts even Charlotte Brontë’s picture of Shirley in the shade:—
With blue eyes fixed on joy and sorrow past,
Tall Brynhild stands on Sigurd’s funeral pyre;
She stoops to kiss his mouth, though forks of fire
Rise fighting with the reek and wintry blast;
She smiles, though earth and sky are overcast
With shadow of wings that shudder of Asgard’s ire;
She weeps, but not because the gods conspire
To quell her soul and break her heart at last.“Odin,” she cries, “it is for gods to droop!—
Heroes! we still have man’s all-sheltering tomb,
Where cometh peace at last, whate’er may come:
Fate falters, yea, the very Norns shall stoop
Before man’s courage, naked, bare of hope,
Standing against all Hell and Death and Doom.
Rhona Boswell, too, under all her playful humour, is of this strain, as we see in that sonnet on ‘Kissing the Maybuds’ in ‘The Coming of Love’ (given on page 406 of this book).
As Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ are in many ways of special interest, I will for a moment digress from the main current of my argument, and say a few words about it. Of course as the gypsies figure so largely in this story, there were very few writers competent to review it from the Romany point of view. Leland was living when it appeared, but he was residing on the Continent; moreover, at his age, and engrossed as he was, it was not likely that he would undertake to review it. There was another Romany scholar, spoken of with enthusiasm by Groome—I allude to Mr. Sampson, of Liverpool, who has since edited Borrow’s ‘Romany Rye’ for Messrs. Methuen, and who is said to know more of Welsh Romany than any Englishman ever knew before. At that time, however, he was almost unknown. Finally, there was Groome himself, whose articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ had proclaimed him to be the greatest living gypsologist. The editor of the ‘Bookman,’ being anxious to get a review of the book from the most competent writer he could find, secured Groome himself. I can give only a few sentences from the review. Groome, it will be seen, does not miss the opportunity of flicking in his usual satirical manner the omniscience of some popular novelists:—
“Novelty and truth,” he says, “are ‘Aylwin’s’ chief characteristics, a rare combination nowadays. Our older novelists—those at least still held in remembrance—wrote only of what they knew, or of what they had painfully mastered. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot belong to the foremost rank of these; for types of the second or the third may stand Marryat, Lever, Charles Reade, James Grant, Surtees, Whyte Melville, and Wilkie Collins. But now we have changed all that; the maximum of achievement seldom rises above school board nescience. With a few exceptions (one could count them on the ten fingers) our present-day novelists seem to write only about things of which they clearly know nothing. One of the most popular lays the scene of a story in Paris: the Seine there is tidal, it rolls a murdered corpse upwards. In another work by her a gambler shoots himself in a cab. ‘I trust,’ cries a friend who has heard the shot, ‘he has missed.’ ‘No,’ says a second friend, ‘he was a dead shot.’ Mr. X. writes a realistic novel about betting. It is crammed with weights, acceptances, and all the rest of it; but, alas! on an early page a servant girl wins 12s. 6d. at 7 to 1. Mrs. Y. takes her heroine to a Scottish deer-forest: it is full of primeval oaks. Mrs. Z. sends her hero out deerstalking. Following a hill-range, he sights a stag upon the opposite height, fires at it, and kills his benefactor, who is strolling below in the glen. And Mr. Ampersand in his masterpiece shows up the littleness of the Establishment: his ritualistic church presents the inconceivable conjunction of the Ten Commandments and a gorgeous rood-screen. I have drawn upon memory for these six examples, but subscribers to Mudie’s should readily recognize the books I mean; they have sold by thousands on thousands. ‘Aylwin’ is not such as these. There is much in it of the country, of open-air life, of mountain scenery, of artistic fellowship, of Gypsydom; it might be called the novel of the two Bohemias.”
Many readers have expressed the desire to know something about the prototypes of Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. The following words from the Introduction to the 20th edition (called the ‘Snowdon Edition’) may therefore be read with interest:—
“Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years—during the time when he lived in Hereford Square. When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out an edition of ‘Lavengro,’ I prefaced that delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Borrow’s gypsy characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most remarkable ‘Romany Chi’ that had ever been met with in the part of East Anglia known to Borrow and myself—Sinfi Lovell. I described her playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl Isopel Berners.
Since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ I have received very many letters from English and American readers inquiring whether ‘the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to “Lavengro” is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of “Aylwin,” and also whether ‘the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the same as the Rhona of “The Coming of Love?”’ The evidence of the reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the appearance of Rhona’s first letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ where the poem was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very ill,—near her death indeed,—urging me to tell her whether Rhona’s love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the Sinfi of ‘Aylwin’ and the Sinfi described in my introduction to ‘Lavengro’ are one and the same character—except that the story of the child Sinfi’s weeping for the ‘poor dead Gorgios’ in the churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the gypsies, not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded to in the now famous sonnet describing ‘the walking lord of gypsy lore,’ Borrow; by his most intimate friend, Dr. Gordon Hake.
Now that so many of the gryengroes (horse-dealers), who form the aristocracy of the Romany race, have left England for America, it is natural enough that to some readers of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love,’ my pictures of Romany life seem a little idealized. The ‘Times,’ in a kindly notice of ‘The Coming of Love,’ said that the kind of gypsies there depicted are a very interesting people, ‘unless the author has flattered them unduly.’ Those who best knew the gypsy women of that period will be the first to aver that I have not flattered them unduly.”
