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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Theodore Watts-Dunton, by James Douglas
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Theodore Watts-Dunton
+       Poet, Novelist, Critic
+
+
+Author: James Douglas
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2013  [eBook #41792]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1904 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+  [Picture: Theodore Watts-Dunton, from a painting by Miss H. B. Norris]
+
+
+
+
+
+                          THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
+
+
+                           POET NOVELIST CRITIC
+
+                                    BY
+                              JAMES DOUGLAS
+
+              [Picture: Decorative graphic, Natura Benigna]
+
+                      WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+
+                           HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+
+                            27 PATERNOSTER ROW
+
+                                   1904
+
+
+
+
+SYNOPSIS
+
+                                                          PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                                 1
+                          CHAPTER I
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER                                    11
+                          CHAPTER II
+COWSLIP COUNTRY                                             26
+                         CHAPTER III
+THE CRITIC IN THE BUD                                       40
+                          CHAPTER IV
+CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM                                 50
+                          CHAPTER V
+EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES                               61
+                          CHAPTER VI
+SPORT AND WORK                                              65
+                         CHAPTER VII
+EAST ANGLIA                                                 72
+                         CHAPTER VIII
+LONDON                                                      87
+                          CHAPTER IX
+GEORGE BORROW                                               95
+                          CHAPTER X
+THE ACTED DRAMA                                            117
+                          CHAPTER XI
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI                                     138
+                         CHAPTER XII
+WILLIAM MORRIS                                             170
+                         CHAPTER XIII
+THE ‘EXAMINER’                                             183
+                         CHAPTER XIV
+THE ‘ATHENÆUM’                                             190
+                          CHAPTER XV
+THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER                                   228
+                         CHAPTER XVI
+A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR                                    242
+                         CHAPTER XVII
+‘THE LIFE POETIC’                                          262
+                        CHAPTER XVIII
+AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS           295
+                         CHAPTER XIX
+WALES                                                      312
+                          CHAPTER XX
+IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE                             321
+                         CHAPTER XXI
+THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION                               345
+                         CHAPTER XXII
+A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES                                  363
+                        CHAPTER XXIII
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION                       372
+                         CHAPTER XXIV
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR                         382
+                         CHAPTER XXV
+GORGIOS AND ROMANIES                                       389
+                         CHAPTER XXVI
+‘THE COMING OF LOVE’                                       393
+                        CHAPTER XXVIII
+“CHRISTMAS AT THE ‘MERMAID’”                               422
+                        CHAPTER XXVIII
+CONCLUSION                                                 442
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+Theodore Watts-Dunton.  From a painting by Miss H.        Frontispiece
+B. Norris
+Reverie.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at ‘The Pines’                    1
+The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.  (From a Water                    28
+Colour by Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)
+‘The Thicket,’ St. Ives.  (From a Water Colour by                   32
+Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)
+Slepe Hall: Cromwell’s Supposed Residence at St.                    36
+Ives.  (From an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
+‘Evening Dreams with the Poets.’  (From an Oil                      68
+Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
+A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Painted and                    92
+Carved Cabinet
+A Letter Box on the Broads.  (From an Oil Painting                 114
+at ‘The Pines.’)
+Pandora.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at ‘The Pines’                  140
+‘The Green Dining Room,’ 16 Cheyne Walk.  (From a                  161
+Painting by Dunn, at ‘The Pines.’)
+One of the Carved Mirrors at ‘The Pines,’                          162
+decorated with Dunn’s copy of the lost Rossetti
+Frescoes at the Oxford Union
+Kelmscott Manor.  (From a Water Colour by Miss May                 170
+Morris.)
+‘The Pines.’  (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)                 262
+A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Lacquer                       266
+Cabinet
+Summer at ‘The Pines’—I                                            268
+A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Chinese Divan                 270
+described in ‘Aylwin’
+Summer at ‘The Pines’—II                                           274
+‘Picture for a Story.’  (Face and Instrument                       276
+designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)
+Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd                          312
+Moel Siabod and the River Lledr                                    314
+Snowdon and Glaslyn                                                318
+Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff.  (From                  342
+an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)
+Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh.  (From a Painting at                     364
+‘The Pines.’)
+‘John the Pilgrim.’  (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)                    416
+
+NATURA BENIGNA
+
+
+   _What power is this_? _what witchery wins my feet_
+   _To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow_,
+   _All silent as the emerald gulfs below_,
+   _Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat_?
+   _What thrill of earth and heaven_—_most wild_, _most sweet_—
+   _What answering pulse that all the senses know_,
+   _Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow_
+   _Where_, _far away_, _the skies and mountains meet_?
+   _Mother_, ’_tis I reborn_: _I know thee well_:
+   _That throb I know and all it prophesies_,
+   _O Mother and Queen_, _beneath the olden spell_
+   _Of silence_, _gazing from thy hills and skies_!
+   _Dumb Mother_, _struggling with the years to tell_
+   _The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes_.
+
+        [Picture: Reverie.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines]
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+    ‘It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide
+    circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full
+    acknowledged: that one thing was—to die.’—DOUGLAS JERROLD.
+
+ALTHOUGH in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living
+writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general
+reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it.
+
+Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong,
+Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source
+of his education.  He replied: “Cambridge, scholastically, and
+Watts-Dunton’s articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the
+‘Athenæum’ from the purely literary point of view.  I have been a reader
+of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I
+should have been without them.”  Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that
+he bought the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ simply to possess one article—Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s article on Poetry.  There are many other men of letters
+who would give similar testimony.  With regard to his critical work, Mr.
+Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on Poetry,
+describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as ‘the first critic of our time, perhaps the
+largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,’ {1} a judgment which,
+according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s
+‘Encyclopædia,’ Rossetti endorsed.  In this same article it is further
+said:—
+
+    “He came to exercise a most important influence on the art and
+    culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many
+    volumes—in the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum’ (since 1876), the
+    ‘Nineteenth Century,’ the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ etc.—he has let year
+    after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always
+    dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous,
+    and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his.
+    But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he is only
+    ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and
+    other poems that, from the ‘Athenæum,’ etc., have found their way
+    into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has
+    contributed to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ‘Chambers’s
+    Encyclopædia,’ etc.  The chief note of his poetry—much of it written
+    in youth—is its individuality, the source of its inspiration Nature
+    and himself.  For he who of all men has most influenced his brother
+    poets has himself remained least influenced by them.  So, too, his
+    prose writings—literary mainly, but ranging also over folk-lore,
+    ethnology, and science generally—are marked as much by their
+    independence and originality as by their suggestiveness, harmony,
+    incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight.  They have made
+    him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not Jeffrey, is
+    a parallel.” {2}
+
+These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, written before
+his theory of the ‘Renascence of Wonder’ was exemplified in ‘Aylwin’ and
+‘The Coming of Love,’ show, I think, that this book would have had a
+right to exist even if his critical writings had been collected into
+volumes; but as this collection has never been made, and I believe never
+will be made by the author, I feel that to do what I am now doing is to
+render the reading public a real service.  For many years he has been
+urged by his friends to collect his critical articles, but although
+several men of letters have offered to relieve him of that task, he has
+remained obdurate.
+
+Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was not an eager
+student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings.  Like most boys born with the
+itch for writing, I began to spill ink on paper in my third lustre.  The
+fermentation of the soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy,
+modelled upon ‘Lycidas,’ on the death of an indulgent aunt, also drove me
+to welter in drowsy critical journals.  By some humour of chance I
+stumbled upon the ‘Athenæum,’ and there I found week by week writing that
+made me tingle with the rapture of discovery.  The personal magic of some
+unknown wizard led me into realms of gold and kingdoms of romance.  I
+used to count the days till the ‘Athenæum’ appeared in my Irish home, and
+I spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into
+ponderous tomes.  Well I remember the advent of the old, white-bearded
+Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes: even now I can smell the
+pungent odour of the damp paste and glue.  In those days I was a solitary
+bookworm, living far from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name
+of the magician who was carrying me into so ‘many goodly states and
+kingdoms.’  With boyish audacity I wrote to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’
+begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naïve appeal
+provoked a smile in Took’s Court.  But although the editor was dumb, I
+exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials, ‘J. D.,’ under the
+solemn rubric, ‘To Correspondents.’
+
+It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles with the
+unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the name of my hero,
+Theodore Watts.  Of course, the sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my
+execrable imitation of ‘Australia’s Mother’ was printed in the ‘Belfast
+News-Letter’ I felt like Byron when he woke up and found himself famous.
+Afterwards, when I had plunged into the surf of literary London, I learnt
+that the writer who had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was
+well known in cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.
+
+There was, indeed, no account of him in print.  It was not till 1887 that
+I found a brief but masterly memoir in ‘Celebrities of the Century.’  The
+article concluded with the statement that in the ‘Athenæum’ and in the
+Ninth Edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ Mr. Watts-Dunton had
+‘founded a school of criticism which discarded conventional authority,
+and sought to test all literary effects by the light of first principles
+merely.’  These words encouraged me, for they told me that as a boy I had
+not been wrong in thinking that I had discovered a master and a guide in
+literature.  Then came the memoir of Philip Bourke Marston by the
+American poetess, Louise Chandler Moulton, in which she described Mr.
+Watts-Dunton as ‘a poet whose noble work won for him the intimate
+friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord Tennyson, and was the first
+link in that chain of more than brotherly love which binds him to
+Swinburne, his housemate at present and for many years past.’  I also
+came across Clarence Stedman’s remarks upon the opening of ‘The Coming of
+Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ first printed in the ‘Athenæum.’  He was
+enthusiastic about the poet’s perception of ‘Nature’s grander aspects,’
+and spoke of his poetry as being ‘quite independent of any bias derived
+from the eminent poets with whom his life has been closely associated.’
+
+When afterwards I made his acquaintance, our intercourse led to the
+formation of a friendship which has deepened my gratitude for the
+spiritual and intellectual guidance I have found in his writings for
+nearly twenty years.  Owing to the popularity of ‘The Coming of Love’ and
+of ‘Aylwin’—which the late Lord Acton, in ‘The Annals of Politics and
+Culture,’ placed at the head of the three most important books published
+in 1898—Mr. Watts-Dunton’s name is now familiar to every fairly educated
+person.  About few men living is there so much literary curiosity; and
+this again is a reason for writing a book about him.
+
+The idea of making an elaborate study of his work, however, did not come
+to me until I received an invitation from Dr. Patrick, the editor of
+Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ to write for that
+publication an article on Mr. Watts-Dunton—an article which had been
+allotted to Professor Strong, but which he had been obliged through
+indisposition to abandon at the last moment.  I undertook to do this.
+But within the limited space at my command I was able only very briefly
+to discuss his work as a poet.  Soon afterwards I was invited by my
+friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, to write a monograph upon Mr. Watts-Dunton
+for Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, and, if I should see my way to do so, to
+sound him on the subject.  My only difficulty was in approaching Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, for I knew how constantly he had been urged by the press to
+collect his essays, and how persistently he had declined to do so.
+Nevertheless, I wrote to him, telling him how gladly I should undertake
+the task, and how sure I was that the book was called for.  His answer
+was so characteristic that I must give it here:—
+
+    “MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,—It must now be something like fifteen years
+    since Mr. John Lane, who was then compiling a bibliography of George
+    Meredith, asked me to consent to his compiling a bibliography of my
+    articles in the ‘Athenæum’ and elsewhere, and although I emphatically
+    declined to sanction such a bibliography, he on several occasions did
+    me the honour to renew his request.  I told him, as I have told one
+    or two other generous friends, that although I had put into these
+    articles the best criticism and the best thought at my command, I
+    considered them too formless to have other than an ephemeral life.  I
+    must especially mention the name of Mr. Alfred Nutt, who for years
+    has been urging me to let him publish a selection from my critical
+    essays.  I am really proud to record this, because Mr. Nutt is not
+    only an eminent publisher but an admirable scholar and a man of
+    astonishing accomplishments.  I had for years, let me confess,
+    cherished the idea that some day I might be able to take my various
+    expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon poetry, and
+    mould them into a coherent and, perhaps, into a harmonious whole.
+    This alone would have satisfied me.  But year by year the body of
+    critical writing from my pen has grown, and I felt and feel more and
+    more unequal to the task of grappling with such a mass.  To the last
+    writer of eminence who gratified me by suggesting a collection of
+    these essays—Dr. Robertson Nicoll—I wrote, and wrote it with entire
+    candour, that in my opinion the view generally taken of the value of
+    them is too generous.  Still, they are the result of a good deal of
+    reflection and not a little research, especially those in the
+    ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ and I am not so entirely without literary
+    aspiration as not to regret that, years ago, when the mass of
+    material was more manageable, I neglected to collect them and edit
+    them myself.  But the impulse to do this is now gone.  Owing to the
+    quite unexpected popularity of ‘The Coming of Love’ and of ‘Aylwin,’
+    my mind has been diverted from criticism, and plunged into those much
+    more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction in which I used to
+    revel long before.  If you really think that a selection of passages
+    from the articles, and a critical examination and estimate of the
+    imaginative work would be of interest to any considerable body of
+    readers, I do not know why I should withhold my consent.  But I
+    confess, judging from such work of your own as I have seen, I find it
+    difficult to believe that it is worth your while to enter upon any
+    such task.
+
+    I agree with you that it is difficult to see how you are to present
+    and expound the principles of criticism advanced in the ‘Encyclopædia
+    Britannica,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ etc., without discussing those two
+    imaginative works the writing of which inspired the canons and
+    generalizations in the critical work—‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of
+    Love.’  As regards ‘Aylwin,’ however, I cannot help wincing under the
+    thought that in these days when so much genius is at work in prose
+    fiction, your discussion will seem to give quite an undue prominence
+    to a writer who has published but one novel.  This I confess does
+    disturb me somewhat, and I wish you to bear well in mind this aspect
+    of the matter before you seriously undertake the book.  As to the
+    prose fiction of the present moment, I constantly stand amazed at its
+    wealth.  If, however, you do touch upon ‘Aylwin,’ I hope you will
+    modify those generous—too generous—expressions of yours which, I
+    remember, you printed in a review of the book when it first
+    appeared.”
+
+After getting this sanction I set to work, and soon found that my chief
+obstacle was the superabundance of material, which would fill several
+folio volumes.  But although it is undoubtedly ‘a mighty maze,’ it is
+‘not without a plan.’  In a certain sense the vast number of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s generalizations upon literature, art, philosophy, and what
+Emerson calls ‘the conduct of life,’ revolve round certain fixed
+principles which have guided me in the selection I have made.  I also
+found that to understand these principles of romantic art, it was
+necessary to make a thorough critical study of the romance, ‘Aylwin,’ and
+of the book of poems, ‘The Coming of Love.’  I think I have made that
+study, and that I have connected the critical system with the imaginative
+work more thoroughly than has been done by any other writer, although the
+work of Mr. Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been acutely
+discussed, not only in England but also in France and in Italy.
+
+The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as that of his
+poetry and fiction.  He poured into his criticism the intellectual and
+imaginative force which other men pour into purely artistic channels, for
+he made criticism a vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his
+irony.  His criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime.  Their vitality
+is not impaired by the impermanence of their texts.  No critic has
+surpassed his universality of range.  Out of a full intellectual and
+imaginative life he has evolved speculations which cut deep not only into
+the fibre of modern thought but into the future of human development.
+Great teachers have their day and their disciples.  Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+day and disciples belong to the young future whose dawn some of us
+already descry.  For, as Mr. Justin McCarthy wrote of ‘Aylwin,’ ‘it is
+inspired by the very spirit of youth,’ and this is why so many of the
+younger writers are beginning to accept him as their guide.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life which, I
+think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the pessimists across
+the history of the soul of man.  That is the aspect of his work which
+calls for the comprehension of the new generation.  The old cosmogonies
+are dead; here is the new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse
+of wonder reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion
+of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna which no
+assaults of science can shake.
+
+But, although the main object of this book is to focus, as it were, the
+many scattered utterances of Mr. Watts-Dunton in prose and poetry upon
+the great subject of the Renascence of Wonder, I have interspersed here
+and there essays which do not touch upon this theme, and also excerpts
+from those obituary notices of his friends which formed so fascinating a
+part of his contributions to the ‘Athenæum.’  For, of course, it was
+necessary to give the charm of variety to the book.  Rossetti used to
+say, I believe, that there is one quality necessary in a poem which very
+many poets are apt to ignore—the quality of being amusing.  I have always
+thought that there is great truth in this, and I have also thought that
+the remark is applicable to prose no less than to poetry.  This is why I
+have occasionally enlivened these pages with extracts from his
+picturesque monographs; indeed, I have done more than this.  Not having
+known Mr. Watts-Dunton’s great contemporaries myself, I have looked about
+me for the aid of certain others who did know them.  I have not hesitated
+to collect from various sources such facts and details connected with Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his friends as are necessarily beyond the scope of my
+own experience and knowledge.  Among these I must prominently mention one
+to whom I have been specially indebted for reminiscences of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his circle.  This is Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, eldest son
+of the ‘parable poet,’ a gentleman of much too modest and retiring a
+disposition, who, from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s first appearance in London
+right onwards, was brought into intimate relations with himself, his
+relatives, Rossetti, William Morris, Westland Marston, Philip Bourke
+Marston, Madox Brown, George Borrow, Stevenson, Minto, and many others.
+I have not only made free use of his articles, but I have had the
+greatest aid from him in many other respects, and it is my bare duty to
+express my gratitude to him for his services.  I have also to thank the
+editor of the ‘Athenæum’ for cordially granting me permission to quote so
+freely from its columns; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging my
+debt to the many other publications from which I have drawn materials for
+this book.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER
+
+
+    “‘The renascence of wonder,’ to employ Mr. Watts-Dunton’s appellation
+    for what he justly considers the most striking and significant
+    feature in the great romantic revival which has transformed
+    literature, is proclaimed by this very appellation not to be the
+    achievement of any one innovator, but a general reawakening of
+    mankind to a perception that there were more things in heaven and
+    earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.”—DR. R. GARNETT:
+    Monograph on Coleridge.
+
+UNDOUBTEDLY the greatest philosophical generalization of our time is
+expressed in the four words, ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’  They suggest
+that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that set in
+after the publication of Darwin’s great book.  This phrase, which I first
+became familiar with in his ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ article on
+Rossetti, seems really to have been used first in ‘Aylwin.’  The story
+seems originally to have been called ‘The Renascence of Wonder,’ but the
+title was abandoned because the writer believed that an un-suggestive
+name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the practical
+point of view.  For the knowledge of this I am indebted to Mr. Hake, who
+says:—
+
+    “During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in Great James Street,
+    several of his friends had chambers in the same street, and among
+    them were my late father, Dr. Gordon Hake—Rossetti’s friend and
+    physician—Mr. Watts-Dunton and myself.  Mr. Watts-Dunton, as is well
+    known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as a
+    writer.  I have heard him tell scores of stories full of plot and
+    character that have never appeared in print.  On a certain occasion
+    he was suffering from one of his periodical eye troubles that had
+    used occasionally to embarrass him.  He had just been telling Mr.
+    Swinburne the plot of a suggested story, the motive of which was the
+    ‘renascence of wonder in art and poetry’ depicting certain well-known
+    characters.
+
+    I offered to act as his amanuensis in writing the story, and did so,
+    with the occasional aid of my father and brothers.  The story was
+    sent to the late F. W. Robinson, the novelist, then at the zenith of
+    his vogue, who declared that he ‘saw a fortune in it,’ and it was he
+    who advised the author to send it to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett.  As
+    far as I remember, the time occupied by the work was between five and
+    six months.  When a large portion of it was in type it was read by
+    many friends,—among others by the late Madox Brown, who thought some
+    of the portraits too close, as the characters were then all living,
+    except one, the character who figures as Cyril.  Although
+    unpublished, it was so well known that an article upon it appeared in
+    the ‘Liverpool Mercury.’  This was more than twenty years ago.”
+
+The important matter before us, however, is not when he first used this
+phrase, which has now become a sort of literary shorthand to express a
+wide and sweeping idea, but what it actually imports.  Fortunately Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has quite lately given us a luminous exposition of what the
+words do precisely mean.  Last year he wrote for that invaluable work,
+Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ the Introduction to volume
+iii., and no one can any longer say that there is any ambiguity in this
+now famous phrase:—
+
+    “As the storm-wind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty
+    billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the
+    effect of the French Revolution.  It was nothing less than a great
+    revived movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic
+    acceptance in all things, including literature and art.  To this
+    revival the present writer, in the introduction to an imaginative
+    work dealing with this movement, has already, for convenience’ sake,
+    and in default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of
+    Wonder.  As was said on that occasion, ‘The phrase, the Renascence of
+    Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing
+    man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious
+    life: the impulse of acceptance—the impulse to take unchallenged and
+    for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are—and the
+    impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.’
+    It would seem that something works as inevitably and as logically as
+    a physical law in the yearning which societies in a certain stage of
+    development show to get away, as far away as possible, from the
+    condition of the natural man; to get away from that despised
+    condition not only in material affairs, such as dress, domestic
+    arrangements and economies, but also in the fine arts and in
+    intellectual methods, till, having passed that inevitable stage, each
+    society is liable to suffer (even if it does not in some cases
+    actually suffer) a reaction, when nature and art are likely again to
+    take the place of convention and artifice.  Anthropologists have
+    often asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark
+    womb of some remote semi-human brain, which, by first stirring,
+    lifting, and vitalizing other potential and latent faculties, gave
+    birth to man?  Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a
+    vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder?  But certainly it is not
+    rash, as regards the races of man, to affirm that the more
+    intelligent the race the less it is governed by the instinct of
+    acceptance, and the more it is governed by the instinct of wonder,
+    that instinct which leads to the movement of challenge.  The
+    alternate action of the two great warring instincts is specially seen
+    just now in the Japanese.  Here the instinct of challenge which
+    results in progress became active up to a certain point, and then
+    suddenly became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have
+    full play, and then everything became crystallized.  Ages upon ages
+    of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were required
+    before the Mongolian savage was developed into the Japanese of the
+    period before the nature-worship of ‘Shinto’ had been assaulted by
+    dogmatic Buddhism.  But by that time the instinct of challenge had
+    resulted in such a high state of civilization that acceptance set in
+    and there was an end, for the time being, of progress.  There is no
+    room here to say even a few words upon other great revivals in past
+    times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian renascence of the
+    ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in philosophical
+    speculation, which had previously been arrested, was revived; when
+    the old sciences were revived; and when some modern sciences were
+    born.  There are, of course, different kinds of wonder.”
+
+This passage has a peculiar interest for me, because I instinctively
+compare it with the author’s speech delivered at the St. Ives old Union
+Book Club dinner when he was a boy.  It shows the same wide vision, the
+same sweep, and the same rush of eloquence.  It is in view of this great
+generalization that I have determined to quote that speech later.
+
+The essay then goes on in a swift way to point out the different kinds of
+wonder:—
+
+    “Primitive poetry is full of wonder—the naïve and eager wonder of the
+    healthy child.  It is this kind of wonder which makes the ‘Iliad’ and
+    the ‘Odyssey’ so delightful.  The wonder of primitive poetry passes
+    as the primitive conditions of civilization pass; and then for the
+    most part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of
+    wonder—the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery of man’s
+    life and the mystery of nature’s theatre on which the human drama is
+    played—the wonder, in short, of Æschylus and Sophocles.  And among
+    the Romans, Virgil, though living under the same kind of Augustan
+    acceptance in which Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, is
+    full of this latter kind of wonder.  Among the English poets who
+    preceded the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed
+    there is no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he
+    can only be slightly touched upon.  He stands at the head of those
+    who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the
+    wonder of the ‘world at hand.’  Of the poets whose wonder is of the
+    simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of
+    the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king.  But
+    it is not the wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in
+    the following sentences.  It is the spiritual wonder which in our
+    literature came afterwards.  It is that kind of wonder which filled
+    the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Webster, of
+    Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the old ballads: it is that poetical
+    attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen
+    powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which
+    man finds himself entangled, dominate it.  That this high temper
+    should have passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance
+    is quite inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction
+    of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract
+    from the Introduction to ‘Aylwin.’  Perhaps the difference between
+    the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian
+    on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better
+    understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective
+    periods.”
+
+Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and relative
+humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type of absolute
+humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin.’
+
+I will now quote a passage from an article in the ‘Quarterly Review’ on
+William Morris by one of Morris’s intimate friends:—
+
+    “The decorative renascence in England is but an expression of the
+    spirit of the pre-Raphaelite movement—a movement which has been
+    defined by the most eminent of living critics as the renascence of
+    the ‘spirit of wonder’ in poetry and art.  So defined, it falls into
+    proper relationship with the continuous development of English
+    literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last century and
+    a half, and is no longer to be considered an isolated phenomenon
+    called into being by an erratic genius.  The English Romantic school,
+    from its first inception with Chatterton, Macpherson, and the
+    publication of the Percy ballads, does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+    finely pointed out, aim merely at the revival of natural language; it
+    seeks rather to reach through art and the forgotten world of old
+    romance, that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of
+    which poets gain glimpses through
+
+             magic casements, opening on the foam
+    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
+
+In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:—
+
+    “It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that
+    mysterious side of nature and man’s life which to other painters of
+    his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the
+    wings of sport.  It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity
+    as Dante’s Dream, La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they
+    Met Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that
+    Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern
+    art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical
+    imitation of the facts of nature.
+
+    For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in
+    modern Europe, if it is not a mere passing mood, if it is really the
+    inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of
+    civilization (when the sanctions which have made and moulded society
+    are found to be not absolute and eternal, but relative, mundane,
+    ephemeral, and subject to the higher sanctions of unseen powers that
+    work behind ‘the shows of things’), then perhaps one of the first
+    questions to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the
+    nineteenth century is, In what relation does he stand to the
+    newly-awakened spirit of romance?  Had he a genuine and independent
+    sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over Europe
+    had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation, prosaic
+    acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic materialism?  Or was his
+    apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence and awe the
+    result of artistic environment dictated to him by other and more
+    powerful and original souls around him?  I do not say that the mere
+    fact of a painter’s or poet’s showing but an imperfect sympathy with
+    the Renascence of Wonder is sufficient to place him below a poet in
+    whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, because we should then be
+    driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti above our great
+    realistic painters, and we should be driven to place a poet like the
+    author of ‘The Excursion’ and ‘The Prelude’ beneath a poet like the
+    author of ‘The Queen’s Wake’; but we do say that, other things being
+    equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be
+    judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement which we
+    call the Renascence of Wonder—call it so because the word romanticism
+    never did express it even before it had been vulgarized by French
+    poets, dramatists, doctrinaires, and literary harlequins.
+
+    To struggle against the prim traditions of the eighteenth century,
+    the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types instead of
+    character, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Balzac, and Hugo
+    struggled, was well.  But in studying Rossetti’s works we reach the
+    very key of those ‘high palaces of romance’ which the English mind
+    had never, even in the eighteenth century, wholly forgotten, but
+    whose mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked.  Not all the
+    romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with
+    their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood
+    of romance) could equal the romantic spirit expressed in a single
+    picture or drawing of Rossetti’s, such, for instance, as Beata
+    Beatrix or Pandora.
+
+    For while the French romanticists—inspired by the theories (drawn
+    from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck, and Herder—cleverly
+    simulated the old romantic feeling, the ‘beautifully devotional
+    feeling’ which Holman Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it: he
+    was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded
+    the great renascence of materialism that he might have lived and
+    worked amidst the old masters.  Hence, in point of design, so
+    original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in Lilith,
+    Hesterna Rosa, Michael Scott’s Wooing, the Sea Spell, etc., we have
+    to turn to the sister art of poetry, where only we can find an
+    equally powerful artistic representation of the idea at the core of
+    the old romanticism—the idea of the evil forces of nature assailing
+    man through his sense of beauty.  We must turn, we say, not to
+    art—not even to the old masters themselves—but to the most perfect
+    efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery—to such ballads as
+    ‘The Demon Lover,’ to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan,’ to
+    Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ for parallels to Rossetti’s most
+    characteristic designs.”
+
+These words about Coleridge recall to the students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+work a splendid illustration of the true wonder of the great poetic
+temper which he gives in the before-mentioned essay on The Renascence of
+Wonder in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’:—
+
+    “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ and ‘Kubla Khan’
+    are, as regards the romantic spirit, above—and far above—any work of
+    any other English poet.  Instances innumerable might be adduced
+    showing how his very nature was steeped in the fountain from which
+    the old balladists themselves drew, but in this brief and rapid
+    survey there is room to give only one.  In the ‘Conclusion’ of the
+    first part of ‘Christabel’ he recapitulates and summarizes, in lines
+    that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in succinctness of
+    statement, the entire story of the bewitched maiden and her terrible
+    foe which had gone before:—
+
+    A star hath set, a star hath risen,
+    O Geraldine! since arms of thine
+    Have been the lovely lady’s prison.
+    O Geraldine! one hour was thine—
+    Thou’st had thy will!  By tairn and rill,
+    The night-birds all that hour were still.
+    But now they are jubilant anew,
+    From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!
+    Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!
+
+    Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the human
+    drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul of poetic
+    wonder.  So great is the maleficent power of the beautiful witch that
+    a spell is thrown over all Nature.  For an hour the very woods and
+    fells remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic consciousness of
+    her—
+
+    The night-birds all that hour were still.
+
+    When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare,
+    and ‘the night-birds’ are jubilant anew.  This is the very highest
+    reach of poetic wonder—finer, if that be possible, than the
+    night-storm during the murder of Duncan.”
+
+And now let us turn again to the essay upon Rossetti from which I have
+already quoted:—
+
+    “Although the idea at the heart of the highest romantic poetry
+    (allied perhaps to that apprehension of the warring of man’s soul
+    with the appetites of the flesh which is the basis of the Christian
+    idea), may not belong exclusively to what we call the romantic temper
+    (the Greeks, and also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less
+    familiar with it, as we see in the ‘Salámán’ and ‘Absál’ of Jámí),
+    yet it became a peculiarly romantic note, as is seen from the fact
+    that in the old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its
+    logical expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all
+    romantic art.  But, in order to express this stupendous idea as fully
+    as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to adopt the
+    asceticism of the old masters?  This is the question that Rossetti
+    asked himself, and answered by his own progress in art.”
+
+In the same article, Mr. Watts-Dunton discusses the crowning specimen of
+Rossetti’s romanticism before it had, as it were, gone to seed and passed
+into pure mysticism, the grand design, ‘Pandora,’ of which he possesses
+by far the noblest version:—
+
+    “In it is seen at its highest Rossetti’s unique faculty of treating
+    classical legend in the true romantic spirit.  The grand and sombre
+    beauty of Pandora’s face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep
+    blue-grey eyes as she tries in vain to re-close the fatal box from
+    which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves
+    as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with
+    agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest
+    romantic mood.”
+
+It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction of this
+masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too grateful.  The
+influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s teachings is seen in the fact that the
+idea of the Renascence of Wonder has become expanded by theological
+writers and divines in order to include within its scope subjects
+connected with religion.  Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened
+its ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander White’s
+‘Appreciation’ of Bishop Butler.  He quotes one of the Logia discovered
+by the explorers of the Egypt Fund:—‘Let not him that seeketh cease from
+his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he
+shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have
+rest.’  He then points out that Bishop Butler was ‘one of the first to
+share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of religion.’
+
+And now I must quote a passage alluding to the generalization upon
+absolute and relative humour which I shall give later when discussing the
+humour of Mrs. Gudgeon.  I shall not be able in these remarks to dwell
+upon Mr. Watts-Dunton as a humourist, but the extracts will speak for
+themselves.  Writing of the great social Pyramid of the Augustan age, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton says:—
+
+    “This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the symmetry which Blackstone
+    so much admired in the English constitution and its laws; and when,
+    afterwards, the American colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid
+    of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model.  At the base—patient
+    as the tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony—was the
+    people, born to be the base and born for nothing else.  Resting on
+    this foundation were the middle classes in their various strata, each
+    stratum sharply marked off from the others.  Then above these was the
+    strictly genteel class, the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in
+    dress if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of
+    right.  Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the
+    monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the sacred
+    structure save that a little—a very little—above him sat God, the
+    suzerain to whom the prayers even of the monarch himself were
+    addressed.  The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done a daring
+    thing, and an original thing, by striking off the apex of this
+    pyramid, and it might reasonably have been expected that the building
+    itself would collapse and crumble away.  But it did nothing of the
+    kind.  It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off—a structure to
+    serve afterwards as a model of the American and French pyramids, both
+    of which, though aspiring to be original structures, are really built
+    on exactly the same scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour as that
+    upon which the pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built.
+    Then came the Restoration: the apex was restored: the structure was
+    again complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever, stronger than
+    ever.
+
+    With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic
+    movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural
+    side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be
+    described realistically.  Yet we must not suppose that in the
+    eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations,
+    without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty
+    of gazing honestly in her face.  She does not work in that way.  In
+    the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a
+    great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk.  In the
+    period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will
+    give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the
+    greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen.  In the time of
+    Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a
+    diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable
+    insight and intellectual breadth that his generalizations cover not
+    only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual
+    limbs of so complex an epoch as the twentieth century.”
+
+Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour is in prose
+fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got into romantic poetry,
+as he himself understood romantic poetry; for he did not class ballads
+like Kinmont Willie, where there are such superb touches of humour, among
+the romantic ballads.  And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked,
+his poems, like Morris’s, are entirely devoid of humour, although both
+the poets were humourists.  But the readers of Rhona’s Letters in ‘The
+Coming of Love’ will admit that a delicious humour can be imported into
+the highest romantic poetry.
+
+With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of
+English Literature,’ I must conclude my remarks upon the keynote of all
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, whether imaginative or critical:—
+
+    “The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have
+    ended with Milton.  For Milton, although born only twenty-three years
+    before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs
+    properly to the period of romantic poetry.  He has no relation
+    whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and
+    which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain
+    contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by
+    Ben Jonson.  From the moment when Augustanism really began—in the
+    latter decades of the seventeenth century—the periwig poetry of
+    Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true
+    poets.  All the periwig poets became too ‘polite’ to be natural.  As
+    acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the
+    most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom
+    everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of
+    Cathay.”
+
+One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the most
+powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in Rossetti’s
+poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in ‘Aylwin,’ but in ‘The Coming
+of Love.’  But in order fully to understand Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work it is
+necessary to know something of his life-history, and thanks to the aid I
+have received from certain of his friends, and also to a little
+topographical work, the ‘History of St. Ives,’ by Mr. Herbert E. Norris,
+F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long before he
+was known in London.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+COWSLIP COUNTRY
+
+
+SOME time ago I was dipping into the ‘official pictorial guides’ of those
+three great trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the
+Great Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St.
+Ives—not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town in
+Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell spent those
+five years of meditation upon which his after life was nourished.  In the
+Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon these words: ‘At Slepe Hall dwelt
+the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little
+Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace of Mr.
+Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the English sonnet and
+judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of poetry and art are familiar
+to lovers of our national literature.’  ‘Well,’ I thought, when I found
+similar remarks in the other two guides, ‘here at least is one case in
+which a prophet has honour in his own country.’  This set me musing over
+a subject which had often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the
+whimsical workings of the Spirit of Place.  To a poet, what are the
+advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a microcosm
+like St. Ives?  If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet were as great
+as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne, or as that of his dead
+friend, Rossetti, I should not have been surprised to find the place of
+his birth thus associated with his name.  But whether or not Rossetti was
+right in saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘had sought obscurity as other
+poets seek fame,’ it is certain that until quite lately he neglected to
+claim his proper place among his peers.  Doubtless, as the ‘Journal des
+Débats’ has pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in
+subject and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique
+quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo through
+the world, there is one respect in which they were less lucky than their
+friend.  They were born in the macrocosm of London, where the Spirit of
+Place has so much to attend to that his memory can find but a small
+corner even for the author of ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ or for the author of
+‘Atalanta in Calydon.’
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law
+repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country—Buttercup Land, as the
+Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good luck.
+Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with Rhona
+Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess of the
+D’Urbervilles.  For the poet born in a microcosm becomes identified with
+it in the public eye, whereas the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom
+associated with his birthplace.
+
+To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater advantage
+in being born in a microcosm.  He sees the drama of life from a point of
+view entirely different from that of the novelist born in the macrocosm.
+The human microbe, or, as Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human
+cheese-mite in the macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other
+cheese-mite on the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe
+or every other cheese-mite in the round.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work is saturated with memories of the Ouse.  Cowper
+had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who first
+flung the rainbow of romance over the river and over the sweet meadows of
+Cowslip Land, through which it flows.  In these lines he has described a
+sunset on the Ouse:—
+
+    More mellow falls the light and still more mellow
+    Around the boat, as we two glide along
+    ’Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,
+    The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.
+    She knows the nightingales of ‘Portobello’;
+    Love makes her know each bird!  In all that throng
+    No voice seems like another: soul is song,
+    And never nightingale was like its fellow;
+    For, whether born in breast of Love’s own bird,
+    Singing its passion in those islet bowers
+    Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers
+    The rosy river’s glowing arms engird,
+    Or born in human souls—twin souls like ours—
+    Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.
+
+   [Picture: The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.  (From a Water Colour by
+                         Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)]
+
+Now, will it be believed that this lovely river—so famous too among
+English anglers for its roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, and gudgeon—has
+been libelled?  Yes, it has been libelled, and libelled by no less a
+person than Thomas Carlyle.  Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath
+the reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:—
+
+    “There is, as far as I know, nothing like the Ouse elsewhere in
+    England.  I do not mean that our river surpasses or even equals in
+    picturesqueness such rivers as the Wye, the Severn, the Thames, but
+    that its beauty is unique.  There is not to be seen anywhere else so
+    wide and stately a stream moving so slowly and yet so clearly.
+    Consequently there is no other river which reflects with such beauty
+    the scenery of the clouds floating overhead.  This, I think, is owing
+    to the stream moving over a bottom which is both flat and gravelly.
+    When Carlyle spoke of the Ouse dragging in a half-stagnant way under
+    a coating of floating oils, he showed ‘how vivid were his perceptive
+    faculties and also how untrustworthy.’  I have made a good deal of
+    enquiry into the matter of Carlyle’s visit to St. Ives, and have
+    learnt that, having spent some time exploring Ely Cathedral in search
+    of mementoes of Cromwell, he rode on to St. Ives, and spent about an
+    hour there before proceeding on his journey.  Among the objects at
+    which he gave a hasty glance was the river, covered from the bridge
+    to the Holmes by one of those enormous fleets of barges which were
+    frequently to be seen at that time, and it was from the newly tarred
+    keels of this fleet of barges that came the oily exudation which
+    Carlyle, in his ignorance of the physical sciences and his contempt
+    for them, believed to arise from a greasy river-bottom.  And to this
+    mistake the world is indebted for this description of the Ouse, which
+    has been slavishly followed by all subsequent writers on Cromwell.
+    This is what makes strangers, walking along the tow-path of
+    Hemingford meadow, express so much surprise when, instead of seeing
+    the oily scum they expected, they see a broad mirror as clear as
+    glass, whose iridescence is caused by the reflection of the clouds
+    overhead and by the gold and white water lilies on the surface of the
+    stream.”
+
+If the beauty of the Ouse inspired Mr. Norris to praise it so eloquently
+in prose, we need not wonder at the pictorial fascination of what
+Rossetti styled in a letter to a friend ‘Watts’s magnificent star
+sonnet’:—
+
+    The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears,
+    And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
+    The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
+    Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
+    We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
+    An angel’s, yet with woman’s dearer wiles;
+    But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
+    And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
+
+    What shaped those shadows like another boat
+    Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
+    There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
+    While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
+    We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,
+    And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
+
+According to Mr. Sharp, Rossetti pronounced this sonnet to be the finest
+of all the versions of the Doppelganger idea, and for many years he
+seriously purposed to render it in art.  It is easy to understand why
+Rossetti never carried out his intention, for the pictorial magic of the
+sonnet is so powerful that even the greatest of all romantic painters
+could hardly have rendered it on canvas.  Poetry can suggest to the
+imagination deeper mysteries than the subtlest romantic painting.
+
+No sonnet has been more frequently localized—erroneously localized than
+this.  It is often supposed to depict the Thames above Kew, but Mr.
+Norris says that ‘every one familiar with Hemingford Meadow will see that
+it describes the Ouse backwater near Porto Bello, where the author as a
+young man was constantly seen on summer evenings listening from a canoe
+to the blackcaps and nightingales of the Thicket.’
+
+That excellent critic, Mr. Earl Hodgson, the editor of Dr. Gordon Hake’s
+‘New Day,’ seems to think that the ‘lily-isles’ are on the Thames at
+Kelmscott, while other writers have frequently localized these
+‘lily-isles’ on the Avon at Stratford.  But, no doubt, Mr. Norris is
+right in placing them on the Ouse.
+
+This, however, gives me a good opportunity of saying a few words about
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s love of the Avon.  The sacred old town of
+Stratford-on-Avon has always been a favourite haunt of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s.  No poet of our time has shown a greater love of our
+English rivers, but he seems to love the Avon even more passionately than
+the Ouse.  He cannot describe the soft sands of Petit Bot Bay in Guernsey
+without bringing in an allusion to ‘Avon’s sacred silt.’  It was at
+Stratford-on-Avon that he wrote several of his poems, notably the two
+sonnets which appeared first in the ‘Athenæum,’ and afterwards in the
+little volume, ‘Jubilee Greetings at Spithead to the Men of Greater
+Britain.’  They are entitled ‘The Breath of Avon: To English-speaking
+Pilgrims on Shakspeare’s Birthday’:—
+
+    Whate’er of woe the Dark may hide in womb
+    For England, mother of kings of battle and song—
+    Rapine, or racial hate’s mysterious wrong,
+    Blizzard of Chance, or fiery dart of Doom—
+    Let breath of Avon, rich of meadow-bloom,
+    Bind her to that great daughter sever’d long—
+    To near and far-off children young and strong—
+    With fetters woven of Avon’s flower perfume.
+    Welcome, ye English-speaking pilgrims, ye
+    Whose hands around the world are join’d by him,
+    Who make his speech the language of the sea,
+    Till winds of Ocean waft from rim to rim
+    The Breath of Avon: let this great day be
+    A Feast of Race no power shall ever dim.
+
+    From where the steeds of Earth’s twin oceans toss
+    Their manes along Columbia’s chariot-way;
+    From where Australia’s long blue billows play;
+    From where the morn, quenching the Southern Cross,
+    Startling the frigate-bird and albatross
+    Asleep in air, breaks over Table Bay—
+    Come hither, pilgrims, where these rushes sway
+    ’Tween grassy banks of Avon soft as moss!
+    For, if ye found the breath of Ocean sweet,
+    Sweeter is Avon’s earthy, flowery smell,
+    Distill’d from roots that feel the coming spell
+    Of May, who bids all flowers that lov’d him meet
+    In meadows that, remembering Shakspeare’s feet,
+    Hold still a dream of music where they fell.
+
+It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr. Watts-Dunton
+wrote the cantata, ‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ a poem in which breathes
+the very atmosphere of Shakespeare’s town.  There are no poetical
+descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the
+descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.
+
+  [Picture: ‘The Thicket,’ St. Ives.  (From a Water Colour by Fraser at
+                              ‘The Pines.’)]
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes called, ‘The
+Green Country,’ is Hemingford Meadow, adjoining St. Ives.  It is a level
+tract of land on the banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of
+alluvium from the overflowings of the river.  In summer it is clothed
+with gay flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as
+a skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is a
+famous skating centre.  On the opposite side of the meadow is The
+Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely picture.  This, no doubt, is
+the scene described in one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s birthday addresses to
+Tennyson:—
+
+    Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.
+    There through the branches of the glittering trees
+    The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze
+    Sends forth methinks a thrill—a conscious thrill
+    That tells yon meadows by the steaming rill—
+    Where, o’er the clover waiting for the bees,
+    The mist shines round the cattle to their knees—
+    ‘Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!’
+
+The meadow leads to what the ‘oldest rustic inhabitant’ calls the ‘First
+Hemingford,’ or ‘Hemingford Grey.’  The imagination of this same ‘oldest
+inhabitant’ used to go even beyond the First Hemingford to the Second
+Hemingford, and then of course came Ultima Thule!  The meadow has quite a
+wide fame among those students of nature who love English grasses in
+their endless varieties.  Owing to the richness of the soil, the
+luxuriant growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in
+England.  For years the two Hemingfords have been the favourite haunt of
+a group of landscape painters the chief of whom are the brothers Fraser,
+two of whose water-colours are reproduced in this book.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more advantage
+than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through Huntingdonshire into
+East Anglia.  It was not, however, near St. Ives, but in another somewhat
+distant part of Cowslip Country that the gypsies depicted in ‘The Coming
+of Love’ took an active part in haymaking.  But alas! in these times of
+mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer hope to see
+such a picture as that painted in the now famous gypsy haymaking song
+which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth of Rhona Boswell.  Moreover,
+the prosperous gryengroes depicted by Borrow and by the author of ‘The
+Coming of Love’ have now entirely vanished from the scene.  The present
+generation knows them not.  But it is impossible for the student of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s poetry to ramble along any part of Cowslip Country, with
+the fragrance of newly-made hay in his nostrils, without recalling this
+chant, which I have the kind permission of the editor of the ‘Saturday
+Review’ (April 19, 1902) to quote:—
+
+    Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’ {34}
+    Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,
+    Sayin, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,
+    Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
+    Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it
+    To lennor and love!’
+
+    Hark, the sharpenin’ scythes that tingle!
+    See they come, the farmin’ ryes!
+    ‘Leave the dell,’ they say, ‘an’ pingle!
+    Never a gorgie, married or single,
+    Can toss the kas in dell or dingle
+    Like Romany chies.’
+    Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’
+
+    Bees are a-buzzin’ in chaw an’ clover
+    Stealin’ the honey from sperrits o’ morn,
+    Shoshus leap in puv an’ cover,
+    Doves are a-cooin’ like lover to lover,
+    Larks are awake an’ a-warblin’ over
+    Their kairs in the corn.
+    Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’
+
+    Smell the kas on the baval blowin’!
+    What is that the gorgies say?
+    Never a garden rose a-glowin’,
+    Never a meadow flower a-growin’,
+    Can match the smell from a Rington mowin’
+    Of new made hay.
+
+    All along the river reaches
+    ‘Cheep, cheep, chee!’—from osier an’ sedge;
+    ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ rings from the beeches;
+    Every chirikel’s song beseeches
+    Ryes to larn what lennor teaches
+    From copse an’ hedge.
+    Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’
+
+    Lennor sets ’em singin’ an’ pairin’,
+    Chirikels all in tree an’ grass,
+    Farmers say, ‘Them gals are darin’,
+    Sometimes dukkerin’, sometimes snarin’;
+    But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin’,’
+    Toss the kas!
+
+    Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’
+    Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,
+    Sayin’, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,
+    Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
+    Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it
+    To lennor and love!’
+
+Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was Slepe, and
+that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a farmer for five years
+in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the late forties.  When Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s friend, Madox Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the
+scenery for his famous picture, ‘Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,’ he could
+present only an imaginary farm.
+
+Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being born in a
+microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing stories full of local
+colour and character which, according to friends of D. G. Rossetti, would
+keep the poet-painter up half the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr.
+Hake in his account of the origin of ‘Aylwin’ which I have already given.
+I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe Hall which I have heard
+Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would certainly make a good nucleus for
+a short story.  It is connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement
+Shorter, in some reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes:
+“My mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns by
+inheritance some freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe
+Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed.  At Slepe Hall, a
+picturesque building, she went to school in girlhood.  She remembers Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, the author of ‘Aylwin,’ who was also born at St. Ives, as a
+pretty little boy then unknown to fame.”
+
+ [Picture: Slepe Hall: Cromwell’s Supposed Residence at St. Ives.  (From
+                    an Oil Painting at ‘The Pines.’)]
+
+When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they
+sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in
+building lots.  It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell
+was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older
+house whose cellars remained intact.  This was, of course, a tremendous
+event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the
+schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to
+watch the workmen in their task of demolition.  In the early stages of
+this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was
+centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found,
+whence Oliver Cromwell’s ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his
+terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks
+about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds.  But no such
+secret chamber could be found.  When at length the work had proceeded so
+far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure
+was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact,
+Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it
+was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives,
+that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the
+world—
+
+    Imposteur à la Mecque et prophète à Mèdine.
+
+Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at
+the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that,
+before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to
+St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel
+friends, in Slepe Hall cellars.  No treasure turned up, but what was
+found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once
+christened ‘Cromwell’s wine’ by the local humourist of the town, who was
+also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much
+interest as the boys in the exploration.  The workmen, of course, at once
+began knocking off the bottles’ necks and drinking the wine, and were
+soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a
+teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to
+take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days
+that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell’s wine and perhaps imbibed some of
+the Cromwellian spirit and pluck.  Consequently the young urchins carried
+off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called ‘Oliver’s
+Tree,’ and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink.  The
+wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to
+have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous—elder
+wine.  Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was,
+he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell’s
+elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, ‘I was never even
+excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being
+drunk on Oliver Cromwell’s elder-wine.’  The wine was probably about a
+century old.
+
+I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve
+was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time
+than is usual.  He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat
+elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly
+biology, and also art and music.  As has been said in the notice of him
+in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ he is one of the few contemporary
+poets with a scientific knowledge of music.  Owing to his father’s
+passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this
+accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his
+writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the
+lower animals.
+
+Upon the subject of “the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase,
+‘the dumb animals,’” Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often
+been eloquent about ‘those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St.
+Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful
+animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe
+the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry
+like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could
+direct it to trace out any given name in the company.’
+
+    “Of course,” he says, “the ‘lower animals’ are no more dumb than we
+    are.  With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape
+    from isolation—to get as close as may be to some other conscious
+    thing—which is a great factor of progress.  With them, as with us,
+    each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others
+    around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless
+    accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what
+    these signs and sounds shall be.  Those among us who have gone at all
+    underneath conventional thought and conventional expression—those who
+    have penetrated underneath conventional feeling—know that neither
+    thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all.  The voice cannot
+    do it, as we see by comparing one language with another.  Wordsworth
+    calls language the incarnation of thought.  But the mere fact of
+    there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this.  If
+    there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream of,
+    the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd.  Soul cannot
+    communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when you
+    can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a ‘lower
+    animal,’ interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with
+    them as it is with men.  Nay, with some temperaments and in some
+    moods, the communication is far, far closer.  ‘When I am assailed
+    with heavy tribulation,’ said Luther, ‘I rush out among my pigs
+    rather than remain alone by myself.’  And there is no creature that
+    does not at some points sympathize with man.  People have laughed at
+    Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed
+    upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used
+    to lavish his endearments.  Neither I nor my companion had a pet
+    passion for leeches.  Erskine probably knew leeches better than we,
+    for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of
+    which they know nothing.  Like most dog lovers, we had no special
+    love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge.  ‘I wish
+    women would purr when they are pleased,’ said Horne Tooke to Rogers
+    once.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+THE CRITIC IN THE BUD
+
+
+ONE of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the
+nooks of old England and ‘ould Ireland’; I have a propensity for
+‘dawdling and dandering’ among them whenever the occasion arises, and I
+am yielding to it here.
+
+Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been
+compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of
+brochures upon the surrounding villages.  One of these, called ‘St. Ives
+and the Printing Press,’ has greatly interested me, for it reveals the
+wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural
+districts lies ready for the picking up.  I am tempted to quote from
+this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell’s time the temper which
+produced Cromwell has remained.  During the time when at Cambridge George
+Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond
+of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen’s, revolted against the discipline and the
+doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the
+Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed.  The house whence
+issued these fulminations was the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street, now pulled
+down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father, having
+remained during all this time a printing office.  Mr. Norris gives a very
+picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the
+house, with its pointed roof, ‘king posts’ and panelling, reminding one
+of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices.  Mr. Norris also
+tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the ‘Crown Inn,’ that
+William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear
+the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens.  According to
+Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John
+Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father
+when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor.  A
+curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer
+addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the
+eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to
+Lamb, and inspired some of Elia’s most delightful touches of humour.
+This poem of Dyer’s opens thus:—
+
+    Though much I love th’ Æolian lyre,
+       Whose varying sounds beguil’d my youthful day,
+       And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
+    In fabled groves, among th’ Aonian choir:
+    Yet more on native fields, thro’ milder skies,
+       Nature’s mysterious harmonies delight:
+    There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
+       What is the moon’s pale orb that cheer’d the lonesome night?
+    I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
+       Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
+       Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
+    And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
+    No purple Venus round my Hammond’s bow’r,
+       No blue-ey’d graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
+    The king of gods here rains no golden show’r,
+       Nor have these lips e’er sipt Castilian dews.
+
+At the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer’s time,
+if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at
+this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his
+boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general.  Filled
+with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that
+boyish utterance.  It interests me much, because I seem to see in it
+adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I
+hope to enrich these pages.  I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking
+advantage of a lucky accident—the accident that a member of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown
+newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported.  In 1854, ‘W. Theodore
+Watts,’ as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be
+himself a member—if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just
+left it—on account of his father’s great local reputation as a man of
+learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the
+toast, ‘Science.’  In the ‘Cambridge Chronicle’ of that date the
+proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given
+to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by
+the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely
+improvized.  The subject which he discussed was ‘The Influence of Science
+upon Modern Civilization’:—
+
+    “It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical
+    lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs
+    straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches.  Now, of
+    all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most
+    hopeful one for humanity is physical science—that branch of the tree
+    which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to
+    bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present
+    wondrous state of development.  I am aware that the assertion that
+    Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by
+    many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person
+    young and inexperienced as myself.  It is heterodox; it clashes, for
+    instance, with the venerable superstition of ‘the wisdom of the
+    ancients’—a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my
+    friend Mr. Wright’s old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been
+    talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the
+    point:—
+
+    For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
+    Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
+    And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
+    Cometh all this new science that men lere.
+
+    But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom
+    in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply
+    abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients
+    more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy.  It is
+    the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong
+    only to individuals.  There can be no doubt that, of contemporary
+    individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and
+    is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with
+    generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact.  As
+    Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, ‘Those who came
+    first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least
+    experience.  Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in
+    arms—chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under
+    Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the
+    white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are
+    prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can
+    supply.
+
+    And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own
+    English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity.  What, for instance,
+    was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans—what but the
+    wildest Astrology?  What schoolboy has not chuckled over the
+    ingenious old Herodotus’s description of the sun being blown out of
+    the heavens?  Or again, at old Plutarch’s veracious story of the
+    hedgehogs and the grapes?  Nay, there are absurdities enough in such
+    great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us
+    that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters
+    appertaining to the Physical Sciences.
+
+    Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the
+    ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence.  But
+    theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our
+    day—though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has
+    been proving to us lately—is, as essentially, the day of Science.  I
+    might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here—the constitution
+    of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking
+    as the soul of antiquity).  Was that scientific?  Surely not.
+
+    The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was
+    beauty, sensuous beauty.  This prevailing passion for the beautiful
+    exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said:
+    it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in
+    their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture.  The
+    productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful,
+    and, as such, will never fade and decay, for
+
+                     A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
+
+    Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that
+    Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity.
+    Athens was too imaginative and poetical.  Sparta was too warlike and
+    barbarous.  Rome was too sensual and gross.  It had to wait for the
+    steady Teutonic mind—the plodding brains of modern England and modern
+    Germany.  That Homer is the father of poetry—that Æschylus is a
+    wonder of sublimity—that Sophocles and Euripides are profound masters
+    of human passion and human pathos—that Aristophanes is an exhaustless
+    fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour—no one in this room, or
+    out of it, is more willing to admit than I am.  But is that to blind
+    us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison and Lyell are
+    greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or Aristotle?
+
+    The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied
+    through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius.  Every right
+    action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he
+    attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad
+    thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius.  And this was
+    not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and
+    breathing faith with him.  He believed it in his childhood, in his
+    youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the
+    deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of
+    Laocoon, around his giant brain.  Well, gentlemen, don’t let us laugh
+    at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a
+    beautiful one, and typical of many great truths.  And I have often
+    thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than
+    Socrates.  I mean the great man—mankind.  He, too, has his good
+    genius and his evil genius.  The former we will designate science,
+    the latter we will call superstition.  For ages upon ages,
+    superstition has had the sway over him—that evil genius, who blotted
+    out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and
+    substituted all manner of blinding errors—errors which have made him
+    play
+
+    Such fantastic tricks before high heaven
+    As make the angels weep.
+
+    This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of
+    creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells
+    us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries.  In a word,
+    the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the
+    angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the
+    fiends.
+
+    But, at last, God has permitted man’s long, long experience to be
+    followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient
+    enemy, and clasped the hands of Science—Science, that good genius who
+    makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the ethereal
+    lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns king of
+    the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of Methusaleh into
+    seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human frame, and ranges
+    through its most secret chambers, until at last nothing, save the
+    mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden; who maps out all the
+    nations of the earth; showing how the sable Ethiopian, the dusky
+    Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the intellectual European, are
+    but differently developed exemplars of the same type of manhood, and
+    warning man that he is still his ‘brother’s keeper’ now as in the
+    primeval days of Cain and Abel.
+
+    The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his dædal wings up
+    into the starry night, there where ‘God’s name is writ in worlds,’
+    and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving
+    around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever
+    around the great central sun—‘The Great White Throne of God!’
+
+    The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long
+    vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world
+    which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first,
+    as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious
+    course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid
+    mass, ‘without form and void,’ where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled
+    in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages,
+    having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had
+    intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life,
+    to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns,
+    compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable
+    dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder
+    of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious
+    forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian,
+    the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and
+    bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle
+    in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath
+    their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders,
+    the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and
+    the basest work of God—the creation of the thinking, reasoning,
+    sinning animal, Man.
+
+    And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing
+    and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand
+    work of developing the divinity within it.  I know, indeed, that it
+    is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will
+    decline and vanish, ‘like the civilizations of old.’  But I venture
+    to deny it in toto.  From a human point of view, it is utterly
+    impossible.  And without going into the question (for I see the time
+    is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed
+    away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life
+    after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times
+    more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I
+    contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern
+    must of necessity be futile and fallacious.  And for this reason,
+    that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science
+    has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of
+    antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political
+    life, and come to its own conclusions.  So isolated, indeed, was one
+    nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of
+    each other’s existence.  A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh,
+    was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for
+    Italy alone.  There was no science then to ‘put a girdle round about
+    the earth’ (as Puck says) ‘in forty minutes.’  But now, a new idea
+    brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the
+    whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole
+    habitable globe—from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru.  I
+    am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the
+    ruler of the waves.  The day may come that will see her sink to a
+    second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe.  In
+    spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that
+    will see Russia the dominant power in Europe.  The day may come that
+    will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and
+    learning.  It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each
+    race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race—that the
+    negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian
+    race is now lording it over the negro.  Why not?  It would be only
+    equity.  But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of
+    nationalities.  I speak again of the great man, Mankind—the one
+    indivisible man that Science is making him.  He will never
+    retrograde, because ‘matter and mind comprise the universe,’ and
+    matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind—because good
+    must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made?  Henceforth his
+    road is onward—onward.  Science has helped to give him such a start
+    that nothing shall hold him back—nothing can hold him back—save a
+    fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God.”
+
+But I am wandering from the subject of the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street
+and its connection with printing.  The last important book that was ever
+printed there was a very remarkable one.  It was the famous essay on
+Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that
+time a curate of the St. Ives Church—a book that was the result of an
+enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book,
+moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought.  It has
+passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM
+
+
+MRS. CRAIGIE has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that
+London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the
+provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the
+nation.  It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than
+that in which Theodore Watts grew up.  Indeed, his early life may be
+compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening
+and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of
+the Mill family.  Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father was in many respects a very
+remarkable man.  ‘He was,’ says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in
+Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ‘a naturalist intimately connected with
+Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of
+considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert
+White of the Ouse valley.’  There is, as the ‘Times’ said in its review
+of ‘Aylwin,’ so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of
+the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made
+to identify all the characters.  Many of these guesses have been wrong;
+and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr.
+Hake, who, in two papers in ‘Notes and Queries’ identified many of the
+characters.  Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that
+the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the
+story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father.  Mr. Hake, however,
+tells us that this is not so.  Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the
+author’s uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to
+say later.  I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable
+account of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father in Mr. Norris’s ‘History of St.
+Ives’:—
+
+    “For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was
+    the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though
+    his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford
+    Abbots.  According to the following extracts from ‘The Cambridge
+    Chronicle and University Journal’ of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died
+    quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: ‘We record with much regret
+    the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died
+    after an hour’s illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he
+    had been taken after the seizure.  Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was
+    called in, but without avail.  At the inquest the post-mortem
+    examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing
+    fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions,
+    resulted in syncope.  Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back
+    to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme
+    heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of
+    death.
+
+    Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the
+    oldest solicitors in the county.  He had also devoted much time and
+    study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a
+    well-known figure in the scientific circles of London.  He was for
+    years connected with Section E of the British Association for the
+    Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee.  He read papers
+    on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other
+    Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles
+    of geology.  Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors,
+    and in the Association’s reports upon this subject some of the most
+    interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by
+    Mr. Watts.  He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical
+    Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.’
+
+    Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last
+    moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he
+    had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the ‘Antiquary’
+    for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire
+    Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months
+    after his death.  It was, however, not by Archæology, but by his
+    geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation.
+    And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison,
+    Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the
+    geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton
+    Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied
+    by Mr. Matton.  In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is
+    mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr.
+    Watts at St. Ives.  Since his death there have been frequent
+    references to him as a man of ‘encyclopædic general knowledge.’
+
+    He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St.
+    Ives have been more liked or more generally respected.  His great
+    delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the
+    changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our
+    neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself.  On such occasions the
+    present writer has often met him and had many interesting
+    conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science.”
+
+With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mother, the Duntons,
+although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in
+Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several
+generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic
+chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr.
+Jessopp in his charming essay, ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.’  This
+essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the
+Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, and treating of the Register
+of Crab House Nunnery.  In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother’s
+to his father’s name, by a deed in Chancery.
+
+I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in
+temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about
+Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend)
+used to tell.  When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets
+pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school
+library a copy of Wells’s ‘Stories after Nature,’ and read them with
+great avidity.  Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was
+reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small
+family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to
+find, in a number of the ‘Illuminated Magazine,’ a periodical which his
+father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one
+of the ‘Stories after Nature’ reprinted with an illustration by the
+designer and engraver Linton.  He said to his father, ‘Why, I have read
+this story before!’  ‘That is quite impossible,’ said his father, ‘quite
+impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number
+of a magazine.’  ‘I have read it before; I know all about it,’ said the
+boy.  ‘As I do not think you untruthful,’ said the father, ‘I think I can
+explain your hallucination about this matter.’  ‘Do, father,’ said the
+son.  ‘Well,’ said the father, ‘I do not know whether or not you are a
+poet.  But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams.  You have told me
+before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape
+that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.’  ‘Yes,
+father, that often occurs.’  ‘Well, the reason for that is this, as you
+will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology.
+The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each
+other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but
+it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things,
+one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the
+other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy
+hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.’  The
+explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.
+
+The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the
+father said, ‘Well, Walter, have you read this before?’  ‘Yes,’ said the
+boy falteringly, ‘unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain,
+father.’  And so it went on from month to month.  When the boy had grown
+into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the
+literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells’s
+‘Joseph and His Brethren’ and ‘Stories after Nature.’  Rossetti was
+agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of ‘Joseph
+and His Brethren,’ he was very familiar with the ‘Stories after Nature.’
+‘Well,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘they appeared in the “Illuminated
+Magazine.”’  ‘Who should have thought,’ said Rossetti, ‘that the
+“Illuminated Magazine” in its moribund days, when Linton took it up,
+should have got down to St. Ives.  Its circulation, I think, was only a
+few hundreds.  Among Linton’s manœuvres for keeping the magazine alive
+was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells’s “Stories after Nature”
+without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book
+form.’  ‘They did then appear in book form first?’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+‘Yes, but there can’t have been over a hundred or two sold,’ said
+Rossetti.  ‘I discovered it at the British Museum.’  ‘I read it at
+Cambridge in my school library,’ said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  It was the
+startled look on Rossetti’s face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell
+him the story about his father and the ‘Illuminated Magazine.’
+
+It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to
+express himself in literature rather early.  But it will be new to many,
+and especially to the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ that as a mere child he
+contributed to its pages.  When he was a boy he read the ‘Athenæum,’
+which his father took in regularly.  One day he caught a correspondent of
+the ‘Athenæum’—no less a person than John P. Collier—tripping on a point
+of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance.  He had
+stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father’s
+books.  He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing
+the blunder with youthful scorn.  In due time the correction was noted in
+the Literary Gossip of the journal.  Soon after, his father had occasion
+to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he
+said, ‘Walter, have you been marking this book?’  ‘Yes, father.’  ‘But
+you know I object?’  ‘Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.’
+‘Why,’ said his father, ‘somebody has been writing about this very
+passage to the “Athenæum.”’  ‘Yes, father,’ replied the boy, red and
+ungrammatical with proud confusion, ‘it was me.’  ‘You!’ cried his
+astonished father, ‘you!’  And thus the matter was explained.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his
+first contribution to the ‘Athenæum.’
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando
+Watts.  His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have
+made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism.  As I have already
+pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of
+Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero.  The importance of this character
+in ‘Aylwin’ is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find
+that the character of Philip is its motive power.  After his death,
+everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams,
+his fantasies and his whims.  This effect of making a man dominate from
+his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be
+unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some
+critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there
+they leave it.  What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls ‘the tragic mischief’ of the
+drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and
+mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of ‘The Veiled Queen.’
+There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an
+interest.  He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish,
+and German.  And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover
+of the acted drama.  One of his stories in connection with acting is
+this.  A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission
+to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and
+sometimes Cromwell’s Barn.  Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on
+returning home after the performance said, ‘I have seen a little actor
+who is a real genius.  He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund
+Kean’s acting.  I shall go and see him every night.  And he went.  The
+actor’s name was Robson.  When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in
+London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the
+second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon.  He went to the theatre
+and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so
+impressed him down at St. Ives.  From that time he followed Robson to
+whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known
+figure among the playgoers of the Olympic.  He always contended that
+Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time.  Mr. Hake seems to
+have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in
+London:—
+
+    “He was,” says Mr. Hake, “a man of extraordinary learning in the
+    academic sense of the word, and he possessed still more extraordinary
+    general knowledge.  He lived for many years the strangest kind of
+    hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts.  His two
+    great passions were philology and occultism, but he also took great
+    interest in rubbings from brass monuments.  He knew more, I think, of
+    those strange writers discussed in Vaughan’s ‘Hours with the Mystics’
+    than any other person—including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he
+    managed to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the
+    physical sciences, especially astronomy.  He seemed to be learning
+    languages up to almost the last year of his life.  His method of
+    learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow—that is
+    to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died, it is said
+    that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among
+    his books.  He used to express great contempt for Borrow’s method of
+    learning languages from dictionaries only.  I do not think that any
+    one connected with literature—with the sole exception of Mr.
+    Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G. Latham—knew so much of him as I
+    did.  His personal appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin,
+    as described in the novel.  Although he never wrote poetry, he
+    translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese
+    poets.  I remember that he was an extraordinary admirer of Shelley.
+    His knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists was a
+    link between him and Mr. Swinburne.
+
+    At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum reading
+    room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed to know
+    anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he spoke to me
+    it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should disturb the other
+    readers, which in his eyes would have been a heinous offence.  For
+    very many years he had been extremely well known to the second-hand
+    booksellers, for he was a constant purchaser of their wares.  He was
+    a great pedestrian, and, being very much attached to the north of
+    London, would take long, slow tramps ten miles out in the direction
+    of Highgate, Wood Green, etc.  I have a very distinct recollection of
+    calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living
+    close to him in Percy Circus.  Books were piled up from floor to
+    ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember
+    where to find every book and what there was in it.  It is a singular
+    fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to
+    have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas
+    Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him ‘the
+    scholar.’  How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that
+    surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must
+    have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the
+    north of London where ‘the scholar’ was taking his chop and bottle of
+    Beaune.  He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after
+    another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I
+    think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of ‘Aylwin,’
+    and myself.  But at Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines,
+    when and where my father and I used to meet him.  His memory was so
+    powerful that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he
+    had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part.
+    He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to
+    the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life.  He
+    always reminded me of Charles Lamb’s description of George Dyer.
+
+    Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only
+    of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent
+    to touch upon his inner life.  He was a still greater recluse than
+    the ‘Philip Aylwin’ of the novel.  I think I am right in saying that
+    he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of
+    age.  Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these
+    studies that he sympathized with the author of ‘Aylwin’s’ friend, the
+    late Lord de Tabley.  I remember one story of his peculiarities which
+    will give an idea of the kind of man he was.  He had a brother, Mr.
+    William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him in every
+    way—strikingly good-looking, with great charm of manner and savoir
+    faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial
+    knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of
+    British military and naval exploits—where he was really learned.
+    Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a
+    parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great
+    volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in
+    the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until
+    at last he got to be called the ‘walking encyclopædia.’  The result
+    was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an
+    original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was
+    frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned
+    brother.  This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply
+    amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories
+    as to what people had said to him on this subject.” {60}
+
+Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of one of his
+stories.  I may add that the editor of ‘Notes and Queries,’ Mr. Joseph
+Knight, knew James Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he ‘can testify
+to the truth’ of Mr. Hake’s ‘portraiture.’
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES
+
+
+ALTHOUGH an East Midlander by birth it seems to have been to East Anglia
+that Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathies were most strongly drawn.  It was
+there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it was to East
+Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.
+
+On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the Hemingford side
+already described, the country, though not so lovely as the western side,
+is at first fairly attractive; but it becomes less and less so as it
+nears the Fens.  The Fens, however, would seem to have a charm of their
+own, and Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness
+that could hardly be surpassed.  It was here as a boy that he made
+friends with the Gryengroes—that superior variety of the Romanies which
+Borrow had known years before.  These gypsies used to bring their Welsh
+ponies to England and sell them at the fairs.  I must now go back for
+some years in order to enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic
+description of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country,
+which appeared in ‘Great Thoughts’ in 1903.
+
+    “I shall never forget my earliest recollections of them.  My father
+    used sometimes to drive in a dogcart to see friends of his through
+    about twelve miles of Fen country, and he used to take me with him.
+    Let me say that the Fen country is much more striking than is
+    generally supposed.  Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the
+    midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are divided
+    by dykes; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles.
+    This gives an importance to the skies such as is observed nowhere
+    else except on the open sea.  The flashing opalescent radiance of the
+    sea is apt to challenge the riches of the sky, and in a certain
+    degree tends to neutralize it; but in the Fen country the level,
+    monotonous greenery of the crops in summer, and, in autumn and
+    winter, the vast expanse of black earth, make the dome of the sky, by
+    contrast, so bright and glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams
+    and suggests a roof of rainbows; and in cloudy weather it seems
+    almost the only living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more
+    magical still.  And as to sunsets, I do not know of any, either by
+    land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen
+    country.  The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal
+    to do with it.  The sun frequently sets in a pageantry of gauzy
+    vapour of every colour, quite indescribable.
+
+    The first evening that I took one of these drives, while I was
+    watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps of
+    twitch-grass, set burning by the farm-labourers, which stretched
+    right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the dogcart and pointed
+    to a ruddy fire glowing, flickering, and smoking in an angle where a
+    green grassy drove-way met the dark-looking high-road some yards
+    ahead.  And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky
+    figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about.  ‘The
+    gypsies!’ I said, in the greatest state of exultation, which soon
+    fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle and saw a lot of these
+    dusky people running and leaping like wild things towards the
+    dog-cart.  ‘Will they kill us, father?’ I said.  ‘Kill us?  No,’ he
+    said, laughing; ‘they are friends of mine.  They’ve only come to lead
+    the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at it.’  They came
+    flocking up.  So far from the mare starting, as she would have done
+    at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome
+    the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose
+    with their tawny but well-shaped fingers, and caressing her neck.
+    Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw.
+    When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was fascinated by the
+    charm of the picture.  Outside the tents in front of the fire, over
+    which a kettle was suspended from an upright iron bar, which I
+    afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was spread a large dazzling white
+    table-cloth, covered with white crockery, among which glittered a
+    goodly number of silver spoons.  I afterwards learnt that to possess
+    good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons, was as ‘passionate
+    a desire in the Romany chi as in the most ambitious farmer’s wife in
+    the Fen country.’  It was from this little incident that my intimacy
+    with the gypsies dated.  I associated much with them in after life,
+    and I have had more experiences among them than I have yet had an
+    opportunity of recording in print.”
+
+This pretty gypsy girl was the prototype, I believe, of the famous Rhona
+Boswell herself.
+
+It must of course have been after the meeting with Rhona in the East
+Midlands—supposing always that we are allowed to identify the novelist
+with the hero, a bold supposition—that Mr. Watts-Dunton again came across
+her—this time in East Anglia.  Whether this is so or not, I must give
+this picture of her from ‘Aylwin’:—
+
+    “It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie’s friend,
+    Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl.  Graylingham Wood and
+    Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of
+    a superior kind of Gypsies called Gryengroes, that is to say,
+    horse-dealers.  Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell
+    them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands.  Thus it was that
+    Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales.  Compared
+    with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie
+    seemed quite a grave little person.  Rhona’s limbs were always on the
+    move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions.  Her laugh
+    seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it
+    was impossible to mistake for any other.  The laughter of most Gypsy
+    girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona’s laughter was a
+    sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards, when she
+    grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her.  It seemed
+    to emanate, not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame.
+    If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the
+    ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some
+    idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell.  Ah, what days they were!  Rhona
+    would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor, some
+    miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of
+    flowers that she had been weaving for herself.  This induced Winnie
+    to weave for herself a coronet of seaweeds, and an entire morning was
+    passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+SPORT AND WORK
+
+
+IT was at this period that, like so many young Englishmen who were his
+contemporaries, he gave attention to field sports, and took interest in
+that athleticism which, to judge from Wilkie Collins’s scathing pictures,
+was quite as rampant and absurd then as it is in our own time.  It was
+then too that he acquired that familiarity with the figures prominent in
+the ring which startles one in his reminiscences of George Borrow.  But
+it will scarcely interest the readers of this book to dwell long upon
+this subject.  Nor have I time to repeat the humorous stories I have
+heard him tell about the queer characters who could then be met at St.
+Ives Fair (said to have been the largest cattle fair in England), and at
+another favourite resort of his, Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge.
+Stourbridge Fair still exists, but its glory was departing when Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was familiar with it; and now, possibly, it has departed for
+ever.  Of Cambridge and the entire county he tells many anecdotes.  Here
+is a specimen:—
+
+Once in the early sixties he and his brother and some friends were
+greatly exercised by the news that Deerfoot, the famous American Indian
+runner in whom Borrow took such an interest, was to run at Cambridge
+against the English champion.  When the day came, they drove to Cambridge
+in a dog-cart from St. Ives, about a dozen miles.  The race took place in
+a field called Fenner’s Ground, much used by cricketers.  This is how, as
+far as I can recall the words, he tells the anecdote:—
+
+    “The place was crammed with all sorts of young men—’varsity men and
+    others.  There were not many young farmers or squires or yeomen
+    within a radius of a good many miles that did not put in an
+    appearance on that occasion.  The Indian won easily, and at the
+    conclusion of the race there was a frantic rush to get near him and
+    shake his hand.  The rush was so wild and so insensate that it
+    irritated me more than I should at the present moment consider it
+    possible to be irritated.  But I ought to say that at that time of my
+    life I had developed into a strangely imperious little chap.  I had
+    been over-indulged—not at home, but at the Cambridge school to which
+    I had been sent—and spoilt.  This seems odd, but it’s true.  It was
+    the boys who spoilt me in a curious way—a way which will not be
+    understood by those who went to public schools like Eton, where the
+    fagging principle would have stood in the way of the development of
+    the curious relation between me and my fellow-pupils which I am
+    alluding to.  There is an inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct
+    in the genus homo which causes boys, without in the least knowing
+    why, to select one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and
+    spoil him, almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which
+    is so valuable in the social struggle for life that follows
+    school-days.  This kind of emperor I had been at that school.  It
+    indicated no sort of real superiority on my part; for I learnt that
+    immediately after I had left the vacant post it was filled by another
+    boy—filled for an equally inscrutable reason.  The result of it was
+    that I became (as I often think when I recall those days) the most
+    masterful young urchin that ever lived.  If I had not been so, I
+    could not have got into a fury at being jostled by a good-humoured
+    crowd.  My brother, who had not been so spoilt at school, was very
+    different, and kept urging me to keep my temper.  ‘It’s capital fun,’
+    he said; ‘look at this blue-eyed young chap jostling and being
+    jostled close to us.  He’s fond of a hustle, and no mistake.  That’s
+    the kind of chap I should like to know’; and he indicated a young
+    ’varsity man of whose elbow at that moment I was unpleasantly
+    conscious, and who seemed to be in a state of delight at other elbows
+    being pushed into his ribs.  I soon perceived that certain men whom
+    he was with seemed angry, not on their own account, but on account of
+    this youth of the laughing lips and blue eyes.  As they were trying
+    to make a ring round him, ‘Hanged if it isn’t the Prince!’ said my
+    brother.  ‘And look how he takes it!  Surely you can stand what he
+    stands!’  It was, in fact, the Prince of Wales, who had come to see
+    the American runner.  I needed only two or three years of buffeting
+    with the great life outside the schoolroom to lose all my
+    imperiousness and learn the essential lesson of give-and-take.”
+
+For a time Mr. Watts-Dunton wavered about being articled to his father as
+a solicitor.  His love of the woods and fields was too great at that time
+for him to find life in a solicitor’s office at all tolerable.  Moreover,
+it would seem that he who had been so precocious a student, and who had
+lived in books, felt a temporary revulsion from them, and an irresistible
+impulse to study Nature apart from books, to study her face to face.  And
+it was at this time that, as the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ remarks, he
+‘moved much among the East Anglian gypsies, of whose superstitions and
+folklore he made a careful study.’  But of this period of his life I have
+but little knowledge.  Judging from Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ in the
+‘Bookman,’ he alone had Mr. Watts-Dunton’s full confidence in the matter.
+So great was his desire to pore over the book of nature, there appears to
+have been some likelihood, perhaps I ought to say some danger, of his
+feeling the impulse which had taken George Borrow away from civilization.
+He seems, besides, to have shared with the Greeks and with Montaigne a
+belief in the value of leisure.  It was at this period, to judge from his
+writings, that he exclaimed with Montaigne, ‘Have you known how to
+regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
+composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
+than he who has taken empires and cities.’  I suppose, however, that this
+was the time when he composed that unpublished ‘Dictionary for
+Nature-worshippers,’ from which he often used to quote in the ‘Athenæum.’
+There is nothing in his writings so characteristic as those definitions.
+Work and Sport are thus defined: ‘Work: that activity of mind or body
+which exhausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or health to
+the individual.  Sport: that activity of mind or body which, in
+exhausting the vital forces, yields pleasure and health to the
+individual.  The activity, however severe, of a born artist at his easel,
+of a born poet at his rhymings, of a born carpenter at his plane, is
+sport.  The activity, however slight, of the born artist or poet at the
+merchant’s desk, is work.  Hence, to work is not to pray.  We have called
+the heresy of Work modern because it is the characteristic one of our
+time; but, alas! like all heresies, it is old.  It was preached by
+Zoroaster in almost Mr. Carlyle’s words when Concord itself was in the
+woods and ere Chelsea was.’
+
+[Picture: ‘Evening Dreams with the Poets.’  (From an Oil Painting at ‘The
+                                Pines.’)]
+
+In one of his books Mr. Watts-Dunton writes with great eloquence upon
+this subject:—
+
+    “How hateful is the word ‘experience’ in the mouth of the
+    littérateur.  They all seem to think that this universe exists to
+    educate them, and that they should write books about it.  They never
+    look on a sunrise without thinking what an experience it is; how it
+    is educating them for bookmaking.  It is this that so often turns the
+    true Nature-worshipper away from books altogether, that makes him
+    bless with what at times seems such malicious fervour those two great
+    benefactors of the human race, Caliph Omar and Warburton’s cook.
+
+    In Thoreau there was an almost perpetual warring of the Nature
+    instinct with the Humanity instinct.  And, to say the truth, the
+    number is smaller than even Nature-worshippers themselves are
+    aware—those in whom there is not that warring of these two great
+    primal instincts.  For six or eight months at a time there are many,
+    perhaps, who could revel in ‘utter solitude,’ as companionship with
+    Nature is called; with no minster clock to tell them the time of day,
+    but, instead, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle in the
+    morning, the shifting of the shadows at noon, and the cawing of rooks
+    going home at sunset.  But then to these, there comes suddenly, and
+    without the smallest warning, a half-recognized but secretly sweet
+    pleasure in looking at the smooth high-road, and thinking that it
+    leads to the city—a beating of the heart at the sound of the distant
+    railway-whistle, as the train winds its way, like a vast gliding
+    snake, to the whirlpool they have left.
+
+    In order to realize the folly of the modern Carlylean heresy of work,
+    it is necessary to realize fully how infinitely rich is Nature, and
+    how generous, and consequently what a sacred duty as well as wise
+    resolve it is that, before he ‘returns unto the ground,’ man should
+    drink deeply while he may at the fountain of Life.  Let it be enough
+    for the Nature-worshipper to know that he, at least, has been
+    blessed.  Suppose he were to preach in London or Paris or New York
+    against this bastard civilization, and expatiate on Nature’s largess,
+    of which it robs us?  Suppose he were to say to people to whom
+    opinion is the breath of life, ‘What is it that this civilization of
+    yours can give you by way of compensation for that of which it robs
+    you?  Is it your art?  Is it your literature?  Is it your music?  Is
+    it your science?’  Suppose, for instance, he were to say to the
+    collector of Claudes, or Turners, or David Coxes: ‘Your possessions
+    are precious undoubtedly, but what are even they when set against the
+    tamest and quietest sunrise, in the tamest and quietest district of
+    Cambridge or Lincoln, in this tame and quiet month, when, over the
+    treeless flat you may see, and for nothing, purple bar after purple
+    bar trembling along the grey, as the cows lift up their heads from
+    the sheet of silver mist in which they are lying?  How can you really
+    enjoy your Turners, you who have never seen a sunrise in your lives?’
+    Or suppose he were to say to the opera-goer: ‘Those notes of your
+    favourite soprano were superb indeed; and superb they ought to be to
+    keep you in the opera-house on a June night, when all over the south
+    of England a thousand thickets, warm with the perfumed breath of the
+    summer night, are musical with the gurgle of the nightingales.’
+    Thoreau preached after this fashion, and was deservedly laughed at
+    for his pains.
+
+    Yet it is not a little singular that this heresy of the sacredness of
+    work should be most flourishing at the very time when the sophism on
+    which it was originally built is exploded; the sophism, we mean, that
+    Nature herself is the result of Work, whereas she is the result of
+    growth.  One would have thought that this was the very time for
+    recognizing what the sophism had blinded us to, that Nature’s
+    permanent temper—whatever may be said of this or that mood of hers—is
+    the temper of Sport, that her pet abhorrence, which is said to be a
+    vacuum, is really Work.  We see this clearly enough in what are
+    called the lower animals—whether it be a tiger or a gazelle, a ferret
+    or a coney, a bat or a butterfly—the final cause of the existence of
+    every conscious thing is that it should sport.  It has no other use
+    than that.  For this end it was that ‘the great Vishnu yearned to
+    create a world.’  Yet over the toiling and moiling world sits Moloch
+    Work; while those whose hearts are withering up with hatred of him
+    are told by certain writers to fall down before him and pretend to
+    love.
+
+    The worker of the mischief is, of course, civilization in excess, or
+    rather, civilization in wrong directions.  For this word, too, has to
+    be newly defined in the Dictionary before mentioned, where you will
+    find it thus given:—Civilization: a widening and enriching of human
+    life.  Bastard or Modern Western Civilization: the art of inventing
+    fictitious wants and working to supply them.  In bastard civilization
+    life becomes poorer and poorer, paltrier and paltrier, till at last
+    life goes out of fashion altogether, and is supplanted by work.  True
+    freedom is more remote from us than ever.  For modern Freedom is thus
+    defined: the exchange of the slavery of feudality for the slavery of
+    opinion.  Thoreau realized this, and tried to preach men back to
+    common-sense and Nature.  Here was his mistake—in trying to preach.
+    No man ever yet had the Nature-instinct preached into him.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+EAST ANGLIA
+
+
+WHATEVER may have been those experiences with the gryengroes which made
+Groome, when speaking of the gypsies of ‘Aylwin,’ say ‘the author writes
+only of what he knows,’ it seems to have been after his intercourse with
+the gypsies that he and a younger brother, Alfred Eugene Watts (elsewhere
+described), were articled as solicitors to their father.  His bent,
+however, was always towards literature, especially poetry, of which he
+had now written a great deal—indeed, the major part of the volume which
+was destined to lie unpublished for so many years.  But before I deal
+with the most important period of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life—his life in
+London—it seems necessary to say a word or two about his visits to East
+Anglia, and especially to the Norfolk coast.  There are some admirable
+remarks upon the East Coast in Mr. William Sharp’s chapter on
+‘Aylwinland’ in ‘Literary Geography,’ and he notes the way in which Rhona
+Boswell links it with Cowslip Land; but he does not give examples of the
+poems which thus link it, such as the double roundel called ‘The Golden
+Hand.’
+
+                            THE GOLDEN HAND {73a}
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    Do you forget that day on Rington strand
+    When, near the crumbling ruin’s parapet,
+    I saw you stand beside the long-shore net
+    The gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?
+
+                                    RHONA
+
+    Do I forget?
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy band
+    Around your hair which shone as black as jet:
+    No fairy’s crown of bloom was ever set
+    Round brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.
+
+    I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:
+    Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:
+    Love-lips (with one tattoo ‘for dukkerin’ {73b}) tanned
+    By sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.
+
+                                    RHONA
+
+       Do I forget?
+    The Golden Hand shone there: it’s you forget,
+    Or p’raps us Romanies ondly understand
+    The way the Lover’s Dukkeripen is planned
+    Which shone that second time when us two met.
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    Blest ‘Golden Hand’!
+
+                                    RHONA
+
+    The wind, that mixed the smell o’ violet
+    Wi’ chirp o’ bird, a-blowin’ from the land
+    Where my dear Mammy lies, said as it fanned
+    My heart-like, ‘Them ’ere tears makes Mammy fret.’
+    She loves to see her chavi {74} lookin’ grand,
+    So I made what you call’d a coronet,
+    And in the front I put her amulet:
+    She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    Blest ‘Golden Hand’!
+
+In the same way that the velvety green of Hunts is seen in the verses I
+have already quoted, so the softer side of the inland scenery of East
+Anglia is described in the following lines, where also we find an
+exquisite use of the East Anglian fancy about the fairies and the
+foxglove bells.
+
+At a waltz during certain Venetian revels after the liberation from the
+Austrian yoke, a forsaken lover stands and watches a lady whose
+child-love he had won in England:—
+
+    Has she forgotten for such halls as these
+       The domes the angels built in holy times,
+       When wings were ours in childhood’s flowery climes
+    To dance with butterflies and golden bees?—
+    Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breeze
+       Shook out those English harebells’ magic chimes
+       On that child-wedding morn, ’neath English limes,
+    ’Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?
+
+    The love that childhood cradled—girlhood nursed—
+       Has she forgotten it for this dull play,
+       Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and sway
+    Like dancers in a telescope reversed?
+       Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,
+    ‘Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed’?
+
+    But was it this that bought her—this poor splendour
+       That won her from her troth and wild-flower wreath
+       Who ‘cracked the foxglove bells’ on Grayland Heath,
+    Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,
+    Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,
+       Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,
+       Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,
+    When Love grew grave—to hide her soul’s surrender?
+
+Mr. Sharp has dwelt upon the striking way in which the scenery and
+atmosphere are rendered in ‘Aylwin,’ but this, as I think, is even more
+clearly seen in the poems.  And in none of these is it seen so vividly as
+in that exhilarating poem, ‘Gypsy Heather,’ published in the ‘Athenæum,’
+and not yet garnered in a volume.  This poem also shows his lyrical
+power, which never seems to be at its very best unless he is depicting
+Romany life and Romany passion.  The metre of this poem is as original as
+that of ‘The Gypsy Haymaking Song,’ quoted in an earlier chapter.  It has
+a swing like that of no other poem:—
+
+                                GYPSY HEATHER
+
+    ‘If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it’ll show
+    him the selfsame heather where it wur born.’—SINFI LOVELL.
+
+    [Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the ‘Petrel,’ takes from his
+    pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south
+    seas, the Melbourne post had brought him—a letter from Rhona, staying
+    then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by the
+    Boswells, called ‘Gypsy Heather.’  He takes from the envelope a
+    withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on
+    which Rhona has written the words, ‘Remember Gypsy Heather.’]
+
+                                      I
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Remember Jasper’s camping-place
+       Where heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,
+    And scents of meadow, wood and chase,
+       Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?