It is Winifred who shares, not only with Henry Aylwin, but also with the author himself, that love of the wind which he revealed in the ‘Athenæum’ many years before ‘Aylwin’ was published. I may quote this passage in praise of the wind as an example of the way in which his imaginative work and his critical work are often interwoven:—
“There is no surer test of genuine nature instinct than this. Anybody can love sunshine. No people had less of the nature instinct than the Romans, but they could enjoy the sun; they even took their solaria or sun-baths, and gave them to their children. And, if it may be said that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be said of the French! None but a born child of the tent could ever have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written in ‘Les Travailleurs de la Mer,’ as though they were the ministers of Ahriman. ‘From Ormuzd, not from Ahriman, ye come.’ And here, indeed, is the difference between the two nationalities. Love of the wind has made England what she is; dread of the wind has greatly contributed to make France what she is. The winds are the breathings of the Great Mother. Under the ‘olden spell’ of dumbness, nature can yet speak to us by her winds. It is they that express her every mood, and, if her mood is rough at times, her heart is kind. This is why the true child of the open-air—never mind how much he may suffer from the wind—loves it, loves it as much when it comes and ‘takes the ruffian billows by the top’ to the peril of his life, as when it comes from the sweet South. In the wind’s most boisterous moods, such as those so splendidly depicted by Dana in the doubling of Cape Horn, there is an exhilaration, a fierce delight, in struggling with it. It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes about the wind, and that which the wind so loves—the snow.”
And now as to the real inner meaning of ‘Alwyin,’ about which so much has been written. “‘Aylwin,’” says Groome, “is a passionate love-story, with a mystical idée mère. For the entire dramatic action revolves around a thought that is coming more and more to the front—the difference, namely, between a materialistic and a spiritualistic cosmogony.” And Dr. Nicoll, in his essay on “The Significance of ‘Aylwin,’” in the ‘Contemporary Review,’ says:—
“Every serious student will see at a glance that ‘Aylwin’ is a concrete expression of the author’s criticism of life and literature, and even—though this must be said with more reserve—a concrete expression of his theory of the universe. This theory I will venture to define as an optimistic confronting of the new cosmogony of growth on which the author has for long descanted. Throughout all his writings there is evidence of a mental struggle as severe as George Eliot’s with that materialistic reading of the universe which seemed forced upon thinkers when the doctrine of evolution passed from hypothesis to an accepted theory. Those who have followed Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings in the ‘Examiner’ and in the ‘Athenæum’ must have observed with what passionate eagerness he insisted that Darwinism, if properly understood, would carry us no nearer to materialism than did the spiritualistic cosmogonies of old, unless it could establish abiogenesis against biogenesis. As every experiment of every biologist has failed to do so, a new spiritualist cosmogony must be taught.”
And yet the student of ‘Aylwin’ must bear in mind that some critics, taking the very opposite view, have said that its final teaching is not meant to be mystical at all, but anti-mystical—that what to Philip Aylwin and his disciples seems so mystical is all explained by the operation of natural laws. This theory reminds me of a saying of Goethe’s about the enigmatic nature of all true and great works of art. I forget the exact words, but they set me thinking about the chameleon-like iridescence of great poems and dramas.
With regard to the fountain-head of all the mysticism of the story, Philip Aylwin, much has been said. Philip is the real protagonist of the story—he governs, as I have said, the entire dramatic action from his grave, and illustrates at every point Sinfi Lovell’s saying, ‘You must dig deep to bury your daddy.’ Everything that occurs seems to be the result of the father’s speculations, and the effect of them upon other minds like that of his son and that of Wilderspin.
The appearance of this new epic of spiritual love came at exactly the right moment—came when a new century was about to dawn which will throw off the trammels of old modes of thought. While I am writing these lines Mr. Balfour at the British Association has been expounding what must be called ‘Aylwinism,’ and (as I shall show in the last chapter of this book) saying in other words what Henry Aylwin’s father said in ‘The Veiled Queen.’ In the preface to the edition of ‘Aylwin’ in the ‘World’s Classics’ the author says:—
“The heart-thought of this book being the peculiar doctrine in Philip Aylwin’s ‘Veiled Queen,’ and the effect of it upon the fortunes of the hero and the other characters, the name ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ was the first that came to my mind when confronting the difficult question of finding a name for a book that is at once a love-story and an expression of a creed. But eventually I decided, and I think from the worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply the name of the hero.
The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed, did not escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which she made in the ‘Rivista d’Italia,’ gave great attention to its central idea; so did M. Maurice Muret, in the ‘Journal des Débats’; so did M. Henri Jacottet in ‘La Semaine Littéraire.’ Mr. Baker, again, in his recently published ‘Guide to Fiction,’ described ‘Aylwin’ as “an imaginative romance of modern days, the moral idea of which is man’s attitude in face of the unknown, or, as the writer puts it, ‘the renascence of wonder.’” With regard to the phrase itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of ‘Aylwin’—the twenty-second edition—I made the following brief reply to certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England and on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, ‘The Renascence of Wonder,’ ‘is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of Rossetti.’
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, ‘The one great event of my life has been the reading of “The Veiled Queen,” your father’s book of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of man.’ And further on he says that his own great picture symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin’s vignette. Since the original writing of ‘Aylwin,’ many years ago, I have enlarged upon its central idea in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ in the introductory essay to the third volume of ‘Chambers’s Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ and in other places. Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon the ‘Renascence of Wonder in Religion.’
Mr. Watts-Dunton then quotes Dr. Nicoll’s remarks upon the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund. He shows how men came to see ‘once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man’s destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the lifelong struggle of soul, of the power of the unseen.’
“The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately be used as a motto for ‘Aylwin’ and also for its sequel ‘The Coming of Love: Rhona Boswell’s Story.’”
When ‘Aylwin’ first appeared, the editor of a well-known journal sent it to me for review. I read it: never shall I forget that reading. I was in Ireland at the time—an Irish Wedding Guest at an Irish Wedding. Now an Irish Wedding is more joyous than any novel, and Irish girls are lovelier than any romance. A duel between Life and Literature! Picture it! Behold the Irish Wedding Guest spell-bound by a story-teller as cunning as ‘The Ancient Mariner’ himself! He heareth the bridal music, but Aylwin continueth his tale: he cannot choose but hear, until ‘The Curse’ of the ‘The Moonlight Cross’ of the Gnostics is finally expiated, and Aylwin and Winnie see in the soul of the sunset ‘The Dukkeripen of the Trushùl,’ the blessed Cross of Rose and Gold. Amid the ‘merry din’ of the Irish Wedding Feast the Irish Wedding Guest read and wrote. And among other lyrical things, he said that ‘since Shakespeare created Ophelia there has been nothing in literature so moving, so pathetic, so unimaginably sorrowful as the madness of Winnie Wynne.’ And he also said that “the majority of readers will delight in ‘Aylwin’ as the most wonderful of love stories, but as the years go by an ever increasing number will find in it the germ of a new religion, a clarified spiritualism, free from charlatanry, a solace and a consolation for the soul amid the bludgeonings of circumstance and the cruelties of fate.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton, when I told him that I was going to write this book, urged me to moderate my praise and to call into action the critical power that he was good enough to say that I possessed. He especially asked me not to repeat the above words, the warmth of which, he said, might be misconstrued; but the courage of my opinions I will exercise so long as I write at all. The ‘newspaper cynics’ that once were and perhaps still are strong, I have always defied and always will defy. I am glad to see that there is one point of likeness between us of the younger generation and the great one to which Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious friends belong. We are not afraid and we are not ashamed of being enthusiastic. This, also, I hope, will be a note of the twentieth century.
No doubt mine was a bold prophecy to utter in a rapid review of a romance, but time has shown that it was not a rash one. The truth is that the real vogue of ‘Aylwin’ as a message to the soul is only beginning. Five years have elapsed since the publication of ‘Aylwin,’ and during that time it has, I think, passed into twenty-four editions in England alone, the latest of all these editions being the beautiful ‘Arvon Edition,’ not to speak of the vast issue in sixpenny form.
I will now quote the words of a very accomplished scholar and critic upon the inner meaning of ‘Aylwin’ generally. They appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of October 1904, and they show that the interest in the book, so far from waning, is increasing:—
“Public taste has for once made a lucky shot, and we are only too pleased to be able to put an item to the credit of an account in taste, where the balance is so heavily on the wrong side. How ‘Aylwin’ ever came to be a popular success is hard indeed to understand. We cannot wonder at the doubts of a popular reception confessed to by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his dedication of the latest edition to Mr. Ernest Rhys. How did a book, notable for its poetry and subtlety of thought, come to appeal to an English public? That it should have a vogue in Wales was natural; Welsh patriotism would assure a certain success, though by itself it could not indeed have made the book the household word it has now become throughout all Wales. And undoubtedly its Welsh reception has been the more intelligent; it has been welcomed there for the qualities that most deserved a welcome; while in England we fear that in many quarters it has rather been welcomed in spite of them. The average English man and woman do not like mystery and distrust poetry. They have little sympathy with the ‘renascence of wonder,’ which some new passages unfold to us in the Arvon edition, passages originally omitted for fear of excessive length and now restored from the MS. We are glad to have them, for they illustrate further the intellectual motive of the book. We are of those who do not care to take ‘Aylwin’ merely as a novel.”
These words remind me of two reviews of ‘Aylwin,’ one by Mr. W. P. Ryan, a fellow-countryman of mine, which was published when ‘Aylwin’ first appeared, the other by an eminent French writer.
“The salient impression on the reader is that he is looking full into deep reaches of life and spirituality rather than temporary pursuits and mundane ambitions. In this regard, in its freedom from littleness, its breadth of life, its exaltation of mood, its sense of serene issues that do not pass with the changing fashions of a generation, the book is almost epic.
But ‘Aylwin’ has yet other sides. It is a vital and seizing story. The girl-heroine is a beautiful presentment, and the struggle with destiny, when, believing in the efficacy of a mystic’s curse she loses her reason, and flies from poignantly idyllic life to harrowing life, her stricken lover in her wake, is nearly Greek in its intensity and pathos. The long, long quest through the mountain magic of Wales, the wandering spheres of Romany-land, and the art-reaches of London, could only be made real and convincing by triumphant art. A less expert pioneer would enlarge his effects in details that would dissipate their magic; Mr. Watts-Dunton knows that one inspired touch is worth many uninspired chapters, as Shakespeare knew that ‘she should have died hereafter.’
Death came on her like an untimely frost,
Upon the fairest flower of all the field.or
Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
is worth an afternoon of emphasis, a night of mystical elaboration.
Incidentally, the Celtic and Romany types of character reveal their essence. Here, too, the author preserves the artistic unities. Delightful as one realizes these characters to be, full-blooded personalities though they are, it is still their spirit, and through it the larger spirit of their race, that shines clearest. Their story is all realistic, and yet it leaves the flavour of a fairy tale of Regeneration. At first sight one is inclined to speak of their beautiful kinship with Nature; but the truth is that Nature and they together are seen with spiritual eyes; that they and Nature are different but kindred embodiments of the underlying, all-extending, universal soul; that Henry’s love, and Winnie’s rapture, and Snowdon’s magic, and Sinfi’s crwth, and the little song of y Wydffa, and the glorious mountain dawn are but drops and notes in a melodic mystic ocean, of which the farthest stars and the deepest loves are kindred and inevitable parts—parts of a whole, of whose ministry we hardly know the elements, yet are cognisant that our highest joy is to feel in radiant moments that we, too, are part of the harmony. In idyll, despair or tragedy, the beauty of ‘Aylwin’ is that always the song of the divine in humanity is beneath it. Everything merges into one consistent, artistically suggested, spiritual conception of life; love tried, tortured, finally rewarded as the supreme force utilized to drive home the intolerable negation and atrophy of materialism; in Henry’s gnostic father, in the scientific Henry himself, the Romany Sinfi, Winnie whose nature is a song, Wilderspin who believes that his model is a heavenly visitant with an immaterial body, D’Arcy who stands for Rossetti, the end is the same; and the striking trait is the felicity with which so many dissimilar personalities, while playing the drama of divergent actuality to the full, yet realize and illustrate, without apparent manipulation by the author, the one abiding spiritual unity.