+    Remember where, in Rington Furze,
+       I kissed her and she asked me whether
+    I ‘thought my lips of teazel-burrs,
+    That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,
+    Felt nice on a rinkenny moey {76} like hers?’—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      II
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Remember her whom nought could tame
+       But love of me, the poacher-maiden
+    Who showed me once my father’s game
+       With which her plump round arms were laden
+    Who, when my glances spoke reproach,
+       Said, “Things o’ fur an’ fin an’ feather
+    Like coneys, pheasants, perch an’ loach,
+    An’ even the famous ‘Rington roach,’
+    Wur born for Romany chies to poach!”—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                     III
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Atolls and reefs, you change, you change
+       To dells of England dewy and tender;
+    You palm-trees in yon coral range
+       Seem ‘Rington Birches’ sweet and slender
+    Shading the ocean’s fiery glare:
+       We two are in the Dell together—
+    My body is here, my soul is there
+    With lords of trap and net and snare,
+    The Children of the Open Air,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      IV
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Its pungent breath is on the wind,
+       Killing the scent of tropic water;
+    I see her suitors swarthy skinned,
+       Who pine in vain for Jasper’s daughter.
+    The ‘Scollard,’ with his features tanned
+       By sun and wind as brown as leather—
+    His forehead scarred with Passion’s brand—
+    Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,
+    Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      V
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Now Rhona sits beneath the tree
+       That shades our tent, alone and weeping;
+    And him, the ‘Scollard,’ him I see:
+       From bush to bush I see him creeping—
+    I see her mock him, see her run
+       And free his pony from the tether,
+    Who lays his ears in love and fun,
+    And gallops with her in the sun
+    Through lace the gossamers have spun,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      VI
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    She reaches ‘Rington Birches’; now,
+       Dismounting from the ‘Scollard’s’ pony,
+    She sits alone with heavy brow,
+       Thinking, but not of hare or coney.
+    The hot sea holds each sight, each sound
+       Of England’s golden autumn weather:
+    The Romanies now are sitting round
+    The tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;
+    Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                     VII
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    She’s thinking of this withered spray
+       Through all the dance; her eyes are gleaming
+    Darker than night, yet bright as day,
+       While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;
+    I see the lips—the upper curled,
+       A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,
+    Whence—while the floating shawl is twirled,
+    As if a ruddy cloud were swirled—
+    Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                     VIII
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    In storm or calm, in sun or rain,
+       There’s magic, Rhona, in the writing
+    Wound round these flowers whose purple stain
+       Dims the dear scrawl of Love’s inditing:
+    Dear girl, this spray between the leaves
+        (Now fading like a draggled feather
+    With which the nesting song-bird weaves)
+    Makes every wave the vessel cleaves
+    Seem purple of heather as it heaves,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      IX
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of home
+       Are everywhere; the skylark winging
+    Through amber cloud-films till the dome
+       Seems filled with love, our love, a-singing.
+    The sea-wind seems an English breeze
+       Bearing the bleat of ewe and wether
+    Over the heath from Rington Leas,
+    Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,
+    You taught me Romany ’neath the trees,—
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+Another reason that makes it necessary for me to touch upon the inland
+part of East Anglia is that I have certain remarks to make upon what are
+called ‘the Omarian poems of Mr. Watts-Dunton.’  Although, as I have
+before hinted, St. Ives, being in Hunts, belongs topographically to the
+East Midlands, its sympathies are East Anglian.  This perhaps is partly
+because it is the extreme east of Hunts, and partly because the mouth of
+the Ouse is at Lynn: to those whom Mr. Norris affectionately calls St.
+Ivians and Hemingfordians, the seaside means Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Cromer,
+Hunstanton, and the towns on the Suffolk coast.  The splendour of Norfolk
+ale may also partly account for it.  This perhaps also explains why the
+famous East Anglian translator of Omar Khayyàm would seem to have been
+known to a few Omarians on the banks of the Ouse and Cam as soon as the
+great discoverer of good things, Rossetti, pounced upon it in the penny
+box of a second-hand bookseller.  Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s obituary
+notice of F. H. Groome in the ‘Athenæum’ will recall these words:—
+
+    “It was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of
+    sympathy at ‘The Pines’ during that first luncheon; there was that
+    other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm.
+    We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps
+    all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be
+    esoteric.  And here was a guest who had been brought into actual
+    personal contact with the wonderful old ‘Fitz.’  As a child of eight
+    he had seen him, talked with him, been patted on the head by him.
+    Groome’s father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s
+    most intimate friends.  This was at once a delightful and a powerful
+    link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when
+    he heard, as he soon did, the toast to ‘Omar Khayyàm,’ none drank
+    that toast with more gusto than he.  The fact is, as the Romanies
+    say, true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first
+    sight.”
+
+This is the poem alluded to: it is entitled, ‘Toast to Omar Khayyàm: An
+East Anglian echo-chorus inscribed to old Omarian Friends in memory of
+happy days by Ouse and Cam’:—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    In this red wine, where memory’s eyes seem glowing,
+       And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
+    And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showing
+    What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
+    We drink to thee, right heir of Nature’s knowing,
+                Omar Khayyàm!
+
+                                      I
+
+    Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowing
+       Her scriptured orbs on Time’s wide oriflamme,
+       Nature’s proud blazon: ‘Who shall bless or damn?
+    Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!’
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
+
+                                      II
+
+    Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowing
+       Through Persian gardens, widened till it swam—
+       A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam—
+    Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,—
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
+
+                                     III
+
+    Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,
+       And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,
+       And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,
+    And swish of scythe in Bredfield’s dewy mowing?
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
+
+                                      IV
+
+    ’Twas Fitz, ‘Old Fitz,’ whose knowledge, farther going
+       Than lore of Omar, ‘Wisdom’s starry Cham,’
+       Made richer still thine opulent epigram:
+    Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.—
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyàm!
+
+                                      V
+
+    In this red wine, where Memory’s eyes seem glowing,
+       And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
+    And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showing
+    What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
+    We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!
+             Omar Khayyàm!
+
+It was many years after this—it was as a member of another Omar Khayyàm
+Club of much greater celebrity than the little brotherhood of Ouse and
+Cam—not large enough to be called a club—that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote the
+following well-known sonnet:—
+
+                             PRAYER TO THE WINDS
+
+    On planting at the head of FitzGerald’s grave two rose-trees whose
+    ancestors had scattered their petals over the tomb of Omar Khayyàm.
+
+    “My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon
+    it.”
+
+                                            OMAR KHAYYÀM TO KWÁJAH NIZAMI.
+
+    Hear us, ye winds!  From where the north-wind strows
+       Blossoms that crown ‘the King of Wisdom’s’ tomb,
+       The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,
+    Dreaming in seed of Love’s ancestral rose,
+    To meadows where a braver north-wind blows
+       O’er greener grass, o’er hedge-rose, may, and broom,
+       And all that make East England’s field-perfume
+    Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows.
+
+    Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!
+    This granite covers him whose golden mouth
+       Made wiser ev’n the Word of Wisdom’s King:
+    Blow softly over Omar’s Western herald
+       Till roses rich of Omar’s dust shall spring
+    From richer dust of Suffolk’s rare FitzGerald.
+
+I must now quote another of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s East Anglian poems, partly
+because it depicts the weird charm of the Norfolk coast, and partly
+because it illustrates that sympathy between the poet and the lower
+animals which I have already noted.  I have another reason: not long ago,
+that good East Anglian, Mr. Rider Haggard interested us all by telling
+how telepathy seemed to have the power of operating between a dog and its
+beloved master in certain rare and extraordinary cases.  When the poem
+appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ (December 20, 1902), it was described
+as ‘part of a forthcoming romance.’  It records a case of telepathy
+between man and dog quite as wonderful as that narrated by Mr. Rider
+Haggard:—
+
+                          CAUGHT IN THE EBBING TIDE
+
+    The mightiest Titan’s stroke could not withstand
+       An ebbing tide like this.  These swirls denote
+       How wind and tide conspire.  I can but float
+    To the open sea and strike no more for land.
+    Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sand
+       Her feet have pressed—farewell, dear little boat
+       Where Gelert, {82} calmly sitting on my coat,
+    Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!
+
+    All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:
+       Yet these air-pictures of the past that glide—
+       These death-mirages o’er the heaving tide—
+    Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,
+       Will break my heart.  I see them and I hear
+    As there they sit at morning, side by side.
+
+                               THE FIRST VISION
+
+    _With Raxton elms behind—in front the sea_,
+       _Sitting in rosy light in that alcove_,
+       _They hear the first lark rise o’er Raxton Grove_;
+    ‘_What should I do with fame_, _dear heart_?’ _says he_.
+    ‘_You talk of fame_, _poetic fame_, _to me_
+       _Whose crown is not of laurel but of love_—
+       _To me who would not give this little glove_
+    _On this dear hand for Shakspeare’s dower in fee_.
+
+    _While_, _rising red and kindling every billow_,
+       _The sun’s shield shines_ ’_neath many a golden spear_,
+    _To lean with you against this leafy pillow_,
+       _To murmur words of love in this loved ear_—
+    _To feel you bending like a bending willow_,
+       _This is to be a poet_—_this_, _my dear_!’
+
+    O God, to die and leave her—die and leave
+       The heaven so lately won!—And then, to know
+       What misery will be hers—what lonely woe!—
+    To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieve
+    Will make me a coward as I sink, and cleave
+       To life though Destiny has bid me go.
+       How shall I bear the pictures that will glow
+    Above the glowing billows as they heave?
+
+    One picture fades, and now above the spray
+       Another shines: ah, do I know the bowers
+       Where that sweet woman stands—the woodland flowers,
+    In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay—
+       That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hours
+    Wore angel-wings,—till portents brought dismay?
+
+                              THE SECOND VISION
+
+    _Proud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel_,
+       _She smiles on him_—_on him_, _the prouder giver_,
+       _As there they stand beside the sunlit river_
+    _Where petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel_:
+    _The chirping reed-birds_, _in their play or quarrel_,
+       _Make musical the stream where lilies quiver_—
+       _Ah_! _suddenly he feels her slim waist shiver_:
+    _She speaks_: _her lips grow grey_—_her lips of coral_!
+
+    ‘_From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are swaying_,
+       _The seeds of which that gypsy girl has spoken_—
+       ’_Tis fairy grass_, _alas_! _the lover’s token_.’
+    _She lifts her fingers to her forehead_, _saying_,
+       ‘_Touch the twin hearts_.’  _Says he_, ‘’_Tis idle playing_’:
+       _He touches them_; _they fall_—_fall bruised and broken_.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    Shall I turn coward here who sailed with Death
+       Through many a tempest on mine own North Sea,
+       And quail like him of old who bowed the knee—
+    Faithless—to billows of Genesereth?
+    Did I turn coward when my very breath
+       Froze on my lips that Alpine night when he
+       Stood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,
+    While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?
+
+    Each billow bears me nearer to the verge
+       Of realms where she is not—where love must wait.—
+    If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urge
+       That friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,
+       To come and help me, or to share my fate.
+    Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.
+
+                             [The dog, plunging into the tide and striking
+                                towards him with immense strength, reaches
+                                                 him and swims round him.]
+
+    Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of paw
+       Here gazing like your namesake, ‘Snowdon’s Hound,’
+       When great Llewelyn’s child could not be found,
+    And all the warriors stood in speechless awe—
+    Mute as your namesake when his master saw
+       The cradle tossed—the rushes red around—
+       With never a word, but only a whimpering sound
+    To tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.
+
+    In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,
+       Should I, brave friend, have needed other speech
+    Than this dear whimper?  Is there not a bond
+       Stronger than words that binds us each to each?—
+    But Death has caught us both.  ’Tis far beyond
+       The strength of man or dog to win the beach.
+
+    Through tangle-weed—through coils of slippery kelp
+       Decking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyes
+       Shine true—shine deep of love’s divine surmise
+    As hers who gave you—then a Titan whelp!
+    I think you know my danger and would help!
+       See how I point to yonder smack that lies
+       At anchor—Go!  His countenance replies.
+    Hope’s music rings in Gelert’s eager yelp!
+
+                                [The dog swims swiftly away down the tide.
+
+    Now, life and love and death swim out with him!
+       If he should reach the smack, the men will guess
+       The dog has left his master in distress.
+    You taught him in these very waves to swim—
+    ‘The prince of pups,’ you said, ‘for wind and limb’—
+       And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.
+
+                                    ENVOY
+
+    (The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the sand.)
+
+    ’Twas in no glittering tourney’s mimic strife,—
+       ’Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,
+       While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,
+    And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife—
+    ’Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,
+       Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove
+       Conquered and found his foe a soul to love,
+    Found friendship—Life’s great second crown of life.
+
+    So I this morning love our North Sea more
+       Because he fought me well, because these waves
+    Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore
+       Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves
+       That yawned above my head like conscious graves—
+    I love him as I never loved before.
+
+In these days when so much is written about the intelligence of the lower
+animals, when ‘Hans,’ the ‘thinking horse,’ is ‘interviewed’ by eminent
+scientists, the exploit of the Second Gelert is not without interest.  I
+may, perhaps, mention a strange experience of my own.  The late Betts
+Bey, a well-known figure in St. Peter’s Port, Guernsey, had a fine black
+retriever, named Caro.  During a long summer holiday which we spent in
+Guernsey, Caro became greatly attached to a friend, and Betts Bey
+presented him to her.  He was a magnificent fellow, valiant as a lion,
+and a splendid diver and swimmer.  He often plunged off the parapet of
+the bridge which spans the Serpentine.  Indeed, he would have dived from
+any height.  His intelligence was surprising.  If we wished to make him
+understand that he was not to accompany us, we had only to say, ‘Caro, we
+are going to church!’  As soon as he heard the word ‘church’ his barks
+would cease, his tail would drop, and he would look mournfully resigned.
+One evening, as I was writing in my room, Caro began to scratch outside
+the door, uttering those strange ‘woof-woofs’ which were his canine
+language.  I let him in, but he would not rest.  He stood gazing at me
+with an intense expression, and, turning towards the door, waited
+impatiently.  For some time I took no notice of his dumb appeal, but his
+excitement increased, and suddenly a vague sense of ill seemed to pass
+from him into my mind.  Drawn half-consciously I rose, and at once with a
+strange half-human whine Caro dashed upstairs.  I followed him.  He ran
+into a bedroom, and there in the dark I found my friend lying
+unconscious.  It is well-nigh certain that Caro thus saved my friend’s
+life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+LONDON
+
+
+BETWEEN Mr. Watts-Dunton and the brother who came next to him, before
+mentioned, there was a very great affection, although the difference
+between them, mentally and physically, was quite noticeable.  They were
+articled to their father on the same day and admitted solicitors on the
+same day, a very unusual thing with solicitors and their sons.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton afterwards passed a short term in one of the great
+conveyancing offices in London in order to become proficient in
+conveyancing.  His brother did the same in another office in Bedford Row;
+but he afterwards practised for himself.  Mr. A. E. Watts soon had a
+considerable practice as family solicitor and conveyancer.  Mr. Hake
+identifies him with Cyril Aylwin, but before I quote Mr. Hake’s
+interesting account of him, I will give the vivid description of Cyril in
+‘Aylwin’:—
+
+    “Juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wideawake.  He
+    had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he
+    gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the
+    little crow’s feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately
+    as being probably on the verge of thirty-five.  His figure was slim
+    and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall.  I should have
+    considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and
+    sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an
+    impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often
+    produce.  This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek
+    which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of
+    sedateness . . . but in the one glance I had got from those watchful,
+    sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to
+    them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.”
+
+Cyril Aylwin was at first thought to be a portrait of Whistler, which is
+not quite so outrageously absurd as the wild conjecture that William
+Morris was the original of Wilderspin.  Mr. Hake says:—
+
+    “I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been
+    inquired about more than any other in the book.  I knew him, I think,
+    even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group.  He was
+    a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s—Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts.  He lived at
+    Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly
+    after I had met him at a wedding party.  Among the set in which I
+    moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist.
+    His style of humour always struck me as being more American than
+    English.  While bringing out humorous things that would set a dinner
+    table in a roar, he would himself maintain a perfectly unmoved
+    countenance.  And it was said of him, as ‘Wilderspin’ says of ‘Cyril
+    Aylwin,’ that he was never known to laugh.” {88}
+
+After a time Mr. Watts-Dunton joined his brother, and the two practised
+together in London.  They also lived together at Sydenham.  Some time
+after this, however, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to abandon the law for
+literature.  The brothers migrated to Sydenham, because at that time Mr.
+Watts-Dunton pursued music with an avidity and interest which threatened
+for a time to interfere with those literary energies which it was now his
+intention to exercise.  At that time the orchestral concerts at the
+Crystal Palace under Manns, given every morning and every afternoon, were
+a great attraction to music lovers, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, who lived close
+by, rarely missed either the morning or the afternoon concert.  It was in
+this way that he became steeped in German music; and afterwards, when he
+became intimate with Dr. F. Hueffer, the musical critic of the ‘Times,’
+and the exponent of Wagner in Great Britain, he became a thorough
+Wagnerian.
+
+It was during this time, and through the extraordinary social attractions
+of his brother, that Mr. Watts-Dunton began to move very much in London
+life, and saw a great deal of what is called London society.  After his
+brother’s death he took chambers in Great James Street, close to Mr.
+Swinburne, with whom he had already become intimate.  And according to
+Mr. Hake, in his paper in ‘T. P.’s Weekly’ above quoted from, it was here
+that he wrote ‘Aylwin.’  I have already alluded to his record of this
+most interesting event:—
+
+    “I have just read,” he says, “with the greatest interest the article
+    in your number of Sept. 18, 1903, called ‘How Authors Work Best.’
+    But the following sentence in it set me reflecting: ‘Flaubert took
+    ten years to write and repolish “Madame Bovary,” Watts-Dunton twenty
+    years to write, recast, and conclude “Aylwin.”’  The statement about
+    ‘Aylwin’ has often been made, and in these days of hasty production
+    it may well be taken by the author as a compliment; but it is as
+    entirely apocryphal as that about Scott’s brother having written the
+    Waverley Novels, and as that about Bramwell Brontë having written
+    ‘Wuthering Heights.’  As to ‘Aylwin,’ I happen to be in a peculiarly
+    authoritative position to speak upon the genesis of this very popular
+    book.  If any one were to peruse the original manuscript of the story
+    he would find it in four different handwritings—my late father’s, and
+    two of my brothers’, but principally in mine.
+
+    Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that its
+    composition did not take twenty years to achieve.  It was dictated to
+    us.”
+
+Dr. Gordon Hake is mainly known as the ‘parable poet,’ but as a fact he
+was a physician of extraordinary talent, who had practised first at Bury
+St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, until he partly retired to
+be private physician to the late Lady Ripon.  After her death he left
+practice altogether in order to devote himself to literature, for which
+he had very great equipments.  As ‘Aylwin’ touched upon certain subtle
+nervous phases it must have been a great advantage to the author to
+dictate these portions of the story to so skilled and experienced a
+friend.  The rare kind of cerebral exaltation into which Henry Aylwin
+passed after his appalling experience in the Cove, in which the entire
+nervous system was disturbed, was not what is known as brain fever.  The
+record of it in ‘Aylwin’ is, I understand, a literal account of a rare
+and wonderful case brought under the professional notice of Dr. Hake.
+
+As physician to Rossetti, a few years after the death of his beloved
+wife, Dr. Hake’s services must have been priceless to the poet-painter;
+for, as is only too well known, Rossetti’s grief for the death of his
+wife had for some time a devastating effect upon his mind.  It was one of
+the causes of that terrible insomnia to relieve himself from which he
+resorted to chloral, though later on the attacks upon him by certain foes
+intensified the distressing ailment.  The insomnia produced fits of
+melancholia, an ailment, according to the skilled opinion of Dr. Hake,
+more difficult than all others to deal with; for when the nervous system
+has sunk to a certain state of depression, the mind roams over the
+universe, as it were, in quest of imaginary causes for the depression.
+This accounts for the ‘cock and bull’ stories that were somewhat rife
+immediately after Rossetti’s death about his having expressed remorse on
+account of his ill-treatment of his wife.  No one of his intimates took
+the least notice of these wild and whirling words.  For he would express
+remorse on account of the most fantastic things when the fits of
+melancholia were upon him; and when these fits were past he would smile
+at the foolish things he had said.  I get this knowledge from a very high
+authority, Dr. Hake’s son—Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, before mentioned—who
+knew Rossetti intimately from 1871 until his death, having lived under
+the same roof with him at Cheyne Walk, Bognor and Kelmscott.  After
+Rossetti’s most serious attack of melancholia, his relations and friends
+persuaded him to stay with Dr. Hake at Roehampton, and it was there that
+the terrible crisis of his illness was passed.
+
+It is interesting to know that in the original form of ‘Aylwin’ the
+important part taken in the development of the story by D’Arcy was taken
+by Dr. Hake, under the name of Gordon, and that afterwards, when all
+sorts of ungenerous things were written about Rossetti, D’Arcy was
+substituted for Gordon in order to give the author an opportunity of
+bringing out and showing the world the absolute nobility and charm of
+Rossetti’s character.
+
+    [Picture: A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Painted and Carved
+                                 Cabinet]
+
+Among the many varieties of life which Mr. Watts-Dunton saw at this time
+was life in the slums; and this was long before the once fashionable
+pastime of ‘slumming’ was invented.  The following lines in Dr. Hake’s
+‘New Day’ allude to the deep interest that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
+shown in the poor—shown years before the writers who now deal with the
+slums had written a line.  Artistically, they are not fair specimens of
+Dr. Gordon Hake’s verses, but nevertheless it is interesting to quote
+them here:—
+
+    Know you a widow’s home? an orphanage?
+          A place of shelter for the crippled poor?
+    Did ever limbless men your care engage
+       Whom you assisted of your larger store?
+    Know you the young who are to early die—
+       At their frail form sinks not your heart within?
+    Know you the old who paralytic lie
+       While you the freshness of your life begin?
+    Know you the great pain-bearers who long carry
+       The bullet in the breast that does not kill?
+    And those who in the house of madness tarry,
+       Beyond the blest relief of human skill?
+    These have you visited, all these assisted,
+    In the high ranks of charity enlisted.
+
+That Mr. Watts-Dunton has retained his interest in the poor is shown by
+the sonnet, ‘Father Christmas in Famine Street,’ which was originally
+printed as ‘an appeal’ on Christmas Eve in the ‘Athenæum’:—
+
+    When Father Christmas went down Famine Street
+       He saw two little sisters: one was trying
+       To lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,
+    Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.
+
+    From out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweet
+       Leapt, as in answer to the other’s sighing,
+       While came a murmur, ‘Don’t ’ee keep on crying—
+    I wants to die: you’ll get my share to eat.’
+    Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the city
+    Hymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,
+       Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.
+    Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,
+        ‘They do His bidding—if in thrifty fashion:
+    They let the little children go to Him.’
+
+With this sonnet should be placed that entitled, ‘Dickens Returns on
+Christmas Day’:—
+
+    A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: ‘Dickens dead?
+    Then will Father Christmas die too?’—June 9, 1870.
+
+    ‘Dickens is dead!’  Beneath that grievous cry
+       London seemed shivering in the summer heat;
+       Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:
+    ‘Dickens is dead!’ said they, and hurried by;
+    Street children stopped their games—they knew not why,
+       But some new night seemed darkening down the street.
+       A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,
+    Cried, ‘Dickens dead?  Will Father Christmas die?’
+
+    City he loved, take courage on thy way!
+       He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.
+    Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey—
+       Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,
+       Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears—
+    Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!
+
+Let me say here, parenthetically, that ‘The Pines’ is so far out of date
+that for twenty-five years it has been famous for its sympathy with the
+Christmas sentiment which now seems to be fading, as this sonnet shows:—
+
+                      THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT ‘THE PINES.’
+
+    Life still hath one romance that naught can bury—
+       Not Time himself, who coffins Life’s romances—
+       For still will Christmas gild the year’s mischances,
+    If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry—
+    To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry—
+       To smile with eyes outshining by their glances
+       The Christmas tree—to dance with fairy dances
+    And crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.
+
+    And as to us, dear friend, the carols sung
+       Are fresh as ever.  Bright is yonder bough
+    Of mistletoe as that which shone and swung
+       When you and I and Friendship made a vow
+       That Childhood’s Christmas still should seal each brow—
+    Friendship’s, and yours, and mine—and keep us young.
+
+I may also quote from ‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice’ this romantic
+description of the Rosicrucian Christmas:—
+
+    (The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called ‘The
+    Rosy Scar,’ depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine
+    galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of
+    Rosenkreutz, as a ‘rosy phantom.’  The Lover reads aloud the
+    descriptive verses on the frame.)
+
+    While Night’s dark horses waited for the wind,
+       He stood—he shone—where Sunset’s fiery glaives
+       Flickered behind the clouds; then, o’er the waves,
+    He came to them, Faith’s remnant sorrow-thinned.
+    The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,
+       Cried, ‘Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?
+       Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,
+    The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.’
+
+    All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;
+       Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,
+    Flushed the grey sky—flushed sea and sail and spar,
+       Flushed, blessing every slave’s woe-wasted cheek.
+       Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:
+    ‘Sufferers, take heart!  Christ lends the Rosy Scar.’
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+GEORGE BORROW
+
+
+IT was not until 1872 that Mr. Watts-Dunton was introduced to Borrow by
+Dr. Gordon Hake, Borrow’s most intimate friend.
+
+The way in which this meeting came about has been familiar to the readers
+of an autobiographical romance (not even yet published!) wherein Borrow
+appears under the name of Dereham, and Hake under the name of Gordon.
+But as some of these passages in a modified form have appeared in print
+in an introduction by Mr. Watts-Dunton to the edition of Borrow’s
+‘Lavengro,’ published by Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., in 1893, there will be
+nothing incongruous in my quoting them here:—
+
+    “Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon
+    grew up an intimacy between us.  It has been my experience to learn
+    that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference
+    of age between friends of either sex.  At that time I do not think I
+    had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on
+    terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men,
+    each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father.  Basevi
+    was one of these: so was Lineham.  I daresay it was owing to some
+    idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young
+    fellows with whom I was brought into contact was mainly confined to
+    matters connected with field-sports.  I found it far easier to be
+    brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age
+    than with men.  But as Basevi told me that it was the same with
+    himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all.  When
+    Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any
+    difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same
+    with himself.
+
+    One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near
+    Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and
+    in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons
+    came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common,
+    evidently bound for the house.
+
+    ‘Dereham!’ I said.  ‘Is there a man in the world I should so like to
+    see as Dereham?’
+
+    And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in
+    the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.
+
+    ‘Why do you want so much to see him?’ asked Gordon.
+
+    ‘Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the
+    Open Air.’
+
+    Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant.  But it is
+    necessary here to explain what that meaning was.
+
+    We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the
+    picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels,
+    ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as
+    ever it was—perhaps rarer.  It was, we believed, quite an affair of
+    individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost.
+    That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is
+    known.  Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with
+    science.  The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the
+    man of science as rarely.  I wish I could define it.  In human
+    souls—in one, perhaps, as much as in another—there is always that
+    instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is
+    always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as
+    close as may be to some other conscious thing.  In most individuals
+    this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some
+    few it is not.  There are some in every country of whom it is the
+    blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to
+    some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’
+    herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to
+    brother, sister, wife, or friend.  Darwin among English savants, and
+    Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English
+    gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children
+    of the Open Air.’  But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of
+    his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing
+    pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Brontë, the sensitivity to
+    human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love
+    passion—disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct
+    with which they were undoubtedly endowed.  I was perfectly conscious
+    that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers—that is, I
+    was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a
+    free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion
+    to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child
+    of the Open Air.
+
+    Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there
+    are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other
+    barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to
+    overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the
+    attempt is not found to be worth the making.  For, what this kind of
+    Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not
+    the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to
+    touch her close, soul to soul—but another ego enisled like his
+    own—sensitive, shrinking, like his own—a soul which, love him as it
+    may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the
+    universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other
+    Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations.
+    But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon
+    Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no
+    more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a
+    beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns.  To them a
+    Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a
+    mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah.  A
+    balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s
+    sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious
+    life.
+
+    To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot
+    touch him.  Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will
+    go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a
+    dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky,
+    the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep.  And as life goes on, love
+    of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature
+    seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.
+
+    Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no
+    retreating, and we were introduced.
+
+    He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much
+    annoyed.  Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that
+    drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still.
+    My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling
+    of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible
+    barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully.  I knew from his books
+    that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way
+    directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he
+    considered that in these his own special directions lay all the
+    knowledge that was of any value.  Accordingly, what appeared to
+    Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was
+    its ignorance.  Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk
+    of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be
+    ‘prying,’ though there I should have been quite at home.  I knew,
+    however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet
+    literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of
+    eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned,
+    and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction.  I
+    touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect.  Dereham
+    evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar
+    with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail.  Then I
+    touched upon beer, the British bruiser, ‘gentility nonsense,’ and
+    other ‘nonsense’; then upon etymology—traced hoity-toityism to
+    ‘toit,’ a roof—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a
+    withering smile.  I tried other subjects in the same direction, but
+    with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of
+    Ambrose Gwinett.  There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet
+    narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having
+    been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had
+    shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night,
+    escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and
+    afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been
+    hanged for murdering.  The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim,
+    having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding
+    at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in
+    the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to
+    sea, where he had been in service ever since.  I introduced the
+    subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and
+    at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.
+
+    We all went out of the house and looked over the common.  It chanced
+    that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the
+    sunken road opposite to Gordon’s house.  These same gypsies, by the
+    by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared
+    in the ‘Graphic.’  Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they
+    were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but
+    basket-makers.  After passing this group we went on the common.  We
+    did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty
+    figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them,
+    striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now
+    stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose
+    lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now
+    stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.
+
+    After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham’s suggestion,
+    for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the
+    ‘Bald-Faced Stag’ in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should
+    introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the special
+    glories of that once famous hostelry.  A divine summer day it was I
+    remember—a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been
+    tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from
+    an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at
+    the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
+
+    These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a
+    rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the
+    meadows on the left breathe more freely.  In a word, it was one of
+    those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was
+    Dereham’s special delight.  He liked rain, but he liked it falling on
+    the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a
+    summer storm) he generally carried.  As we entered the Robin Hood
+    Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical
+    and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us
+    there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a
+    rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on
+    the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away.
+    Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in
+    connection with the rainbow—how, by making a ‘trus’hul’ (cross) of
+    two sticks, the Romany chi who ‘pens the dukkerin can wipe the
+    rainbow out of the sky,’ etc.  Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a
+    man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into
+    a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record,
+    upon the subject of the ‘Spirit of the Rainbow’ which I, as a child,
+    went out to find.
+
+    Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree.  I
+    found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar
+    with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers,
+    seemed to shine in the sun like metal.  Of course, I observed him
+    closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the
+    silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under
+    his arm, a true ‘Child of the Open Air.’
+
+    ‘Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green
+    umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?’ I murmured to
+    Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the
+    Park, said in a dreamy way, ‘Old England!  Old England!’
+
+    It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham’s
+    arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the
+    trees, ‘Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?’  And then, calling to
+    mind the books he had written, I said: ‘He went into the Dingle, and
+    lived alone—went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as
+    Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond.  He could enjoy living alone,
+    for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring
+    from solitary living.  He was never disturbed by passion as was the
+    Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi
+    Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been
+    placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.’
+
+    ‘But the most damning thing of all,’ said Gordon, ‘is that umbrella,
+    gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.’
+
+    ‘Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,’ said I.
+    ‘So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is
+    quite beyond his powers.  Picturesque he always is, powerful never.
+    No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story
+    finds himself able to realize from Dereham’s description the misery
+    of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East
+    Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with
+    starvation staring him in the face.  It is not passion,’ I said to
+    Gordon, ‘that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the
+    Nature-worshipper.  It is Ambition!  His books show that he could
+    never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition.
+    To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was
+    as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander
+    Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.’
+
+    ‘Ambition and the green gamp,’ said Gordon.  ‘But look, the rainbow
+    is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries;
+    and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the
+    light.’
+
+    But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open
+    Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human
+    kind which the ‘Child of the Open Air’ must needs lack.
+
+    Knowing Dereham’s extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of
+    meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close
+    to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the
+    terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that
+    walk.  But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why
+    Dereham should at once take to me—reasons that had nothing whatever
+    to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
+
+    By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon
+    Dereham’s character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
+
+    Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably
+    had their nests.  By the expression on Dereham’s face as he stood and
+    gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
+
+    ‘Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was
+    drained?’ I said.
+
+    ‘I should think so,’ said he dreamily, ‘and every kind of water
+    bird.’
+
+    Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, ‘But how
+    do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?’
+
+    ‘You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of
+    Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.’
+
+    ‘I don’t mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,’ he said.
+
+    ‘No,’ said I, ‘but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at
+    Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.’
+
+    ‘Then you know Whittlesea Mere?’ said Dereham, much interested.
+
+    ‘I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,’ I
+    said, ‘and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know
+    the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized.  He
+    was a generation before my time.  Indeed, I never was thrown much
+    across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of
+    the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.’
+
+    I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave
+    him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the
+    viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected
+    child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper—as he, Dereham, when
+    a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
+
+    ‘The gypsies,’ said Dereham, ‘always believed me to be a Romany.  But
+    surely you are not a Romany Rye?’
+
+    ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it
+    has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and
+    low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?’
+
+    ‘I should think not,’ said Dereham indignantly.
+
+    ‘But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.’
+
+    ‘Gordon is my only link to that dark world,’ I said, ‘and even you
+    don’t object to Gordon.  I am purer than he, purer than you, from the
+    taint of printers’ ink.’
+
+    He laughed.  ‘Who are you?’
+
+    ‘The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child
+    in short frocks,’ I said, ‘and have never yet found an answer.  But
+    Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself
+    with any such troublesome query.’
+
+    This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as
+    these had been able to take no part.  The humorous mystery of Man’s
+    personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in
+    many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere.  At once he threw himself
+    into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly
+    vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
+    gypsies and East Anglia.
+
+    ‘You are an Englishman?’ said Dereham.
+
+    ‘Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,’ I said, using a
+    phrase of his own in one of his books—‘if not a thorough East
+    Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.’
+
+    ‘Nearly,’ said Dereham.
+
+    And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
+    ‘Shales mare,’ a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who
+    could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk
+    farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and
+    when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare
+    with myself behind her in a dogcart—an East Anglian dogcart; when I
+    praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth,
+    Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most
+    buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told
+    him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the
+    rainbow he loved was ‘the glassy Ouse’ of East Anglia, and the only
+    place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was
+    the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing
+    that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East
+    Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment
+    we became friends.
+
+    Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance.  He
+    turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity
+    between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon
+    a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the
+    distance.
+
+    ‘It is on sand alone,’ said Dereham, ‘that the sea strikes its true
+    music—Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.’
+
+    ‘The best of the sea’s lutes,’ I said, ‘is made by the sands of
+    Cromer.’”
+
+These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above
+quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus
+described by the ‘Gordon’ of the story in one of the sonnets in ‘The New
+Day’:—
+
+    And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!
+       How often ’mid the deer that grazed the park,
+    Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,
+       Made musical with many a soaring lark,
+    Have we not held brisk commune with him there,
+       While Lavengro, there towering by your side,
+    With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
+       Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
+    To tell the legends of the fading race—
+       As at the summons of his piercing glance,
+    Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
+       While you called up that pendant of romance
+    To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
+    Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!
+
+In the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and in Chambers’ ‘Cyclopædia of English
+Literature,’ and scattered through scores of articles in the ‘Athenæum,’
+I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without number.  They
+afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man that exists or
+is ever likely to exist.  But, of course, it is quite impossible for me
+to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many more important
+figures waiting to be introduced.  Still, I must find room for the most
+brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush these pages with
+a colour which I feel they need.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has been described as
+the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in verse or in prose,
+and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but never, I think, is he
+so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.
+
+I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of gypsy life is
+to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England
+where East Anglia and the Midlands join.  It adds interest to the
+incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona
+Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow.  This also is a chapter from
+the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to
+be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow’s books:—
+
+    “It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with
+    what Dereham called ‘gypsy gold,’ and the bright green of the foliage
+    showed scarcely a touch of bronze—at that very moment, indeed, when
+    the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and
+    the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their
+    half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy,
+    and pimpernel.  Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man
+    could give.  He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of
+    gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days.  In
+    conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I
+    chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume
+    of Matthew Arnold in which appears ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’  Dereham said
+    he well remembered my directing his attention to ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’
+    After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was
+    scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever
+    the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be, from any supposed
+    artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of
+    the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or
+    even understand its motive in the least degree.  I challenged this,
+    contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above
+    a gypsy’s intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the
+    most illiterate person could grasp it.
+
+    ‘I wish,’ said Dereham, ‘you would come with me to the camp and try
+    the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp.
+    As to gypsy men,’ said he, ‘they are too prosaic to furnish a fair
+    test.’
+
+    We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became
+    very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense,
+    and many other pet subjects of his.  I already knew that he was no
+    lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the
+    ‘trumpery great,’ although in other regards he was such a John Bull.
+    By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition.
+    As we were walking along, Dereham’s eyes, which were as longsighted
+    as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush
+    some distance off.  He stopped and said: ‘At first I thought that
+    white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a
+    magpie,’—next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies’ most famous bird.
+    On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the
+    leaves.  As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: ‘It is
+    wounded—or else dying—or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?’
+    ‘Hawk!’ said Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed
+    into the sky.  ‘The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his
+    quarry and made his meal.  I fancied he has himself been ‘chivvied’
+    by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.’
+
+    And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that
+    speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk—one of the kind which takes its
+    prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands—was wheeling up
+    and up, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to
+    swoop at and devour it.  That the magpie had seen the hawk and had
+    been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident,
+    for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest
+    birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk.
+    Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.
+
+    As we were gazing at the bird a woman’s voice at our elbows said,—
+
+    ‘It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie.  I shall stop
+    here till the hawk’s flew away.’
+
+    We turned round, and there stood a fine young gypsy woman, carrying,
+    gypsy fashion, a weakly child that in spite of its sallow and wasted
+    cheek proclaimed itself to be hers.  By her side stood a young gypsy
+    girl.  She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not
+    of the typical Romany kind.  It was, as I afterwards learned, more
+    like the beauty of a Capri girl.
+
+    She was bareheaded—there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her
+    head—her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a
+    gypsy girl’s hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the
+    back of her neck and upon her shoulders.  In the tumbled tresses
+    glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.
+    They were small dead dragonflies, of the crimson kind called
+    ‘sylphs.’
+
+    To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known.  The woman with
+    the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what was her
+    connection, if any, with ‘Boswell the Great’—I mean Sylvester
+    Boswell, the grammarian and ‘well-known and popalated gypsy of
+    Codling Gap,’ who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about
+    the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, ‘on the
+    accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of
+    Nature’s life.’
+
+    Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was Perpinia, and that the
+    other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, was the famous beauty of
+    the neighbourhood—Rhona Boswell, of whom many stories had reached him
+    with regard to Percy Aylwin, a relative of Rosamond’s father.
+
+    After greeting the two, Dereham looked at the weakling child with the
+    deepest interest, and said to the mother: ‘This chavo ought not to
+    look like that—with such a mother as you, Perpinia.’  ‘And with such
+    a daddy, too,’ said she.  ‘Mike’s stronger for a man nor even I am
+    for a woman’—a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; ‘and as to
+    good looks, it’s him as has got the good looks, not me.  But none on
+    us can’t make it out about the chavo.  He’s so weak and sick he don’t
+    look as if he belonged to Boswell’s breed at all.’
+
+    ‘How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?’ said I, looking at
+    the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia’s finely cut
+    lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.
+
+    ‘Can’t say,’ said she, laughing.
+
+    ‘About as many as she can afford to buy,’ interrupted ‘the beauty of
+    the Ouse,’ as Rhona Boswell was called.  ‘That’s all.  Mike don’t
+    like her a-smokin’.  He says it makes her look like a old Londra
+    Irish woman in Common Garding Market.’
+
+    ‘You must not smoke another pipe,’ said I to the mother—‘not another
+    pipe till the child leaves the breast.’
+
+    ‘What?’ said Perpinia defiantly.  ‘As if I could live without my
+    pipe!’
+
+    ‘Fancy Pep a-living without her baccy!’ laughed Rhona.
+
+    ‘Your child can’t live with it,’ said I to Perpinia.  ‘That pipe of
+    yours is full of a poison called nicotine.’
+
+    ‘Nick what?’ said Rhona, laughing.  ‘That’s a new kind of nick.  Why,
+    you smoke yourself!’
+
+    ‘Nicotine,’ said I.  ‘And the first part of Pep’s body that the
+    poison gets into is her breast, and—’
+
+    ‘Gets into my burk,’ {112} said Perpinia.  ‘Get along wi’ ye.’
+
+    ‘Yes.’
+
+    ‘Do it pison Pep’s milk?’ said Rhona.
+
+    ‘Yes.’
+
+    ‘That ain’t true,’ said Perpinia—‘can’t be true.’
+
+    ‘It is true,’ said I.  ‘If you don’t give up that pipe for a time,
+    the child will die, or else be a ricketty thing all his life.  If you
+    do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your
+    husband can be.’
+
+    ‘Chavo agin pipe, Pep!’ said Rhona.
+
+    ‘Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,’ said Dereham, in that
+    hail-fellow-well-met tone of his, which he reserved for the
+    Romanies—a tone which no Romany could ever resist.  And he took it
+    gently from the woman’s lips.  ‘Don’t smoke any more till I come to
+    the camp and see the chavo again.’
+
+    ‘He be’s a good friend to the Romanies,’ said Rhona, in an appeasing
+    tone.
+
+    ‘That’s true,’ said the woman; ‘but he’s no business to take my pipe
+    out o’ my mouth for all that.’
+
+    She soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain the
+    pipe.  Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty high-road
+    leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona.  Perpinia remained,
+    keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking
+    child.
+
+    It was determined now that Rhona was the very person to be used as
+    the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold’s poem, for she was
+    exceptionally intelligent.  So instead of going to the camp, the
+    oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse,
+    and heather towards ‘Kingfisher brook,’ and when we reached it we sat
+    down on a fallen tree.
+
+    Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl so much,
+    in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a story either
+    told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from my pocket the
+    gypsy girl began to clap her hands.  Her anticipation of enjoyment
+    sent over her face a warm glow.
+
+    Her complexion, though darker than an English girl’s, was rather
+    lighter than an ordinary gypsy’s.  Her eyes were of an indescribable
+    hue; but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for me,
+    described it as a mingling of pansy purple and dark tawny.  The
+    pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped
+    and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both
+    above and below, and this had the peculiar effect of making the eyes
+    seem always a little contracted and just about to smile.  The great
+    size and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem
+    smaller than it really was; they also lessened the apparent size of
+    the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she
+    laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.
+
+    Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried,
+    ‘Look at the Devil’s needles!  They’re come to sew my eyes up for
+    killing their brothers.’
+
+    And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky
+    blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a
+    rainbow gauze, caught the sun as he swept dazzling by, did really
+    seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by
+    the lights shed from the girl’s eyes.
+
+    ‘I dussn’t set here,’ said she.  ‘Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly
+    Brook.’  And that’s the king o’ the dragon-flies: he lives here.’
+
+    As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a
+    dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some
+    green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to
+    justify their Romany name and sew up the girl’s eyes.
+
+    ‘The Romanies call them the Devil’s needles,’ said Dereham; ‘their
+    business is to sew up pretty girls’ eyes.’
+
+    In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while
+    sat down again to listen to the ‘lil,’ as she called the story.
+
+   [Picture: A Letter Box on the Broads.  (From an Oil Painting at ‘The
+                                Pines.’)]
+
+    Glanville’s prose story, upon which Arnold’s poem is based, was read
+    first.  In this Rhona was much interested.  But when I went on to
+    read to her Arnold’s poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at
+    the lovely bits of description—for the country about Oxford is quite
+    remarkably like the country in which she was born—she looked sadly
+    bewildered, and then asked to have it all read again.  After a second
+    reading she said in a meditative way: ‘Can’t make out what the lil’s
+    all about—seems all about nothink!  Seems to me that the pretty
+    sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy makes
+    this ’ere gorgio want to cry.  What a rum lot gorgios is surely!’
+
+    And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility
+    of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and
+    laughing aloud.
+
+    ‘Let’s go to the camp!’ said Dereham.  ‘That was all true about the
+    nicotine—was it not?’
+
+    ‘Partly, I think,’ said I, ‘but not being a medical man I must not be
+    too emphatic.  If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for
+    any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.’
+
+    ‘Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,’
+    growled Dereham.  ‘Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale
+    tobacco—pheugh!’”
+
+After giving these two delightful descriptions of Borrow and his
+environment, I will now quote Mr. Watts-Dunton’s description of their
+last meeting:—
+
+    ‘The last time I ever saw Borrow was shortly before he left London to
+    live in the country.  It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge,
+    where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking
+    splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and
+    boiling over the West End.  Borrow came up and stood leaning over the
+    parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be.  Like most
+    people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets.  Turner
+    could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could
+    not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun
+    and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose
+    above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the
+    sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a
+    golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and
+    clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply.  I never
+    saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and
+    from its association with ‘the last of Borrow’ I shall never forget
+    it.’
+
+                        A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE
+                     THE LAST SIGHT OF GEORGE BORROW
+
+    We talked of ‘Children of the Open Air,’
+       Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
+       Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
+    Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
+    Till, on a day, across the mystic bar
+       Of moonrise, came the ‘Children of the Roof,’
+       Who find no balm ’neath evening’s rosiest woof,
+    Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.
+
+    We looked o’er London where men wither and choke,
+       Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
+       And lore of woods and wild wind-prophecies—
+    Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
+    And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
+       Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.
+
+While the noble music of this double valediction in poetry and prose is
+sounding in our ears, my readers and I, ‘with wandering steps and slow,’
+may also fitly take our reluctant leave of George Borrow.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+THE ACTED DRAMA
+
+
+IT was during the famous evenings in Dr. Marston’s house at Chalk Farm
+that Mr. Watts-Dunton was for the first time brought into contact with
+the theatrical world.  I do not know that he was ever closely connected
+with that world, but in the set in which he specially moved at this time
+he seems to have been almost the only one who was a regular playgoer and
+first-nighter, for Rossetti’s playgoing days were nearly over, and Mr.
+Swinburne never was a playgoer.  Mr. Watts-Dunton still takes, as may be
+seen in his sonnet to Ellen Terry, which I shall quote, a deep interest
+in the acted drama and in the acting profession, although of late years
+he has not been much seen at the theatres.  When, after a while, he and
+Minto were at work on the ‘Examiner’ Mr. Watts-Dunton occasionally,
+although I think rarely, wrote a theatrical critique for that paper.  The
+only one I have had an opportunity of reading is upon Miss Neilson—not
+the Miss Julia Neilson who is so much admired in our day; but the
+powerful, dark-eyed creole-looking beauty, Lilian Adelaide Neilson, who,
+after being a mill-hand and a barmaid, became a famous tragedian, and
+made a great impression in Juliet, and in impassioned poetical parts of
+that kind.  The play in which she appeared on that occasion was a play by
+Tom Taylor, called ‘Anne Boleyn,’ in which Miss Neilson took the part of
+the heroine.  It was given at the Haymarket in February 1876.  I do not
+remember reading any criticism in which so much admirable writing—acute,
+brilliant, and learned—was thrown away upon so mediocre a play.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s remarks upon Miss Neilson’s acting were, however, not
+thrown away, for the subject seems to have been fully worthy of them; and
+I, who love the acted drama myself, regret that the actress’s early death
+in 1880, robbed me of the pleasure of seeing her.  She was one of the
+actresses whom Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet on Sunday evenings at
+Marston’s, and I have heard him say that her genius was as apparent in
+her conversation as in her acting.  Miss Corkran has recently sketched
+one of these meetings, and has given us a graphic picture of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton there, contrasting his personal appearance with that of Mr.
+Swinburne.  They must indeed have been delightful gatherings to a lover
+of the theatre, for there Miss Neilson, Miss Glyn, Miss Ada Cavendish,
+and others were to be met—met in the company of Irving, Sothern, Hermann
+Vezin, and many another famous actor.
+
+That Mr. Watts-Dunton had a peculiar insight into histrionic art was
+shown by what occurred on his very first appearance at the Marston
+evenings, whither he was taken by his friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, who used
+to tell the following story with great humour; and Rossetti also used to
+repeat it with still greater gusto.  I am here again indebted to his son,
+Mr. Hake—who was also a friend of Dr. Marston, Ada Cavendish, and
+others—for interesting reminiscences of these Marston evenings which have
+never been published.  Mr. Watts-Dunton at that time was, of course,
+quite unknown, except in a very small circle of literary men and artists.
+Three or four dramatic critics, several poets, and two actresses, one of
+whom was Ada Cavendish, were talking about Irving in ‘The Bells,’ which
+was a dramatization by a writer named Leopold Lewis of the ‘Juif
+Polonais’ of Erckmann-Chatrian.  They were all enthusiastically extolling
+Irving’s acting; and this is not surprising, as all will say who have
+seen him in the part.  But while some were praising the play, others were
+running it down.  “What I say,” said one of the admirers, “is that the
+motif of ‘The Bells,’ the use of the idea of a sort of embodied
+conscience to tell the audience the story and bring about the
+catastrophe, is the newest that has appeared in drama or fiction—it is
+entirely original.”
+
+“Not entirely, I think,” said a voice which, until that evening, was new
+in the circle.  They turned round to listen to what the dark-eyed young
+stranger, tanned by the sun to a kind of gypsy colour, who looked like
+William Black, quietly smoking his cigarette, had to say.
+
+“Not entirely new?” said one.  “Who was the originator, then, of the
+idea?”
+
+“I can’t tell you that,” said the interrupting voice, “for it occurs in a
+very old Persian story, and it was evidently old even then.  But
+Erckmann-Chatrian took it from a much later story-teller.  They adapted
+it from Chamisso.”
+
+“Is that the author of ‘Peter Schlemihl’?” said one.
+
+“Yes,” replied Mr. Watts-Dunton, “but Chamisso was a poet before he was a
+prose writer, and he wrote a rhymed story in which the witness of a
+murder was the sunrise, and at dawn the criminal was affected in the same
+way that Matthias is affected by the sledge bells.  The idea that the
+sensorium, in an otherwise perfectly sane brain, can translate sights and
+sound into accusations of a crime is, of course, perfectly true, and in
+the play it is wonderfully given by Irving.”
+
+“Well,” said Dr. Marston, “that is the best account I have yet heard of
+the origin of ‘The Bells.’”
+
+Then the voice of one of the disparagers of the play said: “There you
+are!  The very core of Erckmann-Chatrian’s story and Lewis’s play has
+been stolen and spoilt from another writer.  The acting, as I say, is
+superb—the play is rot.”
+
+“Well, I do not think so,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  “I think it a new and
+a striking play.”
+
+“Will you give your reasons, sir?” said Dr. Marston, in that
+old-fashioned courtly way which was one of his many charms.
+
+“Certainly,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “if it will be of any interest.  You
+recollect Coleridge’s remarks upon expectation and surprise in drama.  I
+think it a striking play because I cannot recall any play in which the
+entire source of interest is that of pure expectation unadulterated by
+surprise.  From the opening dialogue, before ever the burgomaster
+appears, the audience knows that a murder has been committed, and that
+the murderer must be the burgomaster, and yet the audience is kept in
+breathless suspense through pure expectation as to whether or not the
+crime will be brought home to him, and if brought home to him, how.”
+
+“Well,” said the voice of one of the admirers of the play, “that is the
+best criticism of ‘The Bells’ I have yet heard.”  After this the
+conversation turned upon Jefferson’s acting of Rip Van Winkle, and many
+admirable remarks fell from a dozen lips.  When there was a pause in
+these criticisms, Dr. Marston turned to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said, “Have
+you seen Jefferson in ‘Rip van Winkle,’ sir?”
+
+“Yes, indeed,” was the reply, “many times; and I hope to see it many more
+times.  It is wonderful.  I think it lucky that I have been able to see
+the great exemplar of what may be called the Garrick type of actor, and
+the great exemplar of what may be called the Edmund Kean type of actor.”
+
+On being asked what he meant by this classification, Mr. Watts-Dunton
+launched out into one of those wide-sweeping but symmetrical monologues
+of criticism in which beginning, middle, and end, were as perfectly
+marked as though the improvization had been a well-considered essay—the
+subject being the style of acting typified by Garrick and the style of
+acting typified by Robson.  As this same idea runs through Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s criticism of Got in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ (which I shall quote
+later), there is no need to dwell upon it here.
+
+“As an instance,” he said, “of Jefferson’s supreme power in this line of
+acting, one might refer to Act II. of the play, where Rip mounts the
+Catskill Mountains in the company of the goblins.  Rip talks with the
+goblins one after the other, and there seems to be a dramatic dialogue
+going on.  It is not till the curtain falls that the audience realizes
+that every word spoken during that act came from the lips of Rip, so
+entirely have Jefferson’s facial expression and intonation dramatized
+each goblin.”
+
+Between Mr. Watts-Dunton and our great Shakespearean actress, Ellen
+Terry, there has been an affectionate friendship running over nearly a
+quarter of a century.  This is not at all surprising to one who knows
+Miss Terry’s high artistic taste and appreciation of poetry.  Among the
+poems expressing that friendship, none is more pleasing than the sonnet
+that appeared in the ‘Magazine of Art’ to which Mr. Bernard Partridge
+contributed his superb drawing of Miss Terry in the part of Queen
+Katherine.  It is entitled, ‘Queen Katherine: on seeing Miss Ellen Terry
+as Katherine in King Henry VIII’:—
+
+    Seeking a tongue for tongueless shadow-land,
+       Has Katherine’s soul come back with power to quell
+       A sister-soul incarnate, and compel
+    Its bodily voice to speak by Grief’s command?
+    Or is it Katherine’s self returns to stand
+       As erst she stood defying Wolsey’s spell—
+       Returns with those vile wrongs she fain would tell
+    Which memory bore to Eden’s amaranth strand?
+
+    Or is it thou, dear friend—this Queen, whose face
+       The salt of many tears hath scarred and stung?—
+       Can it be thou, whose genius, ever young,
+    Lighting the body with the spirit’s grace,
+    Is loved by England—loved by all the race
+       Round all the world enlinked by Shakespeare’s tongue!
+
+With one exception I do not find any dramatic criticisms by Mr.
+Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum.’  Indeed, I should not expect to find him
+trenching upon the domain of the greatest dramatic critic of our time,
+Mr. Joseph Knight.  No one speaks with greater admiration of Mr. Knight
+than his friend of thirty years’ standing, Mr. Watts-Dunton himself; and
+when an essay on ‘King John’ was required for the series of Shakespeare
+essays to accompany Mr. Edwin Abbey’s famous illustrations in ‘Harper’s
+Magazine,’ it was Mr. Knight whom Mr. Watts-Dunton invited to discuss
+this important play.  The exception I allude to is the criticism of
+Victor Hugo’s ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ which appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of
+December 2, 1882.
+
+The way in which it came about that Mr. Watts-Dunton undertook for the
+‘Athenæum’ so important a piece of dramatic criticism is interesting.  In
+1882 M. Vacquerie, the editor of ‘Le Rappel,’ a relative of Hugo’s, and a
+great friend of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton, together with other
+important members of the Hugo cenacle, determined to get up a
+representation of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ on the jubilee of its first
+representation, since when it had never been acted.  Vacquerie sent two
+fauteuils, one for Mr. Swinburne and one for Mr. Watts-Dunton; and the
+two poets were present at that memorable representation.  Long before the
+appointed day there was on the Continent, from Paris to St. Petersburg,
+an unprecedented demand for seats; for it was felt that this was the most
+interesting dramatic event that had occurred for fifty years.
+
+Consequently the editor of the ‘Athenæum’ for once invited his chief
+literary contributor to fill the post which the dramatic editor of the
+paper, Mr. Joseph Knight, generously yielded to him for the occasion, and
+the following article appeared:—
+
+                                                “Paris, November 23, 1882.
+
+    “I felt that the revival, at the Theatre Français, of ‘Le Roi
+    s’Amuse,’ on the fiftieth anniversary of its original production,
+    must be one of the most interesting literary events of our time, and
+    so I found it to be.  Victor Hugo was there, sitting with his arms
+    folded across his breast, calm but happy, in a stage box.  He
+    expressed himself satisfied and even delighted with the acting.  The
+    poet’s appearance was fuller of vitality and more Olympian than ever.
+    Between the acts he left the theatre and walked about in the square,
+    leaning on the arm of his illustrious poet friend and family
+    connection, Auguste Vacquerie, to whose kindness I was indebted for a
+    seat in the fauteuils d’orchestre, which otherwise I should have
+    found to be quite unattainable, so unprecedented was the demand for
+    places.  It is said that a thousand francs were given for a seat.
+    Never before was seen, even in a French theatre, an audience so
+    brilliant and so illustrious.  I did not, however, see any English
+    face I knew save that of Mr. Swinburne, who at the end of the third
+    act might have been seen talking to Hugo in his box.  Among the most
+    appreciative and enthusiastic of those who assisted at the
+    representation was the French poet, who perhaps in the nineteenth
+    century stands next to Hugo for intellectual massiveness, M. Leconte
+    de Lisle.  And I should say that every French poet and indeed every
+    man of eminence was there.
+
+    Considering the extraordinary nature of the piece, the cast was
+    perhaps as satisfactory as could have been hoped for.  Fond as is M.
+    Hugo of spectacular effects, and even of coups de théâtre, no other
+    dramatist gives so little attention as he to the idiosyncrasies of
+    actors.  It is easy to imagine that Shakespeare in writing his lines
+    was not always unmindful of an actor like Burbage.  But in depicting
+    Triboulet, Hugo must have thought as little about the specialities of
+    Ligier, who took the part on the first night in 1832, as of the
+    future Got, who was to take it on the second night in 1882.  And the
+    same may be said of Blanche in relation to the two actresses who
+    successively took that part.  This is, I think, exactly the way in
+    which a dramatist should work.  The contrary method is not more
+    ruinous to drama as a literary form than to the actor’s art.  To
+    write up to an actor’s style destroys all true character-drawing;
+    also it ends by writing up to the actor’s mere manner, who from that
+    moment is, as an artist, doomed.  On the whole, the performance
+    wanted more glow and animal spirits.  The François I of M.
+    Mounet-Sully was full of verve, but this actor’s voice is so
+    exceedingly rich and emotional that the king seemed more poetic, and
+    hence more sympathetic to the audience, than was consistent with a
+    character who in a sense is held up as the villain of the piece.  The
+    true villain, here, however, as in ‘Torquemada,’ ‘Notre Dame de
+    Paris,’ ‘Les Misérables,’ and, indeed, in all Hugo’s characteristic
+    works, is not an individual at all, but Circumstance.  Circumstance
+    placed Francis, a young and pleasure-loving king, over a licentious
+    court.  Circumstance gave him a court jester with a temper which, to
+    say the least of it, was peculiar for such times as those.
+    Circumstance, acting through the agency of certain dissolute
+    courtiers, thrust into the king’s very bedroom the girl whom he loved
+    and who belonged to a class from whom he had been taught to expect
+    subservience of every kind.  The tragic mischief of the rape follows
+    almost as a necessary consequence.  Add to this the fact that
+    Circumstance contrives that the girl Maguelonne, instead of aiding
+    her more conscientious brother in killing the disguised king at the
+    bidding of ‘the client who pays,’ falls unexpectedly in love with
+    him; while Circumstance also contrives that Blanche shall be there
+    ready at the very spot at the very moment where and when she is
+    imperatively wanted as a substituted victim;—and you get the entire
+    motif of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’—man enmeshed in a web of circumstance, the
+    motif of ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ the motif of ‘Torquemada,’ and, in a
+    certain deep sense, perhaps the proper motif in romantic drama.  For
+    when the vis matrix of classic drama, the supernatural interference
+    of conscious Destiny, was no longer available to the artist,
+    something akin to it—something nobler and more powerful than the
+    stage villain—was found to be necessary to save tragedy from sinking
+    into melodrama.  And this explains so many of the complexities of
+    Shakespeare.
+
+    In the dramas of Victor Hugo, however, the romantic temper has
+    advanced quite as far as it ought to advance not only in the use of
+    Circumstance as the final cause of the tragic mischief, but in the
+    use of the grotesque in alliance with the terrible.  The greatest
+    masters of the terrible-grotesque till we get to the German
+    romanticists were the English dramatists of the sixteenth and the
+    early portion of the seventeenth century, and of course by far the
+    greatest among these was Shakespeare.  For the production of the
+    effect in question there is nothing comparable to the scenes in
+    ‘Lear’ between the king and the fool—scenes which seem very early in
+    his life to have struck Hugo more than anything else in literature.
+    Outside the Elizabethan dramatists, however, there can be no doubt
+    that (leaving out of the discussion the great German masters in this
+    line) Hugo is the greatest worker in the terrible-grotesque that has
+    appeared since Burns.  I need only point to Quasimodo and Triboulet
+    and compare them not merely with such attempts in this line as those
+    of writers like Beddoes, but even with the magnificent work of Mr.
+    Browning, who though far more subtle than Hugo is without his
+    sublimity and amazing power over chiaroscuro.  Now, the most
+    remarkable feature of the revival of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ and that which
+    made me above all other reasons desirous to see it, was that the
+    character of Triboulet was to be rendered by an actor of rare and
+    splendid genius, but who, educated in the genteel comedy of modern
+    France and also in the social subtleties of Molière, seemed the last
+    man in Paris to give that peculiar expression of the romantic temper
+    which I have called the terrible-grotesque.
+
+    That M. Got’s success in a part so absolutely unsuited to him should
+    have been as great as it was is, in my judgment, the crowning success
+    of his life.  It is as though Thackeray, after completing ‘Philip,’
+    had set himself to write a romance in the style of ‘Notre Dame de
+    Paris,’ and succeeded in the attempt.  Yet the success of M. Got was
+    relative only, I think.  The Triboulet was not the Triboulet of the
+    reader’s own imaginings, but an admirable Triboulet of the Comédie
+    Française.  Perhaps, however, the truth is that there is not an actor
+    in Europe who could adequately render such a character as Triboulet.
+
+    This is what I mean: all great actors are divisible into two groups,
+    which are by temperament and endowment the exact opposites of each
+    other.  There are those who, like Garrick, producing their effects by
+    means of a self-dominance and a conservation of energy akin to that
+    of Goethe in poetry, are able to render a character, coldly indeed,
+    but with matchless verisimilitude in its every nuance.  And there are
+    those who, like Edmund Kean and Robson, ‘live’ in the character so
+    entirely that self-dominance and conservation of energy are not
+    possible, and who, whensoever the situation becomes very intense,
+    work miracles of representation by sheer imaginative abandon, but do
+    so at the expense of that delicacy of light and shade in the entire
+    conception which is the great quest of the actor as an artist.  And
+    if it should be found that in order to render Triboulet there is
+    requisite for the more intense crises of the piece the abandon of
+    Kean and Robson, and at the same time, for the carrying on of the
+    play, the calm, self-conscious staying power of Garrick, the
+    conclusion will be obvious that Triboulet is essentially an unactable
+    character.  I will illustrate this by an instance.  The reader will
+    remember that in the third act of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ Triboulet’s
+    daughter Blanche, after having been violated by the king at the
+    Louvre, rushes into the antechamber, where stands her father
+    surrounded by the group of sneering courtiers who, unknown both to
+    the king and to Triboulet, have abducted her during the night and set
+    her in the king’s way.  When the girl tells her father of the
+    terrible wrong that has been done to her, he passes at once from the
+    mood of sardonic defiance which was natural to him into a state of
+    passion so terrible that a sudden and magical effect is produced: the
+    conventional walls between him, the poor despised court jester, and
+    the courtiers, are suddenly overthrown by the unexpected operation of
+    one of those great human instincts which make the whole world kin:—
+
+    TRIBOULET (faisant trois pas, et balayant du geste tous les seigneurs
+    inter dits).
+
+       Allez-vous-en d’ici!
+    Et, si le roi François par malheur se hasarde
+    A passer près d’ici, (à Monsieur de Vermandois) vous êtes de sa
+    garde,
+    Dites-lui de ne pas entrer,—que je suis là.
+
+    M. DE PIENNE.  On n’a jamais rien vu de fou comme cela.
+
+    M. DE GORDES (lui faisant signe de se retirer).  Aux fous comme aux
+    enfants on cède quelque chose.
+
+    Veillons pourtant, de peur d’accident.
+
+                                                             [Ils sortent.
+
+    TRIBOULET (s’asseyant sur le fauteuil du roi et relevant sa fille.)
+    Allons, cause.
+    Dis-moi tout.  (Il se retourne, et, apercevant Monsieur de Cossé, qui
+    est resté, il se lève à demi en lui montrant la porte).  M’avez-vous
+    en tendu, monseigneur?
+
+    M. DE COSSÉ (tout en se retirant comme subjugué par l’ascendant du
+    bouffon).  Ces fous, cela se croit tout permis, en honneur!
+
+                                                                 [Il sort.
+
+    Now in reading ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ startling as is the situation, it
+    does not seem exaggerated, for Victor Hugo’s lines are adequate in
+    simple passion to effect the dramatic work, and the reader feels that
+    Triboulet was wrought up to the state of exaltation to which the
+    lines give expression, that nothing could resist him, and that the
+    proud courtiers must in truth have cowered before him in the manner
+    here indicated by the dramatist.  In literature the artist does not
+    actualize; he suggests, and leaves the reader’s imagination free.
+    But an actor has to actualize this state of exaltation—he has to
+    bring the physical condition answering to the emotional condition
+    before the eyes of the spectator; and if he fails to display as much
+    of the ‘fine frenzy’ of passion as is requisite to cow and overawe a
+    group of cynical worldlings, the situation becomes forced and
+    unnatural, inasmuch as they are overawed without a sufficient cause.
+    That an actor like Robson could and would have risen to such an
+    occasion no one will doubt who ever saw him (for he was the very
+    incarnation of the romantic temper), but then the exhaustion would
+    have been so great that it would have been impossible for him to go
+    on bearing the entire weight of this long play as M. Got does.  The
+    actor requires, as I say, the abandon characteristic of one kind of
+    histrionic art together with the staying power characteristic of
+    another.  Now, admirable as is M. Got in this and in all scenes of
+    ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ he does not pass into such a condition of exalted
+    passion as makes the retirement of the courtiers seem probable.  For
+    artistic perfection there was nothing in the entire representation
+    that surpassed the scenes between Saltabadil and Maguelonne in the
+    hovel on the banks of the Seine.  It would be difficult, indeed, to
+    decide which was the more admirable, the Saltabadil of M. Febvre or
+    the Maguelonne of Jeanne Samary.
+
+                           AT THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS
+                              NOVEMBER 22, 1882
+
+    Poet of pity and scourge of sceptred crime—
+       Titan of light, with scarce the gods for peers—
+       What thoughts come to thee through the mist of years,
+    There sitting calm, master of Fate and Time?
+    Homage from every tongue, from every clime,
+       In place of gibes, fills now thy satiate ears.
+       Mine own heart swells, mine eyelids prick with tears
+    In very pride of thee, old man sublime!
+
+    And thou, the mother who bore him, beauteous France,
+       Round whose fair limbs what web of sorrow is spun!—
+    I see thee lift thy tear-stained countenance—
+       Victress by many a victory he hath won;
+    I hear thy voice o’er winds of Fate and Chance
+       Say to the conquered world: ‘Behold my son!’
+
+I may mention here that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always shown the greatest
+admiration of the actor’s art and the greatest interest in actors and
+actresses.  He has affirmed that ‘the one great art in which women are as
+essential as men—the one great art in which their place can never be
+supplied by men—is in the acted drama, which the Greeks held in such high
+esteem that Æschylus and Sophocles acted as stage managers and
+show-masters, although the stage mask dispensed with much of the
+necessity of calling in the aid of women.’
+
+‘Great as is the importance of female poets,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘men
+are so rich in endowment, that literature would be a worthy expression of
+the human mind if there had been no Sappho and no Emily Brontë—no Mrs.
+Browning—no Christina Rossetti.  Great as is the importance of female
+novelists, men again are so rich in endowment that literature would be a
+worthy expression of the human mind if there had been no Georges Sand, no
+Jane Austen, no Charlotte Brontë, no George Eliot, no Mrs. Gaskell, no
+Mrs. Craigie.  As to painting and music, up to now women have not been
+notable workers in either of these departments, notwithstanding Rosa
+Bonheur and one or two others.  But, to say nothing of France, what in
+England would have been the acted drama, whether in prose or verse,
+without Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Hermann Vezin, Adelaide Neilson, Miss Glyn, in
+tragedy; without Mrs. Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Julia Neilson, Ellen
+Terry, Irene Vanbrugh and Ada Rehan in comedy?’
+
+People who run down actresses should say at once that the acted drama is
+not one of the fine arts at all.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has often expressed
+the opinion that there is in England a great waste of histrionic
+endowment among women, owing to the ignorant prejudice against the stage
+which even now is prevalent in England.  ‘An enormous waste of force,’
+says he, ‘there is, of course, in other departments of intellectual
+activity, but nothing like the waste of latent histrionic powers among
+Englishwomen.’  And he supplies many examples of this which have come
+under his own observation, among which I can mention only one.
+
+‘Some years ago,’ he said to me, ‘I was invited to go to see the
+performance of a French play given by the pupils of a fashionable school
+in the West End of London.  Apart from the admirable French accent of the
+girls I was struck by the acting of two or three performers who showed
+some latent dramatic talent.  I have always taken an interest in amateur
+dramatic performances, for a reason that Lady Archibald Campbell in one
+of her writings has well discussed, namely, that what the amateur actor
+or actress may lack in knowledge of stage traditions he or she will
+sometimes more than make up for by the sweet flexibility and abandon of
+nature.  The amateur will often achieve that rarest of all artistic
+excellencies, whether in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, or
+histrionics—naïveté: a quality which in poetry is seen in its perfection
+in the finest of the writings of Coleridge; in acting, it is perhaps seen
+in its perfection in Duse.  Now, on the occasion to which I refer, one of
+these schoolgirl actresses achieved, as I thought, and as others thought
+with me, this rare and perfect flower of histrionics; and when I came to
+know her I found that she joined wide culture and an immense knowledge of
+Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Molière with an innate gift for
+rendering them.  In any other society than that of England she would have
+gone on the stage as a matter of course, but the fatal prejudice about
+social position prevented her from following the vocation that Nature
+intended for her.  Since then I have seen two or three such cases, not so
+striking as this one, but striking enough to make me angry with
+Philistinism.’
+
+With this sympathy for histrionic art, it is not at all surprising that
+Mr. Watts-Dunton took the greatest interest in the open-air plays
+organized by Lady Archibald Campbell at Coombe.  I have seen a brilliant
+description of these plays by him which ought to have been presented to
+the public years ago.  It forms, I believe, a long chapter of an
+unpublished novel.  Turning over the pages of Davenport Adams’s
+‘Dictionary of the Drama,’ which every lover of the theatre must regret
+he did not live to complete, I come accidentally upon these words: “One
+of the most recently printed epilogues is that which Theodore
+Watts-Dunton wrote for an amateur performance of Banville’s ‘Le Baiser’
+at Coombe, Surrey, in August, 1889.”  And this reminds me that I ought to
+quote this famous epilogue here; for Professor Strong in his review of
+‘The Coming of Love’ in ‘Literature’ speaks of the amazing command over
+metre and colour and story displayed in the poem.  It is, I believe, the
+only poem in the English language in which an elaborate story is fully
+told by poetic suggestion instead of direct statement.
+
+                    A REMINISCENCE OF THE OPEN-AIR PLAYS.
+
+    Epilogue for the open-air performance of Banville’s ‘Le Baiser, in
+    which Lady Archibald Campbell took the part of ‘Pierrot’ and Miss
+    Annie Schletter the part of the ‘Fairy.’—Coombe, August 9, 1889.
+
+                              TO PIERROT IN LOVE
+
+            The Clown whose kisses turned a Crone to a Fairy-queen
+
+    What dost thou here in Love’s enchanted wood,
+       Pierrot, who once wert safe as clown and thief—
+    Held safe by love of fun and wine and food—
+       From her who follows love of Woman, Grief—
+    Her who of old stalked over Eden-grass
+       Behind Love’s baby-feet—whose shadow threw
+    On every brook, as on a magic glass,
+    Prophetic shapes of what should come to pass
+       When tears got mixt with Paradisal dew?
+
+    Kisses are loved but for the lips that kiss:
+       Thine have restored a princess to her throne,
+    Breaking the spell which barred from fairy bliss
+       A fay, and shrank her to a wrinkled crone;
+    But, if thou dream’st that thou from Pantomime
+       Shalt clasp an angel of the mystic moon,
+    Clasp her on banks of Love’s own rose and thyme,
+    While woodland warblers ring the nuptial-chime—
+       Bottom to thee were but a week buffoon.
+
+    When yonder fairy, long ago, was told
+       The spell which caught her in malign eclipse,
+    Turning her radiant body foul and old,
+       Would yield to some knight-errant’s virgin lips,
+    And when, through many a weary day and night,
+       She, wondering who the paladin would be
+    Whose kiss should charm her from her grievous plight,
+    Pictured a-many princely heroes bright,
+       Dost thou suppose she ever pictured thee?
+
+    ’Tis true the mischief of the foeman’s charm
+       Yielded to thee—to that first kiss of thine.
+    We saw her tremble—lift a rose-wreath arm,
+       Which late, all veined and shrivelled, made her pine;
+    We saw her fingers rise and touch her cheek,
+       As if the morning breeze across the wood,
+    Which lately seemed to strike so chill and bleak
+    Through all the wasted body, bent and weak,
+       Were light and music now within her blood.
+
+    ’Tis true thy kiss made all her form expand—
+       Made all the skin grow smooth and pure as pearl,
+    Till there she stood, tender, yet tall and grand,
+       A queen of Faery, yet a lovesome girl,
+    Within whose eyes—whose wide, new-litten eyes—
+       New-litten by thy kiss’s re-creation—
+    Expectant joy that yet was wild surprise
+    Made all her flesh like light of summer skies
+       When dawn lies dreaming of the morn’s carnation.
+
+    But when thou saw’st the breaking of the spell
+       Within whose grip of might her soul had pined,
+    Like some sweet butterfly that breaks the cell
+       In which its purple pinions slept confined,
+    And when thou heard’st the strains of elfin song
+       Her sisters sang from rainbow cars above her—
+    Didst thou suppose that she, though prisoned long,
+    And freed at last by thee from all the wrong,
+       Must for that kiss take Harlequin for lover?
+
+    Hearken, sweet fool!  Though Banville carried thee
+       To lawns where love and song still share the sward
+    Beyond the golden river few can see,
+       And fewer still, in these grey days, can ford;
+    And though he bade the wings of Passion fan
+       Thy face, till every line grows bright and human,
+    Feathered thy spirit’s wing for wider span,
+    And fired thee with the fire that comes to man
+       When first he plucks the rose of Nature, Woman;
+
+    And though our actress gives thee that sweet gaze
+       Where spirit and matter mingle in liquid blue—
+    That face, where pity through the frolic plays—
+       That form, whose lines of light Love’s pencil drew—
+    That voice whose music seems a new caress
+       Whenever passion makes a new transition
+    From key to key of joy or quaint distress—
+    That sigh, when, now, thy fairy’s loveliness
+       Leaves thee alone to mourn Love’s vanished vision:
+
+    Still art thou Pierrot—naught but Pierrot ever;
+       For is not this the very word of Fate:
+    ‘No mortal, clown or king, shall e’er dissever
+       His present glory from his past estate’?
+    Yet be thou wise and dry those foolish tears;
+       The clown’s first kiss was needed, not the clown,
+    By her, who, fired by hopes and chilled by fears,
+    Sought but a kiss like thine for years on years:
+       Be wise, I say, and wander back to town.
+
+Recurring to the Marston gatherings, I reproduce here, from the same
+unpublished story to which I have already alluded, the following
+interesting account of them and of other social reunions of the like
+kind.
+
+    “Many of those who have reached life’s meridian, or passed it, will
+    remember the sudden rise, a quarter of a century ago, of Rossetti,
+    Swinburne, and William Morris—poets who seemed for a time to threaten
+    the ascendency of Tennyson himself.  Between this galaxy and the
+    latest generation of poets there rose, culminated, and apparently
+    set, another—the group which it was the foolish fashion to call ‘the
+    pre-Raphaelite poets,’ some of whom yielded, or professed to yield,
+    to the influence of Rossetti, some to that of William Morris, and
+    some to that of Swinburne.  Round them all, however, there was the
+    aura of Baudelaire or else of Gautier.  These—though, as in all such
+    cases, nature had really made them very unlike each other—formed
+    themselves into a set, or rather a sect, and tried apparently to
+    become as much like each other as possible, by studying French
+    models, selecting subjects more or less in harmony with the French
+    temper, getting up their books after the fashion that was as much
+    approved then as contemporary fashions in books are approved now, and
+    by various other means.  They had certain places of meeting, where
+    they held high converse with themselves.  One of these was the
+    hospitable house, in Fitzroy Square, of the beloved and venerable
+    painter, Mr. Madox Brown, whose face, as he sat smiling upon his
+    Eisteddfod, radiating benevolence and encouragement to the unfledged
+    bards he loved, was a picture which must be cherished in many a
+    grateful memory now.  Another was the equally hospitable house, in
+    the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, where reigned the dramatist,
+    Westland Marston, and where his blind poet-boy Philip lived.  Here
+    O’Shaughnessy would come with a glow of triumph on his face, which
+    indicated clearly enough what he was carrying in his pocket—something
+    connecting him with the divine Théophile—a letter from the Gallic
+    Olympus perhaps, or a presentation copy sent from the very top of the
+    Gallic Parnassus.  It was on one of these occasions that Rossetti
+    satirically advised one of the cenacle to quit so poor a language as
+    that of Shakespeare and write entirely in French, which language
+    Morris immediately defined as ‘nosey Latin.’  It is a pity that some
+    literary veteran does not give his reminiscences of those Marston
+    nights, or rather Marston mornings, for the symposium began at about
+    twelve and went on till nearly six—those famous gatherings of poets,
+    actors, and painters, enlinking the days of Macready, Phelps, Miss
+    Glyn, Robert Browning, Dante Rossetti, and R. H. Horne, with the days
+    of poets, actors, and painters like Mr. Swinburne, Morris, and Mr.
+    Irving.  Yet these pre-Raphaelite bards had another joy surpassing
+    even that of the Chalk Farm symposium, that of assisting at those
+    literary and artistic feasts which Rossetti used occasionally to give
+    at Cheyne Walk.  Generosity and geniality incarnate was the
+    mysterious poet-painter to those he loved; and if the budding bard
+    yearned for sympathy, as he mostly does, he could get quite as much
+    as he deserved, and more, at 16 Cheyne Walk.  To say that any artist
+    could take a deeper interest in the work of a friend than in his own
+    seems bold, yet it could be said of Rossetti.  The mean rivalries of
+    the literary character that so often make men experienced in the
+    world shrink away from it, found no place in that great heart.  To
+    hear him recite in his musical voice the sonnet or lyric of some
+    unknown bard or bardling—recite it in such a way as to lend the lines
+    the light and music of his own marvellous genius, while the bard or
+    bardling listened with head bowed low, so that the flush on his cheek
+    and the moisture in his eye should not be seen—this was an experience
+    that did indeed make the bardic life ‘worth living.’”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+    Thou knowest that island, far away and lone,
+       Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+       In spray of music and the breezes shake
+    O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+    While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+       In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake,
+       Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+    A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+    Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore,
+       Struck golden song, as from the strand of Day:
+       For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay—
+    Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core,
+       Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+    Around thy lovely island evermore.
+
+I am now brought to a portion of my study which may well give me
+pause—the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti.  The latest
+remarks upon them are, I think, the best; they are by Mr. A. C. Benson in
+his monograph on Rossetti in the ‘English Men of Letters’:—
+
+    “It would be impossible to exaggerate the value of his friendship for
+    Rossetti.  Mr. Watts-Dunton understood him, sympathized with him, and
+    with self-denying and unobtrusive delicacy shielded him, so far as
+    any one can be shielded, from the rough contact of the world.  It was
+    for a long time hoped that Mr. Watts-Dunton would give the memoir of
+    his great friend to the world, but there is such a thing as knowing a
+    man too well to be his biographer.  It is, however, an open secret
+    that a vivid sketch of Rossetti’s personality has been given to the
+    world in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s well-known romance ‘Aylwin,’ where the
+    artist D’Arcy is drawn from Rossetti. . . .  Though singularly
+    independent in judgment, it is clear that, at all events in the later
+    years of his life, Rossetti’s taste was, unconsciously, considerably
+    affected by the critical preferences of Mr. Watts-Dunton.  I have
+    heard it said by one {139} who knew them both well that it was often
+    enough for Mr. Watts-Dunton to express a strong opinion for Rossetti
+    to adopt it as his own, even though he might have combated it for the
+    moment. . . .
+
+    At the end of each part [of ‘Rose Mary’] comes a curious lyrical
+    outburst called the Beryl-songs, the chant of the imprisoned spirits,
+    which are intended to weld the poem together and to supply
+    connections.  It is said that Mr. Watts-Dunton, when he first read
+    the poem in proof, said to Rossetti that the drift was too intricate
+    for an ordinary reader.  Rossetti took this to heart, and wrote the
+    Beryl-songs to bridge the gaps; Mr. Watts-Dunton, on being shown
+    them, very rightly disapproved, and said humorously that they turned
+    a fine ballad into a bastard opera.  Rossetti, who was ill at the
+    time, was so much disconcerted and upset at the criticism, that Mr.
+    Watts-Dunton modified his judgment, and the interludes were printed.
+    But at a later day Rossetti himself came round to the opinion that
+    they were inappropriate.  They are curiously wrought, rhapsodical,
+    irregular songs, with fantastic rhymes, and were better away. . . .
+
+    Then he began to settle down into the production of the single-figure
+    pictures, of which Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote that ‘apart from any
+    question of technical shortcomings, one of Rossetti’s strongest
+    claims to the attention of posterity was that of having invented, in
+    the three-quarter length pictures painted from one face, a type of
+    female beauty which was akin to none other, which was entirely new,
+    in short—and which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion,
+    unaided by complex dramatic design, was unique in the art of the
+    world.”
+
+       [Picture: Pandora.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at ‘The Pines’]
+
+It is well known that Rossetti wished his life—if written at all—to be
+written by Mr. Watts-Dunton, unless his brother should undertake it.  It
+is also well known that the brother himself wished it, but pressure of
+other matters prevented Mr. Watts-Dunton from undertaking it.  I expected
+difficulties in approaching with regard to the delicate subject of his
+relations with Rossetti, but I was not prepared to find them so great as
+they have proved to be.  When I wrote to him and asked him whether the
+portrait of D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’ was to be accepted as a portrait of
+Rossetti, and when I asked him to furnish me with some materials and
+facts to form the basis of this chapter, I received from him the
+following letter:—
+
+    “MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,—I have never myself affirmed that D’Arcy was to
+    be taken as an actual portrait of Rossetti.  Even if I thought that a
+    portrait of him could be given in any form of imaginative literature,
+    I have views of my own as to the propriety of giving actual portraits
+    of men with whom a novelist or poet has been brought into contact.
+    It is quite impossible for an imaginative writer to avoid the
+    imperious suggestions of his memory when he is conceiving a
+    character.  Thousands of times in a year does one come across
+    critical remarks upon the prototypes of the characters of such great
+    novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot,
+    George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and the rest.  And I believe that
+    every one of these writers would confess that his prominent
+    characters were suggested to him by living individuals or by
+    individuals who figure in history—but suggested only.  And as to the
+    ethics of so dealing with friends and acquaintances I have also views
+    of my own.  These are easily stated.  The closer the imaginative
+    writer gets to the portrait of a friend, or even of an acquaintance,
+    the more careful must he be to set his subject in a genial and even a
+    generous light.  It would be a terrible thing if every man who has
+    been a notable figure in life were to be represented as this or that
+    at the sweet will of everybody who has known him.  Generous
+    treatment, I say, is demanded of every writer who makes use of the
+    facets of character that have struck him in his intercourse with
+    friend or acquaintance.  I will give you an instance of this.  When I
+    drew De Castro in ‘Aylwin’ I made use of my knowledge of a certain
+    individual.  Now this individual, although a man of quite
+    extraordinary talents, brilliance, and personal charm, bore not a
+    very good name, because he was driven to live upon his wits.  He had
+    endowments so great and so various that I cannot conceive any line of
+    life in which he was not fitted to excel—but it was his irreparable
+    misfortune to have been trained to no business and no profession, and
+    to have been thrown upon the world without means, and without useful
+    family connections.  Such a man must either sink beneath the oceanic
+    waves of London life, or he must make a struggle to live upon his
+    wits.  This individual made that struggle—he struck out with a vigour
+    that, as far as I know, was without example in London society.  He
+    got to know, and to know intimately, men like Ruskin, G. F. Watts, D.
+    G. Rossetti, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, William Morris, Mr. Swinburne, Sir
+    Edward Burne Jones, Cruikshank, and I know not what important people
+    besides.  When he was first brought into touch with the painters, he
+    knew nothing whatever of art; in two or three years, as I have heard
+    Rossetti say, he was a splendid ‘connoisseur.’  If he had been
+    brought up as a lawyer he must have risen to the top of the
+    profession.  If he had been brought up as an actor he must, as I have
+    heard a dramatist say, have risen to the top.  But from his very
+    first appearance in London he was driven to live upon his wits.  And
+    here let me say that this man, who was a bitter unfriend of my own,
+    because I was compelled to stand in the way of certain dealings of
+    his, but whom I really could have liked if he had not been obliged to
+    live upon his wits at the expense of certain friends of mine, formed
+    the acquaintance of the great men I have enumerated, not so much from
+    worldly motives, as I believe, as from real admiration.  But being
+    driven to live upon his wits, he had not sufficient moral strength to
+    afford a conscience, and the queerest stories were told—some of them
+    true enough—of his dealings with those great men.  Whistler’s
+    anecdotes of him at one period set many a table in a roar; and yet so
+    winsome was the man that after a time he became as intimate with
+    Whistler as ever.  If he had possessed a private income, and if that
+    income had been carefully settled upon him, I believe he would have
+    been one of the most honest of men; I know he would have been one of
+    the most generous.  His conduct to the late Treffry Dunn, from whom
+    he could not have expected the least return except that of gratitude,
+    was proof enough of his generosity.  Of course to make use of so
+    strange a character as this was a great temptation to me when I wrote
+    ‘Aylwin.’  But in what has been called my ‘thumb-nail portrait of
+    him,’ I treated the peccadilloes attributed to him in a playful and
+    jocose way.  It would have been quite wrong to have painted otherwise
+    than in playful colours a character like this.  Like every other man
+    and woman in this world, he left behind him people who believed in
+    him and loved him.  It would have been cruel to wound these, and
+    unfair to the man; and yet because I gave only a slight suggestion of
+    his sublime quackery and supreme blarney, a writer who also knew
+    something about him, but of course not a thousandth part of what I
+    knew, said that I had tried my hand at depicting him in ‘Aylwin,’ but
+    with no great success.  As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to
+    give a portrait of him: I simply used certain facets of his character
+    to work out my story, and then dismissed him.  On the other hand,
+    where the character of a friend or acquaintance is noble, the
+    imagination can work more freely—as in the case of Philip Aylwin,
+    Cyril Aylwin, Wilderspin, Rhona Boswell, Winifred Wynne, Sinfi
+    Lovell.  And as to Rossetti, whom I have been charged by certain
+    critics with having idealized in my picture of D’Arcy, all I have to
+    say on that point is this—that if the noble and fascinating qualities
+    which Rossetti showed had been leavened with mean ones I should not,
+    in introducing his character into a story, have considered it right
+    or fair or generous to dwell upon those mean ones.  But as a matter
+    of fact, during my whole intercourse with him he displayed no such
+    qualities.  The D’Arcy that I have painted is not one whit nobler,
+    more magnanimous, wide-minded, and generous, than was D. G. Rossetti.
+    As I have said on several occasions, he could and did take as deep an
+    interest in a friend’s work as in his own.  And to benefit a friend
+    was the greatest pleasure he had in life.  I loved the man so deeply
+    that I should never have introduced D’Arcy into the novel had it not
+    been in the hope of silencing the misrepresentations of him that
+    began as soon as ever Rossetti was laid in the grave at Birchington,
+    by depicting his character in colours as true as they were
+    sympathetic.  It has been the grievous fate of Rossetti to be the
+    victim of an amount of detraction which is simply amazing and
+    inscrutable.  I cannot in the least understand why this is so.  It is
+    the great sorrow of my life.  There is a fatality of detraction about
+    his name which in its unreasonableness would be grotesque were it not
+    heartrending.  It would turn my natural optimism about mankind into
+    pessimism were it not that another dear friend of mine—a man of equal
+    nobility of character, and almost of equal genius, has escaped
+    calumny altogether—William Morris.  This matter is a painful puzzle
+    to me.  The only great man of my time who seems to have shared
+    something of Rossetti’s fate, is Lord Tennyson.  There seems to be a
+    general desire to belittle him, to exaggerate such angularities as
+    were his, and to speak of that almost childlike simplicity of
+    character which was an ineffable charm in him as springing from
+    boorishness and almost from loutishness.  On the other hand, another
+    great genius, Browning, for whom I had and have the greatest
+    admiration, seems to be as fortunate as Morris in escaping the
+    detractor.  But I am wandering from Rossetti.  I do not feel any
+    impulse to write reminiscences of him.  Too much has been written
+    about him already—of late a great deal too much.  The only thing
+    written about him that has given me comfort—I may say joy, is this—it
+    has been written by a man who knew him before I did, who knew him at
+    the time he lost his wife.  Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A., has declared that
+    in Rossetti’s relations with his wife there was nothing whatever upon
+    which his conscience might reasonably trouble him.  I do not remember
+    the exact words, but this was the substance of them.  Mr. Val Prinsep
+    is a man of the highest standing, and he knew Rossetti intimately,
+    and he has declared in print that Rossetti could have had no qualms
+    of conscience in regard to his relations with his wife.  This, I say,
+    is a source of great comfort to me and to all who loved Rossetti.