In execution, ‘Aylwin’ is far above the accomplished English novel-work of latter years; as a conception of life it surely transcends all. The ‘schools’ we have known: the realistic, the romantic, the quasi-historical, the local, seem but parts of the whole when their motives are measured with the idea that permeates this novel. They take drear or gallant roads through limited lands; it rises like a stately hill from which a world is clearer, above and beyond whose limits there are visions, Voices, and the verities.”
With equal eloquence M. Jacottet on the same day wrote about “Aylwin” in ‘La Semaine Littéraire’:—
“The central idea of this poetic book is that of love stronger than death, love elevating the soul to a mystical conception of the universe. It is a singular fact that at the moment when England, intoxicated with her successes, seems to have no room for thought except with regard to her fleet and her commerce, and allows herself to be dazzled by dreams of universal empire, the book in vogue should be Mr. Watts-Dunton’s romance—the most idealistic, the farthest removed from the modern Anglo-Saxon conception of life that he could possibly conceive. But this fact has often been observable in literary history. Is not the true charm of letters that of giving to the soul respite from the brutalities of contemporary events?”
The character of Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin’ stands as entirely alone among humourous characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs. Partridge. In my own review of ‘Aylwin’ I thus noted the entirely new kind of humour which characterizes it:—“To one aspect of this book we have not yet alluded, namely, its humour. Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is inimitable, with her quaint saying: ‘I shall die a-larfin’, they say in Primrose Court, and so I shall—unless I die a-crying.’” Few critics have done justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the ‘Times’ said: ‘In Mrs. Gudgeon, one of his characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what seems to be a new comic figure,’ and the ‘Saturday Review’ singled her out as being the triumph of the book”. Could she really have been a real character? Could there ever have existed in the London of the mid-Victorian period a real flesh and blood costermonger so rich in humour that her very name sheds a glow of laughter over every page in which it appears? According to Mr. Hake, she was suggested by a real woman, and this makes me almost lament my arrival in London too late to make her acquaintance. “With regard to the most original character of the story,” says Mr. Hake, “those who knew Clement’s Inn, where I myself once resided, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify Mrs. Gudgeon, who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market. Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper. At one time, I believe—but I am not certain about this—she kept a stall on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge, and it might have been there that, as I have been told, her portrait was drawn for a specified number of early breakfasts by an unfortunate artist who sank very low, but had real ability. Her constant phrase was ‘I shall die o’-laughin’—I know I shall!’ On account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an Irishwoman. But she was not; she was cockney to the marrow. Recluse as Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different, and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her impudence, and I may say insolence, Mrs. Gudgeon was a great favourite with the police, who were the constant butts of her chaff.” [383] But, of course, this interesting costermonger could have only suggested our unique Mrs. Gudgeon.
She shows that it is possible to paint a low-class humourist as rich in the new cosmic humour as any one of Dickens’s is rich in the old terrene humour, and yet without one Dickensian touch. The difficulty of achieving this feat is manifested every day, both in novels and on the stage. Until Mrs. Gudgeon appeared I thought that Dickens had made it as impossible for another writer to paint humourous pictures of low-class London women as Swinburne has made it impossible for another poet to write in anapæsts. But there is in all that Mrs. Gudgeon says or does a profundity of humour so much deeper than the humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it wins her a separate niche in our gallery of humourous women. The chief cause of the delight which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she illustrates Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of absolute humour as distinguished from relative humour—a theory which delighted me in those boyish days in Ireland, to which I have already alluded. I have read his words on this theme so often that I think I could repeat them as fluently as a nursery rhyme. In their original form I remember that the word ‘caricature’ took the place of the phrase ‘relative humour.’ I do not think there is anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings so suggestive and so profound, and to find in reading ‘Aylwin’ that they were suggested to him by a real living character was exhilarating indeed.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of humour is one of his most original generalizations, and it is vitally related both to his theory of poetry and to his generalization of generalizations, ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ I think Mrs. Gudgeon is a cockney Anacharsis in petticoats. The Scythian philosopher, it will be remembered, when jesters were taken to him, could not be made to smile, but afterwards, when a monkey was brought to him, broke out into a fit of laughter and said, ‘Now this is laughable by nature, the other by art.’ I will now quote the essay on absolute and relative humour:—
“Anarcharsis, who found the humour of Nature alone laughable, was the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, who only finds food for laughter in the distortions of so-called humourous art. The quality which I have called absolute humour is popularly supposed to be the characteristic and special temper of the English. The bustling, money grubbing, rank-worshipping British slave of convention claims to be the absolute humourist! It is very amusing. The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of ‘contentment with things as they be,’ who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his ‘thick rotundity of belly,’ good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature’s largess, the exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet rains and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side. Between this and relative humour how wide is the gulf!
That an apprehension of incongruity is the basis of both relative and absolute humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of relative humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal, in the case of absolute humour it is the sweet incongruity of the normal itself. Relative humour laughs at the breach of the accustomed laws of nature and the conventional laws of man, which laws it accepts as final. Absolute humour (comparing them unconsciously with some ideal standard of its own, or with that ideal or noumenal or spiritual world behind the cosmic show) sees the incongruity of those very laws themselves—laws which are the relative humourist’s standard. Absolute humour, in a word, is based on metaphysics—relative humour on experience. A child can become a relative humourist by adding a line or two to the nose of Wellington, or by reversing the nose of the Venus de Medici. The absolute humourist has so long been saying to himself, ‘What a whimsical idea is the human nose!’ that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the child’s laughter on seeing it turned upside down. So with convention and its codes of etiquette—from the pompous harlequinade of royalty—the ineffable gingerbread of an aristocracy of names without office or culture, down to the Draconian laws of Philistia and bourgeois respectability; whatever is a breach of the local laws of the game of social life, whether the laws be those of a village pothouse or of Mayfair; whether it displays an ignorance of matters of familiar knowledge, these are the quarry of the relative humourist. The absolute humourist, on the other hand, as we see in the greatest masters of absolute humour, is so perpetually overwhelmed with the irony of the entire game, cosmic and human, from the droll little conventions of the village pothouse to those of London, of Paris, of New York, of Pekin—up to the apparently meaningless dance of the planets round the sun—up again to that greater and more meaningless waltz of suns round the centre—he is so delighted with the delicious foolishness of wisdom, the conceited ignorance of knowledge, the grotesqueness even of the standard of beauty itself; above all, with the whim of the absolute humourist Nature, amusing herself, not merely with her monkeys, her flamingoes, her penguins, her dromedaries, but with these more whimsical creatures still—these ‘bipeds’ which, though ‘featherless’ are proved to be not ‘plucked fowls’; these proud, high-thinking organisms—stomachs with heads, arms, and legs as useful appendages—these countless little ‘me’s,’ so all alike and yet so unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be the me, the only true original me, round whom all other me’s revolve—so overwhelmed is the absolute humourist with the whim of all this—with the incongruity, that is, of the normal itself—with the ‘almighty joke’ of the Cosmos as it is—that he sees nothing ‘funny’ in departures from laws which to him are in themselves the very quintessence of fun. And he laughs the laugh of Rabelais and of Sterne; for he feels that behind this rich incongruous show there must be a beneficent Showman. He knows that although at the top of the constellation sits Circumstance, Harlequin and King, bowelless and blind, shaking his starry cap and bells, there sits far above even Harlequin himself another Being greater than he—a Being who because he has given us the delight of laughter must be good, and who in the end will somewhere set all these incongruities right—who will, some day, show us the meaning of that which now seems so meaningless. With Charles Lamb he feels, in short, that humour ‘does not go out with life’; and in answer to Elia’s question, ‘Can a ghost laugh?’ he says, ‘Assuredly, if there be ghosts at all,’ for he is as unable as Soame Jenyns himself to imagine that even the seraphim can be perfectly happy without a perception of the ludicrous.
If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, his type is not Dickens or Cruikshank, but Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial source of amusement to the absolute humourist he gets to love. Mere representation, therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of art. Exaggeration offends him. Nothing to him is so rich as the real. He pronounces Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’ or the public-house scene in ‘Silas Marner’ to be more humourous than the trial scene in ‘Pickwick.’ Wilkie’s realism he finds more humourous than the funniest cartoon in the funniest comic journal. And this mood is as much opposed to satire as to relative humour. Of all moods the rarest and the finest—requiring, indeed, such a ‘blessed mixing of the juices’ as nature cannot every day achieve—it is the mood of each one of those fatal ‘Paradis Artificiels,’ the seeking of which has devastated the human race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of Villon; of Walter Mapes in the following verse:—
Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”Now it is because Mrs. Gudgeon is the very type of the absolute humourist as defined in this magnificent fugue of prose, and the only example of absolute humour which has appeared in prose fiction, that she is to me a fount of esoteric and fastidious joy. If I were asked what character in ‘Aylwin’ shows the most unmistakable genius, I should reply, ‘Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs. Gudgeon!’”
The publication of ‘The Coming of Love’ in book form preceded that of ‘Aylwin’ by about a year, but it had been appearing piecemeal in the ‘Athenæum’ since 1882.
“So far as regards Rhona Boswell’s story,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “‘The Coming of Love’ is a sequel to ‘Aylwin.’ If the allusions to Rhona’s lover, Percy Aylwin, in the prose story have been, in some degree, misunderstood by some readers—if there is any danger of Henry Aylwin, the hero of the novel, being confounded with Percy Aylwin, the hero of this poem—it only shows how difficult it is for the poet or the novelist (who must needs see his characters from the concave side only) to realize that it is the convex side only which he can present to his reader.
The fact is that the motive of ‘Aylwin’—dealing only as it does with that which is elemental and unchangeable in man—is of so entirely poetic a nature that I began to write it in verse. After a while, however, I found that a story of so many incidents and complications as the one that was growing under my hand could only be told in prose. This was before I had written any prose at all—yes, it is so long ago as that. And when, afterwards, I began to write criticism, I had (for certain reasons—important then, but of no importance now) abandoned the idea of offering the novel to the outside public at all. Among my friends it had been widely read, both in manuscript and in type.
But with regard to Romany women, Henry Aylwin’s feeling towards them was the very opposite of Percy’s. When, in speaking of George Borrow some years ago, I made the remark that between Englishmen of a certain type and gypsy women there is an extraordinary physical attraction—an attraction which did not exist between Borrow and the gypsy women with whom he was brought into contact—I was thinking specially of the character depicted here under the name of Percy Aylwin. And I asked then the question—Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn with much power towards any woman, could she possibly have been Romany? Would she not rather have been of the Scandinavian type?—would she not have been what he used to call a ‘Brynhild’? From many conversations with him on this subject, I think she must necessarily have been a tall blonde of the type of Isopel Berners—who, by-the-by, was much more a portrait of a splendid East-Anglian road-girl than is generally imagined. And I think, besides, that Borrow’s sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon type may account for the fact that, notwithstanding his love of the free and easy economies of life among the better class of Gryengroes, his gypsy women are all what have been called ‘scenic characters.’
When he comes to delineate a heroine, she is the superb Isopel Berners—that is to say, she is physically (and indeed mentally, too), the very opposite of the Romany chi. It was here, as I happen to know, that Borrow’s sympathies were with Henry Aylwin far more than with Percy Aylwin.
The type of the Romany chi, though very delightful to Henry Aylwin as regards companionship, had no physical attractions for him, otherwise the witchery of the girl here called Rhona Boswell, whom he knew as a child long before Percy Aylwin knew her, must surely have eclipsed such charms as Winifred Wynne or any other winsome ‘Gorgie’ could possess. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have been impossible for Percy Aylwin to be brought closely and long in contact with a Romany girl like Sinfi Lovell and remain untouched by those unique physical attractions of hers—attractions that made her universally admired by the best judges of female beauty as being the most splendid ‘face-model’ of her time, and as being in form the grandest woman ever seen in the studios—attractions that upon Henry Aylwin seem to have made almost no impression.