+    That he was whimsical, fanciful, and at times most troublesome to his
+    friends, no one knows better than I do.
+
+    No one, I say, is more competent to speak of the whims and the
+    fancies and the troublesomeness of Rossetti than I am; and yet I say
+    that he was one of the noblest-hearted men of his time, and
+    lovable—most lovable.”
+
+It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of day upon the painful
+subject of the “Buchanan affair.”  Indeed, I have often thought it is a
+great pity that it is not allowed to die out.  The only reason why it is
+still kept alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is
+impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s nervous illness, about which so
+much has been said.  I remember seeing in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s essay on
+Congreve in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia’ a definition of envy as the
+‘literary leprosy.’  This phrase has often been quoted in reference to
+the case of Buchanan, and also in reference to a recent and much more
+ghastly case between two intimate friends.  Now, with all deference to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, I cannot accept it as a right and fair definition.  It
+is a fact no doubt that the struggle in the world of art—whether poetry,
+music, painting, sculpture, or the drama—is unlike that of the mere
+strivers after wealth and position, inasmuch as to praise one man’s
+artistic work is in a certain way to set it up against the work of
+another.  Still, one can realize, without referring to Disraeli’s
+‘Curiosities of Literature,’ that envy is much too vigorous in the
+artistic life.  Now, whatever may have been the good qualities of
+Buchanan—and I know he had many good qualities—it seems unfortunately to
+be true that he was afflicted with this terrible disease of envy.  There
+can be no question that what incited him to write the notorious article
+in the ‘Contemporary Review’ entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ was
+simply envy—envy and nothing else.  It was during the time that Rossetti
+was suffering most dreadfully from the mental disturbance which seems
+really to have originated in this attack and the cognate attacks which
+appeared in certain other magazines, that the intimacy between Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and Rossetti was formed and cemented.  And it is to this
+period that Mr. William Rossetti alludes in the following words: “‘Watts
+is a hero of friendship’ was, according to Mr. Caine, one of my brother’s
+last utterances, easy enough to be credited.”
+
+That he deserved these words I think none will deny; and that the
+friendship sprang from the depths of the nature of a man to whom the word
+‘friendship’ meant not what it generally means now, a languid sentiment,
+but what it meant in Shakespeare’s time, a deep passion, is shown by what
+some deem the finest lines Mr. Watts-Dunton ever wrote—I mean those lines
+which he puts into the mouth of Shakespeare’s Friend in ‘Christmas at the
+Mermaid,’ lines part of which have been admirably turned into Latin by
+Mr. E. D. Stone, {147} and published by him in the second volume of that
+felicitous series of Latin translations,’ Florilegium Latinum’:—
+
+                                 ‘MR. W. H.’
+
+    To sing the nation’s song or do the deed
+    That crowns with richer light the motherland,
+    Or lend her strength of arm in hour of need
+    When fangs of foes shine fierce on every hand,
+    Is joy to him whose joy is working well—
+    Is goal and guerdon too, though never fame.
+    Should find a thrill of music in his name;
+    Yea, goal and guerdon too, though Scorn should aim
+    Her arrows at his soul’s high citadel.
+
+    But if the fates withhold the joy from me
+    To do the deed that widens England’s day,
+    Or join that song of Freedom’s jubilee
+    Begun when England started on her way—
+    Withhold from me the hero’s glorious power
+    To strike with song or sword for her, the mother,
+    And give that sacred guerdon to another,
+    Him will I hail as my more noble brother—
+    Him will I love for his diviner dower.
+
+    Enough for me who have our Shakspeare’s love
+    To see a poet win the poet’s goal,
+    For Will is he; enough and far above
+    All other prizes to make rich my soul.
+    Ben names my numbers golden.  Since they tell
+    A tale of him who in his peerless prime
+    Fled us ere yet one shadowy film of time
+    Could dim the lustre of that brow sublime,
+    Golden my numbers are: Ben praiseth well.
+
+It seems to me to be needful to bear in mind these lines, and the
+extremely close intimacy between these two poet-friends in order to be
+able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of Buchanan in the
+following sonnet if, as some writers think, Buchanan was meant:—
+
+                       THE OCTOPUS OF THE GOLDEN ISLES
+                     ‘WHAT! WILL THEY EVEN STRIKE AT ME?’
+
+    Round many an Isle of Song, in seas serene,
+       With many a swimmer strove the poet-boy,
+       Yet strove in love: their strength, I say, was joy
+    To him, my friend—dear friend of godlike mien!
+    But soon he felt beneath the billowy green
+       A monster moving—moving to destroy:
+       Limb after limb became the tortured toy
+    Of coils that clung and lips that stung unseen.
+
+    “And canst thou strike ev’n me?” the swimmer said,
+       As rose above the waves the deadly eyes,
+       Arms flecked with mouths that kissed in hellish wise,
+    Quivering in hate around a hateful head.—
+       I saw him fight old Envy’s sorceries:
+    I saw him sink: the man I loved is dead!
+
+Here we get something quite new in satire—something in which poetry,
+fancy, hatred, and contempt, are mingled.  The sonnet appeared first in
+the ‘Athenæum,’ and afterwards in ‘The Coming of Love.’  If Buchanan or
+any special individual was meant, I doubt whether any man has a moral
+right to speak about another man in such terms as these.
+
+All the friends of Rossetti have remarked upon the extraordinary
+influence exercised upon him by Mr. Watts-Dunton.  Lady Mount Temple, a
+great friend of the painter-poet, used to tell how when she was in his
+studio and found him in a state of great dejection, as was so frequently
+the case, she would notice that Rossetti’s face would suddenly brighten
+up on hearing a light footfall in the hall—the footfall of his friend,
+who had entered with his latch-key—and how from that moment Rossetti
+would be another man.  Rossetti’s own relatives have recorded the same
+influence.  I have often thought that the most touching thing in Mr. W.
+M. Rossetti’s beautiful monograph of his brother is the following extract
+from his aged mother’s diary at Birchington-on-Sea, when the poet is
+dying:—
+
+    ‘March 28, Tuesday.  Mr. Watts came down; Gabriel rallied
+    marvellously.
+
+    This is the last cheerful item which it is allowed me to record
+    concerning my brother; I am glad that it stands associated with the
+    name of Theodore Watts.’
+
+Here is another excerpt from the brother’s diary:—
+
+    ‘Gabriel had, just before Shields entered the drawing-room for me,
+    given two violent cries, and had a convulsive fit, very sharp and
+    distorting the face, followed by collapse.  All this passed without
+    my personal cognizance.  He died 9.31 p.m.; the others—Watts, mother,
+    Christina, and nurse, in room; Caine and Shields in and out; Watts at
+    Gabriel’s right side, partly supporting him.’
+
+That Mr. Watts-Dunton’s influence over Rossetti extended even to his art
+as a poet is shown by Mr. Benson’s words already quoted.  I must also
+quote the testimony of Mr. Hall Caine, who says, in his ‘Recollections’:—
+
+    “Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+    to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+    offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’ influence in his critical
+    estimates; and the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I
+    knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical
+    criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
+    me, printed in Chapter VIII of this volume, will show.  I had a
+    striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I
+    had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius
+    of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him.  He read
+    out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem ‘Cloud
+    Confines.’  As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently
+    was very fond of it himself.  But he surprised me by saying that he
+    should not print it.  On my asking him why, he said:
+
+    ‘Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+    without it.’
+
+    ‘Well, but you like it yourself,’ said I.
+
+    ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but in a question of gain or loss to a poem I
+    feel that Watts must be right.’
+
+    And the poem appeared in ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ without the stanza in
+    question.”
+
+Here is another beautiful passage from Mr. Hall Caine’s ‘Recollections’—a
+passage which speaks as much for the writer as for the object of his
+enthusiasm:—
+
+    “As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him and
+    beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+    known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+    without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+    friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other.
+    No light matter it must have been to lay aside one’s own
+    long-cherished life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti’s
+    closest friend and brother, at a moment like the present, when he
+    imagined the world to be conspiring against him; but through these
+    evil days, and long after them, down to his death, the friend that
+    clung closer than a brother was with him, as he himself said, to
+    protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert, to interest and inspire
+    him—asking, meantime, no better reward than the knowledge that a
+    noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted out of sorrow.
+    Among the world’s great men the greatest are sometimes those whose
+    names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish aims have
+    been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others as to
+    leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal
+    distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price
+    that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy
+    their renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the
+    fine spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of
+    friendship.  Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:
+    ‘Watts is a hero of friendship’; and indeed, he has displayed his
+    capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that
+    part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes
+    by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the
+    gainer.  If in the end it should appear that he has in his own person
+    done less than might have been hoped for from one possessed of his
+    splendid gifts, let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a
+    quite incalculable degree, and influenced for good, several of the
+    foremost among those who in their turn have influenced the age.  As
+    Rossetti’s faithful friend and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John
+    Marshall, has often declared, there were periods when Rossetti’s very
+    life may be said to have hung upon Mr. Watts’ power to cheer and
+    soothe.”
+
+This anecdote is also told by Mr. Caine:—
+
+    “Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited
+    thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem ‘Rose
+    Mary,’ as well as two lyrics published at the time in ‘The
+    Fortnightly Review’; but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent
+    assaults of criticism, that he seemed definitely to lay aside all
+    hope of producing further poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of
+    the delusion that he had for ever lost all power of doing so.  It is
+    an interesting fact, well known in his own literary circle, that his
+    taking up poetry afresh was the result of a fortuitous occurrence.
+    After one of his most serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing
+    off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which
+    in an invalid’s mind usually gather about his own too absorbing
+    personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite solicitation,
+    to try his hand afresh at a sonnet.  The outcome was an effort so
+    feeble as to be all but unrecognizable as the work of the author of
+    the sonnets of ‘The House of Life,’ but, with more shrewdness and
+    friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished
+    measureless praise upon it and urged the poet to renewed exertion.
+    One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and
+    this exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine,
+    with the result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his old
+    dexterity and mastery of hand.  The artifice had succeeded beyond
+    every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the twofold end of
+    improving the invalid’s health by preventing his brooding over
+    unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished
+    works.  Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce
+    Rossetti to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by
+    challenging the poet’s ability to compose in the simple, direct, and
+    emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad proper, as
+    distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which
+    he had hitherto worked in.  Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this
+    second artifice practised upon him was that he wrote ‘The White Ship’
+    and afterwards ‘The King’s Tragedy.’
+
+    Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of
+    poetic composition, and had recovered a healthy tone of body, before
+    he became conscious of what was being done with him.  It is a further
+    amusing fact that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet
+    which, in view of the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose
+    judgment he reposed, had encouraged him to renewed effort.  The
+    sonnet was bad: the critic knew it was bad, and had from the first
+    hour of its production kept it carefully out of sight, and was now
+    more than ever unwilling to show it.  Eventually, however, by reason
+    of ceaseless importunity, he returned it to its author, who, upon
+    reading it, cried: ‘You fraud!  You said this sonnet was good, and
+    it’s the worst I ever wrote!’  ‘The worst ever written would perhaps
+    be a truer criticism,’ was the reply, as the studio resounded with a
+    hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the flames.  It would
+    appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large portion of the
+    contents of the volume of 1881.”
+
+Mr. William Rossetti is ever eager to testify to the beneficent effect of
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s intimacy upon his brother; and quite lately Madox
+Brown’s grandson, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who, from his connection with
+the Rossetti family, speaks with great authority, wrote: ‘In 1873 came
+Mr. Theodore Watts, without whose practical friendship and advice, and
+without whose literary aids and sustenance, life would have been from
+thenceforth an impracticable affair for Rossetti.’  Mr. Hueffer speaks of
+the great change that came over Rossetti’s work when he wrote ‘The King’s
+Tragedy’ and ‘The White Ship’:—
+
+    “It should be pointed out that ‘The White Ship’ was one of Rossetti’s
+    last works, and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narration,
+    under the advice of Mr. Theodore Watts.  In this he was undoubtedly
+    on the right track, and the ‘rhymed chronicles’ might have
+    disappeared had Rossetti lived long enough to revise the poem as
+    sedulously as he did his earlier work, and to revise it with the
+    knowledge of narrative-technique that the greater part of the poem
+    shows was coming to be his.”
+
+It was impossible for a man of genius to live so secluded a life as
+Rossetti lived at Cheyne Walk and at Kelmscott for several years, without
+wild, unauthenticated stories getting about concerning him.  Among other
+things Rossetti, whose courtesy and charm of manner were, I believe,
+proverbial, was now charged with a rudeness, or rather boorishness like
+that which with equal injustice, apparently, is now being attributed to
+Tennyson.  Stories got into print about his rude bearing towards people,
+sometimes towards ladies of the most exalted position.  And these
+apocryphal and disparaging legends would no doubt have been still more
+numerous and still more offensive, had it not been for the influence of
+his watchful and powerful friend.  Here is an interesting letter which
+Rossetti addressed to the ‘World,’ and which shows the close relations
+between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton:—
+
+                                            “16 CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA, S.W.
+                                                        December 28, 1878.
+
+    My attention has been directed to the following paragraph which has
+    appeared in the newspapers: ‘A very disagreeable story is told about
+    a neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s, whose works are not exhibited to the
+    vulgar herd; the Princess Louise in her zeal therefore, graciously
+    sought them at the artist’s studio, but was rebuffed by a ‘Not at
+    home’ and an intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+    princesses.  I trust it is not true,’ continues the writer of the
+    paragraph, ‘that so medievally minded a gentleman is really a
+    stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that dignified
+    obedience,’ etc.
+
+    The story is certainly disagreeable enough; but if I am pointed out
+    as the ‘near neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s’ who rebuffed, in this rude
+    fashion, the Princess Louise, I can only say that it is a canard
+    devoid of the smallest nucleus of truth.  Her Royal Highness has
+    never called upon me, and I know of only two occasions when she has
+    expressed a wish to do so.  Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke
+    to me upon the subject, but I was at that time engaged upon an
+    important work, and the delays thence arising caused the matter to
+    slip through.  And I heard no more upon the subject till last summer,
+    when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the Princess, in conversation,
+    had mentioned my name to him, and that he had then assured her that I
+    should feel ‘honoured and charmed to see her,’ and suggested her
+    making an appointment.  Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as
+    one of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+    himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had she
+    called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in that
+    ‘generous loyalty’ which is due, not more to her exalted position,
+    than to her well-known charm of character and artistic gifts.  It is
+    true that I do not run after great people on account of their mere
+    social position, but I am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man
+    who could rebuff the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+                                                          D. G. ROSSETTI.”
+
+At the very juncture in question Lord Lorne was suddenly and unexpectedly
+appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+Highness did not return until Rossetti’s health had somewhat suddenly
+broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most
+intimate friends.
+
+My account of the friendship between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti would
+not be complete without the poem entitled, ‘A Grave by the Sea,’ which I
+think may be placed beside Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ Shelley’s ‘Adonais,’
+Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis,’ and Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale,’ as one of
+the noblest elegies in our literature:—
+
+                              A GRAVE BY THE SEA
+
+                                      I
+
+    Yon sightless poet {157} whom thou leav’st behind,
+       Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,
+       Above the grave he feels but cannot see,
+    Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,
+    Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?
+       Ah no!—For all his sobs, he seems to me
+       Less lonely standing there, and nearer thee,
+    Than I—less lonely, nearer—standing blind!
+
+    Free from the day, and piercing Life’s disguise
+       That needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,
+       His inner eyes may see thee as thou art
+    In Memory’s land—see thee beneath the skies
+    Lit by thy brow—by those beloved eyes,
+       While I stand by him in a world apart.
+
+                                      II
+
+    I stand like her who on the glittering Rhine
+       Saw that strange swan which drew a faëry boat
+       Where shone a knight whose radiant forehead smote
+    Her soul with light and made her blue eyes shine
+    For many a day with sights that seemed divine,
+       Till that false swan returned and arched his throat
+       In pride, and called him, and she saw him float
+    Adown the stream: I stand like her and pine.
+
+    I stand like her, for she, and only she,
+    Might know my loneliness for want of thee.
+       Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,
+    Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,
+       And then, departing like a vision thence,
+    Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.
+
+                                     III
+
+    Last night Death whispered: ‘Death is but the name
+       Man gives the Power which lends him life and light,
+       And then, returning past the coast of night,
+    Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.
+    What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaim
+       The sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?
+       Art thou not vanished—vanished from my sight—
+    Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?
+
+    With Nature dumb, save for the billows’ moan,
+       Engirt by men I love, yet desolate—
+    Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,
+       King’d by my sorrow, made by grief so great
+    That man’s voice murmurs like an insect’s drone—
+       What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?
+
+                                      IV
+
+    Last night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,
+       Flickering with blazon of the human story—
+       Time’s fen-flame over Death’s dark territory—
+    Will leave no trail, no sign of Life’s aggression.
+    Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,
+       Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.
+       Since Life is only Death’s frail feudatory,
+    How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?’
+
+    I answered thus: ‘If Friendship’s isle of palm
+       Is but a vision, every loveliest leaf,
+    Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calm
+       This soul of mine in this most fiery grief?
+       If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,
+    What balm in knowing that Love is Death’s—what balm?’
+
+                                      V
+
+    Yea, thus I boldly answered Death—even I
+       Who have for boon—who have for deathless dower—
+       Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,
+    Filling with music earth and sea and sky:
+    ‘O Death,’ I said, ‘not Love, but thou shalt die;
+       For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,
+       And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,
+    Death striking Love but strikes to deify.’
+
+    Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,
+    For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,
+       And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;
+    And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,
+    I watched—I listened for that voice of thine,
+       Though Reason said: ‘Nor voice nor face can come.’
+
+    BIRCHINGTON,
+             EASTERTIDE, 1882.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has written many magnificent sonnets, but the sonnet in
+this sequence beginning—
+
+    Last night Death whispered: ‘Life’s purblind procession,’
+
+is, I think, the finest of them all.  The imaginative conception packed
+into these fourteen lines is cosmic in its sweep.  In the metrical scheme
+the feminine rhymes of the octave play a very important part.  They
+suggest pathetic suspense, mystery, yearning, hope, fear; they ask, they
+wonder, they falter.  But in the sestet the words of destiny are calmly
+and coldly pronounced, and every rhyme clinches the voice of doom, until
+the uttermost deep of despair is sounded in the iterated cry of the last
+line.  The craftsmanship throughout is masterly.  There is, indeed, one
+line which is not unworthy of being ranked with the great lines of
+English poetry:
+
+    Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session.
+
+Here by a bold use of the simple verb ‘strikes’ a whole poem is hammered
+into six words.  As to the interesting question of feminine rhymes, while
+I admit that they should never be used without an emotional mandate, I
+think that here it is overwhelming.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I have tried to show the beauty of the friendship between these two rare
+spirits by means of other testimony than my own, for although I have been
+granted the honour of knowing Rossetti’s ‘friend of friends,’ I missed
+the equal honour of knowing Rossetti, save through that ‘friend of
+friends.’  But to know Mr. Watts-Dunton seems almost like knowing
+Rossetti, for when at The Pines he begins to recall those golden hours
+when the poets used to hold converse, the soul of Rossetti seems to come
+back from the land of shadows, as his friend depicts his winsome ways,
+his nobility of heart, his generous interest in the work of others, that
+lovableness of nature and charm of personality which, if we are to
+believe Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, worked, in some degree, ill for the poet.
+Mr. Hueffer, who, as a family connection, may be supposed to represent
+the family tradition about ‘Gabriel,’ has some striking and pregnant
+words upon the injurious effect of Rossetti’s being brought so much into
+contact with admirers from the time when Mr. Meredith and Mr. Swinburne
+were his housemates at Cheyne Walk.  “Then came the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’
+poets like Philip Marston, O’Shaughnessy, and ‘B. V.’  Afterwards there
+came a whole host of young men like Mr. William Sharp, who were serious
+admirers, and to-day are in their places or are dead or forgotten; and
+others again who came for the ‘pickings.’  They were all more or less
+enthusiasts.”
+
+ [Picture: ‘The Green Dining Room,’ 16 Cheyne Walk.  (From a Painting by
+                         Dunn, at ‘The Pines.’)]
+
+Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902), says:
+
+    “With regard to the green room in which Winifred took her first
+    breakfast at ‘Hurstcote,’ I am a little in confusion.  It seems to me
+    more like the green dining-room in Cheyne Walk, decorated with
+    antique mirrors, which was painted by Dunn, showing Rossetti reading
+    his poems aloud.  This is the only portrait of Rossetti that really
+    calls up the man before me.  As Mr. Watts-Dunton is the owner of
+    Dunn’s drawing, and as so many people want to see what Rossetti’s
+    famous Chelsea house was like inside, it is a pity he does not give
+    it as a frontispiece to some future edition of ‘Aylwin.’
+    Unfortunately, Mr. G. F. Watts’s picture, now in the National
+    Portrait Gallery, was never finished, and I never saw upon Rossetti’s
+    face the dull, heavy expression which that portrait wears.  I think
+    the poet told me that he had given the painter only one or two
+    sittings.  As to the photographs, none of them is really
+    satisfactory.”
+
+I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of the famous
+‘Green Dining Room’ at 16 Cheyne Walk, to which Mr. Hake refers.  Mr.
+Hake also writes in the same article: “With regard to the two circular
+mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy
+Grail, ‘in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt,’ I do not
+remember seeing these there.  But they are evidently the mirrors
+decorated with copies by Dunn of the lost Holy Grail frescoes once
+existing on the walls of the Union Reading-Room at Oxford.  These
+beautiful decorations I have seen at ‘The Pines,’ but not elsewhere.”  I
+am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of one of
+these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has generously permitted to
+be specially taken for this book.
+
+[Picture: One of the Carved Mirrors at ‘The Pines,’ decorated with Dunn’s
+         copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the Oxford Union]
+
+And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake’s fascinating book of
+poetry, ‘The New Day,’ which must live, if only for its reminiscences of
+the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:—
+
+                                 THE NEW DAY
+
+                                      I
+
+    In the unbroken silence of the mind
+       Thoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,
+    And life is back among the days behind—
+       The spectral days of that lamented love—
+    Days whose romance can never be repeated.
+       The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,
+    We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,
+       His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.
+    These vanished hours, where are they stored away?
+       Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?
+    Its utterances are swallowed up in day;
+       The gabled house, the mighty master gone.
+    Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall—
+    What dreams he of the days we there recall?
+
+                                      II
+
+    O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
+       We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
+    The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
+       From Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.
+    How often did we trace the nestling Thames
+       From humblest waters on his course of might,
+    Down where the weir the bursting current stems—
+       There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
+    Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand
+       Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
+    That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
+       Triumphal labours of the day to be.
+    The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’
+    The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.
+
+                                     III
+
+    Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rill
+       Still calls the flowers upon its misty bank
+    To stoop into the stream and drink their fill.
+       And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,
+    Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,
+       Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.
+    Slowly a loosened weed another meets;
+       They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.
+    We are here surely if the world, forgot,
+       Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;
+    We are here surely at this witching spot,—
+       Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.
+    A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,
+    It is as if a play pervaded all.
+
+                                      IV
+
+    Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,
+       With many a speaking vision on the wall,
+    The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,
+       Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl—
+    ’Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,
+       Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,
+    And Art grew fragrant in the glow of spring
+       With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.
+    Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,
+       Fed by the waters of the forest stream;
+    Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,
+       Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;
+    Or else was mingled the rough billow’s glee
+    With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.
+
+                                      V
+
+    Remember how we roamed the Channel’s shore,
+       And read aloud our verses, each in turn,
+    While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,
+       And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.
+    Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to capture
+       The potent word that makes a thought abiding,
+    And wings it upward to its place of rapture,
+       While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.
+    Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonder
+       That art knew not the mighty reverie
+    That moves earth’s spirit and her orb asunder,
+       While ocean’s depths, even, seem a shallow sea.
+    Yet with rare genius could his hand impart
+    His own far-searching poesy to art.
+
+The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all.  It makes
+me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the
+fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with
+him a new atmosphere—the salt atmosphere which envelops ‘Mother Carey’s
+Chicken,’ and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna.  And yet
+perhaps the description of
+
+    ‘The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming’
+
+is equally fascinating.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush,
+has in his sonnet ‘The Shadow on the Window Blind,’ made Kelmscott Manor
+and the poetic life lived there still more memorable:—
+
+    Within this thicket’s every leafy lair
+       A song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,
+       Though red behind their nests the moon has swum—
+    But still I see that shadow writing there!—
+    Poet, behind yon casement’s ruddy square,
+       Whose shadow tells me why you do not come—
+       Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,
+    Flying and singing through thine inch of air—
+
+    Come thither, where on grass and flower and leaf
+       Gleams Nature’s scripture, putting Man’s to shame:
+    ‘Thy day,’ she says, ‘is all too rich and brief—
+       Thy game of life too wonderful a game—
+    To give to Art entirely or in chief:
+       Drink of these dews—sweeter than wine of Fame.’
+
+‘Aylwin,’ too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and
+Kelmscott.
+
+The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk,
+has been declared by one of Rossetti’s most intimate friends to be
+marvellously graphic and true:—
+
+    “On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after
+    threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and
+    pictures upon easels, I found D’Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa.
+    Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in
+    no mood to meet strangers.  However, he sprang up and introduced me
+    to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a
+    peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one
+    of Mr. D’Arcy’s chief buyers.  This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.
+
+    He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a
+    stranger somewhat disconcerted him.
+
+    After he was gone D’Arcy said: ‘A good fellow!  One of my most
+    important buyers.  I should like you to know him, for you and I are
+    going to be friends, I hope.’
+
+    ‘He seems very fond of pictures,’ I said.
+
+    ‘A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.’
+
+    A little while after this gentleman’s departure, in came De Castro,
+    who had driven up in a hansom.  I certainly saw a flash of anger in
+    his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his
+    manner became cordiality itself.  Late as it was (it was nearly
+    twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to
+    begin the evening.  As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been
+    there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner.  Evidently
+    his métier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker.
+    Talk was his stock-in-trade.
+
+    The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept
+    pulling out his watch.  It was evident that he wanted to be going,
+    but was reluctant to leave me there.  For my part, I frequently rose
+    to go, but on getting a sign from D’Arcy that he wished me to stay I
+    sat down again.  At last D’Arcy said:
+
+    ‘You had better go now, De Castro—you have kept that hansom outside
+    for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still
+    daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with
+    him alone.’
+
+    De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left
+    us.
+
+    D’Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that
+    became after a while rather awkward.  He lay there, gazing
+    abstractedly at the fireplace.
+
+    ‘Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other
+    night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things.
+    I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can’t sleep
+    is the chief of blessings.  De Castro, however, is not so bad as he
+    seems.  A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant.
+    I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.’
+
+    Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the
+    servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen.  On being told that he had not,
+    I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous
+    evening.  After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I
+    walked to the window and looked out at the garden.  It was large, and
+    so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness.  While I
+    was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the
+    eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon
+    astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull.  My
+    curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature.
+    He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me
+    to go up to him and stroke him.  Then I left the Indian bull and
+    explored this extraordinary domain.  It was full of unkempt trees,
+    including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall.
+    Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of
+    black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to
+    be a hedgehog.  It was so tame that it did not curl up as I
+    approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness,
+    to stroke its pretty little black snout.  As I walked about the
+    garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such
+    as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens.
+    Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.
+
+    My love of animals led me to linger in the garden.  When I returned
+    to the house I found that D’Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at
+    work in the studio.
+
+    After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:
+
+    ‘No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie.  Every man has one side
+    of his character where the child remains.  I have a love of animals
+    which, I suppose, I may call a passion.  The kind of amusement they
+    can afford me is like none other.  It is the self-consciousness of
+    men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing.
+    I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of
+    enjoyment.  To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of
+    a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep
+    me for hours from being bored.’
+
+    ‘And children,’ I said—‘do you like children?’
+
+    ‘Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—until they become
+    self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon.  Then their charm
+    goes.  Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young
+    girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal?  What
+    makes you sigh?’
+
+    My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ‘Prince of
+    the Mist’ on Snowdon.  And I said to myself, ‘How he would have been
+    fascinated by a sight like that!’
+
+    My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I
+    then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account.  But since
+    then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the
+    view I then took of his conversational powers.  When his spirits were
+    at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal
+    as a humourist.  He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of
+    repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality.  To define it
+    would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic
+    fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid
+    movements—so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be
+    merely fancy, in him became wit.  Beneath the coruscations of this
+    wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.
+
+    His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but
+    here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his
+    other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a
+    humourist of the first order; every ‘jeu d’esprit’ seemed to leap
+    from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain.  A dull man
+    like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.
+
+    While he was talking he kept on painting.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+WILLIAM MORRIS
+
+
+IT is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris.
+In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s ‘Athenæum’
+monographs is the one upon him.  Between these two there was an intimacy
+of the closest kind—from 1873 to the day of the poet’s death.  This, no
+doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic power, accounts for the
+extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend.  I have heard more
+than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs
+of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this
+fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything
+else that has been published about him.  It is a grievous loss to
+literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of
+Morris is scarcely likely to write one.  Morris, when he was busy in
+Queen’s Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the
+gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox
+Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton
+were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint
+occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti’s death.
+
+  [Picture: Kelmscott Manor.  (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)]
+
+When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote ‘Aylwin’ he did not contemplate that the
+Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott
+Manor.  The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters
+were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and
+D’Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti.  Morris’s passion for
+angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and
+this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s life were spent at Kelmscott.  Treffry Dunn’s portrait of
+him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at
+Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the
+picture.
+
+Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting
+facts with regard to ‘Hurstcote Manor’ and Morris:—
+
+    “Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom
+    I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to
+    in ‘Aylwin’ (chap. lx. book xv.) as the ‘enthusiastic angler’ who
+    used to go down to ‘Hurstcote’ to fish.  At that time this fine old
+    seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of
+    Rossetti and Morris.  Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of
+    Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who,
+    with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris’s will.  The series of
+    ‘large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams’ supporting
+    the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the
+    ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls—a
+    peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after
+    dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would
+    go to the attics to listen to them.
+
+    With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with
+    low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved
+    oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept.  In fact, the only thing in the
+    description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful
+    ‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro
+    dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name).  I
+    wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr.
+    Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and
+    which has been exhibited.  This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads
+    by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded
+    tapestry—so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull
+    grey texture’—depicting the story of Samson.  Rossetti used the
+    tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same
+    pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the
+    ‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in
+    her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening
+    and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same
+    famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and
+    the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more
+    beautiful woman—Mrs. Stillman).  These pictures were not permanently
+    placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on
+    a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”
+
+Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott,
+was Morris’s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine
+Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South
+Kensington Museum—a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of
+the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died
+prematurely.  Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s anecdotes of the causeries at
+Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that
+it is a pity they have never been recorded in print.  Middleton was one
+of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s collaborators in the ninth edition of the
+‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ to which he contributed the article on ‘Rome,’
+one of the finest essays in that work.
+
+Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his
+work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he
+ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the
+‘Athenæum.’  And the poet, might well say this, for those who have
+studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon ‘Sigurd,’
+‘The House of the Wolfings,’ ‘The Roots of the Mountains,’ ‘The
+Glittering Plain,’ ‘The Well at the World’s End,’ ‘The Tale of Beowulf,’
+‘News from Nowhere,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ will be inclined to put them at
+the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s purely critical work.  The ‘Quarterly
+Review,’ in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations
+between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable
+article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of
+English Literature.’  I record these facts, not in order to depreciate
+the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going
+to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s monograph in the ‘Athenæum.’
+
+The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death:—
+
+    “Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries,
+    that he suffered no pain whatever.  And a comforting thought this is
+    to us all—that Morris suffered no pain.  To Death himself we may
+    easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s
+    final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel
+    means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission.  The
+    thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the
+    thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest
+    form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the
+    mortal coil—would have been intolerable almost.  For among the
+    thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief,
+    that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment,
+    and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, ‘Enjoy.’
+    Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of
+    wealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two
+    daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to
+    understand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom
+    were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the
+    very salt of the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she
+    touched him at all, never struck home.  If it is true, as Mérimée
+    affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted
+    Morris to be mature?  Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy
+    of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and
+    carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as
+    when they first opened on the world?  Enough for us to think that the
+    man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his
+    sixty-third year dies young.  Old age Morris could not have borne
+    with patience.  Pain would not have developed him into a hero.  This
+    beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous
+    powers were at their best—and died without pain.  The scheme of life
+    and death does not seem so much awry, after all.
+
+    At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the
+    little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned
+    out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a
+    subject he rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death.
+    The conversation ended with these words of his: ‘I have enjoyed my
+    life—few men more so—and death in any case is sure.’”
+
+It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+reflections upon the wear and tear of genius:—
+
+    “It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death
+    was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the
+    imaginative faculty.  When I talked to him, as I often did, of the
+    peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea.
+    ‘Look at Gladstone,’ he would say, ‘look at those wise owls your
+    chancellors and your judges.  Don’t they live all the longer for
+    work?  It is rust that kills men, not work.’  No doubt he was right
+    in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded
+    to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the ‘dry light of
+    intelligence,’ a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without
+    any sapping of the sources of life.  But is this so where that fusion
+    of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed?  I doubt
+    it.  In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey
+    pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of ‘the thinking machine’
+    only, but of the whole man—the whole ‘genial’ nature of the
+    worker—his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of
+    lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the
+    part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul.  Hence
+    when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and
+    presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is
+    overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for
+    its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitæ.
+
+    We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its
+    amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand
+    such a strain.  Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is
+    his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning
+    till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had
+    produced 750 lines!  Think of the forces at work in producing a poem
+    like ‘Sigurd.’  Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the
+    Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in
+    our time; think, I say, of the collating of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ with
+    the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man,
+    and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing
+    the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the
+    nineteenth century.  Was there not work enough here for a
+    considerable portion of a poet’s life?  And yet so great is the
+    entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in
+    many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last
+    few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three
+    words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt
+    with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.”
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than
+in his remarks upon Morris’s translation of the Odyssey:—
+
+    “Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris’s translation;
+    yet in a certain sense it is a triumph.  The two specially Homeric
+    qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other
+    poets—are eagerness and dignity.  Never again can they be fully
+    combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek
+    hexameters and by a Homer.  That Tennyson could have given us the
+    Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the
+    Iliad shows.  Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can
+    be caught.  Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of
+    Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking
+    with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the
+    entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured
+    the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase,
+    and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay
+    frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote. . . .  Morris’s translation of
+    the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an
+    almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a
+    glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the
+    modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet.
+    But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely
+    original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The
+    Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ etc.  And
+    then come his translations from the Icelandic.  Mere translation is,
+    of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the ‘Saga
+    Library.’  Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a
+    work this is!  Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the
+    language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so
+    concrete as to make each Saga an English poem—for poem each one is,
+    if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not
+    metre is the first requisite of a poem.”
+
+In connection with William Morris, readers of ‘The Coming of Love’ will
+recall the touching words in the ‘Prefatory Note’:—
+
+    “Had it not been for the intervention of matters of a peculiarly
+    absorbing kind—matters which caused me to delay the task of
+    collecting these verses—I should have been the most favoured man who
+    ever brought out a volume of poems, for they would have been printed
+    by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press.  As that projected edition
+    of his was largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the
+    subscribers is, I am told, required from me.  Among the friends who
+    saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of
+    his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he
+    would die—myself.  To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a
+    point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must
+    die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to
+    think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to
+    come upon us.  And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my
+    verses in one of Mr. Lane’s inviting little volumes will be dimmed
+    and marred by the thought that Morris’s name also might have been,
+    and is not, on the imprint.”
+
+As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of ‘The Coming of
+Love’ is an instance of that artistic conscientiousness which up to a
+certain point is of inestimable value to the poet, but after that point
+is reached, baffles him.  The poem had been read in fragments and deeply
+admired by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved.
+Certain fragments of it had appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ and other
+journals, but the publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing
+to the fact that certain portions of it had been lent and lost.  Morris
+not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an édition de luxe
+of the book, but he actually took the trouble to get a full list of
+subscribers, and insisted upon allowing the author a magnificent royalty.
+Nothing, however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book
+until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the
+generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then, when the
+book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which robbed us of one
+of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century.  And even after
+Morris’s death the poet’s executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis
+and the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were willing
+and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems should be
+brought out.  Subsequently, when a large portion of the lost poems was
+found, the volume was published by Mr. John Lane.  This anecdote alone
+explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is never tired of dwelling upon the
+nobility of Morris’s nature, and upon his generosity in small things as
+well as in large.
+
+Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject is the
+following.  When Morris published his first volume in the Kelmscott
+Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy of the book.  He also
+sent him a presentation copy of the second and third.  But knowing how
+small was the profit at this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott
+Press, Mr. Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these
+presentation copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest
+against such extravagance.  Mrs. Morris assured him that it would be
+perfectly useless to do so.  But when the edition of Keats was coming
+out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to grapple with the matter, and one
+Sunday afternoon when he was at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:
+
+‘Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber to the Keats, and
+I give my commission for it in the presence of witnesses.  I am a paying
+subscriber to the Keats.’
+
+‘All right, old chap, you’re a subscriber.’
+
+In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the Keats; and
+when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the following Sunday
+afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had been made.  Morris laughed.
+
+‘All right, there’s no mistake—that is my presentation copy of Keats.’
+
+But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was being
+discussed—the marvellous Chaucer with Burne-Jones’s illustrations—Mr.
+Watts-Dunton knew that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and
+probably sunk, and he said to Morris:
+
+‘Now, Morris, I’m going to talk to you seriously about the Chaucer.  I
+know that it’s going to be a dead loss to you, and I do really and
+seriously hope that you do not contemplate anything so wild as to send me
+a presentation copy of that book.  You know my affection for you, and you
+know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me pain to
+accept it.’
+
+‘Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to stay my hand, for,
+between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some money over it; but the
+Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned Jones and I are going to join
+in the presentation of a copy to Algernon Swinburne.’
+
+After this Mr. Watts-Dunton’s mind was set at rest, as he told Mrs.
+Morris.  But when Mr. Swinburne’s copy reached ‘The Pines’ it was
+accompanied by another one—‘Theodore Watts-Dunton from William Morris.’
+
+Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr. Watts-Dunton also
+tells.  Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess a copy of ‘The Golden Legend,’
+bought the Kelmscott edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris
+this.  Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.
+
+‘What!  Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of mine!  Why I thought he did
+not care for black letter reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy
+of every book I brought out.’
+
+And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent to ‘The
+Pines,’ one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for Mr. Swinburne.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles,’ tells
+this amusing story:—
+
+    “Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled into seeing and hearing
+    the great poet-singer Stead, whose rhythms have had such a great
+    effect upon the ‘art poetic,’ the author of ‘The Perfect Cure,’ and
+    ‘It’s Daddy this and Daddy that,’ and other brilliant lyrics.  A
+    friend with whom Morris had been spending the evening, and who had
+    been talking about poetic energy and poetic art in relation to the
+    chilly reception accorded to ‘Sigurd,’ persuaded him—much against his
+    will—to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr. Stead, whose performance
+    consisted of singing a song, the burden of which was ‘I’m a perfect
+    cure!’ while he leaped up into the air without bending his legs and
+    twirled round like a dervish.  ‘What made you bring me to see this
+    damned tomfoolery?’ Morris grumbled; and on being told that it was to
+    give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest, without poetic
+    art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way out.  If Morris
+    were now alive—and all England will sigh, ‘Ah, would he were!’—he
+    would confess, with his customary emphasis, that the poet had nothing
+    of the slightest importance to learn, even from the rhythms of Mr.
+    Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses that were beyond
+    the powers of the ‘Great Vance.’”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+THE ‘EXAMINER’
+
+
+LONG before Mr. Watts-Dunton printed a line, he was a prominent figure in
+the literary and artistic sets in London; but, as Mr. Hake has said, it
+was merely as a conversationalist that he was known.  His conversation
+was described by Rossetti as being like that of no other person moving in
+literary circles, because he was always enunciating new views in
+phrasings so polished that, to use Rossetti’s words, his improvized
+locutions were as perfect as ‘fitted jewels.’  Those who have been
+privileged to listen to his table-talk will attest the felicity of the
+image.  Seldom has so great a critic had so fine an audience.  Rossetti
+often lamented that Theodore Watts’ spoken criticism had never been taken
+down in shorthand.  For a long time various editors who had met him at
+Rossetti’s, at Madox Brown’s, at Westland Marston’s, at Whistler’s
+breakfasts, and at the late Lord Houghton’s, endeavoured to persuade him
+to make practical use in criticism of the ideas that flowed in a
+continuous stream from his lips.  But, as Rossetti used to affirm, he was
+the one man of his time who, with immense literary equipment, was without
+literary ambition.  This peculiarity of his was eloquently described by
+the late Dr. Gordon Hake in his ‘New Day’:—
+
+    You say you care not for the people’s praise,
+       That poetry is its own recompense;
+    You care not for the wreath, the dusty bays,
+       Given to the whirling wind and hurried hence.
+
+The first editor who secured Theodore Watts, after repeated efforts to do
+so, was the late Professor Minto, and this only came about because during
+his editorship of the ‘Examiner’ both he and Watts resided in Danes Inn,
+and were constantly seeing each other.
+
+It was Minto who afterwards declared that “the articles in the ‘Examiner’
+and the ‘Athenæum’ are goldmines, in which we others are apt to dig
+unconsciously without remembering that the nuggets are Theodore Watts’s,
+who is too lazy to peg out his claim.”  The first article by him that
+appeared in Minto’s paper attracted great attention and roused great
+curiosity.  This indeed is not surprising, for, as I found when I read
+it, it was as remarkable for pregnancy of thought and of style as the
+latest and ripest of his essays.  A friend of his, belonging to the set
+in which he moved, who remembers the appearance of this article, has been
+kind enough to tell me the following anecdote in connection with it.  The
+contributors to the paper at that time consisted of Minto, Dr Garnett,
+Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, ‘Scholar’ Williams, Comyns Carr, Walter Pollock,
+Duffield (the translator of ‘Don Quixote’), Professor Sully, Dr. Marston,
+William Bell Scott, William Black, and many other able writers.  On the
+evening of the day when Theodore Watts’s first article appeared, there
+was a party at the house of William Bell Scott in Chelsea, and every one
+was asking who this new contributor was.  It was one of the conditions
+under which the article was written that its authorship was to be kept a
+secret.  Bell Scott, who took a great interest in the ‘Examiner,’ was
+especially inquisitive about the new writer.  After having in vain tried
+to get from Minto the name of the writer, he went up to Watts, and said:
+“I would give almost anything to know who the writer is who appears in
+the ‘Examiner’ for the first time today.”  “What makes you inquire about
+it?” said Watts.  “What is the interest attaching to the writer of such
+fantastic stuff as that?  Surely it is the most mannered writing that has
+appeared in the ‘Examiner’ for a long time!”  Then, turning to Minto, he
+said: “I can’t think, Minto, what made you print it at all.”  Scott, who
+had a most exalted opinion of Watts as a critic, was considerably abashed
+at this, and began to endeavour to withdraw some of his enthusiastic
+remarks.  This set Minto laughing aloud, and thus the secret got out.
+
+From that hour Watts became the most noticeable writer among a group of
+critics who were all noticeable.  Week after week there appeared in this
+historic paper criticism as fine as had ever appeared in it in the time
+of Leigh Hunt, and as brilliant as had appeared in it in the time of
+Fonblanque.  At this time Minto used to entertain his contributors on
+Monday evening in the room over the publisher’s office in the Strand, and
+I have been told by one who was frequently there that these smoking
+symposia were among the most brilliant in London.  One can well imagine
+this when one remembers the names of those who used to attend the
+meetings.
+
+It was through the ‘Examiner’ that Watts formed that friendship with
+William Black which his biographer, Sir Wemyss Reid, alludes to.  Between
+these two there was one subject on which they were especially in
+sympathy—their knowledge and love of nature.  At that time Black was
+immensely popular.  In personal appearance there was, I am told, a
+superficial resemblance between the two, and they were constantly being
+mistaken for each other; and yet, when they were side by side, it was
+evident that the large, dark moustache and the black eyes were almost the
+only points of resemblance between them.
+
+It was at the then famous house in Gower Street of Mr. Justin McCarthy
+that Black and Mr. Watts-Dunton first met.  Speaking as an Irishman of a
+younger but not, I fear, of so genial a generation, I hear tantalizing
+accounts of the popular gatherings at the home of the most charming and
+the most distinguished Irishman of letters in the London of that time,
+where so many young men of my own country were welcomed as warmly as
+though they had not yet to win their spurs.  No one speaks more
+enthusiastically of the McCarthy family than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who seems
+to have been on terms of friendship with them almost as soon as he
+settled in London.  Mr. Watts-Dunton was always a lover of McCarthy’s
+novels, but on his first visit to Gower Street Mr. McCarthy was, as
+usual, full of the subject not of his own novels, but of another man’s.
+He urged his new friend to read ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ almost
+forcing him to take the book away with him, which he did: this was the
+way in which Mr. Watts-Dunton became for the first time acquainted with a
+story which he always avers is the only book that has ever revived the
+rich rustic humour of Shakespeare’s early comedies.  A perfect household
+of loving natures, warm Irish hearts, bright Irish intellects, cultivated
+and rare, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s testimony, was that little
+family in Gower Street.  I think he will pardon me for repeating one
+quaint little story about himself and Black in connection with this first
+visit to the McCarthys.  On entering the room Mr. Watts-Dunton was much
+struck with what appeared to be real musical genius in a bright-eyed
+little lady who was delighting the party with her music.  This was at the
+period in his own life which Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his ‘music-mad
+period.’  And after a time he got talking with the lady.  He was a little
+surprised that he was at once invited by the musical lady to go to a
+gathering at her house.  But he was as much pleased as surprised to be so
+welcomed, and incontinently accepted the invitation.  It never entered
+his mind that he had been mistaken for another man, until the other man
+entered the room and came up to the lady.  She, on her part, began to
+look in an embarrassed way from one to the other of the two swarthy,
+black-moustached gentlemen.  She had mistaken Mr. Watts-Dunton for
+William Black, with whom her acquaintance was but slight.  The
+contretemps caused much amusement when the husband of the lady, an
+eminent novelist, who knew Mr. Watts-Dunton well, introduced him to his
+wife.  I do not know what was the end of the comedy, but no doubt it was
+a satisfactory one.  It could not be otherwise among such people as
+Justin McCarthy would be likely to gather round him.
+
+At that time, to quote the words of the same friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+Watts used frequently to meet at Bell Scott’s and Rossetti’s Professor
+Appleton, the editor of the ‘Academy.’  The points upon which these two
+touched were as unlike the points upon which Watts and William Black
+touched as could possibly be.  They were both students of Hegel; and when
+they met, Appleton, who had Hegel on the brain, invariably drew Watts
+aside for a long private talk.  People used to leave them alone, on
+account of the remoteness of the subject that attracted the two.  Watts
+had now made up his mind that he would devote himself to literature, and,
+indeed, his articles in the ‘Examiner’ showed that he had only to do so
+to achieve a great success.  Appleton rarely left Watts without saying,
+“I do wish you would write for the ‘Academy.’  I want you to let me send
+you all the books on the transcendentalists that come to the ‘Academy,’
+and let me have articles giving the pith of them at short intervals.”
+This invitation to furnish the ‘Academy’ with a couple of columns
+condensing the spirit of many books about subjects upon which only a
+handful of people in England were competent to write, seemed to Watts a
+grotesque request, seeing that he was at this very time the leading
+writer on the ‘Examiner,’ and was being constantly approached by other
+editors.  It was consequently the subject of many a joke between Minto,
+William Black, Watts, and the others present at the famous ‘Examiner’
+gatherings.  After a while Mr. Norman MacColl, who was then the editor of
+the ‘Athenæum,’ invited Watts to take an important part in the reviewing
+for the ‘Athenæum.’  At first he told the editor that there were two
+obstacles to his accepting the invitation—one was that the work that he
+was invited to do was largely done by his friend Marston, and that,
+although he would like to join him, he scarcely saw his way, on account
+of the ‘Examiner,’ which was ready to take all the work he could produce.
+On opening the matter to Dr Marston, that admirably endowed writer would
+not hear of Watts’s considering him in the matter.  The ‘Athenæum’ was
+then, as now, the leading literary organ in Europe, and the editor’s
+offer was, of course, a very tempting one, and Watts was determined to
+tell Minto about it.  And this he did.
+
+“Now, Minto,” he said, “it rests entirely with you whether I shall write
+in the ‘Athenæum’ or not.”  Minto, between whom and Watts there was a
+deep affection, made the following reply:
+
+“My dear Theodore, I need not say that it will not be a good day for the
+‘Examiner’ when you join the ‘Athenæum.’  The ‘Examiner’ is a struggling
+paper which could not live without being subsidized by Peter Taylor, and
+it is not four months ago since Leicester Warren said to me that he and
+all the other readers of the ‘Examiner’ looked eagerly for the ‘T. W.’ at
+the foot of a literary article.  The ‘Athenæum’ is both a powerful and a
+wealthy paper.  In short, it will injure the ‘Examiner’ when your name is
+associated with the ‘Athenæum.’  But to be the leading voice of such a
+paper as that is just what you ought to be, and I cannot help advising
+you to entertain MacColl’s proposal.”
+
+In consequence of this Mr. Watts-Dunton closed with Mr. MacColl’s offer,
+and his first article in the ‘Athenæum’ appeared on July 8, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+THE ‘ATHENÆUM’
+
+
+AS the first review which Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed to the ‘Athenæum’
+has been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any other
+of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire.  It has the
+additional interest, I believe, of being the most rapidly executed piece
+of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton ever achieved.  Mr. MacColl,
+having secured the new writer, tried to find a book for him, and failed,
+until Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him whether he intended to give an article
+upon Skelton’s ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ.’  The editor said that
+he had not thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that,
+if Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to him.  As the
+article was wanted on the following day, it was dictated as fast as the
+amanuensis—not a shorthand writer—could take it down.
+
+It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one of his
+great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays on Victor
+Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as any:—
+
+    ‘Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun?
+    Here, at least, is the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ squeezed into one volume.
+
+    Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which,
+    as far as we remember, is this.  The library of the Indian kings was
+    composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to
+    remove it.  But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading
+    much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said:
+    ‘Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of
+    both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin,
+    which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard
+    to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze ’em!’  The Brahmin,
+    understanding well what the order to ‘squeeze ’em’ meant (for he was
+    a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little
+    flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words
+    and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work,
+    aided by many scribes—striking out all the idle words from every book
+    in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted it
+    was found that ten camels could carry that library without ruffling a
+    hair.  And therefore the Brahmin was appointed ‘Grand Squeezer’ of
+    the realm.  Ages after this, another prince, who loved reading much
+    and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand Squeezer of
+    his time and said: ‘Thy duties are neglected, O Grand Squeezer!  Thy
+    life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.’  Thereupon the Grand
+    Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and squeezed and
+    squeezed till the whole library became at last a load that a foal
+    would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book, a tiny
+    volume, containing four maxims.  Yet the wisdom in the last library
+    was the wisdom in the first.
+
+    The appearance of Mr. Skelton’s condensation of the ‘Noctes
+    Ambrosianæ’ reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn warning
+    we always find it our duty to administer to those who show a
+    propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship—the warning
+    that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying
+    for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary
+    be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by
+    itself.  Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension
+    to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call ‘the writing
+    fellows,’ for adding to the camel’s burden, instead of distributing
+    the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected
+    squeezers.  We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that
+    almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints,
+    while nobody reads, and, to judge from the ‘spelling bees,’ nobody
+    even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a ‘writing animal’ is
+    on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself.  This
+    is the alarming thing.  Where are we to find so many squeezers?  Nay,
+    in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer’s
+    every book.  Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle
+    squeezer—what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than that
+    he should squeeze ‘Frederick the Great’—that enormous, rank and
+    pungent ‘haggis’ from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would
+    flow of ‘oniony liquid’ that compared with it the famous
+    ‘haggis-deluge’ of the ‘Noctes’ which nearly drowned in gravy
+    ‘Christopher,’ ‘the Shepherd,’ and ‘Tickler’ in Ambrose’s parlour,
+    would be, both for quantity and flavour, but ‘a beaker full of the
+    sweet South’?  Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what
+    would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to
+    the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson—the mighty
+    Christopher, who for about thirty years literally talked in type upon
+    every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of
+    which he had none; whose ‘words, words, words’ are, indeed, as
+    Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, ‘as the rush of mighty waters’?
+
+    What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to
+    guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, ‘if what is said be not to the
+    purpose, a single word is already too much.’
+
+    Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations
+    upon the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ.’  He loves the memory of the fine old
+    Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that
+    are too timid of grip.  In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot
+    overdo it.  There are certain parts we should have especially liked
+    squeezed away; and among these—will Mr. Skelton pardon us?—are the
+    ‘amazingly humourous’ ones, such as the ‘opening of the haggis,’
+    which, Mr. Skelton tells us, ‘manifests the humour of conception as
+    well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been
+    surpassed by the greatest masters’; ‘the amazing humour’ of which
+    consists in the Shepherd’s sticking his supper knife into a ‘haggis’
+    (a sheep’s paunch filled with the ‘pluck’ minced, with suet, onions,
+    salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy
+    that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save
+    themselves from being drowned in it!  In truth, Mr. Skelton should
+    have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the
+    Professor’s twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining,
+    omit everything ‘amazingly humourous,’ he will be the best
+    Wilson-squeezer imaginable.
+
+    Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be.  The ‘Noctes’ are
+    dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to save them, squeezes away all the
+    political events—so important once, so unimportant now—all the
+    foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in
+    them.  He eliminates all the critiques upon all those ‘greatest
+    poems’ and those ‘greatest novels of the age’ written by
+    Christopher’s friends—friends so famous once, so peacefully forgotten
+    now.  And he has left what he calls the ‘Comedy of the Noctes
+    Ambrosianæ,’ i.e. ‘that portion of the work which deals with or
+    presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and
+    character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it
+    which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of
+    literary, artistic, or political interest only.’  And, although Mr.
+    Skelton uses thus the word ‘comedy’ in its older and wider meaning,
+    it is evident that it is as an ‘amazing humourist’ that he would
+    present to our generation the great Christopher North.  And
+    assuredly, at this the ‘delighted spirit’ of Christopher smiles
+    delightedly in Hades.  For, however the ‘Comic Muse’ may pout upon
+    hearing from Mr. Skelton that ‘the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” belong to
+    her,’ it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson’s life was to
+    cultivate her—was to be an ‘amazing humourist,’ in short.  It is
+    clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he
+    most of all affected, that which we call technically ‘Rabelaisian.’
+    To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of
+    the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all
+    his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds
+    hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot.  His personality was
+    enormous.  He had more of that demonic element—of which since
+    Goethe’s time we have heard so much—than any man in Scotland.
+    Everybody seems to have been dominated by him.  De Quincey, with a
+    finer intellect than even his own—and that is using strong
+    language—looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master.  It is
+    positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey’s ‘Autobiographic
+    Sketches,’ to come again and again upon the naïve refrain: ‘I think
+    so, so does Professor Wilson.’  Gigantic as was the egotism of the
+    Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism
+    of Christopher North.  In this, as in everything else, he was the
+    opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter
+    Scott.  Scott’s desire was to create eccentric humourous characters,
+    but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself.  Wilson’s great
+    ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your
+    superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create.  He would
+    like the universe to himself.  If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if
+    you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that
+    character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a
+    smile: ‘Don’t you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I—John Wilson?’  He
+    always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler
+    were John Wilson—as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather,
+    what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered.  This
+    determination to be a humourous character it was—and no lack of
+    literary ambition—that caused him to squander his astonishing powers
+    in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man,
+    lament.
+
+    Many articles in ‘Blackwood’—notably the one upon Shakspeare’s four
+    great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge’s
+    poetry—show that his insight into the principles of literary art was
+    true and deep—far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this
+    inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form,
+    nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature
+    show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or
+    review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his
+    merits.
+
+    Has Wilson secured such a place?  We fear not; and if Skelton were to
+    ask us, on our oath, why Wilson’s fourteen volumes of brilliant,
+    eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund
+    state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the
+    ‘Coverley’ papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review
+    articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we
+    fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that
+    mere elaborated intellectual ‘humour’ has the seeds of dissolution in
+    it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live;
+    and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a
+    humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian.
+    But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what
+    precise meaning we attach to the word ‘Rabelaisian’—though the
+    subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.
+    Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will
+    venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of
+    temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic
+    humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist—the
+    comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of
+    mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits,
+    with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the
+    almighty joke of the Cosmos—a mood which in literature is rarer than
+    in life—rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common and
+    characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.
+
+    Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing.  For
+    this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save
+    in the most un-egotistic souls.  It belongs to the Chaucers, the
+    Shakspeares, the Molières, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles,
+    the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots—upon whom the rich
+    tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and
+    yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.
+    Among these—to whom to create is everything—Sterne would perhaps have
+    been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and never
+    read Rabelais; while Dickens’s growth was a development from
+    Rabelaisianism to Cervantism.  But surely so delicate a critic as Mr.
+    Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously
+    tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in
+    Wilson.  Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying
+    the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters.
+    Even the humourless Plato could do that.  Even the humourless Landor
+    could do that.  But, strip the ‘Shepherd’s’ talk of its Scottish
+    accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose
+    rush in the ‘Recreations’ and the ‘Essays’ we are so familiar with.
+    While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of
+    De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to
+    be purposely destroyed, and the ‘Opium-Eater’ becomes a fantastic
+    creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.
+
+    The ‘amazing humour’ of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic.  Is it
+    Rabelaisian?  Again, we fear not.  Very likely the genuine
+    Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the ‘writing fellows’ at all.
+    We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our
+    time.  One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a
+    pathetic hatred.  The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with
+    a beautiful and a pathetic love.  And we have just heard from one of
+    our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be
+    found—where he ought to be found—at Stratford-on-Avon.  This is
+    interesting.  Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there
+    were Rabelaisians, even among the ‘writing fellows,’ before Rabelais;
+    the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all
+    we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of
+    getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, ‘in a duck-pond drowned
+    him,’ he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very
+    first rank.  But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say
+    nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the ‘Birds’ alone puts
+    Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians.  But
+    when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: ‘Let
+    down the curtain; the farce is done,’ they were prophetic as regards
+    the literary Rabelaisians—prophetic in this, that no writer has since
+    thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood—the mood, that is, of the
+    cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of
+    meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine.  Yet, if his mantle has
+    fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped upon
+    several; for the great Curé divides his qualities among his followers
+    impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in the
+    ‘Paradise of Fruits,’ from which every other fruit in the garden drew
+    its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits with
+    stealing theirs.  Among a few others, it may be said that the cosmic
+    humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half
+    stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits—the love of
+    life—the fine passion for victuals and drink—has fallen to several
+    more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of ‘John Buncle’; to
+    Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the ‘Jolly Beggars’), to
+    John Skinner, the author of ‘Tullochgorum.’  Shakspeare, having
+    everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as
+    Cervantism.  Some of the scenes in ‘Henry the Fourth’ and ‘Henry the
+    Fifth’ are rich with it.  So is ‘Twelfth Night,’ to go no further.
+    Dickens’s Rabelaisianism stopped with ‘Pickwick.’  If Hood’s gastric
+    fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the
+    greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais.  A good man, if his juices are
+    right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into
+    Rabelaisianism.  Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief.
+    Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and
+    this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour
+    becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the
+    harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by
+    imitating Mr. Carlyle.  This is bad.  But far worse is simulated
+    animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism.  This is insupportable.  For we
+    ask the reader—who may very likely have been to an undergraduates’
+    wine-party, or to a medical students’ revel, or who may have read the
+    ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’—we seriously and earnestly ask him whether, among
+    all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is
+    anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.
+
+    And now we come reluctantly to the point.  It breaks our heart to say
+    to Mr. Skelton—for we believed in Professor Wilson once—it breaks our
+    heart to say that Wilson’s Rabelaisianism is nothing but
+    jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind.  In
+    reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have
+    felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains.
+    We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if
+    those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if
+    they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their
+    ghostly liquor!’
+
+    Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of
+    the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine.  They do
+    not hop, skip, and jump for effect.  Their friskiness is the
+    friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who
+    runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue
+    that all creatures know, ‘I live, I live, I live!’  But, whatever
+    might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring
+    about the literary cheerfulness of the ‘Noctes’ that, notwithstanding
+    all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at
+    heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real
+    Wilson is the Wilson of the ‘Isle of Palms,’ ‘The City of the
+    Plague,’ of the ‘Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,’ of the ‘Lights and
+    Shadows of Scottish Life,’ Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of
+    Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that ‘almost the only
+    passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler
+    sympathies of our nature—tender compassion—confiding affection, and
+    gentleness and sorrow.’
+
+    He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a
+    good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney
+    army if necessary.  This kind of man he may have been—Mr. Skelton
+    inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us
+    to think he was playing a part.  A temperamental humourist, we say
+    decidedly, he was not.
+
+    Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book?  In a certain
+    sense no doubt humour may be found there.  Just as science tells us
+    that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same
+    elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so
+    is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest,
+    and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is
+    humour.  And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the
+    little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous,
+    the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary
+    skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more
+    telling his wit.  Now, Wilson’s intellect was exceedingly and
+    wonderfully fine.  As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many
+    a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of
+    those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds
+    from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay.”
+
+No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and
+saw the author of it.  Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and
+indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry
+between the ‘Athenæum’ and the ‘Academy.’
+
+“You belong to us,” said Appleton.  “The ‘Academy’ is the proper place
+for you.  You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have
+Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy’s camp.”
+
+“And shall I tell you why I have joined the ‘Athenæum’ in place of the
+‘Academy’?” said Watts; “it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you
+did not.”
+
+“For months and months I have been urging you to write in the ‘Academy,’”
+said Appleton.
+
+“That is true, no doubt,” said Watts, “but while MacColl offered me an
+important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you
+invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon
+metaphysics.  It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late.  If to join
+the ‘Athenæum’ is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a
+Philistine am I.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then
+called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends
+afterwards.  Shirley, in his ‘Reminiscences’ of Rossetti, like most of
+his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the
+poet-painter.  I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides
+cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a
+genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays.  I have heard him say more than
+once that Skelton’s style had a certain charm for him, and he could not
+understand why Skelton’s position is not as great as it deserves to be.
+‘Scotsmen,’ he said, ‘often complain that English critics are slow to do
+them justice.  This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol’s
+life.  He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering
+under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile
+Club.  As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the
+idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in
+the great literary cockpit of London.  To say the truth, the Scottish
+cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can
+more than take care of himself.  For my part, with the exception of
+Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish,
+Scottish, or Welsh.  But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had
+been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an
+enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been
+more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was
+liked.’
+
+As will be seen further on, before the review of the ‘Comedy of the
+Noctes Ambrosianæ’ appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the
+‘Athenæum’ an article on ‘The Art of Interviewing.’  From this time
+forward he became the chief critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ and for nearly a
+quarter of a century—that is to say, until he published ‘The Coming of
+Love,’ when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any
+kind—he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of
+which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound
+generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the
+phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic
+style—a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in
+an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.
+
+As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness
+upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his
+creative work is of the closest kind.  Indeed, it has been said by
+Rossetti that ‘the subtle and original generalizations upon the first
+principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to
+him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own
+poetry.’  The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets.
+Rossetti used humourously to call him ‘The Symposiarch,’ and no doubt the
+influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at
+Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr.
+Marston’s, Madox Brown’s, and Mrs. Procter’s, may be traced in his
+writings.  For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic
+of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of
+spontaneous conversation overheard.  Its variety of manner, as well as of
+subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism.  In it
+are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation,
+irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily
+mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit.  To
+the ‘Athenæum’ he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as
+‘The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,’ ‘The Troubadours and Trouvères,’
+‘The Children of the Open Air,’ ‘The Gypsies,’ ‘Cosmic Humour,’ ‘The
+Effect of Evolution upon Literature.’  And although the most complete and
+most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the
+vast ocean of the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ and the ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica,’ there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is
+proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, that
+contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian
+minister, to the ‘Rivista d’ Italia.’  In this article she makes frequent
+allusions to the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and quotes freely from them.
+Rossetti once said that ‘the reason why Theodore Watts was so little
+known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as
+eagerly as other men sought fame’; but although his indifference to
+literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts
+of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his
+influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be
+profound.
+
+There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves
+untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates.  His treatise in the
+‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ on ‘Poetry’ is alone sufficient to show how
+deep has been his study of poetic principles.  The essay on the ‘Sonnet,’
+too, which appeared in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ is admitted by critics
+of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject.  It
+has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl
+Leutzner in his treatise, ‘Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.’
+
+The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the ‘Athenæum’ are
+admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B.
+Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the ‘Idler.’  The
+allusion to the ‘smart slaters’ will be sufficient to indicate the
+approximate date of the interview.
+
+    “Having read your treatise on poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia
+    Britannica,’ which, it is said, has been an influence in every
+    European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned
+    in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of
+    comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his
+    time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English
+    poetry at the present moment.  There are those who run down the
+    present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are
+    really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
+    It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in
+    sympathy with the poetry of the present hour.”
+
+    “I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic.  To say
+    the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque
+    misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.
+    Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I
+    was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in
+    which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are
+    so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same
+    misconception seems to be spreading in England—attacks which the
+    smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing
+    men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers.”
+
+    “It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the
+    newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd.”
+
+    “I do not believe in answering attacks.  The public, as I say, knows
+    that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm
+    to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer
+    does him more good than praise would do.  But, as a matter of fact, I
+    have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of
+    letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations
+    upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a
+    review.  It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one’s
+    excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful
+    criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike
+    reviewing than mine.  Yet it has one good quality, I think—it is
+    never unkindly.  I never will take a book for review unless I can say
+    something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour.”
+
+    “Then you never practise the smart ‘slating’ which certain would-be
+    critics indulge in?”
+
+    “Never!  In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give
+    pain to a young writer.  In the next place, this ‘smart slating,’ as
+    you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world.
+    Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as
+    many miles of such smart ‘slating’ as could be achieved by any six of
+    the smart slaters.  A charming phrase of yours, ‘smart slaters’!  But
+    I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my
+    time—men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to
+    mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they
+    hold such work in contempt.  Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for
+    instance.  Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day
+    of his valuable life are wasted on ‘leader’ writing, but there is in
+    any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be
+    achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he!
+    going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.
+    Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.
+    While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by
+    making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little
+    spiteful brow, Grant Allen’s good-natured sayings have the very wit
+    that the unlucky sweater and ‘slater’ is trying for.  Read what he
+    said about William Watson, and see how kind he is.  Compare his
+    geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers.  Again, take
+    Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters
+    in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the
+    scurrility of the smart writers.  But it was not, I suppose, of such
+    as they that you came to talk about.  You are asking me whether I am
+    in sympathy with the younger writers of my time.  My answer is that I
+    cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.
+    In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of
+    them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal
+    friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work
+    and their aims.  No doubt there are some points in which they and I
+    agree to differ.”
+
+    “And what about our contemporary novelists?  Perhaps you do not give
+    attention to fiction?”
+
+    “Give attention to novels!  Why, if I did not, I should not give
+    attention to literature at all.  In a true and deep sense all pure
+    literature is fiction—to use an extremely inadequate and misleading
+    word as a substitute for the right phrase, ‘imaginative
+    representation.’  ‘The Iliad,’ ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘The Æneid,’ ‘The
+    Divina Commedia,’ are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as
+    certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our
+    writers.  The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old
+    Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and
+    the mustard-seed.  A time which has given birth to such novelists as
+    many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time
+    for the English novel.  Criticism will have to recognize, and at
+    once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of
+    the ‘literature of power,’ and if criticism does not so recognize it,
+    so much the worse for criticism, I think.  That the novel will grow
+    in importance is, I say, quite certain.  In such a time as ours (as I
+    have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing
+    boy—it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for
+    the growing limbs of life.  The novel is more flexible; it can be
+    stretched to fit the muscles as they swell.”
+
+    “I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent
+    critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?”
+
+    “Well, there I am a ‘galled jade’ that must needs ‘wince’ a little.
+    No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not
+    yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my
+    writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity.  The chief
+    argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any
+    scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed
+    with the journal’s own authority—and the same applies, of course, to
+    the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious.  With regard
+    to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to
+    be always on his guard against it.  An editor cannot read all the
+    books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary
+    world.  When Jones asks him for Brown’s book for review, the editor
+    cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up
+    irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes
+    in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones’s name,
+    but that of the journal.
+
+    In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but
+    not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great
+    injustice may flow from this.  I myself have more than once heard a
+    good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted
+    the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the
+    work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry
+    fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything.”
+
+Now that the day of the ‘smart slaters’ is over, it is interesting to
+read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the
+article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the
+‘Athenæum,’ spoke of its record and its triumphs:—
+
+    “The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every
+    line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through
+    its columns.  Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that
+    the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is
+    difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the
+    editorial ‘we.’  But with regard to the general public, the reader of
+    a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of
+    the ‘we,’ and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an
+    author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men
+    ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers.  These were the
+    views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the
+    best writers of our time there can be no doubt.  Some very
+    illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them.  On a
+    certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne
+    Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having
+    accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced
+    himself, and told how he had stood ‘dividing the swift mind’ as to
+    whether he could or could not offer the man his hand.  ‘I think I
+    should have offered him mine,’ said Rossetti, ‘although no one
+    detests his offence more than I do.’  And then the conversation ran
+    upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old
+    friends could not shake hands.  ‘There is one kind of miscreant,’
+    said Rossetti, ‘whom you have forgotten to name—a miscreant who in
+    kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an
+    anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when
+    he knows it to be good.  That is the man who should never defile my
+    hand by his touch.  By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I
+    must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste
+    bread and salt with him.  I would quietly get up and go.’  Tennyson,
+    on afterwards being told this story, said, ‘And who would not do the
+    same?  Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege—sacrilege against
+    art.’  Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume
+    of the ‘Athenæum’ worked on the great principle that the critic’s
+    primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art
+    and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by.  Their
+    pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his
+    coadjutors; and from its commencement the ‘Athenæum’ has striven to
+    avoid slashing and smart writing.  A difficult thing to avoid, no
+    doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar
+    slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever.  Of all
+    forms of writing, the founders of the ‘Athenæum’ held the shallow,
+    smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable.  And
+    here again the views of the ‘Athenæum’ have remained unchanged.  The
+    critic who works ‘without a conscience or an aim’ knows only too well
+    that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses
+    of human nature—the love that people have of seeing each other
+    attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself.
+    For although man has a strong instinct for admiration—else had he
+    never reached his present position in the conscious world—he has,
+    running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct—the
+    instinct for contempt.  A reviewer’s ridicule poured upon a writer
+    titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority.  It is by
+    pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist
+    hopes to kill two birds with one stone—to gratify his own malignity
+    and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so.
+    Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is
+    far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all.  Many
+    brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever,
+    have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart
+    saying.  One of these writers—the greatest wit of the nineteenth
+    century—used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered
+    his own prodigious powers of wit, ‘I will engage in six lessons to
+    teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks
+    it worth his while to learn.’  And the ‘Athenæum,’ at the time when
+    Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same
+    thing.  The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and
+    among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching.”
+
+Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a
+kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor
+should ‘come down a cropper’ over some matter of fact, and open the door
+to troublesome correspondence.  As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the
+mysterious ‘we’ must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the
+authority of the oracle?  When a contributor ‘comes down a cropper,’
+although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor
+cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of
+the ‘Saturday Review’ under Cook) refuse to insert a correction.  Now, as
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, ‘the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy
+does it feel in setting other intelligences right.’  I have been told
+that it was a tradition in the office of the ‘Examiner,’ and also in the
+office of the ‘Athenæum,’ that Theodore Watts had not only never been
+known to ‘come down a cropper,’ but had never given the ‘critical gnats’
+a chance of pretending that he had to.  One day, however, in an article
+on Frederick Tennyson’s poems, speaking of the position that the poet
+Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with
+the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith—the same Smith whom ‘Z’
+(the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the ‘Athenæum’—had been
+admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer
+had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith’s with the metaphors of
+Shakespeare.  The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next
+Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great
+man:—
+
+    ‘Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson’s poems,
+    which was published in your last number, please say where I have
+    compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?
+
+                                                         HERBERT SPENCER.’
+
+The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor
+had at last ‘come down a cropper,’ sent a proof of Spencer’s note to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any
+editorial comment at all.  Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last
+‘come down a cropper,’ this would have been the wisest plan.  But he
+returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following
+footnote added to it:—
+
+    “It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the
+    magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in
+    literary art—an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original
+    in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature
+    may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from
+    their ranks—and it is many years since we had the pleasure of reading
+    it.  Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in which
+    he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as ‘I speared him
+    with a jest,’ etc.  Our only object, however, in alluding to the
+    subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the
+    hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as this—
+
+             —My drooping sails
+    Flap idly ’gainst the mast of my intent;
+    I rot upon the waters when my prow
+    Should grate the golden isles—
+
+    had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and
+    favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer.”
+
+Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, ‘Of course
+the article was Theodore Watts’s.  I had forgotten entirely what I had
+said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.’
+
+If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of
+critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which
+distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings, I think I should select this
+bland postscript to Spencer’s letter.
+
+Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton
+always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson.  It
+occurred in connection with ‘Kidnapped.’  I will quote here Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the
+‘Athenæum’ review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson’s works.  The
+playful allusion to the ‘Athenæum’s’ kindness is very characteristic:—
+
+    “Of Stevenson’s sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could
+    quote many instances; but let one suffice.  When ‘Kidnapped’
+    appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of
+    giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we
+    refused to be scared from making certain strictures.  It occurred to
+    us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic
+    detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really
+    vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts.
+    From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of
+    two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to
+    weld into one.  We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of
+    Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer,
+    anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power
+    is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story
+    on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding
+    one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the
+    villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him
+    and sending him off to the plantations.  The ‘Athenæum,’ whose
+    kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small,
+    has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its
+    usual kind and gentle way.  This aroused the wrath of the
+    Stevensonians.  Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the
+    author of ‘Kidnapped’ himself a charming letter.’
+
+This letter appears in Stevenson’s ‘Letters,’ and by the courtesy of Mr.
+Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it
+here:—
+
+                                                  SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.
+
+    DEAR MR. WATTS,—The sight of the last ‘Athenæum’ reminds me of you,
+    and of my debt now too long due.  I wish to thank you for your notice
+    of ‘Kidnapped’; and that not because it was kind, though for that
+    also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before
+    now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers.  A critic
+    like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity,
+    and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance,
+    surely not in vain.
+
+    What you say of the two parts in ‘Kidnapped’ was felt by no one more
+    painfully than by myself.  I began it, partly as a lark, partly as a
+    pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from
+    the canvas, and I found I was in another world.  But there was the
+    cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old
+    friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back
+    door.  So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to
+    me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay.  For a
+    man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private
+    means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist’s
+    proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden:
+    the days of professional literature very hard.  Yet I do not so far
+    deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing
+    my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality
+    to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my ‘Kidnapped’ was doomed,
+    while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the
+    thing it is.
+
+    And now to the more genial business of defence.  You attack my fight
+    on board the ‘Covenant,’ I think it literal.  David and Alan had
+    every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good
+    conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first
+    attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have
+    taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms
+    and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.
+    The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever
+    ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not;
+    still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would
+    perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.—I am, dear Mr.
+    Watts, your very sincere admirer,
+
+                                                   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson, of his
+personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and Stevenson, on
+his part, in conversation never failed to speak of himself, as in this
+letter he subscribes himself, as Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sincere admirer.  But
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s admiration of Stevenson’s work was more tempered with
+judgment than was the admiration of some critics, who afterwards, when he
+became too successful, disparaged him.  Greatly as he admired ‘Kidnapped’
+and ‘Catriona,’ there were certain of Stevenson’s works for which his
+admiration was qualified, and certain others for which he had no
+admiration at all.  His strictures upon the story which seems to have
+been at first the main source of Stevenson’s popularity, ‘Dr. Jekyll and
+Mr. Hyde,’ were much resented at the time by those insincere and fickle
+worshippers to whom I have already alluded.  Yet these strictures are
+surely full of wisdom, and they specially show that wide sweep over the
+entire field of literature which is characteristic of all his criticism.
+As they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will quote
+them here:—
+
+    “Take the little story ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ the laudatory
+    criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like
+    the comet’s tail in relation to the comet.  On its appearance as a
+    story, a ‘shilling shocker’ for the railway bookstalls, the critic’s
+    attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred
+    qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the
+    world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to
+    its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing.
+    But when it is offered as a classic—and this is really how it is
+    offered—it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different
+    kind.  It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having
+    a like motive—stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest
+    literature—as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke to
+    the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible being—stories
+    whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest kind.
+
+    It is many years since, in writing of the ‘Parables of Buddhaghosha,’
+    it was our business to treat at length of the grand idea of man’s
+    dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been
+    embodied.  We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsène
+    Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life’s road, sees on a
+    lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards—when sin has
+    soiled him—finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own
+    sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely modern
+    story of Edgar Poe, ‘William Wilson,’ up to the earliest allegories
+    upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by
+    gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart
+    of the ‘Great Man, Mankind.’  We traced the idea, as far as our
+    knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and
+    found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive—from the
+    ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all motives—had
+    been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that did honour
+    to literary art.  Manu, after telling us that ‘single is each man
+    born into the world—single dies,’ implores each one to ‘collect
+    virtue,’ in order that after death he may be met by the virtuous part
+    of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in traversing ‘that
+    gloom which is so hard to be traversed.’  Fine as this is, it is
+    surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since versified by Sir
+    Edwin Arnold)—the story of the wicked king who met after death a
+    frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her to be only a
+    part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own evil deeds.
+    And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in Arda Viraf, in
+    which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid pleasant trees whose
+    fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of his own dual nature, a
+    beautiful maiden, who says to him, ‘O youth, I am thine own actions.’
+
+    And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in
+    which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it
+    deserves.  It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous
+    tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery—a story of astonishing
+    brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man’s
+    soul is effected not by psychological development, and not by the
+    ‘awful alchemy’ of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the
+    previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed
+    new drug.
+
+    If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De
+    Quincey’s ‘Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ it tells
+    poorly for Stevenson’s sense of humour.  If it is meant as a serious
+    allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same
+    motive with which most literatures have been enriched.  That a story
+    so coarse should have met with the plaudits that ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+    Hyde’ met with at the time of its publication—that it should now be
+    quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while
+    all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are
+    ignored—what does it mean?  Is it a sign that the ‘shrinkage of the
+    world,’ the ‘solidarity of civilisation,’ making the record of each
+    day’s doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our
+    public writers?  Is it that they not only have no time to think, but
+    no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour?  Is it
+    that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon
+    them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and
+    turn to it for convenient illustration?  That Stevenson should have
+    been impelled to write the story shows what the ‘Suicide Club’ had
+    already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a
+    charm to ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped,’ there was that morbid
+    strain which is so often associated with physical disease.
+
+    Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all
+    writers since Chaucer—Walter Scott—Stevenson might have been in the
+    ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who
+    do their best to make life hideous.  It must be remembered that he
+    was a critic first and a creator afterwards.  He himself tells us how
+    critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to
+    writing himself.  No one really understood better than he Hesiod’s
+    fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a
+    forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares.  No one understood
+    better than he Joubert’s saying, ‘Fiction has no business to exist
+    unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one aim
+    is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere
+    frightful reality.’  And for the most part he succeeded in keeping
+    down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a
+    crazy body.
+
+    Save in such great mistakes as ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ and a few
+    other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert’s excellent maxim.  But
+    Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter—right by
+    instinct.  He alone is always a delight.  If all art is dedicated to
+    joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious
+    problem than how to make men happy, then the ‘Waverley Novels’ are
+    among the most precious things in the literature of the world.”
+
+Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always speaks warmly
+is Browning.  Among the many good anecdotes I have heard him relate in
+this connection, I will give one.  I do not think that he would object to
+my doing so.
+
+    “It is one of my misfortunes,” said he, “to be not fully worthy (to
+    use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning’s poetry.
+    Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative
+    and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements
+    in a general way not pleasing to my ear.  When a certain book of his
+    came out—I forget which—it devolved upon me to review it.  Certain
+    eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I
+    expressed my irritation in something very like chaff.  A close friend
+    of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself—in fact, Mr.
+    Swinburne—chided me for it, and I feel that he was right.  On the
+    afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal
+    Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began
+    talking about the review.  Lowell, I found, was delighted with
+    it—said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had
+    appeared for many years.  ‘But,’ said he, ‘You’re a brave man to be
+    here where Browning always comes.’  Then, looking round the room, he
+    said: ‘Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side
+    opposite to us.  Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!’
+
+    ‘Slip away!’ I said, ‘to avoid Browning!  You don’t know him as well
+    as I do, after all!  Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if
+    we stand here for a minute or two.  Miss Browning, whose eyes are
+    looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak
+    to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me.
+    And then you will see her turn her head to Browning’s ear and tell
+    him something.  And then Browning will come straight across to me and
+    be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing
+    that be possible.’
+
+    ‘No, I don’t believe it.’
+
+    ‘If you were not such a Boston Puritan,’ I said, ‘I would ask you
+    what will you bet that I am wrong.’
+
+    No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied, Miss
+    Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn and whisper
+    in Browning’s ear, and Browning did come straight across the room to
+    us; and this is what he said, speaking to me before he spoke to the
+    illustrious American—a thing which on any other occasion he would
+    scarcely have done:
+
+    ‘Now,’ said he, ‘you’re not going to put me off with generalities any
+    longer.  You promised to write and tell me when you could come to
+    luncheon.  You have never done so—you will never do so, unless I fix
+    you with a distinct day.  Will you come to-morrow?’
+
+    ‘I shall be delighted,’ I said.  And he turned to Lowell and
+    exchanged a few friendly words with him.
+
+    After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: ‘Well, this is
+    wonderful.  You would have won the bet.  How do you explain it?’
+
+    ‘I explain it by Browning’s greatness of soul and heart.  His
+    position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative
+    review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him.  But
+    he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson,
+    Jowett, and others.  He wishes to make it quite apparent that he
+    feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.’”
+
+After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to turn to
+the bound volume of my ‘Athenæum’ and read the article on ‘Ferishtah’s
+Fancies,’ which I imagine must have been the review in question.  This is
+what I read:—
+
+    ‘The poems in this volume can only be described as
+    parable-poems—parable-poems, not in the sense that they are capable
+    of being read as parables (as is said to be the case with the
+    ‘Rubá’iyát’ of Omar Khayyàm), but parable-poems in the sense that
+    they must be read as parables, or they show no artistic raison d’être
+    at all.
+
+    Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem?  It
+    is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the
+    young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall.  Or rather, it is to
+    imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda,
+    and set the preacher strumming a gypsy’s tambourine.  Though in the
+    pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so
+    absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses
+    it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere
+    with that entire abandon—that emotional freedom—which seems necessary
+    to the very existence of song.  Indeed, if poetry must, like
+    Wordsworth’s ideal John Bull, ‘be free or die’; if she must know no
+    law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of ‘L’art pour l’art’
+    declares); if she must not even seem to know _that_ (as the doctrine
+    of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it apparently in
+    tricksy sport alone—how can she—‘the singing maid with pictures in
+    her eyes’—mount the pulpit, read the text, and deliver the sermon?
+
+    In European literature how many parable poems should we find where
+    the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly strife?  But
+    we discussed all this in speaking of prose parables, comparing the
+    stories of the Prodigal Son and Kiságotamí with even such perfect
+    parable poetry as that of Jami.  We said then what we reiterate now:
+    that to sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius
+    of a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order—a genius
+    rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a certain
+    Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot in
+    floriculture.  Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental fancies, and
+    being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy with a certain
+    fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar with the
+    Persian story we allude to, the famous story of ‘Poetry and
+    Cabbages.’  Still, we will record it here for a certain learned
+    society.
+
+    The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers,
+    and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages.  So the
+    Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tûba Tree (whose fruit becomes
+    flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to
+    another, ‘The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well
+    be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon;
+    for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in
+    colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they
+    are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so
+    very intent upon cabbages.’  So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit
+    on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers
+    out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words
+    of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven.  So
+    bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer—for not only has
+    Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the
+    poet—
+
+    Breathe a stream of otto and balm,
+    Which through a woof of living music blown
+    Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?
+
+    —so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the
+    angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and
+    perfumed words upon the petals.  And this was how the Angels of the
+    Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of ‘Poetry and
+    Cabbages.’
+
+    But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is
+    nothing less than the celestial charactery of heaven, and is
+    consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very few—that is to
+    say, the eyes of those mortals who are ‘of the race of Israfel.’  To
+    common eyes—the eyes of the ordinary human cabbage-grower—what,
+    indeed, is that angelic caligraphy with which the petals of the
+    flowers are ornamented?  Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful
+    veins and scents and colours.
+
+    But who are ‘of the race of Israfel’?  Not the prosemen, certainly,
+    as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher’s idle
+    nonsense about the ‘Alphabet of the Angels’ in his ‘Ædipus
+    Egyptiacus.’  Are they, then, the poets?  This is indeed a solemn
+    query.  ‘If,’ says Feridun, ‘the mottoes that adorn the bowers of
+    Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall
+    be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of
+    hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?’
+
+    One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel—the
+    parable-poet—the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as reasoned
+    conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized in
+    concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic
+    form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it
+    that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the
+    colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of
+    these, and to be as inseparable from them as the ‘morning breath’ of
+    the Sabæan rose is inalienable from the innermost petals—‘the subtle
+    odour of the rose’s heart,’ which no mere chemistry of man, but only
+    the morning breeze, can steal.”
+
+It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous for Mr.
+Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and we have only to contrast it—or its
+richness and its rareness—with the naïve, simple, unadorned style of
+‘Aylwin’ to realize how wide is the range of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a master
+of the fine shades of literary expression.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER
+
+
+AND now begins the most difficult and the most responsible part of my
+task—the selection of one typical essay from the vast number of essays
+expressing more or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to
+all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work.  I can, of course, give only one, for
+already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions far beyond
+those originally intended for it.  Naturally, I thought at first that I
+would select one of the superb articles on Victor Hugo’s works, such for
+instance as ‘La Legénde des Siècles,’ or that profound one on ‘La
+Religion des Religion.’  But, after a while, when I had got the essay
+typed and ready for inclusion, I changed my mind.  I thought that one of
+those wonderful essays upon Oriental subjects which had called forth
+writings like those of Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better.
+Finally, I decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full
+of profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible, that it
+was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the Bible in Europe
+and in America.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has often been urged to reprint this
+essay as a brief text-book for scholastic use, but he has never done so.
+It will be noted by readers of ‘Aylwin’ that even so far back as the
+publication of this article in the ‘Athenæum ‘, in 1877, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton—to judge from the allusion in it to ‘Nin-ki-gal, the Queen
+of Death’—seems to have begun to draw upon Philip Aylwin’s ‘Veiled
+Queen’:—
+
+    “There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive
+    subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western
+    literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform
+    failure of these attempts.  At the time that Sternhold was ‘bringing’
+    the Psalms into ‘fine Englysh meter’ for Henry the Eighth and Edward
+    the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for
+    their own monarchs—notably Clement Marot for Francis the First.  And
+    it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any
+    importance having been entered against it.  This is astonishing, for
+    the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a
+    sacred book.  Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come,
+    and a literary journal may be its proper medium.
+
+    A great living savant has characterized the Bible as ‘a collection of
+    the rude imaginings of Syria,’ ‘the worn-out old bottle of Judaism
+    into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.’  The
+    great savant was angry when he said so.  The ‘new wine’ of science is
+    a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets
+    from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much
+    intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless.  But whatever may
+    become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have
+    passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of
+    Chaldæa,—the ‘old bottle’ is going to be older yet,—the Bible is
+    going to be eternal.  For that which decides the vitality of any book
+    is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul—not the
+    knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the
+    universe, unseen as well as seen.  The attitude of the Bible is just
+    that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always
+    assume—that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as this—that
+    of a noble humility before a God such as He ‘in whose great Hand we
+    stand.’  This is why—like Alexander’s mirror—like that most precious
+    ‘Cup of Jemshîd,’ imagined by the Persians—the Bible reflects to-day,
+    and will reflect for ever, every wave of human emotion, every passing
+    event of human life—reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great
+    and simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was written.
+    Coming from the Vernunft of Man, it goes straight to the Vernunft.
+    This is the kind of literature that never does die: a fact which the
+    world has discovered long ago.  For the Bible is Europe’s one book.
+    And with regard to Asia, as far back as the time of Chrysostom it
+    could have been read in languages Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian,
+    Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan; now it can be read in every
+    language, and in almost every dialect, under the sun.
+
+    And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms.
+    Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful;
+    the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible
+    to sing so badly.  It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I
+    should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should
+    find it in their hearts to sing Marot’s Psalms when they might have
+    sung David’s—that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable
+    jig, ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation’; and that Anthony,
+    King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, ‘Stand
+    up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.’  For, although it is given to the
+    very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the
+    ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar
+    convolution.
+
+    In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the
+    English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in
+    various incarnations, are fastidious.
+
+    When Lord Macaulay’s tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating
+    the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British
+    Museum to study us through our books—what volume can he take as the
+    representative one—what book, above all others, can the ghostly
+    librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into
+    the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure
+    in the earth?  We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the
+    English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the
+    Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most
+    exalted and its most abject phases.  That in the same volume can be
+    found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the
+    grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of
+    Brady and Tate—masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous
+    is an inspired bard—would be adequate evidence that the Church using
+    it must be a British Church—that British, most British, must be the
+    public tolerating it.
+
+    ‘By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy
+    Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and
+    Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver
+    us.’