There is no accounting for this, as there is no accounting for anything connected with the mysterious witchery of sex. And again, the strong inscrutable way in which some gypsy girls are drawn towards a ‘Tarno Rye’ (as a young English gentleman is called), is quite inexplicable. Some have thought—and Borrow was one of them—that it may arise from that infirmity of the Romany Chal which causes the girls to ‘take their own part’ without appealing to their men-companions for aid—that lack of masculine chivalry among the men of their own race.
And now for a word or two upon a matter in connection with ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ which interests me more deeply. Some of those who have been specially attracted towards Sinfi Lovell have had misgivings, I find, as to whether she is not an idealization, an impossible Romany chi, and some of those who have been specially attracted towards Rhona Boswell have had the same misgivings as to her.
One of the great racial specialities of the Romany is the superiority of the women to the men. For it is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over language, in comparative breadth of view regarding the Gorgio world that the Romany women (in Great Britain, at least) leave the men far behind. In everything that goes to make nobility of character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imagine a gypsy hero is, I will confess, rather difficult. Not that the average male gypsy is without a certain amount of courage, but it soon gives way, and, in a conflict between a gypsy and an Englishman, it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped the virility of Romany stamina.
Although some of our most notable prize-fighters have been gypsies, it used to be well known, in times when the ring was fashionable, that a gypsy could not always be relied upon to ‘take punishment’ with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly-strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain.
The courage of a gypsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt it. This superiority of the women to the men extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift of music for which the gypsies as a race are noticeable. With regard to music, however, even in Eastern Europe (Russia alone excepted), where gypsy music is so universal that, according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men, and not, in general, the women, who excel. Those, however, who knew Sinfi Lovell may think with me that this state of things may simply be the result of opportunity and training.”
In my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’ I devoted most of my space to ‘The Coming of Love.’ I put the two great romantic poems ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Christmas at the “Mermaid”’ far above everything he has done. I think I see both in the conception and in the execution of these poems the promise of immortality—if immortality can be predicted of any poems of our time. In reading them one remembers in a flash Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own noble words about the poetic impulse:—
“In order to produce poetry the soul must for the time being have reached that state of exaltation, that state of freedom from self-consciousness, depicted in the lines—
I started once, or seemed to start, in pain
Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,
As when a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek.Whatsoever may be the poet’s ‘knowledge of his art,’ into this mood he must always pass before he can write a truly poetic line. For, notwithstanding all that we have said and are going to say upon poetry as a fine art, it is in the deepest sense of the word an ‘inspiration’ indeed. No man can write a line of genuine poetry without having been ‘born again’ (or, as the true rendering of the text says, ‘born from above’); and then the mastery over those highest reaches of form which are beyond the ken of the mere versifier comes to him as a result of the change. Hence, with all Mrs. Browning’s metrical blemishes, the splendour of her metrical triumphs at her best.
For what is the deep distinction between poet and proseman? A writer may be many things besides a poet; he may be a warrior like Æschylus, a man of business like Shakespeare, a courtier like Chaucer, or a cosmopolitan philosopher like Goethe; but the moment the poetic mood is upon him all the trappings of the world with which for years he may perhaps have been clothing his soul—the world’s knowingness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition—fall away, and the man becomes an inspired child again, with ears attuned to nothing but the whispers of those spirits from the Golden Age, who, according to Hesiod, haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such a man produces may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not so greatly as it delights and astonishes himself. His passages of pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his own eyes while he writes; his sublime passages overawe no soul so imperiously as his own; his humour draws no laughter so rich or so deep as that stirred within his own breast.
It might almost be said, indeed, that Sincerity and Conscience, the two angels that bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic dream, bring him also the deepest, truest delight of form. It might almost be said that by aid of sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled to see more clearly than other men the eternal limits of his own art—to see with Sophocles that nothing, not even poetry itself, is of any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil, unless it is in the deepest and highest sense good, unless it comes linking us all together by closer bonds of sympathy and pity, strengthening us to fight the foes with whom fate and even nature, the mother who bore us, sometimes seem in league—to see with Milton that the high quality of man’s soul which in English is expressed by the word virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized, greater than all the rhythms of all the tongues that have been spoken since Babel—and to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the high passion which in England is called love is lovelier than all art, lovelier than all the marble Mercuries that ‘await the chisel of the sculptor’ in all the marble hills.”
The reason why the criticism of the hour does not always give Mr. Watts-Dunton the place accorded to him by his great contemporaries is not any lack of generosity: it arises from the unprecedented, not to say eccentric, way in which his poetry has reached the public. In this respect alone, apart from its great originality, ‘The Coming of Love’ is a curiosity of literature. I know nothing in the least like the history of this poem. It was written, circulated in manuscript among the very elite of English letters, and indeed partly published in the ‘Athenæum,’ very nearly a quarter of a century ago. I have before alluded to Mrs. Chandler Moulton’s introduction to Philip Bourke Marston’s poems, where she says that it was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry which won for him the friendship of Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Yet for lustre after lustre it was persistently withheld from the public; cenacle after poetic cenacle rose, prospered and faded away, and still this poet, who was talked of by all the poets and called ‘the friend of all the poets,’ kept his work back until he had passed middle age. Then, at last, owing I believe to the energetic efforts of Mr. John Lane, who had been urging the matter for something like five years, he launched a volume which seized upon the public taste and won a very great success so far as sales go. It is now in its sixth edition. There can be no doubt whatever that if the book had appeared, as it ought to have appeared, at the time it was written, critics would have classed the poet among his compeers and he would have come down to the present generation, as Swinburne has come down, as a classic. But, as I have said, it is not in the least surprising that, notwithstanding Rossetti’s intense admiration of the poem, notwithstanding the fact that Morris intended to print it at the Kelmscott Press, and notwithstanding the fact that Swinburne, in dedicating the collected edition of his works to Mr. Watts-Dunton, addresses him as a poet of the greatest authority—it is only the true critics who see in the right perspective a poet who has so perversely neglected his chances. If his time of recognition has not yet fully come, this generation is not to blame. The poet can blame only himself, although to judge by Rossetti’s words, and by the following lines from Dr. Hake’s ‘New Day,’ he is indifferent to that:—
You tell me life is all too rich and brief,
Too various, too delectable a game,
To give to art, entirely or in chief;
And love of Nature quells the thirst for fame.