+
+    Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in
+    such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music
+    are so mysteriously blended—blended so divinely that the man who can
+    utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch
+    close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from
+    some of us.  Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that
+    could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said:—‘More than any
+    race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and
+    energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit.  Enthusiasm is
+    their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration
+    as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.’  And now listen to
+    this:—
+
+    When we, our wearied limbs to rest,
+       Sat down by proud Euphrates’ stream,
+    We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,
+       And Zion was our mournful theme.
+
+    Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have
+    thus degraded the words: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat
+    down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’  For, to achieve such
+    platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the
+    ‘Hopkins element,’ an element which is quite an insular birthright of
+    ours, a characteristic which came over with the ‘White Horse,’—that
+    ‘dull and greasy coarseness of taste’ which distinguishes the British
+    mind from all others; that ‘ächtbrittische Beschränktheit,’ which
+    Heine speaks of in his tender way.  The Scottish version is rough,
+    but Brady and Tate’s inanities are worse than Rous’s roughness.
+
+    Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and
+    the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it
+    come?  It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking
+    the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end,
+    and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set
+    the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for
+    generations:—‘What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental,
+    difference between English literature—and all other Western
+    literatures—Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?’  The simple
+    truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been
+    bipartite as now—has always been, as now, half sublime and half
+    homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired
+    by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk
+    schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such
+    of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them.
+    For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has
+    been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction
+    of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he
+    is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty.  When St.
+    Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins,
+    a heathen then, in possession of the soil.
+
+    There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says.
+    The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous,
+    much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by
+    nature none of the Hebraic style.  But, somehow, here is the
+    difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is
+    born of taste—though le style c’est la race; and though the
+    Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone;
+    yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of
+    many years—just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows
+    not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him—so may
+    the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil be
+    Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years.  The
+    result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their
+    deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the
+    Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes
+    when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in
+    parts of Raleigh’s ‘History of the World,’ in Jeremy Taylor’s
+    sermons, in Hall’s ‘Contemplations,’ and other such books of the
+    seventeenth century.
+
+    The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined.  To
+    define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life.  When we
+    say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean
+    that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or
+    unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or
+    conscious grace which we call manner.  The difference is fundamental.
+    It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or
+    grace—manner is conscious power or grace.  But the Great Style, both
+    in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace
+    in one.
+
+    And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression
+    of a national temper?  Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does.
+    Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive
+    with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness
+    of the Aryan mind—not, certainly, to those who, though producing
+    Æschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians, but
+    to the descendants of Shem,—the only gentleman among all the sons of
+    Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the face of
+    God and live, can see not much else.  The Great Style, in a word, is
+    Semitic.  It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic.  For though two
+    of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt, plentiful
+    enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the most part.
+    The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as compared with
+    Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high reach of ethical
+    writing as even that noble and well-known passage from Manu,
+    beginning, ‘Single is each man born into the world, single he dies,’
+    etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared with the
+    ethical parts of Scripture.  The Persians have the grace always, the
+    power often, but the unconsciousness almost never.  We might perhaps
+    say that there were those in Egypt once who came near to the great
+    ideal.  That description of the abode of ‘Nin-ki-gal,’ the Queen of
+    Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British Museum, is
+    nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite.  Conscious power and
+    conscious grace are Hellenic, of course.  That there is a deal of
+    unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons
+    by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how
+    artificial he seems.  And note that, afterwards, when he who
+    approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the
+    Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the
+    Nile.  It is to the Latin races—some of them—that has filtered
+    Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has
+    been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain,
+    but straight from the Hebrew.
+
+    What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have—unconsciousness;
+    often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalité.
+    Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too.  The Hopkins
+    element,—the dull and stupid homeliness,—the coarse grotesque, mingle
+    with and mar its finest effects.  Over it all the atmosphere is that
+    of pantomime—singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner’s libretti.
+    Even that great final conflict between gods and men and the swarming
+    brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the Völu-seeress,
+    when from Yötunland they come and storm the very gates of
+    Asgard;—even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar
+    picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and
+    digesting the universe to chaos.  But, out of the twenty-three
+    thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no
+    one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist
+    to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement.  This is why
+    style in literature is virtue.  Like royalty, the Great Style ‘can do
+    no wrong.’
+
+    Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far
+    the largest endowment.  They wanted another element, in short, not
+    the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that
+    of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live;
+    as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold—two of the finest and most delicate
+    minds of modern times—can testify.
+
+    But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before
+    the Bishops’ Bible or Coverdale’s Bible; long before even Aldhelm’s
+    time—Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon
+    mind.  From the time when Cædmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep
+    beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the
+    Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic.
+    Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was
+    steeped had been Hebraism at second hand—that of the Vulgate
+    mainly—till Tyndale’s time, or rather till the present Authorized
+    Version of the Bible appeared in 1611.  ‘There is no book,’ says
+    Selden, ‘so translated as the Bible for the purpose.  If I translate
+    a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into
+    French-English.  “Il fait froid,” I say, ’tis cold, not it makes
+    cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into
+    English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that
+    language is kept.’
+
+    And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal
+    accuracy—importation of Hebraisms—was not of itself enough to produce
+    a translation in the Great Style—a translation such as this, which,
+    as Coleridge says, makes us think that ‘the translators themselves
+    were inspired.’  To reproduce the Great Style of the original in a
+    Western idiom, the happiest combination of circumstances was
+    necessary.  The temper of the people receiving must, notwithstanding
+    all differences of habitation and civilization, be elementally in
+    harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it must be poetic
+    rather than ratiocinative.  Society must not be too complex—its tone
+    must not be too knowing and self-glorifying.  The accepted psychology
+    of the time must not be the psychology of the scalpel—the metaphysics
+    must not be the metaphysics of newspaper cynicism; above all,
+    enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered synonymous terms.
+    Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the faintest suspicion
+    of nineteenth century flavour.  That this is the kind of national
+    temper necessary to such a work might have been demonstrated by an
+    argument a priori.  It was the temper of the English nation when the
+    Bible was translated.  That noble heroism—born of faith in God and
+    belief in the high duties of man—which we have lost for the hour—was
+    in the very atmosphere that hung over the island.  And style in real
+    life, which now, as a consequence of our loss, does not exist at all
+    among Englishmen, and only among a very few Englishwomen—having given
+    place in all classes to manner—flourished then in all its charm.  And
+    in literature it was the same: not even the euphuism imported from
+    Spain could really destroy or even seriously damage the then national
+    sense of style.
+
+    Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what
+    must that be?  Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do
+    all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and
+    yet must be free from any soupçon of that ‘artifice,’ in the
+    ‘abandonment’ of which, says an Arabian historian, ‘true art alone
+    lies.’  For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art,
+    the Semites show but small conception, even in Job.  It was too
+    sacred for that—drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.
+
+    But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation
+    of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical
+    prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic
+    and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be
+    chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon;
+    just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even
+    ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion.  It
+    must be neither verse nor prose, it seems.  It must be a new movement
+    altogether.  The musical movement of the English Bible is a new
+    movement; let us call it ‘Bible Rhythm.’  And the movement was
+    devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles.  Thanks to
+    Difficulty—thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls ‘Hebrew
+    phrase and English phrase,’ the translators fashioned, or rather,
+    Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor
+    wholly the other—a movement which, for music, for variety, splendour,
+    sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English poetic
+    art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern world—a
+    movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself—but a form in
+    which ‘artifice’ is really ‘abandoned’ at last.  This rhythm it is to
+    which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book, and
+    which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches perhaps
+    being in the Psalms—this rhythm it is which the Hopkinses and Rouses
+    have—improved!  It would not be well to be too technical here, yet
+    the matter is of the greatest literary importance just now, and it is
+    necessary to explain clearly what we mean.
+
+    Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is
+    technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the
+    fulfilment of expectation.  In rhymed verse this is obvious: having
+    familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet’s rhymes, we
+    take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to
+    this arrangement.  In blank verse the law of expectation is less
+    apparent.  Yet it is none the less operative.  Having familiarized
+    ourselves with the poet’s rhythm, having found that iambic foot
+    succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun
+    to grow monotonous, variations occur—trochaic, anapæstic,
+    dactylic—according to the law which governs the ear of this
+    individual poet;—we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals
+    these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are
+    fulfilled.  And our delight is augmented if also our expectations
+    with regard to cæsuric effects are realized in the same proportions.
+    Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has
+    an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say,
+    to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence,—we expect
+    that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard
+    to the initial foot of any sequence,—there must be, not far ahead,
+    that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses
+    have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader
+    shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights.  And when
+    this expectation of cæsuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified
+    in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which
+    obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final
+    third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result.
+    In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from
+    poetry is in the recognition of law.  The more obvious and formulated
+    is the law,—nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian,—the more pleasure
+    it gives to the uncultivated ear.  This is why uneducated people may
+    delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is
+    why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in
+    such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom.  But, as the ear
+    becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law
+    should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law itself
+    may become a tyranny and a burden.  He who will read Shakespeare’s
+    plays chronologically, as far as that is practicable, from ‘Love’s
+    Labour’s Lost’ to the ‘Tempest,’ will have no difficulty in seeing
+    precisely what we mean.  In literature, as in social life, the
+    progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is
+    lawful.  Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are a recognized
+    music apart from a recognized law—‘artifice’ so completely abandoned
+    that we forget we are in the realm of art—pauses so divinely set that
+    they seem to be ‘wood-notes wild,’ though all the while they are, and
+    must be, governed by a mysterious law too subtly sweet to be
+    formulated; and all kind of beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs
+    of the metricist, but beauties that are unexpected.  There is a
+    metre, to be sure, but it is that of the ‘moving music which is
+    life’; it is the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of
+    him who speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the
+    passions which are passing into the words.  And if this is so in
+    other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where ‘the
+    flaming steeds of song,’ though really kept strongly in hand, seem to
+    run reinless as ‘the wild horses of the wind’?”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR
+
+
+THE reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of
+what I may call ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ essays gave me so much trouble
+that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay
+typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism dealing with what he calls ‘the
+laws of cause and effect in literary art’ it naturally occurred to me to
+write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two.  In response to my
+letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection
+for a friend took entire precedence of his own work:—
+
+    “MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,—The selections from my critiques must really be
+    left entirely to yourself.  They are to illustrate your own critical
+    judgment upon my work, and not mine.  Overwhelmed as I am with
+    avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge into
+    the countless columns of the ‘Athenæum,’ in quest of articles of mine
+    which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden at the
+    present moment.  I can think of only one article which I should
+    specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in part—not on
+    account of any merit in it which I can recall, but because it was the
+    means of bringing me into contact with one of the most delightful men
+    and one of the most splendidly equipped writers of our time, whose
+    sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond measure.  A few days after
+    the article appeared, the then editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ Mr. MacColl,
+    the dear friend with whom I was associated for more than twenty
+    years, showed me a letter that he had received from Traill.  It was
+    an extremely kind letter.  Among the many generous things that Traill
+    said was this—that it was just the kind of review article which makes
+    the author regret that he had not seen it before his book appeared.
+    I wrote to Traill in acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not
+    until a good while after this that we met at the Incorporated
+    Authors’ Society dinner.  At the table where I was sitting, and
+    immediately opposite me, sat a gentleman whose countenance,
+    especially when it was illuminated by conversation with his friends,
+    perfectly charmed me.  Although there was not the smallest regularity
+    in his features, the expression was so genial and so winsome that I
+    had some difficulty in persuading myself that it was not a beautiful
+    face after all, and his smile was really quite irresistible.  The
+    contrast between his black eyebrows and whiskers and the white hair
+    upon his head gave him a peculiarly picturesque appearance.  Another
+    thing I noticed was a boyish kind of lisp, which somehow, I could not
+    say why, gave to the man an added charm.  I did not know it was
+    Traill, but after the dinner was over, when I was saying to myself,
+    ‘That is a man I should like to know,’ a friend who sat next him—I
+    forget who it was—brought him round to me and introduced him as ‘Mr.
+    Traill.’  ‘You and I ought to know each other,’ he said, ‘for,
+    besides having many tastes in common, we live near each other.’  And
+    then I found that he lived near the ‘Northumberland Arms,’ between
+    Putney and Barnes.  I think that he must have seen how greatly I was
+    drawn to him, for he called at The Pines in a few days—I think,
+    indeed, it was the very next day—and then began a friendship the
+    memory of which gives me intense pleasure, and yet pleasure not
+    unmixed with pain, when I recall his comparatively early and sudden
+    death.  I used to go to his gatherings, and it was there that I first
+    met several interesting men that I had not known before.  One of
+    them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney Low, then the editor of the ‘St.
+    James’s Gazette.’  And I also used to meet there interesting men whom
+    I had known before, such as the late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose ‘Light
+    of Asia,’ and other such works, I had reviewed in the ‘Athenæum.’  I
+    do not hesitate for a moment to say that Traill was a man of genius.
+    Had he lived fifty years earlier, such a writer as he who wrote ‘The
+    New Lucian,’ ‘Recaptured Rhymes,’ ‘Saturday Songs,’ ‘The Canaanitish
+    Press’ and ‘Israelitish Questions,’ ‘the Life of Sterne,’ and the
+    brilliant articles in the ‘Saturday Review’ and the ‘Pall Mall
+    Gazette,’ would have made an unforgettable mark in literature.  But
+    there is no room for anybody now—no room for anybody but the very,
+    very few.  When he was about starting ‘Literature,’ he wrote to me,
+    and a gratifying letter it was.  He said that, although he had no
+    desire to wean me from the ‘Athenæum,’ he should be delighted to
+    receive anything from me when I chanced to be able to spare him
+    something.  It was always an aspiration of mine to send something to
+    a paper edited by so important a literary figure—a paper, let me say,
+    that had a finer, sweeter tone than any other paper of my time—I
+    mean, that tone of fine geniality upon which I have often commented,
+    that tone without which, ‘there can be no true criticism.’  A certain
+    statesman of our own period, who had pursued literature with success,
+    used to say (alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead),
+    that the besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of
+    gentlemanlike feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all
+    the other educated classes.  This might have been so then, but,
+    through the influence mainly of ‘Literature’ and H. D. Traill, it is
+    not so now.  Many people have speculated as to why a literary
+    journal, edited by such a man, and borne into the literary arena on
+    the doughty back of the ‘Times,’ did not succeed.  I have a theory of
+    my own upon that subject.  Although Traill’s hands were so full of
+    all kinds of journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is
+    a mistake to suppose that his own journal was badly edited.  It was
+    well edited, and it had a splendid staff, but several things were
+    against it.  It confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as
+    I remember, give its attention to much else.  Its price was sixpence;
+    but its chief cause of failure was what I may call its ‘personal
+    appearance.’  If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor
+    at the beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the
+    first quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper
+    or a magazine.  When the ‘Saturday Review’ was started, its personal
+    appearance—something quite new then—did almost as much for it as the
+    brilliant writing.  It was the same with the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ when
+    it started.  Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a
+    great deal in clothes.  Now, as I told Traill when we were talking
+    about this, ‘Literature’ in appearance seemed an uninviting cross
+    between the ‘Law Times’ and ‘The Lancet’—it seemed difficult to
+    connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a
+    business-like looking sheet as that.  Traill laughed, but ended by
+    saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of
+    mine.  Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died
+    only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten.  I should
+    be sorry indeed to think that.  All that I can say is that for a book
+    such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about
+    Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as
+    any that Traill’s own delightful whimsical imagination could have
+    pictured.”
+
+Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s wishes, and I do this with the
+more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on
+Sterne and the imaginative work—the theory of absolute humour exemplified
+in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article.  It was a
+review of Traill’s ‘Sterne,’ in the ‘English Men of Letters,’ and it
+appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of November 18, 1882.  I will quote the
+greater part of it:—
+
+    “Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated
+    writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and
+    Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while
+    Addison as a humorist is not even talked about.  In gauging the
+    quality of poetry—in finding for any poet his proper place in the
+    poetic heavens—there is always uncertainty and difficulty.  With
+    humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily
+    in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous
+    relations, and that the quality of every man’s humour depends upon
+    the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable.  If,
+    for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities
+    deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his
+    relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey
+    to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and
+    the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and
+    the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent.  Again, if
+    a man’s sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is
+    confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between
+    individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is
+    surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt—according, at least, to
+    the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according
+    to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon
+    in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the
+    Philistine only.  If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree)
+    Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer’s sense of the incongruous
+    is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill
+    calls ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ he is indeed a humourist, and
+    in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily
+    of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of
+    the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to
+    apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest
+    and deepest incongruities possible.  And it will be found that these
+    harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very ‘order of the
+    universe’ itself and the mind of man.  In certain temperaments the
+    eternal incongruities between man’s mind and the scheme of the
+    universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and
+    Novalis; but to other temperaments—to a Rabelais or Sterne, for
+    instance—the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder,
+    turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most
+    temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some ‘paradis
+    artificiel.’  Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is
+    that of ‘human intercourse,’ if he has no sense of this much deeper
+    irony—the irony of man’s intercourse with the universal harmony
+    itself—he cannot be ranked with the very greatest.  Of this irony in
+    the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive,
+    while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment.  Of Swift and Carlyle it
+    might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible
+    apprehension of it.  And if we should find that this quality exists
+    in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ how high, then, must we not place Sterne!  And
+    if we should find that Cervantes deals with the ‘irony of human
+    intercourse’ merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity,
+    terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne?  Why
+    is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is
+    based so melancholy?  Because it only sees the farce from the human
+    point of view.  The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a
+    soul deeply conscious of man’s ludicrous futility in his relations to
+    his fellow-man.  But while the futilities of ‘Don Quixote’ are tragic
+    because terrene, the futilities of ‘Tristram Shandy’ are comic
+    because they are derived from the order of things.  It is the great
+    humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock
+    at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the
+    constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram’s nose.  And if
+    Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end
+    a benevolent king; and hence all is well.
+
+    While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a
+    humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne
+    under a classification.  In Sterne’s writings every kind of humour is
+    to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must
+    have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as
+    Addison’s, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare’s.  In loving
+    sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by
+    Sterne in his ‘fat, foolish scullion.’  Lower than the Dogberry type
+    there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to
+    whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph.  While
+    the news of Bobby’s death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen,
+    suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must
+    follow such a sad calamity to the ‘fat, foolish scullion,’ scrubbing
+    her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of
+    her own life, and consequently to the wail that ‘Bobby is certainly
+    dead’ her soul merely answers as she scrubs, ‘So am not I.’  In four
+    words that scullion lives for ever.
+
+    Sterne’s humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian,
+    Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for
+    such a Proteus?  So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at
+    first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing
+    its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the
+    method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can
+    work.  Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed
+    the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of
+    Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate
+    between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on
+    the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne’s
+    natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or
+    Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the
+    humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation.  But
+    the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly
+    shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which
+    he pretended to be.  And after all this is the important question as
+    regards Sterne.  Lamb’s critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly
+    seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own ‘self-pleasing
+    quaintness.’  When any form of art departs in any way from
+    symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it
+    is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic?
+    That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we
+    feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the
+    artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust.  In the
+    humourous portions of Sterne’s work there is, probably, not a page,
+    however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and
+    therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an
+    offence. . . .
+
+    ‘Yorickism’ is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of
+    the humour of Swift.  One recognizes that the universe is rich in
+    things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the
+    universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate.  One recognizes
+    that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and
+    (because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that
+    there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as
+    a man.  The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in
+    the temperament—the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of
+    Apemantus.  And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to
+    say which fate is more terrible, Swift’s or Carlyle’s—that of the man
+    whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing
+    intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious,
+    conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot.
+    It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick.
+    It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in
+    a roar, or of him who, in the words of the ‘cadet of the house of
+    Keppoch,’ was ‘sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick,
+    a very great favourite of the gentlemen.’  Sterne, like Jaques and
+    Hamlet, deals with ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ but what he
+    specially recognizes is a deeper irony still—the irony of man’s
+    intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the
+    intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical
+    being—the irony, in short, of man’s position amid these natural
+    conditions of life and death.  It is in the apprehension of this
+    anomaly—a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature—that
+    Sterne’s strength lies.
+
+    Man, the ‘fool of nature,’ prouder than Lucifer himself, yet ‘bounded
+    in a nutshell,’ brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more
+    account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little
+    ‘beastie’ whose house is ruined by the ploughshare—here is, indeed, a
+    creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at and
+    to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter!  There is
+    nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because
+    they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is
+    nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a
+    horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the
+    grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed,
+    so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared
+    with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are
+    fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist.  That
+    Sterne’s donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain
+    natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he
+    should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of
+    certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in
+    it no material for humoristic treatment.  To render him absurd you
+    must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back
+    panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human
+    cook.  Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is
+    tried by human standards.  But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey
+    who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and
+    cooked the macaroons.  All other humour is thin compared with this.
+    Besides, it never grows old.  It is difficult, no doubt, to think
+    that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the
+    kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no
+    advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre.  Certainly up to the
+    present moment the anomaly of man’s position upon the planet is not
+    lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and
+    development.  On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in
+    speaking of Thoreau.  If man was a strange and anomalous ‘piece of
+    work’ as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a ‘piece of
+    work’ does he appear now!  He has the knack of advancing and leaving
+    the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it?  By the fact of his
+    being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions.
+    A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal
+    kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once
+    supposed) from any ‘inner yearning’ for progress, but because it was
+    pushed on by overmastering circumstances.  An ungulate becomes the
+    giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and
+    yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to
+    leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve.  But
+    man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of
+    harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the
+    other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips
+    them so completely that he forgets he is one of them.  If Uncle
+    Toby’s progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the
+    fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to
+    buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain
+    Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of
+    the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is
+    the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.
+
+    And while Sterne’s abiding sense of the struggle between man’s
+    spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical nature accounts
+    for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour, it greatly accounts
+    for his indecencies too.  Sterne had that instinct for idealizing
+    women, and the entire relations between the sexes which accompanies
+    the poetic temperament.  To such natures the spiritual side of sexual
+    relations is ever present; and as a consequence of this the animal
+    side never loses with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was
+    enveloped in their boyish days.  Not that we are going to justify
+    Sterne’s indecencies.  Coleridge’s remark that the pleasure Sterne
+    got from his double entendre was akin to ‘that trembling daring with
+    which a child touches a hot teapot because it has been forbidden,’
+    partly explains, but it does not excuse, Sterne’s transgressions
+    herein.  The fact seems to be that if we divide love into the passion
+    of love, the sentiment of love, and the appetite of love, and inquire
+    which of these was really known to Sterne, we shall come to what will
+    seem to most readers the paradoxical conclusion that it was the
+    sentiment only.  There is abundant proof of this.  In the ‘Letter to
+    the Earl of —,’ printed by his daughter, after dilating upon the
+    manner in which the writing of the ‘Sentimental Journey’ has worn out
+    both his spirits and body, he says: ‘I might indeed solace myself
+    with my wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been
+    a sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the
+    contrary.  The world has imagined because I wrote “Tristram Shandy”
+    that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.’  Upon this
+    passage Mr. Traill has the pertinent remark: ‘The connubial
+    affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently,
+    opposed to the sentimental emotions—as the lower to the higher.  To
+    indulge the former is to be “Shandian,” that is to say, coarse and
+    carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend
+    one’s days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex
+    indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.’  Now, to men of
+    this kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious
+    double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more animal
+    temperament.  The incongruity between the ideal and the actual
+    relations brings poignant distress at first, and afterwards a sense
+    of irresistible absurdity.  Originally the fascination of repulsion,
+    it becomes the fascination of attraction, and it is not at all
+    fanciful to say that in Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne
+    (quite unconsciously to himself perhaps) realized to his own mind
+    those two opposite sides of man’s nature whose conflict in some form
+    or another was ever present to Sterne’s mind.  And, as we say, it has
+    a deep relation to the kind of humour with which Sterne was so richly
+    endowed.  After one of his most sentimental flights, wherein the
+    spiritual side of man is absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a
+    sudden revulsion (which at first was entirely natural, if even
+    self-conscious afterwards).  The incongruity of all this sentiment
+    with man’s actual condition as an animal strikes him with
+    irresistible force, and he says to man, ‘What right have you in that
+    galley after all—you who came into the world in this extremely
+    unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency of functions which
+    are if possible more unspiritual and more absurd still?’
+
+    No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with sexual
+    matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but rather
+    far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of this great
+    and eternal incongruity of man’s existence—the conflict of a
+    spiritual nature and such aspirations as man’s with conditions
+    entirely physical.  And perhaps the only truly philosophical
+    definition of the word ‘indecency’ would be this: ‘A painful and
+    shocking contrast of man’s spiritual with his physical nature.’  When
+    Hamlet, with his finger on Yorick’s skull, declares that his ‘gorge
+    rises at it,’ and asks if Alexander’s skull ‘smelt so,’ he shocks us
+    as deeply in a serious way as Sterne in his allusion to the winding
+    up of the clock shocks us in a humourous way, and to express the
+    sensation they each give there is, perhaps, no word but ‘indecent.’”
+
+I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the metaphysical
+meaning of humour.  In order to show what are his opinions upon wit, I
+think I shall do well to turn from the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and to quote
+from the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ a few sentences upon wit, and upon the
+distinction between comedy and farce.  For the obvious reason that the
+‘Athenæum’ articles are buried in oblivion, and the ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica’ articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it is from the
+former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of the most important
+parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work are to be found in the ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica.’  Perhaps, however, I had better introduce my citations by
+saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s connection with that work.
+
+The story of the way in which he came to write in the ‘Encyclopædia’ has
+been often told by Prof. Minto.  At the time when the ninth edition was
+started, he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and
+were seeing each other constantly.  When Minto was writing his articles
+upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that Baynes would be
+delighted to get work from him.  But at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton had
+got more critical work in hand than he wanted, and besides he had already
+a novel and a body of poetry ready for the press, and wished to confine
+his energies to creative work.  Besides this, he felt, as he declared,
+that he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike
+pedestrian style of an encyclopædia.  But when the most important
+treatise in the literary department of the work—the treatise on
+Poetry—was wanted, a peculiar difficulty in selecting the writer was
+felt.  The article in the previous edition had been written by David
+Macbeth Moir, famous under the name of ‘Delta’ as the author of ‘The
+Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.’  Moir’s article was intelligent enough,
+but quite inadequate to such a work as the publishers of the
+‘Encyclopædia’ aspired to make.  A history of Poetry was, of course,
+quite impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the
+principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as exemplified by
+the poetry of the great literatures.  It was decided, according to
+Minto’s account, that there were but three men, that is to say,
+Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Theodore Watts, who could produce this
+special kind of work, the other critics being entirely given up to the
+historic method of criticism.  The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes
+went to London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and
+explaining exactly what was wanted.
+
+I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier choice.
+Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on ‘The Coming of Love’ in the ‘Saturday
+Review’ has written very luminously upon this subject.  He tells us that,
+wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant fragment,
+owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the space that could be
+given to it.  The truth is that the essay is but the introduction to an
+exhaustive discussion of what the writer believes to be the most
+important event in the history of all poetry—the event discussed under
+the name of ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’  The introduction to the third
+volume of the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English
+Literature’ is but a bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings upon
+this subject.  It has been said over and over again that since the best
+critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our literature to
+equal this treatise on Poetry.  It has been exhaustively discussed in
+England, America, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, where it
+has been compared to the critical system of Goethe.  Those who have not
+read it will be surprised to hear that it is not confined to the
+formulating of generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent
+passages on human life and human conduct.
+
+It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist, Vanbrugh, that
+Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous distinction between comedy
+and farce:—
+
+    “In order to find and fix Vanbrugh’s place among English comic
+    dramatists, an examination of the very basis of the comedy of
+    repartee inaugurated by Etheredge would be necessary, and, of course,
+    such an examination would be impossible here.  It is chiefly as a
+    humourist, however, that he demands attention.
+
+    Given the humorous temperament—the temperament which impels a man to
+    get his enjoyment by watching the harlequinade of life, and
+    contrasting it with his own ideal standard of good sense, which the
+    harlequinade seems to him to mock and challenge—given this
+    temperament, then the quality of its humourous growth depends of
+    course on the quality of the intellectual forces by means of which
+    the temperament gains expression.  Hence it is very likely that in
+    original endowment of humour, as distinguished from wit, Vanbrugh was
+    superior to Congreve.  And this is saying a great deal: for, while
+    Congreve’s wit has always been made much of, it has, since Macaulay’s
+    time, been the fashion among critics to do less than justice to his
+    humour—a humour which, in such scenes as that in ‘Love for Love,’
+    where Sir Sampson Legend discourses upon the human appetites and
+    functions, moves beyond the humour of convention and passes into
+    natural humour.  It is, however, in spontaneity, in a kind of lawless
+    merriment, almost Aristophanic in its verve, that Vanbrugh’s humour
+    seems so deep and so fine, seems indeed to spring from a fountain
+    deeper and finer and rarer than Congreve’s.  A comedy of wit, like
+    every other drama, is a story told by action and dialogue, but to
+    tell a story lucidly and rapidly by means of repartee is exceedingly
+    difficult, not but that it is easy enough to produce repartee.  But
+    in comic dialogue the difficulty is to move rapidly and yet keep up
+    the brilliant ball-throwing demanded in this form; and without
+    lucidity and rapidity no drama, whether of repartee or of character,
+    can live.  Etheredge, the father of the comedy of repartee, has at
+    length had justice done to him by Mr. Gosse.  Not only could
+    Etheredge tell a story by means of repartee alone: he could produce a
+    tableau too; so could Congreve, and so also could Vanbrugh; but
+    often—far too often—Vanbrugh’s tableau is reached, not by fair means,
+    as in the tableau of Congreve, but by a surrendering of probability,
+    by a sacrifice of artistic fusion, by an inartistic mingling of
+    comedy and farce, such as Congreve never indulges in.  Jeremy Collier
+    was perfectly right, therefore, in his strictures upon the farcical
+    improbabilities of the ‘Relapse.’  So farcical indeed are the
+    tableaux in that play that the broader portions of it were (as Mr.
+    Swinburne discovered) adapted by Voltaire and acted at Sceaux as a
+    farce.  Had we space here to contrast the ‘Relapse’ with the ‘Way of
+    the World,’ we should very likely come upon a distinction between
+    comedy and farce such as has never yet been drawn.  We should find
+    that farce is not comedy with a broadened grin—Thalia with her girdle
+    loose and run wild—as the critics seem to assume.  We should find
+    that the difference between the two is not one of degree at all, but
+    rather one of kind, and that mere breadth of fun has nothing to do
+    with the question.  No doubt the fun of comedy may be as broad as
+    that of farce, as is shown indeed by the celebrated Dogberry scenes
+    in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ and by the scene in ‘Love for Love’
+    between Sir Sampson Legend and his son, alluded to above; but here,
+    as in every other department of art, all depends upon the quality of
+    the imaginative belief that the artist seeks to arrest and secure.
+    Of comedy the breath of life is dramatic illusion.  Of farce the
+    breath of life is mock illusion.  Comedy, whether broad or genteel,
+    pretends that its mimicry is real.  Farce, whether broad or genteel,
+    makes no such pretence, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up
+    between itself and the audience, says, ‘My acting is all sham, and
+    you know it.’  Now, while Vanbrugh was apt too often to forget this
+    the fundamental difference between comedy and farce, Congreve never
+    forgot it, Wycherly rarely.  Not that there should be in any literary
+    form any arbitrary laws.  There is no arbitrary law declaring that
+    comedy shall not be mingled with farce, and yet the fact is that in
+    vital drama they cannot be so mingled.  The very laws of their
+    existence are in conflict with each other, so much so that where one
+    lives the other must die, as we see in the drama of our own day.  The
+    fact seems to be that probability of incident, logical sequence of
+    cause and effect, are as necessary to comedy as they are to tragedy,
+    while farce would stifle in such an air.  Rather, it would be
+    poisoned by it, just as comedy is poisoned by what farce flourishes
+    on; that is to say, inconsequence of reasoning—topsy-turvy logic.
+    Born in the fairy country of topsy-turvy, the logic of farce would be
+    illogical if it were not upside-down.  So with coincidence, with
+    improbable accumulation of convenient events—farce can no more exist
+    without these than comedy can exist with them.  Hence we affirm that
+    Jeremy Collier’s strictures on the farcical adulterations of the
+    ‘Relapse’ pierce more deeply into Vanbrugh’s art than do the
+    criticisms of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt.  In other words, perhaps the
+    same lack of fusion which mars Vanbrugh’s architectural ideas mars
+    also his comedy.”
+
+Without for a moment wishing to institute comparisons between the merit
+of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary articles and the merit of other literary
+articles by other contemporary writers, I may at least say that between
+his articles and theirs the difference is not one of degree, it is one of
+kind.  Theirs are compact, business-like compressions of facts admirably
+fitted for an Encyclopædia.  No attempt is made to formulate
+generalizations upon the principles of literary art, and this must be
+said in their praise—they are faultless as articles in a book of
+reference.  But no student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work who turns over the
+pages of an article in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ can fail after
+reading a few sentences to recognize the author.  Generalizations, hints
+of daring theories, novel and startling speculations, graze each other’s
+heels, until one is dazzled by the display of intellectual brilliance.
+That his essays are out of place in an Encyclopædia may be true, but they
+seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating idiosyncrasy
+upon their coldly impersonal environment.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+‘THE LIFE POETIC’
+
+
+      [Picture: ‘The Pines.’  (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)]
+
+I have been allowed to enrich this volume with photographs of ‘The Pines’
+and of some of the exquisite works of art therein.  But it is unfortunate
+for me that I am not allowed to touch upon what are the most important
+relations of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life—important though so many of them
+are.  I mean his intimacy with the poet whose name is now beyond doubt
+far above any other name in the contemporary world of letters.  I do not
+sympathize with the hyper-sensitiveness of eminent men with regard to
+privacy.  The inner chamber of what Rossetti calls the ‘House of Life’
+should be kept sacred.  But Rossetti’s own case shows how impossible it
+is in these days to keep those recesses inviolable.  The fierce light
+that beats upon men of genius grows fiercer and fiercer every day, and it
+cannot be quenched.  This was one of my arguments when I first answered
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own objection to the appearance of this monograph.
+The times have changed since he was a young man.  Then publicity was
+shunned like a plague by poets and by painters.  If such men wish the
+light to be true as well as fierce, they must allow their friends to
+illuminate their ‘House of Life’ by the lamp of truth.  If Rossetti
+during his lifetime had allowed one of his friends who knew the secrets
+of his ‘House of Life’ to write about him, we might have been spared
+those canards about him and the wife he loved which were rife shortly
+after his death.  Byron’s reluctance to take payment for his poetry was
+not a more belated relic of an old quixotism than is this dying passion
+for privacy.  Publicity may be an evil, but it is an inevitable evil, and
+great men must not let the wasps and the gadflies monopolize its uses.
+It may be a reminiscence of an older and a nobler social temper, the
+temper under the influence of which Rossetti in 1870 said that he felt
+abashed because a paragraph had appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ announcing the
+fact that a book from him was forthcoming.  But that temper has gone by
+for ever.  We live now in very different times.  Scores upon scores of
+unauthorized and absolutely false paragraphs about eminent men are
+published, especially about these two friends who have lived their poetic
+life together for more than a quarter of a century.  Only the other day I
+saw in a newspaper an offensive descriptive caricature of Mr. Swinburne,
+of his dress, etc.  It is interesting to recall the fact that mendacious
+journalism was the cause of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s very first contribution to
+the ‘Athenæum,’ before he wrote any reviews at all.  At that time the
+offenders seem to have been chiefly Americans.  The article was not a
+review, but a letter signed ‘Z,’ entitled ‘The Art of Interviewing,’ and
+it appeared in the ‘Athenæum,’ of March 11, 1876.  As it shows the great
+Swinburne myth in the making, I will reproduce this merry little skit:—
+
+    “‘Alas! there is none of us without his skeleton-closet,’ said a
+    great writer to one who was congratulating him upon having reached
+    the goal for which he had, from the first, set out.  ‘My skeleton
+    bears the dreadful name of “American Interviewer.”  Pity me!’  ‘Is he
+    an American with a diary in his pocket?’ was the terrified question
+    always put by another man of genius, whenever you proposed
+    introducing a stranger to him.  But this was in those ingenuous
+    Parker-Willisian days when the ‘Interviewer’ merely invented the
+    dialogue—not the entire dramatic action—not the interview itself.
+    Primitive times! since when the ‘Interviewer’ has developed indeed!
+    His dramatic inspiration now is trammelled by none of those foolish
+    and arbitrary conditions which—whether his scene of action was at the
+    ‘Blue Posts’ with Thackeray, or in the North with Scottish
+    lords—vexed and bounded the noble soul of the great patriarch of the
+    tribe.  Uncribbed, uncabined, unconfined, the ‘Interviewer’ now
+    invents, not merely the dialogue, but the ‘situation,’ the place, the
+    time—the interview itself.  Every dramatist has his favourite
+    character—Sophocles had his; Shakspeare had his; Schiller had his;
+    the ‘Interviewer’ has his.  Mr. Swinburne has, for the last two or
+    three years, been—for some reason which it might not be difficult to
+    explain—the ‘Interviewer’s’ special favourite.  Moreover, the
+    accounts of the interviews with him are always livelier than any
+    others, inasmuch as they are accompanied by brilliant fancy-sketches
+    of his personal appearance—sketches which, if they should not gratify
+    him exactly, would at least astonish him; and it is surely something
+    to be even astonished in these days.  Some time ago, for instance, an
+    American lady journalist, connected with a ‘Western newspaper,’ made
+    her appearance in London, and expressed many ‘great desires,’ the
+    greatest of all her ‘desires’ being to know the author of ‘Atalanta,’
+    or, if she could not know him, at least to ‘see him.’
+
+    The Fates, however, were not kind to the lady.  The author of
+    ‘Atalanta’ had quitted London.  She did not see him, therefore—not
+    with her bodily eyes could she see him.  Yet this did not at all
+    prevent her from ‘interviewing’ him.  Why should it?  The ‘soul hath
+    eyes and ears’ as well as the body—especially if the soul is an
+    American soul, with a mission to ‘interview.’  There soon appeared in
+    the lady’s Western newspaper a graphic account of one of the most
+    interesting interviews with this poet that has ever yet been
+    recorded.  Mr. Swinburne—though at the time in Scotland—‘called’ upon
+    the lady at her rooms in London; but, notwithstanding this unexampled
+    feat of courtesy, he seems to have found no favour in the lady’s
+    eyes.  She ‘misliked him for his complexion.’  Evidently it was
+    nothing but good-breeding that prevented her from telling the bard,
+    on the spot, that he was physically an unlovely bard.  His manners,
+    too, were but so-so; and the Western lady was shocked and disgusted,
+    as well she might be.  In the midst of his conversation, for example,
+    he called out frantically for ‘pen and ink.’  He had become suddenly
+    and painfully ‘afflated.’  When furnished with pen and ink he began
+    furiously writing a poem, beating the table with his left hand and
+    stamping the floor with both feet as he did so.  Then, without saying
+    a word, he put on his hat and rushed from the room like a madman!
+    This account was copied into other newspapers and into the magazines.
+    It is, in fact, a piece of genuine history now, and will form
+    valuable material for some future biographer of the poet.  The
+    stubborn shapelessness of facts has always distressed the
+    artistically-minded historian.  But let the American ‘Interviewer’ go
+    on developing thus, and we may look for History’s becoming far more
+    artistic and symmetrical in future.  The above is but one out of many
+    instances of the art of interviewing.”
+
+It is all very well to say that irresponsible statements of this kind are
+not in the true sense of the word believed by readers; they create an
+atmosphere of false mist which destroys altogether the picture of the
+poet’s life which one would like to preserve.  And I really think that it
+would have been better if I or some one else among the friends of the
+poets had been allowed to write more freely about the beautiful and
+intellectual life at ‘The Pines.’  But I am forbidden to do this, as the
+following passage in a letter which I have received from Mr. Watts-Dunton
+will show:
+
+    “I cannot have anything about our life at ‘The Pines’ put into print,
+    but I will grant you permission to give a few reproductions of the
+    interesting works of art here, for many of them may have a legitimate
+    interest for the public on account of their historic value, as having
+    come to me from the magician of art, Rossetti.  And I assure you that
+    this is a concession which I have denied to very many applicants,
+    both among friends and others.”
+
+     [Picture: A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Lacquer Cabinet]
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s allusion to the Rossetti mementoes requires a word of
+explanation.  Rossetti, it seems, was very fond of surprising his friends
+by unexpected tokens of generosity.  I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say
+that during the week when he was moving into ‘The Pines,’ he spent as
+usual Wednesday night at 16 Cheyne Walk, and he and Rossetti sat talking
+into the small hours.  Next morning after breakfast he strolled across to
+Whistler’s house to have a talk with the ever-interesting painter, and
+this resulted in his getting home two hours later than usual.  On
+reaching the new house he saw a waggon standing in front of it.  He did
+not understand this, for the furniture from the previous residence had
+been all removed.  He went up to the waggon, and was surprised to find it
+full of furniture of a choice kind.  But there was no need for him to
+give much time to an examination of the furniture, for he found he was
+familiar with every piece of it.  It had come straight from Rossetti’s
+house, having been secretly packed and sent off by Dunn on the previous
+day.  Some of the choicest things at ‘The Pines’ came in this way.  Not a
+word had Rossetti said about this generous little trick on the night
+before.  The superb Chinese cabinet, a photograph of which appears in
+this book, belonged to Rossetti.  It seems that on a certain occasion
+Frederick Sandys, or some one else, told Rossetti that the clever but
+ne’er-do-well artist, George Chapman, had bought of a sea-captain,
+trading in Chinese waters, a wonderful piece of lacquer work of the
+finest period—before the Manchu pig-tail time.  The captain had bought it
+of a Frenchman who had aided in looting the Imperial Palace.  Rossetti,
+of course, could not rest until he had seen it, and when he had seen it,
+he could not rest until he had bought it of Chapman; and it was taken
+across to 16 Cheyne Walk, where it was greatly admired.  The captain had
+barbarously mutilated it at the top in order to make it fit in his cabin,
+and it remained in that condition for some years.  Afterwards Rossetti
+gave it to Mr. Watts-Dunton, who got it restored and made up by the
+wonderful amateur carver, the late Mr. T. Keynes, who did the carving on
+the painted cabinet also photographed for this book.  There is a long and
+interesting story in connection with this piece of Chinese lacquer, but I
+have no room to tell it here.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                    [Picture: Summer at ‘The Pines’—I]
+
+All I am allowed to say about the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+Mr. Swinburne is that the friendship began in 1872, that it soon
+developed into the closest intimacy, not only with the poet himself, but
+with all his family.  In 1879 the two friends became house-mates at ‘The
+Pines,’ Putney Hill, and since then they have never been separated, for
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s visits to the Continent, notably those with the late
+Dr. Hake recorded in ‘The New Day,’ took place just before this time.
+The two poets thenceforth lived together, worked together; saw their
+common friends together, and travelled together.  In 1882, after the
+death of Rossetti they went to the Channel Islands, staying at St.
+Peter’s Port, Guernsey, for some little time, and then at Petit Bot Bay.
+Their swims in this beautiful bay Mr. Watts-Dunton commemorated in two of
+the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love’:—
+
+                          NATURE’S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
+
+                 (A MORNING SWIM OFF GUERNSEY WITH A FRIEND)
+
+       As if the Spring’s fresh groves should change and shake
+    To dark green woods of Orient terebinth,
+    Then break to bloom of England’s hyacinth,
+    So ’neath us change the waves, rising to take
+    Each kiss of colour from each cloud and flake
+    Round many a rocky hall and labyrinth,
+    Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,
+    Show how the sea’s fine rage dares make and break.
+    Young with the youth the sea’s embrace can lend,
+    Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,
+    Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,
+    Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,
+    Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend
+    Over the magic wonders of the world
+
+                      THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE’S FRAGRANCY
+
+                        (THE TIRING-ROOM IN THE ROCKS)
+
+    These are the ‘Coloured Caves’ the sea-maid built;
+    Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,
+    For she must fly at every tide’s return,
+    And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.
+    Outside behold the bay, each headland gilt
+    With morning’s gold; far off the foam-wreaths burn
+    Like fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearn
+    Up sand more soft than Avon’s sacred silt.
+    And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,
+    From lips of may or rose or eglantine,
+    Comes with the language of a breath benign,
+    Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,
+    Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,
+    Like scent of sea-weed rich of morn and brine.
+
+The two friends afterwards went to Sark.  A curious incident occurred
+during their stay in the island.  The two poet-swimmers received a
+bravado challenge from ‘Orion’ Horne, who was also a famous swimmer, to
+swim with him round the whole island of Sark!  I need hardly say that the
+absurd challenge was not accepted.
+
+During the cruise Mr. Swinburne conceived and afterwards wrote some
+glorious poetry.  In the same year the two friends went to Paris, as I
+have already mentioned, to assist at the Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse.’
+Since then their love of the English coasts and the waters which wash
+them, seems to have kept them in England.  For two consecutive years they
+went to Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast, for bathing.  It was there that
+Mr. Swinburne wrote some of his East Anglian poems, and it was there that
+Mr. Watts-Dunton conceived the East coast parts of ‘Aylwin.’  It was
+during one of these visits that Mr. Swinburne first made the acquaintance
+of Grant Allen, who had long been an intimate friend of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s.  The two, indeed, were drawn together by the fact that
+they both enjoyed science as much as they enjoyed literature.  It was a
+very interesting meeting, as Grant Allen had long been one of Swinburne’s
+most ardent admirers, and his social charm, his intellectual sweep and
+brilliance, made a great impression on the poet.  Since then their visits
+to the sea have been confined to parts of the English Channel, such as
+Eastbourne, where they were near neighbours of Rossetti’s friends, Lord
+and Lady Mount Temple, between whom and Mr. Watts-Dunton there had been
+an affectionate intimacy for many years—but more notably Lancing, whither
+they went for three consecutive years.  For several years they stayed
+during their holiday with Lady Mary Gordon, an aunt of Mr. Swinburne’s,
+at ‘The Orchard,’ Niton Bay, Isle of Wight.  During the hot summer of
+1904 they were lucky enough to escape to Cromer, where the temperature
+was something like twenty degrees lower than that of London.  A curious
+incident occurred during this visit to Cromer.  One day Mr. Watts-Dunton
+took a walk with another friend to ‘Poppy-land,’ where he and Mr.
+Swinburne had previously stayed, in order to see there again the
+landslips which he has so vividly described in ‘Aylwin.’  While they were
+walking from ‘Poppyland’ to the old ruined churchyard called ‘The Garden
+of Sleep,’ they sat down for some time in the shade of an empty hut near
+the cliff.  Coming back Mr. Watts-Dunton said that the cliff there was
+very dangerous, and ought to be fenced off, as the fatal land-springs
+were beginning to show their work.  Two or three weeks after this a
+portion of the cliff at that point, weighing many thousands of tons, fell
+into the sea, and the hut with it.
+
+[Picture: A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Chinese Divan described in
+                                ‘Aylwin’]
+
+A friendship so affectionate and so long as the friendship between these
+two poets is perhaps without a parallel in literature.  It has been
+frequently and beautifully commemorated.  When Mr. Swinburne’s noble
+poem, ‘By the North Sea,’ was published, it was prefaced by this sonnet:—
+
+                           TO WALTER THEODORE WATTS
+
+    ‘WE ARE WHAT SUNS AND WINDS AND WATERS MAKE US.’
+
+                                                                   Landor.
+
+    Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath
+       The spirit of man fulfilling—these create
+       That joy wherewith man’s life grown passionate
+    Gains heart to hear and sense to read and faith
+    To know the secret word our Mother saith
+       In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great,
+       Death as the shadow cast by life on fate,
+    Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.
+
+    Brother, to whom our Mother, as to me,
+       Is dearer than all dreams of days undone,
+    This song I give you of the sovereign three
+       That are, as life and sleep and death are, one:
+    A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea,
+       Where nought of man’s endures before the sun.
+
+1882 was a memorable year in the life of Mr. Watts-Dunton.  The two most
+important volumes of poetry published in that year were dedicated to him.
+Rossetti’s ‘Ballads and Sonnets,’ the book which contains the chief work
+of his life, bore the following inscription:—
+
+                                      TO
+                                THEODORE WATTS
+                     THE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR ME,
+                             THESE FEW MORE PAGES
+                        ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
+
+A few weeks later Mr. Swinburne’s ‘Tristram of Lyonesse,’ the volume
+which contains what I regard as his ripest and richest poetry, was thus
+inscribed:—
+
+                              TO MY BEST FRIEND
+                                THEODORE WATTS
+                           I DEDICATE IN THIS BOOK
+                         THE BEST I HAVE TO GIVE HIM.
+
+    Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,
+       And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,
+       That twice have made keen April’s clarion sound
+    Since here we first together saw and heard
+    Spring’s light reverberate and reiterate word
+       Shine forth and speak in season.  Life stands crowned
+       Here with the best one thing it ever found,
+    As of my soul’s best birthdays dawns the third.
+
+    There is a friend that as the wise man saith
+       Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me
+          Hath time not shown, through days like waves at strife
+    This truth more sure than all things else but death,
+       This pearl most perfect found in all the sea
+          That washes toward your feet these waifs of life.
+
+    THE PINES,
+             _April_, 1882.
+
+But the finest of all these words of affection are perhaps those opening
+the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the magnificent Collected Edition of
+Mr. Swinburne’s poems issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1904:—
+
+    ‘To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition
+    of my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the
+    occasion.’
+
+Once also Mr. Watts-Dunton dedicated verses of his own to Mr. Swinburne,
+to wit, in 1897, when he published that impassioned lyric in praise of a
+nobler and larger Imperialism, the ‘Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the
+Men of Greater Britain’:—
+
+                     “TO OUR GREAT CONTEMPORARY WRITER OF
+                              PATRIOTIC POETRY,
+                         ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
+
+    You and I are old enough to remember the time when, in the world of
+    letters at least, patriotism was not so fashionable as it is
+    now—when, indeed, love of England suggested Philistinism rather than
+    ‘sweetness and light.’  Other people, such as Frenchmen, Italians,
+    Irishmen, Hungarians, Poles, might give voice to a passionate love of
+    the land of their birth, but not Englishmen.  It was very curious, as
+    I thought then, and as I think now.  And at that period love of the
+    Colonies was, if possible, even more out of fashion than was love of
+    England; and this temper was not confined to the ‘cultured’ class.
+    It pervaded society and had an immense influence upon politics.  On
+    one side the Manchester school, religiously hoping that if the
+    Colonies could be insulted so effectually that they must needs
+    (unless they abandoned all self-respect) ‘set up for themselves,’ the
+    same enormous spurt would be given to British trade which occurred
+    after the birth of the United States, bade the Colonies ‘cut the
+    painter.’  On the other hand the old Tories and Whigs, with a few
+    noble exceptions, having never really abandoned the old traditions
+    respecting the unimportance of all matters outside the parochial
+    circle of European diplomacy, scarcely knew where the Colonies were
+    situated on the map.
+
+    There was, however, in these islands one person who saw as clearly
+    then as all see now the infinite importance of the expansion of
+    England to the true progress of mankind—the Great Lady whose praises
+    in this regard I have presumed to sing in the opening stanza of these
+    verses.
+
+    I may be wrong, but I, who am, as you know, no courtier, believe from
+    the bottom of my heart that without the influence of the Queen this
+    expansion would have been seriously delayed.  Directly and indirectly
+    her influence must needs be enormous, and, as regards this matter, it
+    has always been exercised—energetically and even eagerly exercised—in
+    one way.  This being my view, I have for years been urging more than
+    one friend clothed with an authority such as I do not possess to
+    bring the subject prominently before the people of England at a time
+    when England’s expansion is a phrase in everybody’s mouth.  I have
+    not succeeded.  Let this be my apology for undertaking the task
+    myself and for inscribing to you, as well as to the men of Greater
+    Britain, these lines.”
+
+                   [Picture: Summer at ‘The Pines’—II]
+
+I feel that it is a great privilege to be able to present to my readers
+beautiful photogravures and photographs of interiors and pictures and
+works of art at ‘The Pines.’  Many of the pictures and other works of art
+at ‘The Pines’ are mementoes of a most interesting kind.
+
+Among these is the superb portrait of Madox Brown, at this moment hanging
+in the Bradford Exhibition.  Madox Brown painted it for the owner.  An
+interesting story is connected with it.  One day, not long after Mr.
+Watts-Dunton had become intimate with Madox Brown, the artist told him he
+specially wanted his boy Nolly to read to him a story that he had been
+writing, and asked him to meet the boy at dinner.
+
+‘Nolly been writing a story!’ exclaimed Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+
+‘I understand your smile,’ said Madox Brown; ‘but you will find it better
+than you think.’
+
+At this time Oliver Madox Brown seemed a loose-limbed hobbledehoy, young
+enough to be at school.  After dinner Oliver began to read the opening
+chapters of the story in a not very impressive way, and Mr. Watts-Dunton
+suggested that he should take it home and read it at his leisure.  This
+was agreed to.  Pressure of affairs prevented him from taking it up for
+some time.  At last he did take it up, but he had scarcely read a dozen
+pages when he was called away, and he asked a member of his family to
+gather up the pages from the sofa and put them into an escritoire.  On
+his return home at a very late hour he found the lady intently reading
+the manuscript, and she declared that she could not go to bed till she
+had finished it.
+
+On the next day Mr. Watts-Dunton again took up the manuscript, and was
+held spellbound by it.  It was a story of passion, of intense love, and
+intense hate, told with a crude power that was irresistible.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton knew Smith Williams (the reader of Smith, Elder & Co.),
+whose name is associated with ‘Jane Eyre.’  He showed it to Williams, who
+was greatly struck by it, but pointed out that it terminated in a violent
+scene which the novel-reading public of that time would not like, and
+asked for a concluding scene less daring.  The ending was modified, and
+the story, when it appeared, attracted very great attention.  Madox Brown
+was so grateful to Mr. Watts-Dunton for his services in the matter that
+he insisted on expressing his gratitude in some tangible form.  Miss Lucy
+Madox Brown (afterwards Mrs. W. M. Rossetti) was consulted, and at once
+suggested a portrait of the painter, painted by himself.  This was done,
+and the result was the masterpiece which has been so often exhibited.
+From that moment Oliver Madox Brown took his place in the literary world
+of his time.  The mention of Oliver Madox Brown will remind the older
+generation of his friendship with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet,
+one of the most pathetic chapters in literary annals.
+
+ [Picture: ‘Picture for a Story.’  (Face and Instrument designed by D. G.
+                     Rossetti, background by Dunn.)]
+
+Although Rossetti never fulfilled his intention of illustrating what he
+called ‘Watts’s magnificent star sonnet,’ he began what would have been a
+superb picture illustrating Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sonnet, ‘The Spirit of the
+Rainbow.’  He finished a large charcoal drawing of it, which is thus
+described by Mr. William Sharp in his book, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a
+Record and a Study’:—
+
+    “It represents a female figure standing in a gauzy circle composed of
+    a rainbow, and on the frame is written the following sonnet (the poem
+    in question by Mr. Watts-Dunton):
+
+                           THE WOOD-HAUNTER’S DREAM
+
+    The wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:
+          ‘Though meads are sweet when flowers at morn uncurl,
+          And woods are sweet with nightingale and merle,
+    Where are the dreams that flush’d thy childish bed?
+    The Spirit of the Rainbow thou would’st wed!’
+       I rose, I found her—found a rain-drenched girl
+       Whose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearl
+    Coloured the rain above her golden head.
+
+    But when I stood by that sweet vision’s side
+       I saw no more the Rainbow’s lovely stains;
+    To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyed
+       The sun showed naught but dripping woods and plains:
+        ‘God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains,’
+    The wood-sprite laugh’d, ‘Our seeker finds a bride!’
+
+Rossetti meant to have completed the design with the ‘woods and plains’
+seen in perspective through the arch; and the composition has an
+additional and special interest because it is the artist’s only
+successful attempt at the wholly nude—the ‘Spirit’ being extremely
+graceful in poise and outline.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I am able to give a reproduction of another of Rossetti’s beautiful
+studies which has never been published, but which has been very much
+talked about.  Many who have seen it at ‘The Pines’ agree with the late
+Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest of all
+his female faces.  It is thus described by Mr. William Sharp: “The
+drawing, which, for the sake of a name, I will call ‘Forced Music,’
+represents a nude half-figure of a girl playing on a mediæval stringed
+instrument elaborately ornamented.  The face is of a type unlike that of
+any other of the artist’s subjects, and extraordinarily beautiful.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of the girl in
+the version of the picture here reproduced, are by Dunn.  These two
+exquisite drawings were made from the same girl, who never sat for any
+other pictures.  Her face has been described as being unlike that of any
+other of Rossetti’s models and yet combining the charm of them all.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any
+personal description of him.  For my part I do not sympathize with this
+extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one’s personal
+characteristics described in print.  What is there so dreadful or so
+sacred in mere print?  The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I
+think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter
+there was ‘a great gulf fixed.’  Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr.
+Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of
+friends or strangers, remarks—delicate enough, no doubt—are made about
+them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in
+ever so small a degree.  Not so very long ago I remained in a room after
+Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it.  Straightway there were the freest remarks
+about him, not in the least unkind, but free.  Some did not expect to see
+so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him
+to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences,
+described his dark-brown eyes as ‘green’—through a printer’s error, no
+doubt.  Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his
+absent friend, Mr. Swinburne—and so on, and so on.  Now, what is the
+difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation?
+Merely that the printed report reaches a wider—a little wider—audience.
+That is all.  I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition
+to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in
+the papers.  Some energetic gentleman—possibly some one living in the
+neighbourhood—took the following ‘Kodak’ of him.  It appeared in ‘M.A.P.’
+and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could be
+painted.  In years to come, when he and I and the ‘Kodaker’ are dead, it
+may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written
+about him:—
+
+    “Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn
+    lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin
+    has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he
+    loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes
+    and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance.
+    For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and
+    thick moustache are partially shot with grey.  But he looks not a day
+    over forty-five.  Generally he carries a book.  Often, however, he
+    turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits.  For—it will be
+    news to lie-abeds of the district—Wimbledon Common is lively with
+    rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere
+    the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until
+    the moon rises again.  To him, morning, although he has seen more
+    sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious
+    pageant.  This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore
+    Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet,
+    novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour.”
+
+The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to
+the sea-side.  One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late
+Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his
+country places, such as Boar’s Hill.
+
+I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the
+famous Master of Balliol.  I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great
+admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+intellectual powers and various accomplishments.  There was no one, I
+have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem.  That
+air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett’s
+friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.
+
+Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were these visits
+with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett’s house, where he had the opportunity of
+meeting some of the most prominent men of the time.  He has described the
+Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to
+them.  I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which
+appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of December 22, 1894.
+
+    “It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the
+    poet of ‘Atalanta’ and the student of Plato and translator of
+    Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no
+    common strength.  They took expeditions into the country together,
+    and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at
+    Jowett’s quiet autumnal retreat at Boar’s Hill.  The Master of
+    Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself
+    the admiration of men of poetic genius.  To say which poet admired
+    and loved him most deeply—Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr.
+    Swinburne—would be difficult.  He seemed to join their hands all
+    round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of
+    the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett.  He was
+    always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his
+    verses as in telling him what he liked.  And although the poets of
+    our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times
+    past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after
+    all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are
+    poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to
+    straightforward men like Jowett.  That Jowett’s judgment in artistic
+    matters, and especially in poetry, was borné no one knew better than
+    himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical
+    subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and
+    this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would
+    otherwise have been allowed to him.  For, notwithstanding the Oxford
+    epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be
+    more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary
+    knowledge.  He was fond of quoting Hallam’s words that without an
+    exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction;
+    and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge,
+    he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion.  They are
+    not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to
+    secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the
+    Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a
+    great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble
+    and most truly lovable.  The kind of restraint in social intercourse
+    resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as
+    his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett’s
+    taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the
+    peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for
+    talking’s sake.  If a proper and right response to a friend’s remark
+    chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to
+    deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to
+    be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of
+    keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or
+    uneducated man.  It is, however, extremely difficult to write
+    reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett.  In order to bring out
+    one of Jowett’s pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it
+    has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and
+    then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism.”
+
+Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits
+that the two friends used to pay to Jowett’s rural retreat at Boar’s
+Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the
+riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian.  The two poets used to spend
+the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master
+to Boar’s Hill.  Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry will remember
+the following sonnets:—
+
+                      THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR’S HILL
+                               To A. C. S.
+
+                                    I
+
+    One after one they go; and glade and heath,
+       Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers
+       They made so dear, are haunted by the hours
+    Once musical of those who sleep beneath;
+    One after one does Sorrow’s every wreath
+       Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,
+       And Love and Memory from each loss of ours
+    Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.
+
+    Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield
+    The friend with whom we walk through mead and field
+       To-day as on that day when last we parted,
+    Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?
+    Love shapes a presence out of Memory’s dream,
+       A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.
+
+                                      II
+
+    Can he be dead?  We walk through flowery ways
+       From Boar’s Hill down to Oxford, fain to know
+       What nugget-gold, in drift of Time’s long flow,
+    The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;
+    He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,
+       Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,
+       Still talks of Plato while the scene below
+    Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.
+
+    Can he be dead?  He shares our homeward walk,
+    And by the river you arrest the talk
+       To see the sun transfigure ere he sets
+    The boatmen’s children shining in the wherry
+       And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,
+    Making the clumsy craft an angel’s ferry.
+
+                                     III
+
+    The river crossed, we walk ’neath glowing skies
+       Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
+       With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air—
+    Fading as colour after colour dies:
+    We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise—
+       Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
+       We win the scholar’s nest—his simple fare
+    Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.
+
+    Can he be dead?  His heart was drawn to you.
+    Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew
+       The poet’s heart of gold that gives the spell!
+    Can he be dead?  Your heart being drawn to him,
+    How shall ev’n Death make that dear presence dim
+       For you who loved him—us who loved him well?
+
+Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
+loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill.  Not the least interesting among
+the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious
+contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith.  Mr.
+William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the
+intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+Speaking of Swinburne’s championship, in the ‘Spectator,’ of Meredith’s
+first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the ‘Pall Mall
+Magazine,’ of December 1901, says:—
+
+    “Among those who read and considered” [Meredith’s work] “was another
+    young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the
+    most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . .  If
+    the letter signed ‘A. C. Swinburne’ had not appeared, another signed
+    ‘Theodore Watts’ would have been published, to the like effect.  It
+    was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith,
+    A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion.”
+
+The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the
+article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum’ on ‘Poems and Lyrics of the
+Joy of Earth.’  After this appeared articles appreciative of Meredith’s
+prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others.  But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton
+who led the way.  The most touching of all the testimonies of love and
+admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr Watts-Dunton, or
+indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed to him on
+his seventy-fourth birthday.  It appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of
+February 15, 1902:—
+
+                              TO GEORGE MEREDITH
+                       (ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)
+
+    This time, dear friend—this time my birthday greeting
+       Comes heavy of funeral tears—I think of you,
+       And say, ‘’Tis evening with him—that is true—
+    But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;
+    Still he is spared—while Spring and Winter, meeting,
+       Clasp hands around the roots ’neath frozen dew—
+       To see the ‘Joy of Earth’ break forth anew,
+    And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.’
+
+    Love’s remnant melts and melts; but, if our days
+       Are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, still,
+    Still Winter has a sun—a sun whose rays
+       Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,
+    And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,
+       Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.
+
+The allusion to ‘funeral tears’ was caused by one of the greatest
+bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years,
+namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the ‘Athenæum.’
+I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often heard Mr.
+Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration the fine
+charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and style of
+his conversation.
+
+But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of
+‘The Pines’ Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.
+
+I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of
+Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between
+the external facets of Tennyson’s character and the ‘abysmal deeps’ of
+his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet’s son, is the only man
+living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet.
+Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries
+nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy.  So
+long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his
+seventy-first birthday.  It attracted much attention, and although it was
+not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well
+he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to
+another:—
+
+    TO ALFRED TENNYSON, ON HIS PUBLISHING, IN HIS SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR, THE
+    MOST RICHLY VARIOUS VOLUME OF ENGLISH VERSE THAT HAS APPEARED IN HIS
+    OWN CENTURY.
+
+    Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs
+       Whose magic waters to a flood expand,
+       Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,
+    The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.
+    From honeyed flowers,—from balm of zephyr-wings,—
+       From fiery blood of gems, {286} through all the land,
+       The river draws;—then, in one rainbow-band,
+    Ten leagues of nectar o’er the ocean flings.
+
+    Rich with the riches of a poet’s years,
+       Stained in all colours of Man’s destiny,
+    So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears
+       The misty main, and, taking now the sea,
+    Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears
+       The ashen billows of Eternity.
+
+Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a
+garden party, and they fraternized at once.  Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open
+invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this
+invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth.  One point in
+which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the ‘Table Talk’) or with Mr.
+Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson’s ear was defective at the very
+first.  He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show
+a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the
+demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of
+poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best
+occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield.  As an
+illustration of Tennyson’s sensibility to the most delicate nuances of
+metrical music, I remember at one of those charming ‘symposia’ at ‘The
+Pines,’ hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English
+poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of
+Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of
+this.  It referred to the two sonnets upon ‘The Omnipotence of Love’ in
+the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of ‘Aylwin’
+and ‘The Coming of Love.’  These sonnets appeared in an article called
+‘The New Hero’ in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ in 1883.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article
+reached him.  The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the
+son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high
+position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to
+his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets.  Tennyson,
+who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in
+criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of
+the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge.  The line was
+this:—
+
+    And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.
+
+Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially praised by two
+other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris, to whom the sonnet
+had been read in manuscript.  Tennyson’s criticism was that there were
+too many sibilants in the line, and that although, other things being
+equal, ‘scents’ might be more accurate than ‘scent,’ this was a case
+where the claims of music ought to be dominant over other claims.  The
+present Lord Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they were right,
+and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting ‘scent’ in place
+of ‘scents.’
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson’s sensibility to
+criticism was the result, not of imperious egotism, but of a kind of
+morbid modesty.  Tennyson used to say that “to whatsoever exalted
+position a poet might reach, he was not ‘born to the purple,’ and that if
+the poet’s mind was especially plastic he could never shake off the
+reminiscence of the time when he was nobody.”
+
+On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the
+summer-house at Aldworth to read to him ‘Becket,’ then in manuscript.
+Although another visitor, whom he esteemed very highly, both as a poet
+and an old friend, was staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer
+to read the play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone.  And this no doubt was
+because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism.  Freedom of
+criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr. Watts-Dunton is the
+most outspoken on the subject of the poet’s art.  The entire morning was
+absorbed in the reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, ‘the remarks upon
+poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made the
+fortune of any critic.’
+
+On the subject of what has been called Tennyson’s gaucherie and rudeness
+to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax very indignant.  ‘There was to
+me,’ he said, ‘the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson’s bluntness.
+I would there were a leaven of Tennyson’s single-mindedness in the
+society of the present day.’
+
+One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as Tennyson’s rudeness to
+women shows how entirely the man was misunderstood.  Mrs. Oliphant has
+stated that Tennyson, in his own house, after listening in silence to an
+interchange of amiable compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson,
+said abruptly, ‘What liars you women are!’  ‘I seem to hear,’ said Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, ‘Tennyson utter the exclamation—utter it in that tone of
+humourous playfulness, followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized
+the rudeness as entirely as Douglas Jerrold’s laugh neutralized the sting
+of his satire.  For such an incident to be cited as instance of
+Tennyson’s rudeness to women is ludicrous.  When I knew him I was, if
+possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me
+with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious
+people.  I did not feel that I had any claim to such treatment, for he
+was, beyond doubt, the greatest literary figure in the world of that
+time.  There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which
+springs up after a period of laudation.’
+
+The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of stricture
+upon Tennyson’s work was that, considering his enormous powers as a poet,
+he seemed deficient in the gift of inventing a story:—“The stanzas
+beginning, ‘O, that ’twere possible’—the nucleus of ‘Maud’—appeared
+originally in ‘The Tribute.’  They were the finest lines that Tennyson
+ever wrote—right away the finest.  They suggested some superb story of
+passion and mystery; and every reader was compelled to make his own guess
+as to what the story could possibly be.  In an evil moment some friend
+suggested that Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story.
+A person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson might
+perhaps have invented an adequate story—might perhaps have invented a
+dozen adequate stories; but he could not have invented a worse story than
+the one used by Tennyson in the writing of his monodrama.  But think of
+the poetic riches poured into it!”
+
+I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton once made
+in regard to ‘The Princess.’  “Shakspeare,” he said, “is the only poet
+who has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of which
+is fanciful.  The extremely insincere story of ‘The Princess’ is filled
+with such noble passages of sincere poetry as ‘Tears, idle tears,’ ‘Home
+they brought her warrior dead,’ etc., passages which unfortunately lose
+two-thirds of their power through the insincere setting.”
+
+Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the ‘Magazine of Art’
+invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write an article upon the portraits of
+Tennyson.  Mr. Watts-Dunton consulted the poet upon this project, and he
+agreed, promising to aid in the selection of the portraits.  The result
+was two of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been
+written—in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without a knowledge of
+these articles no student of Tennyson can be properly equipped.  It is
+tantalizing that they have never been reprinted.  Tennyson died before
+their appearance, and this, of course, added to the general interest felt
+in them.
+
+After Tennyson’s death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two penetrating essays upon
+Tennyson in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ one of them being his reminiscences
+of Tennyson as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a
+nature-poet in reference to evolution.  It will be a great pity if these
+essays too are not reprinted.  Mr. Knowles, the editor, also included Mr.
+Watts-Dunton among the friends of Tennyson who were invited to write
+memorial verses on his death for the ‘Nineteenth Century.’  To this
+series Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one of
+the several poems upon Tennyson not published in ‘The Coming of Love’
+volume, which, I may note in passing, contains ‘What the Silent Voices
+Said,’ the fine ‘sonnet sequence’ commemorating the burial of Tennyson:—
+
+                             IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
+
+                   ‘THE CROWD IN THE ABBEY WAS VERY GREAT.’
+
+                                                        Morning Newspaper.
+
+    I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold
+       What others saw not—his lov’d face sublime
+       Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime
+    Of Tennyson’s long day that grows not old;
+    And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;
+       And, ‘Who art thou,’ the music seemed to chime,
+        ‘To mourn that King of song whose throne is Time?’
+    Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.
+
+    Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow’s shame:
+       ‘So great he was, striving in simple strife
+       With Art alone to lend all beauty life—
+    So true to Truth he was, whatever came—
+       So fierce against the false when lies were rife—
+    That love o’erleapt the golden fence of Fame.’
+
+By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr. Watts-Dunton was one
+of the few friends of the poet, including Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T.
+Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll, and others, who contributed
+reminiscences of him to the ‘Life.’  In a few sentences he paints this
+masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled, ‘Impressions: 1883–1892’
+{291}:—
+
+    “All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti’s was a peculiarly winning
+    personality, but no one has been in the least able to say why.
+    Nothing is easier, however, than to find the charm of Tennyson.  It
+    lay in a great veracity of soul: it lay in a simple
+    single-mindedness, so childlike that, unless you had known him to be
+    the undoubted author of poems as marvellous for exquisite art as for
+    inspiration, you could not have supposed but that all subtleties—even
+    those of poetic art—must be foreign to a nature so simple.
+
+    Working in a language like ours—a language which has to be moulded
+    into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art—how can this great,
+    inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The
+    Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of
+    Fair Women’?
+
+    Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he said—viz.
+    that it was the thing he thought.  Behind his uncompromising
+    directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy of the grand
+    old type.  As he stood at the porch of Aldworth meeting a guest or
+    bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall far beyond the height of
+    average men, his skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind—as
+    he stood there, no one could mistake him for anything but a great
+    forthright English gentleman.  Always a man of an extraordinary
+    beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the beauty of old age to
+    a degree rarely seen.  He was the most hospitable of men.  It was
+    very rare indeed for him to part from a guest without urging him to
+    return, and generally with the words, ‘Come whenever you like.’
+
+    Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was simply
+    astonishing.  His passion for ‘stargazing’ has often been commented
+    upon by readers of his poetry.  Since Dante, no poet in any land has
+    so loved the stars.  He had an equal delight in watching the
+    lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a
+    thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he
+    persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding
+    lightning.  For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong,
+    and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that
+    he passed away in the light he so much loved—in a room where there
+    was no artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light
+    of the full moon, which somehow seems to shine more brightly at
+    Aldworth than anywhere else in England.
+
+    In a country having a composite language such as ours it may be
+    affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of poetry:
+    one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other appealing to the
+    few who are sensitive to the felicitous expression of deep thought
+    and to the true beauties of poetic art.
+
+    Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his use of
+    what Dante calls the ‘sieve for noble words’ his skill transcends
+    that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.  His felicities
+    of thought and of diction in the great passages seem little short of
+    miraculous, and there are so many that it is easy to understand why
+    he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore.
+    That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will
+    take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’
+    with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of
+    Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603
+    with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version
+    of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623.  Next
+    to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two
+    great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace
+    public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps,
+    Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything
+    like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular
+    and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS
+
+
+I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s literary friendships
+would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends.
+There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting
+between him and James Russell Lowell.  Shortly after Lowell had accepted
+the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at
+dinner.  During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the
+conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one.  He observed
+that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the
+conversation.  The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English
+writers—Dickens, Thackeray, and others.  As the dinner wore on, his
+conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was
+equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also
+upon the prominent political men of the previous generation—Palmerston,
+Lord John Russell, and the like.  Then the name of the Alabama came up;
+the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American),
+dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the
+Alabama escape.  This diatribe he concluded thus: ‘You know we owe
+England nothing.’  In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+manifestly addressing his remarks to him.
+
+These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at
+last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the
+first time, he said: “Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong.  You owe
+England a very great deal, for I see you are an American.”
+
+“What do we owe England?” said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now
+began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.
+
+“You owe England,” he said, “for an infinity of good feeling which you
+are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans.  So kind is the
+feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the
+middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English
+people themselves.  They are petted and made much of, until at last it
+has come to this, that the very fact of a person’s being American is a
+letter of introduction.”
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so
+penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause
+in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel
+between the two.  After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his
+chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:
+
+“You were very sharp upon me just now, sir.”
+
+“Not in the least,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  “You were making an onslaught
+on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were
+addressing your conversation to me.”
+
+“Well,” replied Mr. Lowell, “I will confess that I did address my
+conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts.”
+
+“That is my little name,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  “But I really don’t see
+why that should induce you to address your conversation to me.  I suppose
+it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American
+newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies.  An
+entire mistake!  I have several charming American friends, and I am a
+great admirer of many of your most eminent writers.  But I notice that
+whensoever an American book is severely handled in the ‘Athenæum,’ the
+article is attributed to me.”
+
+“I do not think,” said Mr. Lowell, “that you are a lover of my country,
+but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never
+wrote.”
+
+And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more
+confidential.
+
+“Well,” he said, “I will tell you something that, I think, will not be
+altogether unpleasant to you.  When I came to take up my permanent
+residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine
+about London and Londoners, and I said to him: ‘There is one man whom I
+very much want to meet.’  ‘You!’ said he, ‘why, you can meet anybody from
+the royal family downwards.  Who is the man you want to meet?’  ‘It is a
+man in the literary world,’ said I, ‘and I have no doubt you can
+introduce me to him.  It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in
+the “Athenæum.”’  My friend laughed.  ‘Well, it is curious,’ he replied:
+‘that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you
+to.  I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures
+on my writing which I don’t much approve of.’  Does that interest you?”
+added Mr. Lowell.
+
+“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+
+“Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the
+‘Athenæum’ I have read every article you have written?”
+
+“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+
+“Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said
+to a friend of mine: ‘At last there is a new voice in English
+criticism?’”
+
+“Very much,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  “But you must first tell me what
+that article was, for I don’t believe there is one of my countrymen who
+could do so.”
+
+“That article,” said Lowell, “was an essay upon the ‘Comedy of the Noctes
+Ambrosianæ,’ and it opened with an Oriental anecdote.”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that does interest me very much.”
+
+“And I will go further,” said Lowell: “every line you have written in the
+‘Athenæum’ has been read by me, and often re-read.”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “I confess to being amazed, for I assure
+you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my
+name is absolutely unknown.  And I must add that I feel honoured, for it
+is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for
+some of your critical essays.  But still, I don’t quite forgive you for
+your onslaught upon my poor little island!  My sympathies are not
+strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic
+than Anglo-Saxon in temper.  But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way,
+and I don’t quite forgive you.”
+
+The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.
+
+“Won’t you come to see me,” said Lowell, “at the Embassy?”
+
+“I don’t know where it is.”
+
+“Then you ought to know!” said Lowell.  “Another proof of the stout
+sufficiency of the English temper—not to know where the American Embassy
+is!  It is in Lowndes Square.”  Then he named the number.
+
+“Why,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt
+of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the
+Swinburne family—a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the
+open air at I don’t know what age of life—something like eighty.  She was
+a friend of Turner’s, and is the possessor of some of Turner’s finest
+works.”
+
+“So you actually go next door, and don’t know where the American Embassy
+is!  A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English
+temper!  However, as you come next door, won’t you come and see me?”
+
+“I shall be delighted,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton; “but I am perfectly sure
+you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man.”
+
+“On the contrary,” said Lowell, “I always reserve to myself an hour, from
+five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette.”
+
+Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an
+hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution,
+this hour over a cigarette once a week.
+
+This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling
+the way in which Lowell’s Anglophobia became milder and milder, ‘fine by
+degrees and beautifully less,’ until at last it entirely vanished.  Then
+it was followed by something like Anglo-mania.  Lowell began to talk with
+the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways
+which he would formerly have deprecated.  The climax of this revolution
+was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:
+
+“Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have
+ceased to be able to follow you.  The English ladies are—let us say,
+charming; English gentlemen are—let us say, charming, or at least some of
+them.  Everything is charming!  But there is one thing you cannot say a
+word for, and that is our detestable climate.”
+
+“And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!” said
+Lowell.  “I positively cannot live out of it.”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “you and I will cease to talk about
+England and John Bull, if you please.  I cannot follow you.”
+
+In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with
+all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his
+own country.  There never was a stauncher American than James Russell
+Lowell.  Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed
+man.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling
+between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to
+Lowell.  Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest
+sonnets.  It appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ after Lowell’s death, and it has
+been frequently reprinted in the United States.  It now appears in ‘The
+Coming of Love.’  It was addressed ‘To Britain and America: On the Death
+of James Russell Lowell,’
+
+    Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
+       And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
+       Your fathers drew, for Freedom’s pioneers,
+    Your English speech, your dower of English blood—
+    Ye ask to-day, in sorrow’s holiest mood,
+       When all save love seems film—ye ask in tears—
+        ‘How shall we honour him whose name endears
+    The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?’
+
+    Your hands he joined—those fratricidal hands,
+       Once trembling, each, to seize a brother’s throat:
+    How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
+       Between you still?—Keep Love’s bright sails afloat
+       For Lowell’s sake, where once ye strove and smote
+    On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.
+
+This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings
+towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile.  Apart from his
+intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence
+Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most
+cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey,
+Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans.
+Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during
+several years they saw each other nearly every day.  That was before
+Whistler’s genius had received full recognition.  I may recall that
+during a certain controversy concerning Whistler’s animosity against the
+Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the
+‘Times’ of August 12, 1903:—
+
+    “In the ‘Times’ of to-day Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., says: ‘I was on
+    friendly terms with Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never
+    heard him at any time testify animosity against the Academy or its
+    members.’
+
+    My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty years,
+    but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so intimate
+    that during part of this period we met almost every day.  Indeed, at
+    one time we were jointly engaged on a weekly periodical called
+    ‘Piccadilly,’ for which Du Maurier designed the cover, and for which
+    Whistler furnished his very first lithographs, by the valuable aid of
+    Mr. T. Way.  During that time there were not many days when he failed
+    to ‘testify animosity’ against the Academy and its members.  To say
+    the truth, the testifications on this subject by ‘Jimmy,’ as he was
+    then called, were a little afflictive to his friends.  Whether he was
+    right or wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified
+    to express an opinion.
+
+    May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my admiration of
+    your New York Correspondent’s amazingly vivid portrait of one of the
+    most vivid personalities of our time?  It is a masterpiece. . . . ”
+
+When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most appreciative
+estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for the ‘Athenæum.’  I
+am tempted to quote it nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with
+American literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words
+of mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards Americans:—
+
+    “As a personality Bret Harte seems to have exercised a great charm
+    over his intimate friends, and I am not in the least surprised at his
+    being a favourite.  It is many years since I last saw him.  I think
+    it must have been at a club dinner given by William Black; but I have
+    a very vivid remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have
+    been more than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred
+    to me that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles
+    Dickens, might have been an admirable actor.  On that account the
+    following incident is worth recording.  A friend of mine, an American
+    poet, who at that time was living in London, brought him to my
+    chambers, and did me the honour of introducing me to him.  Bret Harte
+    had read something about the London music-halls, and proposed that we
+    should all three take a drive round the town and see something of
+    them.  At that time these places took a very different position in
+    public estimation from what they appear to be doing now.  People then
+    considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very inane, as,
+    indeed, they were, and were shy about going to them.  I hope they
+    have improved now, for they seem to have become quite fashionable.
+    Our first visit was to the Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one
+    or two songs that gave the audience immense delight—some comic, some
+    more comic from being sentimental-maudlin.  And we saw one or two
+    shapeless women in tights.  Then we went to the ‘Oxford,’ and saw
+    something on exactly the same lines.  In fact, the performers seemed
+    to be the same as those we had just been seeing.  Then we went to
+    other places of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to
+    the distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women
+    seemed to be finding so amusing.  At that time, indeed, the almost
+    only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the theatres was
+    that at Evans’s supper-rooms, where, under the auspices of the famous
+    Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh rarebit while listening to the
+    ‘Chough and Crow’ and ‘The Men of Harlech,’ given admirably by
+    choir-boys.  Years passed before I saw Bret Harte again.  I met him
+    at a little breakfast party, and he amused those who sat near him by
+    giving an account of what he had seen at the music-halls—an account
+    so graphic that I think a fine actor was lost in him.  He not only
+    vivified every incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every
+    performer in a peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the
+    humour of it.  His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson
+    of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ fame.  This proved to me what a genius he had for
+    accurate observation, and also what a remarkable memory for the
+    details of a scene.  His death has touched English people very
+    deeply.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte—easy to say that he was a
+    disciple of Dickens—easy to say that in richness, massiveness, and
+    variety he fell far short of his great and beloved master.  No one
+    was so ready to say all this and more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte
+    himself.  For of all the writers of his time he was perhaps the most
+    modest, the most unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where
+    he believed honour to be due.
+
+    But the comparison between the English and American story-tellers
+    must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of the latter.  If
+    Dickens showed great superiority to Bret Harte on one side of the
+    imaginative writer’s equipment, there were, I must think, other sides
+    of that equipment on which the superiority was Bret Harte’s.
+
+    Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of
+    universal criticism Bret Harte’s reputation will be found to be of
+    the usual ephemeral kind.  It is, of course, impossible to speak on
+    such matters with anything like confidence.  But it does seem to me
+    that Bret Harte’s reputation is more likely than is generally
+    supposed to ripen into what we call fame.  For in his short
+    stories—in the best of them, at least—there is a certain note quite
+    indescribable by any adjective—a note which is, I believe, always to
+    be felt in the literature that survives.  The charge of not being
+    original is far too frequently brought against the imaginative
+    writers of America.  What do we mean by ‘originality’?  Scott did not
+    invent the historic method.  Dickens simply carried the method of
+    Smollett further, and with wider range.  Thackeray is admittedly the
+    nineteenth century Fielding.  Perhaps, indeed, there is but one
+    absolutely original writer of prose fiction of the nineteenth
+    century—Nathaniel Hawthorne.  By original I mean simply original.  I
+    do not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his epoch.
+    But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a fiction in which
+    the material world and the spiritual world were not merely brought
+    into touch, but were positively intermingled one with the other.
+
+    Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material for
+    literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly fascinating
+    kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it adequately.  This
+    is what I mean: in the wonderful history of the nineteenth century
+    there are no more picturesque figures than those goldseekers—those
+    ‘Argonauts’ of the Pacific slope—who in 1848 and 1849 showed the
+    world what grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call
+    ‘the Anglo-Saxon race.’  The Australian gold-diggers of 1851 who
+    followed them, although they were picturesque and sturdy too, were
+    not exactly of the strain of the original Argonauts.  The romance of
+    the thing had been in some degree worn away.  The land of the Golden
+    Fleece had degenerated into a Tom Tiddler’s Ground.  Moreover, the
+    Tom Tiddler’s Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a comparatively
+    easy distance from the Antipodean centre of civilization.  ‘Canvas
+    Town’ could easily be reached from Sydney.  But to reach the Golden
+    Fleece sought by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer
+    had before him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind.  Every
+    Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of gold.
+    He must either trek overland—that is to say, over those vast prairies
+    and then over those vast mountain chains which to men of the time of
+    Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up the limitless ‘far West’ regions
+    which only a few pioneers had dared to cross—or else he must take a
+    journey, equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy vessel
+    in which he could get a passage.  It follows that for an adventurer
+    to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece at all implied
+    in itself that grit which adventurers of the Anglo-Saxon type are
+    generally supposed to show in a special degree.  What kind of men
+    these Argonauts were, and what kind of life they led, the people of
+    the Eastern states of America and the people of England had for years
+    been trying to gather from newspaper reports and other sources; but
+    had it not been for the genius of Bret Harte this most picturesque
+    chapter of nineteenth-century history would have been obliterated and
+    forgotten.  Thanks to the admirable American writer whom England had
+    the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many years, those
+    wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the Sierra Nevada are
+    as familiar to us as is Dickens’s London.  Surely those who talk of
+    Bret Harte as being ‘Dickens among the Californian pines’ do not
+    consider what their words imply.  It is true, no doubt, that there
+    was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens and the
+    temperament of Bret Harte.  They both held the same principles of
+    imaginative art, they both felt that the function of the artist is to
+    aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him beautiful
+    ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called realism
+    which lowers man in his aspirations—which calls before man’s
+    imagination degrading pictures of his ‘animal origin’—is to do him a
+    disservice.  For man has still a long journey before he reaches the
+    goal.  Yet though they were both by instinct idealists as regards
+    character-drawing, they both sought to give their ideals a local
+    habitation and a name by surrounding those ideals with vividly
+    painted real accessories, as real as those of the ugliest realist.
+
+    With regard to Bret Harte’s Argonauts and the romantic scenery in
+    which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a bold thing to
+    say whether Dickens could or could not have painted them, and
+    whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or would not have
+    been as good as Bret Harte’s pictures.  But Dickens never did paint
+    these Argonauts; he never had the chance of painting them.  Bret
+    Harte did paint them, and succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens
+    succeeded in painting certain classes of London life.  Now,
+    assuredly, I should have never dreamt of instituting a comparison of
+    this kind between two of the most delightful writers and the most
+    delightful men that have lived in my time had not critics been doing
+    so to the disparagement of one of them.  But if one of these writers
+    must be set up against another, I feel that something should be said
+    upon the other side of the question—I feel that something should be
+    said on those points where the American had the advantage.  Take the
+    question of atmosphere, for instance.  Let us not forget how
+    enormously important is atmosphere in any imaginative picture of
+    life.  Without going so far as to say that atmosphere is as
+    important, or nearly as important, as character, let me ask, What was
+    it that captured the readers of ‘Robinson Crusoe’?  Was it the
+    character of Defoe’s hero, or was it the scenery and the atmosphere
+    in which he placed him?  Again, see what an important part scenery
+    and atmosphere played in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ in ‘The Lady
+    of the Lake,’ in ‘Marmion,’ and in ‘Waverley.’  And surely it was the
+    atmosphere of Byron’s ‘Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The
+    Corsair,’ that mainly gave these poems their vogue.  And, in a
+    certain sense, it may be said that Dickens gave to his readers a new
+    atmosphere, for he was the first to explore what was something new to
+    the reading world—the great surging low-life of London and the life
+    of the lower stratum of its middle class.  It seems that the pure
+    novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and picturesque
+    atmosphere.  It was natural for England to look to American writers
+    to enrich English literature with a new imaginative atmosphere, and
+    she did not look in vain.  But, notwithstanding all that had been
+    done by writers like Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and
+    others to bring American atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave
+    us an atmosphere that was American and yet as new as though the
+    above-mentioned writers had never written.  He had the advantage of
+    depicting a scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his
+    predecessors as it was unlike everything else in the world.  It is
+    doubtful whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as
+    the mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and
+    Canada.
+
+    Every one is born with an instinct for loving some particular kind of
+    scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the
+    birth-environment as is generally supposed.  It would have been of no
+    avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty canons, peaks,
+    and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had had a natural
+    genius for loving and depicting them; and this, undoubtedly, he had,
+    as we see by the effect upon us of his descriptions.  Once read, his
+    pictures are never forgotten.  But it was not merely that the scenery
+    and atmosphere of Bret Harte’s stories are new—the point is that the
+    social mechanism in which his characters move is also new.  And if it
+    cannot be denied that in temperament his characters are allied to the
+    characters of Dickens, we must not make too much of this.