The ‘parable poet’ then goes on to give voice to the opinion, not only of himself, but of most of the great poets of the mid-Victorian epoch:—
You who in youth the cone-paved forest sought,
Musing until the pines to musing fell;
You who by river-path the witchery caught
Of waters moving under stress of spell;
You who the seas of metaphysics crossed,
And yet returned to art’s consoling haven—
Returned from whence so many souls are lost,
With wisdom’s seal upon your forehead graven—
Well may you now abandon learning’s seat,
And work the ore all seek, not many find;
No sign-post need you to direct your feet,
You draw no riches from another’s mind.
Hail Nature’s coming; bygone be the past;
Hail her New Day; it breaks for man at last.Fulfil the new-born dream of Poesy!
Give her your life in full, she turns from less—
Your life in full—like those who did not die,
Though death holds all they sang in dark duress.
You, knowing Nature to the throbbing core,
You can her wordless prophecies rehearse.
The murmers others heard her heart outpour
Swell to an anthem in your richer verse.
If wider vision brings a wider scope
For art, and depths profounder for emotion,
Yours be the song whose master-tones shall ope
A new poetic heaven o’er earth and ocean.
The New Day comes apace; its virgin fame
Be yours, to fan the fiery soul to flame.
Indeed, he has often said to me: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, and I did not throw myself upon my little tide until it was too late, and I am not going to repine now.’ For my part, I have been a student of English poetry all my life—it is my chief subject of study—and I predict that when poetic imagination is again perceived to be the supreme poetic gift, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s genius will be acclaimed. In respect of imaginative power, apart from the other poetic qualities—‘the power of seeing a dramatic situation and flashing it upon the physical senses of the listener,’ none of his contemporaries have surpassed him.
I have said in print more than once that I, a Celt myself, can see more Celtic glamour in his poetry than in many of the Celtic poets of our time. And, if we are to judge by the vogue of ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Aylwin’ in Wales, the Welsh people seem to see it very clearly. Take, for instance, the sonnet called ‘The Mirrored Stars’ again, given on page 29. It is impossible for Celtic glamour to go further than this; and yet it is rarely noted by critics in discussing the Celtic note in poetry.
In order fully to understand ‘The Coming of Love’ it is necessary to bear in mind a distinction between the two kinds of poetry upon which Mr. Watts-Dunton has often dwelt. “There are,” he tells us, “but two kinds of poetry, but two kinds of art—that which interprets, and that which represents. ‘Poetry is apparent pictures of unapparent realities,’ says the Eastern mind through Zoroaster; ‘the highest, the only operation of art is representation (Gestaltung),’ says the Western mind through Goethe. Both are right.” Madame Galimberti has called Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘the poet of the sunrise’: There are richer descriptions of sunrise in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ than in any other writer I know. “Few poets,” Mr. Watts-Dunton says, “have been successful in painting a sunrise, for the simple reason that, save through the bed-curtains, they do not often see one. They think that all they have to do is to paint a sunset, which they sometimes do see, and call it a sunrise. They are entirely mistaken, however; the two phenomena are both like and unlike. Between the cloud-pageantry of sunrise and of sunset the difference to the student of Nature is as apparent as is the difference to the poet between the various forms of his art.”
‘The Coming of Love’ shows that independence of contemporary vogues and influences which characterizes all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, whether in verse or prose, whether in romance or criticism, or in that analysis and exposition of the natural history of minds about which Sainte Beuve speaks. It was as a poet that his energies were first exercised, but this for a long time was known only to his poetical friends. His criticism came many years afterwards, and, as Rossetti used to say, ‘his critical work consists of generalizations of his own experience in the poet’s workshop.’ For many years he was known only in his capacity as a critic. James Russell Lowell is reported to have said: ‘Our ablest critics hitherto have been 18-carat; Theodore Watts goes nearer the pure article.’ Mr. William Sharp, in his study of Rossetti, says: ‘In every sense of the word the friendship thus begun resulted in the greatest benefit to the elder writer, the latter having greater faith in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary judgment than seems characteristic with so dominant and individual an intellect as that of Rossetti. Although the latter knew well the sonnet-literature of Italy and England, and was a much-practised master of the heart’s key himself, I have heard him on many occasions refer to Theodore Watts as having still more thorough knowledge on the subject, and as being the most original sonnet-writer living.’
‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ are vitally connected with the poet’s peculiar critical message. Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin may be regarded as the embodiment of his philosophy of life. The very popularity of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is apt to make readers forget the profundity of the philosophical thought upon which they are based, although this profundity has been indicated by such competent critics as Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the ‘Contemporary Review,’ M. Maurice Muret in the ‘Journal des Débats,’ and other thoughtful writers. Upon the inner meaning of the romance and the poem I have, however, ideas of my own to express, which are not in full accordance with any previous criticisms. To me it seems that the two cousins, Henry Aylwin of the romance, and Percy Aylwin of the poem, are phases of a modern Hamlet, a Hamlet who has travelled past the pathetic superstitions of the old cosmogonies to the last milestone of doubting hope and questioning fear, a Hamlet who stands at the portals of the outer darkness, gazing with eyes made wistful by the loss of a beloved woman. In both the romance and the poem the theme is love at war with death. Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to the illustrated edition of ‘Aylwin’ says:—
“It is a story written as a comment on Love’s warfare with death—written to show that, confronted as man is every moment by signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the unknown country beyond Orion, where the beloved dead are loving us still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything else: a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes intensified when a man has lost—or thinks he has lost—a woman whose love was the only light of his world—when his soul is torn from his body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the ‘viewless winds’ right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter darkness and loneliness. It was to depict this phase of human emotion that both ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ were written. They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer’s soul, sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world—sent out to find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was, without knowing it, akin. In ‘Aylwin’ the problem is symbolized by the victory of love over sinister circumstance, whereas in the poem it is symbolized by a mystical dream of ‘Natura Benigna.’
In ‘The Coming of Love’ Percy Aylwin is a poet and a sailor, with such an absorbing love for the sea that he has no room for any other passion; to him an imprisoned seabird is a sufferer almost more pitiable than any imprisoned man, as will be seen by the opening section of the poem, ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken.’ On seeing a storm-petrel in a cage on a cottage wall near Gypsy Dell, he takes down the cage in order to release the bird; then, carrying the bird in the cage, he turns to cross a rustic wooden bridge leading past Gypsy Dell, when he suddenly comes upon a landsman friend of his, a Romany Rye, who is just parting from a young gypsy-girl. Gazing at her beauty, Percy stands dazzled and forgets the petrel. It is symbolical of the inner meaning of the story that the bird now flies away through the half-open door. From that moment, through the magic of love, the land to Percy is richer than the sea: this ends the first phase of the story. The first kiss between the two lovers is thus described:—
If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,
Is heaven a dream? Is she I claspt a dream?
Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam
And miles of furze shine yellow down the West?
I seem to clasp her still—still on my breast
Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.
I think she kissed these lips, for now they seem
Scarce mine: so hallowed of the lips they pressed.
Yon thicket’s breath—can that be eglantine?
Those birds—can they be Morning’s choristers?
Can this be Earth? Can these be banks of furze?
Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!
I seem to know them, though this body of mine
Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!
Percy stays with the gypsies, and the gypsy-girl, Rhona, teaches him Romany. This arouses the jealousy of a gypsy rival—Herne the ‘Scollard.’ Percy Aylwin’s family afterwards succeeds in separating him from her, and he is again sent to sea. While cruising among the coral islands he receives the letter from Rhona which paints her character with unequalled vividness:—
RHONA’S LETTER
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Wot leaves her till the comin o the swallow. |
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All night I heerd them bees and grasshoppers; All night I smelt the breath o grass and may, Mixed sweet wi’ smells o honey from the furze Like on that mornin when you went away; |
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laugh |
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Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo |
girl-whole |
O Bozzles breed—tans, vardey, greis, and all— |
tents: waggons: horses |
To see dat tarno rye o hern palall |
back |
Wots left her till the comin o the swallow. |
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I woke and went a-walkin on the ice |
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All white with snow-dust, just like sparklin loon, |
salt |
And soon beneath the stars I heerd a vice, |
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A vice I knowed and often, often shoon; |
hear |
An then I seed a shape as thin as tuv; |
smoke |
I knowed it wur my blessed mammy s mollo. [403a] |
spirit |
Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love, |
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He s thinkin on you; don t you go and rove; |
weep |
You ll see him at the comin o the swallow. |
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Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the grass |
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When he wur gone, and freeze the brooklets gillies; |
songs |
There wornt no smell, dear, in the sweetest cas, |
hay |
And when the summer brought the water-lilies, |
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And when the sweet winds waved the golden giv, |
wheat |
The skies above em seemed as bleak and kollo [403b] |
black |
As now, when all the world seems frozen yiv. |
snow |
The months are long, but mammy says you ll live |
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By thinkin o the comin o the swallow. |
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She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver throat |
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Will meet the stonechat in the buddin whin, |
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And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie ull float |
song |
From light-green boughs through leaves a-peepin thin; |
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The wheat-ear soon ull bring the willow-wren, |
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And then the fust fond nightingale ull follow, |
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A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen |
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Still out at sea, the spring is in our glen; |
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Come, darlin, wi the comin o the swallow. |
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In mornin twilight wot you rote to me; |
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They made the Christmas sing with summer birds, |
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And spring-leaves shine on every frozen tree; |
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And when the dawnin kindled Rington spire, |
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And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and lollo |
red |
Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o fire, |
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Another night, I sez, has brought him nigher; |
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He s comin wi the comin o the swallow. |
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And soon the bull-pups found me on the Pool— |
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You know the way they barks to see me slide— |
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But when the skatin bors o Rington scool |
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Comed on, it turned my head to see em glide. |
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I seemed to see you twirlin on your skates, |
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And somethin made me clap my hans and hollo; |
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It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s. |
cutting |
But when I woke-like—Im the gal wot waits |
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Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow. |
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Comin seemed ringin in the Christmas-chime; |
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Comin seemed rit on everything I seed, |
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In beads o frost along the nets o rime, |
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Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed; |
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And when the pups began to bark and play, |
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And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock and wallow |
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Among the snow and fling it up like spray, |
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I says to them, You know who rote to say |
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He s comin wi the comin o the swallow. |
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The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o December |
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Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o spring |
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Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups, remember; |
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If not—for me no singin birds ull sing: |
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No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale |
cuckoo |
Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, [404] over hill and hollow: |
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Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail, |
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For her wot waits the comin o the swallow. |
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Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your han |
mine own |
To that fine rawni rowin on the river; |
lady |
I ll never call that lady a chovihan |
witch |
Nor yit a mumply gorgie—I’ll forgive her. |
miserable Gentile |
Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife. |
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Come back—or, say the word, and I will follow |
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Your footfalls round the world: Ill leave this life |
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(Ive flung away a-ready that ere knife)— |
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I m dyin for the comin o the swallow. |
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