+    Notwithstanding all the freshness and newness of Dickens’s characters
+    they were entirely the slaves of English sanctions.  Those
+    incongruities which gave them their humourous side arose from their
+    contradicting the English social sanctions around them.  But in Bret
+    Harte’s Argonauts we get characters that move entirely outside those
+    sanctions of civilization with which the reader is familiar.  And
+    this is why the violent contrasts in his stories seem, somehow, to be
+    better authenticated than do the equally violent contrasts in
+    Dickens’s stories.  Bret Harte’s characters are amenable to no laws
+    except the improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is
+    either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch.  And yet
+    underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep
+    ‘law-abidingness’ which the late Grant Allen despised as being ‘the
+    Anglo-Saxon characteristic.’  To my mind, indeed, there is nothing so
+    new, fresh, and piquant in the fiction of my time as Bret Harte’s
+    pictures of the mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right
+    outside all the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own
+    peculiar instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.
+
+    We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from the old
+    sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good deal of that
+    natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was surrendered by
+    the first human compact in order to secure its substitute, civil
+    liberty.  We get vivid pictures of the racial qualities which enable
+    the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots and flourish in almost every
+    square mile of the New World that lies in the temperate zone.  Let a
+    group of this great race of universal squatters be the dwellers in
+    Roaring Camp, or a party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a ‘no
+    man’s land,’ or even a gang of mutineers from the Bounty, it is all
+    one as regards their methods as squatters.  The moment that the
+    mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they improvise a code of laws
+    something like the camp laws of Bret Harte’s Argonauts, and the code
+    on the whole works well.
+
+    Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence
+    of the presentation, Bret Harte’s pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in
+    these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature.  And
+    again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are
+    what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more
+    sought after.  This accounts in a large measure for the growing
+    interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if
+    there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of
+    Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
+
+    Bret Harte’s stories give the reader a sense of the open air second
+    only to Borrow’s own pictures.  And if I am right in thinking that
+    the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this
+    also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
+
+    And now what about his power of creating new characters—not
+    characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters?  Well, here
+    one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret
+    Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens.  Dickens,
+    of course, used a larger canvas—gave himself more room to depict his
+    subjects.
+
+    If Bret Harte’s scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may
+    it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories
+    and not long novels?  For it is very difficult in a short story to
+    secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to
+    nature—the last perfection of imaginative art.
+
+    All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection.
+    In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having
+    the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as
+    in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from
+    the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature.  The
+    shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence
+    the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of
+    course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from
+    which a long novel may be free.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+WALES
+
+
+           [Picture: Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd]
+
+IT is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr.
+Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described
+by Dr. Hake in ‘The New Day.’  I can best show the impression that Alpine
+scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of ‘The Coming of
+Love.’  But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two
+should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted
+‘Aylwin’ as the representative Welsh novel.  And this is not surprising,
+because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born
+upon her soil.  The ‘Arvon’ edition is thus dedicated:—
+
+    “To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my very dear friend, this
+    edition of ‘Aylwin’ is affectionately inscribed.
+
+    It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read the
+    proofs of ‘Aylwin’—used to read them in the beautiful land the story
+    endeavours to depict—that the wish came to me to inscribe it to you,
+    whose paraphrases of ‘The Lament of Llywarch Hën,’ ‘The Lament of
+    Urien,’ and ‘The Song of the Graves’ have so entirely caught the old
+    music of Kymric romance.
+
+    When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that ‘love of the wind’
+    which is such a fascinating characteristic of the Snowdonian girls I
+    had only to recall that poetic triumph, your paraphrase of Taliesin’s
+    ‘Song of the Wind’—
+
+    Oh, most beautiful One!
+    In the wood and in the mead,
+    How he fares in his speed!
+    And over the land,
+    Without foot, without hand,
+    Without fear of old age,
+    Or Destiny’s rage.
+
+       * * *
+
+    His banner he flings
+    O’er the earth as he springs
+    On his way, but unseen
+    Are its folds; and his mien,
+    Rough or fair, is not shown,
+    And his face is unknown.
+
+    Had I anticipated that ‘Aylwin’ would achieve a great success among
+    the very people for whom I wrote it, I should without hesitation have
+    asked you to accept the dedication at that time.  But I felt that it
+    would seem like endeavouring to take a worldly advantage of your
+    friendship to ask your permission to do this—to ask you to stand
+    literary sponsor, as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the
+    great Kymric race with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so
+    grandly associated.  For although my heart had the true ‘Kymric
+    beat’—if love of Wales may be taken as an indication of that
+    ‘beat’—the privilege of having been born on the sacred soil of the
+    Druids could not be claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital
+    presentation of that organic detail, which is the first requisite in
+    all true imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting.
+    You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that ‘Aylwin’ would win
+    the hearts of your countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your
+    generous nature; I knew also if I may say it, your affection for me.
+    How could I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the
+    kind thought?
+
+    But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there is, if I
+    am to accept the words of another Welsh writer, ‘scarcely any home in
+    Wales where a well-thumbed copy of “Aylwin” is not to be found,’ and
+    now that thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as
+    I know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the story
+    of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time has come
+    when I may look for the pleasure of associating your name with the
+    book.
+
+                [Picture: Moel Siabod and the River Lledr]
+
+    Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne is not an
+    idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the characteristics
+    of the race to which you belong—know it far too well to dream of
+    asking that question.  There are not many people, I think, who know
+    the Kymric race so intimately as I do; and I have said on a previous
+    occasion what I fully meant and mean, that, although I have seen a
+    good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways
+    at the top of them all.  They combine, as I think, the poetry, the
+    music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the
+    other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity
+    of the very different race to which they are so closely linked by
+    circumstance—the race whom it is the fashion to call the Anglo-Saxon.
+    And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who knows them as you
+    and I do can fail to be struck by it continually.  Winifred Wynne I
+    meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found her—affectionate,
+    warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and brave.  And I only wish that my
+    power to do justice to her and to the country that gave her birth had
+    been more adequate.  There are, however, writers now among you whose
+    pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can hold their own with
+    almost anything in contemporary fiction; and to them I look for
+    better work than mine in the same rich field.  Although I am familiar
+    with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe, in their
+    wildest and most beautiful recesses, no hill scenery has for me the
+    peculiar witchery of that around Eryri.  And what race in Europe has
+    a history so poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours?  That
+    such a country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such
+    an atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is
+    with me a matter of fervid faith.”
+
+As to the descriptions of North Wales in ‘Aylwin,’ they are now almost
+classic; especially the descriptions of the Swallow Falls and the Fairy
+Glen.  Long before ‘Aylwin’ was published, Welsh readers had been
+delighted with the ‘Athenæum’ article containing the description of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon
+at break of day.
+
+Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not finer than
+the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the nobly symbolic
+conclusion of ‘Aylwin’:—
+
+    “We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard,
+    and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn
+    Ddu’r Arddu.  And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers’ Llyn and
+    the echoes to be heard there.  She then took me to another famous
+    sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five
+    thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers’ Anvil.  While we
+    lingered here Winnie gave me as many-anecdotes and legends of this
+    stone as would fill a little volume.  But suddenly she stopped.
+
+    ‘Look!’ she said, pointing to the sunset.  ‘I have seen that sight
+    only once before.  I was with Sinfi.  She called it “The Dukkeripen
+    of the Trúshul.”’
+
+    The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on
+    the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films
+    floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a
+    ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire.  A
+    horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell
+    upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from
+    the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment
+    a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold.  But what
+    Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where
+    the sun had now sunk behind the horizon.  Shooting up from the cliffs
+    where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of
+    clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.”
+
+It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell
+took on the morning when the search for Winifred began was a source of
+speculation, notably in ‘Notes and Queries.’  Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with
+this point in the preface to the twenty-second edition:—
+
+    “Nothing,” he says, “in regard to ‘Aylwin’ has given me so much
+    pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh
+    friends and my Romany friends.  I little thought, when I wrote it,
+    that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it
+    would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so
+    well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent
+    and famous ‘Gypsy Smith,’ and described by him as ‘the most
+    trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language,
+    containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy
+    girl.’
+
+    Since the first appearance of the book there have been many
+    interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals,
+    upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of
+    Snowdon.
+
+    A very picturesque letter appeared in ‘Notes and Queries’ on May 3,
+    1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a query by E. W., which I will
+    give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer’s
+    ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen,
+    late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that
+    taken by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent
+    spectacle that was seen by them:—
+
+    ‘The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was
+    entirely gone.  So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense
+    a prospect, I have never beheld since.  For the first and only time
+    in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and
+    Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland
+    and Ireland.  The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth
+    walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for
+    even a briefer view than that.’
+
+    Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer says:—
+
+    ‘Only from Glaslyn would the description in “Aylwin” of y Wyddfa
+    standing out against the sky “as narrow and as steep as the sides of
+    an acorn” be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of
+    Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance
+    of the mountain.  We must suppose the action of the story to have
+    taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on
+    Snowdon.’
+
+                      [Picture: Snowdon and Glaslyn]
+
+    With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself
+    all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli
+    in the same number of ‘Notes and Queries’:—
+
+    ‘None of us are very likely to succeed in “placing” this llyn,
+    because the author of “Aylwin,” taking a privilege of romance often
+    taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks
+    in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story.  It may be,
+    indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a
+    rough translation of the gipsies’ name for it, the “Knockers” being
+    gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence “Coblynau”—goblins.  If so, the
+    name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure
+    the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide.  In any case, the only
+    point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps
+    llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture),
+    is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the
+    actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes
+    something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake.
+    The “Knockers,” it must be remembered, usually depend upon the
+    existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings
+    where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the
+    curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the
+    Snowdon chapters of “Aylwin.”’”
+
+In ‘Aylwin’ Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his readers little
+pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:—
+
+    “The peasants and farmers all knew me.  ‘Sut mae dy galon? (How is
+    thy heart?)’ they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met
+    them.  ‘How is my heart, indeed!’  I would sigh as I went on my way.
+
+    Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in
+    the Principality.  Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who
+    knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country.
+    Never a trace of Winifred could I find.
+
+    At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to
+    Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach
+    the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that
+    morning.”
+
+His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the following
+description of the little Welsh girl and her fascinating lisp:—
+
+    “‘Would you like to come in our garden?  It’s such a nice garden.’
+
+    I could resist her no longer.  That voice would have drawn me had she
+    spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin.  To
+    describe it would of course be impossible.  The novelty of her
+    accent, the way in which she gave the ‘h’ in ‘which,’ ‘what,’ and
+    ‘when,’ the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me
+    as the timbre of her voice.  And let me say here, once for all, that
+    when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the
+    English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions
+    were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives;
+    but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair.  I found that to use
+    colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible
+    without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.
+
+    Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book
+    will go out to the world.  While a story-teller may reproduce, by
+    means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish
+    accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to
+    represent Welsh accent.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE
+
+
+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.
+
+    [Picture: 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.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION
+
+
+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.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES
+
+
+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.’
+
+ [Picture: 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 12_s._ 6_d._ 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.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION
+
+
+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?”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR
+
+
+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!’”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+GORGIOS AND ROMANIES
+
+
+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.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+‘THE COMING OF LOVE’
+
+
+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
+
+    On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams
+    the day
+    When Herne the Scollard come and
+    said to me,
+    He s off, that rye o yourn, gone                  gentleman
+    clean away
+    Till swallow-time; hes left this
+    letter: see.
+    In dreams I heerd the bee and
+    grasshopper,
+    Like on that mornin, buz in Rington
+    Hollow,
+    Shell live till swallow-time and                     die
+    then shell mer,
+    For never will a rye come back to                 gentleman
+    her
+Wot leaves her till the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+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;
+
+All night I heerd in dreams my daddy                  laugh
+sal,
+Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo            girl-whole
+O Bozzles breed—tans, vardey, greis, and     tents: waggons: horses
+all—
+To see dat tarno rye o hern palall                    back
+Wots left her till the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+I woke and went a-walkin on the ice
+All white with snow-dust, just like                   salt
+sparklin loon,
+And soon beneath the stars I heerd a
+vice,
+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                   spirit
+mollo. {403a}
+Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love,
+He s thinkin on you; don t you go and                 weep
+rove;
+You ll see him at the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the
+grass
+When he wur gone, and freeze the                      songs
+brooklets gillies;
+There wornt no smell, dear, in the                     hay
+sweetest cas,
+And when the summer brought the
+water-lilies,
+And when the sweet winds waved the                    wheat
+golden giv,
+The skies above em seemed as bleak and                black
+kollo {403b}
+As now, when all the world seems frozen               snow
+yiv.
+The months are long, but mammy says you
+ll live
+By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.
+
+She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver
+throat
+Will meet the stonechat in the buddin
+whin,
+And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie                song
+ull float
+From light-green boughs through leaves
+a-peepin thin;
+The wheat-ear soon ull bring the
+willow-wren,
+And then the fust fond nightingale ull
+follow,
+A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen
+Still out at sea, the spring is in our
+glen;
+Come, darlin, wi the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+And she wur gone!  And then I read the
+words
+In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;
+They made the Christmas sing with summer
+birds,
+And spring-leaves shine on every frozen
+tree;
+And when the dawnin kindled Rington
+spire,
+And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and   red
+lollo
+Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o
+fire,
+Another night, I sez, has brought him
+nigher;
+He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
+
+And soon the bull-pups found me on the
+Pool—
+You know the way they barks to see me
+slide—
+But when the skatin bors o Rington scool
+Comed on, it turned my head to see em
+glide.
+I seemed to see you twirlin on your
+skates,
+And somethin made me clap my hans and
+hollo;
+It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s.                 cutting
+But when I woke-like—Im the gal wot
+waits
+Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.
+
+Comin seemed ringin in the
+Christmas-chime;
+Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,
+In beads o frost along the nets o rime,
+Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;
+And when the pups began to bark and
+play,
+And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock
+and wallow
+Among the snow and fling it up like
+spray,
+I says to them, You know who rote to say
+He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
+
+The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o
+December
+Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o
+spring
+Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups,
+remember;
+If not—for me no singin birds ull sing:
+No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale                cuckoo
+Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, {404} over hill and
+hollow:
+Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail,
+Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale,
+For her wot waits the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your             mine own
+han
+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            miserable Gentile
+her.
+Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife.
+Come back—or, say the word, and I will
+follow
+Your footfalls round the world: Ill
+leave this life
+(Ive flung away a-ready that ere knife)—
+I m dyin for the comin o the swallow.
+
+Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very moment when
+‘the Schollard,’ maddened by the discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy
+that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the
+river-bank.  Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle
+on the other side without being able to go to Rhona’s assistance.  But
+the girl hurls her antagonist into the water, and he is drowned.  There
+are other witnesses—the stars, whose reflected light, according to a
+gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man
+sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the deed.  For a Romany
+woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty is death.  Nevertheless, Rhona
+marries Percy.  I will quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in
+the tent at dawn:—
+
+    The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
+    The tent’s mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
+    The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
+    Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.
+    I hear the earliest anvil’s tingling clink
+    From Jasper’s forge; the cattle on the leas
+    Begin to low.  She’s waking by degrees:
+    Sleep’s rosy fetters melt, but link by link.
+    What dream is hers?  Her eyelids shake with tears;
+    The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
+    She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
+    “You’ll never leave me now?  There is but you;
+    I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
+    ‘The Dukkeripen o’ stars comes ever true.’”
+
+    She rises, startled by a wandering bee
+    Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
+    She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
+    And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
+    Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree—
+    Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,
+    Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl—
+    The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
+    And says, ‘This bride of yours, I know her well,
+    And so do all the birds in all the bowers
+    Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
+    When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
+    See, on the curtain of the morning haze
+    The Future’s finger writes of happy days.’
+
+Rhona, half-hidden by ‘the branches of the hawthorn tree,’ stretches up
+to kiss the white and green May buds overhanging the bridal tent, while
+Percy Aylwin stands at the tent’s mouth and looks at her:—
+
+    Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
+       When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings
+       Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
+    From Rhona’s eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
+    Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,
+       Kissing the buds for ‘luck o’ love’ it brings,
+       While from the dingle grass the skylark springs
+    And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?
+
+                           [He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches
+                                        apart, and clasps her in his arms.
+
+    Can she here, covering with her childish kisses
+       These pearly buds—can she so soft, so tender,
+    So shaped for clasping—dowered of all love-blisses—
+       Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
+    An angel storming hell, through death’s abysses,
+       Where never a sight could fright or power could bend her?
+
+But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the lovers are on
+the river she reads the scripture of the stars.  I must give here the
+sonnet quoted on page 29:—
+
+    The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,
+    And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
+    The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
+    Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
+    We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
+    An angel’s, yet with woman’s dearer wiles;
+    But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
+    And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
+
+    What shaped those shadows like another boat
+    Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
+    There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
+    While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
+    We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,
+    And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
+
+The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in which Percy
+confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its menace.  The stars write in the
+river:—
+
+    Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is strong.
+
+Percy reads the rune and answers:—
+
+    I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
+    In Heav’n that wove this net of life for men?
+    Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
+    Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth—
+       King that can do no wrong!
+    Ah!  Night seems opening!  There, above the skies,
+    Who sits upon that central sun for throne
+    Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
+    Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
+    Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?
+    Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes
+    Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
+    Of infinite light, ’tis Love that stands immortal,
+    The King of Kings.
+
+The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering Rhona’s secret,
+secretly slay her.  Percy, having returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to
+find her grave.  Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona
+should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into
+the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called ‘Natura Maligna,’
+which has been much discussed by the critics:—
+
+    The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
+    Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
+    By glacier-brink she stood—by cataract-spray—
+    When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
+    At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
+    And if a footprint shone at break of day,
+    My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
+    ‘’Tis hers whose hand God’s mightier hand doth hold.’
+    I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
+    Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
+    When lo, she stood! . . .  God made her let me pass,
+    Then felled the bridge! . . .  Oh, there in sallow light,
+    There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
+    And all my wondrous days as in a glass.
+
+This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry.
+Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the ‘Athenæum’ of February
+5, 1881: “Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu
+Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali (‘the malignant’) or Parvati
+(‘the mountaineer’).  It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek
+to God in the delirium of their fear.”
+
+Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while
+New Year’s morning is breaking:—
+
+    Through Fate’s mysterious warp another weft
+       Of days is cast; and see!  Time’s star-built throne,
+       From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
+    Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
+    Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
+       Of all that was its music—stand alone,
+       Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
+    Impatient of the leaden minutes left—
+
+    The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
+       The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
+    Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
+       Barren and foolish, and I cry, ‘No grain,
+    No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!’
+    And yet I cannot join the dead—and live.
+
+    Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
+       In England, heedless of the knells they ring
+       To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
+    Each to the other ere you say adieu!—
+    I seem to hear their chimes—the chimes we knew
+       In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
+       Greeting a New Year’s Day as bright of wing
+    As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.
+
+    If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
+       Could bring the past and make it live again,
+       Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
+    And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears—
+       And with the past bring her I weep in vain—
+    Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.
+
+                                        [The clouds move away and show the
+                                             stars in dazzling brightness.
+
+    Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
+       Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
+       My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove—
+    They bring the mighty Mother’s new-year greeting:
+       ‘All save great Nature is a vision fleeting’—
+       So says the scripture of those orbs above.
+       ‘All, all,’ I cry, ‘except man’s dower of love!—
+    Love is no child of Nature’s mystic cheating!’
+
+    And yet it comes again, the old desire
+        To read what yonder constellations write
+        On river and ocean—secrets of the night—
+    To feel again the spirit’s wondering fire
+        Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
+    To catch the master-note of Nature’s lyre.
+
+    New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
+       And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
+       By Fate and Death, ‘Nature is ever young,
+    Clad in new riches, as each morning’s gold
+    Blooms o’er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
+       The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
+       The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
+    The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;
+
+    The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
+    But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
+       Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
+    In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
+       Of Youth’s fresh runners in the lists of Time.
+    Arise, and drink the wine of Nature’s light!’
+
+Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of
+‘The Promise of the Sunrise’ and the revelation of ‘Natura Benigna’:—
+
+    Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
+    Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
+    Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
+    Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
+    ‘Sorrow,’ I said, ‘has made me old, my dear;
+    ’Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
+    Beneath my load a seraph’s neck might bow,
+    Vigils like mine would blanch an angel’s hair.’
+    Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
+    I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes—
+    I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
+    Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
+    But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
+    Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.
+
+And now ‘Natura Benigna’ reveals to him her mystic consolation:—
+
+    What power is this?  What witchery wins my feet
+    To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
+    All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
+    Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
+    What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—
+    What answering pulse that all the senses know,
+    Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
+    Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
+    Mother, ’tis I, reborn: I know thee well:
+    That throb I know and all it prophesies,
+    O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
+    Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
+    Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
+    The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
+
+This is not the pathetic fallacy.  It is the poetic interpretation of the
+latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that
+the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard
+only by the poet’s finer ear.
+
+The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s poetry, both in subject and in form.  The originality of
+any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in
+new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the
+language.  In ‘The Coming of Love’ the poet has invented a new poetic
+form.  Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the
+disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel,
+and of the prose play.  In Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ and in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+other lyrical drama, “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” the special functions
+of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form.  The
+story is told by brief pictures.  In ‘The Coming of Love’ this method
+reaches its perfection.  Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets,
+are used according to an inner law of the poet’s mind.  The exaltation of
+these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being
+summarized in bare prose.  The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is
+revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions.  In Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ a
+method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind
+of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante’s poems are all
+sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in ‘The
+Coming of Love.’  Here the very ‘rhyme-colour’ and the subtle variety of
+vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical
+composition.  Wagner’s music is the only modern art-form which is
+comparable with the metrical architecture of ‘The Coming of Love,’ and
+“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’”  No one can fully understand the rhythmic
+triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton’s theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated
+in his treatise on Poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’—a theory which
+shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of
+music, is still developing.  Both these lyrical dramas ought to be
+carefully studied by all students of English metres.
+
+The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an
+extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry.  It is
+remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in
+Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under
+such conditions.  Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her
+portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry.
+But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson’s Maud,
+the difference is startling.  Maud does not tingle with personality.  She
+is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of ‘creamy English
+girls.’  Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality.
+One makes pictures of her in one’s brain—pictures that never become
+blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic
+heroines.  How much of this is due to the poetic form?  Could Rhona have
+lived so intensely in a novel or a play?  I do not think so.  At any
+rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel,
+and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is
+well worth the study of critics and craftsmen.  Mr. Kernahan has called
+attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative.  Perhaps this
+defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose
+like that of the opening of ‘Aylwin,’ which would lead the imagination
+insensibly from one situation or mood to another.
+
+In connection with the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love,’ a very
+interesting point of criticism presents itself.  These sonnets, in which
+Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket
+lighthouse, appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ a week after Mr. Swinburne and he
+returned from a visit to the Channel Islands.  They record a real
+incident.  Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the ‘English
+Illustrated Magazine’ his version of the story, a splendid specimen of
+his sonorous rhythms.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s version of the story may interest the reader:—
+
+                    LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
+         (THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)
+
+    Amid the Channel’s wiles and deep decoys,
+    Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
+    A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
+    Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
+    The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
+    Were hers.  At last she sailed to Alderney,
+    But there she pined.  ‘The bustling world,’ said she,
+    ‘Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.’
+    The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
+    Had winds for sponsor—one proud rock for nurse,
+    Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
+    All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
+    The cold bright sea was hers for universe
+    Till o’er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.
+
+    But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:—
+    Her lover’s boat was out; her ears were dinned
+    With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
+    That shook the troubled sun’s red canopy.
+    Even while she prayed the storm’s high revelry
+    Woke petrel, gull—all revellers winged and finned—
+    And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
+    And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
+    ‘My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,’
+    The Mother sang.  ‘Thy sea-boy waged no strife
+    With Hatred’s poison, gangrened Envy’s knife—
+    With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
+    Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
+    Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!’
+
+Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature
+than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends.  It seems
+impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other’s work or
+ever have known each other well.  The point which I wish to emphasize is
+that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers,
+they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every
+day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the
+evening in each other’s society; and yet when they sit down at their
+desks they may be as far asunder as the poles.  From this we may perhaps
+infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this
+one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.
+
+Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem.  I
+may mention that the other day I came across a little book called
+‘Authors that have Influenced me,’ and found that Mr. Rider Haggard
+instanced the opening section of ‘The Coming of Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s
+Chicken,’ as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than
+all others.  I think this is a compliment, for the originality of
+invention displayed in ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and ‘She’ sets Rider
+Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr.
+Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and
+also good is a rare achievement.
+
+I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton’s miscellaneous sonnets.  Some of them have had a great
+vogue: for instance, ‘John the Pilgrim.’  Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.,
+as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the
+subject.  It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in
+this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister
+power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature’s
+mockery by the mirage:—
+
+    Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
+       But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
+       Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
+    Claspt in a silvery river’s winding maze:
+    ‘Water, water!  Blessed be God!’ he says,
+       And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
+       Then all is fled!  Over the sandy piles
+    The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.
+
+    ‘God heard me not,’ says he, ‘blessed be God!’
+       And dies.  But as he nears the pearly strand,
+       Heav’n’s outer coast where waiting angels stand,
+    He looks below: ‘Farewell, thou hooded clod,
+       Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
+    God heard my prayer for life—blessed be God!’
+
+        [Picture: ‘John the Pilgrim.’  (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)]
+
+This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic
+in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled,
+or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious
+faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet.  The rhymes in
+this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer’s luck, good and
+ill.  To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have
+been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of
+‘chamomiles’ and ‘isles,’ ‘chamomiles’ giving the picture of the flowers,
+and ‘isles’ giving the false vision of the mirage.  The same thing is
+notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, ‘The Bedouin Child’
+(see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified.  Without
+the fortunate rhyme-words ‘pashas,’ ‘camel-maws,’ and ‘claws’ in the
+octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.
+
+The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry and that of Coleridge has
+been frequently discussed.  It has the same romantic glamour and often
+the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the
+music of the ravishing octosyllabics of ‘Christabel.’  This at least I
+know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,—he owns the true wizard of
+romance as master.  I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me
+quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and
+his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the
+author as follows: ‘The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive
+analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through
+volumes of essays and not so paint him.  There is Coleridge!  But whence
+the source of your story—if anything of such aptness could have been
+other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu—I cannot tell.  It is new to
+me.’
+
+After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the
+reader with the ‘pure amber’ itself:—
+
+    I see thee pine like her in golden story
+       Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
+       The gates thrown open—saw the sunbeams play,
+    With only a web ’tween her and summer’s glory;
+    Who, when that web—so frail, so transitory,
+       It broke before her breath—had fallen away,
+       Saw other webs and others rise for aye
+    Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.
+
+    Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine—
+       That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh—
+    Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
+       Could thy rare spirit’s wings have pierced the mesh
+       Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
+    But lets the poet see how heav’n can shine.
+
+Here again the verbal parsimony is notable.  I defy any one to find
+anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony.
+There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet.  Every word is
+cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning.
+The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising
+imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a
+sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall.  Metrical students
+will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a
+part in the suspensive music.
+
+I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as
+one of the wisest, done by the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ was that of
+printing Rhona’s letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at
+the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the
+poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona.  It certainly showed immense
+confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great
+success.  The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George
+Meredith: “I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that.  When I
+read her love-letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ I had the regret that the dialect
+might cause its banishment from literature.  Reading the whole poem
+through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate.  We are the richer
+for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed.”  And,
+discussing ‘The Coming of Love,’ Meredith wrote: ‘I will not speak of the
+tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the dexterity
+which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of the work.’
+Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry is so
+consummate that it is concealed from the reader.  There is no sense of
+difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice.  Yet the metrical structure
+of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest.
+‘Rhona’s Love Letter’ is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern,
+each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of
+a sonnet.  But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naïve,
+unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether,
+and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour
+are produced by the most elaborate art.
+
+I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry.  There
+can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not
+merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the
+deeper quality of imaginative energy.  By ‘the most original poet’ I do
+not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what
+I mean.  Poe’s ‘Raven’ is more ‘original’ than Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion,’
+but it is not so great.  In my article on Blake in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia
+of English Literature,’ I pointed out that there are greater poets than
+Blake (or Donne) but none more original.  There are many poets who
+possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual
+matching of common ideas with common metaphors.  But few poets have the
+rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also
+the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty.  Now Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift.  He uses the symbol to suggest ideas
+which cannot be suggested otherwise.  His theory of the universe is
+optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads.  He sees
+the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as
+benignant.  Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the
+two great sonnets, ‘Natura Maligna’ and ‘Natura Benigna,’ which I have
+already quoted.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell.  Upon
+this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the
+introduction to the later editions of the poem:—
+
+    “But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio
+    readers seem to be most sceptical.  The humourous endowment of most
+    races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the
+    men than among the women.  But among the Romanies the women seem to
+    have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.
+
+    A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with
+    my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit
+    and the humourous charm that you attribute to them?  My answer to
+    this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome’s delightful book,
+    ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales.’  Speaking of the Romany chi’s incomparable
+    piquancy, he says:—
+
+    ‘I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale
+    impromptu.  She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with “a lot
+    o’ real tip-top gentry”; and “Reia,” she said to me afterwards, “I’ll
+    tell you the comicalest thing as ever was.  We’d pulled up to put the
+    brake on, and there was a púro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and
+    looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard.  I could see he’d
+    his eye upon me.  And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife,
+    and ‘Missus,’ he’d say, ‘what d’ye think?  I seen a little gypsy gal
+    just now in a coach and four horses’; and ‘Dabla,’ she’d say,
+    ‘sawkumni ’as varde kenaw’” [‘Bless us! every one now keeps a
+    carriage’].’
+
+    Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell,
+    I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome,
+    that it might well have been she.  Although there is as great a
+    difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English
+    girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between
+    the humour of all gypsy girls.  No three girls could possibly be more
+    unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr.
+    Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the
+    fanciful humour of them all.  The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak
+    for itself in these pages—where, however, the passionate and tragic
+    side of her character and her story dominates everything.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+“CHRISTMAS AT THE ‘MERMAID’”
+
+
+SECOND in importance to ‘The Coming of Love’ among Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+poems is the poem I have already mentioned—the poem which Mr. Swinburne
+has described as ‘a great lyrical epic’—“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’”
+The originality of this wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of
+‘The Coming of Love.’  No other writer would have dreamed of depicting
+the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a golden skeleton in the
+form of one of the burnt Incas, called up by ‘the righteous sea,’ and
+squatting grimly at the prow of Medina’s flag-ship.  Here we get ‘The
+Renascence of Wonder’ indeed.  Some Aylwinians put it at the head of all
+his writings.  The exploit of David Gwynn is accepted by Motley and
+others as historic, but it needed the co-operation of the Golden Skeleton
+to lift his narrative into the highest heaven of poetry.  Extremely
+unlike ‘The Coming of Love’ as it is in construction, it is built on the
+same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with ‘The Coming of
+Love’ the remarks I have made upon a desideratum in poetic art—that is to
+say, it is cast in a form which gives as much scope to the dramatic
+instinct at work as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from
+the restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped.  The poem
+was written, or mainly written, during one of those visits which, as I
+have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to pay to Stratford-on-Avon.
+The scene is laid, however, in London, at that famous ‘Mermaid’ tavern
+which haunts the dreams of all English poets:—
+
+    “With the exception of Shakespeare, who has quitted London for good,
+    in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has
+    lately rebuilt, all the members of the ‘Mermaid’ Club are assembled
+    at the ‘Mermaid’ Tavern.  At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson
+    dealing out wassail from a large bowl.  At the other end sits
+    Raleigh, and at Raleigh’s right hand, the guest he had brought with
+    him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man,
+    whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada
+    before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or
+    false, given him in the low countries a great reputation, the echo of
+    which had reached England.  Raleigh’s desire was to excite the public
+    enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and
+    generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already
+    become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice
+    spirits as those associated with the ‘Mermaid’ club.”
+
+It opens with a chorus:—
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+    Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+             Where?
+
+Then Ben Jonson rises, fills the cup with wassail and drinks to
+Shakespeare, and thus comments upon his absence:—
+
+    That he, the star of revel, bright-eyed Will,
+       With life at golden summit, fled the town
+       And took from Thames that light to dwindle down
+    O’er Stratford farms, doth make me marvel still.
+
+Then he calls upon Shakespeare’s most intimate friend—the mysterious Mr.
+W. H. of the sonnets—to give them reminiscences of Shakespeare with a
+special reference to the memorable evening when he arrived at Stratford
+on quitting London for good and all.
+
+To the sixth edition of the poem Mr. Watts-Dunton prefixed the following
+remarks, and I give them here because they throw light upon his view of
+Shakespeare’s friend:—
+
+    “Since the appearance of this volume, there has been a great deal of
+    acute and learned discussion as to the identity of that mysterious
+    ‘friend’ of Shakespeare, to whom so many of the sonnets are
+    addressed.  But everything that has been said upon the subject seems
+    to fortify me in the opinion that ‘no critic has been able to
+    identify’ that friend.  Southampton seems at first to fit into the
+    sacred place; so does Pembroke at first.  But, after a while, true
+    and unbiassed criticism rejects them both.  I therefore feel more
+    than ever justified in ‘imagining the friend for myself.’  And this,
+    at least, I know, that to have been the friend of Shakespeare, a man
+    must needs have been a lover of nature;—he must have been a lover of
+    England, too.  And upon these two points, and upon another—the
+    movement of a soul dominated by friendship as a passion—I have tried
+    to show Shakespeare’s probable influence upon his ‘friend of
+    friends.’  It would have been a mistake, however, to cast the sonnets
+    in the same metrical mould as Shakespeare’s.”
+
+Shakspeare’s friend thus records what Shakespeare had told him about his
+return to Stratford:—
+
+    As down the bank he strolled through evening dew,
+    Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves
+    Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,
+    And all his happy childhood came to view;
+    He saw a child watching the birds that flew
+    Above a willow, through whose musky leaves
+    A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves
+    That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.
+    These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling
+    From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,
+    With power beyond all power of things beholden
+    Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk
+    Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,
+    And closed him in from all but willow musk.
+
+    And then a child beneath a silver sallow—
+    A child who loved the swans, the moorhen’s ‘cheep’—
+    Angled for bream where river holes were deep—
+    For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,
+    Or ate the ‘fairy cheeses’ of the mallow,
+    And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep
+    Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep
+    In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;
+    And then a child to whom the water-fairies
+    Sent fish to ‘bite’ from Avon’s holes and shelves,
+    A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,
+    The flower-sprites sent the bees and ‘sunshine elves’;
+    Then, in the shifting vision’s sweet vagaries,
+    He saw two lovers walking by themselves—
+
+    Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain
+    Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy
+    Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,
+    Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain—
+    Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain
+    By sudden silence, ‘lest his plaint should cloy’—
+    Knew when the skylark’s changing note of joy
+    Saith, ‘Now will I return to earth again’—
+    Knew every warning of the blackbird’s shriek,
+    And every promise of his joyful song—
+    Knew what the magpie’s chuckle fain would speak;
+    And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,
+    Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,
+    Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.
+    He heard her say, ‘The birds attest our troth!’
+    Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may
+    Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray
+    Round summer’s royal field of golden cloth
+    Shines o’er the buttercups like snowy froth,
+    And that sweet skylark on his azure way,
+    And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:
+    ‘We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.’
+    And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory,
+    River and church, grows rosier with our story!
+    This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,
+    Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!
+    They breathe—o’er mead and stream they breathe—the blessing.
+    ‘We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!’
+
+When Mr. ‘W. H.’ sits down, the friend and brother of another great poet,
+Christopher Marlowe, who had been sitting moody and silent, oppressed by
+thoughts of the dead man, many of whose unfriends were at the gathering,
+recites these lines ‘On Seeing Kit Marlowe Slain at Deptford’:—
+
+    ’Tis Marlowe falls!  That last lunge rent asunder
+    Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe’s life,
+    Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heaven at strife,
+    Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!
+    Heav’n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,
+    If Fate’s hand guided yonder villain’s knife
+    Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife
+    With dower of poets—song and love and wonder.
+    Or was it Chance?  Shakspeare, who art supreme
+    O’er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe’s sight
+    To pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height
+    Where man and men and gods and all that seem
+    Are Nature’s mutterings in her changeful dream—
+    Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!
+
+After they have all drunk in silence to the memory of Marlowe, Marlowe’s
+friend speaks:—
+
+    Where’er thou art, ‘dead Shepherd,’ look on me;
+       The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,
+       He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;
+    Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!
+
+Then Raleigh rises, and the great business of the evening begins with the
+following splendid chorus:—
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+                           (Turning to David Gwynn)
+
+       Wherever billows foam
+       The Briton fights at home:
+    His hearth is built of water—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Water blue and green;
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       There’s never a wave of ocean
+       The wind can set in motion
+    That shall not own our England—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Own our England queen. {427}
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       The guest I bring to-night
+       Had many a goodly fight
+    On seas the Don hath found—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Hath found for English sails;
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       And once he dealt a blow
+       Against the Don to show
+    What mighty hearts can move—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Can move in leafy Wales.
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,
+       Who hast a heart akin
+    To England’s own brave hearts—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Brave hearts where’er they beat;
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,
+       And tell the Mermaid how
+    A galley-slave struck hard—
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Struck hard the Spanish fleet.
+
+       Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+          Where he goes with fondest face,
+             Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+Upon being thus called forth the old sea-dog rises, and tells a wonderful
+story indeed, the ‘story of how he and the Golden Skeleton crippled the
+Great Armada sailing out’:—
+
+    ‘A galley lie’ they called my tale; but he
+       Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales:
+    The man, I say, who helped to keep you free
+       Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.
+    Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,
+       Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,
+    Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire
+    Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire—
+       Stands asking here Truth’s one reward, belief!
+
+    And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,
+       This tale of mine—shall tell, in future days,
+    How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled
+       For England when she moved in perilous ways;
+    But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung
+       From loins of men whose ghosts have still the sea—
+    Doth England—she who loves the loudest tongue—
+    Remember mariners whose deeds are sung
+       By waves where flowed their blood to keep her free?
+
+    I see—I see ev’n now—those ships of Spain
+       Gathered in Tagus’ mouth to make the spring;
+    I feel the cursed oar, I toil again,
+       And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys sing;
+    And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,
+       Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing out—
+    Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,
+    Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,
+       Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.
+
+    And one we call the ‘Princess,’ one the ‘Royal,’
+        ‘Diana’ one; but ’tis the fell ‘Basana’
+    Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,
+       Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;
+    For by their help Hope whispers me that I—
+       Whom ten hours’ daily travail at a stretch
+    Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die—
+    May strike once more where flags of England fly,
+       Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.
+
+    True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:
+       Again I feel the lash that tears my back;
+    Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,
+       Answered by boatswain’s laugh and scourge’s crack;
+    Again I feel the pang when trying to choke
+       Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread
+    Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,
+    They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;
+       Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.
+
+    By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,
+       And mighty waves assault our trembling galley
+    With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,
+       And soldiers cry, ‘What saint shall bid her rally?’
+    Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore
+       The Dons to free them from the metal tether
+    By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;
+    Some shout, in answer to the billows’ roar,
+        ‘The Dons and we will drink brine-wine together.’
+
+    ‘Bring up the slave,’ I hear the captain cry,
+        ‘Who sank the golden galleon “El Dorado,”
+    The dog can steer.’
+                    ‘Here sits the dog,’ quoth I,
+        ‘Who sank the ship of Commodore Medrado!’
+    With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,
+       Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:
+    ‘Hearken, thou pirate—bold Medrado’s bane!—
+    Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain,
+       If thou canst take the galley through this sea.’
+
+    ‘Ay! ay!’ quoth I.  The fools unlock me straight!
+       And then ’tis I give orders to the Don,
+    Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,
+       Whose winning game I know hath just begun.
+    I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak
+       Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night
+    Oh then I see beneath the galley’s beak
+    A glow like Spanish _auto’s_ ruddy reek—
+       Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!
+
+    A skeleton, but yet with living eyes—
+       A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold—
+    Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,
+       And round his brow, of high imperial mould,
+    A burning circle seems to shake and shine,
+       Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,
+    Throwing a radiance o’er the foam-lit brine:
+       ‘’Tis God’s Revenge,’ methinks.  ‘Heaven sends for sign
+    That bony shape—that Inca’s diadem.’
+
+    At first the sign is only seen of me,
+       But well I know that God’s Revenge hath come
+    To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,
+       And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous foam.
+    Quoth I, ‘How fierce soever be the levin
+       Spain’s hand can hurl—made mightier still for wrong
+    By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven—
+    Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven—
+       Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is strong.’
+
+    ‘The dog can steer,’ I laugh; ‘yea, Drake’s men know
+       How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.’
+    Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,
+       Some ’neath the hatches, some beside the slaves,
+    And bid them stack their muskets all in piles
+       Beside the foremast, covered by a sail,
+    The captives guess my plan—I see their smiles
+    As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,
+       Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and pale.
+
+    I say, they guess my plan—to send beneath
+       The soldiers to the benches where the slaves
+    Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth—
+       Hate’s nails and teeth more keen than Spanish glaives,
+    Then wait until the tempest’s waxing might
+       Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,
+    Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite
+    The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,
+       Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.
+
+    Past Ferrol Bay each galley ’gins to stoop,
+       Shuddering before the Biscay demon’s breath.
+    Down goes a prow—down goes a gaudy poop:
+        ‘The Don’s “Diana” bears the Don to death,’
+    Quoth I, ‘and see the “Princess” plunge and wallow
+       Down purple trough, o’er snowy crest of foam:
+    See! see! the “Royal,” how she tries to follow
+    By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,
+       Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to roam.’
+
+    Now, three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;
+       The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,
+    Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,
+       Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,
+    Each rower murmuring o’er my whispered plan,
+       Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,
+    ‘Rise, every man, to tear to death his man—
+    Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,
+       When God’s Revenge sings loud to ocean’s lyre.’
+
+    Taller the spectre grows ’mid ocean’s din;
+       The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:
+    I give the sign: the slaves cry, ‘Ho for Gwynn!’
+        ‘Teach them,’ quoth I, ‘the way we grip in Wales.’
+    And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,
+       I win the key—let loose a storm of slaves:
+    ‘When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,’
+    They cry; ‘sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,
+       Or drink to England’s Queen in foaming waves.’
+
+    We leap adown the hatches; in the dark
+       We stab the Dons at random, till I see
+    A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,
+       Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be
+    A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:
+       Then, lo: a bony shape with lifted hands—
+    A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,
+    O’ertopping groans, o’ertopping Ocean’s quire—
+       A skeleton with Inca’s diadem stands!
+
+    It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,
+       Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,
+    When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,
+       Sniffing man’s flesh at roast for Christ His sake.
+    The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;
+       They cross their foreheads, but they dare not speak.
+    Anon the spectre, when the strife is o’er,
+    Melts from the dark, then glimmers as before,
+       Burning upon the conquered galley’s beak.
+
+    And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows
+       The ‘Royal’ bearing down upon our craft—
+    Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows
+       Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.
+    I take the helm; I put the galley near:
+       We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.
+    Amid the ‘Royal’s’ din I laugh to hear
+    The curse of many a British mutineer,
+       The crack, crack, crack of boatswain’s biting scourge.
+
+    ‘Ye scourge in vain,’ quoth I, ‘scourging for life
+       Slaves who shall row no more to save the Don’;
+    For from the ‘Royal’s’ poop, above the strife,
+       Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!
+    ‘What! is it thou, Pirate of “El Dorado”?
+       He shouts in English tongue.  And there, behold!
+    Stands he, the devil’s commodore, Medrado.
+    ‘Ay! ay!’ quoth I, ‘Spain owes me one strappado
+       For scuttling Philip’s ship of stolen gold.’
+
+    ‘I come for that strappado now,’ quoth I.
+        ‘What means yon thing of burning bones?’ he saith.
+    ‘’Tis God’s Revenge cries, “Bloody Spain shall die!”
+       The king of El Dorado’s name is Death.
+    Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,’
+       I cry; ‘strong hands are stretched to save you now;
+    Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.’
+    But when the ‘Royal,’ captured, rides adrift,
+       I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.
+
+    When all are slain, the tempest’s wings have fled,
+       But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:
+    Far down the offing glows a spot of red,
+       My soul knows well it hath that Inca’s form.
+    ‘It lights,’ quoth I, ‘the red cross banner of Spain
+       There on the flagship where Medina sleeps—
+    Hell’s banner, wet with sweat of Indian’s pain,
+    And tears of women yoked to treasure train,
+       Scarlet of blood for which the New World weeps.’
+
+    There on the dark the flagship of the Don
+       To me seems luminous of the spectre’s glow;
+    But soon an arc of gold, and then the sun,
+       Rise o’er the reddening billows, proud and slow;
+    Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,
+       That take all shifting colours as they shake,
+    I see the great Armada coil and twist
+    Miles, miles along the ocean’s amethyst,
+       Like hell’s old snake of hate—the winged snake.
+
+    And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,
+       That snake accursed, with wings which swell and puff
+    Before the slackening horses of the wind,
+       Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.
+    ‘Behold,’ quoth I, ‘their floating citadels,
+       The same the priests have vouched for musket-proof,
+    Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,
+    That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells—
+       Yea, sailed from Tagus’ mouth, for Christ’s behoof.
+
+    For Christ’s behoof they sailed: see how they go
+       With that red skeleton to show the way
+    There sitting on Medina’s stem aglow—
+       A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;
+    Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse—
+       Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,
+    Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,
+    Their trucks, their flags—behold them, how they pass—
+       With God’s Revenge for figurehead—to Doom!’
+
+Then Ben Jonson, the symposiarch, rises and calls upon Raleigh to tell
+the story of the defeat of the Great Armada.  I can give only a stanza or
+two and the chorus:—
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       The choirboys sing the matin song,
+    When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard’s right.
+       He drives the wing—a huddled throng—
+    Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.
+       While galleon hurtles galeasse,
+    And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,
+       As scythes cut down the summer grass,
+       Drake closes on the writhing mass,
+    Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,
+                Skimming the waves.
+
+       Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,
+    Running from ship to ship like living things.
+       With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,
+    Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.
+       Through smoke we see their chiefs encased
+    In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;
+       And once I see within a waist
+       Wild English captives ashen-faced,
+    Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced
+                In purple weals.
+
+                         [DAVID GWYNN here leaps up, pale and panting, and
+                           bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from RALEIGH
+                                                          sits down again.
+
+       The Don fights well, but fights not now
+    The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,
+       To pluck the gold from off the brow,
+    Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.
+       He hunts not now the Indian maid
+    With bloodhound’s bay—Peru’s confiding daughter,
+       Who saw in flowery bower or glade
+       The stranger’s god-like cavalcade,
+    And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro’s trade
+                Of rape and slaughter.
+
+       His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,
+    Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,
+       Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,
+    Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:
+       Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,
+    Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:
+       Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage
+       Like any wolf that tears his cage!
+    ’Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge
+                Till set of sun!
+
+       Their troops, superfluous as their gold,
+    Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,
+       Are packed away in every hold—
+    Targets of flesh for every English gun—
+       Till, like Pizarro’s halls of blood,
+    Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,
+       Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,
+       Reddening the waves for many a rood,
+    As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud
+                Before the wind.
+
+The chief leit-motiv of the poem is the metrical idea that whenever a
+stanza ends with the word ‘sea,’ Ben Jonson and the rest of the jolly
+companions break into this superb chorus:—
+
+                   The sea!
+       Thus did England fight;
+       And shall not England smite
+    With Drake’s strong stroke in battles yet to be?
+       And while the winds have power
+       Shall England lose the dower
+       She won in that great hour—
+                   The sea?
+
+Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven
+out to the open sea.  He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of
+excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but
+in quite a different spirit.  In Gwynn’s fevered imagination the skeleton
+which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to
+its destruction:—
+
+                                    GWYNN
+
+       With towering sterns, with golden stems
+    That totter in the smoke before their foe,
+       I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
+    With death above the billows, death below!
+       Who leads them down the tempest’s path,
+    From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
+       Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
+       All helpless in the wild wind’s wrath,
+    Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
+                The Skeleton!
+
+       At length with toil the cape is passed,
+    And faster and faster still the billows come
+       To coil and boil till every mast
+    Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
+       I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
+    That Inca’s bony shape burn on the waves,
+       Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
+       While Mother Carey, Orkney’s witch,
+    Waves to the Spectre’s song her lantern-switch
+                O’er ocean-graves.
+
+       The glimmering crown of Scotland’s head
+    They pass.  No foe dares follow but the storm.
+       The Spectre, like a sunset red,
+    Illumines mighty Wrath’s defiant form,
+       And makes the dreadful granite peak
+    Burn o’er the ships with brows of prophecy;
+       Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
+       Above the tempest’s foam and reek,
+    More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
+                 ‘Tyrants, ye die!’
+
+       The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
+    Writes ‘God’s Revenge’ on waves that climb and dash,
+       Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
+    Where ships are hurled.  It sings amid the crash;
+       Yea, sings amid the tempest’s roar,
+    Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
+       And yells of captives chained to oar,
+       And cries of those who strike for shore,
+    ‘Spain’s murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
+                The righteous sea!’
+
+The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted
+in anthologies:—
+
+                                WASSAIL CHORUS
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+    Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       ’Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,
+          Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
+       Bright with golden roofs and walls—
+          El Dorado’s rare domain—
+       Seem those halls when sunlight launches
+       Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
+    Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches
+                Field and farm and lane.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+       Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+          Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+                                   DRAYTON
+
+       ’Tis where Avon’s wood-sprites weave
+          Through the boughs a lace of rime,
+       While the bells of Christmas Eve
+          Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
+       O’er the river-flags embossed
+       Rich with flowery runes of frost—
+    O’er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed—
+                Strains of olden time.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+       Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+          Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+                             SHAKSPEARE’S FRIEND
+
+       ’Tis, methinks, on any ground
+          Where our Shakspeare’s feet are set.
+       There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
+          With his blithest coronet:
+       Friendship’s face he loveth well:
+          ’Tis a countenance whose spell
+       Sheds a balm o’er every mead and dell
+                Where we used to fret.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
+                Where?
+
+                                   HEYWOOD
+
+       More than all the pictures, Ben,
+          Winter weaves by wood or stream,
+       Christmas loves our London, when
+          Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam—
+       Clouds like these, that, curling, take
+       Forms of faces gone, and wake
+    Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
+                London like a dream.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
+                Where?
+
+                                  BEN JONSON
+
+       Love’s old songs shall never die,
+          Yet the new shall suffer proof;
+       Love’s old drink of Yule brew I,
+          Wassail for new love’s behoof:
+       Drink the drink I brew, and sing
+       Till the berried branches swing,
+    Till our song make all the Mermaid ring—
+                Yea, from rush to roof.
+
+                                    FINALE
+
+       Christmas loves this merry, merry place:—
+          Christmas saith with fondest face
+          Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
+                Rare!’
+
+This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of ‘The Coming of Love,’
+fine as it is, was overshadowed by the wild and romantic poem which lends
+its name to the volume.  But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his
+beautiful series, ‘Flowers of Parnassus,’ where it was charmingly
+illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue considerably.
+There is no doubt that for originality, for power, and for music,
+“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid’” is enough to form the base of any poet’s
+reputation.  It has been enthusiastically praised by some of the foremost
+writers of our time.  I have permission to print only one of the letters
+in its praise which the author received, but that is an important one, as
+it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:—
+
+    “I have been beginning Christmas, in a way, by reading over the fire
+    your delightful little ‘Christmas at the “Mermaid”’ which it was most
+    kind of you to send.  I was carried back right into Armada times by
+    David Gwynn’s vivid story: it seems remarkable that you should have
+    had the conjuring power to raise up those old years so brightly in
+    your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers in such
+    high relief of three dimensions, as one may say.
+
+    The absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest
+    touches of the poem: it throws one into a ‘humourous melancholy’—and
+    we feel him, in some curious way, more than if he had been there.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVIII
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+‘ASSUREDLY,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, ‘there is no
+profession so courageous as that of the pen.’  Well, in coming to the end
+of my task—a task which has been a labour of love—I wish I could feel
+confident that I have not been too courageous—that I have satisfactorily
+done what I set out to do.  But I have passed my four-hundred and
+fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a child’s bucket into
+a sea of ideas that has no limit.  Out of scores upon scores of articles
+buried in many periodicals I have been able to give three or four from
+the ‘Athenæum,’ none from the ‘Examiner,’ and none out of the ‘Nineteenth
+Century,’ ‘The Fortnightly Review,’ ‘Harper’s Magazine,’ etc.  Still, I
+have been able to show that a large proportion of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+scattered writings preaches the same peculiar doctrine in a ratiocinative
+form which in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is artistically
+enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest importance at the
+present time, when science seems to be revealing a system of the universe
+so deeply opposed to the system which in the middle of the last century
+seemed to be revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s is
+making a very deep impression upon the generation to which I belong.  If
+it should be said that in speaking for the younger generation I am
+speaking for a pigmy race (and I sometimes fear that we are pigmies when
+I remember the stature of our fathers), I am content to appeal to one of
+the older generation, who has spoken words in praise of Mr. Watts-Dunton
+as a poet, which would demand even my courage to echo.  I mean Dr. Gordon
+Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, ‘The New Day,’ was published in
+1890.  It was these remarkable sonnets which moved Frank Groome to dub
+Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘homo ne quidem unius libri,’ a literary celebrity who
+had not published a single book.  I have already referred to ‘The New
+Day,’ but I have not given an adequate account of this sonnet-sequence.
+In their nobility of spirit, their exalted passion of friendship, their
+single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not think they have ever
+been surpassed.  It is a fine proof of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s genius for
+friendship that he should be able unconsciously to enlink himself to the
+souls of his seniors, his coevals and his juniors, and that there should
+be between him and the men of three generations, equal links of equal
+affection.  But I must not lay stress on the whimsies of chronology and
+the humours of the calendar, for all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friends are
+young, and the youngest of them, Mr. George Meredith, is the oldest.  The
+youthfulness of ‘The New Day’ makes it hard to believe that it was
+written by a septuagenarian.  The dedication is full of the fine candour
+of a romantic boy:—
+
+    “To ‘W. T. W.,’ the friend who has gone with me through the study of
+    Nature, accompanied me to her loveliest places at home and in other
+    lands, and shared with me the reward she reserves for her ministers
+    and interpreters, I dedicate this book.”
+
+The following sonnet on ‘Friendship’ expresses a very rare mood and a
+very high ideal:—
+
+    Friendship is love’s full beauty unalloyed
+       With passion that may waste in selfishness,
+    Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:
+       Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.
+    It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound
+       With cheery look that makes a winter bright;
+    It saves the hope from falling to the ground,
+       And turns the restless pillow towards the light.
+    To be another’s in his dearest want,
+       At struggle with a thousand racking throes,
+    When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant
+       Is that which friendship’s soothing hand bestows:
+    How joyful to be joined in such a love,—
+    We two,—may it portend the days above!
+
+The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine order.  Many
+English and American critics have highly praised them, but not too
+highly.  This venerable ‘parable poet’ did not belong to my generation.
+Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s generation.  His day was the day
+before yesterday, and yet he wrote these sonnets when he was past
+seventy, not to glorify himself, but to glorify his friend.  They are one
+long impassioned appeal to that friend to come forward and take his place
+among his peers.  The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of
+the most bewildering enigmas of literature.  I have already quoted what
+Gordon Hake says about the man who when the ‘New Day’ was written had not
+published a single book.
+
+With regard to the unity binding together all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+writings, I can, at least, as I have shown in the Introduction, speak
+with the authority of a careful student of them.  With the exception of
+the late Professor Strong, who when ‘The Coming of Love’ appeared, spoke
+out so boldly upon this subject in ‘Literature,’ I doubt if anyone has
+studied those writings more carefully than I have; and yet the difficulty
+of discovering the one or two quotable essays which more than the others
+expound and amplify their central doctrine has been so great that I am
+dubious as to whether, in the press of my other work, I have achieved my
+aim as satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by
+another—especially by Professor Strong, had he not died before he could
+write his promised essay upon the inner thought of ‘Aylwinism’ in the
+‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’  But, even if I have failed
+adequately to expound the gospel of ‘Aylwinism,’ it is undeniable that,
+since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ (whether as a result of that
+publication or not), there has been an amazing growth of what may be
+called the transcendental cosmogony of ‘Aylwinism.’
+
+Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of ‘Aylwin’—the
+‘Arvon’ illustrated edition—says:—
+
+    “When ‘Aylwin’ was in type, the author, getting alarmed at its great
+    length, somewhat mercilessly slashed into it to shorten it, and the
+    more didactic parts of the book went first.  Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+    restored one or two of these excised passages, notably one in which
+    he summarizes his well-known views of the ‘great Renascence of
+    Wonder, which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century
+    and the beginning of the nineteenth.’  In one of these passages he
+    has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour’s speculations at the recent
+    meeting of the British Association.”
+
+Something like the same remark was made in the ‘Athenæum’ of September 3,
+1904:—
+
+    “The writer has restored certain didactic passages of the story which
+    were eliminated before the publication of the book, owing to its
+    great length.  Though the teaching of the book is complete without
+    the restorations, it seems a pity that they were ever struck out,
+    because they appear to have anticipated the striking remarks of Mr.
+    Balfour at the British Association the other day, to say nothing of
+    the utterances of certain scientific writers who have been discussing
+    the transcendental side of Nature.”
+
+The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and ‘The Athenæum’ refer are
+excerpts from ‘The Veiled Queen,’ by Aylwin’s father.  The first of these
+comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called ‘The Revolving Cage of
+Circumstance’ and runs thus:—
+
+    “‘The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth
+    and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in
+    Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of
+    the nineteenth.
+
+    The warring of the two impulses governing man—the impulse of wonder
+    and the impulse of acceptance—will occupy all the energies of the
+    next century.
+
+    The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy
+    has to come back—has to triumph—before the morning of the final
+    emancipation of man can dawn.
+
+    But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those
+    in which it was exercised in the past.  The materialism, which at
+    this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of
+    evolution, will go.  Against their own intentions certain scientists
+    are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not
+    the creature of organism—is a something outside the material world, a
+    something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal
+    expression.
+
+    The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the
+    testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold,
+    when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell him that
+    “the principle of all certitude” is not and cannot be the testimony
+    of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests
+    of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can
+    neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the
+    excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the
+    materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical,
+    lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive
+    series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not,
+    according to the organism upon which they fall.’
+
+    These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about
+    ‘the Omnipotence of Love,’ which showed, beyond doubt, that if my
+    father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very
+    original poet.”
+
+The second restored excerpt from ‘The Veiled Queen’ comes in at the end
+of the chapter called ‘The Magic of Snowdon,’ and runs thus:—
+
+    “I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy
+    expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer,
+    Ferridoddin:—
+
+    With love I burn: the centre is within me;
+    While in a circle everywhere around me
+    Its Wonder lies—
+
+    that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the
+    Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of
+    the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of
+    my life, ‘The Veiled Queen.’
+
+    The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
+
+    ‘The omnipotence of love—its power of knitting together the entire
+    universe—is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind.  Just
+    after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called “The
+    Bedouin Child,” dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins
+    about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic.  Among these
+    Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
+    daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
+
+    Ilyàs the prophet, lingering ’neath the moon,
+       Heard from a tent a child’s heart-withering wail,
+       Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
+    And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
+    A little maiden dreaming there alone.
+       She babbled of her father sitting pale
+       ’Neath wings of Death—’mid sights of sorrow and bale,
+    And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
+
+    “Poor child, plead on,” the succouring prophet saith,
+       While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
+       To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
+    To Heaven for help—“Plead on; such pure love-breath,
+    Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death
+       That, in the Desert, fan thy father’s eyes.”
+
+    The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
+       Seven sons await the morning vultures’ claws;
+       ’Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
+    The father sits, the last of all the band.
+    He mutters, drowsing o’er the moonlit sand,
+        “Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all pashas;
+       Or, if the wings are Death’s, why Azraeel draws
+    A childless father from an empty land.”
+
+    “Nay,” saith a Voice, “the wind of Azraeel’s wings
+       A child’s sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:”
+       A camel’s bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
+    Filling the Bedouin’s brain with bubble of springs
+       And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
+    Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.
+
+    ‘Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but “the superficial
+    film” of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of
+    love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no
+    real difference.  Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly
+    be confined to Asia.  The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic
+    element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards
+    Sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such
+    as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
+    Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune
+    of universal love and beauty.’”
+
+With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has said that
+the method of depicting the power of love in them is sublime.  ‘The Slave
+girl’s Progress to Paradise,’ however, is equally powerful and equally
+original.  The feeling in the ‘Bedouin Child’ and in ‘The Slave Girl’s
+Progress to Paradise’ is exactly like that which inspires ‘The Coming of
+Love.’  When Percy sees Rhona’s message in the sunrise he exclaims:—
+
+    But now—not all the starry Virtues seven
+       Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.
+       And morning says, ‘Love hath such godlike might
+    That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
+    Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
+    Were quelled by doom, Love’s high-creative leaven
+       Could light new worlds.’  If, then, this Lord of Fate,
+       When death calls in the stars, can re-create,
+    Is it a madman’s dream that Love can show
+    Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
+       And build again my heaven?
+
+The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately affirmed in
+the words of ‘The Spirit of the Sunrise,’ addressed to the bereaved
+poet:—
+
+    Though Love be mocked by Death’s obscene derision,
+       Love still is Nature’s truth and Death her lie;
+       Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
+    To taste the fell destroyer’s crowning spite
+    That blasts the soul with life’s most cruel sight,
+    Corruption’s hand at work in Life’s transition:
+       This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
+       Her body’s image pictured in thy brain;
+    The flowers above her weave the only shroud
+    Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
+          Rhona!  Behold the vision!
+
+Some may call this too mystical—some may dislike it on other accounts—but
+few will dream of questioning its absolute originality.
+
+Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour’s to which the passages
+quoted from ‘The Veiled Queen’ have been compared.  In his presidential
+address to the British Association, entitled, ‘Reflections suggested by
+the New Theory of Matter,’ he said:—
+
+    “We claim to found all our scientific opinions on experience: and the
+    experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is
+    our sense of perception of that universe.  That is experience; and in
+    this region of belief there is no other.  Yet the conclusions which
+    thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all
+    appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is
+    based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it
+    to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from
+    anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and
+    nature compels us to employ.
+
+    Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply the
+    premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the physical world.
+    It is they which tell us there is a physical world; it is on their
+    authority that we learn its character.  But in order of causation
+    they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our orders of
+    sense.  What we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen,
+    but on our eyes.  What we hear depends, not merely on what there is
+    to hear, but on our ears.”
+
+I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any idea that
+is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is afterwards accepted as
+a simple truth.  One of the reviewers of ‘Aylwin’ was much amused by the
+description of the hero’s emotions when he stood in the lower room of
+Mrs. Gudgeon’s cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by Winifred’s
+corpse, stretched upon a squalid mattress:—
+
+    “At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and
+    died I passed into a new world of horror.  Dead matter had become
+    conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before
+    me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of
+    brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the
+    walls,—it was these which seemed to have life—a terrible life—and to
+    be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the
+    triumph of evil over good.  I knew that the woman was still speaking,
+    but for a time I heard no sound—my senses could receive no
+    impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet
+    living matter around me.  Not an object there that did not seem
+    charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates.”
+
+‘Fancy,’ said the reviewer, ‘any man out of Bedlam feeling as if dead
+matter were alive!’
+
+Well, apart from the psychological subtlety of this passage, our critic
+must have been startled by the declaration lately made by a sane man of
+science, that there is no such thing as dead matter—and that every
+particle of what is called dead matter is alive and shedding an aura
+around it!
+
+Had the mass of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s scattered writings been collected into
+volumes, or had a representative selection from them been made, their
+unity as to central idea with his imaginative work, and also the
+importance of that central idea, would have been brought prominently
+forward, and then there would have been no danger of his contribution to
+the latest movement—the anti-materialistic movement—of English thought
+and English feeling being left unrecognized.  Lost such teachings as his
+never could have been, for, as Minto said years ago, their colour tinges
+a great deal of the literature of our time.  The influence of the
+‘Athenæum,’ not only in England, but also in America and on the
+Continent, was always very great—and very great of course must have been
+the influence of the writer who for a quarter of a century spoke in it
+with such emphasis.  Therefore, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had himself collected
+or selected his essays, or if he had allowed any of his friends to
+collect or select them, this book of mine would not have been written,
+for more competent hands would have undertaken the task.  But a study of
+work which, originally issued in fragments, now lies buried ‘full fathom
+five’ in the columns of various journals, could, I felt, be undertaken
+only by a cadet of letters like myself.  There are many of us younger men
+who express views about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work which startle at times
+those who are unfamiliar with it.  And I, coming forward for the moment
+as their spokesman, have long had the desire to justify the faith that is
+in us, and in the wide and still widening audience his imaginative work
+has won.  But I doubt if I should have undertaken it had I realized the
+magnitude of the task.  For it must be remembered that the articles,
+called ‘reviews,’ are for the most part as unlike reviews as they can
+well be.  No matter what may have been the book placed at the head of the
+article, it was used merely as an opportunity for the writer to pour
+forth generalizations upon literature and life, or upon the latest
+scientific speculations, or upon the latest reverie of philosophy, in a
+stream, often a torrent, coruscating with brilliancies, and alive with
+interwoven colours like that of the river in the mountains of Kaf
+described in his birthday sonnet to Tennyson.  Take, for instance, that
+great essay on the Psalms which I have used as the key-note of this
+study.  The book at the head of the review was not, as might have been
+supposed, a discourse learned, or philosophical, or emotional, upon the
+Psalms—but a little unpretentious metrical version of the Psalms by Lord
+Lorne.  Only a clear-sighted and daring editor would have printed such an
+article as a review.  But I doubt if there ever was a more prescient
+journalist than he who sat in the editorial chair at that time.  A man of
+scholarly accomplishments and literary taste, he knew that an article
+such as this would be a huge success; would resound through the world of
+letters.  The article, I believe, was more talked about in literary
+circles than any book that had come out during that month.
+
+Again, take that definition of humour which I seized upon (page 384) to
+illustrate my exposition of that wonderful character in ‘Aylwin’—Mrs.
+Gudgeon, a definition that seems, as one writer has said, to make all
+other talk about humour cheap and jejune.  It is in a review of an
+extremely futile history of humour.  Now let the reader consider the
+difficult task before a writer in my position—the task of searching for a
+few among the innumerable half-remembered points of interest that turn up
+in the most unexpected places.  Of course, if the space allotted to me by
+my publishers had been unlimited, and if my time had been unlimited, I
+should have been able to give so large a number of excerpts from the
+articles as to make my selection really representative of what has been
+called the “modern Sufism of ‘Aylwin.’”  But in this regard my publishers
+have already been as liberal and as patient as possible.  After all, the
+best, as well as the easiest way, to show that ‘Aylwin,’ and ‘The Coming
+of Love,’ are but the imaginative expression of a poetic religion
+familiar to the readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism for twenty-five
+years, is to quote an illuminating passage upon the subject from one of
+the articles in the ‘Athenæum.’  Moreover, I shall thus escape what I
+confess I dread—the sight of my own prose at the end of my book in
+juxtaposition to the prose of a past master of English style:—
+
+    “The time has not yet arrived for poetry to utilize even the results
+    of science; such results as are offered to her are dust and ashes.
+    Happily, however, nothing in science is permanent save mathematics.
+    As a great man of science has said, ‘everything is provisional.’  Dr.
+    Erasmus Darwin, following the science of his day, wrote a long poem
+    on the ‘Loves of the Plants,’ by no means a foolish poem, though it
+    gave rise to the ‘Loves of the Triangles,’ and though his grandson
+    afterwards discovered that the plants do not love each other at all,
+    but, on the contrary, hate each other furiously—‘struggle for life’
+    with each other, ‘survive’ against each other—just as though they
+    were good men and ‘Christians.’  But if a poet were to set about
+    writing a poem on the ‘Hates of the Plants,’ nothing is more likely
+    than that, before he could finish it, Mr. Darwin will have discovered
+    that the plants do love after all; just as—after it was a settled
+    thing that the red tooth and claw did all the business of
+    progression—he delighted us by discovering that there was another
+    factor which had done half the work—the enormous and very proper
+    admiration which the females have had for the males from the very
+    earliest forms upwards.  In such a case, the ‘Hates of the Plants’
+    would have become ‘inadequate.’  Already, indeed, there are faint
+    signs of the physicists beginning to find out that neither we nor the
+    plants hate each other quite so much as they thought, and that Nature
+    is not quite so bad as she seems.  ‘She is an Æolian harp,’ says
+    Novalis, ‘a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher
+    strings within us.’  And after all there are higher strings within us
+    just as real as those which have caused us to ‘survive,’ and poetry
+    is right in ignoring ‘interpretations,’ and giving us ‘Earthly
+    Paradises’ instead.  She must wait, it seems; or rather, if this
+    aspiring ‘century’ will keep thrusting these unlovely results of
+    science before her eyes, she must treat them as the beautiful girl
+    Kisāgotamī treated the ugly pile of charcoal.  A certain rich man
+    woke up one morning and found that all his enormous wealth was turned
+    to a huge heap of charcoal.  A friend who called upon him in his
+    misery, suspecting how the case really stood, gave him certain
+    advice, which he thus acted upon.  ‘The Thuthe, following his
+    friend’s instructions, spread some mats in the bazaar, and, piling
+    them upon a large heap of his property which was turned into
+    charcoal, pretended to be selling it.  Some people, seeing it, said,
+    “Why does he sell charcoal?”  Just at this time a young girl, named
+    Kisāgotamī, who was worthy to be owner of the property, and who,
+    having lost both her parents, was in a wretched condition, happened
+    to come to the bazaar on some business.  When she saw the heap, she
+    said, “My lord Thuthe, all the people sell clothes, tobacco, oil,
+    honey, and treacle; how is it that you pile up gold and silver for
+    sale?”  The Thuthe said, “Madam, give me that gold and silver.”
+    Kisāgotamī, taking up a handful of it, brought it to him.  What the
+    young girl had in her hand no sooner touched the Thuthe’s hand than
+    it became gold and silver.’”
+
+I cannot find a clearer note for the close of this book than that which
+sounds in one of the latest and one of the finest of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s
+sonnets.  It was composed on the last night of the Nineteenth Century, a
+century which will be associated with many of the dear friends Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has lost, and, as I must think, associated also with
+himself.  The lines have a very special charm for me, because they show
+the turn which the poet’s noble optimism has taken; they show that faith
+in my own generation which for so many years has illumined his work, and
+which has endeared him to us all.  I wish I could be as hopeful as this
+nineteenth century poet with regard to the poets who will carry the torch
+of imagination and romance through the twentieth century; but whether or
+not there are any poets among us who are destined to bring in the Golden
+Fleece, it is good to see ‘the Poet of the Sunrise’ setting the trumpet
+of optimism to his lips, and heralding so cheerily the coming of the new
+argonauts:—
+
+                         THE ARGONAUTS OF THE NEW AGE
+
+                                   THE POET
+
+                             [In starlight, listening to the chimes in the
+                                   distance, which sound clear through the
+                                                           leafless trees.
+
+    Say, will new heroes win the ‘Fleece,’ ye spheres
+       Who—whether around some King of Suns ye roll
+       Or move right onward to some destined goal
+    In Night’s vast heart—know what Great Morning nears?
+
+                                  THE STARS
+
+    Since Love’s Star rose have nineteen hundred years
+       Written such runes on Time’s remorseless scroll,
+       Impeaching Earth’s proud birth, the human soul,
+    That we, the bright-browed stars, grow dim with tears.
+
+    Did those dear poets you loved win Light’s release?
+       What ‘ship of Hope’ shall sail to such a world?
+
+                                     [The night passes, and morning breaks
+                                             gorgeously over the tree top.
+
+                                   THE POET
+
+    Ye fade, ye stars, ye fade with night’s decease!
+       Above yon ruby rim of clouds empearled—
+       There, through the rosy flags of morn unfurled—
+    I see young heroes bring Light’s ‘Golden Fleece.’
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 THE END
+
+
+
+
+Index
+
+
+Abbey, Edwin, 122, 301
+
+Abershaw, Jerry, 100
+
+Abiogenesis, 373
+
+Absolute humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
+
+Accent, English verse governed by, 344
+
+Acceptance, instinct of, 14; Horace as poet of, 15
+
+Acton, Lord, place given ‘Aylwin’ by, 5
+
+Actors, two types of, 127
+
+Actresses, English prejudice against, 131
+
+Adams, Davenport, 132
+
+Addison, ‘softness of touch’ in portraiture, 350
+
+‘Adonais,’ 157
+
+‘Æneid,’ 208
+
+Æschylus, reference to, 15, 45, 324
+
+‘Agamemnon,’ 323
+
+Alabama, Lowell and, 295
+
+Aldworth, 286, 293
+
+Allen, Grant, 207, 269, 309, 361
+
+Allingham, William, 213
+
+Ambition v. Nature-Worship, 103
+
+America, Watts-Dunton’s friends in, 295; his feelings towards, 297, 301
+
+Anacharsis, 384
+
+Anapæsts, Swinburne and, 383
+
+Anglomania and Anglophobia, Lowell’s, 299
+
+Anglo-Saxon, law-abidingness of, 309; conception of life, 381
+
+Animals, man’s sympathy with 38–9, 82–86
+
+‘Anne Boleyn,’ Watts-Dunton’s criticism of Lilian Adelaide Neilson’s
+acting in, 117
+
+Anonymity in criticism, 209
+
+Anthropology, 14
+
+Apemantus, 250
+
+Appleton, Prof., Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—met at Bell Scott’s and
+Rossetti’s; Hegel on the brain; asks Watts to write for ‘Academy,’ 187;
+wants him to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns, 188; in a
+rage; Watts explains why he has gone into enemy’s camp, 201; a
+Philistine, 202
+
+‘Arda Viraf,’ 219
+
+‘Argonauts of the New Age,’ 457
+
+Argyll, Duchess of: see Louise, Princess
+
+Argyll, Duke of, 291: see Lorne, Marquis of
+
+Aristocrats, in ‘Aylwin,’ 351
+
+Aristotle, unities of, 18; 177; 340, 341
+
+Armada, 423
+
+‘Armadale,’ 348
+
+Arnold, Sir Edwin, 219, 228
+
+Arnold, Matthew, ‘The Scholar Gypsy,’ Borrow’s criticism of, 108; Rhona
+Boswell and, 114; 157
+
+Artifice, 239
+
+Athenæum, 1–4; editor of, 10; seventieth birthday of, 210–213; influence
+of, 452; Watts-Dunton’s connection with, 6, 173, 188, 212–27, 315, 418,
+454
+
+Augustanism, 15, 16; pyramid of, 23
+
+Austen, Jane, 367
+
+‘Australia’s Mother,’ 4
+
+‘Ave Atque Vale,’ 157
+
+Avon, River, Watts-Dunton’s love for, 31
+
+‘AYLWIN,’ Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, 2; popularity of, 7;
+principles of romantic art expressed in, 8; Justin McCarthy’s opinion of,
+9; ‘Renascence of Wonder,’ original title of, 11; attempted
+identification of characters in, 50, 88; ‘Veiled Queen,’ dominating
+influence of author, 56; Cyril Aylwin, identification with A. E. Watts,
+87; genesis of, 89; nervous phases in, 90; D’Arcy, identification with
+Rossetti, 139, 140–45; description of Rossetti in, 165–169; landslip in,
+270; Welsh acceptation of, 312–318; Snowdon ascent, 317; ‘Encyc. Brit.’
+on, 321; naïveté in style of, 328; youthfulness of, 328; richness in
+style, 330–38; Galimberti, Mme., criticism of, 338; ‘Athenæum’ canons
+observed in, 338, 343; begun in metre, 342; critical analysis of,
+345–362; ‘softness of touch’ in portraiture, 351; love-passion, 362;
+Swinburne on, 363; Meredith on, 364; Groome on, 367; novel of the two
+Bohemias, 368; editions of, 368, 377; enigmatic nature of, 373; Dr.
+Nicoll on, 375; Celtic element in, 378; Jacottet on, 380; two heroines
+of, 363; spirituality of, 372, 375, 378, 380; inner meaning of, 372–81;
+heart-thought of contained in the ‘Veiled Queen,’ 374; ‘Saturday Review’
+on, 377; motive of, 389, ‘Arvon’ edition, restoration of excised
+passages, 445–50; modern Sufism of, 454; quotations from, 330, 331, 333,
+336
+
+Aylwin, Cyril, 168
+
+Aylwin, Henry, at 16 Cheyne Walk, 165; autobiographical element in, 322,
+356; see ‘Aylwin’; his mother, 352
+
+Aylwin, Philip: see Watts, J. O.
+
+Aylwin, Percy, contrasted with Henry Aylwin, 361; the part he plays in
+the ‘Coming of Love,’ 401–11; autobiographical element in—see description
+of Swinburne swimming, 268
+
+Aylwinism, Mr. Balfour and, 373, 446, 450; growth of, 445
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Bacon, 43
+
+Badakhshân, ruby hills of, 329
+
+Balfour, A. J., Aylwinism and, 373, 446, 450
+
+Ballads, old, wonder in, 16
+
+‘Ballads and Sonnets,’ Rossetti’s, 271
+
+Balliol, Jowett’s dinner parties at, 280
+
+Balzac, 18
+
+Banville, his ‘Le Baiser,’ 133
+
+Basevi, 95
+
+Bateson, Mary, her paper on Crab House Nunnery, 53
+
+Baudelaire, 135
+
+Baynes, invites Watts to write for ‘Encyc. Brit.,’ 256–7
+
+Beddoes, 126
+
+‘Bedouin Child, The,’ 448
+
+‘Belfast News-Letter,’ 4
+
+‘Belle Dame Sans Merci, La,’ wonder and mystery of, 19
+
+Bell, Mackenzie: on Watts-Dunton’s study of music: see ‘Poets and Poetry
+of the Century,’ 38: also ‘Shadow on the Window Blind’
+
+‘Bells, The,’ Watts on, 119
+
+Benson, A. C, his monograph on Rossetti, 138–40
+
+Berners, Isopel, 364, 369
+
+Beryl-Songs, in ‘Rose Mary,’ 139–40
+
+Betts Bey, 85
+
+Bible, The, Watts-Dunton’s essay on, 228–41
+
+Bible Rhythm, 238
+
+Biogenesis, 373
+
+Bird, Dr., 306
+
+Birdwood, Sir George, 409
+
+Bisset, animal trainer, 38
+
+Black, William, 119; Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 185; their
+resemblance to each other, 185; an amusing mistake, 186
+
+Blackstone, 23, 309
+
+Blank verse, 239
+
+Boar’s Hill, 282
+
+Bodleian, 282
+
+Body, its functions—humour of, 387
+
+Bognor, 91
+
+Bohemians, in ‘Aylwin,’ 351
+
+Bohemias, Novel of the Two, ‘Aylwin’ as, 368
+
+Borrow, George, 10; method of learning languages, 58; Watts-Dunton’s
+description of, 95–106, 108–16; characteristics of, 99–106, 368; his
+gypsy women scenic characters, 390; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—his
+first meeting with, 95; his shyness, 99; Watts attacks it; tries Bamfylde
+Moore Carew; then tries beer, the British bruiser, philology, Ambrose
+Gwinett, etc., 100; a stroll in Richmond Park; visit to ‘Bald-Faced
+Stag’; Jerry Abershaw’s sword; his gigantic green umbrella, 101–2; tries
+Whittlesea Mere; Borrow’s surprise; vipers of Norman Cross; Romanies and
+vipers, 104; disclaims taint of printers’ ink; ‘Who are you?’ 105; an
+East Midlander; the Shales Mare, 106; Cromer sea best for swimming;
+rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, 106; goes to a gypsy camp;
+talks about Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gypsy,’ 108; resolves to try it on
+gypsy woman; watches hawk and magpie, 109; meets Perpinia Boswell; ‘the
+popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,’ 110; Rhona Boswell, girl of the dragon
+flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to smoke, 112; description of Rhona,
+113; the Devil’s Needles; reads Glanville’s story; Rhona bored by Arnold,
+114; hatred of tobacco, 115; last sight of Borrow on Waterloo Bridge,
+115; sonnet on, 116
+
+Boswell, Perpinia, 110–12
+
+BOSWELL, RHONA, her ‘Haymaking Song,’ 33–5; her prototype, first meeting
+with, 63; description from ‘Aylwin,’ 64; East Anglia and ‘Cowslip Land’
+linked by, 72, 108; description of in unpublished romance, 110–15; her
+beauty, 113; courageous nature of, 366, 406; presented dramatically, 356;
+type of English heroine, 366; Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ compared with, 413;
+George Meredith on, 418; humour of, 421; ‘Rhona’s Letter,’ 402–5;
+rhyme-pattern of same, 419
+
+Boswell, Sylvester, 110
+
+Bounty, mutineers of, 310
+
+Boxhill, Meredith’s house at, 283
+
+Bracegirdle, Mrs., 131
+
+‘Breath of Avon: To English-speaking Pilgrims on Shakespeare’s Birthday,’
+31
+
+British Association, 373, 445, 450
+
+Brontë, Charlotte and Emily, Nature instinct of, 97; novels of, 346, 367
+
+Brown, Charles Brockden, 308
+
+Brown, Lucy Madox: see Rossetti, Mrs. W. M.
+
+Brown, Madox, 10, 12, 35, 170; his Eisteddfod, 136; portrait of, story
+connected with, 274
+
+Brown, Oliver Madox, 274–6
+
+Browne, Sir Thomas, 337
+
+Browning, Robert, 4; compared with Victor Hugo, 126; 144; Watts-Dunton’s
+reminiscences of:—chaffs him in ‘Athenæum’; chided by Swinburne, 222,
+sees him at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him to slip away;
+bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell astonished at his
+magnanimity, 222–23; the review in question, ‘Ferishtah’s Fancies,’
+223–26
+
+Brynhild, 365
+
+‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s Funeral Pyre,’ 366
+
+Buchanan, Robert, his attacks on Rossetti, 145–6; Watts-Dunton’s
+impeachment of, 148
+
+‘Buddhaghosha,’ Parables of, 218
+
+Buddhism, 14
+
+Bull, John, 224, 299, 300
+
+Burbage, 124
+
+Burgin, G. B., his interview with Watts-Dunton, 205
+
+Burns, Robert, 38
+
+Butler, Bishop, share in Renascence of Wonder, 22
+
+‘B.V.,’ 161
+
+‘Byles the Butcher,’ 215–16
+
+Byron, 307
+
+‘By the North Sea,’ 271
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Caine, Hall, Rossetti ‘Recollections’ by, 150, 151–4
+
+Calderon, 219
+
+Cam, Ouse and, 79
+
+‘Cambridge Chronicle,’ 51
+
+Cambridge University, 1; George Dyer, Frend, Hammond and, 40; Prince of
+Wales at, 67
+
+Campbell, Lady Archibald, open-air plays organized by, 132
+
+Capri girl, Rhona Boswell like, 110
+
+Carew, Bamfylde Moore, 99
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, River Ouse, libellous description of, 27, 28; his heresy
+of ‘work,’ 68–71; ‘Frederick the Great,’ Watts-Dunton on, 192
+
+Carr, Comyns, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
+
+Casket Lighthouse, girl in—poems by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 413
+
+Cathay, pyramid of, 25
+
+‘Catriona,’ 217
+
+‘Caught in the Ebbing Tide,’ 82
+
+Cavendish, Ada, 118
+
+‘Celebrities of the Century,’ memoir of Watts-Dunton in, 4
+
+Celtic temper, ‘Aylwin,’ 313–15; 378; 398
+
+Cervantes, Watts-Dunton on, 197, 246–52; 382
+
+Chalk Farm, Westland Marston’s theatrical reunions at, 117; Parnassians
+at, 135
+
+‘Chambers’s Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ Watts-Dunton’s ‘Renascence
+of Wonder’ article, 13, 20, 25; 173; Douglas, James, article on
+Watts-Dunton by, 393
+
+‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ article on Watts-Dunton in, 1; Watts-Dunton’s
+contributions to, 2; Sonnet, Watts-Dunton’s essay on, 205
+
+Chamisso, 119
+
+Channel Islands, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 268–9
+
+Chapman, George, 267
+
+Chaucer, his place in English poetry, 15, 43, 294, 394
+
+Chelsea, Rossetti’s residence at, 137, 155, 161, 162, 165
+
+Cheyne Walk, 16: see Chelsea
+
+‘Children of the Open Air,’ 96, 97, 98, 116
+
+Children, Rossetti on, 168
+
+Chinese Cabinet, Rossetti’s, 267
+
+‘Christabel,’ wonder and mystery of, 19; quotation from, 20
+
+Christmas, ‘The Pines’ and, 93, 94; Rosicrucian, 94
+
+“Christmas Tree at ‘The Pines,’ The,” 94
+
+“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” 32; metrical construction of, 422;
+Watts-Dunton’s preface to sixth edition, 424; written at
+Stratford-on-Avon, 423; opening chorus, 423; description of Shakespeare’s
+return to Stratford-on-Avon, 425–26; quotations from, 423–40; chief
+leit-motiv of, 436; Wassail Chorus, 438; ‘The Golden Skeleton,’ 428–34,
+436–37; Raleigh and the Armada, 434–36; letter from Thomas Hardy about,
+440–41
+
+Circumstance, as villain, 125, 349; as humourist, 248; as harlequin, 387
+
+Civilization, definition of, 71
+
+Climate, English, Lowell on, 300
+
+Clive, Kitty, 131
+
+Cockerell, Sydney C., 179
+
+Coincidence, long arm of, 348
+
+Cole, Herbert, 440
+
+Coleridge, S. T., 19, 20, 38; Watts-Dunton’s poetry, kinship to, 417,
+419; 324, 338; on accent in verse, 344
+
+Coleridge, Watts-Dunton’s Sonnet to, 417; Meredith’s opinion of same, 417
+
+Collaboration, 415
+
+Collier, Jeremy, 259
+
+Collier, John P., 55
+
+Collins, Wilkie, fiction of, 348, 367
+
+Colonies, Watts-Dunton on, 273
+
+Colvin, Sidney, 216
+
+Comédie Française: see Théâtre Française
+
+Comedy: and Farce, distinction between, 258; of repartee, 259
+
+‘COMING OF LOVE, THE’: Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, 2; popularity
+of, 7; principles of Romantic Art explained in, 8; humour in, 24;
+locality of Gypsy Song, 33; publication of, 178, 389; history of, 395;
+inner meaning of, 400; form of, 411; opening sonnets, incident connected
+with, 413; quotations from, 402–11, 450; references to, 5, 361, 376
+
+Common Prayer, Book of, 231
+
+Congreve, his wit and humour, 258–60
+
+Convincement, artistic, 325
+
+Coombe, open-air plays at, 132
+
+Cooper, Fenimore, 306
+
+Corkran, Miss, 118, 278
+
+Corneille, 132
+
+Cosmic humour, 204
+
+Cosmogony, New, 9; see Renascence of Wonder, 373
+
+Cosmos, joke of, 386
+
+Cowper, W., 38
+
+Cowslip Country, Watts-Dunton’s association with, 27, 32
+
+Craigie, Mrs., intellectual energy of the provinces asserted by, 50; 325
+
+Criticism, anonymity in, 209, 210; new ideas in, 344
+
+Cromer, 106; Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, 270
+
+Cromwell, Oliver, Slepe Hall, supposed residence at, 35; his elder wine,
+36–7
+
+Cruikshank, 387
+
+‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’: see ‘Chambers’s Cyclopædia’
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Daddy this and Daddy that, It’s,’ 181
+
+Dana, 371
+
+Dante, 208, 293, 412, 418
+
+D’Arcy (see Rossetti, D. G.), character in ‘Aylwin’ originally ‘Gordon’
+(Gordon Hake), 91; Rossetti as prototype of, 91–2, 139, 140–45, 165, 336
+
+Darwin, Charles, 52, 97, 373, 455
+
+Darwin, Erasmus, 455
+
+Death, Pain and, 173
+
+‘Débats, Journal des,’ 27, 374, 400
+
+De Castro, 141–43, 166: see Howell, C. A.
+
+Decorative renascence, 16
+
+Deerfoot, the Indian, race won at Cambridge by, 65
+
+‘Defence of Guinevere,’ 177
+
+Defoe, 307, 367
+
+De Lisle, Leconte, 124
+
+‘Demon Lover, The,’ wonder and mystery expressed by, 19
+
+Dénouement in fiction, dialogue and, 346
+
+De Quincey, 175, 197, 220, 340
+
+Dereham, Borrow as, 95
+
+Destiny, in drama, 125
+
+Devil’s Needles, 113
+
+Dialect in poetry—Meredith on Rhona Boswell’s letters, 418
+
+Dialogue in fiction, 346
+
+Dichtung, Wahrheit and, in ‘Aylwin,’ 50
+
+Dickens, Lowell’s strictures on, 295; 325; hardness of touch in
+portraiture, 350; 367, 384, 387
+
+‘Dickens returns on Christmas Day,’ 93
+
+Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on the sibilant in poetry, 287; substance and
+form in poetry, 341
+
+Disraeli, ‘softness of touch’ in St. Aldegonde, 351; 353
+
+‘Divina Commedia,’ 208
+
+‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ Watts-Dunton’s criticism of, 218
+
+Dogs, telepathy and, 82–6
+
+Döppelganger idea, 30
+
+Drama, surprise in, 120; famous actors and actresses, 117; table talk
+about ‘The Bells’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 119: see Actors, Actresses,
+Æschylus, Banville, Burbage, Comedy and Farce, Congreve, Etheredge, Ford,
+Garrick, Got, Hamlet, Hugo, Kean, Marlowe, Robson, Shakspeare, Sophocles,
+Cyril Tourneur, Vanbrugh, Webster, Wells, Wycherley
+
+Dramatic method in fiction, 346
+
+Drayton, 438
+
+Drury Lane, ragged girl in, 93
+
+Dryden, the first great poet of ‘acceptance,’ 25
+
+Du Chaillu, 52
+
+Duffield, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
+
+Dukkeripen, The Lovers’, 73
+
+Dumas, 346
+
+Du Maurier, 301
+
+Dunn, Treffry, De Castro’s conduct to, 143; Watts-Dunton’s portrait
+painted by, 171; drawings by, 161, 277
+
+Dunton, family of, 53
+
+Dyer, George, St. Ives and, 40, 41
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Earthly Paradise, The,’ 177
+
+East Anglia, gypsies of, 63; Omar Khayyàm and, 79; 72–85; Watts-Dunton’s
+poem on, 82–5; road-girls in, 390
+
+Eastbourne, Swinburne and Watts visit, 270
+
+East Enders, in ‘Aylwin,’ 351
+
+Eliot, George, 372
+
+Ellis, F. S., 179
+
+Emerson, 8
+
+‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ Watts-Dunton’s connection with, 1, 2, 4, 6,
+205, 256; his Essay on Poetry, 340, 393; on Vanbrugh, 258
+
+‘Encyclopædia, Chambers’s’: see ‘Chambers’s Encyc.’
+
+England, its beloved dingles, 69–70; Borrow and, 102; love of the wind
+and, 370
+
+‘English Illustrated Magazine,’ 287
+
+Epic method in fiction, 346
+
+Erckmann-Chatrian, ‘Juif Polonais’ by, 119
+
+Erskine, his pet leeches, 39
+
+‘Esmond,’ 328
+
+Etheredge, 259
+
+‘Examiner,’ contributors to, 184; Watts-Dunton’s articles in, 184
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Fairy Glen,’ 315
+
+‘Faith and Love,’ Wilderspin’s picture, 331
+
+Falstaff, 382
+
+Farce, comedy and, distinction between, 258
+
+Farringford, 286
+
+‘Father Christmas in Famine Street,’ 92
+
+Febvre, as Saltabadil, 129
+
+Fens, the, description of, 62
+
+Feridun, 225
+
+‘Ferishtah’s Fancies,’ Watts’s review of, 223
+
+Ferridoddin, 447
+
+Fiction, genius at work in, 7; importance of, 208; beauty in, 221;
+atmosphere in, 308; ‘artistic convincement’ in, 325; methods of, 345 et
+seq.; epic and dramatic methods in, 346; ‘softness of touch’ in, 349 et
+seq.
+
+Fielding, 305, 321, 347; ‘softness of touch’ in, 350, 367
+
+Findlay, 52
+
+FitzGerald, Edward, 79; Watts-Dunton’s Omarian poems, 80–1
+
+Fitzroy Square, Madox Brown’s symposia at, 136–7
+
+Flaubert, 89
+
+‘Fleshly School of Poetry,’ 145–46
+
+‘Florilegium Latinum,’ 147
+
+Fonblanque, Albany, 185
+
+Ford, spirit of wonder in, 16
+
+‘Fortnightly Review,’ 442
+
+Foxglove bells, fairies and, 74
+
+France, Anatole, irony of, 204
+
+France, dread of the wind, 370
+
+Fraser, the brothers, water-colour drawings by, 33
+
+Freedom, modern, 71
+
+French Revolution, its relation to the Renascence of Wonder, 13
+
+Frend, William, revolt against English Church, 40
+
+Friendship, passion of, 146–48; sonnet (Dr. Gordon Hake), 444
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Gainsborough, ‘softness of touch’ in portraits by, 350
+
+Galimberti, Alice, her appreciation of Watts-Dunton’s work, 204, 338,
+339, 347
+
+Gamp, Mrs., 384
+
+‘Garden of Sleep,’ 270
+
+Garnett, Dr., his views on ‘Renascence of Wonder,’ 11; contributions to
+‘Examiner,’ 184
+
+Garrick, David, 127
+
+Gaskell, Mrs., softness of touch, 350
+
+Gautier, Théophile, 135, 136
+
+Gawtry, in ‘Night and Morning,’ 349
+
+Gelert, 82–5
+
+Genius, wear and tear of, 175
+
+Gentility, 25, 109
+
+‘Gentle Art of Making Enemies,’ 353
+
+German music, fascination of, 89
+
+German romanticists, the terrible-grotesque in, 126
+
+Gestaltung, Goethe on, 398
+
+Ghost, laughter of, 387
+
+Gladstone, 175
+
+Glamour, Celtic, 313–15; 378
+
+‘Glittering Plain,’ 173
+
+Glyn, Miss, 118, 136
+
+God as beneficent Showman, 387
+
+Goethe, his critical system, Watts-Dunton’s treatise on Poetry compared
+to, 257; his theory as to enigmatic nature of great works of art, 373,
+394; Gestaltung in art, 398
+
+‘Golden Hand, The,’ 73
+
+‘Gordon,’ Dr. G. Hake as, 91, 95
+
+Gordon, Lady Mary, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton’s visits to, 270
+
+Gorgios and Romanies, 389
+
+Gosse, Edmund, contributes to ‘Examiner,’ 184; his study of Etheredge,
+259
+
+Got, M., Watts on his acting in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ 127
+
+Grande dame, Aylwin’s mother as type of, 352
+
+Grant, James, 367
+
+‘Graphic,’ 100
+
+‘Grave by the Sea, A,’ 157
+
+‘Great Thoughts,’ 61
+
+Grecian Saloon, Robson at, 57
+
+Greek mind, the, 44
+
+Green Dining Room at 16 Cheyne Walk, 161
+
+Groome, F. H., account of J. K. Watts by, 50; intimacy with Watts-Dunton,
+68; Watts-Dunton and the gypsies, 72; Watts-Dunton’s obituary notice of,
+79; on gypsies in ‘Aylwin,’ 351; ‘Kriegspiel,’ 364; his review of
+‘Aylwin,’ 367, 372; gypsy humour—anecdote, 420
+
+Grotesque, the terrible-, in art, 126
+
+Gryengroes: see Gypsies
+
+‘GUDGEON, MRS.,’ humour of, 382–84, 388; prototype of, 383
+
+‘Guide to Fiction,’ Baker’s, 374
+
+Gwinett, Ambrose, 99
+
+Gwynn, David, 423
+
+‘Gypsy Folk-tales,’ 420
+
+‘Gypsy Heather,’ 75
+
+Gypsies, Watts-Dunton’s acquaintance with, 61, 67; superstitions of, 101;
+‘prepotency of transmission’ in, 362; in ‘Aylwin,’ Groome on, 367;
+‘Aylwin,’ gypsy characters of, 368; ‘Times’ on, 370; superiority of gypsy
+women to men, 392; characteristics of same, 390; music, 392; humour of,
+420
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Hacker, Arthur, A.R.A., illustration of ‘John the Pilgrim’ by, 415
+
+Haggard, Rider, telepathy and dumb animals, 82; Watts-Dunton’s influence
+on writings of, 415
+
+Haggis, the stabbing of, 193
+
+Hake, Gordon, 12; ‘Aylwin,’ connection with, 90; physician to Rossetti,
+90–91; his view of Rossetti’s melancholia and remorse—cock and bull
+stories about ill-treatment of his wife, 91; physician to Lady Ripon, 90;
+Borrow and Watts-Dunton introduced by, 95; poems connected with
+Watts-Dunton, 92; ‘The New Day’ (see that title)
+
+Hake, Thomas St. E., author’s gratitude for assistance from, 10; 11, 12;
+‘Notes and Queries,’ papers on ‘Aylwin’ by, 50; J. O. Watts identified
+with Philip Aylwin by, 51, 56; account of J. O. Watts by, 57; A. E.
+Watts, description by, 88; ‘Aylwin,’ genesis of, account by, 89; account
+of his father’s relations with Rossetti, 90–91; Hurstcote and Cheyne
+Walk, ‘green dining room,’ identified by, 161; William Morris, facts
+concerning, given by, 171
+
+Hallam, Henry, 281
+
+‘Hamlet,’ 293
+
+Hammond, John, 40–1
+
+‘Hand and Soul,’ 172
+
+Hardy, Thomas, 27, 186, 325; letter from, 440–41
+
+‘Harper’s Magazine,’ 122, 442
+
+Harte, Bret, 301; Watts-Dunton’s estimate of, 302–11; histrionic gifts,
+302; meeting with; drive round London music-halls, 303; ‘Holborn,’
+‘Oxford’; Evans’s supper-rooms; Paddy Green; meets him again at
+breakfast; a fine actor lost, 303
+
+Hartley, on sexual shame, 255
+
+Hawk and magpie, Borrow and, 109
+
+Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 305
+
+‘Haymaking Song,’ 34
+
+Hazlitt, W., 261
+
+Hegel, 187
+
+Heine, 232
+
+Heminge and Condell, 293
+
+Hemingford Grey, 33
+
+Hemingford Meadow, description, 32, 33
+
+Henley, W. E., 284, 322
+
+Herder, 19
+
+Herkomer, Prof. H., 100
+
+Herne, the ‘Scollard,’ 402, 405
+
+Herodotus, 340
+
+Hero, English type of, 365
+
+‘Hero, New,’ The, 287
+
+Heroines, ‘Aylwin,’ a story with two, 363
+
+Hesiod, 221, 394
+
+Heywood, 439
+
+Higginson, Col., 301
+
+Hodgson, Earl, 30
+
+Homer, 177, 208, 323, 355
+
+Hood, Thomas, 1
+
+Hopkins, John, 233
+
+Horne, R. H., 137; challenge to Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 269
+
+Hotei, Japanese god of contentment, 385
+
+‘House of the Wolfings,’ 173
+
+Houssaye, Arsène, 218
+
+Houghton, Lord, 183
+
+Howell, Charles Augustus, prototype of De Castro, q.v.
+
+Hueffer, Dr. F., Wagner exponent, 89; Watts-Dunton’s intimacy with, 89
+
+Hueffer, Ford Madox, testimony to the friendship of Watts-Dunton and
+Rossetti, 154
+
+Hugo, Victor, ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ 123–30; Watts-Dunton’s sonnet to, 129;
+dread of the wind, 370
+
+Humboldt, 45
+
+Humour, Watts-Dunton’s definition of, 196; absolute and relative, 16, 23,
+384; cosmic, 204; renascence of wonder in, 242; metaphysical meaning of,
+246–55
+
+Hunt, Holman, 19
+
+Hunt, Leigh, 261
+
+Hunt, Rev. J., 49
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Idler,’ interview with Watts-Dunton in, 205
+
+‘Illuminated Magazine,’ 55
+
+Imagination, lyrical and dramatic, in ‘Aylwin,’ 356–61
+
+Imaginative power in ‘Aylwin,’ 345
+
+Imaginative representation, 208, 398
+
+Imperialism, 273
+
+Incongruity, basis of humour, 385
+
+Indecency, definition of, 255
+
+Ingelow, Jean, 369
+
+Interviewing, skit on, 263
+
+Ireland, hero-worship in, 3
+
+Irony, Anatole France’s, 204; in human intercourse, 251
+
+Irving, Sir Henry, 118, 137
+
+Isis, 332
+
+Isle of Wight, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, 270
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Jacottet, Henri, 347, 374, 380
+
+Jámi, 21
+
+‘Jane Eyre,’ 342, 345
+
+Japanese, race development of, 14
+
+Jaques, 250
+
+‘Jason,’ 177
+
+Jefferson, Joseph, 121
+
+Jeffrey, Francis, 2
+
+Jenyns, Soame, 387
+
+Jerrold, Douglas, 1, 53, 289
+
+Jessopp, Dr., ‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,’ reference to Dunton
+family in, 53
+
+Jewish-Arabian Renascence: see Renascence
+
+‘John the Pilgrim,’ 416
+
+Johnson, Dr., 326
+
+Jolly-doggism, 199
+
+Jones, Sir Edward Burne, 180
+
+Jonson, Ben, 423
+
+‘Joseph and His Brethren,’ 55
+
+Joubert, 221
+
+‘Journal des Débats,’ 27, 374
+
+Journalism, mendacious, 263
+
+Jowett, Benjamin, Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 279; pen portrait of,
+280; see ‘Last Walk from Boar’s Hill,’ 282
+
+‘Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain,’ 31
+
+‘Juif-Polonais,’ 119
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Kaf, mountains of, 286, 453
+
+Kean, Edmund, 121, 127
+
+Keats, John, spirit of wonder in poetry of, 19, 293; richness of style,
+329
+
+Kelmscott Manor, Rossetti’s residence at, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165;
+identification of Hurstcote with, 170; causeries at, 173
+
+Kelmscott Press, 178, 181
+
+Kernahan, Coulson, 56, 413
+
+Kew, Lord, Thackeray’s, 351
+
+Keynes, T., 267
+
+Khayyàm, Omar, ‘Toast to,’ 79, 81; Sonnet on, 81; ‘The Pines,’ Groome
+and, 79
+
+‘Kidnapped,’ Watts-Dunton’s review of, 215; letter from Stevenson
+concerning same, 216
+
+‘King Lear,’ 126, 323, 355
+
+Kisāgotamī, 456
+
+‘Kissing the May Buds,’ 406
+
+Knight, Joseph, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 60; as dramatic critic,
+122, 123
+
+Knowles, James, 290: see also ‘Nineteenth Century’
+
+‘Kriegspiel,’ 364
+
+‘Kubla Khan,’ wonder and mystery of, 19, 20
+
+Kymric note, in ‘Aylwin,’ 313–15
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Lamb, Charles, 41, 59, 250, 387
+
+Lancing, Swinburne and Watts visit, 270
+
+Landor, 271, 352
+
+Landslips at Cromer, 270
+
+Lane, John, wishes to compile bibliography of Watts-Dunton’s articles, 6;
+publication of ‘Coming of Love,’ 396; 440
+
+Lang, Andrew, critical work of, 207; 415
+
+Language, inadequacy of, 323
+
+‘Language of Nature’s Fragrancy,’ 269
+
+Laocoon, 323
+
+‘Last Walk from Boar’s Hill, The,’ 282
+
+Latham, Dr. R. G., acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 58
+
+‘Lavengro,’ 368
+
+‘Lear, King,’ 126, 323, 355
+
+Le Gallienne, R., 1
+
+Leighton, Lord, 172
+
+Leslie, G. D., 301
+
+Leutzner, Dr. Karl, 205
+
+Lever, 367
+
+Lewis, Leopold, 119
+
+Ligier, as Triboulet in ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’ 124
+
+Lineham, 95
+
+Litany, 231
+
+‘Literature,’ 132, 244, 245
+
+‘Literature of power,’ 208
+
+‘Liverpool Mercury,’ article on ‘Aylwin,’ 12
+
+Livingstone, J. K. Watts’s friendship with, 52
+
+Llyn Coblynau, 317
+
+London, Watts-Dunton’s life in, 87 et seq.; its low-class women,
+humourous pictures of, 383
+
+Lorne, Marquis of, 453: see Argyll, Duke of
+
+‘Lothair,’ 353
+
+Louise, Princess (Duchess of Argyll), Rossetti’s alleged rudeness to, 156
+
+‘Love brings Warning of Natura Maligna,’ 414
+
+‘Love for Love,’ 258, 260
+
+‘Love is Enough,’ 177
+
+Love-passion in ‘Aylwin,’ 362
+
+‘Lovers of Gudrun,’ written in twelve hours, 176
+
+‘Loves of the Plants,’ 455
+
+‘Loves of the Triangles,’ 455
+
+Lovell, Sinfi, Nature instinct of, 97; ‘Amazonian Sinfi,’ 107; true
+representation of gypsy girl, 317; Meredith’s praise of, 363; Groome on,
+364; Richard Whiteing on, 364; dominating character of, 363, 365;
+prototype of, 368–9; beauty of, 391
+
+Low, Sidney, 244
+
+Lowell, James Russell, 222; Watts-Dunton’s critical work, appreciation
+of, 399; sonnet on the death of, 300; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences
+of:—meets him at dinner, 295; he attacks England; directs diatribe at
+Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel, 296; recognition; cites Watts’s first
+article, 298; his anglophobia turns into anglomania, 299; likes English
+climate, 300
+
+Lowestoft, 106
+
+Luther, his pigs, 39
+
+‘Lycidas,’ 3, 157
+
+Lyell (geologist), 45; J. K. Watts’s acquaintance with, 50, 52
+
+Lytton, Bulwer, novels of, 349
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+McCarthy, Justin, ‘Aylwin,’ criticism of, 9; hospitality of, 186
+
+MacColl, Norman, invites Watts-Dunton to write for ‘Athenæum,’ 188; 243,
+418
+
+Macready, 136
+
+Macrocosm, microcosm and, 26, 27, 35
+
+‘Madame Bovary,’ 89
+
+Madonna, by Parmigiano, 172
+
+‘Magazine of Art,’ 290
+
+Magpie, hawk and, 109
+
+Maguelonne, Jeanne Samary as, 129
+
+Man, final emancipation of, 47: see also Renascence of Wonder,
+‘Aylwinism.’
+
+‘Man and Wife,’ 348
+
+Manchester School, 273
+
+‘Mankind, the Great Man,’ 46
+
+Manns, August, Crystal Palace Concerts conducted by, 89
+
+Manu, 219
+
+‘M.A.P.,’ 278
+
+Mapes, Walter, 388
+
+Marcianus, 104
+
+Marlowe, Christopher, spirit of wonder in poetry of, 16; 329; friend of,
+426
+
+Marot, Clement, 229
+
+Marryat, 367
+
+Marshall, John, medical adviser to Rossetti, 152
+
+Marston, Dr. Westland:—symposia at Chalk Farm; famous actors and
+actresses, 117; table talk about ‘The Bells’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 119;
+on staff of ‘Examiner,’ 184; the sub-Swinburnians at the Marston
+Mornings; the divine Théophile; the Gallic Parnassus, 136
+
+Marston, Philip Bourke, Louise Chandler Moulton’s memoir of, 4, 10, 157;
+Oliver Madox Brown’s friendship with, 276
+
+Martin, Sir Theodore, 156
+
+Matter, dead, 411, 452; new theory of, 451
+
+Meredith, George, 6; Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 283, 284; literary
+style of, 325, 328; Watts-Dunton’s Sonnet on Coleridge, opinion of, 417;
+‘Coming of Love,’ opinion of, 418
+
+‘Meredith, ‘To George, Sonnet, 284
+
+Meredithians, mock, 325
+
+‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ 293
+
+Methuen, A. M. S., 216
+
+Metrical art, new, 343, 344, 412
+
+Microcosm, of St. Ives, 26–7; 35; characters in the, 50–60
+
+Middleton, Dr. J. H., his friendship with Morris, 172; ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica,’ collaboration in, 173
+
+Mill, John Stuart, education of, Watts-Dunton’s early education compared
+with, 50
+
+Miller, Joaquin, 301
+
+Milton, John, 3; period of wonder in poetry ended with, 25; 157; 293
+
+Minto, Prof., 10; Watts-Dunton’s connection with ‘Examiner’ and, 184–88,
+256; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—neighbours in Danes Inn; editing
+‘Examiner’; secures Watts; first article appears; Bell Scott’s party;
+Scott wants to know name of new writer, 184; Watts slates himself, 185;
+Minto’s Monday evening symposia, 185
+
+Molière, 126, 132
+
+Montaigne—value of leisure—quotation, 68
+
+Morley, John, 27
+
+Morris, Mrs., Rossetti’s picture painted from, 172; reference to, 179,
+180
+
+Morris, William, ‘Quarterly Review’ article on, 16; ‘Chambers’s
+Cyclopædia,’ article on, 173; ‘Odyssey,’ his translation of, 176;
+Watts-Dunton’s criticism of poems by, 176; intimacy with Watts-Dunton,
+170; Watts-Dunton’s monograph on, 170, 173–77; indifference to criticism,
+173; anecdotes of, 179–82; generosity of, 179; death of, 178–79;
+Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; ‘nosey
+Latin,’ 136; Wednesday evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston,
+Madox Brown and Morris, 170; at Kelmscott, 170; passion for angling, 171;
+snoring of young owls, 171; causeries at Kelmscott, 173; the only reviews
+he read, 173; the little carpetless room, 175; writes 750 lines in twelve
+hours, 176; the crib on his desk, 177; offers to bring out an
+édition-de-luxe of Watts’s poems; gets subscribers; a magnificent
+royalty, 179; presentation copies; extravagant generosity; ‘All right,
+old chap’; ‘Ned Jones and I,’ 180; ‘Algernon pay £10 for a book of
+mine!’, 181; disgusted with Stead, the music hall singer and dancer;
+‘damned tomfoolery,’ 181
+
+Moulton, Louise Chandler, 4, 301
+
+Mounet-Sully, as François I in Le Roi s’Amuse, 125
+
+‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ 260
+
+Murchison, 45, 50, 52
+
+‘Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,’ 220
+
+Muret, Maurice, 374, 400
+
+Music, Watts-Dunton’s knowledge of, 38, 89
+
+Myers, F. W. H., 291
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Natura Benigna,’ 97; the keynote of ‘Aylwinism,’ 411
+
+‘Natura Maligna,’ 408; Sir George Birdwood on, 409
+
+Natura Mystica, 73
+
+‘Nature’s Fountain of Youth,’ 268
+
+Nature, ‘Poetic Interpretation of,’ 204; as humourist, 386
+
+Nature-worship, Shintoism, 14, 97; ambition and, 103
+
+‘Nature-worshippers,’ Dictionary for, 68
+
+Neilson, Julia, 117
+
+Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton’s criticism of her acting, 117–18
+
+Nelson, 365
+
+‘New Day, The,’ 92, 107, 162–64, 312, 396, 443
+
+New Year, sonnets on morning of, 409
+
+‘News from Nowhere,’ 173
+
+‘Nibelungenlied,’ 176
+
+Nicol, John, 202
+
+Nicoll, Dr. Robertson, 5; collection of Watts-Dunton’s essays suggested
+by, 6, 22; “Significance of ‘Aylwin,’” essay by, 372; Renascence of
+Wonder in Religion, articles on, 22, 375, 445
+
+Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton’s appreciation of, 117
+
+‘Night and Morning,’ 349
+
+‘Nineteenth Century,’ 290, 291, 442
+
+‘Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death,’ 235
+
+Niobe, 323
+
+Niton Bay, 270
+
+‘Noctes Ambrosianæ, Comedy of,’ Watts-Dunton’s review of, 190–201;
+Lowell’s opinion of same, 298
+
+Norman Cross, vipers of, 104
+
+Norris, H. E., ‘History of St. Ives’ (reference to), 25, 40, 51; River
+Ouse, praise of, 28, 29, 30
+
+North, Christopher: see Wilson, Professor
+
+‘Northern Farmer,’ 387
+
+Norwich horse fair, 106
+
+‘Notes and Queries,’ 50, 51, 56, 57, 88, 161, 171, 316, 317, 318
+
+‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ 125
+
+Novalis, 247, 455
+
+Novel, importance of, 208; of manners, 308; see Fiction.
+
+Novelists, absurdities of popular, 367
+
+Nutt, Alfred, 6
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Octopus of the Golden Isles,’ 148
+
+‘Odyssey,’ Morris’s translation of, 176; 208; 341
+
+‘Œdipus Egyptiacus,’ 226
+
+Olympic, Robson at, 57
+
+Omar, Caliph, 69
+
+Omar Khayyàm Club, 81
+
+Omarian Poems, Watts-Dunton’s, 78, 79, 80, 81
+
+‘Omnipotence of Love.’  The, 287
+
+‘Orchard, The,’ Niton Bay, 270
+
+O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, ‘Marston Nights,’ presence at, 136; 161
+
+Ouse, River, poems on, 28, 29, 30; Carlyle’s libel of, 28–9
+
+Owen, Harry, 317
+
+Oxford Union, Rossetti’s lost frescoes at, 162
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Pain and Death, 173
+
+Palgrave, F. T., 291
+
+‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ 245
+
+Palmerston, 295
+
+Pamphlet literature, 99
+
+‘Pandora,’ Rossetti’s, 21
+
+‘Pantheism’: Dr. Hunt’s book, 49
+
+Parable poetry, 224
+
+Paradis artificiel, 248, 388
+
+Paragraph-mongers, Rossetti and, 155
+
+Parmigiano, Madonna by, 172
+
+Parsimony, verbal, 418
+
+Partridge, Mrs., 382
+
+Patrick, Dr. David, 5
+
+Penn, William, St. Ives, his death there, 41
+
+‘Perfect Cure,’ The, 181
+
+‘Peter Schlemihl,’ 119
+
+Petit Bot Bay, 31, 268
+
+Phelps, 136
+
+Philistia, romance carried into, 327; 386
+
+Philistinism, actresses and, 132
+
+‘Piccadilly,’ Watts-Dunton writes for, 301, 353
+
+‘Pickwick,’ trial scene in, 387
+
+‘Pines, The,’ residence of Watts-Dunton and Swinburne: Christmas at,
+93–4; 262 et seq.; works of art at, 266
+
+Plato, 341
+
+Plot-ridden, ‘Aylwin’ not, 348
+
+Poe, Edgar Allan, on ‘homely’ note in fiction, 325; ‘The Raven,’
+originality of, 419
+
+‘Poems by the Way,’ 173, 177
+
+Poetic prose: see Prose
+
+_ποιήσις_, 341
+
+_ποιητής_, 340
+
+Poetry, wonder element in, 15, 25; English Romantic School, 17; humour
+in, question of, 24; parables in, 224; blank verse, 239; popular and
+artistic, 293; Watts-Dunton’s Essay on, 340, 354, 393; Herodotus, Plato,
+Aristotle, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Bacon on, 340, 341; difference
+between prose and, 339; rhetoric and, 340; poetic impulse, 393; sincerity
+and, conscience in, 394; imagination in, 397; Zoroaster’s definition of,
+398; originality in, 419
+
+‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ Mackenzie Bell’s study of Watts-Dunton
+in, 38
+
+Pollock, Walter, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
+
+Pope, Alexander, periwig poetry of, 25
+
+‘Poppyland,’ Watts-Dunton visits, 270
+
+Portraiture, ethics of, 141, 143
+
+‘Prayer to the Winds,’ 81
+
+Pre-Raphaelite movement, definition of, 16; poets, 160–61
+
+Priam, 355
+
+Primitive poetry, 15
+
+Prinsep, Val, his vindication of Rossetti, 145
+
+Printers’ ink, taint of, 105
+
+Priory Barn, Robson at 57
+
+Prize-fighters, gypsy, 392
+
+‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice,’ 94
+
+Prose, poetic, 339: difference between poetry and, 339; see also
+‘Aylwin,’ Bible Rhythm, Common Prayer, Book of Litany; Manu; Ruskin
+
+Psalms, Watts-Dunton on, 228–41
+
+Publicity, evils of, 262
+
+Purnell, Thomas, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 59
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Quarterly Review,’ on Renascence of Wonder, 16–17; on friendship between
+Morris and Watts-Dunton, 173
+
+Queen Katherine, Watts’s sonnet on Ellen Terry as, 122
+
+Quickly, Mrs., 382
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Rabelais, 196–200, 387
+
+Racine, 132
+
+Rainbow, The Spirit of the, 101
+
+Raleigh, Sir Walter, 423; on ‘command of the sea,’ 427
+
+Rappel, Le, 123
+
+Reade Charles, 325, 348; hardness of touch, 351
+
+Rehan, Ada, 131
+
+Reid, Sir Wemyss, 185
+
+‘Relapse, The,’ 259
+
+Relative humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
+
+Religion, Renascence of Wonder in, 375; poetic, 455
+
+‘Reminiscence of Open-Air Plays,’ Epilogue, 133
+
+Renascence, decorative, connection with pre-Raphaelite movement, 16
+
+Renascence, Jewish-Arabian, connection with instinct of wonder, 14
+
+Renascence of religion, 22
+
+Renascence of Wonder, exemplified in ‘Aylwin,’ 2; origin of phrase, 11;
+meaning of phrase, 13, 17, 374; Garnett on, 11, French Revolution, cause
+of, 13; pre-Raphaelite movement, connection with, 16; Watts-Dunton’s
+article on, 20, 25; in Philistia, 327, 328; in religion, 22, 375; ‘Coming
+of Love, The,’ the most powerful expression of, 25; Watts-Dunton’s
+Treatise on Poetry, 257; ‘Aylwin,’ passages on, 446; foreign critics on,
+374; 9, 325
+
+Repartee, comedy of, 259
+
+Representation, imaginative, 398
+
+Rhetoric, Poetry and, 340
+
+RHONA BOSWELL, see Boswell.
+
+‘Rhona’s Letter,’ 402
+
+Rhyme colour, 412
+
+Rhys, Ernest, ‘Aylwin’ dedicated to, 312; ‘Song of the Wind,’ paraphrase
+by; 313; 377
+
+Rhythm, 239, 412: see Bible Rhythm
+
+Richardson, 367
+
+Richmond Park, Borrow in, 100
+
+Ripon, Lady, 91
+
+‘Rip Van Winkle,’ 121
+
+‘Rivista d’Italia’: see Galimberti, Madame
+
+‘Robinson Crusoe,’ 307
+
+Robinson, F. W., 12
+
+Robson, actor, J. O. Watts’s admiration for, 57; 127, 129
+
+Rogers, S., 39
+
+‘Roi s’Amuse, Le,’ 123
+
+Romanies, Gorgios and, 389; see Gypsies
+
+Romantic movement, 16–25
+
+‘Romany Rye,’ 367
+
+‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 293
+
+‘Roots of the Mountains,’ 173
+
+‘Rose Mary,’ Watts-Dunton’s advice to Rossetti concerning, 139
+
+Rosicrucian Christmas, 94
+
+Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1, 2; Watts-Dunton on, 17, 18, 19, 21; ‘Spirit
+of Wonder’ expressed by, 18, 19; ‘Pandora,’ 21; Poems of, lack of humour
+in, 24; ‘Watts’s magnificent Star Sonnet,’ his appreciation of, 29; Omar
+Khayyàm, translation discovered by, 79; his insomnia; Dr. Hake as his
+physician; grief for his wife’s death; his melancholia; cock-and-bull
+stories as to his treatment of his wife; their origin; wild and whirling
+words; 90–91; stay at Roehampton, 91; Cheyne Walk reunions, 137;
+Watts-Dunton, affection for, 138–69; Watts-Dunton’s influence on, 139,
+140, 149, 150, 154; type of female beauty invented by, 140; dies in
+Watts-Dunton’s arms, 150; illness of, anecdote concerning, 153; Watts
+Dunton’s elegy on, 157; Cheyne Walk green dining-room, description, 161;
+Watts-Dunton’s description of his house, 165–69; his wit and humour, 169;
+‘Spirit of the Rainbow,’ illustration to, 276; references to, 9, 10, 27,
+35, 262, 263; Watts-Dunton’s reminiscences of:—at Marston symposia; the
+Gallic Parnassians; he advises the bardlings to write in French, 136;
+interest in work of others; reciting a bardling’s sonnet, 137; wishes
+Watts to write his life, 140; letter to author about Rossetti, 140;
+Charles Augustus Howell (De Castro), Rossetti’s opinion of, 142; portrait
+as D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’; not idealized; ethics of portraiture of friend;
+amazing detraction of, 144; too much written about him, 145; relations
+with his wife; Val Prinsep’s testimony, 145; ‘lovable—most lovable,’ 145;
+a pious fraud, 153; alleged rudeness to Princess Louise, 155; attitude to
+a disgraced friend, 210; the dishonest critic; ‘By God, if I met such a
+man,’ 211; a generous gift, 267; dislike of publicity; abashed by an
+‘Athenæum’ paragraph, 263
+
+Rossetti, W. M., 149, 154
+
+Rossetti, Mrs. W. M., 275
+
+Rous, 232
+
+Ruskin, 340
+
+Russell, Lord John, 295
+
+Ryan, W. P., 378
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+‘Salaman’ and ‘Absal’ of Jámi, 21
+
+Saltabadil, Febvre as, 129
+
+St. Aldegonde, Disraeli’s ‘softness of touch’ in, 351
+
+St. Francis of Assisi, 38
+
+St. Ives, birthplace of Watts-Dunton, 26; old Saxon name for, 35; George
+Dyer and, 40–41; printing press at, 40; Union Book Club, Watts-Dunton’s
+speech at, 42; History of, 51; East Anglian sympathies of, 78
+
+St. Peter’s Port, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 268
+
+Sainte-Beuve, Watts-Dunton compared to, 2; 399
+
+Saïs, 331
+
+Samary, Jeanne, as Maguelonne, 129
+
+Sampson, Mr., Romany scholar, 367
+
+Sancho Panza, 382
+
+Sandys, Frederick, 267
+
+Sark, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton’s visit to, 269
+
+‘Saturday Review,’ 34, 245, 257, 382
+
+Savile Club, 202
+
+Schiller, 221
+
+‘Scholar Gypsy, The,’ 108
+
+Schopenhauer, 247
+
+Science, man’s good genius, 47–9
+
+Science, Watts-Dunton’s speech on, 42–9
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, his humour, 195; tribute to, 220, 221, 307; 346;
+‘softness of touch’ in portraiture, 350; 367
+
+Scott, William Bell, anecdote of, 184
+
+‘Scullion, Sterne’s fat, foolish,’ 249
+
+‘Semaine Littéraire, La,’ 347, 374, 380
+
+Sex, witchery of, 391
+
+‘Shadow on the Window Blind,’ 164: first printed in Mackenzie Bell’s
+Study of Watts-Dunton in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ q.v.
+
+Shakespeare, spirit of wonder in, 16; 126; 186; 293; richness in style,
+328; 355; 382; 394
+
+‘Shales mare,’ 106
+
+Shandys, the two, 350
+
+Sharp, William, 29; scenery and atmosphere of ‘Aylwin,’ 72, 75; 276, 284;
+influence of Watts-Dunton on Rossetti, 399
+
+Shaw, Byam, ‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s Funeral Pyre,’ illustration of, 366
+
+Shaw, Dr. Norton, intimacy with J. K. Watts, 52
+
+Shelley, 157; 293; ‘Epipsychidion,’ 419
+
+Shintoism, 14
+
+Shirley: see Skelton, Sir John
+
+Shirley Essays, 202
+
+‘Shirley,’ Watts-Dunton’s criticism of, 365
+
+Shorter, Clement, his connection with Slepe Hall, 35
+
+Sibilant, in poetry, 286–88
+
+Siddons, Mrs., 131
+
+Sidestrand, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 269
+
+Sidney, Sir Philip, 365
+
+‘Sigurd,’ 173, 176; 366
+
+‘Silas Marner,’ public-house scene in, 387
+
+Sinfi Lovell, see Lovell
+
+Skeleton, the Golden, 422 et seq.
+
+Skelton, Sir John, his ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ Watts-Dunton’s
+review of, 190–201; Rossetti ‘Reminiscences,’ 202; Watts-Dunton’s
+friendship with, 202
+
+Sleaford, Lord, 353
+
+Slepe Hall, Clement Shorter’s connection with, 35; story told in
+connection with, 36
+
+Sly, Christopher, 388
+
+Smalley, G. W., his article on Whistler, 302
+
+Smart set, 353
+
+‘Smart slating,’ Watts-Dunton on, 207
+
+Smetham, James: see Wilderspin
+
+Smith, Alexander, 44; Herbert Spencer and, 213
+
+Smith, Gypsy, 351
+
+Smith, Sydney, 43, 196
+
+Smollett, 304, 367
+
+Snowdon, 315
+
+Socrates, 45
+
+‘Softness of touch’ in fiction, 350
+
+Sonnet, The, Essay on, reference to, 205
+
+Sophocles, 323, 394
+
+Sothern, 118
+
+Spencer, Herbert, Alexander Smith and, ‘Athenæum’ anecdote, 212–14
+
+Spenser, Edmund, Spirit of Wonder in poetry of, 16
+
+Spirit of Place, 26
+
+‘Spirit of the Sunrise,’ 450
+
+Sport, 65–67; definition of, 68
+
+Sports, field, 65
+
+Squeezing of books, 191
+
+Staël, Madame de, her struggle against tradition of 18th century, 18
+
+Stanley, Fenella, 362, 363
+
+Stead, William Morris and, 181
+
+Stedman, Clarence, his remarks on ‘The Coming of Love,’ 4, 10, 301
+
+Sterne, his humour, 246–55; his indecencies, 253; his ‘softness of
+touch,’ 350; 367, 387
+
+Sternhold, 229
+
+Stevenson, R. L., 10; Watts-Dunton’s criticism of ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Dr.
+Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ 215–21; letter from, 216
+
+Stillman, Mrs., Rossetti’s picture painted from, 172
+
+Stone, E. D., “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” Latin translation by, 147
+
+‘Stories after Nature,’ Wells’s, 53–55
+
+Stourbridge Fair, 65
+
+Strand, the symposium in the, 185
+
+Stratford-on-Avon, Watts-Dunton’s poems on, 31, 32; see also “Christmas
+at the ‘Mermaid,’” 423
+
+Stress in poetry, 344
+
+Strong, Prof. A. S., references to, 1, 5, 132; article on ‘The Coming of
+Love,’ 444; 445
+
+Style, le, c’est la race, 233
+
+Style, the Great, 234
+
+Sufism, 449; in ‘Aylwin,’ 454
+
+‘Suicide Club, The,’ 220
+
+Sully, Professor, contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
+
+Sunrise, Poet of the, 398
+
+Sunsets, in the Fens, 62
+
+Surtees, 367
+
+Swallow Falls, 315
+
+Swift, his humour the opposite of Sterne’s, 250
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 58;
+intercourse and friendship with Watts-Dunton, 89, 268–74; ‘Jubilee
+Greeting’ dedicated to, 273; partly identified with Percy Aylwin, see
+description of his swimming, 268; 279–84; at Théâtre Française, 124;
+dedications to Watts-Dunton, 271, 272; offensive newspaper caricatures
+of, 263; championship of Meredith, 284; on ‘Tom Jones,’ ‘Waverley,’
+‘Aylwin,’ 346; on ‘Aylwin,’ 363; references to, 1, 12, 27, 117, 123, 139,
+147, 157, 170, 180, 181, 184, 328, 413; ANECDOTES OF:—chambers in Great
+James St., 89; never a playgoer, 117; life at ‘The Pines,’ 262 et seq.;
+the great Swinburne myth, 263; the American lady journalist, 264; an
+imaginary interview, 265; an unlovely bard; painfully ‘afflated’; method
+of composition; ‘stamping with both feet,’ 265; friendship with Watts
+began in 1872, 268; inseparable since; housemates at ‘The Pines’; visit
+to Channel Islands; swimming in Petit Bot Bay, 268; Sark; ‘Orion’ Horne’s
+bravado challenge, 269; visits Paris for Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’
+269; swimming at Sidestrand; meets Grant Allen, 269; visits Eastbourne,
+Lancing, Isle of Wight, Cromer, 270; visits to Jowett; Jowett’s
+admiration of Watts, 279; Balliol dinner parties, 280; at the Bodleian,
+282; great novels which are popular, 273
+
+Swinburne, Miss, 299
+
+Symons, Arthur, ‘Coming of Love,’ article on, 257
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Table-Talk, Watts-Dunton’s, Rossetti on, 183
+
+Tabley, Lord de, 277
+
+Taine, 232
+
+‘Tale of Beowulf,’ 173
+
+Taliesin, ‘Song of the Wind,’ 313
+
+Talk on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘A, 116
+
+Tarno Rye, 351, 391
+
+Tate and Brady, 232
+
+Telepathy, dogs and, 82–6
+
+Temple, Lord and Lady Mount, 270
+
+Tenderness, in English hero, 365
+
+‘Tennyson, Alfred, Birthday Address,’ 32
+
+‘Tennyson, Alfred,’ sonnet to, 286
+
+Tennyson, Lord, 4, 32, 144; dishonest criticism, opinion of, 211;
+Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 285; Watts-Dunton’s criticism of and
+essays on, 289, 290; ‘Memoir,’ Watts-Dunton’s contribution, 291;
+anecdotes concerning, 287–89; ‘The Princess,’ defects of, 290; portraits
+of, Watts-Dunton’s articles on, 290; ‘Maud,’ compared with Rhona Boswell,
+413; WATTS-DUNTON AND:—sympathy between him and, 285; sonnet on birthday,
+286; meeting at garden party; open invitation to Aldworth and
+Farringford; his ear not defective, 286; sensibility to delicate metrical
+nuances, 287; challenges a sibilant in a sonnet, 287; ‘scent’ better than
+‘scents,’ 287; his morbid modesty, 288; a poet is not born to the purple,
+288; reading ‘Becket’ in summer-house; desired free criticism, 288;
+alleged rudeness to women, 289; detraction of, 289; could not invent a
+story, 289; the nucleus of ‘Maud,’ 289
+
+Terry, Ellen, Watts-Dunton’s friendship with, 117, 121; sonnet on, 122
+
+Thackeray, 295, 305, 325, 328; ‘softness of touch,’ 350–53
+
+Théâtre Française, Swinburne and Watts at, 123–29
+
+Thicket, The, St. Ives, 30, 32
+
+Thoreau, teaching of, 69; love of wind, 371; 442
+
+Thuthe, the, Kisāgotámī and, 455–6
+
+‘Thyrsis,’ 157
+
+Tieck, 19
+
+‘Times,’ 89, 245, 301, 370
+
+‘Toast to Omar Khayyám,’ 79
+
+Tooke, Horne, 39
+
+‘T. P.’s Weekly,’ 89
+
+‘Torquemada,’ motif of, 125
+
+Tourneur, Cyril, ‘spirit of wonder’ in, 16
+
+Traill, H. D., his criticism, 207; Watts-Dunton’s meeting with, 243;
+review of his ‘Sterne,’ 246–55; his letter to MacColl, 243; meets him at
+dinner, 243; picturesque appearance; boyish lisp; calls at ‘The Pines’;
+interesting figures at his gatherings; ‘a man of genius’; asks Watts to
+write for ‘Literature’; his geniality as an editor, 244; why ‘Literature’
+failed, 245
+
+‘Travailleurs de la Mer, Les,’ 370
+
+‘Treasure Island,’ 220
+
+Triboulet, Got as, 124–29
+
+‘Tribute, The,’ 289
+
+‘Tristram of Lyonesse,’ dedicated to Watts-Dunton, 272
+
+Troubadours and Trouvères, The, 204
+
+Trus’hul, the Romany Cross, 101
+
+Turner, 299
+
+Twentieth Century, Cosmogony of, 373
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Ukko, the Sky God, 73
+
+‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ rustic humour of, 186
+
+‘Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,’ 53
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Vacquerie, Auguste, ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’ produced by, 123
+
+Vanbrugh, Irene, 131
+
+Vanbrugh, Watts-Dunton’s article on, 258
+
+Vance, the Great, 182
+
+Vaughan, his ‘Hours with the Mystics,’ 58
+
+‘Veiled Queen, The,’ 57, 229, 374, 375
+
+Vernunft of Man, the Bible and the, 230
+
+Verse, English, accent in, 344
+
+Vezin, Hermann, 118; Mrs., 131
+
+Victoria, Queen, Watts-Dunton’s tribute to, 274
+
+Villain in Hugo’s novels, 125; ‘Aylwin,’ a novel without a, 349
+
+Villon, 388
+
+Virgil, wonder in, 15; 208
+
+Vision, absolute and relative, 354; in ‘Aylwin,’ 357 et seq.
+
+‘Vita Nuova,’ 412
+
+‘Volsunga Saga,’ 176
+
+Voltaire, 259
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Wagner, 89, 412
+
+Wahrheit and Dichtung, in ‘Aylwin,’ 50
+
+Wales, Watts-Dunton’s sympathy with, 312; popularity of ‘Aylwin’ in, 314;
+descriptions of, 315, 317, 318; Welsh accent, 319–20
+
+Wales, Prince of, anecdote of, 67
+
+Warburton, 69
+
+‘Wassail Chorus,’ 438
+
+Waterloo Bridge, Borrow on, 115
+
+‘Water of the Wondrous Isles,’ 181
+
+Watson, William, Grant Allen on, 207
+
+Watts, A. E., Watts-Dunton’s brother, articled as solicitor, 72; Cyril
+Aylwin, identification with, 87; his humour, 88; death, 89
+
+Watts, G. F., Rossetti’s portrait by, 161
+
+Watts, James Orlando, Watts-Dunton’s uncle, identity of character with
+Philip Aylwin, 51, 56–60
+
+Watts, J. K., Watts-Dunton’s father, account of, 50, 53; scientific
+celebrities, intimacy with, 50–53; scientific reputation of, 52
+
+Watts, William K., description of, 160
+
+WATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE, memoirs of, 4; monograph on, reply to author’s
+suggestion to write, 6, 7; plan of same, 9; description of, 278–9;
+Boyhood:—birthplace, 26; Cromwell’s elder wine, 37; Cambridge
+school-days, 37, 66; St. Ives Union Book Club, speech delivered at, 15,
+42–49; family of Dunton, 53; father and son—the double brain, 53–5; as
+child critic, 55; interest in sport and athletics, 65; Deerfoot and the
+Prince of Wales, 67; period of Nature study, 67; articled to solicitor,
+72; Life in London:—solicitor’s practice, 88; life at Sydenham, 89;
+London Society, 89, 353; interest in slum-life, 92; connection with
+theatrical world, 117–35; Characteristics:—Love of animals, 38, 39,
+82–85; interest in poor, 92–4; conversational powers, 183; genius for
+friendship, 443; indifference to fame, 3, 183, 204; habit of early
+rising, 279; influence, 1, 2, 22, 452; dual personality, 322, 356; music,
+love of, 38, 89; natural science, proficiency in, 38; optimism, 9, 457;
+identification with Henry Aylwin, 356; Romany blood in, 361;
+Writings:—‘Academy,’ invitation to write for, 187; ‘Athenæum,’ invitation
+to write for, 188, 202; contributions to, 1, 55, 170, 173, 189–201, 204;
+his treatise on Sonnet—Dr. Karl Leutzner on, 205; critical principles,
+205; ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ articles, 1, 2, 4, 6, 205, 256, 257–8;
+difference between prose and poetry, 339; 340, 393; poetic style, 323;
+‘Examiner’ articles, 184; see also Minto; Critical Work:—Swinburne’s
+opinion of, 1; character of, 8, 205–208; critical and creative work,
+relation between, 203; critical and imaginative work interwoven, 370;
+School of Criticism founded, 4; Essays on Tennyson, 290; Lowell on, 399;
+Dramatic Criticism:—119, 120, 121, 123–30; Poetry:—2, 4, 15, 393–441;
+Rossetti on, 399; Prose Writings:—character of, 2, 321–25, 327–92, 350,
+453; richness of style, 329, 330, 331, 333, 336; unity of his writings,
+445; American friends of, 295–311; Gypsies, description of first meeting
+with, 61; Friends, Reminiscences of:—APPLETON, PROF: at Bell Scott’s and
+Rossetti’s; Hegel on the brain; asks Watts to write for ‘Academy,’ 187;
+wants him to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns, 188; in a
+rage; Watts explains why he has gone into enemy’s camp, 201; a
+Philistine, 202; BLACK, WILLIAM: resemblance to Watts, 185; meeting at
+Justin McCarthy’s, 186; Watts mistaken for Black, 186; BORROW, GEORGE:
+his first meeting with, 95; his shyness, 99; Watts attacks it; tries
+Bamfylde Moore Carew; then tries beer, the British bruiser, philology,
+Ambrose Gwinett, etc., 100; a stroll in Richmond Park; visit to
+‘Bald-faced Stag’; Jerry Abershaw’s sword; his gigantic green umbrella,
+101–102; tries Whittlesea Mere; Borrow’s surprise; vipers of Norman
+Cross; Romanies and vipers, 104; disclaims taint of printers’ ink; ‘Who
+are you?’ 105; an East Midlander; the Shales Mare, 106; Cromer sea best
+for swimming; rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, 106; goes to a
+gypsy camp; talks about Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gypsy,’ 108; resolves
+to try it on gypsy woman; watches hawk and magpie, 109; meets Perpinia
+Boswell; ‘the popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,’ 110; Rhona Boswell, girl
+of the dragon flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to smoke, 112;
+description of Rhona, 113; the Devil’s Needles; reads Glanville’s story;
+Rhona bored by Arnold, 114; hatred of tobacco, 115; last sight of Borrow
+on Waterloo Bridge, 115; sonnet on, 116; BROWN, MADOX: 10, 12, 35, 136,
+170; anecdote about portrait of, 274; BROWN, OLIVER MADOX: his novel,
+274–6; BROWNING: Watts chaffs him in ‘Athenæum’; chided by Swinburne,
+222; 223–27; sees him at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him
+to slip away; bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell astonished
+at his magnanimity, 222–23; the review in question, ‘Ferishtah’s
+Fancies,’ 223–26; GROOME, FRANK: a luncheon at ‘The Pines,’ 79; ‘Old
+Fitz’; patted on the head by, 79; see also 50, 68, 72, 285, 351, 364,
+367, 372, 420; HAKE, GORDON: Introduces Borrow, 95; see ‘New Day’;
+physician to Rossetti and to Lady Ripon, 90–91; HARTE, BRET: Watts’s
+estimate of, 302–11; histrionic gifts, 302; meeting with; drive round
+London music halls, 303; ‘Holborn,’ ‘Oxford’; Evans’s supper-rooms; Paddy
+Green; meets him again at breakfast; a fine actor lost, 303; LOWELL,
+JAMES RUSSELL: meets him at dinner, 295; he attacks England; directs
+diatribe at Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel, 296; recognition; cites
+Watts’s first article, 298; his anglophobia turns into anglomania, 299;
+likes English climate, 300; MARSTON, WESTLAND: symposia at Chalk Farm;
+famous actors and actresses, 117; table talk about ‘The Bells’ and ‘Rip
+Van Winkle,’ 119; on staff of ‘Examiner,’ 184; the sub-Swinburnians at
+the Marston mornings; the divine Théophile; the Gallic Parnassus, 136;
+MEREDITH, GEORGE: 6, 283, 284, 325, 328, 417, 418; MINTO, PROF.:
+neighbours in Danes Inn; editing ‘Examiner’; secures Watts; first article
+appears; Bell Scott’s party; Scott wants to know name of new writer, 184;
+Watts slates himself, 185; Minto’s Monday evening symposia, 185; MORRIS,
+WILLIAM: Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; ‘nosey Latin,’ 136; Wednesday
+evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston, Madox Brown and Morris,
+170; at Kelmscott, 170; passion for angling, 171; snoring of young owls,
+171; causeries at Kelmscott, 173; the only reviews he read, 173; the
+little carpetless room, 175; writes 750 lines in twelve hours, 176; the
+crib on his desk, 177; offers to bring out an édition-de-luxe of Watts’s
+poems; gets subscribers; a magnificent royalty, 179; presentation copies;
+extravagant generosity; ‘All right, old chap’; ‘Ned Jones and I,’ 180;
+‘Algernon pay £10 for a book of mine!’ 181; disgusted with Stead, the
+music-hall singer and dancer; ‘damned tomfoolery,’ 181; ROSSETTI, DANTE
+GABRIEL: at Marston symposia; the Gallic Parnassians; he advises the
+bardlings to write in French, 136; interest in work of others; reciting a
+bardling’s sonnet, 137; wishes Watts to write his life, 140; Swinburne on
+Watts’s influence over, 139; letter to author about Rossetti, 140;
+Charles Augustus Howell (De Castro), Rossetti’s opinion of, 142; portrait
+as D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’; not idealized; ethics of portraiture of friend;
+amazing detraction of, 144; too much written about him, 145; relations
+with his wife; Val Prinsep’s testimony, 145; ‘lovable, most lovable,’
+145; dies in Watts’s arms, 150; a pious fraud, 153; alleged rudeness to
+Princess Louise, 155; described in ‘Aylwin,’ 165–9; his wit and humour,
+169; attitude to a disgraced friend, 210; the dishonest critic; ‘By God,
+if I met such a man,’ 211; a generous gift, 267; dislike of publicity;
+abashed by an ‘Athenæum’ paragraph, 263; SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES:
+James Orlando Watts and, 58; chambers in Great James Street, 89; life at
+‘The Pines,’ 262 et seq.; offensive newspaper caricature of, 263; the
+great Swinburne myth, 263; the American lady journalist, 264; an
+imaginary interview, 265; an unlovely bard; painfully ‘afflated’; method
+of composition; ‘stamping with both feet,’ 265; friendship with Watts
+began in 1872, 268; inseparable since; housemates at ‘The Pines’; visit
+to Channel Islands; swimming in Petit Bot Bay, 268; Sark; ‘Orion’ Horne’s
+bravado challenge, 269; visits Paris for Jubilee of ‘Le Roi s’Amuse,’
+269; swimming at Sidestrand; meets Grant Allen, 269; visits Eastbourne,
+Lancing, Isle of Wight, Cromer, 270; sonnet to Watts, 271; dedicates
+‘Tristram of Lyonesse’ to Watts, 272; also Collected Edition of Poems,
+272; visits to Jowett; Jowett’s admiration of Watts, 279; Balliol dinner
+parties, 280; at the Bodleian, 282; great novels which are popular, 273;
+champions Meredith, 284; TENNYSON, ALFRED: friendship with, 285; sympathy
+between him and, 285; sonnet on birthday, 286; meeting at garden party;
+open invitation to Aldworth and Farringford; his ear not defective, 286;
+sensibility to delicate metrical nuances, 287; challenges a sibilant in a
+sonnet, 287; ‘scent’ better than ‘scents,’ 287; his morbid modesty, 288;
+a poet is not born to the purple, 288; reading ‘Becket’ in summer-house;
+desired free criticism, 288; alleged rudeness to women, 289; detraction
+of, 289; could not invent a story, 289; the nucleus of ‘Maud,’ 289; his
+articles on portraits of, 290; TRAILL, H. D.: reviews his ‘Sterne’; his
+letter to MacColl, 243; meets him at dinner, 243; picturesque appearance;
+boyish lisp; calls at ‘The Pines’; interesting figures at his gatherings;
+‘a man of genius’; asks Watts to write for ‘Literature’; his geniality as
+an editor, 244; why ‘Literature’ failed, 245; WHISTLER, J. MCNEILL: Cyril
+Aylwin not a portrait of, 88; anecdotes of De Castro, 142; neighbour of
+Rossetti, 156; close friendship with Watts, 301; hostility to Royal
+Academy, 301–2; his first lithographs, 301–2; engaged with Watts on
+‘Piccadilly,’ 301, 353; ‘To Theodore Watts, the Worldling,’ 353
+
+Watts-Dunton, Theodore, Swinburne’s sonnets to, 271, 272
+
+‘Waverley,’ Swinburne on; its new dramatic method; cause of its success;
+imitated by Dumas, 346
+
+Way, T., Whistler’s first lithographs, 301, 302
+
+Webster, ‘Spirit of Wonder’ in, 16
+
+‘Well at the World’s End,’ 173
+
+Wells, Charles, 53–55
+
+‘Westminster Abbey, In’ (Burial of Tennyson), 291
+
+‘W. H. Mr.,’ 424–26
+
+‘What the Silent Voices said,’ 291
+
+Whewell, intimacy with J. K. Watts, 52
+
+Whistler, J. McNeill:—Cyril Aylwin not a portrait of, 88; anecdotes of De
+Castro, 142; neighbour of Rossetti, 156; close friendship with Watts,
+301; his first lithographs, 301–2; hostility to Royal Academy, 301–2;
+engaged with Watts on ‘Piccadilly,’ 301, 353; ‘To Theodore Watts, the
+Worldling,’ 353
+
+White, Gilbert, 50
+
+Whiteing, Richard, 364
+
+‘White Ship, The,’ 153, 154
+
+Whittlesea Mere, 104
+
+Whyte-Melville, 352, 367
+
+Wilderspin, 331: see Smetham, James
+
+Wilkie, his realism, humour of, 387
+
+Williams,’ Scholar,’ contributor to ‘Examiner,’ 184
+
+Williams, Smith, 275
+
+‘William Wilson,’ 219
+
+Willis, Parker, 264
+
+Wilson, Professor, Watts-Dunton’s essay on his ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ,’
+190–201
+
+Wimbledon Common, Borrow and, 101; Watts-Dunton and, 279
+
+Wind, love of the, Thoreau’s, 370, 371
+
+Women, as actresses, 131; heroic type of, 365
+
+Wonder: see Renascence of Wonder; old and new, 15; Bible as great book
+of, 228; place in race development, 14
+
+‘Wood-Haunter’s Dream, The,’ 276
+
+Wordsworth, William, definition of language, 39; his ideal John Bull, 224
+
+Word-twisting, 325, 327
+
+Work, heresy of, 68
+
+‘World,’ The, Rossetti’s letter to, 155
+
+‘World’s Classics,’ edition of ‘Aylwin’ in, 374
+
+‘Wuthering Heights,’ 342, 345
+
+Wynne, Winifred, character of, 314, 315, 363; love of the wind, 371
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Yarmouth, 106
+
+Yorickism, 250
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Zoroaster, heresy of work, 68; definition of poetry, 398
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+     Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  ‘Studies in Prose.’
+
+{2}  ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ vol. x., p. 581.
+
+{34}  The meanings of the gypsy words are:
+
+baval                              wind
+chaw                              grass
+chirikels                         birds
+dukkerin’               fortune-telling
+farmin’ ryes                    farmers
+gals                              girls
+ghyllie                            song
+ghyllie                            song
+gorgie                    Gentile woman
+gorgies                        Gentiles
+kairs                             homes
+kas                                 hay
+kas-kairin’                   haymaking
+kem                                 sun
+lennor                           summer
+puv                               field
+Romany chies                gypsy girls
+Shoshus                           hares
+
+{60}  ‘Notes and Queries,’ August 2, 1902.
+
+{73a}  Among the gypsies of all countries the happiest possible
+‘Dukkeripen’ (i.e. prophetic symbol of Natura Mystica) is a hand-shaped
+golden cloud floating in the sky.  It is singular that the same idea is
+found among races entirely disconnected with them—the Finns, for
+instance, with whom Ukko, the ‘sky god,’ or ‘angel of the sunrise,’ was
+called the ‘golden king’ and ‘leader of the clouds,’ and his Golden Hand
+was more powerful than all the army of Death.  The ‘Golden Hand’ is
+sometimes called the Lover’s Dukkeripen.
+
+{73b}  Good-luck.
+
+{74}  Child.
+
+{76}  Pretty mouth.
+
+{82}  A famous swimming dog belonging to the writer.
+
+{88}  ‘Notes and Queries,’ June 7, 1902.
+
+{112}  Bosom.
+
+{139}  I think I am not far wrong in saying that he whom Mr. Benson heard
+make this remark was a more illustrious poet than even D. G. Rossetti,
+the greatest poet indeed of the latter half of the nineteenth century,
+the author of ‘Erechtheus’ and ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’
+
+{147}  As Mr. Swinburne has pronounced Mr. Stone’s translation to be in
+itself so fine as to be almost a work of genius, I will quote it here:—
+
+                               Θειος ἀοιδός
+
+    Felix, qui potuit gentem illustrare canendo,
+    quique decus patriae claris virtutibus addit
+    succurritque laboranti, tutamque periclis
+    eruit, hostilesque minas avertit acerbo
+    dente lacessitae; bene, quicquid fecerit audax,
+    explevisse iuvat: metam tenet ille quadrigis,
+    praemia victor habet, quamvis tuba vivida famae
+    ignoret titulos, vel si flammante sagitta
+    oppugnet Livor quam mens sibi muniit arcem.
+    quod si fata mihi virtutis gaudia tantae
+    invideant, nec fas Anglorum extendere fines
+    latius, et nitidae primordia libertatis,
+    Anglia cui praecepit iter, cantare poetae;
+    si numeris laudare meam vel marte Parentem
+    non mihi contingat, nec Divom adsumere vires
+    atque inconcessos sibi vindicet alter honores,
+    dignior ille mihi frater, quem iure saluto—
+    illum divino praestantem numine amabo.
+
+{157}  Philip Bourke Marston.
+
+{286}  According to a Mohammedan tradition, the mountains of Kaf are
+entirely composed of gems, whose reflected splendours colour the sky.
+
+{291}  ‘Tennyson: A Memoir,’ by his son (1897), vol. ii. p. 479.
+
+{339}  “Tanto è vero, che ‘Aylwin’ fu cominciato a scrivere in versi, e
+mutato di forma soltanto quando l’intreccio, in certo modo prendendo la
+mano al poeta, rese necessario un genere di sua natura meno astretto alla
+rappresentazione di scorcio; e che l’Avvento d’amore, ove le circostanze
+di fatto sono condensate in modo da dar pieno risalto al motivo
+filosofico, riesce una cosa, a mio credere, più perfetta.”
+
+{383}  ‘Notes and Queries,’ June 7, 1902.
+
+{403a}  Mostly pronounced ‘mullo,’ but sometimes in the East Midlands
+‘mollo.’
+
+{403b}  Mostly pronounced ‘kaulo,’ but sometimes in the East Midlands
+‘kollo.’
+
+{404}  The gypsies are great observers of the cuckoo, and call certain
+spring winds ‘cuckoo storms,’ because they bring over the cuckoo earlier
+than usual.
+
+{427}  ‘England is a country that can never be conquered while the
+Sovereign thereof has the command of the sea.’—RALEIGH.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON***
+
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Theodore Watts-Dunton, by James Douglas</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Theodore Watts-Dunton, by James Douglas
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Theodore Watts-Dunton
+       Poet, Novelist, Critic
+
+
+Author: James Douglas
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2013  [eBook #41792]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1904 Hodder and Stoughton edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p0ab.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Theodore Watts-Dunton, from a painting by Miss H. B. Norris"
+title=
+"Theodore Watts-Dunton, from a painting by Miss H. B. Norris"
+src="images/p0as.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1>THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center">POET NOVELIST CRITIC</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+JAMES DOUGLAS</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p0bb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Decorative graphic, Natura Benigna"
+title=
+"Decorative graphic, Natura Benigna"
+src="images/p0bs.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">WITH
+TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS</span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">HODDER AND STOUGHTON</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">27 PATERNOSTER ROW</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">1904</p>
+<h2><a name="pagevii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vii</span>SYNOPSIS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Introduction</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER I</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Renascence of Wonder</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page11">11</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER II</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Cowslip Country</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER III</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Critic in the Bud</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER IV</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Characters in the Microcosm</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER V</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Early Glimpses of the
+Gypsies</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page61">61</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER VI</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Sport and Work</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><a
+name="pageviii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. viii</span>CHAPTER
+VII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">East Anglia</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER VIII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">London</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER IX</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">George Borrow</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page95">95</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER X</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Acted Drama</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XI</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Dante Gabriel Rossetti</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page138">138</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">William Morris</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XIII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page183">183</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XIV</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page190">190</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><a
+name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p. ix</span>CHAPTER
+XV</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Great Book of Wonder</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XVI</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">A Humourist upon Humour</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page242">242</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XVII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">&lsquo;The Life
+Poetic&rsquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page262">262</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XVIII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">American Friends: Lowell, Bret Harte,
+and Others</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XIX</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Wales</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page312">312</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XX</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Imaginative and Didactic
+Prose</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page321">321</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXI</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Methods of Prose
+Fiction</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page345">345</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">A Story With Two Heroines</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page363">363</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><a
+name="pagex"></a><span class="pagenum">p. x</span>CHAPTER
+XXIII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Renascence of Wonder in
+Religion</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page372">372</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXIV</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Renascence of Wonder in
+Humour</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXV</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Gorgios and Romanies</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page389">389</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXVI</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">&lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page393">393</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXVIII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">&ldquo;Christmas at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid&rsquo;&rdquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page422">422</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER XXVIII</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Conclusion</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page442">442</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="pagexi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xi</span>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Theodore Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; From a painting by Miss H. B.
+Norris</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Frontispiece</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Reverie.&nbsp; Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at &lsquo;The
+Pines&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.&nbsp; (From a Water
+Colour by Fraser at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page28">28</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;The Thicket,&rsquo; St. Ives.&nbsp; (From a Water
+Colour by Fraser at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Slepe Hall: Cromwell&rsquo;s Supposed Residence at St.
+Ives.&nbsp; (From an Oil Painting at &lsquo;The
+Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xii</span>&lsquo;Evening Dreams with the Poets.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+(From an Oil Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Painted
+and Carved Cabinet</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A Letter Box on the Broads.&nbsp; (From an Oil Painting at
+&lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Pandora.&nbsp; Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at &lsquo;The
+Pines&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;The Green Dining Room,&rsquo; 16 Cheyne Walk.&nbsp;
+(From a Painting by Dunn, at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>One of the Carved Mirrors at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo;
+decorated with Dunn&rsquo;s copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at
+the Oxford Union</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page162">162</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Kelmscott Manor.&nbsp; (From a Water Colour by Miss May
+Morris.)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;&nbsp; (From a Drawing by Herbert
+Railton.)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page262">262</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexiii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xiii</span>A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the
+Lacquer Cabinet</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page266">266</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Summer at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;&mdash;I</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Chinese
+Divan described in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Summer at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;&mdash;II</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page274">274</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;Picture for a Story.&rsquo;&nbsp; (Face and
+Instrument designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page276">276</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page312">312</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Moel Siabod and the River Lledr</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page314">314</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Snowdon and Glaslyn</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page318">318</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff.&nbsp; (From an
+Oil Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page342">342</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexiv"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xiv</span>Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh.&nbsp; (From a Painting at
+&lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page364">364</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;John the Pilgrim.&rsquo;&nbsp; (By Arthur Hacker,
+A.R.A.)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page416">416</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="pagexvi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xvi</span>NATURA BENIGNA</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><i>What power is this</i>? <i>what witchery
+wins my feet</i><br />
+<i>To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow</i>,<br />
+<i>All silent as the emerald gulfs below</i>,<br />
+<i>Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat</i>?<br />
+<i>What thrill of earth and heaven</i>&mdash;<i>most wild</i>,
+<i>most sweet</i>&mdash;<br />
+<i>What answering pulse that all the senses know</i>,<br />
+<i>Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow</i><br />
+<i>Where</i>, <i>far away</i>, <i>the skies and mountains
+meet</i>?<br />
+<i>Mother</i>, &rsquo;<i>tis I reborn</i>: <i>I know thee
+well</i>:<br />
+<i>That throb I know and all it prophesies</i>,<br />
+<i>O Mother and Queen</i>, <i>beneath the olden spell</i><br />
+<i>Of silence</i>, <i>gazing from thy hills and skies</i>!<br />
+<i>Dumb Mother</i>, <i>struggling with the years to tell</i><br
+/>
+<i>The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p0cb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Reverie.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines"
+title=
+"Reverie.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines"
+src="images/p0cs.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+1</span>Introduction</h2>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to
+do one thing ere the wide circle and profound depth of his genius
+were to the full acknowledged: that one thing was&mdash;to
+die.&rsquo;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Douglas Jerrold</span>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> in the inner circle of
+English letters this study of a living writer will need no
+apology, it may be well to explain for the general reader the
+reasons which moved me to undertake it.</p>
+<p>Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur
+Strong, Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been
+the chief source of his education.&nbsp; He replied:
+&ldquo;Cambridge, scholastically, and Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+articles in the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; and
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; from the purely literary point
+of view.&nbsp; I have been a reader of them for many years, and
+it would be difficult for me to say what I should have been
+without them.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that
+he bought the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; simply
+to possess one article&mdash;Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s article on
+Poetry.&nbsp; There are many other men of letters who would give
+similar testimony.&nbsp; With regard to his critical work, Mr.
+Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on
+Poetry, describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as &lsquo;the first critic of
+our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any
+age,&rsquo; <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1"
+class="citation">[1]</a> a judgment which, according to the
+article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; Rossetti endorsed.&nbsp; In
+this same article it is further said:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;He came to exercise a most important
+influence on the art and culture of the day; but although he has
+written enough to fill many volumes&mdash;in the
+&lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <a name="page2"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 2</span>the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;
+(since 1876), the &lsquo;Nineteenth Century,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Fortnightly Review,&rsquo; etc.&mdash;he has let year
+after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always
+dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really
+anonymous, and are quoted by the press both in England and in
+Germany as his.&nbsp; But, having wrapped up his talents in a
+weekly review, he is only ephemerally known to the general
+public, except for the sonnets and other poems that, from the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; etc., have found their way into
+anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has
+contributed to the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Encyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; etc.&nbsp; The
+chief note of his poetry&mdash;much of it written in
+youth&mdash;is its individuality, the source of its inspiration
+Nature and himself.&nbsp; For he who of all men has most
+influenced his brother poets has himself remained least
+influenced by them.&nbsp; So, too, his prose
+writings&mdash;literary mainly, but ranging also over folk-lore,
+ethnology, and science generally&mdash;are marked as much by
+their independence and originality as by their suggestiveness,
+harmony, incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight.&nbsp;
+They have made him a force in literature to which only
+Sainte-Beuve, not Jeffrey, is a parallel.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2"
+class="citation">[2]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+work, written before his theory of the &lsquo;Renascence of
+Wonder&rsquo; was exemplified in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love,&rsquo; show, I think, that this book
+would have had a right to exist even if his critical writings had
+been collected into volumes; but as this collection has never
+been made, and I believe never will be made by the author, I feel
+that to do what I am now doing is to render the reading public a
+real service.&nbsp; For many <a name="page3"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 3</span>years he has been urged by his friends
+to collect his critical articles, but although several men of
+letters have offered to relieve him of that task, he has remained
+obdurate.</p>
+<p>Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was
+not an eager student of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s writings.&nbsp;
+Like most boys born with the itch for writing, I began to spill
+ink on paper in my third lustre.&nbsp; The fermentation of the
+soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy, modelled upon
+&lsquo;Lycidas,&rsquo; on the death of an indulgent aunt, also
+drove me to welter in drowsy critical journals.&nbsp; By some
+humour of chance I stumbled upon the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; and there I found week by week
+writing that made me tingle with the rapture of discovery.&nbsp;
+The personal magic of some unknown wizard led me into realms of
+gold and kingdoms of romance.&nbsp; I used to count the days till
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; appeared in my Irish home, and I
+spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into
+ponderous tomes.&nbsp; Well I remember the advent of the old,
+white-bearded Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes:
+even now I can smell the pungent odour of the damp paste and
+glue.&nbsp; In those days I was a solitary bookworm, living far
+from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name of the
+magician who was carrying me into so &lsquo;many goodly states
+and kingdoms.&rsquo;&nbsp; With boyish audacity I wrote to the
+editor of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; begging him to
+disclose the secret; and I am sure my na&iuml;ve appeal provoked
+a smile in Took&rsquo;s Court.&nbsp; But although the editor was
+dumb, I exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials,
+&lsquo;J. D.,&rsquo; under the solemn rubric, &lsquo;To
+Correspondents.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles
+with the unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the
+name of my hero, Theodore Watts.&nbsp; Of <a
+name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 4</span>course, the
+sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my execrable imitation of
+&lsquo;Australia&rsquo;s Mother&rsquo; was printed in the
+&lsquo;Belfast News-Letter&rsquo; I felt like Byron when he woke
+up and found himself famous.&nbsp; Afterwards, when I had plunged
+into the surf of literary London, I learnt that the writer who
+had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was well known in
+cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.</p>
+<p>There was, indeed, no account of him in print.&nbsp; It was
+not till 1887 that I found a brief but masterly memoir in
+&lsquo;Celebrities of the Century.&rsquo;&nbsp; The article
+concluded with the statement that in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; and in the Ninth Edition of the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; Mr. Watts-Dunton had
+&lsquo;founded a school of criticism which discarded conventional
+authority, and sought to test all literary effects by the light
+of first principles merely.&rsquo;&nbsp; These words encouraged
+me, for they told me that as a boy I had not been wrong in
+thinking that I had discovered a master and a guide in
+literature.&nbsp; Then came the memoir of Philip Bourke Marston
+by the American poetess, Louise Chandler Moulton, in which she
+described Mr. Watts-Dunton as &lsquo;a poet whose noble work won
+for him the intimate friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord
+Tennyson, and was the first link in that chain of more than
+brotherly love which binds him to Swinburne, his housemate at
+present and for many years past.&rsquo;&nbsp; I also came across
+Clarence Stedman&rsquo;s remarks upon the opening of &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love,&rsquo; &lsquo;Mother Carey&rsquo;s
+Chicken,&rsquo; first printed in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was enthusiastic about the
+poet&rsquo;s perception of &lsquo;Nature&rsquo;s grander
+aspects,&rsquo; and spoke of his poetry as being &lsquo;quite
+independent of any bias derived from the eminent poets with whom
+his life has been closely associated.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 5</span>When
+afterwards I made his acquaintance, our intercourse led to the
+formation of a friendship which has deepened my gratitude for the
+spiritual and intellectual guidance I have found in his writings
+for nearly twenty years.&nbsp; Owing to the popularity of
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; and of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;which the late Lord Acton, in
+&lsquo;The Annals of Politics and Culture,&rsquo; placed at the
+head of the three most important books published in
+1898&mdash;Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s name is now familiar to every
+fairly educated person.&nbsp; About few men living is there so
+much literary curiosity; and this again is a reason for writing a
+book about him.</p>
+<p>The idea of making an elaborate study of his work, however,
+did not come to me until I received an invitation from Dr.
+Patrick, the editor of Chambers&rsquo;s &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia
+of English Literature,&rsquo; to write for that publication an
+article on Mr. Watts-Dunton&mdash;an article which had been
+allotted to Professor Strong, but which he had been obliged
+through indisposition to abandon at the last moment.&nbsp; I
+undertook to do this.&nbsp; But within the limited space at my
+command I was able only very briefly to discuss his work as a
+poet.&nbsp; Soon afterwards I was invited by my friend, Dr.
+Robertson Nicoll, to write a monograph upon Mr. Watts-Dunton for
+Messrs. Hodder &amp; Stoughton, and, if I should see my way to do
+so, to sound him on the subject.&nbsp; My only difficulty was in
+approaching Mr. Watts-Dunton, for I knew how constantly he had
+been urged by the press to collect his essays, and how
+persistently he had declined to do so.&nbsp; Nevertheless, I
+wrote to him, telling him how gladly I should undertake the task,
+and how sure I was that the book was called for.&nbsp; His answer
+was so characteristic that I must give it here:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+6</span>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">My dear Mr.
+Douglas</span>,&mdash;It must now be something like fifteen years
+since Mr. John Lane, who was then compiling a bibliography of
+George Meredith, asked me to consent to his compiling a
+bibliography of my articles in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;
+and elsewhere, and although I emphatically declined to sanction
+such a bibliography, he on several occasions did me the honour to
+renew his request.&nbsp; I told him, as I have told one or two
+other generous friends, that although I had put into these
+articles the best criticism and the best thought at my command, I
+considered them too formless to have other than an ephemeral
+life.&nbsp; I must especially mention the name of Mr. Alfred
+Nutt, who for years has been urging me to let him publish a
+selection from my critical essays.&nbsp; I am really proud to
+record this, because Mr. Nutt is not only an eminent publisher
+but an admirable scholar and a man of astonishing
+accomplishments.&nbsp; I had for years, let me confess, cherished
+the idea that some day I might be able to take my various
+expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon poetry,
+and mould them into a coherent and, perhaps, into a harmonious
+whole.&nbsp; This alone would have satisfied me.&nbsp; But year
+by year the body of critical writing from my pen has grown, and I
+felt and feel more and more unequal to the task of grappling with
+such a mass.&nbsp; To the last writer of eminence who gratified
+me by suggesting a collection of these essays&mdash;Dr. Robertson
+Nicoll&mdash;I wrote, and wrote it with entire candour, that in
+my opinion the view generally taken of the value of them is too
+generous.&nbsp; Still, they are the result of a good deal of
+reflection and not a little research, especially those in the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo; and I am not so
+entirely without literary aspiration as not to regret that, years
+ago, when the mass of material was more manageable, <a
+name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>I neglected to
+collect them and edit them myself.&nbsp; But the impulse to do
+this is now gone.&nbsp; Owing to the quite unexpected popularity
+of &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; and of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;
+my mind has been diverted from criticism, and plunged into those
+much more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction in which I
+used to revel long before.&nbsp; If you really think that a
+selection of passages from the articles, and a critical
+examination and estimate of the imaginative work would be of
+interest to any considerable body of readers, I do not know why I
+should withhold my consent.&nbsp; But I confess, judging from
+such work of your own as I have seen, I find it difficult to
+believe that it is worth your while to enter upon any such
+task.</p>
+<p>I agree with you that it is difficult to see how you are to
+present and expound the principles of criticism advanced in the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; etc., without discussing those two
+imaginative works the writing of which inspired the canons and
+generalizations in the critical work&mdash;&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;The Coming of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; As regards
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; however, I cannot help wincing under the
+thought that in these days when so much genius is at work in
+prose fiction, your discussion will seem to give quite an undue
+prominence to a writer who has published but one novel.&nbsp;
+This I confess does disturb me somewhat, and I wish you to bear
+well in mind this aspect of the matter before you seriously
+undertake the book.&nbsp; As to the prose fiction of the present
+moment, I constantly stand amazed at its wealth.&nbsp; If,
+however, you do touch upon &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; I hope you will
+modify those generous&mdash;too generous&mdash;expressions of
+yours which, I remember, you printed in a review of the book when
+it first appeared.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 8</span>After
+getting this sanction I set to work, and soon found that my chief
+obstacle was the superabundance of material, which would fill
+several folio volumes.&nbsp; But although it is undoubtedly
+&lsquo;a mighty maze,&rsquo; it is &lsquo;not without a
+plan.&rsquo;&nbsp; In a certain sense the vast number of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s generalizations upon literature, art,
+philosophy, and what Emerson calls &lsquo;the conduct of
+life,&rsquo; revolve round certain fixed principles which have
+guided me in the selection I have made.&nbsp; I also found that
+to understand these principles of romantic art, it was necessary
+to make a thorough critical study of the romance,
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; and of the book of poems, &lsquo;The Coming
+of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; I think I have made that study, and that I
+have connected the critical system with the imaginative work more
+thoroughly than has been done by any other writer, although the
+work of Mr. Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been
+acutely discussed, not only in England but also in France and in
+Italy.</p>
+<p>The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as
+that of his poetry and fiction.&nbsp; He poured into his
+criticism the intellectual and imaginative force which other men
+pour into purely artistic channels, for he made criticism a
+vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his irony.&nbsp; His
+criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime.&nbsp; Their
+vitality is not impaired by the impermanence of their
+texts.&nbsp; No critic has surpassed his universality of
+range.&nbsp; Out of a full intellectual and imaginative life he
+has evolved speculations which cut deep not only into the fibre
+of modern thought but into the future of human development.&nbsp;
+Great teachers have their day and their disciples.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s day and disciples belong to the young future
+whose dawn some of us already descry.&nbsp; For, as Mr. Justin
+McCarthy <a name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+9</span>wrote of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; &lsquo;it is inspired by
+the very spirit of youth,&rsquo; and this is why so many of the
+younger writers are beginning to accept him as their guide.&nbsp;
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life
+which, I think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the
+pessimists across the history of the soul of man.&nbsp; That is
+the aspect of his work which calls for the comprehension of the
+new generation.&nbsp; The old cosmogonies are dead; here is the
+new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse of wonder
+reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion
+of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna
+which no assaults of science can shake.</p>
+<p>But, although the main object of this book is to focus, as it
+were, the many scattered utterances of Mr. Watts-Dunton in prose
+and poetry upon the great subject of the Renascence of Wonder, I
+have interspersed here and there essays which do not touch upon
+this theme, and also excerpts from those obituary notices of his
+friends which formed so fascinating a part of his contributions
+to the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; For, of course, it was
+necessary to give the charm of variety to the book.&nbsp;
+Rossetti used to say, I believe, that there is one quality
+necessary in a poem which very many poets are apt to
+ignore&mdash;the quality of being amusing.&nbsp; I have always
+thought that there is great truth in this, and I have also
+thought that the remark is applicable to prose no less than to
+poetry.&nbsp; This is why I have occasionally enlivened these
+pages with extracts from his picturesque monographs; indeed, I
+have done more than this.&nbsp; Not having known Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s great contemporaries myself, I have looked
+about me for the aid of certain others who did know them.&nbsp; I
+have not hesitated to collect from various sources such facts and
+details connected with Mr. Watts-Dunton <a
+name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>and his
+friends as are necessarily beyond the scope of my own experience
+and knowledge.&nbsp; Among these I must prominently mention one
+to whom I have been specially indebted for reminiscences of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his circle.&nbsp; This is Mr. Thomas St. E.
+Hake, eldest son of the &lsquo;parable poet,&rsquo; a gentleman
+of much too modest and retiring a disposition, who, from Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s first appearance in London right onwards,
+was brought into intimate relations with himself, his relatives,
+Rossetti, William Morris, Westland Marston, Philip Bourke
+Marston, Madox Brown, George Borrow, Stevenson, Minto, and many
+others.&nbsp; I have not only made free use of his articles, but
+I have had the greatest aid from him in many other respects, and
+it is my bare duty to express my gratitude to him for his
+services.&nbsp; I have also to thank the editor of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; for cordially granting me permission
+to quote so freely from its columns; and I take this opportunity
+of acknowledging my debt to the many other publications from
+which I have drawn materials for this book.</p>
+<h2><a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+11</span>Chapter I<br />
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER</h2>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;The renascence of wonder,&rsquo; to
+employ Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s appellation for what he justly
+considers the most striking and significant feature in the great
+romantic revival which has transformed literature, is proclaimed
+by this very appellation not to be the achievement of any one
+innovator, but a general reawakening of mankind to a perception
+that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt
+of in Horatio&rsquo;s philosophy.&rdquo;&mdash;<span
+class="smcap">Dr. R. Garnett</span>: Monograph on Coleridge.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><span class="smcap">Undoubtedly</span> the greatest
+philosophical generalization of our time is expressed in the four
+words, &lsquo;The Renascence of Wonder.&rsquo;&nbsp; They suggest
+that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that
+set in after the publication of Darwin&rsquo;s great book.&nbsp;
+This phrase, which I first became familiar with in his
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; article on Rossetti,
+seems really to have been used first in
+&lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; The story seems originally to have
+been called &lsquo;The Renascence of Wonder,&rsquo; but the title
+was abandoned because the writer believed that an un-suggestive
+name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the
+practical point of view.&nbsp; For the knowledge of this I am
+indebted to Mr. Hake, who says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+12</span>&ldquo;During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in
+Great James Street, several of his friends had chambers in the
+same street, and among them were my late father, Dr. Gordon
+Hake&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s friend and physician&mdash;Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and myself.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton, as is well
+known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as
+a writer.&nbsp; I have heard him tell scores of stories full of
+plot and character that have never appeared in print.&nbsp; On a
+certain occasion he was suffering from one of his periodical eye
+troubles that had used occasionally to embarrass him.&nbsp; He
+had just been telling Mr. Swinburne the plot of a suggested
+story, the motive of which was the &lsquo;renascence of wonder in
+art and poetry&rsquo; depicting certain well-known
+characters.</p>
+<p>I offered to act as his amanuensis in writing the story, and
+did so, with the occasional aid of my father and brothers.&nbsp;
+The story was sent to the late F. W. Robinson, the novelist, then
+at the zenith of his vogue, who declared that he &lsquo;saw a
+fortune in it,&rsquo; and it was he who advised the author to
+send it to Messrs. Hurst &amp; Blackett.&nbsp; As far as I
+remember, the time occupied by the work was between five and six
+months.&nbsp; When a large portion of it was in type it was read
+by many friends,&mdash;among others by the late Madox Brown, who
+thought some of the portraits too close, as the characters were
+then all living, except one, the character who figures as
+Cyril.&nbsp; Although unpublished, it was so well known that an
+article upon it appeared in the &lsquo;Liverpool
+Mercury.&rsquo;&nbsp; This was more than twenty years
+ago.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The important matter before us, however, is not when he first
+used this phrase, which has now become a sort of literary
+shorthand to express a wide and sweeping idea, but what it
+actually imports.&nbsp; Fortunately Mr. Watts-Dunton <a
+name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>has quite
+lately given us a luminous exposition of what the words do
+precisely mean.&nbsp; Last year he wrote for that invaluable
+work, Chambers&rsquo;s &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English
+Literature,&rsquo; the Introduction to volume iii., and no one
+can any longer say that there is any ambiguity in this now famous
+phrase:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;As the storm-wind is the cause and not the
+effect of the mighty billows at sea, so the movement in question
+was the cause and not the effect of the French Revolution.&nbsp;
+It was nothing less than a great revived movement of the soul of
+man, after a long period of prosaic acceptance in all things,
+including literature and art.&nbsp; To this revival the present
+writer, in the introduction to an imaginative work dealing with
+this movement, has already, for convenience&rsquo; sake, and in
+default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of
+Wonder.&nbsp; As was said on that occasion, &lsquo;The phrase,
+the Renascence of Wonder, merely indicates that there are two
+great impulses governing man, and probably not man only, but the
+entire world of conscious life: the impulse of
+acceptance&mdash;the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted
+all the phenomena of the outer world as they are&mdash;and the
+impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and
+wonder.&rsquo;&nbsp; It would seem that something works as
+inevitably and as logically as a physical law in the yearning
+which societies in a certain stage of development show to get
+away, as far away as possible, from the condition of the natural
+man; to get away from that despised condition not only in
+material affairs, such as dress, domestic arrangements and
+economies, but also in the fine arts and in intellectual methods,
+till, having passed that inevitable stage, each society is liable
+to suffer (even if it does not in some cases actually suffer) a
+reaction, <a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+14</span>when nature and art are likely again to take the place
+of convention and artifice.&nbsp; Anthropologists have often
+asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark womb
+of some remote semi-human brain, which, by first stirring,
+lifting, and vitalizing other potential and latent faculties,
+gave birth to man?&nbsp; Would it be rash to assume that this
+lever-power was a vigorous movement of the faculty of
+wonder?&nbsp; But certainly it is not rash, as regards the races
+of man, to affirm that the more intelligent the race the less it
+is governed by the instinct of acceptance, and the more it is
+governed by the instinct of wonder, that instinct which leads to
+the movement of challenge.&nbsp; The alternate action of the two
+great warring instincts is specially seen just now in the
+Japanese.&nbsp; Here the instinct of challenge which results in
+progress became active up to a certain point, and then suddenly
+became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have full
+play, and then everything became crystallized.&nbsp; Ages upon
+ages of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were
+required before the Mongolian savage was developed into the
+Japanese of the period before the nature-worship of
+&lsquo;Shinto&rsquo; had been assaulted by dogmatic
+Buddhism.&nbsp; But by that time the instinct of challenge had
+resulted in such a high state of civilization that acceptance set
+in and there was an end, for the time being, of progress.&nbsp;
+There is no room here to say even a few words upon other great
+revivals in past times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian
+renascence of the ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in
+philosophical speculation, which had previously been arrested,
+was revived; when the old sciences were revived; and when some
+modern sciences were born.&nbsp; There are, of course, different
+kinds of wonder.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 15</span>This
+passage has a peculiar interest for me, because I instinctively
+compare it with the author&rsquo;s speech delivered at the St.
+Ives old Union Book Club dinner when he was a boy.&nbsp; It shows
+the same wide vision, the same sweep, and the same rush of
+eloquence.&nbsp; It is in view of this great generalization that
+I have determined to quote that speech later.</p>
+<p>The essay then goes on in a swift way to point out the
+different kinds of wonder:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Primitive poetry is full of
+wonder&mdash;the na&iuml;ve and eager wonder of the healthy
+child.&nbsp; It is this kind of wonder which makes the
+&lsquo;Iliad&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Odyssey&rsquo; so
+delightful.&nbsp; The wonder of primitive poetry passes as the
+primitive conditions of civilization pass; and then for the most
+part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of
+wonder&mdash;the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery
+of man&rsquo;s life and the mystery of nature&rsquo;s theatre on
+which the human drama is played&mdash;the wonder, in short, of
+&AElig;schylus and Sophocles.&nbsp; And among the Romans, Virgil,
+though living under the same kind of Augustan acceptance in which
+Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, is full of this
+latter kind of wonder.&nbsp; Among the English poets who preceded
+the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed there is
+no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he can
+only be slightly touched upon.&nbsp; He stands at the head of
+those who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves
+see the wonder of the &lsquo;world at hand.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of the
+poets whose wonder is of the simply terrene kind, those whose
+eyes are occupied by the beauty of the earth and the romance of
+human life, he is the English king.&nbsp; But it is not the
+wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in the
+following sentences.&nbsp; It is the spiritual <a
+name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 16</span>wonder which
+in our literature came afterwards.&nbsp; It is that kind of
+wonder which filled the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of
+Shakespeare, of Webster, of Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the
+old ballads: it is that poetical attitude which the human mind
+assumes when confronting those unseen powers of the universe who,
+if they did not weave the web in which man finds himself
+entangled, dominate it.&nbsp; That this high temper should have
+passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance is quite
+inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction of
+the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract
+from the Introduction to &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; Perhaps the
+difference between the temper of the Elizabethan period and the
+temper of the Chaucerian on the one hand, and Augustanism on the
+other, will be better understood by a brief reference to the
+humour of the respective periods.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and
+relative humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type
+of absolute humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in
+&lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I will now quote a passage from an article in the
+&lsquo;Quarterly Review&rsquo; on William Morris by one of
+Morris&rsquo;s intimate friends:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The decorative renascence in England is but
+an expression of the spirit of the pre-Raphaelite
+movement&mdash;a movement which has been defined by the most
+eminent of living critics as the renascence of the &lsquo;spirit
+of wonder&rsquo; in poetry and art.&nbsp; So defined, it falls
+into proper relationship with the continuous development of
+English literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last
+century and a half, and is no longer to be <a
+name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 17</span>considered an
+isolated phenomenon called into being by an erratic genius.&nbsp;
+The English Romantic school, from its first inception with
+Chatterton, Macpherson, and the publication of the Percy ballads,
+does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has finely pointed out, aim merely
+at the revival of natural language; it seeks rather to reach
+through art and the forgotten world of old romance, that world of
+wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of which poets gain
+glimpses through</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;magic
+casements, opening on the foam<br />
+Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti
+turned to that mysterious side of nature and man&rsquo;s life
+which to other painters of his time had been a mere fancy-land,
+to be visited, if at all, on the wings of sport.&nbsp; It is not
+only in such masterpieces of his maturity as Dante&rsquo;s Dream,
+La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they Met
+Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that
+Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of
+modern art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a
+mechanical imitation of the facts of nature.</p>
+<p>For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of
+Wonder in modern Europe, if it is not a mere passing mood, if it
+is really the inevitable expression of the soul of man in a
+certain stage of civilization (when the sanctions which have made
+and moulded society are found to be not absolute and eternal, but
+relative, mundane, ephemeral, and subject to the higher sanctions
+of unseen powers that work behind &lsquo;the shows of <a
+name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+18</span>things&rsquo;), then perhaps one of the first questions
+to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the nineteenth
+century is, In what relation does he stand to the newly-awakened
+spirit of romance?&nbsp; Had he a genuine and independent
+sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over
+Europe had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation,
+prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic
+materialism?&nbsp; Or was his apparent sympathy with the temper
+of wonder, reverence and awe the result of artistic environment
+dictated to him by other and more powerful and original souls
+around him?&nbsp; I do not say that the mere fact of a
+painter&rsquo;s or poet&rsquo;s showing but an imperfect sympathy
+with the Renascence of Wonder is sufficient to place him below a
+poet in whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, because we
+should then be driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti
+above our great realistic painters, and we should be driven to
+place a poet like the author of &lsquo;The Excursion&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;The Prelude&rsquo; beneath a poet like the author of
+&lsquo;The Queen&rsquo;s Wake&rsquo;; but we do say that, other
+things being equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of
+our time is to be judged very much by his sympathy with that
+great movement which we call the Renascence of Wonder&mdash;call
+it so because the word romanticism never did express it even
+before it had been vulgarized by French poets, dramatists,
+doctrinaires, and literary harlequins.</p>
+<p>To struggle against the prim traditions of the eighteenth
+century, the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types
+instead of character, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Sta&euml;l,
+Balzac, and Hugo struggled, was well.&nbsp; But in studying
+Rossetti&rsquo;s works we reach the very key of those &lsquo;high
+palaces of romance&rsquo; which the English mind had never, even
+in the eighteenth century, wholly forgotten, <a
+name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 19</span>but whose
+mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked.&nbsp; Not all the
+romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with
+their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the
+life-blood of romance) could equal the romantic spirit expressed
+in a single picture or drawing of Rossetti&rsquo;s, such, for
+instance, as Beata Beatrix or Pandora.</p>
+<p>For while the French romanticists&mdash;inspired by the
+theories (drawn from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck, and
+Herder&mdash;cleverly simulated the old romantic feeling, the
+&lsquo;beautifully devotional feeling&rsquo; which Holman Hunt
+speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it: he was so full of the old
+frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded the great
+renascence of materialism that he might have lived and worked
+amidst the old masters.&nbsp; Hence, in point of design, so
+original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in
+Lilith, Hesterna Rosa, Michael Scott&rsquo;s Wooing, the Sea
+Spell, etc., we have to turn to the sister art of poetry, where
+only we can find an equally powerful artistic representation of
+the idea at the core of the old romanticism&mdash;the idea of the
+evil forces of nature assailing man through his sense of
+beauty.&nbsp; We must turn, we say, not to art&mdash;not even to
+the old masters themselves&mdash;but to the most perfect
+efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery&mdash;to such
+ballads as &lsquo;The Demon Lover,&rsquo; to Coleridge&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Christabel&rsquo; and &lsquo;Kubla Khan,&rsquo; to
+Keats&rsquo;s &lsquo;La Belle Dame sans Merci,&rsquo; for
+parallels to Rossetti&rsquo;s most characteristic
+designs.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>These words about Coleridge recall to the students of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work a splendid illustration of the true
+wonder of the great poetic temper which he gives in the
+before-mentioned essay on The Renascence of <a
+name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 20</span>Wonder in
+Chambers&rsquo;s &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English
+Literature&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Coleridge&rsquo;s &lsquo;Christabel,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;The Ancient Mariner,&rsquo; and &lsquo;Kubla Khan&rsquo;
+are, as regards the romantic spirit, above&mdash;and far
+above&mdash;any work of any other English poet.&nbsp; Instances
+innumerable might be adduced showing how his very nature was
+steeped in the fountain from which the old balladists themselves
+drew, but in this brief and rapid survey there is room to give
+only one.&nbsp; In the &lsquo;Conclusion&rsquo; of the first part
+of &lsquo;Christabel&rsquo; he recapitulates and summarizes, in
+lines that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in
+succinctness of statement, the entire story of the bewitched
+maiden and her terrible foe which had gone before:&mdash;</p>
+<p>A star hath set, a star hath risen,<br />
+O Geraldine! since arms of thine<br />
+Have been the lovely lady&rsquo;s prison.<br />
+O Geraldine! one hour was thine&mdash;<br />
+Thou&rsquo;st had thy will!&nbsp; By tairn and rill,<br />
+The night-birds all that hour were still.<br />
+But now they are jubilant anew,<br />
+From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!<br />
+Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!</p>
+<p>Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the
+human drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul
+of poetic wonder.&nbsp; So great is the maleficent power of the
+beautiful witch that a spell is thrown over all Nature.&nbsp; For
+an hour the very woods and fells remain in a shuddering state of
+sympathetic consciousness of her&mdash;</p>
+<p>The night-birds all that hour were still.</p>
+<p>When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous
+nightmare, and &lsquo;the night-birds&rsquo; are jubilant
+anew.&nbsp; <a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+21</span>This is the very highest reach of poetic
+wonder&mdash;finer, if that be possible, than the night-storm
+during the murder of Duncan.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And now let us turn again to the essay upon Rossetti from
+which I have already quoted:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Although the idea at the heart of the
+highest romantic poetry (allied perhaps to that apprehension of
+the warring of man&rsquo;s soul with the appetites of the flesh
+which is the basis of the Christian idea), may not belong
+exclusively to what we call the romantic temper (the Greeks, and
+also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less familiar with it, as
+we see in the &lsquo;Sal&aacute;m&aacute;n&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Abs&aacute;l&rsquo; of J&aacute;m&iacute;), yet it became
+a peculiarly romantic note, as is seen from the fact that in the
+old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its logical
+expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all
+romantic art.&nbsp; But, in order to express this stupendous idea
+as fully as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to
+adopt the asceticism of the old masters?&nbsp; This is the
+question that Rossetti asked himself, and answered by his own
+progress in art.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In the same article, Mr. Watts-Dunton discusses the crowning
+specimen of Rossetti&rsquo;s romanticism before it had, as it
+were, gone to seed and passed into pure mysticism, the grand
+design, &lsquo;Pandora,&rsquo; of which he possesses by far the
+noblest version:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;In it is seen at its highest
+Rossetti&rsquo;s unique faculty of treating classical legend in
+the true romantic spirit.&nbsp; The grand and sombre beauty of
+Pandora&rsquo;s face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep
+blue-grey eyes <a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+22</span>as she tries in vain to re-close the fatal box from
+which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape
+themselves as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces,
+grey with agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in
+the highest romantic mood.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction
+of this masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too
+grateful.&nbsp; The influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+teachings is seen in the fact that the idea of the Renascence of
+Wonder has become expanded by theological writers and divines in
+order to include within its scope subjects connected with
+religion.&nbsp; Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened its
+ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander
+White&rsquo;s &lsquo;Appreciation&rsquo; of Bishop Butler.&nbsp;
+He quotes one of the Logia discovered by the explorers of the
+Egypt Fund:&mdash;&lsquo;Let not him that seeketh cease from his
+search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder:
+wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the
+kingdom he shall have rest.&rsquo;&nbsp; He then points out that
+Bishop Butler was &lsquo;one of the first to share in the
+Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of
+religion.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And now I must quote a passage alluding to the generalization
+upon absolute and relative humour which I shall give later when
+discussing the humour of Mrs. Gudgeon.&nbsp; I shall not be able
+in these remarks to dwell upon Mr. Watts-Dunton as a humourist,
+but the extracts will speak for themselves.&nbsp; Writing of the
+great social Pyramid of the Augustan age, Mr. Watts-Dunton
+says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+23</span>&ldquo;This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the
+symmetry which Blackstone so much admired in the English
+constitution and its laws; and when, afterwards, the American
+colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid of their own, it was
+on the Blackstonian model.&nbsp; At the base&mdash;patient as the
+tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony&mdash;was
+the people, born to be the base and born for nothing else.&nbsp;
+Resting on this foundation were the middle classes in their
+various strata, each stratum sharply marked off from the
+others.&nbsp; Then above these was the strictly genteel class,
+the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in dress if in nothing
+else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of right.&nbsp;
+Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the
+monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the
+sacred structure save that a little&mdash;a very
+little&mdash;above him sat God, the suzerain to whom the prayers
+even of the monarch himself were addressed.&nbsp; The leaders of
+the Rebellion had certainly done a daring thing, and an original
+thing, by striking off the apex of this pyramid, and it might
+reasonably have been expected that the building itself would
+collapse and crumble away.&nbsp; But it did nothing of the
+kind.&nbsp; It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off&mdash;a
+structure to serve afterwards as a model of the American and
+French pyramids, both of which, though aspiring to be original
+structures, are really built on exactly the same scheme of
+hereditary honour and dishonour as that upon which the pyramids
+of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built.&nbsp; Then came the
+Restoration: the apex was restored: the structure was again
+complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever, stronger than
+ever.</p>
+<p>With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the
+romantic movement as distinguished from its <a
+name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 24</span>purely
+poetical and supernatural side, Nature was for the Augustan
+temper much too ungenteel to be described realistically.&nbsp;
+Yet we must not suppose that in the eighteenth century Nature
+turned out men without imaginations, without the natural gift of
+emotional speech, and without the faculty of gazing honestly in
+her face.&nbsp; She does not work in that way.&nbsp; In the time
+of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a great
+artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk.&nbsp; In the
+period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she
+will give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say,
+the greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen.&nbsp;
+In the time of Elizabeth she will give birth, among the
+illiterate yeomen of a diminutive country town, to a dramatist
+with such inconceivable insight and intellectual breadth that his
+generalizations cover not only the intellectual limbs of his own
+time, but the intellectual limbs of so complex an epoch as the
+twentieth century.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour
+is in prose fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got
+into romantic poetry, as he himself understood romantic poetry;
+for he did not class ballads like Kinmont Willie, where there are
+such superb touches of humour, among the romantic ballads.&nbsp;
+And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked, his poems, like
+Morris&rsquo;s, are entirely devoid of humour, although both the
+poets were humourists.&nbsp; But the readers of Rhona&rsquo;s
+Letters in &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; will admit that a
+delicious humour can be imported into the highest romantic
+poetry.</p>
+<p>With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English Literature,&rsquo; I must
+conclude <a name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+25</span>my remarks upon the keynote of all Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work, whether imaginative or
+critical:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The period of wonder in English poetry may
+perhaps be said to have ended with Milton.&nbsp; For Milton,
+although born only twenty-three years before the first of the
+great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs properly to the period
+of romantic poetry.&nbsp; He has no relation whatever to the
+poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and which Dryden
+received partly from France and partly from certain
+contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves,
+headed by Ben Jonson.&nbsp; From the moment when Augustanism
+really began&mdash;in the latter decades of the seventeenth
+century&mdash;the periwig poetry of Dryden and Pope crushed out
+all the natural singing of the true poets.&nbsp; All the periwig
+poets became too &lsquo;polite&rsquo; to be natural.&nbsp; As
+acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility,
+the most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to
+whom everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the
+pyramid of Cathay.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the
+most powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in
+Rossetti&rsquo;s poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; but in &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; But in order fully to understand Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work it is necessary to know something of
+his life-history, and thanks to the aid I have received from
+certain of his friends, and also to a little topographical work,
+the &lsquo;History of St. Ives,&rsquo; by Mr. Herbert E. Norris,
+F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long
+before he was known in London.</p>
+<h2><a name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+26</span>Chapter II<br />
+COWSLIP COUNTRY</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Some</span> time ago I was dipping into
+the &lsquo;official pictorial guides&rsquo; of those three great
+trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the Great
+Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St.
+Ives&mdash;not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town
+in Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell
+spent those five years of meditation upon which his after life
+was nourished.&nbsp; In the Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon
+these words: &lsquo;At Slepe Hall dwelt the future Lord
+Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little
+Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace
+of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the
+English sonnet and judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of
+poetry and art are familiar to lovers of our national
+literature.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Well,&rsquo; I thought, when I
+found similar remarks in the other two guides, &lsquo;here at
+least is one case in which a prophet has honour in his own
+country.&rsquo;&nbsp; This set me musing over a subject which had
+often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the whimsical
+workings of the Spirit of Place.&nbsp; To a poet, what are the
+advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a
+microcosm like St. Ives?&nbsp; If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as
+a poet were as great as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne,
+or as that of his dead friend, Rossetti, I should not have been
+surprised to find the place of his birth thus <a
+name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 27</span>associated
+with his name.&nbsp; But whether or not Rossetti was right in
+saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton &lsquo;had sought obscurity as other
+poets seek fame,&rsquo; it is certain that until quite lately he
+neglected to claim his proper place among his peers.&nbsp;
+Doubtless, as the &lsquo;Journal des D&eacute;bats&rsquo; has
+pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in subject
+and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique
+quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo
+through the world, there is one respect in which they were less
+lucky than their friend.&nbsp; They were born in the macrocosm of
+London, where the Spirit of Place has so much to attend to that
+his memory can find but a small corner even for the author of
+&lsquo;The Blessed Damozel,&rsquo; or for the author of
+&lsquo;Atalanta in Calydon.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those
+corn law repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip
+Country&mdash;Buttercup Land, as the Ouse lanes are sometimes
+called, and therefore he was born to good luck.&nbsp; Cowslip
+Country will be as closely associated with him and with Rhona
+Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess
+of the D&rsquo;Urbervilles.&nbsp; For the poet born in a
+microcosm becomes identified with it in the public eye, whereas
+the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom associated with his
+birthplace.</p>
+<p>To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater
+advantage in being born in a microcosm.&nbsp; He sees the drama
+of life from a point of view entirely different from that of the
+novelist born in the macrocosm.&nbsp; The human microbe, or, as
+Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human cheese-mite in the
+macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other cheese-mite on
+the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe or
+every other cheese-mite in the round.</p>
+<p><a name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 28</span>Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work is saturated with memories of the
+Ouse.&nbsp; Cowper had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr.
+Watts-Dunton who first flung the rainbow of romance over the
+river and over the sweet meadows of Cowslip Land, through which
+it flows.&nbsp; In these lines he has described a sunset on the
+Ouse:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>More mellow falls the light and still more
+mellow<br />
+Around the boat, as we two glide along<br />
+&rsquo;Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,<br />
+The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.<br />
+She knows the nightingales of &lsquo;Portobello&rsquo;;<br />
+Love makes her know each bird!&nbsp; In all that throng<br />
+No voice seems like another: soul is song,<br />
+And never nightingale was like its fellow;<br />
+For, whether born in breast of Love&rsquo;s own bird,<br />
+Singing its passion in those islet bowers<br />
+Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers<br />
+The rosy river&rsquo;s glowing arms engird,<br />
+Or born in human souls&mdash;twin souls like ours&mdash;<br />
+Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p28b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.  (From a Water Colour by
+Fraser at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.  (From a Water Colour by
+Fraser at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p28s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Now, will it be believed that this lovely river&mdash;so
+famous too among English anglers for its roach, perch, pike,
+dace, chub, and gudgeon&mdash;has been libelled?&nbsp; Yes, it
+has been libelled, and libelled by no less a person than Thomas
+Carlyle.&nbsp; Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath the
+reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;There is, as far as I know, nothing like
+the Ouse elsewhere in England.&nbsp; I do not mean that our river
+surpasses or even equals in picturesqueness such rivers as the
+Wye, the Severn, the Thames, but that its beauty is unique.&nbsp;
+There is not to be seen anywhere else so wide and stately a
+stream moving so slowly and yet so clearly.&nbsp; Consequently
+there is no other river which reflects with <a
+name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 29</span>such beauty
+the scenery of the clouds floating overhead.&nbsp; This, I think,
+is owing to the stream moving over a bottom which is both flat
+and gravelly.&nbsp; When Carlyle spoke of the Ouse dragging in a
+half-stagnant way under a coating of floating oils, he showed
+&lsquo;how vivid were his perceptive faculties and also how
+untrustworthy.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have made a good deal of enquiry
+into the matter of Carlyle&rsquo;s visit to St. Ives, and have
+learnt that, having spent some time exploring Ely Cathedral in
+search of mementoes of Cromwell, he rode on to St. Ives, and
+spent about an hour there before proceeding on his journey.&nbsp;
+Among the objects at which he gave a hasty glance was the river,
+covered from the bridge to the Holmes by one of those enormous
+fleets of barges which were frequently to be seen at that time,
+and it was from the newly tarred keels of this fleet of barges
+that came the oily exudation which Carlyle, in his ignorance of
+the physical sciences and his contempt for them, believed to
+arise from a greasy river-bottom.&nbsp; And to this mistake the
+world is indebted for this description of the Ouse, which has
+been slavishly followed by all subsequent writers on
+Cromwell.&nbsp; This is what makes strangers, walking along the
+tow-path of Hemingford meadow, express so much surprise when,
+instead of seeing the oily scum they expected, they see a broad
+mirror as clear as glass, whose iridescence is caused by the
+reflection of the clouds overhead and by the gold and white water
+lilies on the surface of the stream.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>If the beauty of the Ouse inspired Mr. Norris to praise it so
+eloquently in prose, we need not wonder at the pictorial
+fascination of what Rossetti styled in a letter to a friend
+&lsquo;Watts&rsquo;s magnificent star sonnet&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears,<br
+/>
+And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;<br />
+<a name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>The
+ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,<br />
+Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.<br />
+We rowed&mdash;we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears<br />
+An angel&rsquo;s, yet with woman&rsquo;s dearer wiles;<br />
+But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles<br />
+And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.</p>
+<p>What shaped those shadows like another boat<br />
+Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?<br />
+There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,<br />
+While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;<br />
+We wept&mdash;we kissed&mdash;while starry fingers wrote,<br />
+And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>According to Mr. Sharp, Rossetti pronounced this sonnet to be
+the finest of all the versions of the Doppelganger idea, and for
+many years he seriously purposed to render it in art.&nbsp; It is
+easy to understand why Rossetti never carried out his intention,
+for the pictorial magic of the sonnet is so powerful that even
+the greatest of all romantic painters could hardly have rendered
+it on canvas.&nbsp; Poetry can suggest to the imagination deeper
+mysteries than the subtlest romantic painting.</p>
+<p>No sonnet has been more frequently localized&mdash;erroneously
+localized than this.&nbsp; It is often supposed to depict the
+Thames above Kew, but Mr. Norris says that &lsquo;every one
+familiar with Hemingford Meadow will see that it describes the
+Ouse backwater near Porto Bello, where the author as a young man
+was constantly seen on summer evenings listening from a canoe to
+the blackcaps and nightingales of the Thicket.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>That excellent critic, Mr. Earl Hodgson, the editor of Dr.
+Gordon Hake&rsquo;s &lsquo;New Day,&rsquo; seems to think that
+the &lsquo;lily-isles&rsquo; are on the Thames at Kelmscott,
+while other writers have frequently localized these
+&lsquo;lily-isles&rsquo; <a name="page31"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 31</span>on the Avon at Stratford.&nbsp; But,
+no doubt, Mr. Norris is right in placing them on the Ouse.</p>
+<p>This, however, gives me a good opportunity of saying a few
+words about Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s love of the Avon.&nbsp; The
+sacred old town of Stratford-on-Avon has always been a favourite
+haunt of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s.&nbsp; No poet of our time has
+shown a greater love of our English rivers, but he seems to love
+the Avon even more passionately than the Ouse.&nbsp; He cannot
+describe the soft sands of Petit Bot Bay in Guernsey without
+bringing in an allusion to &lsquo;Avon&rsquo;s sacred
+silt.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was at Stratford-on-Avon that he wrote
+several of his poems, notably the two sonnets which appeared
+first in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; and afterwards in the
+little volume, &lsquo;Jubilee Greetings at Spithead to the Men of
+Greater Britain.&rsquo;&nbsp; They are entitled &lsquo;The Breath
+of Avon: To English-speaking Pilgrims on Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+Birthday&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Whate&rsquo;er of woe the Dark may hide in womb<br
+/>
+For England, mother of kings of battle and song&mdash;<br />
+Rapine, or racial hate&rsquo;s mysterious wrong,<br />
+Blizzard of Chance, or fiery dart of Doom&mdash;<br />
+Let breath of Avon, rich of meadow-bloom,<br />
+Bind her to that great daughter sever&rsquo;d long&mdash;<br />
+To near and far-off children young and strong&mdash;<br />
+With fetters woven of Avon&rsquo;s flower perfume.<br />
+Welcome, ye English-speaking pilgrims, ye<br />
+Whose hands around the world are join&rsquo;d by him,<br />
+Who make his speech the language of the sea,<br />
+Till winds of Ocean waft from rim to rim<br />
+The Breath of Avon: let this great day be<br />
+A Feast of Race no power shall ever dim.</p>
+<p>From where the steeds of Earth&rsquo;s twin oceans toss<br />
+Their manes along Columbia&rsquo;s chariot-way;<br />
+From where Australia&rsquo;s long blue billows play;<br />
+<a name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>From where
+the morn, quenching the Southern Cross,<br />
+Startling the frigate-bird and albatross<br />
+Asleep in air, breaks over Table Bay&mdash;<br />
+Come hither, pilgrims, where these rushes sway<br />
+&rsquo;Tween grassy banks of Avon soft as moss!<br />
+For, if ye found the breath of Ocean sweet,<br />
+Sweeter is Avon&rsquo;s earthy, flowery smell,<br />
+Distill&rsquo;d from roots that feel the coming spell<br />
+Of May, who bids all flowers that lov&rsquo;d him meet<br />
+In meadows that, remembering Shakspeare&rsquo;s feet,<br />
+Hold still a dream of music where they fell.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr.
+Watts-Dunton wrote the cantata, &lsquo;Christmas at the
+Mermaid,&rsquo; a poem in which breathes the very atmosphere of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s town.&nbsp; There are no poetical
+descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the
+descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p32b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"&lsquo;The Thicket,&rsquo; St. Ives.  (From a Water Colour by
+Fraser at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"&lsquo;The Thicket,&rsquo; St. Ives.  (From a Water Colour by
+Fraser at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p32s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes
+called, &lsquo;The Green Country,&rsquo; is Hemingford Meadow,
+adjoining St. Ives.&nbsp; It is a level tract of land on the
+banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of alluvium from the
+overflowings of the river.&nbsp; In summer it is clothed with gay
+flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as a
+skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is
+a famous skating centre.&nbsp; On the opposite side of the meadow
+is The Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely
+picture.&nbsp; This, no doubt, is the scene described in one of
+Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s birthday addresses to
+Tennyson:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.<br
+/>
+There through the branches of the glittering trees<br />
+The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze<br />
+Sends forth methinks a thrill&mdash;a conscious thrill<br />
+<a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 33</span>That tells
+yon meadows by the steaming rill&mdash;<br />
+Where, o&rsquo;er the clover waiting for the bees,<br />
+The mist shines round the cattle to their knees&mdash;<br />
+&lsquo;Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The meadow leads to what the &lsquo;oldest rustic
+inhabitant&rsquo; calls the &lsquo;First Hemingford,&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;Hemingford Grey.&rsquo;&nbsp; The imagination of this same
+&lsquo;oldest inhabitant&rsquo; used to go even beyond the First
+Hemingford to the Second Hemingford, and then of course came
+Ultima Thule!&nbsp; The meadow has quite a wide fame among those
+students of nature who love English grasses in their endless
+varieties.&nbsp; Owing to the richness of the soil, the luxuriant
+growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in
+England.&nbsp; For years the two Hemingfords have been the
+favourite haunt of a group of landscape painters the chief of
+whom are the brothers Fraser, two of whose water-colours are
+reproduced in this book.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more
+advantage than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through
+Huntingdonshire into East Anglia.&nbsp; It was not, however, near
+St. Ives, but in another somewhat distant part of Cowslip Country
+that the gypsies depicted in &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo;
+took an active part in haymaking.&nbsp; But alas! in these times
+of mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer
+hope to see such a picture as that painted in the now famous
+gypsy haymaking song which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth
+of Rhona Boswell.&nbsp; Moreover, the prosperous gryengroes
+depicted by Borrow and by the author of &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; have now entirely vanished from the scene.&nbsp; The
+present generation knows them not.&nbsp; But it is impossible for
+the student of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry to ramble along
+any part <a name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+34</span>of Cowslip Country, with the fragrance of newly-made hay
+in his nostrils, without recalling this chant, which I have the
+kind permission of the editor of the &lsquo;Saturday
+Review&rsquo; (April 19, 1902) to quote:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Make the kas while the kem says, &lsquo;Make
+it!&rsquo; <a name="citation34"></a><a href="#footnote34"
+class="citation">[34]</a><br />
+Shinin&rsquo; there on meadow an&rsquo; grove,<br />
+Sayin, &lsquo;You Romany chies, you take it,<br />
+Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,<br />
+Singin&rsquo; the ghyllie the while you shake it<br />
+To lennor and love!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Hark, the sharpenin&rsquo; scythes that tingle!<br />
+See they come, the farmin&rsquo; ryes!<br />
+&lsquo;Leave the dell,&rsquo; they say, &lsquo;an&rsquo;
+pingle!<br />
+Never a gorgie, married or single,<br />
+Can toss the kas in dell or dingle<br />
+Like Romany chies.&rsquo;<br />
+Make the kas while the kem says &lsquo;Make it!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Bees are a-buzzin&rsquo; in chaw an&rsquo; clover<br />
+Stealin&rsquo; the honey from sperrits o&rsquo; morn,<br />
+Shoshus leap in puv an&rsquo; cover,<br />
+Doves are a-cooin&rsquo; like lover to lover,<br />
+Larks are awake an&rsquo; a-warblin&rsquo; over<br />
+Their kairs in the corn.<br />
+Make the kas while the kem says &lsquo;Make it!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Smell the kas on the baval blowin&rsquo;!<br />
+What is that the gorgies say?<br />
+Never a garden rose a-glowin&rsquo;,<br />
+Never a meadow flower a-growin&rsquo;,<br />
+Can match the smell from a Rington mowin&rsquo;<br />
+Of new made hay.</p>
+<p>All along the river reaches<br />
+&lsquo;Cheep, cheep, chee!&rsquo;&mdash;from osier an&rsquo;
+sedge;<br />
+&lsquo;Cuckoo, cuckoo!&rsquo; rings from the beeches;<br />
+Every chirikel&rsquo;s song beseeches<br />
+Ryes to larn what lennor teaches<br />
+From copse an&rsquo; hedge.<br />
+Make the kas while the kem says &lsquo;Make it!&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 35</span>Lennor
+sets &rsquo;em singin&rsquo; an&rsquo; pairin&rsquo;,<br />
+Chirikels all in tree an&rsquo; grass,<br />
+Farmers say, &lsquo;Them gals are darin&rsquo;,<br />
+Sometimes dukkerin&rsquo;, sometimes snarin&rsquo;;<br />
+But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin&rsquo;,&rsquo;<br />
+Toss the kas!</p>
+<p>Make the kas while the kem says, &lsquo;Make it!&rsquo;<br />
+Shinin&rsquo; there on meadow an&rsquo; grove,<br />
+Sayin&rsquo;, &lsquo;You Romany chies, you take it,<br />
+Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,<br />
+Singin&rsquo; the ghyllie the while you shake it<br />
+To lennor and love!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was
+Slepe, and that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a
+farmer for five years in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the
+late forties.&nbsp; When Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friend, Madox
+Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the scenery for his famous
+picture, &lsquo;Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,&rsquo; he could
+present only an imaginary farm.</p>
+<p>Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being
+born in a microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing
+stories full of local colour and character which, according to
+friends of D. G. Rossetti, would keep the poet-painter up half
+the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr. Hake in his account of
+the origin of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; which I have already
+given.&nbsp; I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe
+Hall which I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would
+certainly make a good nucleus for a short story.&nbsp; It is
+connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement Shorter, in some
+reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes: &ldquo;My
+mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns
+by inheritance some <a name="page36"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+36</span>freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe
+Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed.&nbsp; At
+Slepe Hall, a picturesque building, she went to school in
+girlhood.&nbsp; She remembers Mr. Watts-Dunton, the author of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; who was also born at St. Ives, as a pretty
+little boy then unknown to fame.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p36b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Slepe Hall: Cromwell&rsquo;s Supposed Residence at St. Ives.
+(From an Oil Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"Slepe Hall: Cromwell&rsquo;s Supposed Residence at St. Ives.
+(From an Oil Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p36s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it
+down, they sold the materials of the building and also the site
+and grounds in building lots.&nbsp; It was then discovered that
+the house in which Cromwell was said to have lived was built upon
+the foundations of a much older house whose cellars remained
+intact.&nbsp; This was, of course, a tremendous event in the
+microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the schoolboys of
+the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to watch
+the workmen in their task of demolition.&nbsp; In the early
+stages of this work, when the upper stories were being
+demolished, curiosity was centred on the great question as to
+what secret chamber would be found, whence Oliver
+Cromwell&rsquo;s ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his
+terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit
+walks about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish
+ponds.&nbsp; But no such secret chamber could be found.&nbsp;
+When at length the work had proceeded so far as the foundations,
+the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure was supposed to
+be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact, Cromwell was
+born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it was
+not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St.
+Ives, that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every
+hero of the world&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Imposteur &agrave; la Mecque et proph&egrave;te
+&agrave; M&egrave;dine.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Although in all probability Cromwell never lived <a
+name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 37</span>at Slepe
+Hall, but at the Green End Farm at the other end of the town,
+there was a legend that, before the Ironsides started on a famous
+expedition, Noll went back to St. Ives and concealed his own
+plate, and the plate of all his rebel friends, in Slepe Hall
+cellars.&nbsp; No treasure turned up, but what was found was a
+collection of old bottles of wine which was at once christened
+&lsquo;Cromwell&rsquo;s wine&rsquo; by the local humourist of the
+town, who was also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and
+who felt as much interest as the boys in the exploration.&nbsp;
+The workmen, of course, at once began knocking off the
+bottles&rsquo; necks and drinking the wine, and were soon in what
+may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a
+teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being
+allowed to take away their share of it in order that they might
+say in after days that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell&rsquo;s
+wine and perhaps imbibed some of the Cromwellian spirit and
+pluck.&nbsp; Consequently the young urchins carried off a few
+bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called
+&lsquo;Oliver&rsquo;s Tree,&rsquo; and knocked off the tops of
+the bottles and began to drink.&nbsp; The wine turned out to be
+extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to have been a
+wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous&mdash;elder
+wine.&nbsp; Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was, he could not resist the temptation to drink
+freely of Cromwell&rsquo;s elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that
+he has said, &lsquo;I was never even excited by drink except
+once, and that was when I came near to being drunk on Oliver
+Cromwell&rsquo;s elder-wine.&rsquo;&nbsp; The wine was probably
+about a century old.</p>
+<p>I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of
+eleven or twelve was sent to a school at Cambridge, <a
+name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 38</span>where he
+remained for a longer time than is usual.&nbsp; He received there
+and afterwards at home a somewhat elaborate education, comprising
+the physical sciences, particularly biology, and also art and
+music.&nbsp; As has been said in the notice of him in
+&lsquo;Poets and Poetry of the Century,&rsquo; he is one of the
+few contemporary poets with a scientific knowledge of
+music.&nbsp; Owing to his father&rsquo;s passion for science, he
+was specially educated as a naturalist, and this accounts for the
+innumerable allusions to natural science in his writings, and for
+his many expressions of a passionate interest in the lower
+animals.</p>
+<p>Upon the subject of &ldquo;the great human fallacy expressed
+in the phrase, &lsquo;the dumb animals,&rsquo;&rdquo; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often been eloquent
+about &lsquo;those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St.
+Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the
+wonderful animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we
+are to believe the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months
+to fetch and carry like a dog; and having chalked the floor and
+blackened its claws, could direct it to trace out any given name
+in the company.&rsquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;the
+&lsquo;lower animals&rsquo; are no more dumb than we are.&nbsp;
+With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape from
+isolation&mdash;to get as close as may be to some other conscious
+thing&mdash;which is a great factor of progress.&nbsp; With them,
+as with us, each individual tries to warm itself by communication
+with the others around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with
+us, countless accidents through countless years have contributed
+to determine what these signs and sounds shall be.&nbsp; Those
+among us who have gone at all underneath conventional <a
+name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 39</span>thought and
+conventional expression&mdash;those who have penetrated
+underneath conventional feeling&mdash;know that neither thought
+nor emotion can really be expressed at all.&nbsp; The voice
+cannot do it, as we see by comparing one language with
+another.&nbsp; Wordsworth calls language the incarnation of
+thought.&nbsp; But the mere fact of there being such a Babel of
+different tongues disproves this.&nbsp; If there were but one
+universal language, such as speculators dream of, the idea might,
+at least, be not superficially absurd.&nbsp; Soul cannot
+communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when
+you can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a
+&lsquo;lower animal,&rsquo; interchange of feeling and even of
+thought is as easy with them as it is with men.&nbsp; Nay, with
+some temperaments and in some moods, the communication is far,
+far closer.&nbsp; &lsquo;When I am assailed with heavy
+tribulation,&rsquo; said Luther, &lsquo;I rush out among my pigs
+rather than remain alone by myself.&rsquo;&nbsp; And there is no
+creature that does not at some points sympathize with man.&nbsp;
+People have laughed at Erskine because every evening after dinner
+he used to have placed upon the table a vessel full of his pet
+leeches, upon which he used to lavish his endearments.&nbsp;
+Neither I nor my companion had a pet passion for leeches.&nbsp;
+Erskine probably knew leeches better than we, for, as the Arabian
+proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of which they know
+nothing.&nbsp; Like most dog lovers, we had no special love for
+cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+wish women would purr when they are pleased,&rsquo; said Horne
+Tooke to Rogers once.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+40</span>Chapter III<br />
+THE CRITIC IN THE BUD</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> of my special weaknesses is my
+delight in forgotten records of the nooks of old England and
+&lsquo;ould Ireland&rsquo;; I have a propensity for
+&lsquo;dawdling and dandering&rsquo; among them whenever the
+occasion arises, and I am yielding to it here.</p>
+<p>Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have
+been compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a
+series of brochures upon the surrounding villages.&nbsp; One of
+these, called &lsquo;St. Ives and the Printing Press,&rsquo; has
+greatly interested me, for it reveals the wealth of the material
+for topographical literature which in the rural districts lies
+ready for the picking up.&nbsp; I am tempted to quote from this,
+for it shows how strong since Cromwell&rsquo;s time the temper
+which produced Cromwell has remained.&nbsp; During the time when
+at Cambridge George Dyer and his associates, William Frend,
+Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond of Fenstanton, Fellow of
+Queen&rsquo;s, revolted against the discipline and the doctrine
+of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the
+Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed.&nbsp; The house
+whence issued these fulminations was the &lsquo;Old House&rsquo;
+in Crown Street, now pulled down, which for a time belonged to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s father, having remained during all this
+time a printing office.&nbsp; Mr. <a name="page41"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 41</span>Norris gives a very picturesque
+description of this old printing office at the top of the house,
+with its pointed roof, &lsquo;king posts&rsquo; and panelling,
+reminding one of the pictures of the ancient German printing
+offices.&nbsp; Mr. Norris also tells us that it was at the house
+adjoining this, the &lsquo;Crown Inn,&rsquo; that William Penn
+died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear the
+lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens.&nbsp;
+According to Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge
+revolt was the John Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of
+Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s father when the latter was quite a young
+man under articles for a solicitor.&nbsp; A curious character
+must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer addressed
+an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the
+eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement
+to Lamb, and inspired some of Elia&rsquo;s most delightful
+touches of humour.&nbsp; This poem of Dyer&rsquo;s opens
+thus:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Though much I love th&rsquo; &AElig;olian lyre,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose varying sounds beguil&rsquo;d my youthful
+day,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray<br />
+In fabled groves, among th&rsquo; Aonian choir:<br />
+Yet more on native fields, thro&rsquo; milder skies,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nature&rsquo;s mysterious harmonies delight:<br />
+There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What is the moon&rsquo;s pale orb that cheer&rsquo;d
+the lonesome night?<br />
+I cannot leave thee, classic ground,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:<br />
+And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.<br />
+No purple Venus round my Hammond&rsquo;s bow&rsquo;r,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; No blue-ey&rsquo;d graces, wanton mirth diffuse,<br
+/>
+The king of gods here rains no golden show&rsquo;r,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor have these lips e&rsquo;er sipt Castilian
+dews.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 42</span>At the
+&lsquo;Old House&rsquo; in Crown Street there used to be held in
+Dyer&rsquo;s time, if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives
+old Union Book Club, and at this very Book Club, Walter Theodore
+Watts first delivered himself of his boyish ideas about science,
+literature, and things in general.&nbsp; Filled with juvenile
+emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that boyish
+utterance.&nbsp; It interests me much, because I seem to see in
+it adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with
+which I hope to enrich these pages.&nbsp; I cannot let slip the
+opportunity of taking advantage of a lucky accident&mdash;the
+accident that a member of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s family was
+able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown newspaper cutting in
+which the speech is reported.&nbsp; In 1854, &lsquo;W. Theodore
+Watts,&rsquo; as he is described in the cutting, although too
+young to be himself a member&mdash;if he was not still at school
+at Cambridge, he had just left it&mdash;on account of his
+father&rsquo;s great local reputation as a man of learning, was
+invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the toast,
+&lsquo;Science.&rsquo;&nbsp; In the &lsquo;Cambridge
+Chronicle&rsquo; of that date the proceedings of the dinner were
+reported, and great prominence was given to the speech of the
+precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by the
+allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely
+improvized.&nbsp; The subject which he discussed was &lsquo;The
+Influence of Science upon Modern Civilization&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It is one of the many beautiful remarks of
+the great philosophical lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge
+resembles a tree, which runs straight for some time, and then
+parts itself into branches.&nbsp; Now, of all the branches of the
+tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most hopeful one for
+humanity is physical science&mdash;that branch <a
+name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 43</span>of the tree
+which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to
+bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present
+wondrous state of development.&nbsp; I am aware that the
+assertion that Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will
+be considered by many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to
+come from a person young and inexperienced as myself.&nbsp; It is
+heterodox; it clashes, for instance, with the venerable
+superstition of &lsquo;the wisdom of the ancients&rsquo;&mdash;a
+superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my friend
+Mr. Wright&rsquo;s old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment
+been talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse
+to the point:&mdash;</p>
+<p>For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,<br />
+Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,<br />
+And out of olde bookes; in good faith,<br />
+Cometh all this new science that men lere.</p>
+<p>But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their
+wisdom in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend
+that we simply abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied
+to the ancients more properly, or to our own English ancestors,
+is a fallacy.&nbsp; It is the error of applying qualities to
+communities of men which belong only to individuals.&nbsp; There
+can be no doubt that, of contemporary individuals, the oldest of
+them has had the greatest experience, and is therefore, or ought
+therefore, to be the wisest; but with generations of men, surely
+the reverse of this must be the fact.&nbsp; As Sydney Smith says
+in his own inimitably droll way, &lsquo;Those who came first (our
+ancestors), are the young people, and have the least
+experience.&nbsp; Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children
+in arms&mdash;chubby boys in the time of Edward the First;
+striplings under Elizabeth; <a name="page44"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 44</span>men in the reign of Queen Anne; and
+we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have
+treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience
+which human life can supply.</p>
+<p>And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our
+own English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity.&nbsp; What,
+for instance, was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient
+Chaldeans&mdash;what but the wildest Astrology?&nbsp; What
+schoolboy has not chuckled over the ingenious old
+Herodotus&rsquo;s description of the sun being blown out of the
+heavens?&nbsp; Or again, at old Plutarch&rsquo;s veracious story
+of the hedgehogs and the grapes?&nbsp; Nay, there are absurdities
+enough in such great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle,
+to convince us that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most
+matters appertaining to the Physical Sciences.</p>
+<p>Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage
+the ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to
+reverence.&nbsp; But theirs was essentially the day of poetry and
+imagination; our day&mdash;though there are still poets among us,
+as Alexander Smith has been proving to us lately&mdash;is, as
+essentially, the day of Science.&nbsp; I might, if I had time,
+dwell upon another point here&mdash;the constitution of the Greek
+mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking as the
+soul of antiquity).&nbsp; Was that scientific?&nbsp; Surely
+not.</p>
+<p>The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know,
+was beauty, sensuous beauty.&nbsp; This prevailing passion for
+the beautiful exhibits itself in everything they did, and in
+everything they said: it breathes in their poetry, in their
+oratory, in their drama, in their architecture, and above all in
+their marvellous sculpture.&nbsp; The productions of the Greek
+intellect are pure temples <a name="page45"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 45</span>of the beautiful, and, as such, will
+never fade and decay, for</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">A thing of beauty is a joy for
+ever.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe
+that Science could never have found a home in the Europe of
+antiquity.&nbsp; Athens was too imaginative and poetical.&nbsp;
+Sparta was too warlike and barbarous.&nbsp; Rome was too sensual
+and gross.&nbsp; It had to wait for the steady Teutonic
+mind&mdash;the plodding brains of modern England and modern
+Germany.&nbsp; That Homer is the father of poetry&mdash;that
+&AElig;schylus is a wonder of sublimity&mdash;that Sophocles and
+Euripides are profound masters of human passion and human
+pathos&mdash;that Aristophanes is an exhaustless fountain of
+sparkling wit and richest humour&mdash;no one in this room, or
+out of it, is more willing to admit than I am.&nbsp; But is that
+to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison
+and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or
+Aristotle?</p>
+<p>The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was
+accompanied through life by a spiritual good genius and evil
+genius.&nbsp; Every right action he did, and every right thought
+that entered his mind, he attributed to the influence of his good
+Genius; while every bad thought and action he attributed to his
+evil Genius.&nbsp; And this was not the mere poetic figment of a
+poetic brain: it was a living and breathing faith with him.&nbsp;
+He believed it in his childhood, in his youth, in his manhood,
+and he believed it on his death-bed, when the deadly hemlock was
+winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of Laocoon, around his
+giant brain.&nbsp; Well, gentlemen, don&rsquo;t let us laugh at
+this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a
+beautiful one, and typical of many great truths.&nbsp; And I have
+often thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man
+than Socrates.&nbsp; I <a name="page46"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 46</span>mean the great
+man&mdash;mankind.&nbsp; He, too, has his good genius and his
+evil genius.&nbsp; The former we will designate science, the
+latter we will call superstition.&nbsp; For ages upon ages,
+superstition has had the sway over him&mdash;that evil genius,
+who blotted out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within
+his breast, and substituted all manner of blinding
+errors&mdash;errors which have made him play</p>
+<p>Such fantastic tricks before high heaven<br />
+As make the angels weep.</p>
+<p>This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face
+of creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul
+tells us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid
+mysteries.&nbsp; In a word, the great Man who ought to have been
+only a little lower than the angels, has been made, by
+superstition, only a little above the fiends.</p>
+<p>But, at last, God has permitted man&rsquo;s long, long
+experience to be followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the
+yoke of this ancient enemy, and clasped the hands of
+Science&mdash;Science, that good genius who makes matter the
+obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the ethereal lightning and
+makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns king of the raging
+sea and winds; who compresses the life of Methusaleh into seventy
+years; who unlocks the casket of the human frame, and ranges
+through its most secret chambers, until at last nothing, save the
+mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden; who maps out all
+the nations of the earth; showing how the sable Ethiopian, the
+dusky Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the intellectual
+European, are but differently developed exemplars of the same
+type of manhood, and warning man that he is still his
+&lsquo;brother&rsquo;s keeper&rsquo; now as in the primeval days
+of Cain and Abel.</p>
+<p><a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>The
+good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his d&aelig;dal wings
+up into the starry night, there where &lsquo;God&rsquo;s name is
+writ in worlds,&rsquo; and discourses to us of the laws which
+bind the planets revolving around their planetary suns, and those
+suns again circling for ever around the great central
+sun&mdash;&lsquo;The Great White Throne of God!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the
+long vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this
+beautiful world which the wisest and the best of us are so
+unwilling to leave, first, as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire,
+starting on that mysterious course which is to end only with time
+itself; then, as a dark humid mass, &lsquo;without form and
+void,&rsquo; where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled in
+unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages,
+having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator
+had intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of
+vegetable life, to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees
+and towering ferns, compared with which the forest monarchs of
+our day are veritable dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing
+the still greater wonder of animal life, from the primitive,
+half-vegetable, half-conscious forms, till such mighty creatures
+as the Megatherium, the Saurian, the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam
+about the luxuriant forests, and bellow in chaotic caves, and
+wallow in the teeming seas, and circle in the humid atmosphere,
+making the earth rock and tremble beneath their monstrous
+movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders, the climax
+towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and the
+basest work of God&mdash;the creation of the thinking, reasoning,
+sinning animal, Man.</p>
+<p>And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on,
+instructing and improving, and purifying the human <a
+name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 48</span>mind, and
+aiding in the grand work of developing the divinity within
+it.&nbsp; I know, indeed, that it is a favourite argument of some
+people that modern civilization will decline and vanish,
+&lsquo;like the civilizations of old.&rsquo;&nbsp; But I venture
+to deny it in toto.&nbsp; From a human point of view, it is
+utterly impossible.&nbsp; And without going into the question
+(for I see the time is running on) as to whether ancient
+civilization really has passed away, or whether the old germ did
+not rather spring into new life after the dark ages, and is now
+bearing fruit, ten thousand times more glorious than it ever did
+of old; without arguing this point, I contend that all
+comparisons between ancient civilization and modern must of
+necessity be futile and fallacious.&nbsp; And for this reason,
+that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity,
+Science has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation
+of antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and
+political life, and come to its own conclusions.&nbsp; So
+isolated, indeed, was one nation from another, that nations were
+in some instances ignorant of each other&rsquo;s existence.&nbsp;
+A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh, was for Assyria alone;
+at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for Italy alone.&nbsp;
+There was no science then to &lsquo;put a girdle round about the
+earth&rsquo; (as Puck says) &lsquo;in forty minutes.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But now, a new idea brought to light in modern London, or Paris,
+or New York, is for the whole world; it is wafted on the wings of
+science around the whole habitable globe&mdash;from Ireland to
+New Zealand, from India to Peru.&nbsp; I am not going to say,
+gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the ruler of the
+waves.&nbsp; The day may come that will see her sink to a
+second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in
+Europe.&nbsp; In spite of all we have been saying this evening,
+the day may come that will see Russia the dominant power in
+Europe.&nbsp; The <a name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+49</span>day may come that will see Sydney and Melbourne the
+fountain heads of refinement and learning.&nbsp; It may have been
+ordained in Heaven at the first that each race upon the globe
+shall be in its turn the dominant race&mdash;that the negro race
+shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian race
+is now lording it over the negro.&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; It would
+be only equity.&nbsp; But I am not talking of races; I am not
+talking of nationalities.&nbsp; I speak again of the great man,
+Mankind&mdash;the one indivisible man that Science is making
+him.&nbsp; He will never retrograde, because &lsquo;matter and
+mind comprise the universe,&rsquo; and matter must entirely sink
+beneath the weight of mind&mdash;because good must one day
+conquer ill, or why was the world made?&nbsp; Henceforth his road
+is onward&mdash;onward.&nbsp; Science has helped to give him such
+a start that nothing shall hold him back&mdash;nothing can hold
+him back&mdash;save a fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of
+Almighty God.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But I am wandering from the subject of the &lsquo;Old
+House&rsquo; in Crown Street and its connection with
+printing.&nbsp; The last important book that was ever printed
+there was a very remarkable one.&nbsp; It was the famous essay on
+Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friend, the Rev. John Hunt,
+D.D., at that time a curate of the St. Ives Church&mdash;a book
+that was the result of an enormous amount of learning, research,
+and original thought, a book, moreover, which has had a great
+effect upon modern thought.&nbsp; It has passed through several
+editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.</p>
+<h2><a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+50</span>Chapter IV<br />
+CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Craigie</span> has recently protested
+against the metropolitan fable that London enjoys a monopoly of
+culture, and has reminded us that in the provinces may be found a
+great part of the intellectual energy of the nation.&nbsp; It
+would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than that
+in which Theodore Watts grew up.&nbsp; Indeed, his early life may
+be compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the
+hardening and narrowing influences which marred the austere
+educational system of the Mill family.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s father was in many respects a very
+remarkable man.&nbsp; &lsquo;He was,&rsquo; says the famous
+gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in Chambers&rsquo;s
+Encyclop&aelig;dia, &lsquo;a naturalist intimately connected with
+Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian
+evolutionist of considerable mark in the scientific world of
+London, and the Gilbert White of the Ouse valley.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+There is, as the &lsquo;Times&rsquo; said in its review of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with
+the Dichtung of the story, that it is not surprising that
+attempts have often been made to identify all the
+characters.&nbsp; Many of these guesses have been wrong; and
+indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be
+Mr. Hake, who, in two papers in &lsquo;Notes and Queries&rsquo;
+identified many of the characters.&nbsp; <a
+name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 51</span>Until he
+wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that the spiritual
+protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the story,
+Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s father.&nbsp; Mr.
+Hake, however, tells us that this is not so.&nbsp; Philip Aylwin
+is a portrait of the author&rsquo;s uncle, an extraordinary man
+of whom I shall have something to say later.&nbsp; I feel myself
+fortunate in having discovered an admirable account of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s father in Mr. Norris&rsquo;s &lsquo;History
+of St. Ives&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;For many years one of the most interesting
+of St. Ivian figures was the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born
+at St. Ives in 1808, though his family on both sides came from
+Hemingford Grey and Hemingford Abbots.&nbsp; According to the
+following extracts from &lsquo;The Cambridge Chronicle and
+University Journal&rsquo; of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died
+quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: &lsquo;We record with
+much regret the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K.
+Watts, who died after an hour&rsquo;s illness of heart disease at
+Berry House, whither he had been taken after the seizure.&nbsp;
+Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was called in, but without
+avail.&nbsp; At the inquest the post-mortem examination disclosed
+that the cause of death was a long-standing fatty degeneration of
+the heart, which had, on several occasions, resulted in
+syncope.&nbsp; Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back to
+Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme
+heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of
+death.</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of
+the oldest solicitors in the county.&nbsp; He had also devoted
+much time and study to scientific subjects, and was, in his
+earlier life, a well-known figure in the <a
+name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 52</span>scientific
+circles of London.&nbsp; He was for years connected with Section
+E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and
+elected on the Committee.&nbsp; He read papers on geology and
+cognate subjects before that Association and other Societies
+during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles of
+geology.&nbsp; Afterwards he made a special study of luminous
+meteors, and in the Association&rsquo;s reports upon this subject
+some of the most interesting observations of luminous meteors are
+those recorded by Mr. Watts.&nbsp; He was one of the earliest
+Fellows of the Geographical Society, and one of the Founders of
+the Anthropological Society.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the
+last moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to
+which he had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the
+&lsquo;Antiquary&rsquo; for 1883 and 1884, where will be found
+two articles on Cambridgeshire Antiquities, one of which did not
+get into type till several months after his death.&nbsp; It was,
+however, not by Arch&aelig;ology, but by his geological and
+geographical writings that he made his reputation.&nbsp; And it
+was these which brought him into contact with Murchison,
+Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the
+geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr.
+Norton Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now
+occupied by Mr. Matton.&nbsp; In the sketches of the life of Dr.
+Latham it is mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent
+visitor to Mr. Watts at St. Ives.&nbsp; Since his death there
+have been frequent references to him as a man of
+&lsquo;encyclop&aelig;dic general knowledge.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in
+St. Ives have been more liked or more generally respected.&nbsp;
+His great delight seemed to be roaming <a name="page53"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 53</span>about in meadows and lanes observing
+the changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in
+which our neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself.&nbsp; On
+such occasions the present writer has often met him and had many
+interesting conversations with him upon subjects connected with
+natural science.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s mother,
+the Duntons, although in the seventeenth century a branch of the
+family lived in Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen
+there for several generations, they are entirely East Anglian;
+and some very romantic chapters in the history of the family have
+been touched upon by Dr. Jessopp in his charming essay,
+&lsquo;Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.&rsquo;&nbsp; This essay
+was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the
+Norfolk and Norwich Arch&aelig;ological Society, and treating of
+the Register of Crab House Nunnery.&nbsp; In 1896 Walter Theodore
+Watts added his mother&rsquo;s to his father&rsquo;s name, by a
+deed in Chancery.</p>
+<p>I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in
+temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story
+about Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes
+of his friend) used to tell.&nbsp; When the future poet and
+critic was a boy in jackets pursuing his studies at the Cambridge
+school, he found in the school library a copy of Wells&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Stories after Nature,&rsquo; and read them with great
+avidity.&nbsp; Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and
+was reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly
+a small family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he
+was amazed to find, in a number of the &lsquo;Illuminated
+Magazine,&rsquo; a periodical which his father, on account of
+Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the <a name="page54"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 54</span>first, one of the &lsquo;Stories
+after Nature&rsquo; reprinted with an illustration by the
+designer and engraver Linton.&nbsp; He said to his father,
+&lsquo;Why, I have read this story before!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;That is quite impossible,&rsquo; said his father,
+&lsquo;quite impossible that you should have before read a new
+story in a new number of a magazine.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I have
+read it before; I know all about it,&rsquo; said the boy.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;As I do not think you untruthful,&rsquo; said the father,
+&lsquo;I think I can explain your hallucination about this
+matter.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Do, father,&rsquo; said the
+son.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well,&rsquo; said the father, &lsquo;I do not
+know whether or not you are a poet.&nbsp; But I do know that you
+are a dreamer of dreams.&nbsp; You have told me before
+extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape
+that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it
+before.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Yes, father, that often
+occurs.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Well, the reason for that is this, as
+you will understand when you come to know a little more about
+physiology.&nbsp; The brain is divided into two hemispheres,
+exactly answering to each other, and they act so simultaneously
+that they work like one brain; but it often happens that when
+dreamers like you see things or read things, one of the
+hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the other
+one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy
+hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture
+before.&rsquo;&nbsp; The explanation seemed convincing, and yet
+it could not convince the boy.</p>
+<p>The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories,
+and the father said, &lsquo;Well, Walter, have you read this
+before?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said the boy falteringly,
+&lsquo;unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain,
+father.&rsquo;&nbsp; And so it went on from month to month.&nbsp;
+When the boy had grown into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one
+of the very first of the literary subjects <a
+name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 55</span>discussed
+between them was that of Charles Wells&rsquo;s &lsquo;Joseph and
+His Brethren&rsquo; and &lsquo;Stories after Nature.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Rossetti was agreeably surprised that although his new friend
+knew nothing of &lsquo;Joseph and His Brethren,&rsquo; he was
+very familiar with the &lsquo;Stories after Nature.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &lsquo;they appeared
+in the &ldquo;Illuminated Magazine.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Who should have thought,&rsquo; said Rossetti, &lsquo;that
+the &ldquo;Illuminated Magazine&rdquo; in its moribund days, when
+Linton took it up, should have got down to St. Ives.&nbsp; Its
+circulation, I think, was only a few hundreds.&nbsp; Among
+Linton&rsquo;s man&oelig;uvres for keeping the magazine alive was
+to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells&rsquo;s &ldquo;Stories
+after Nature&rdquo; without telling the public that they had
+previously appeared in book form.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;They did
+then appear in book form first?&rsquo; said Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; &lsquo;Yes, but there can&rsquo;t have been
+over a hundred or two sold,&rsquo; said Rossetti.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+discovered it at the British Museum.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I read
+it at Cambridge in my school library,&rsquo; said Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; It was the startled look on Rossetti&rsquo;s
+face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell him the story about
+his father and the &lsquo;Illuminated Magazine.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the
+impulse to express himself in literature rather early.&nbsp; But
+it will be new to many, and especially to the editor of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; that as a mere child he contributed
+to its pages.&nbsp; When he was a boy he read the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; which his father took in
+regularly.&nbsp; One day he caught a correspondent of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;&mdash;no less a person than John P.
+Collier&mdash;tripping on a point of Shakespearean scholarship,
+being able to do so by chance.&nbsp; He had stumbled on the
+matter in question while reading one of his father&rsquo;s
+books.&nbsp; He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand,
+stigmatizing the blunder <a name="page56"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 56</span>with youthful scorn.&nbsp; In due
+time the correction was noted in the Literary Gossip of the
+journal.&nbsp; Soon after, his father had occasion to consult the
+book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he said,
+&lsquo;Walter, have you been marking this book?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Yes, father.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;But you know I
+object?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Yes, father, but I was interested in
+the point.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Why,&rsquo; said his father,
+&lsquo;somebody has been writing about this very passage to the
+&ldquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Yes,
+father,&rsquo; replied the boy, red and ungrammatical with proud
+confusion, &lsquo;it was me.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;You!&rsquo;
+cried his astonished father, &lsquo;you!&rsquo;&nbsp; And thus
+the matter was explained.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton confesses that
+he was never tired of thumbing that, his first contribution to
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his
+uncle, James Orlando Watts.&nbsp; His father may have made him
+scientific: his uncle seems to have made him philosophical with a
+dash of mysticism.&nbsp; As I have already pointed out, Mr. Hake
+has identified this uncle as the prototype of Philip Aylwin, the
+father of the hero.&nbsp; The importance of this character in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the
+story, we find that the character of Philip is its motive
+power.&nbsp; After his death, everything that occurs is brought
+about by his doctrines and his dreams, his fantasies and his
+whims.&nbsp; This effect of making a man dominate from his grave
+the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be
+unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers
+of some critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the
+subject, there they leave it.&nbsp; What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls
+&lsquo;the tragic mischief&rsquo; of the drama is not brought
+about by any villain, but by the <a name="page57"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 57</span>vagaries and mystical speculations of
+a dead man, the author of &lsquo;The Veiled Queen.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take
+an interest.&nbsp; He was a deep student of the drama, Greek,
+English, Spanish, and German.&nbsp; And it is a singular fact
+that this dreamy man was a lover of the acted drama.&nbsp; One of
+his stories in connection with acting is this.&nbsp; A party of
+strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission to act for
+a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and
+sometimes Cromwell&rsquo;s Barn.&nbsp; Mr. J. O. Watts went to
+see them, and on returning home after the performance said,
+&lsquo;I have seen a little actor who is a real genius.&nbsp; He
+reminds me of what I have read about Edmund Kean&rsquo;s
+acting.&nbsp; I shall go and see him every night.&nbsp; And he
+went.&nbsp; The actor&rsquo;s name was Robson.&nbsp; When,
+afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in London, he learnt that an
+actor named Robson was acting in one of the second-rate theatres
+called the Grecian Saloon.&nbsp; He went to the theatre and
+found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so
+impressed him down at St. Ives.&nbsp; From that time he followed
+Robson to whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward
+became a well-known figure among the playgoers of the
+Olympic.&nbsp; He always contended that Robson was the only
+histrionic genius of his time.&nbsp; Mr. Hake seems to have known
+James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in
+London:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;He was,&rdquo; says Mr. Hake, &ldquo;a man
+of extraordinary learning in the academic sense of the word, and
+he possessed still more extraordinary general knowledge.&nbsp; He
+lived for many years the strangest kind of hermit life,
+surrounded by his books and old manuscripts.&nbsp; His two great
+passions were philology and <a name="page58"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 58</span>occultism, but he also took great
+interest in rubbings from brass monuments.&nbsp; He knew more, I
+think, of those strange writers discussed in Vaughan&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Hours with the Mystics&rsquo; than any other
+person&mdash;including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he managed
+to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the
+physical sciences, especially astronomy.&nbsp; He seemed to be
+learning languages up to almost the last year of his life.&nbsp;
+His method of learning languages was the opposite of that of
+George Borrow&mdash;that is to say, he made great use of
+grammars; and when he died, it is said that from four to five
+hundred treatises on grammar were found among his books.&nbsp; He
+used to express great contempt for Borrow&rsquo;s method of
+learning languages from dictionaries only.&nbsp; I do not think
+that any one connected with literature&mdash;with the sole
+exception of Mr. Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G.
+Latham&mdash;knew so much of him as I did.&nbsp; His personal
+appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin, as described
+in the novel.&nbsp; Although he never wrote poetry, he
+translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and
+Portuguese poets.&nbsp; I remember that he was an extraordinary
+admirer of Shelley.&nbsp; His knowledge of Shakespeare and the
+Elizabethan dramatists was a link between him and Mr.
+Swinburne.</p>
+<p>At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum
+reading room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed
+to know anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he
+spoke to me it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should
+disturb the other readers, which in his eyes would have been a
+heinous offence.&nbsp; For very many years he had been extremely
+well known to the second-hand booksellers, for he was a constant
+purchaser of their wares.&nbsp; He was a great pedestrian, and,
+being very much attached to the north <a name="page59"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 59</span>of London, would take long, slow
+tramps ten miles out in the direction of Highgate, Wood Green,
+etc.&nbsp; I have a very distinct recollection of calling upon
+him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living close to
+him in Percy Circus.&nbsp; Books were piled up from floor to
+ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember
+where to find every book and what there was in it.&nbsp; It is a
+singular fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned
+who seems to have known him was that brilliant but eccentric
+journalist, Thomas Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and
+used to call him &lsquo;the scholar.&rsquo;&nbsp; How Purnell
+managed to break through the icy wall that surrounded the recluse
+always puzzled me; but I suppose they must have come across one
+another at one of those pleasant inns in the north of London
+where &lsquo;the scholar&rsquo; was taking his chop and bottle of
+Beaune.&nbsp; He was a man that never made new friends, and as
+one after another of his old friends died he was left so entirely
+alone that, I think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the
+author of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; and myself.&nbsp; But at
+Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines, when and where my
+father and I used to meet him.&nbsp; His memory was so powerful
+that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he had
+read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a
+part.&nbsp; He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his
+faculties up to the last were exactly like those of a man in the
+prime of life.&nbsp; He always reminded me of Charles
+Lamb&rsquo;s description of George Dyer.</p>
+<p>Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it
+is only of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were
+competent to touch upon his inner life.&nbsp; He was a still
+greater recluse than the &lsquo;Philip Aylwin&rsquo; of the
+novel.&nbsp; I think I am right in saying that <a
+name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 60</span>he took up
+one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of
+age.&nbsp; Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in
+these studies that he sympathized with the author of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;s&rsquo; friend, the late Lord de
+Tabley.&nbsp; I remember one story of his peculiarities which
+will give an idea of the kind of man he was.&nbsp; He had a
+brother, Mr. William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him
+in every way&mdash;strikingly good-looking, with great charm of
+manner and savoir faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a
+very superficial knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything
+else, except records of British military and naval
+exploits&mdash;where he was really learned.&nbsp; Being full of
+admiration of his student brother, and having a parrot-like
+instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great volubility upon
+all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in the same
+words what he had been listening to from his brother, until at
+last he got to be called the &lsquo;walking
+encyclop&aelig;dia.&rsquo;&nbsp; The result was that he got the
+reputation of being a great reader and an original thinker, while
+the true student and book-lover was frequently complimented on
+the way in which he took after his learned brother.&nbsp; This
+did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply amused
+him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories as
+to what people had said to him on this subject.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation60"></a><a href="#footnote60"
+class="citation">[60]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of
+one of his stories.&nbsp; I may add that the editor of
+&lsquo;Notes and Queries,&rsquo; Mr. Joseph Knight, knew James
+Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he &lsquo;can testify to
+the truth&rsquo; of Mr. Hake&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;portraiture.&rsquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+61</span>Chapter V<br />
+EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> an East Midlander by birth
+it seems to have been to East Anglia that Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sympathies were most strongly drawn.&nbsp;
+It was there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it
+was to East Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.</p>
+<p>On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the
+Hemingford side already described, the country, though not so
+lovely as the western side, is at first fairly attractive; but it
+becomes less and less so as it nears the Fens.&nbsp; The Fens,
+however, would seem to have a charm of their own, and Mr.
+Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness that
+could hardly be surpassed.&nbsp; It was here as a boy that he
+made friends with the Gryengroes&mdash;that superior variety of
+the Romanies which Borrow had known years before.&nbsp; These
+gypsies used to bring their Welsh ponies to England and sell them
+at the fairs.&nbsp; I must now go back for some years in order to
+enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s graphic description
+of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country, which
+appeared in &lsquo;Great Thoughts&rsquo; in 1903.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;I shall never forget my earliest
+recollections of them.&nbsp; My father used sometimes to drive in
+a dogcart to see friends of his through about twelve miles of Fen
+country, <a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+62</span>and he used to take me with him.&nbsp; Let me say that
+the Fen country is much more striking than is generally
+supposed.&nbsp; Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the
+midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are
+divided by dykes; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for
+miles and miles.&nbsp; This gives an importance to the skies such
+as is observed nowhere else except on the open sea.&nbsp; The
+flashing opalescent radiance of the sea is apt to challenge the
+riches of the sky, and in a certain degree tends to neutralize
+it; but in the Fen country the level, monotonous greenery of the
+crops in summer, and, in autumn and winter, the vast expanse of
+black earth, make the dome of the sky, by contrast, so bright and
+glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams and suggests a roof
+of rainbows; and in cloudy weather it seems almost the only
+living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more magical
+still.&nbsp; And as to sunsets, I do not know of any, either by
+land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the
+Fen country.&nbsp; The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt,
+a good deal to do with it.&nbsp; The sun frequently sets in a
+pageantry of gauzy vapour of every colour, quite
+indescribable.</p>
+<p>The first evening that I took one of these drives, while I was
+watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps
+of twitch-grass, set burning by the farm-labourers, which
+stretched right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the
+dogcart and pointed to a ruddy fire glowing, flickering, and
+smoking in an angle where a green grassy drove-way met the
+dark-looking high-road some yards ahead.&nbsp; And then I saw
+some tents, and then a number of dusky figures, some squatting
+near the fire, some moving about.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+gypsies!&rsquo; I said, in the greatest state of exultation,
+which soon fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle and saw a
+lot of these dusky <a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+63</span>people running and leaping like wild things towards the
+dog-cart.&nbsp; &lsquo;Will they kill us, father?&rsquo; I
+said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Kill us?&nbsp; No,&rsquo; he said, laughing;
+&lsquo;they are friends of mine.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve only come to
+lead the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at
+it.&rsquo;&nbsp; They came flocking up.&nbsp; So far from the
+mare starting, as she would have done at such an invasion by
+English people, she seemed to know and welcome the gypsies by
+instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose with their
+tawny but well-shaped fingers, and caressing her neck.&nbsp;
+Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever
+saw.&nbsp; When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was
+fascinated by the charm of the picture.&nbsp; Outside the tents
+in front of the fire, over which a kettle was suspended from an
+upright iron bar, which I afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was
+spread a large dazzling white table-cloth, covered with white
+crockery, among which glittered a goodly number of silver
+spoons.&nbsp; I afterwards learnt that to possess good linen,
+good crockery, and real silver spoons, was as &lsquo;passionate a
+desire in the Romany chi as in the most ambitious farmer&rsquo;s
+wife in the Fen country.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was from this little
+incident that my intimacy with the gypsies dated.&nbsp; I
+associated much with them in after life, and I have had more
+experiences among them than I have yet had an opportunity of
+recording in print.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This pretty gypsy girl was the prototype, I believe, of the
+famous Rhona Boswell herself.</p>
+<p>It must of course have been after the meeting with Rhona in
+the East Midlands&mdash;supposing always that we are allowed to
+identify the novelist with the hero, a bold
+supposition&mdash;that Mr. Watts-Dunton again came across
+her&mdash;this time in East Anglia.&nbsp; Whether this is so or
+not, I must give this picture of her from
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+64</span>&ldquo;It was at this time that I made the acquaintance
+of Winnie&rsquo;s friend, Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy
+girl.&nbsp; Graylingham Wood and Rington Wood, like the entire
+neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of a superior kind of
+Gypsies called Gryengroes, that is to say, horse-dealers.&nbsp;
+Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell them in the
+Eastern Counties and the East Midlands.&nbsp; Thus it was that
+Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales.&nbsp;
+Compared with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a
+child, Winnie seemed quite a grave little person.&nbsp;
+Rhona&rsquo;s limbs were always on the move, and the movement
+sprang always from her emotions.&nbsp; Her laugh seemed to ring
+through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it was
+impossible to mistake for any other.&nbsp; The laughter of most
+Gypsy girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona&rsquo;s
+laughter was a sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which
+afterwards, when she grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin,
+towards her.&nbsp; It seemed to emanate, not from her throat
+merely, but from her entire frame.&nbsp; If one could imagine a
+strain of merriment and fun blending with the ecstatic notes of a
+skylark soaring and singing, one might form some idea of the
+laugh of Rhona Boswell.&nbsp; Ah, what days they were!&nbsp;
+Rhona would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington
+Manor, some miles off, especially to show us some newly devised
+coronet of flowers that she had been weaving for herself.&nbsp;
+This induced Winnie to weave for herself a coronet of seaweeds,
+and an entire morning was passed in grave discussion as to which
+coronet excelled the other.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+65</span>Chapter VI<br />
+SPORT AND WORK</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was at this period that, like so
+many young Englishmen who were his contemporaries, he gave
+attention to field sports, and took interest in that athleticism
+which, to judge from Wilkie Collins&rsquo;s scathing pictures,
+was quite as rampant and absurd then as it is in our own
+time.&nbsp; It was then too that he acquired that familiarity
+with the figures prominent in the ring which startles one in his
+reminiscences of George Borrow.&nbsp; But it will scarcely
+interest the readers of this book to dwell long upon this
+subject.&nbsp; Nor have I time to repeat the humorous stories I
+have heard him tell about the queer characters who could then be
+met at St. Ives Fair (said to have been the largest cattle fair
+in England), and at another favourite resort of his, Stourbridge
+Fair, near Cambridge.&nbsp; Stourbridge Fair still exists, but
+its glory was departing when Mr. Watts-Dunton was familiar with
+it; and now, possibly, it has departed for ever.&nbsp; Of
+Cambridge and the entire county he tells many anecdotes.&nbsp;
+Here is a specimen:&mdash;</p>
+<p>Once in the early sixties he and his brother and some friends
+were greatly exercised by the news that Deerfoot, the famous
+American Indian runner in whom Borrow took such an interest, was
+to run at Cambridge against the English champion.&nbsp; When the
+day came, they drove to Cambridge in a dog-cart from St. Ives,
+about a <a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+66</span>dozen miles.&nbsp; The race took place in a field called
+Fenner&rsquo;s Ground, much used by cricketers.&nbsp; This is
+how, as far as I can recall the words, he tells the
+anecdote:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The place was crammed with all sorts of
+young men&mdash;&rsquo;varsity men and others.&nbsp; There were
+not many young farmers or squires or yeomen within a radius of a
+good many miles that did not put in an appearance on that
+occasion.&nbsp; The Indian won easily, and at the conclusion of
+the race there was a frantic rush to get near him and shake his
+hand.&nbsp; The rush was so wild and so insensate that it
+irritated me more than I should at the present moment consider it
+possible to be irritated.&nbsp; But I ought to say that at that
+time of my life I had developed into a strangely imperious little
+chap.&nbsp; I had been over-indulged&mdash;not at home, but at
+the Cambridge school to which I had been sent&mdash;and
+spoilt.&nbsp; This seems odd, but it&rsquo;s true.&nbsp; It was
+the boys who spoilt me in a curious way&mdash;a way which will
+not be understood by those who went to public schools like Eton,
+where the fagging principle would have stood in the way of the
+development of the curious relation between me and my
+fellow-pupils which I am alluding to.&nbsp; There is an
+inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct in the genus homo
+which causes boys, without in the least knowing why, to select
+one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and spoil him,
+almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which is so
+valuable in the social struggle for life that follows
+school-days.&nbsp; This kind of emperor I had been at that
+school.&nbsp; It indicated no sort of real superiority on my
+part; for I learnt that immediately after I had left the vacant
+post it was filled by another boy&mdash;filled for an equally
+inscrutable reason.&nbsp; The result of it was that I became (as
+I often think when I recall <a name="page67"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 67</span>those days) the most masterful young
+urchin that ever lived.&nbsp; If I had not been so, I could not
+have got into a fury at being jostled by a good-humoured
+crowd.&nbsp; My brother, who had not been so spoilt at school,
+was very different, and kept urging me to keep my temper.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s capital fun,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;look at
+this blue-eyed young chap jostling and being jostled close to
+us.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s fond of a hustle, and no mistake.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s the kind of chap I should like to know&rsquo;; and
+he indicated a young &rsquo;varsity man of whose elbow at that
+moment I was unpleasantly conscious, and who seemed to be in a
+state of delight at other elbows being pushed into his
+ribs.&nbsp; I soon perceived that certain men whom he was with
+seemed angry, not on their own account, but on account of this
+youth of the laughing lips and blue eyes.&nbsp; As they were
+trying to make a ring round him, &lsquo;Hanged if it isn&rsquo;t
+the Prince!&rsquo; said my brother.&nbsp; &lsquo;And look how he
+takes it!&nbsp; Surely you can stand what he stands!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+It was, in fact, the Prince of Wales, who had come to see the
+American runner.&nbsp; I needed only two or three years of
+buffeting with the great life outside the schoolroom to lose all
+my imperiousness and learn the essential lesson of
+give-and-take.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>For a time Mr. Watts-Dunton wavered about being articled to
+his father as a solicitor.&nbsp; His love of the woods and fields
+was too great at that time for him to find life in a
+solicitor&rsquo;s office at all tolerable.&nbsp; Moreover, it
+would seem that he who had been so precocious a student, and who
+had lived in books, felt a temporary revulsion from them, and an
+irresistible impulse to study Nature apart from books, to study
+her face to face.&nbsp; And it was at this time that, as the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; remarks, he
+&lsquo;moved much among the East Anglian gypsies, of whose
+superstitions and folklore he <a name="page68"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 68</span>made a careful study.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But of this period of his life I have but little knowledge.&nbsp;
+Judging from Groome&rsquo;s remarks upon &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; in
+the &lsquo;Bookman,&rsquo; he alone had Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+full confidence in the matter.&nbsp; So great was his desire to
+pore over the book of nature, there appears to have been some
+likelihood, perhaps I ought to say some danger, of his feeling
+the impulse which had taken George Borrow away from
+civilization.&nbsp; He seems, besides, to have shared with the
+Greeks and with Montaigne a belief in the value of leisure.&nbsp;
+It was at this period, to judge from his writings, that he
+exclaimed with Montaigne, &lsquo;Have you known how to regulate
+your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
+composed books.&nbsp; Have you known how to take repose, you have
+done more than he who has taken empires and cities.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I suppose, however, that this was the time when he composed that
+unpublished &lsquo;Dictionary for Nature-worshippers,&rsquo; from
+which he often used to quote in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is nothing in his
+writings so characteristic as those definitions.&nbsp; Work and
+Sport are thus defined: &lsquo;Work: that activity of mind or
+body which exhausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or
+health to the individual.&nbsp; Sport: that activity of mind or
+body which, in exhausting the vital forces, yields pleasure and
+health to the individual.&nbsp; The activity, however severe, of
+a born artist at his easel, of a born poet at his rhymings, of a
+born carpenter at his plane, is sport.&nbsp; The activity,
+however slight, of the born artist or poet at the
+merchant&rsquo;s desk, is work.&nbsp; Hence, to work is not to
+pray.&nbsp; We have called the heresy of Work modern because it
+is the characteristic one of our time; but, alas! like all
+heresies, it is old.&nbsp; It was preached by Zoroaster in almost
+Mr. Carlyle&rsquo;s words when Concord itself was in the woods
+and ere Chelsea was.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p68b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"&lsquo;Evening Dreams with the Poets.&rsquo;  (From an Oil
+Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"&lsquo;Evening Dreams with the Poets.&rsquo;  (From an Oil
+Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p68s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page69"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 69</span>In one
+of his books Mr. Watts-Dunton writes with great eloquence upon
+this subject:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;How hateful is the word
+&lsquo;experience&rsquo; in the mouth of the
+litt&eacute;rateur.&nbsp; They all seem to think that this
+universe exists to educate them, and that they should write books
+about it.&nbsp; They never look on a sunrise without thinking
+what an experience it is; how it is educating them for
+bookmaking.&nbsp; It is this that so often turns the true
+Nature-worshipper away from books altogether, that makes him
+bless with what at times seems such malicious fervour those two
+great benefactors of the human race, Caliph Omar and
+Warburton&rsquo;s cook.</p>
+<p>In Thoreau there was an almost perpetual warring of the Nature
+instinct with the Humanity instinct.&nbsp; And, to say the truth,
+the number is smaller than even Nature-worshippers themselves are
+aware&mdash;those in whom there is not that warring of these two
+great primal instincts.&nbsp; For six or eight months at a time
+there are many, perhaps, who could revel in &lsquo;utter
+solitude,&rsquo; as companionship with Nature is called; with no
+minster clock to tell them the time of day, but, instead, the
+bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle in the morning, the
+shifting of the shadows at noon, and the cawing of rooks going
+home at sunset.&nbsp; But then to these, there comes suddenly,
+and without the smallest warning, a half-recognized but secretly
+sweet pleasure in looking at the smooth high-road, and thinking
+that it leads to the city&mdash;a beating of the heart at the
+sound of the distant railway-whistle, as the train winds its way,
+like a vast gliding snake, to the whirlpool they have left.</p>
+<p>In order to realize the folly of the modern Carlylean heresy
+of work, it is necessary to realize fully how infinitely rich is
+Nature, and how generous, and consequently <a
+name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>what a sacred
+duty as well as wise resolve it is that, before he &lsquo;returns
+unto the ground,&rsquo; man should drink deeply while he may at
+the fountain of Life.&nbsp; Let it be enough for the
+Nature-worshipper to know that he, at least, has been
+blessed.&nbsp; Suppose he were to preach in London or Paris or
+New York against this bastard civilization, and expatiate on
+Nature&rsquo;s largess, of which it robs us?&nbsp; Suppose he
+were to say to people to whom opinion is the breath of life,
+&lsquo;What is it that this civilization of yours can give you by
+way of compensation for that of which it robs you?&nbsp; Is it
+your art?&nbsp; Is it your literature?&nbsp; Is it your
+music?&nbsp; Is it your science?&rsquo;&nbsp; Suppose, for
+instance, he were to say to the collector of Claudes, or Turners,
+or David Coxes: &lsquo;Your possessions are precious undoubtedly,
+but what are even they when set against the tamest and quietest
+sunrise, in the tamest and quietest district of Cambridge or
+Lincoln, in this tame and quiet month, when, over the treeless
+flat you may see, and for nothing, purple bar after purple bar
+trembling along the grey, as the cows lift up their heads from
+the sheet of silver mist in which they are lying?&nbsp; How can
+you really enjoy your Turners, you who have never seen a sunrise
+in your lives?&rsquo;&nbsp; Or suppose he were to say to the
+opera-goer: &lsquo;Those notes of your favourite soprano were
+superb indeed; and superb they ought to be to keep you in the
+opera-house on a June night, when all over the south of England a
+thousand thickets, warm with the perfumed breath of the summer
+night, are musical with the gurgle of the
+nightingales.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thoreau preached after this fashion,
+and was deservedly laughed at for his pains.</p>
+<p>Yet it is not a little singular that this heresy of the
+sacredness of work should be most flourishing at the very time
+when the sophism on which it was originally built <a
+name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 71</span>is exploded;
+the sophism, we mean, that Nature herself is the result of Work,
+whereas she is the result of growth.&nbsp; One would have thought
+that this was the very time for recognizing what the sophism had
+blinded us to, that Nature&rsquo;s permanent
+temper&mdash;whatever may be said of this or that mood of
+hers&mdash;is the temper of Sport, that her pet abhorrence, which
+is said to be a vacuum, is really Work.&nbsp; We see this clearly
+enough in what are called the lower animals&mdash;whether it be a
+tiger or a gazelle, a ferret or a coney, a bat or a
+butterfly&mdash;the final cause of the existence of every
+conscious thing is that it should sport.&nbsp; It has no other
+use than that.&nbsp; For this end it was that &lsquo;the great
+Vishnu yearned to create a world.&rsquo;&nbsp; Yet over the
+toiling and moiling world sits Moloch Work; while those whose
+hearts are withering up with hatred of him are told by certain
+writers to fall down before him and pretend to love.</p>
+<p>The worker of the mischief is, of course, civilization in
+excess, or rather, civilization in wrong directions.&nbsp; For
+this word, too, has to be newly defined in the Dictionary before
+mentioned, where you will find it thus given:&mdash;Civilization:
+a widening and enriching of human life.&nbsp; Bastard or Modern
+Western Civilization: the art of inventing fictitious wants and
+working to supply them.&nbsp; In bastard civilization life
+becomes poorer and poorer, paltrier and paltrier, till at last
+life goes out of fashion altogether, and is supplanted by
+work.&nbsp; True freedom is more remote from us than ever.&nbsp;
+For modern Freedom is thus defined: the exchange of the slavery
+of feudality for the slavery of opinion.&nbsp; Thoreau realized
+this, and tried to preach men back to common-sense and
+Nature.&nbsp; Here was his mistake&mdash;in trying to
+preach.&nbsp; No man ever yet had the Nature-instinct preached
+into him.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+72</span>Chapter VII<br />
+EAST ANGLIA</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Whatever</span> may have been those
+experiences with the gryengroes which made Groome, when speaking
+of the gypsies of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; say &lsquo;the author
+writes only of what he knows,&rsquo; it seems to have been after
+his intercourse with the gypsies that he and a younger brother,
+Alfred Eugene Watts (elsewhere described), were articled as
+solicitors to their father.&nbsp; His bent, however, was always
+towards literature, especially poetry, of which he had now
+written a great deal&mdash;indeed, the major part of the volume
+which was destined to lie unpublished for so many years.&nbsp;
+But before I deal with the most important period of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s life&mdash;his life in London&mdash;it seems
+necessary to say a word or two about his visits to East Anglia,
+and especially to the Norfolk coast.&nbsp; There are some
+admirable remarks upon the East Coast in Mr. William
+Sharp&rsquo;s chapter on &lsquo;Aylwinland&rsquo; in
+&lsquo;Literary Geography,&rsquo; and he notes the way in which
+Rhona Boswell links it with Cowslip Land; but he does not give
+examples of the poems which thus link it, such as the double
+roundel called &lsquo;The Golden Hand.&rsquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><a
+name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>THE GOLDEN
+HAND <a name="citation73a"></a><a href="#footnote73a"
+class="citation">[73a]</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Percy</span></p>
+<p>Do you forget that day on Rington strand<br />
+When, near the crumbling ruin&rsquo;s parapet,<br />
+I saw you stand beside the long-shore net<br />
+The gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Rhona</span></p>
+<p>Do I forget?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Percy</span></p>
+<p>You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy band<br />
+Around your hair which shone as black as jet:<br />
+No fairy&rsquo;s crown of bloom was ever set<br />
+Round brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.</p>
+<p>I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:<br />
+Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:<br />
+Love-lips (with one tattoo &lsquo;for dukkerin&rsquo; <a
+name="citation73b"></a><a href="#footnote73b"
+class="citation">[73b]</a>) tanned<br />
+By sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Rhona</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Do I forget?<br />
+The Golden Hand shone there: it&rsquo;s you forget,<br />
+Or p&rsquo;raps us Romanies ondly understand<br />
+The way the Lover&rsquo;s Dukkeripen is planned<br />
+Which shone that second time when us two met.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Percy</span></p>
+<p>Blest &lsquo;Golden Hand&rsquo;!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Rhona</span></p>
+<p>The wind, that mixed the smell o&rsquo; violet<br />
+Wi&rsquo; chirp o&rsquo; bird, a-blowin&rsquo; from the land<br
+/>
+<a name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>Where my
+dear Mammy lies, said as it fanned<br />
+My heart-like, &lsquo;Them &rsquo;ere tears makes Mammy
+fret.&rsquo;<br />
+She loves to see her chavi <a name="citation74"></a><a
+href="#footnote74" class="citation">[74]</a> lookin&rsquo;
+grand,<br />
+So I made what you call&rsquo;d a coronet,<br />
+And in the front I put her amulet:<br />
+She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Percy</span></p>
+<p>Blest &lsquo;Golden Hand&rsquo;!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In the same way that the velvety green of Hunts is seen in the
+verses I have already quoted, so the softer side of the inland
+scenery of East Anglia is described in the following lines, where
+also we find an exquisite use of the East Anglian fancy about the
+fairies and the foxglove bells.</p>
+<p>At a waltz during certain Venetian revels after the liberation
+from the Austrian yoke, a forsaken lover stands and watches a
+lady whose child-love he had won in England:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Has she forgotten for such halls as these<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The domes the angels built in holy times,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When wings were ours in childhood&rsquo;s flowery
+climes<br />
+To dance with butterflies and golden bees?&mdash;<br />
+Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breeze<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shook out those English harebells&rsquo; magic
+chimes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On that child-wedding morn, &rsquo;neath English
+limes,<br />
+&rsquo;Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?</p>
+<p>The love that childhood cradled&mdash;girlhood
+nursed&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Has she forgotten it for this dull play,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and sway<br />
+Like dancers in a telescope reversed?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,<br />
+&lsquo;Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed&rsquo;?</p>
+<p>But was it this that bought her&mdash;this poor splendour<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That won her from her troth and wild-flower
+wreath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who &lsquo;cracked the foxglove bells&rsquo; on
+Grayland Heath,<br />
+<a name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 75</span>Or played
+with playful winds that tried to bend her,<br />
+Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and
+teeth,<br />
+When Love grew grave&mdash;to hide her soul&rsquo;s
+surrender?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Sharp has dwelt upon the striking way in which the scenery
+and atmosphere are rendered in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; but this, as
+I think, is even more clearly seen in the poems.&nbsp; And in
+none of these is it seen so vividly as in that exhilarating poem,
+&lsquo;Gypsy Heather,&rsquo; published in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; and not yet garnered in a
+volume.&nbsp; This poem also shows his lyrical power, which never
+seems to be at its very best unless he is depicting Romany life
+and Romany passion.&nbsp; The metre of this poem is as original
+as that of &lsquo;The Gypsy Haymaking Song,&rsquo; quoted in an
+earlier chapter.&nbsp; It has a swing like that of no other
+poem:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">GYPSY HEATHER</p>
+<p>&lsquo;If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your
+man it&rsquo;ll show him the selfsame heather where it wur
+born.&rsquo;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Sinfi Lovell</span>.</p>
+<p>[Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the
+&lsquo;Petrel,&rsquo; takes from his pocket a letter which,
+before he had set sail to return to the south seas, the Melbourne
+post had brought him&mdash;a letter from Rhona, staying then with
+the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by the Boswells,
+called &lsquo;Gypsy Heather.&rsquo;&nbsp; He takes from the
+envelope a withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll
+of paper on which Rhona has written the words, &lsquo;Remember
+Gypsy Heather.&rsquo;]</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">I</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+Remember Jasper&rsquo;s camping-place<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,<br />
+And scents of meadow, wood and chase,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?<br />
+Remember where, in Rington Furze,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I kissed her and she asked me whether<br />
+<a name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 76</span>I
+&lsquo;thought my lips of teazel-burrs,<br />
+That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,<br />
+Felt nice on a rinkenny moey <a name="citation76"></a><a
+href="#footnote76" class="citation">[76]</a> like
+hers?&rsquo;&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">II</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+Remember her whom nought could tame<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But love of me, the poacher-maiden<br />
+Who showed me once my father&rsquo;s game<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With which her plump round arms were laden<br />
+Who, when my glances spoke reproach,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Said, &ldquo;Things o&rsquo; fur an&rsquo; fin
+an&rsquo; feather<br />
+Like coneys, pheasants, perch an&rsquo; loach,<br />
+An&rsquo; even the famous &lsquo;Rington roach,&rsquo;<br />
+Wur born for Romany chies to poach!&rdquo;&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">III</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+Atolls and reefs, you change, you change<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To dells of England dewy and tender;<br />
+You palm-trees in yon coral range<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Seem &lsquo;Rington Birches&rsquo; sweet and
+slender<br />
+Shading the ocean&rsquo;s fiery glare:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We two are in the Dell together&mdash;<br />
+My body is here, my soul is there<br />
+With lords of trap and net and snare,<br />
+The Children of the Open Air,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">IV</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+Its pungent breath is on the wind,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Killing the scent of tropic water;<br />
+I see her suitors swarthy skinned,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who pine in vain for Jasper&rsquo;s daughter.<br />
+The &lsquo;Scollard,&rsquo; with his features tanned<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By sun and wind as brown as leather&mdash;<br />
+<a name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 77</span>His
+forehead scarred with Passion&rsquo;s brand&mdash;<br />
+Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,<br />
+Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">V</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+Now Rhona sits beneath the tree<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That shades our tent, alone and weeping;<br />
+And him, the &lsquo;Scollard,&rsquo; him I see:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From bush to bush I see him creeping&mdash;<br />
+I see her mock him, see her run<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And free his pony from the tether,<br />
+Who lays his ears in love and fun,<br />
+And gallops with her in the sun<br />
+Through lace the gossamers have spun,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">VI</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+She reaches &lsquo;Rington Birches&rsquo;; now,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Dismounting from the &lsquo;Scollard&rsquo;s&rsquo;
+pony,<br />
+She sits alone with heavy brow,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thinking, but not of hare or coney.<br />
+The hot sea holds each sight, each sound<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of England&rsquo;s golden autumn weather:<br />
+The Romanies now are sitting round<br />
+The tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;<br />
+Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">VII</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+She&rsquo;s thinking of this withered spray<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through all the dance; her eyes are gleaming<br />
+Darker than night, yet bright as day,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;<br />
+I see the lips&mdash;the upper curled,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,<br />
+<a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+78</span>Whence&mdash;while the floating shawl is twirled,<br />
+As if a ruddy cloud were swirled&mdash;<br />
+Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">VIII</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+In storm or calm, in sun or rain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There&rsquo;s magic, Rhona, in the writing<br />
+Wound round these flowers whose purple stain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Dims the dear scrawl of Love&rsquo;s inditing:<br />
+Dear girl, this spray between the leaves<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (Now fading like a draggled feather<br />
+With which the nesting song-bird weaves)<br />
+Makes every wave the vessel cleaves<br />
+Seem purple of heather as it heaves,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">IX</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Remember
+Gypsy Heather?<br />
+Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of home<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Are everywhere; the skylark winging<br />
+Through amber cloud-films till the dome<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Seems filled with love, our love, a-singing.<br />
+The sea-wind seems an English breeze<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bearing the bleat of ewe and wether<br />
+Over the heath from Rington Leas,<br />
+Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,<br />
+You taught me Romany &rsquo;neath the trees,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gypsy
+Heather!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Another reason that makes it necessary for me to touch upon
+the inland part of East Anglia is that I have certain remarks to
+make upon what are called &lsquo;the Omarian poems of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&rsquo;&nbsp; Although, as I have before hinted, St.
+Ives, being in Hunts, belongs topographically to the East
+Midlands, its sympathies are East Anglian.&nbsp; This perhaps is
+partly because it is the extreme <a name="page79"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 79</span>east of Hunts, and partly because the
+mouth of the Ouse is at Lynn: to those whom Mr. Norris
+affectionately calls St. Ivians and Hemingfordians, the seaside
+means Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Cromer, Hunstanton, and the towns on
+the Suffolk coast.&nbsp; The splendour of Norfolk ale may also
+partly account for it.&nbsp; This perhaps also explains why the
+famous East Anglian translator of Omar Khayy&agrave;m would seem
+to have been known to a few Omarians on the banks of the Ouse and
+Cam as soon as the great discoverer of good things, Rossetti,
+pounced upon it in the penny box of a second-hand
+bookseller.&nbsp; Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s obituary
+notice of F. H. Groome in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; will
+recall these words:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It was not merely upon Romany subjects that
+Groome found points of sympathy at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; during
+that first luncheon; there was that other subject before
+mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayy&agrave;m.&nbsp; We, a
+handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all
+the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be
+esoteric.&nbsp; And here was a guest who had been brought into
+actual personal contact with the wonderful old
+&lsquo;Fitz.&rsquo;&nbsp; As a child of eight he had seen him,
+talked with him, been patted on the head by him.&nbsp;
+Groome&rsquo;s father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of
+FitzGerald&rsquo;s most intimate friends.&nbsp; This was at once
+a delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those
+at the luncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the
+toast to &lsquo;Omar Khayy&agrave;m,&rsquo; none drank that toast
+with more gusto than he.&nbsp; The fact is, as the Romanies say,
+true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first
+sight.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This is the poem alluded to: it is entitled, &lsquo;Toast to
+Omar Khayy&agrave;m: An East Anglian echo-chorus inscribed <a
+name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 80</span>to old
+Omarian Friends in memory of happy days by Ouse and
+Cam&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>In this red wine, where memory&rsquo;s eyes seem glowing,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,<br
+/>
+And Norfolk&rsquo;s foaming nectar glittered, showing<br />
+What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,<br />
+We drink to thee, right heir of Nature&rsquo;s knowing,<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Omar Khayy&agrave;m!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">I</p>
+<p>Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowing<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her scriptured orbs on Time&rsquo;s wide
+oriflamme,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nature&rsquo;s proud blazon: &lsquo;Who shall bless
+or damn?<br />
+Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span>: Omar Khayy&agrave;m!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">II</p>
+<p>Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowing<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through Persian gardens, widened till it
+swam&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam&mdash;<br
+/>
+Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were
+blowing,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span>: Omar Khayy&agrave;m!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">III</p>
+<p>Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,<br />
+And swish of scythe in Bredfield&rsquo;s dewy mowing?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span>: Omar Khayy&agrave;m!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">IV</p>
+<p>&rsquo;Twas Fitz, &lsquo;Old Fitz,&rsquo; whose knowledge,
+farther going<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Than lore of Omar, &lsquo;Wisdom&rsquo;s starry
+Cham,&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made richer still thine opulent epigram:<br />
+Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span>: Omar Khayy&agrave;m!</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">V</p>
+<p>In this red wine, where Memory&rsquo;s eyes seem glowing,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,<br
+/>
+<a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 81</span>And
+Norfolk&rsquo;s foaming nectar glittered, showing<br />
+What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,<br />
+We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Omar
+Khayy&agrave;m!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It was many years after this&mdash;it was as a member of
+another Omar Khayy&agrave;m Club of much greater celebrity than
+the little brotherhood of Ouse and Cam&mdash;not large enough to
+be called a club&mdash;that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote the following
+well-known sonnet:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">PRAYER TO THE WINDS</p>
+<p>On planting at the head of FitzGerald&rsquo;s grave two
+rose-trees whose ancestors had scattered their petals over the
+tomb of Omar Khayy&agrave;m.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may
+strow roses upon it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Omar
+Khayy&agrave;m to Kw&aacute;jah Nizami</span>.</p>
+<p>Hear us, ye winds!&nbsp; From where the north-wind strows<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Blossoms that crown &lsquo;the King of
+Wisdom&rsquo;s&rsquo; tomb,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,<br />
+Dreaming in seed of Love&rsquo;s ancestral rose,<br />
+To meadows where a braver north-wind blows<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; O&rsquo;er greener grass, o&rsquo;er hedge-rose,
+may, and broom,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And all that make East England&rsquo;s
+field-perfume<br />
+Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows.</p>
+<p>Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!<br />
+This granite covers him whose golden mouth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made wiser ev&rsquo;n the Word of Wisdom&rsquo;s
+King:<br />
+Blow softly over Omar&rsquo;s Western herald<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till roses rich of Omar&rsquo;s dust shall spring<br
+/>
+From richer dust of Suffolk&rsquo;s rare FitzGerald.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I must now quote another of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s East
+Anglian poems, partly because it depicts the weird charm of the
+Norfolk coast, and partly because it illustrates that sympathy
+between the poet and the lower <a name="page82"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 82</span>animals which I have already
+noted.&nbsp; I have another reason: not long ago, that good East
+Anglian, Mr. Rider Haggard interested us all by telling how
+telepathy seemed to have the power of operating between a dog and
+its beloved master in certain rare and extraordinary cases.&nbsp;
+When the poem appeared in the &lsquo;Saturday Review&rsquo;
+(December 20, 1902), it was described as &lsquo;part of a
+forthcoming romance.&rsquo;&nbsp; It records a case of telepathy
+between man and dog quite as wonderful as that narrated by Mr.
+Rider Haggard:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">CAUGHT IN THE EBBING
+TIDE</p>
+<p>The mightiest Titan&rsquo;s stroke could not withstand<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; An ebbing tide like this.&nbsp; These swirls
+denote<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; How wind and tide conspire.&nbsp; I can but float<br
+/>
+To the open sea and strike no more for land.<br />
+Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sand<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her feet have pressed&mdash;farewell, dear little
+boat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where Gelert, <a name="citation82"></a><a
+href="#footnote82" class="citation">[82]</a> calmly sitting on my
+coat,<br />
+Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!</p>
+<p>All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet these air-pictures of the past that
+glide&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; These death-mirages o&rsquo;er the heaving
+tide&mdash;<br />
+Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Will break my heart.&nbsp; I see them and I hear<br
+/>
+As there they sit at morning, side by side.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">The First
+Vision</span></p>
+<p><i>With Raxton elms behind&mdash;in front the sea</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Sitting in rosy light in that alcove</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>They hear the first lark rise o&rsquo;er Raxton
+Grove</i>;<br />
+&lsquo;<i>What should I do with fame</i>, <i>dear
+heart</i>?&rsquo; <i>says he</i>.<br />
+&lsquo;<i>You talk of fame</i>, <i>poetic fame</i>, <i>to
+me</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Whose crown is not of laurel but of
+love</i>&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>To me who would not give this little glove</i><br
+/>
+<i>On this dear hand for Shakspeare&rsquo;s dower in fee</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+83</span><i>While</i>, <i>rising red and kindling every
+billow</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>The sun&rsquo;s shield shines</i> &rsquo;<i>neath
+many a golden spear</i>,<br />
+<i>To lean with you against this leafy pillow</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>To murmur words of love in this loved
+ear</i>&mdash;<br />
+<i>To feel you bending like a bending willow</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>This is to be a poet</i>&mdash;<i>this</i>, <i>my
+dear</i>!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>O God, to die and leave her&mdash;die and leave<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The heaven so lately won!&mdash;And then, to know<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What misery will be hers&mdash;what lonely
+woe!&mdash;<br />
+To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieve<br />
+Will make me a coward as I sink, and cleave<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To life though Destiny has bid me go.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; How shall I bear the pictures that will glow<br />
+Above the glowing billows as they heave?</p>
+<p>One picture fades, and now above the spray<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Another shines: ah, do I know the bowers<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where that sweet woman stands&mdash;the woodland
+flowers,<br />
+In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hours<br />
+Wore angel-wings,&mdash;till portents brought dismay?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">The Second
+Vision</span></p>
+<p><i>Proud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>She smiles on him</i>&mdash;<i>on him</i>, <i>the
+prouder giver</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>As there they stand beside the sunlit
+river</i><br />
+<i>Where petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel</i>:<br />
+<i>The chirping reed-birds</i>, <i>in their play or
+quarrel</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Make musical the stream where lilies
+quiver</i>&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Ah</i>! <i>suddenly he feels her slim waist
+shiver</i>:<br />
+<i>She speaks</i>: <i>her lips grow grey</i>&mdash;<i>her lips of
+coral</i>!</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<i>From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are
+swaying</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>The seeds of which that gypsy girl has
+spoken</i>&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &rsquo;<i>Tis fairy grass</i>, <i>alas</i>! <i>the
+lover&rsquo;s token</i>.&rsquo;<br />
+<i>She lifts her fingers to her forehead</i>, <i>saying</i>,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Touch the twin hearts</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+<i>Says he</i>, &lsquo;&rsquo;<i>Tis idle playing</i>&rsquo;:<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>He touches them</i>; <i>they
+fall</i>&mdash;<i>fall bruised and broken</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
+<p><a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 84</span>Shall I
+turn coward here who sailed with Death<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through many a tempest on mine own North Sea,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And quail like him of old who bowed the
+knee&mdash;<br />
+Faithless&mdash;to billows of Genesereth?<br />
+Did I turn coward when my very breath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Froze on my lips that Alpine night when he<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Stood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,<br />
+While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?</p>
+<p>Each billow bears me nearer to the verge<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of realms where she is not&mdash;where love must
+wait.&mdash;<br />
+If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urge<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To come and help me, or to share my fate.<br />
+Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[The dog, plunging into the tide and
+striking<br />
+towards him with immense strength, reaches<br />
+him and swims round him.]</p>
+<p>Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of paw<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Here gazing like your namesake,
+&lsquo;Snowdon&rsquo;s Hound,&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When great Llewelyn&rsquo;s child could not be
+found,<br />
+And all the warriors stood in speechless awe&mdash;<br />
+Mute as your namesake when his master saw<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The cradle tossed&mdash;the rushes red
+around&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With never a word, but only a whimpering sound<br />
+To tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.</p>
+<p>In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Should I, brave friend, have needed other speech<br
+/>
+Than this dear whimper?&nbsp; Is there not a bond<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Stronger than words that binds us each to
+each?&mdash;<br />
+But Death has caught us both.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis far beyond<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The strength of man or dog to win the beach.</p>
+<p>Through tangle-weed&mdash;through coils of slippery kelp<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Decking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shine true&mdash;shine deep of love&rsquo;s divine
+surmise<br />
+As hers who gave you&mdash;then a Titan whelp!<br />
+I think you know my danger and would help!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; See how I point to yonder smack that lies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+85</span>At anchor&mdash;Go!&nbsp; His countenance replies.<br />
+Hope&rsquo;s music rings in Gelert&rsquo;s eager yelp!</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[The dog swims swiftly away down the
+tide.</p>
+<p>Now, life and love and death swim out with him!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; If he should reach the smack, the men will guess<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The dog has left his master in distress.<br />
+You taught him in these very waves to swim&mdash;<br />
+&lsquo;The prince of pups,&rsquo; you said, &lsquo;for wind and
+limb&rsquo;&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Envoy</span></p>
+<p>(The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the
+sand.)</p>
+<p>&rsquo;Twas in no glittering tourney&rsquo;s mimic
+strife,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &rsquo;Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,<br />
+And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife&mdash;<br />
+&rsquo;Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Conquered and found his foe a soul to love,<br />
+Found friendship&mdash;Life&rsquo;s great second crown of
+life.</p>
+<p>So I this morning love our North Sea more<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Because he fought me well, because these waves<br />
+Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That yawned above my head like conscious
+graves&mdash;<br />
+I love him as I never loved before.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In these days when so much is written about the intelligence
+of the lower animals, when &lsquo;Hans,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;thinking horse,&rsquo; is &lsquo;interviewed&rsquo; by
+eminent scientists, the exploit of the Second Gelert is not
+without interest.&nbsp; I may, perhaps, mention a strange
+experience of my own.&nbsp; The late Betts Bey, a well-known
+figure in St. Peter&rsquo;s Port, Guernsey, had a fine black
+retriever, named Caro.&nbsp; During a long summer holiday which
+we spent in Guernsey, Caro became greatly attached to a friend,
+and Betts Bey presented him to her.&nbsp; He was a magnificent
+fellow, <a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+86</span>valiant as a lion, and a splendid diver and
+swimmer.&nbsp; He often plunged off the parapet of the bridge
+which spans the Serpentine.&nbsp; Indeed, he would have dived
+from any height.&nbsp; His intelligence was surprising.&nbsp; If
+we wished to make him understand that he was not to accompany us,
+we had only to say, &lsquo;Caro, we are going to
+church!&rsquo;&nbsp; As soon as he heard the word
+&lsquo;church&rsquo; his barks would cease, his tail would drop,
+and he would look mournfully resigned.&nbsp; One evening, as I
+was writing in my room, Caro began to scratch outside the door,
+uttering those strange &lsquo;woof-woofs&rsquo; which were his
+canine language.&nbsp; I let him in, but he would not rest.&nbsp;
+He stood gazing at me with an intense expression, and, turning
+towards the door, waited impatiently.&nbsp; For some time I took
+no notice of his dumb appeal, but his excitement increased, and
+suddenly a vague sense of ill seemed to pass from him into my
+mind.&nbsp; Drawn half-consciously I rose, and at once with a
+strange half-human whine Caro dashed upstairs.&nbsp; I followed
+him.&nbsp; He ran into a bedroom, and there in the dark I found
+my friend lying unconscious.&nbsp; It is well-nigh certain that
+Caro thus saved my friend&rsquo;s life.</p>
+<h2><a name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+87</span>Chapter VIII<br />
+LONDON</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Between</span> Mr. Watts-Dunton and the
+brother who came next to him, before mentioned, there was a very
+great affection, although the difference between them, mentally
+and physically, was quite noticeable.&nbsp; They were articled to
+their father on the same day and admitted solicitors on the same
+day, a very unusual thing with solicitors and their sons.&nbsp;
+Mr. Watts-Dunton afterwards passed a short term in one of the
+great conveyancing offices in London in order to become
+proficient in conveyancing.&nbsp; His brother did the same in
+another office in Bedford Row; but he afterwards practised for
+himself.&nbsp; Mr. A. E. Watts soon had a considerable practice
+as family solicitor and conveyancer.&nbsp; Mr. Hake identifies
+him with Cyril Aylwin, but before I quote Mr. Hake&rsquo;s
+interesting account of him, I will give the vivid description of
+Cyril in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Juvenile curls clustered thick and short
+beneath his wideawake.&nbsp; He had at first struck me as being
+not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid,
+searching glance in passing, I perceived the little crow&rsquo;s
+feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being
+probably on the verge of thirty-five.&nbsp; His figure was slim
+and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall.&nbsp; I should
+have considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud,
+manly, and sonorous voice with which he had <a
+name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 88</span>accosted
+Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big
+men do not often produce.&nbsp; This deep voice, coupled with
+that gaunt kind of cheek which we associate with the most demure
+people, produced an effect of sedateness . . . but in the one
+glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes,
+there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite
+inscrutable, quite indescribable.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Cyril Aylwin was at first thought to be a portrait of
+Whistler, which is not quite so outrageously absurd as the wild
+conjecture that William Morris was the original of
+Wilderspin.&nbsp; Mr. Hake says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;I am especially able to speak of this
+character, who has been inquired about more than any other in the
+book.&nbsp; I knew him, I think, even before I knew Rossetti and
+Morris, or any of that group.&nbsp; He was a brother of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s&mdash;Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts.&nbsp; He
+lived at Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871,
+very shortly after I had met him at a wedding party.&nbsp; Among
+the set in which I moved at that time he had a great reputation
+as a wit and humorist.&nbsp; His style of humour always struck me
+as being more American than English.&nbsp; While bringing out
+humorous things that would set a dinner table in a roar, he would
+himself maintain a perfectly unmoved countenance.&nbsp; And it
+was said of him, as &lsquo;Wilderspin&rsquo; says of &lsquo;Cyril
+Aylwin,&rsquo; that he was never known to laugh.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation88"></a><a href="#footnote88"
+class="citation">[88]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>After a time Mr. Watts-Dunton joined his brother, and the two
+practised together in London.&nbsp; They also lived together at
+Sydenham.&nbsp; Some time after this, however, <a
+name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 89</span>Mr.
+Watts-Dunton determined to abandon the law for literature.&nbsp;
+The brothers migrated to Sydenham, because at that time Mr.
+Watts-Dunton pursued music with an avidity and interest which
+threatened for a time to interfere with those literary energies
+which it was now his intention to exercise.&nbsp; At that time
+the orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace under Manns, given
+every morning and every afternoon, were a great attraction to
+music lovers, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, who lived close by, rarely
+missed either the morning or the afternoon concert.&nbsp; It was
+in this way that he became steeped in German music; and
+afterwards, when he became intimate with Dr. F. Hueffer, the
+musical critic of the &lsquo;Times,&rsquo; and the exponent of
+Wagner in Great Britain, he became a thorough Wagnerian.</p>
+<p>It was during this time, and through the extraordinary social
+attractions of his brother, that Mr. Watts-Dunton began to move
+very much in London life, and saw a great deal of what is called
+London society.&nbsp; After his brother&rsquo;s death he took
+chambers in Great James Street, close to Mr. Swinburne, with whom
+he had already become intimate.&nbsp; And according to Mr. Hake,
+in his paper in &lsquo;T. P.&rsquo;s Weekly&rsquo; above quoted
+from, it was here that he wrote &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; I
+have already alluded to his record of this most interesting
+event:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;I have just read,&rdquo; he says,
+&ldquo;with the greatest interest the article in your number of
+Sept. 18, 1903, called &lsquo;How Authors Work Best.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But the following sentence in it set me reflecting:
+&lsquo;Flaubert took ten years to write and repolish
+&ldquo;Madame Bovary,&rdquo; Watts-Dunton twenty years to write,
+recast, and conclude &ldquo;Aylwin.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+statement about &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; has often been made, and in
+<a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 90</span>these days
+of hasty production it may well be taken by the author as a
+compliment; but it is as entirely apocryphal as that about
+Scott&rsquo;s brother having written the Waverley Novels, and as
+that about Bramwell Bront&euml; having written &lsquo;Wuthering
+Heights.&rsquo;&nbsp; As to &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; I happen to be
+in a peculiarly authoritative position to speak upon the genesis
+of this very popular book.&nbsp; If any one were to peruse the
+original manuscript of the story he would find it in four
+different handwritings&mdash;my late father&rsquo;s, and two of
+my brothers&rsquo;, but principally in mine.</p>
+<p>Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that
+its composition did not take twenty years to achieve.&nbsp; It
+was dictated to us.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Dr. Gordon Hake is mainly known as the &lsquo;parable
+poet,&rsquo; but as a fact he was a physician of extraordinary
+talent, who had practised first at Bury St. Edmunds and
+afterwards at Spring Gardens, until he partly retired to be
+private physician to the late Lady Ripon.&nbsp; After her death
+he left practice altogether in order to devote himself to
+literature, for which he had very great equipments.&nbsp; As
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; touched upon certain subtle nervous phases
+it must have been a great advantage to the author to dictate
+these portions of the story to so skilled and experienced a
+friend.&nbsp; The rare kind of cerebral exaltation into which
+Henry Aylwin passed after his appalling experience in the Cove,
+in which the entire nervous system was disturbed, was not what is
+known as brain fever.&nbsp; The record of it in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is, I understand, a literal account of a
+rare and wonderful case brought under the professional notice of
+Dr. Hake.</p>
+<p>As physician to Rossetti, a few years after the death of his
+beloved wife, Dr. Hake&rsquo;s services must have been priceless
+to the poet-painter; for, as is only too well <a
+name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 91</span>known,
+Rossetti&rsquo;s grief for the death of his wife had for some
+time a devastating effect upon his mind.&nbsp; It was one of the
+causes of that terrible insomnia to relieve himself from which he
+resorted to chloral, though later on the attacks upon him by
+certain foes intensified the distressing ailment.&nbsp; The
+insomnia produced fits of melancholia, an ailment, according to
+the skilled opinion of Dr. Hake, more difficult than all others
+to deal with; for when the nervous system has sunk to a certain
+state of depression, the mind roams over the universe, as it
+were, in quest of imaginary causes for the depression.&nbsp; This
+accounts for the &lsquo;cock and bull&rsquo; stories that were
+somewhat rife immediately after Rossetti&rsquo;s death about his
+having expressed remorse on account of his ill-treatment of his
+wife.&nbsp; No one of his intimates took the least notice of
+these wild and whirling words.&nbsp; For he would express remorse
+on account of the most fantastic things when the fits of
+melancholia were upon him; and when these fits were past he would
+smile at the foolish things he had said.&nbsp; I get this
+knowledge from a very high authority, Dr. Hake&rsquo;s
+son&mdash;Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, before mentioned&mdash;who knew
+Rossetti intimately from 1871 until his death, having lived under
+the same roof with him at Cheyne Walk, Bognor and
+Kelmscott.&nbsp; After Rossetti&rsquo;s most serious attack of
+melancholia, his relations and friends persuaded him to stay with
+Dr. Hake at Roehampton, and it was there that the terrible crisis
+of his illness was passed.</p>
+<p>It is interesting to know that in the original form of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; the important part taken in the development
+of the story by D&rsquo;Arcy was taken by Dr. Hake, under the
+name of Gordon, and that afterwards, when all sorts of ungenerous
+things were written about Rossetti, D&rsquo;Arcy was substituted
+for Gordon in order to give the author <a name="page92"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 92</span>an opportunity of bringing out and
+showing the world the absolute nobility and charm of
+Rossetti&rsquo;s character.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p92b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Painted and
+Carved Cabinet"
+title=
+"A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Painted and
+Carved Cabinet"
+src="images/p92s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Among the many varieties of life which Mr. Watts-Dunton saw at
+this time was life in the slums; and this was long before the
+once fashionable pastime of &lsquo;slumming&rsquo; was
+invented.&nbsp; The following lines in Dr. Hake&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;New Day&rsquo; allude to the deep interest that Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has always shown in the poor&mdash;shown years
+before the writers who now deal with the slums had written a
+line.&nbsp; Artistically, they are not fair specimens of Dr.
+Gordon Hake&rsquo;s verses, but nevertheless it is interesting to
+quote them here:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Know you a widow&rsquo;s home? an orphanage?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A place of shelter for the
+crippled poor?<br />
+Did ever limbless men your care engage<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whom you assisted of your larger store?<br />
+Know you the young who are to early die&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At their frail form sinks not your heart within?<br
+/>
+Know you the old who paralytic lie<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While you the freshness of your life begin?<br />
+Know you the great pain-bearers who long carry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The bullet in the breast that does not kill?<br />
+And those who in the house of madness tarry,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Beyond the blest relief of human skill?<br />
+These have you visited, all these assisted,<br />
+In the high ranks of charity enlisted.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>That Mr. Watts-Dunton has retained his interest in the poor is
+shown by the sonnet, &lsquo;Father Christmas in Famine
+Street,&rsquo; which was originally printed as &lsquo;an
+appeal&rsquo; on Christmas Eve in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>When Father Christmas went down Famine Street<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He saw two little sisters: one was trying<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,<br />
+Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.</p>
+<p><a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 93</span>From
+out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweet<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Leapt, as in answer to the other&rsquo;s sighing,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While came a murmur, &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t &rsquo;ee
+keep on crying&mdash;<br />
+I wants to die: you&rsquo;ll get my share to eat.&rsquo;<br />
+Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the city<br />
+Hymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.<br />
+Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;They do His bidding&mdash;if in thrifty
+fashion:<br />
+They let the little children go to Him.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>With this sonnet should be placed that entitled,
+&lsquo;Dickens Returns on Christmas Day&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim:
+&lsquo;Dickens dead?&nbsp; Then will Father Christmas die
+too?&rsquo;&mdash;June 9, 1870.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Dickens is dead!&rsquo;&nbsp; Beneath that grievous
+cry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; London seemed shivering in the summer heat;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Strangers took up the tale like friends that
+meet:<br />
+&lsquo;Dickens is dead!&rsquo; said they, and hurried by;<br />
+Street children stopped their games&mdash;they knew not why,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But some new night seemed darkening down the
+street.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,<br />
+Cried, &lsquo;Dickens dead?&nbsp; Will Father Christmas
+die?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>City he loved, take courage on thy way!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.<br
+/>
+Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened
+years,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made laughters bubble through thy sea of
+tears&mdash;<br />
+Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Let me say here, parenthetically, that &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;
+is so far out of date that for twenty-five years it has been
+famous for its sympathy with the Christmas sentiment which now
+seems to be fading, as this sonnet shows:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><a
+name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 94</span>THE CHRISTMAS
+TREE AT &lsquo;THE PINES.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Life still hath one romance that naught can bury&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Not Time himself, who coffins Life&rsquo;s
+romances&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For still will Christmas gild the year&rsquo;s
+mischances,<br />
+If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry&mdash;<br />
+To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To smile with eyes outshining by their glances<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Christmas tree&mdash;to dance with fairy
+dances<br />
+And crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.</p>
+<p>And as to us, dear friend, the carols sung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Are fresh as ever.&nbsp; Bright is yonder bough<br
+/>
+Of mistletoe as that which shone and swung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When you and I and Friendship made a vow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That Childhood&rsquo;s Christmas still should seal
+each brow&mdash;<br />
+Friendship&rsquo;s, and yours, and mine&mdash;and keep us
+young.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I may also quote from &lsquo;Prophetic Pictures at
+Venice&rsquo; this romantic description of the Rosicrucian
+Christmas:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>(The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian
+panel-picture called &lsquo;The Rosy Scar,&rsquo; depicting
+Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine galley, watching, on
+Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of Rosenkreutz, as a
+&lsquo;rosy phantom.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Lover reads aloud the
+descriptive verses on the frame.)</p>
+<p>While Night&rsquo;s dark horses waited for the wind,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He stood&mdash;he shone&mdash;where Sunset&rsquo;s
+fiery glaives<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Flickered behind the clouds; then, o&rsquo;er the
+waves,<br />
+He came to them, Faith&rsquo;s remnant sorrow-thinned.<br />
+The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Cried, &lsquo;Who is he that comes to Christian
+slaves?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,<br />
+The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,<br />
+Flushed the grey sky&mdash;flushed sea and sail and spar,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Flushed, blessing every slave&rsquo;s woe-wasted
+cheek.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:<br
+/>
+&lsquo;Sufferers, take heart!&nbsp; Christ lends the Rosy
+Scar.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page95"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+95</span>Chapter IX<br />
+GEORGE BORROW</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was not until 1872 that Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was introduced to Borrow by Dr. Gordon Hake,
+Borrow&rsquo;s most intimate friend.</p>
+<p>The way in which this meeting came about has been familiar to
+the readers of an autobiographical romance (not even yet
+published!) wherein Borrow appears under the name of Dereham, and
+Hake under the name of Gordon.&nbsp; But as some of these
+passages in a modified form have appeared in print in an
+introduction by Mr. Watts-Dunton to the edition of Borrow&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Lavengro,&rsquo; published by Messrs. Ward, Lock &amp;
+Co., in 1893, there will be nothing incongruous in my quoting
+them here:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Great as was the difference in age between
+Gordon and me, there soon grew up an intimacy between us.&nbsp;
+It has been my experience to learn that an enormous deal of
+nonsense has been written about difference of age between friends
+of either sex.&nbsp; At that time I do not think I had one
+intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on
+terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished
+men, each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my
+father.&nbsp; Basevi was one of these: so was Lineham.&nbsp; I
+daresay it was owing to some idiosyncrasy of mine, but the
+intimacy between me and the young fellows with whom I was brought
+into <a name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+96</span>contact was mainly confined to matters connected with
+field-sports.&nbsp; I found it far easier to be brought into
+relations of close intimacy with women of my own age than with
+men.&nbsp; But as Basevi told me that it was the same with
+himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after
+all.&nbsp; When Gordon and I were together it never occurred to
+me that there was any difference in our ages at all, and he told
+me that it was the same with himself.</p>
+<p>One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house
+near Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond
+Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one
+of his sons came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding
+across the common, evidently bound for the house.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Dereham!&rsquo; I said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Is there a man in
+the world I should so like to see as Dereham?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before
+swimming in the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to
+him.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Why do you want so much to see him?&rsquo; asked
+Gordon.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true
+Child of the Open Air.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant.&nbsp;
+But it is necessary here to explain what that meaning was.</p>
+<p>We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the
+picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive
+novels, &lsquo;Cook&rsquo;s excursions,&rsquo; etc., the real
+passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was&mdash;perhaps
+rarer.&nbsp; It was, we believed, quite an affair of individual
+temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost.&nbsp; That
+no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how <a
+name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 97</span>little it is
+known.&nbsp; Often it has but little to do with poetry, little
+with science.&nbsp; The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very
+highest; the man of science as rarely.&nbsp; I wish I could
+define it.&nbsp; In human souls&mdash;in one, perhaps, as much as
+in another&mdash;there is always that instinct for contact which
+is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible
+yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to
+some other conscious thing.&nbsp; In most individuals this
+yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some
+few it is not.&nbsp; There are some in every country of whom it
+is the blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional
+power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to
+&lsquo;Natura Benigna&rsquo; herself, closer to her whom we now
+call &lsquo;Inanimate Nature,&rsquo; than to brother, sister,
+wife, or friend.&nbsp; Darwin among English savants, and Emily
+Bront&euml; among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English
+gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the
+&lsquo;Children of the Open Air.&rsquo;&nbsp; But in regard to
+Darwin, besides the strength of his family ties, the pedantic
+inquisitiveness, the methodizing pedantry of the man of science;
+in Emily Bront&euml;, the sensitivity to human contact; and in
+Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love passion&mdash;disturbed, and
+indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they
+were undoubtedly endowed.&nbsp; I was perfectly conscious that I
+belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers&mdash;that is, I
+was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a
+free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love
+passion to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a
+genuine Child of the Open Air.</p>
+<p>Between the true &lsquo;Children of the Open Air&rsquo; and
+their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of
+convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, which <a
+name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 98</span>they find
+most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in
+overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the
+making.&nbsp; For, what this kind of Nature-worshipper finds in
+intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness
+of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul
+to soul&mdash;but another ego enisled like his
+own&mdash;sensitive, shrinking, like his own&mdash;a soul which,
+love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the
+central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round
+whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the
+human constellations.&nbsp; But between these and Nature there is
+no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love, &lsquo;a
+most equal love&rsquo; that varies no more with her change of
+mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether
+she smiles, or weeps, or frowns.&nbsp; To them a Highland glen is
+most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a
+barren peak; so is a South American savannah.&nbsp; A balmy
+summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter&rsquo;s
+sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into
+delicious life.</p>
+<p>To the &lsquo;Child of the Open Air&rsquo; life has but few
+ills; poverty cannot touch him.&nbsp; Let the Stock Exchange rob
+him of his bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento
+Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far
+from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass,
+and the sheep.&nbsp; And as life goes on, love of Nature grows,
+both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems
+&lsquo;to know him and love him&rsquo; in her turn.</p>
+<p>Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no
+retreating, and we were introduced.</p>
+<p>He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much
+annoyed.&nbsp; Yet there was something in the <a
+name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 99</span>very tone of
+his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of
+my boyhood still.&nbsp; My own shyness was being rapidly fingered
+off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the
+bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was; yet I attacked it
+manfully.&nbsp; I knew from his books that Dereham had read but
+little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then,
+unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these
+his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any
+value.&nbsp; Accordingly, what appeared to Dereham as the most
+striking characteristic of the present age was its
+ignorance.&nbsp; Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to
+talk of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him
+to be &lsquo;prying,&rsquo; though there I should have been quite
+at home.&nbsp; I knew, however, from his books that in the
+obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century,
+recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange
+adventures, Dereham was very learned, and I too chanced to be far
+from ignorant in that direction.&nbsp; I touched on Bamfylde
+Moore Carew, but without effect.&nbsp; Dereham evidently
+considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the
+story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail.&nbsp; Then I
+touched upon beer, the British bruiser, &lsquo;gentility
+nonsense,&rsquo; and other &lsquo;nonsense&rsquo;; then upon
+etymology&mdash;traced hoity-toityism to &lsquo;toit,&rsquo; a
+roof&mdash;but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a
+withering smile.&nbsp; I tried other subjects in the same
+direction, but with small success, till in a lucky moment I
+bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett.&nbsp; There is a very scarce
+eighteenth century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose
+Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for
+murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded
+room at a seaside <a name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+100</span>inn, revived in the night, escaped from the
+gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met
+on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for
+murdering.&nbsp; The truth was that Gwinett&rsquo;s supposed
+victim, having been seized on the night in question with a
+violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a
+few minutes&rsquo; walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang
+captured him and bore him off to sea, where he had been in
+service ever since.&nbsp; I introduced the subject of Ambrose
+Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold&rsquo;s play upon it, and at once
+the ice between us thawed and we became friends.</p>
+<p>We all went out of the house and looked over the common.&nbsp;
+It chanced that at that very moment there were a few gypsies
+encamped on the sunken road opposite to Gordon&rsquo;s
+house.&nbsp; These same gypsies, by the by, form the subject of a
+charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared in the
+&lsquo;Graphic.&rsquo;&nbsp; Borrow took the trouble to assure us
+that they were not of the better class of gypsies, the
+gryengroes, but basket-makers.&nbsp; After passing this group we
+went on the common.&nbsp; We did not at first talk much, but it
+delighted me to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years
+rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin
+bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck
+the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed
+the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water
+wagtails by the ponds.</p>
+<p>After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham&rsquo;s
+suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the
+way at the &lsquo;Bald-Faced Stag&rsquo; in Kingston Vale, in
+order that Dereham should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw&rsquo;s
+sword, which was one of the special <a name="page101"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 101</span>glories of that once famous
+hostelry.&nbsp; A divine summer day it was I remember&mdash;a day
+whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered
+every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an
+occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at
+the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.</p>
+<p>These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to
+give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers
+in the meadows on the left breathe more freely.&nbsp; In a word,
+it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly
+English charm was Dereham&rsquo;s special delight.&nbsp; He liked
+rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous,
+shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally
+carried.&nbsp; As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were
+confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and
+mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us
+there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a
+rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling
+on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far
+away.&nbsp; Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany
+superstition in connection with the rainbow&mdash;how, by making
+a &lsquo;trus&rsquo;hul&rsquo; (cross) of two sticks, the Romany
+chi who &lsquo;pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the
+sky,&rsquo; etc.&nbsp; Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a man
+as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into
+a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to
+record, upon the subject of the &lsquo;Spirit of the
+Rainbow&rsquo; which I, as a child, went out to find.</p>
+<p>Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every
+tree.&nbsp; I found also that he was extremely learned in deer,
+and seemed familiar with every dappled <a
+name="page102"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 102</span>coat which,
+washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun
+like metal.&nbsp; Of course, I observed him closely, and I began
+to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant
+striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true
+&lsquo;Child of the Open Air.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic
+green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp
+herself?&rsquo; I murmured to Gordon, while Dereham lingered
+under a tree and, looking round the Park, said in a dreamy way,
+&lsquo;Old England!&nbsp; Old England!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under
+Dereham&rsquo;s arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked
+along beneath the trees, &lsquo;Is he a genuine Child of the Open
+Air?&rsquo;&nbsp; And then, calling to mind the books he had
+written, I said: &lsquo;He went into the Dingle, and lived
+alone&mdash;went there, not as an experiment in self-education,
+as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond.&nbsp; He could enjoy
+living alone, for the &lsquo;horrors&rsquo; to which he was
+occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living.&nbsp;
+He was never disturbed by passion as was the Nature-worshipper
+who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as
+Emily Bront&euml; would certainly have been had she been placed
+in such circumstances as Charlotte Bront&euml; placed
+Shirley.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But the most damning thing of all,&rsquo; said Gordon,
+&lsquo;is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought
+that has often occurred to me.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Passion has certainly never disturbed his
+nature-worship,&rsquo; said I.&nbsp; &lsquo;So devoid of passion
+is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his
+powers.&nbsp; Picturesque he always is, powerful never.&nbsp; No
+one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this
+story finds himself able to realize from Dereham&rsquo;s
+description <a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+103</span>the misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all
+the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water
+in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face.&nbsp; It is
+not passion,&rsquo; I said to Gordon, &lsquo;that prevents
+Dereham from enjoying the peace of the Nature-worshipper.&nbsp;
+It is Ambition!&nbsp; His books show that he could never cleanse
+his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition.&nbsp; To
+become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was
+as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to
+Alexander Smith&rsquo;s poet-hero it was an incentive to write
+poetry.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ambition and the green gamp,&rsquo; said Gordon.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;But look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the
+intervention of gypsy sorceries; and see how the ferns are
+changing colour with the change in the light.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of
+the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep
+sympathy with human kind which the &lsquo;Child of the Open
+Air&rsquo; must needs lack.</p>
+<p>Knowing Dereham&rsquo;s extraordinary shyness and his great
+dislike of meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to
+get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his
+surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up
+between us during that walk.&nbsp; But I was not surprised: there
+were several reasons why Dereham should at once take to
+me&mdash;reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any
+inherent attractiveness of my own.</p>
+<p>By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light
+upon Dereham&rsquo;s character than by any kind of analytical
+disquisition.</p>
+<p>Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they
+probably had their nests.&nbsp; By the expression <a
+name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 104</span>on
+Dereham&rsquo;s face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that,
+like myself, he had a passion for herons.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it
+was drained?&rsquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I should think so,&rsquo; said he dreamily, &lsquo;and
+every kind of water bird.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said,
+&lsquo;But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea
+Mere?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;You say in one of your books that you played among the
+reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my
+books,&rsquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;but you speak of a lake near
+the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea
+Mere.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Then you know Whittlesea Mere?&rsquo; said Dereham,
+much interested.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was
+drained,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;and I know the vipers around
+Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met
+that gypsy you have immortalized.&nbsp; He was a generation
+before my time.&nbsp; Indeed, I never was thrown much across the
+Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the
+Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and
+also gave him Marcianus&rsquo;s story about the Moors being
+invulnerable to the viper&rsquo;s bite, and about their putting
+the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to
+grasp a viper&mdash;as he, Dereham, when a child, grasped one of
+the vipers of Norman Cross.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The gypsies,&rsquo; said Dereham, &lsquo;always
+believed me <a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+105</span>to be a Romany.&nbsp; But surely you are not a Romany
+Rye?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;but I am a student of
+folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every
+kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely
+neglect the Romanies, could I?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I should think not,&rsquo; said Dereham
+indignantly.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But I hope you don&rsquo;t know the literary class
+among the rest.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Gordon is my only link to that dark world,&rsquo; I
+said, &lsquo;and even you don&rsquo;t object to Gordon.&nbsp; I
+am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of
+printers&rsquo; ink.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>He laughed.&nbsp; &lsquo;Who are you?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The very question I have been asking myself ever since
+I was a child in short frocks,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;and have
+never yet found an answer.&nbsp; But Gordon agrees with me that
+no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such
+troublesome query.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences
+as these had been able to take no part.&nbsp; The humorous
+mystery of Man&rsquo;s personality had often been a subject of
+joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and
+elsewhere.&nbsp; At once he threw himself into a strain of
+whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed
+Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
+gypsies and East Anglia.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;You are an Englishman?&rsquo; said Dereham.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,&rsquo;
+I said, using a phrase of his own in one of his
+books&mdash;&lsquo;if not a thorough East Anglian, an East
+Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nearly,&rsquo; said Dereham.</p>
+<p><a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>And
+when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
+&lsquo;Shales mare,&rsquo; a descendant of that same famous
+Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he
+with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the
+Norwich horse fair; and when I promised to show him a portrait of
+this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a
+dogcart&mdash;an East Anglian dogcart; when I praised the
+stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and
+Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant,
+the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him
+that the only English river in which you could see reflected the
+rainbow he loved was &lsquo;the glassy Ouse&rsquo; of East
+Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it
+reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told
+him a good many things showing that I was in very truth, not only
+an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was
+complete, and from that moment we became friends.</p>
+<p>Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the
+distance.&nbsp; He turned and asked Dereham whether he had never
+noticed a similarity between the kind of muffled rattling roar
+made by the sea waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound
+of a large rookery in the distance.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It is on sand alone,&rsquo; said Dereham, &lsquo;that
+the sea strikes its true music&mdash;Norfolk sand; a rattle is
+not music.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The best of the sea&rsquo;s lutes,&rsquo; I said,
+&lsquo;is made by the sands of Cromer.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in
+the above quotation) in Richmond Park and <a
+name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 107</span>the
+neighbourhood, have been thus described by the
+&lsquo;Gordon&rsquo; of the story in one of the sonnets in
+&lsquo;The New Day&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; How often &rsquo;mid the deer that grazed the
+park,<br />
+Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made musical with many a soaring lark,<br />
+Have we not held brisk commune with him there,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While Lavengro, there towering by your side,<br />
+With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride<br />
+To tell the legends of the fading race&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As at the summons of his piercing glance,<br />
+Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While you called up that pendant of romance<br />
+To Petulengro with his boxing glory,<br />
+Your Amazonian Sinfi&rsquo;s noble story!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; and in
+Chambers&rsquo; &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English
+Literature,&rsquo; and scattered through scores of articles in
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; I find descriptions of Borrow
+and allusions to him without number.&nbsp; They afford absolutely
+the only portrait of that wonderful man that exists or is ever
+likely to exist.&nbsp; But, of course, it is quite impossible for
+me to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many more
+important figures waiting to be introduced.&nbsp; Still, I must
+find room for the most brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for
+it will flush these pages with a colour which I feel they
+need.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton has been described as the most
+picturesque of all living writers, whether in verse or in prose,
+and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but never, I
+think, is he so picturesque as when he is writing about
+Borrow.</p>
+<p>I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of <a
+name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 108</span>gypsy life
+is to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part
+of England where East Anglia and the Midlands join.&nbsp; It adds
+interest to the incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl
+was the prototype of Rhona Boswell, and that Dereham is George
+Borrow.&nbsp; This also is a chapter from the unpublished story
+before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to be used in an
+introductory essay to another of Borrow&rsquo;s books:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It was in the late summer, just before the
+trees were clothed with what Dereham called &lsquo;gypsy
+gold,&rsquo; and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely
+a touch of bronze&mdash;at that very moment, indeed, when the
+spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and
+the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their
+half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground
+ivy, and pimpernel.&nbsp; Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as
+so shy a man could give.&nbsp; He told me that he was bound for a
+certain camp of gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering
+days.&nbsp; In conversation I reminded him of our previous talk,
+and I told him I chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket
+a copy of the volume of Matthew Arnold in which appears
+&lsquo;The Scholar-Gypsy.&rsquo;&nbsp; Dereham said he well
+remembered my directing his attention to &lsquo;The
+Scholar-Gypsy.&rsquo;&nbsp; After listening attentively to it,
+Dereham declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry
+worth reading, and also that, whatever the merits of Matthew
+Arnold&rsquo;s poem might be, from any supposed artistic point of
+view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany
+temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or even
+understand its motive in the least degree.&nbsp; I challenged
+this, contending that howsoever Arnold&rsquo;s classic language
+might soar above a gypsy&rsquo;s <a name="page109"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 109</span>intelligence, the motive was so
+clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp
+it.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I wish,&rsquo; said Dereham, &lsquo;you would come with
+me to the camp and try the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy
+woman we meet at the camp.&nbsp; As to gypsy men,&rsquo; said he,
+&lsquo;they are too prosaic to furnish a fair test.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham
+became very communicative, and talked very volubly upon
+gentility-nonsense, and many other pet subjects of his.&nbsp; I
+already knew that he was no lover of the aristocracy of England,
+or, as he called them, the &lsquo;trumpery great,&rsquo; although
+in other regards he was such a John Bull.&nbsp; By this time we
+had proceeded a good way on our little expedition.&nbsp; As we
+were walking along, Dereham&rsquo;s eyes, which were as
+longsighted as a gypsy&rsquo;s, perceived a white speck in a
+twisted old hawthorn-bush some distance off.&nbsp; He stopped and
+said: &lsquo;At first I thought that white speck in the bush was
+a piece of paper, but it&rsquo;s a magpie,&rsquo;&mdash;next to
+the water-wagtail, the gypsies&rsquo; most famous bird.&nbsp; On
+going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the
+leaves.&nbsp; As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him:
+&lsquo;It is wounded&mdash;or else dying&mdash;or is it a tamed
+bird escaped from a cage?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Hawk!&rsquo; said
+Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the
+sky.&nbsp; &lsquo;The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught
+his quarry and made his meal.&nbsp; I fancied he has himself been
+&lsquo;chivvied&rsquo; by the hawk, as the gypsies would
+say.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that
+speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk&mdash;one of the kind which
+takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick
+woodlands&mdash;was wheeling up and up, trying its best to get
+above a poor little lark in order to swoop at <a
+name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 110</span>and devour
+it.&nbsp; That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a
+witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident,
+for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and
+honest birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except
+the hawk.&nbsp; Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as
+a protecting friend.</p>
+<p>As we were gazing at the bird a woman&rsquo;s voice at our
+elbows said,&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It&rsquo;s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a
+magpie.&nbsp; I shall stop here till the hawk&rsquo;s flew
+away.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>We turned round, and there stood a fine young gypsy woman,
+carrying, gypsy fashion, a weakly child that in spite of its
+sallow and wasted cheek proclaimed itself to be hers.&nbsp; By
+her side stood a young gypsy girl.&nbsp; She was
+beautiful&mdash;quite remarkably so&mdash;but her beauty was not
+of the typical Romany kind.&nbsp; It was, as I afterwards
+learned, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.</p>
+<p>She was bareheaded&mdash;there was not even a gypsy
+handkerchief on her head&mdash;her hair was not plaited, and was
+not smooth and glossy like a gypsy girl&rsquo;s hair, but flowed
+thick and heavy and rippling down the back of her neck and upon
+her shoulders.&nbsp; In the tumbled tresses glittered certain
+objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.&nbsp; They
+were small dead dragonflies, of the crimson kind called
+&lsquo;sylphs.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known.&nbsp; The
+woman with the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what
+was her connection, if any, with &lsquo;Boswell the
+Great&rsquo;&mdash;I mean Sylvester Boswell, the grammarian and
+&lsquo;well-known and popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,&rsquo; who,
+on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about the
+superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, &lsquo;on
+the accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the
+pleasure of Nature&rsquo;s life.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+111</span>Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was
+Perpinia, and that the other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies,
+was the famous beauty of the neighbourhood&mdash;Rhona Boswell,
+of whom many stories had reached him with regard to Percy Aylwin,
+a relative of Rosamond&rsquo;s father.</p>
+<p>After greeting the two, Dereham looked at the weakling child
+with the deepest interest, and said to the mother: &lsquo;This
+chavo ought not to look like that&mdash;with such a mother as
+you, Perpinia.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;And with such a daddy,
+too,&rsquo; said she.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mike&rsquo;s stronger for a
+man nor even I am for a woman&rsquo;&mdash;a glow of wifely pride
+passing over her face; &lsquo;and as to good looks, it&rsquo;s
+him as has got the good looks, not me.&nbsp; But none on us
+can&rsquo;t make it out about the chavo.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s so weak
+and sick he don&rsquo;t look as if he belonged to Boswell&rsquo;s
+breed at all.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?&rsquo;
+said I, looking at the great black cutty pipe protruding from
+Perpinia&rsquo;s finely cut lips, and seeming strangely out of
+place there.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Can&rsquo;t say,&rsquo; said she, laughing.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;About as many as she can afford to buy,&rsquo;
+interrupted &lsquo;the beauty of the Ouse,&rsquo; as Rhona
+Boswell was called.&nbsp; &lsquo;That&rsquo;s all.&nbsp; Mike
+don&rsquo;t like her a-smokin&rsquo;.&nbsp; He says it makes her
+look like a old Londra Irish woman in Common Garding
+Market.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;You must not smoke another pipe,&rsquo; said I to the
+mother&mdash;&lsquo;not another pipe till the child leaves the
+breast.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What?&rsquo; said Perpinia defiantly.&nbsp; &lsquo;As
+if I could live without my pipe!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Fancy Pep a-living without her baccy!&rsquo; laughed
+Rhona.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Your child can&rsquo;t live with it,&rsquo; said I to
+Perpinia.&nbsp; &lsquo;That pipe of yours is full of a poison
+called nicotine.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+112</span>&lsquo;Nick what?&rsquo; said Rhona, laughing.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;That&rsquo;s a new kind of nick.&nbsp; Why, you smoke
+yourself!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nicotine,&rsquo; said I.&nbsp; &lsquo;And the first
+part of Pep&rsquo;s body that the poison gets into is her breast,
+and&mdash;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Gets into my burk,&rsquo; <a name="citation112"></a><a
+href="#footnote112" class="citation">[112]</a> said
+Perpinia.&nbsp; &lsquo;Get along wi&rsquo; ye.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Yes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Do it pison Pep&rsquo;s milk?&rsquo; said Rhona.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Yes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;That ain&rsquo;t true,&rsquo; said
+Perpinia&mdash;&lsquo;can&rsquo;t be true.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It is true,&rsquo; said I.&nbsp; &lsquo;If you
+don&rsquo;t give up that pipe for a time, the child will die, or
+else be a ricketty thing all his life.&nbsp; If you do give it
+up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your husband
+can be.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Chavo agin pipe, Pep!&rsquo; said Rhona.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,&rsquo; said Dereham, in
+that hail-fellow-well-met tone of his, which he reserved for the
+Romanies&mdash;a tone which no Romany could ever resist.&nbsp;
+And he took it gently from the woman&rsquo;s lips.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t smoke any more till I come to the camp and see
+the chavo again.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;He be&rsquo;s a good friend to the Romanies,&rsquo;
+said Rhona, in an appeasing tone.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;That&rsquo;s true,&rsquo; said the woman; &lsquo;but
+he&rsquo;s no business to take my pipe out o&rsquo; my mouth for
+all that.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>She soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain
+the pipe.&nbsp; Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty
+high-road leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona.&nbsp;
+Perpinia remained, keeping guard over the magpie that was to
+bring luck to the sinking child.</p>
+<p>It was determined now that Rhona was the very <a
+name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 113</span>person to
+be used as the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold&rsquo;s
+poem, for she was exceptionally intelligent.&nbsp; So instead of
+going to the camp, the oddly assorted little party of three
+struck across the ferns, gorse, and heather towards
+&lsquo;Kingfisher brook,&rsquo; and when we reached it we sat
+down on a fallen tree.</p>
+<p>Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl
+so much, in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a
+story either told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from
+my pocket the gypsy girl began to clap her hands.&nbsp; Her
+anticipation of enjoyment sent over her face a warm glow.</p>
+<p>Her complexion, though darker than an English girl&rsquo;s,
+was rather lighter than an ordinary gypsy&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Her eyes
+were of an indescribable hue; but an artist who has since then
+painted her portrait for me, described it as a mingling of pansy
+purple and dark tawny.&nbsp; The pupils were so large that, being
+set in the somewhat almond-shaped and long-eyelashed lids of her
+race, they were partly curtained both above and below, and this
+had the peculiar effect of making the eyes seem always a little
+contracted and just about to smile.&nbsp; The great size and deep
+richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem smaller
+than it really was; they also lessened the apparent size of the
+mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she
+laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.</p>
+<p>Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and
+cried, &lsquo;Look at the Devil&rsquo;s needles!&nbsp;
+They&rsquo;re come to sew my eyes up for killing their
+brothers.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of
+sky blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like
+a rainbow gauze, caught the sun as he <a name="page114"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 114</span>swept dazzling by, did really seem
+to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by
+the lights shed from the girl&rsquo;s eyes.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I dussn&rsquo;t set here,&rsquo; said she.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Us Romanies call this &lsquo;Dragon-fly
+Brook.&rsquo;&nbsp; And that&rsquo;s the king o&rsquo; the
+dragon-flies: he lives here.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of
+about a dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some
+bronze, some green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if
+they meant to justify their Romany name and sew up the
+girl&rsquo;s eyes.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The Romanies call them the Devil&rsquo;s
+needles,&rsquo; said Dereham; &lsquo;their business is to sew up
+pretty girls&rsquo; eyes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a
+while sat down again to listen to the &lsquo;lil,&rsquo; as she
+called the story.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p114b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"A Letter Box on the Broads.  (From an Oil Painting at &lsquo;The
+Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"A Letter Box on the Broads.  (From an Oil Painting at &lsquo;The
+Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p114s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<blockquote><p>Glanville&rsquo;s prose story, upon which
+Arnold&rsquo;s poem is based, was read first.&nbsp; In this Rhona
+was much interested.&nbsp; But when I went on to read to her
+Arnold&rsquo;s poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at the
+lovely bits of description&mdash;for the country about Oxford is
+quite remarkably like the country in which she was born&mdash;she
+looked sadly bewildered, and then asked to have it all read
+again.&nbsp; After a second reading she said in a meditative way:
+&lsquo;Can&rsquo;t make out what the lil&rsquo;s all
+about&mdash;seems all about nothink!&nbsp; Seems to me that the
+pretty sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o&rsquo; her
+skin for joy makes this &rsquo;ere gorgio want to cry.&nbsp; What
+a rum lot gorgios is surely!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the
+agility of a greyhound, turning round every few moments,
+pirouetting and laughing aloud.</p>
+<p><a name="page115"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+115</span>&lsquo;Let&rsquo;s go to the camp!&rsquo; said
+Dereham.&nbsp; &lsquo;That was all true about the
+nicotine&mdash;was it not?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Partly, I think,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;but not being a
+medical man I must not be too emphatic.&nbsp; If it is true it
+ought to be a criminal offence for any woman to smoke in excess
+while she is suckling a child.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to
+smoke at all,&rsquo; growled Dereham.&nbsp; &lsquo;Fancy kissing
+a woman&rsquo;s mouth that smelt of stale
+tobacco&mdash;pheugh!&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>After giving these two delightful descriptions of Borrow and
+his environment, I will now quote Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+description of their last meeting:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The last time I ever saw Borrow was shortly
+before he left London to live in the country.&nbsp; It was, I
+remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at
+a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous
+clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West
+End.&nbsp; Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet,
+entranced by the sight, as well he might be.&nbsp; Like most
+people born in flat districts, he had a passion for
+sunsets.&nbsp; Turner could not have painted that one, I think,
+and certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke
+was flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and,
+reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and
+towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour,
+leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed
+as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air&mdash;a
+peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply.&nbsp; I never saw
+such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and
+from its association with &lsquo;the last of Borrow&rsquo; I
+shall never forget it.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page116"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 116</span>A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE<br />
+<span class="smcap">The Last Sight of George Borrow</span></p>
+<blockquote><p>We talked of &lsquo;Children of the Open
+Air,&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof<br />
+Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,<br />
+Till, on a day, across the mystic bar<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of moonrise, came the &lsquo;Children of the
+Roof,&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who find no balm &rsquo;neath evening&rsquo;s
+rosiest woof,<br />
+Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.</p>
+<p>We looked o&rsquo;er London where men wither and choke,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and
+skies,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And lore of woods and wild wind-prophecies&mdash;<br
+/>
+Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:<br />
+And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>While the noble music of this double valediction in poetry and
+prose is sounding in our ears, my readers and I, &lsquo;with
+wandering steps and slow,&rsquo; may also fitly take our
+reluctant leave of George Borrow.</p>
+<h2><a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+117</span>Chapter X<br />
+THE ACTED DRAMA</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was during the famous evenings
+in Dr. Marston&rsquo;s house at Chalk Farm that Mr. Watts-Dunton
+was for the first time brought into contact with the theatrical
+world.&nbsp; I do not know that he was ever closely connected
+with that world, but in the set in which he specially moved at
+this time he seems to have been almost the only one who was a
+regular playgoer and first-nighter, for Rossetti&rsquo;s
+playgoing days were nearly over, and Mr. Swinburne never was a
+playgoer.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton still takes, as may be seen in
+his sonnet to Ellen Terry, which I shall quote, a deep interest
+in the acted drama and in the acting profession, although of late
+years he has not been much seen at the theatres.&nbsp; When,
+after a while, he and Minto were at work on the
+&lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; Mr. Watts-Dunton occasionally, although I
+think rarely, wrote a theatrical critique for that paper.&nbsp;
+The only one I have had an opportunity of reading is upon Miss
+Neilson&mdash;not the Miss Julia Neilson who is so much admired
+in our day; but the powerful, dark-eyed creole-looking beauty,
+Lilian Adelaide Neilson, who, after being a mill-hand and a
+barmaid, became a famous tragedian, and made a great impression
+in Juliet, and in impassioned poetical parts of that kind.&nbsp;
+The play in which she appeared on that occasion was a play by Tom
+Taylor, called &lsquo;Anne <a name="page118"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 118</span>Boleyn,&rsquo; in which Miss Neilson
+took the part of the heroine.&nbsp; It was given at the Haymarket
+in February 1876.&nbsp; I do not remember reading any criticism
+in which so much admirable writing&mdash;acute, brilliant, and
+learned&mdash;was thrown away upon so mediocre a play.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s remarks upon Miss Neilson&rsquo;s acting
+were, however, not thrown away, for the subject seems to have
+been fully worthy of them; and I, who love the acted drama
+myself, regret that the actress&rsquo;s early death in 1880,
+robbed me of the pleasure of seeing her.&nbsp; She was one of the
+actresses whom Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet on Sunday evenings
+at Marston&rsquo;s, and I have heard him say that her genius was
+as apparent in her conversation as in her acting.&nbsp; Miss
+Corkran has recently sketched one of these meetings, and has
+given us a graphic picture of Mr. Watts-Dunton there, contrasting
+his personal appearance with that of Mr. Swinburne.&nbsp; They
+must indeed have been delightful gatherings to a lover of the
+theatre, for there Miss Neilson, Miss Glyn, Miss Ada Cavendish,
+and others were to be met&mdash;met in the company of Irving,
+Sothern, Hermann Vezin, and many another famous actor.</p>
+<p>That Mr. Watts-Dunton had a peculiar insight into histrionic
+art was shown by what occurred on his very first appearance at
+the Marston evenings, whither he was taken by his friend, Dr.
+Gordon Hake, who used to tell the following story with great
+humour; and Rossetti also used to repeat it with still greater
+gusto.&nbsp; I am here again indebted to his son, Mr.
+Hake&mdash;who was also a friend of Dr. Marston, Ada Cavendish,
+and others&mdash;for interesting reminiscences of these Marston
+evenings which have never been published.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton
+at that time was, of course, quite unknown, except in a very
+small circle of literary men and artists.&nbsp; <a
+name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 119</span>Three or
+four dramatic critics, several poets, and two actresses, one of
+whom was Ada Cavendish, were talking about Irving in &lsquo;The
+Bells,&rsquo; which was a dramatization by a writer named Leopold
+Lewis of the &lsquo;Juif Polonais&rsquo; of
+Erckmann-Chatrian.&nbsp; They were all enthusiastically extolling
+Irving&rsquo;s acting; and this is not surprising, as all will
+say who have seen him in the part.&nbsp; But while some were
+praising the play, others were running it down.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+I say,&rdquo; said one of the admirers, &ldquo;is that the motif
+of &lsquo;The Bells,&rsquo; the use of the idea of a sort of
+embodied conscience to tell the audience the story and bring
+about the catastrophe, is the newest that has appeared in drama
+or fiction&mdash;it is entirely original.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not entirely, I think,&rdquo; said a voice which, until
+that evening, was new in the circle.&nbsp; They turned round to
+listen to what the dark-eyed young stranger, tanned by the sun to
+a kind of gypsy colour, who looked like William Black, quietly
+smoking his cigarette, had to say.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not entirely new?&rdquo; said one.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who was
+the originator, then, of the idea?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t tell you that,&rdquo; said the
+interrupting voice, &ldquo;for it occurs in a very old Persian
+story, and it was evidently old even then.&nbsp; But
+Erckmann-Chatrian took it from a much later story-teller.&nbsp;
+They adapted it from Chamisso.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is that the author of &lsquo;Peter
+Schlemihl&rsquo;?&rdquo; said one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;but
+Chamisso was a poet before he was a prose writer, and he wrote a
+rhymed story in which the witness of a murder was the sunrise,
+and at dawn the criminal was affected in the same way that
+Matthias is affected by the sledge bells.&nbsp; The idea that the
+sensorium, in an otherwise perfectly sane brain, can translate
+sights and sound into accusations <a name="page120"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 120</span>of a crime is, of course, perfectly
+true, and in the play it is wonderfully given by
+Irving.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Dr. Marston, &ldquo;that is the best
+account I have yet heard of the origin of &lsquo;The
+Bells.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then the voice of one of the disparagers of the play said:
+&ldquo;There you are!&nbsp; The very core of
+Erckmann-Chatrian&rsquo;s story and Lewis&rsquo;s play has been
+stolen and spoilt from another writer.&nbsp; The acting, as I
+say, is superb&mdash;the play is rot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I do not think so,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think it a new and a striking
+play.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Will you give your reasons, sir?&rdquo; said Dr.
+Marston, in that old-fashioned courtly way which was one of his
+many charms.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;if it
+will be of any interest.&nbsp; You recollect Coleridge&rsquo;s
+remarks upon expectation and surprise in drama.&nbsp; I think it
+a striking play because I cannot recall any play in which the
+entire source of interest is that of pure expectation
+unadulterated by surprise.&nbsp; From the opening dialogue,
+before ever the burgomaster appears, the audience knows that a
+murder has been committed, and that the murderer must be the
+burgomaster, and yet the audience is kept in breathless suspense
+through pure expectation as to whether or not the crime will be
+brought home to him, and if brought home to him, how.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the voice of one of the admirers of
+the play, &ldquo;that is the best criticism of &lsquo;The
+Bells&rsquo; I have yet heard.&rdquo;&nbsp; After this the
+conversation turned upon Jefferson&rsquo;s acting of Rip Van
+Winkle, and many admirable remarks fell from a dozen lips.&nbsp;
+When there was a pause in these criticisms, Dr. Marston turned to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton and said, &ldquo;Have you seen Jefferson in
+&lsquo;Rip van Winkle,&rsquo; sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+121</span>&ldquo;Yes, indeed,&rdquo; was the reply, &ldquo;many
+times; and I hope to see it many more times.&nbsp; It is
+wonderful.&nbsp; I think it lucky that I have been able to see
+the great exemplar of what may be called the Garrick type of
+actor, and the great exemplar of what may be called the Edmund
+Kean type of actor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On being asked what he meant by this classification, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton launched out into one of those wide-sweeping but
+symmetrical monologues of criticism in which beginning, middle,
+and end, were as perfectly marked as though the improvization had
+been a well-considered essay&mdash;the subject being the style of
+acting typified by Garrick and the style of acting typified by
+Robson.&nbsp; As this same idea runs through Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of Got in &lsquo;Le Roi
+s&rsquo;Amuse&rsquo; (which I shall quote later), there is no
+need to dwell upon it here.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As an instance,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of
+Jefferson&rsquo;s supreme power in this line of acting, one might
+refer to Act II. of the play, where Rip mounts the Catskill
+Mountains in the company of the goblins.&nbsp; Rip talks with the
+goblins one after the other, and there seems to be a dramatic
+dialogue going on.&nbsp; It is not till the curtain falls that
+the audience realizes that every word spoken during that act came
+from the lips of Rip, so entirely have Jefferson&rsquo;s facial
+expression and intonation dramatized each goblin.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Between Mr. Watts-Dunton and our great Shakespearean actress,
+Ellen Terry, there has been an affectionate friendship running
+over nearly a quarter of a century.&nbsp; This is not at all
+surprising to one who knows Miss Terry&rsquo;s high artistic
+taste and appreciation of poetry.&nbsp; Among the poems
+expressing that friendship, none is more pleasing than the sonnet
+that appeared in <a name="page122"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+122</span>the &lsquo;Magazine of Art&rsquo; to which Mr. Bernard
+Partridge contributed his superb drawing of Miss Terry in the
+part of Queen Katherine.&nbsp; It is entitled, &lsquo;Queen
+Katherine: on seeing Miss Ellen Terry as Katherine in King Henry
+VIII&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Seeking a tongue for tongueless shadow-land,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Has Katherine&rsquo;s soul come back with power to
+quell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A sister-soul incarnate, and compel<br />
+Its bodily voice to speak by Grief&rsquo;s command?<br />
+Or is it Katherine&rsquo;s self returns to stand<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As erst she stood defying Wolsey&rsquo;s
+spell&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Returns with those vile wrongs she fain would
+tell<br />
+Which memory bore to Eden&rsquo;s amaranth strand?</p>
+<p>Or is it thou, dear friend&mdash;this Queen, whose face<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The salt of many tears hath scarred and
+stung?&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Can it be thou, whose genius, ever young,<br />
+Lighting the body with the spirit&rsquo;s grace,<br />
+Is loved by England&mdash;loved by all the race<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Round all the world enlinked by Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+tongue!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>With one exception I do not find any dramatic criticisms by
+Mr. Watts-Dunton in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Indeed, I should not expect to find him trenching upon the domain
+of the greatest dramatic critic of our time, Mr. Joseph
+Knight.&nbsp; No one speaks with greater admiration of Mr. Knight
+than his friend of thirty years&rsquo; standing, Mr. Watts-Dunton
+himself; and when an essay on &lsquo;King John&rsquo; was
+required for the series of Shakespeare essays to accompany Mr.
+Edwin Abbey&rsquo;s famous illustrations in &lsquo;Harper&rsquo;s
+Magazine,&rsquo; it was Mr. Knight whom Mr. Watts-Dunton invited
+to discuss this important play.&nbsp; The exception I allude to
+is the criticism of Victor Hugo&rsquo;s &lsquo;Le Roi
+s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; which appeared in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; of December 2, 1882.</p>
+<p>The way in which it came about that Mr. Watts-Dunton <a
+name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 123</span>undertook
+for the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; so important a piece of
+dramatic criticism is interesting.&nbsp; In 1882 M. Vacquerie,
+the editor of &lsquo;Le Rappel,&rsquo; a relative of
+Hugo&rsquo;s, and a great friend of Mr. Swinburne and Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, together with other important members of the Hugo
+cenacle, determined to get up a representation of &lsquo;Le Roi
+s&rsquo;Amuse&rsquo; on the jubilee of its first representation,
+since when it had never been acted.&nbsp; Vacquerie sent two
+fauteuils, one for Mr. Swinburne and one for Mr. Watts-Dunton;
+and the two poets were present at that memorable
+representation.&nbsp; Long before the appointed day there was on
+the Continent, from Paris to St. Petersburg, an unprecedented
+demand for seats; for it was felt that this was the most
+interesting dramatic event that had occurred for fifty years.</p>
+<p>Consequently the editor of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;
+for once invited his chief literary contributor to fill the post
+which the dramatic editor of the paper, Mr. Joseph Knight,
+generously yielded to him for the occasion, and the following
+article appeared:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: right">&ldquo;Paris, November
+23, 1882.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I felt that the revival, at the Theatre
+Fran&ccedil;ais, of &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; on the
+fiftieth anniversary of its original production, must be one of
+the most interesting literary events of our time, and so I found
+it to be.&nbsp; Victor Hugo was there, sitting with his arms
+folded across his breast, calm but happy, in a stage box.&nbsp;
+He expressed himself satisfied and even delighted with the
+acting.&nbsp; The poet&rsquo;s appearance was fuller of vitality
+and more Olympian than ever.&nbsp; Between the acts he left the
+theatre and walked about in the square, leaning on the arm of his
+illustrious poet friend and family connection, Auguste <a
+name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 124</span>Vacquerie,
+to whose kindness I was indebted for a seat in the fauteuils
+d&rsquo;orchestre, which otherwise I should have found to be
+quite unattainable, so unprecedented was the demand for
+places.&nbsp; It is said that a thousand francs were given for a
+seat.&nbsp; Never before was seen, even in a French theatre, an
+audience so brilliant and so illustrious.&nbsp; I did not,
+however, see any English face I knew save that of Mr. Swinburne,
+who at the end of the third act might have been seen talking to
+Hugo in his box.&nbsp; Among the most appreciative and
+enthusiastic of those who assisted at the representation was the
+French poet, who perhaps in the nineteenth century stands next to
+Hugo for intellectual massiveness, M. Leconte de Lisle.&nbsp; And
+I should say that every French poet and indeed every man of
+eminence was there.</p>
+<p>Considering the extraordinary nature of the piece, the cast
+was perhaps as satisfactory as could have been hoped for.&nbsp;
+Fond as is M. Hugo of spectacular effects, and even of coups de
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre, no other dramatist gives so little
+attention as he to the idiosyncrasies of actors.&nbsp; It is easy
+to imagine that Shakespeare in writing his lines was not always
+unmindful of an actor like Burbage.&nbsp; But in depicting
+Triboulet, Hugo must have thought as little about the
+specialities of Ligier, who took the part on the first night in
+1832, as of the future Got, who was to take it on the second
+night in 1882.&nbsp; And the same may be said of Blanche in
+relation to the two actresses who successively took that
+part.&nbsp; This is, I think, exactly the way in which a
+dramatist should work.&nbsp; The contrary method is not more
+ruinous to drama as a literary form than to the actor&rsquo;s
+art.&nbsp; To write up to an actor&rsquo;s style destroys all
+true character-drawing; also it ends by writing up to the
+actor&rsquo;s mere manner, who from that moment is, as an artist,
+doomed.&nbsp; On the whole, the <a name="page125"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 125</span>performance wanted more glow and
+animal spirits.&nbsp; The Fran&ccedil;ois I of M. Mounet-Sully
+was full of verve, but this actor&rsquo;s voice is so exceedingly
+rich and emotional that the king seemed more poetic, and hence
+more sympathetic to the audience, than was consistent with a
+character who in a sense is held up as the villain of the
+piece.&nbsp; The true villain, here, however, as in
+&lsquo;Torquemada,&rsquo; &lsquo;Notre Dame de Paris,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Les Mis&eacute;rables,&rsquo; and, indeed, in all
+Hugo&rsquo;s characteristic works, is not an individual at all,
+but Circumstance.&nbsp; Circumstance placed Francis, a young and
+pleasure-loving king, over a licentious court.&nbsp; Circumstance
+gave him a court jester with a temper which, to say the least of
+it, was peculiar for such times as those.&nbsp; Circumstance,
+acting through the agency of certain dissolute courtiers, thrust
+into the king&rsquo;s very bedroom the girl whom he loved and who
+belonged to a class from whom he had been taught to expect
+subservience of every kind.&nbsp; The tragic mischief of the rape
+follows almost as a necessary consequence.&nbsp; Add to this the
+fact that Circumstance contrives that the girl Maguelonne,
+instead of aiding her more conscientious brother in killing the
+disguised king at the bidding of &lsquo;the client who
+pays,&rsquo; falls unexpectedly in love with him; while
+Circumstance also contrives that Blanche shall be there ready at
+the very spot at the very moment where and when she is
+imperatively wanted as a substituted victim;&mdash;and you get
+the entire motif of &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse&rsquo;&mdash;man
+enmeshed in a web of circumstance, the motif of &lsquo;Notre Dame
+de Paris,&rsquo; the motif of &lsquo;Torquemada,&rsquo; and, in a
+certain deep sense, perhaps the proper motif in romantic
+drama.&nbsp; For when the vis matrix of classic drama, the
+supernatural interference of conscious Destiny, was no longer
+available to the artist, something akin to it&mdash;something
+nobler and more powerful than <a name="page126"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 126</span>the stage villain&mdash;was found to
+be necessary to save tragedy from sinking into melodrama.&nbsp;
+And this explains so many of the complexities of Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>In the dramas of Victor Hugo, however, the romantic temper has
+advanced quite as far as it ought to advance not only in the use
+of Circumstance as the final cause of the tragic mischief, but in
+the use of the grotesque in alliance with the terrible.&nbsp; The
+greatest masters of the terrible-grotesque till we get to the
+German romanticists were the English dramatists of the sixteenth
+and the early portion of the seventeenth century, and of course
+by far the greatest among these was Shakespeare.&nbsp; For the
+production of the effect in question there is nothing comparable
+to the scenes in &lsquo;Lear&rsquo; between the king and the
+fool&mdash;scenes which seem very early in his life to have
+struck Hugo more than anything else in literature.&nbsp; Outside
+the Elizabethan dramatists, however, there can be no doubt that
+(leaving out of the discussion the great German masters in this
+line) Hugo is the greatest worker in the terrible-grotesque that
+has appeared since Burns.&nbsp; I need only point to Quasimodo
+and Triboulet and compare them not merely with such attempts in
+this line as those of writers like Beddoes, but even with the
+magnificent work of Mr. Browning, who though far more subtle than
+Hugo is without his sublimity and amazing power over
+chiaroscuro.&nbsp; Now, the most remarkable feature of the
+revival of &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; and that which
+made me above all other reasons desirous to see it, was that the
+character of Triboulet was to be rendered by an actor of rare and
+splendid genius, but who, educated in the genteel comedy of
+modern France and also in the social subtleties of
+Moli&egrave;re, seemed the last man in Paris to give that
+peculiar expression of the romantic temper which I have called
+the terrible-grotesque.</p>
+<p><a name="page127"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 127</span>That
+M. Got&rsquo;s success in a part so absolutely unsuited to him
+should have been as great as it was is, in my judgment, the
+crowning success of his life.&nbsp; It is as though Thackeray,
+after completing &lsquo;Philip,&rsquo; had set himself to write a
+romance in the style of &lsquo;Notre Dame de Paris,&rsquo; and
+succeeded in the attempt.&nbsp; Yet the success of M. Got was
+relative only, I think.&nbsp; The Triboulet was not the Triboulet
+of the reader&rsquo;s own imaginings, but an admirable Triboulet
+of the Com&eacute;die Fran&ccedil;aise.&nbsp; Perhaps, however,
+the truth is that there is not an actor in Europe who could
+adequately render such a character as Triboulet.</p>
+<p>This is what I mean: all great actors are divisible into two
+groups, which are by temperament and endowment the exact
+opposites of each other.&nbsp; There are those who, like Garrick,
+producing their effects by means of a self-dominance and a
+conservation of energy akin to that of Goethe in poetry, are able
+to render a character, coldly indeed, but with matchless
+verisimilitude in its every nuance.&nbsp; And there are those
+who, like Edmund Kean and Robson, &lsquo;live&rsquo; in the
+character so entirely that self-dominance and conservation of
+energy are not possible, and who, whensoever the situation
+becomes very intense, work miracles of representation by sheer
+imaginative abandon, but do so at the expense of that delicacy of
+light and shade in the entire conception which is the great quest
+of the actor as an artist.&nbsp; And if it should be found that
+in order to render Triboulet there is requisite for the more
+intense crises of the piece the abandon of Kean and Robson, and
+at the same time, for the carrying on of the play, the calm,
+self-conscious staying power of Garrick, the conclusion will be
+obvious that Triboulet is essentially an unactable
+character.&nbsp; I will illustrate this by an instance.&nbsp; The
+reader will remember that in <a name="page128"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 128</span>the third act of &lsquo;Le Roi
+s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; Triboulet&rsquo;s daughter Blanche, after
+having been violated by the king at the Louvre, rushes into the
+antechamber, where stands her father surrounded by the group of
+sneering courtiers who, unknown both to the king and to
+Triboulet, have abducted her during the night and set her in the
+king&rsquo;s way.&nbsp; When the girl tells her father of the
+terrible wrong that has been done to her, he passes at once from
+the mood of sardonic defiance which was natural to him into a
+state of passion so terrible that a sudden and magical effect is
+produced: the conventional walls between him, the poor despised
+court jester, and the courtiers, are suddenly overthrown by the
+unexpected operation of one of those great human instincts which
+make the whole world kin:&mdash;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Triboulet</span> (faisant trois pas, et
+balayant du geste tous les seigneurs inter dits).</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Allez-vous-en d&rsquo;ici!<br />
+Et, si le roi Fran&ccedil;ois par malheur se hasarde<br />
+A passer pr&egrave;s d&rsquo;ici, (&agrave; Monsieur de
+Vermandois) vous &ecirc;tes de sa garde,<br />
+Dites-lui de ne pas entrer,&mdash;que je suis l&agrave;.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">M. de Pienne</span>.&nbsp; On n&rsquo;a
+jamais rien vu de fou comme cela.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">M. de Gordes</span> (lui faisant signe de
+se retirer).&nbsp; Aux fous comme aux enfants on c&egrave;de
+quelque chose.</p>
+<p>Veillons pourtant, de peur d&rsquo;accident.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Ils sortent.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Triboulet</span> (s&rsquo;asseyant sur le
+fauteuil du roi et relevant sa fille.)&nbsp; Allons, cause.<br />
+Dis-moi tout.&nbsp; (Il se retourne, et, apercevant Monsieur de
+Coss&eacute;, qui est rest&eacute;, il se l&egrave;ve &agrave;
+demi en lui montrant la porte).&nbsp; M&rsquo;avez-vous en tendu,
+monseigneur?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">M. De Coss&eacute;</span> (tout en se
+retirant comme subjugu&eacute; par l&rsquo;ascendant du
+bouffon).&nbsp; Ces fous, cela se croit tout permis, en
+honneur!</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[Il sort.</p>
+<p>Now in reading &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; startling
+as is the situation, it does not seem exaggerated, for Victor
+Hugo&rsquo;s lines are adequate in simple passion to effect the
+dramatic work, and the reader feels that Triboulet was wrought up
+to the state of exaltation to which the lines give expression, <a
+name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 129</span>that
+nothing could resist him, and that the proud courtiers must in
+truth have cowered before him in the manner here indicated by the
+dramatist.&nbsp; In literature the artist does not actualize; he
+suggests, and leaves the reader&rsquo;s imagination free.&nbsp;
+But an actor has to actualize this state of exaltation&mdash;he
+has to bring the physical condition answering to the emotional
+condition before the eyes of the spectator; and if he fails to
+display as much of the &lsquo;fine frenzy&rsquo; of passion as is
+requisite to cow and overawe a group of cynical worldlings, the
+situation becomes forced and unnatural, inasmuch as they are
+overawed without a sufficient cause.&nbsp; That an actor like
+Robson could and would have risen to such an occasion no one will
+doubt who ever saw him (for he was the very incarnation of the
+romantic temper), but then the exhaustion would have been so
+great that it would have been impossible for him to go on bearing
+the entire weight of this long play as M. Got does.&nbsp; The
+actor requires, as I say, the abandon characteristic of one kind
+of histrionic art together with the staying power characteristic
+of another.&nbsp; Now, admirable as is M. Got in this and in all
+scenes of &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; he does not pass
+into such a condition of exalted passion as makes the retirement
+of the courtiers seem probable.&nbsp; For artistic perfection
+there was nothing in the entire representation that surpassed the
+scenes between Saltabadil and Maguelonne in the hovel on the
+banks of the Seine.&nbsp; It would be difficult, indeed, to
+decide which was the more admirable, the Saltabadil of M. Febvre
+or the Maguelonne of Jeanne Samary.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">AT THE TH&Eacute;&Acirc;TRE
+FRAN&Ccedil;AIS<br />
+<span class="smcap">November</span> 22, 1882</p>
+<p>Poet of pity and scourge of sceptred crime&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Titan of light, with scarce the gods for
+peers&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+130</span>What thoughts come to thee through the mist of
+years,<br />
+There sitting calm, master of Fate and Time?<br />
+Homage from every tongue, from every clime,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In place of gibes, fills now thy satiate ears.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Mine own heart swells, mine eyelids prick with
+tears<br />
+In very pride of thee, old man sublime!</p>
+<p>And thou, the mother who bore him, beauteous France,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Round whose fair limbs what web of sorrow is
+spun!&mdash;<br />
+I see thee lift thy tear-stained countenance&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Victress by many a victory he hath won;<br />
+I hear thy voice o&rsquo;er winds of Fate and Chance<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Say to the conquered world: &lsquo;Behold my
+son!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I may mention here that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always shown the
+greatest admiration of the actor&rsquo;s art and the greatest
+interest in actors and actresses.&nbsp; He has affirmed that
+&lsquo;the one great art in which women are as essential as
+men&mdash;the one great art in which their place can never be
+supplied by men&mdash;is in the acted drama, which the Greeks
+held in such high esteem that &AElig;schylus and Sophocles acted
+as stage managers and show-masters, although the stage mask
+dispensed with much of the necessity of calling in the aid of
+women.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Great as is the importance of female poets,&rsquo; says
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, &lsquo;men are so rich in endowment, that
+literature would be a worthy expression of the human mind if
+there had been no Sappho and no Emily Bront&euml;&mdash;no Mrs.
+Browning&mdash;no Christina Rossetti.&nbsp; Great as is the
+importance of female novelists, men again are so rich in
+endowment that literature would be a worthy expression of the
+human mind if there had been no Georges Sand, no Jane Austen, no
+Charlotte Bront&euml;, no George Eliot, no Mrs. Gaskell, no Mrs.
+Craigie.&nbsp; As to painting and music, up to now women have not
+been notable workers in either of these departments,
+notwithstanding <a name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+131</span>Rosa Bonheur and one or two others.&nbsp; But, to say
+nothing of France, what in England would have been the acted
+drama, whether in prose or verse, without Mrs. Siddons, Mrs.
+Hermann Vezin, Adelaide Neilson, Miss Glyn, in tragedy; without
+Mrs. Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Julia Neilson, Ellen Terry, Irene
+Vanbrugh and Ada Rehan in comedy?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>People who run down actresses should say at once that the
+acted drama is not one of the fine arts at all.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has often expressed the opinion that there is in
+England a great waste of histrionic endowment among women, owing
+to the ignorant prejudice against the stage which even now is
+prevalent in England.&nbsp; &lsquo;An enormous waste of
+force,&rsquo; says he, &lsquo;there is, of course, in other
+departments of intellectual activity, but nothing like the waste
+of latent histrionic powers among Englishwomen.&rsquo;&nbsp; And
+he supplies many examples of this which have come under his own
+observation, among which I can mention only one.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Some years ago,&rsquo; he said to me, &lsquo;I was
+invited to go to see the performance of a French play given by
+the pupils of a fashionable school in the West End of
+London.&nbsp; Apart from the admirable French accent of the girls
+I was struck by the acting of two or three performers who showed
+some latent dramatic talent.&nbsp; I have always taken an
+interest in amateur dramatic performances, for a reason that Lady
+Archibald Campbell in one of her writings has well discussed,
+namely, that what the amateur actor or actress may lack in
+knowledge of stage traditions he or she will sometimes more than
+make up for by the sweet flexibility and abandon of nature.&nbsp;
+The amateur will often achieve that rarest of all artistic
+excellencies, whether in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, or
+histrionics&mdash;<a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+132</span>na&iuml;vet&eacute;: a quality which in poetry is seen
+in its perfection in the finest of the writings of Coleridge; in
+acting, it is perhaps seen in its perfection in Duse.&nbsp; Now,
+on the occasion to which I refer, one of these schoolgirl
+actresses achieved, as I thought, and as others thought with me,
+this rare and perfect flower of histrionics; and when I came to
+know her I found that she joined wide culture and an immense
+knowledge of Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Moli&egrave;re
+with an innate gift for rendering them.&nbsp; In any other
+society than that of England she would have gone on the stage as
+a matter of course, but the fatal prejudice about social position
+prevented her from following the vocation that Nature intended
+for her.&nbsp; Since then I have seen two or three such cases,
+not so striking as this one, but striking enough to make me angry
+with Philistinism.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>With this sympathy for histrionic art, it is not at all
+surprising that Mr. Watts-Dunton took the greatest interest in
+the open-air plays organized by Lady Archibald Campbell at
+Coombe.&nbsp; I have seen a brilliant description of these plays
+by him which ought to have been presented to the public years
+ago.&nbsp; It forms, I believe, a long chapter of an unpublished
+novel.&nbsp; Turning over the pages of Davenport Adams&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Dictionary of the Drama,&rsquo; which every lover of the
+theatre must regret he did not live to complete, I come
+accidentally upon these words: &ldquo;One of the most recently
+printed epilogues is that which Theodore Watts-Dunton wrote for
+an amateur performance of Banville&rsquo;s &lsquo;Le
+Baiser&rsquo; at Coombe, Surrey, in August, 1889.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And this reminds me that I ought to quote this famous epilogue
+here; for Professor Strong in his review of &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; in &lsquo;Literature&rsquo; speaks of the amazing
+command over metre and colour and story displayed in <a
+name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 133</span>the
+poem.&nbsp; It is, I believe, the only poem in the English
+language in which an elaborate story is fully told by poetic
+suggestion instead of direct statement.</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">A REMINISCENCE OF THE
+OPEN-AIR PLAYS.</p>
+<p>Epilogue for the open-air performance of Banville&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Le Baiser, in which Lady Archibald Campbell took the part
+of &lsquo;Pierrot&rsquo; and Miss Annie Schletter the part of the
+&lsquo;Fairy.&rsquo;&mdash;Coombe, August 9, 1889.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">To Pierrot in
+Love</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">The Clown whose kisses turned a
+Crone to a Fairy-queen</p>
+<p>What dost thou here in Love&rsquo;s enchanted wood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Pierrot, who once wert safe as clown and
+thief&mdash;<br />
+Held safe by love of fun and wine and food&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From her who follows love of Woman, Grief&mdash;<br
+/>
+Her who of old stalked over Eden-grass<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Behind Love&rsquo;s baby-feet&mdash;whose shadow
+threw<br />
+On every brook, as on a magic glass,<br />
+Prophetic shapes of what should come to pass<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When tears got mixt with Paradisal dew?</p>
+<p>Kisses are loved but for the lips that kiss:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thine have restored a princess to her throne,<br />
+Breaking the spell which barred from fairy bliss<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A fay, and shrank her to a wrinkled crone;<br />
+But, if thou dream&rsquo;st that thou from Pantomime<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shalt clasp an angel of the mystic moon,<br />
+Clasp her on banks of Love&rsquo;s own rose and thyme,<br />
+While woodland warblers ring the nuptial-chime&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bottom to thee were but a week buffoon.</p>
+<p>When yonder fairy, long ago, was told<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The spell which caught her in malign eclipse,<br />
+Turning her radiant body foul and old,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Would yield to some knight-errant&rsquo;s virgin
+lips,<br />
+And when, through many a weary day and night,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She, wondering who the paladin would be<br />
+Whose kiss should charm her from her grievous plight,<br />
+Pictured a-many princely heroes bright,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Dost thou suppose she ever pictured thee?</p>
+<p><a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+134</span>&rsquo;Tis true the mischief of the foeman&rsquo;s
+charm<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yielded to thee&mdash;to that first kiss of
+thine.<br />
+We saw her tremble&mdash;lift a rose-wreath arm,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Which late, all veined and shrivelled, made her
+pine;<br />
+We saw her fingers rise and touch her cheek,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As if the morning breeze across the wood,<br />
+Which lately seemed to strike so chill and bleak<br />
+Through all the wasted body, bent and weak,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Were light and music now within her blood.</p>
+<p>&rsquo;Tis true thy kiss made all her form expand&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made all the skin grow smooth and pure as pearl,<br
+/>
+Till there she stood, tender, yet tall and grand,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A queen of Faery, yet a lovesome girl,<br />
+Within whose eyes&mdash;whose wide, new-litten eyes&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; New-litten by thy kiss&rsquo;s re-creation&mdash;<br
+/>
+Expectant joy that yet was wild surprise<br />
+Made all her flesh like light of summer skies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When dawn lies dreaming of the morn&rsquo;s
+carnation.</p>
+<p>But when thou saw&rsquo;st the breaking of the spell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Within whose grip of might her soul had pined,<br />
+Like some sweet butterfly that breaks the cell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In which its purple pinions slept confined,<br />
+And when thou heard&rsquo;st the strains of elfin song<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her sisters sang from rainbow cars above
+her&mdash;<br />
+Didst thou suppose that she, though prisoned long,<br />
+And freed at last by thee from all the wrong,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Must for that kiss take Harlequin for lover?</p>
+<p>Hearken, sweet fool!&nbsp; Though Banville carried thee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To lawns where love and song still share the
+sward<br />
+Beyond the golden river few can see,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And fewer still, in these grey days, can ford;<br />
+And though he bade the wings of Passion fan<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thy face, till every line grows bright and human,<br
+/>
+Feathered thy spirit&rsquo;s wing for wider span,<br />
+And fired thee with the fire that comes to man<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When first he plucks the rose of Nature, Woman;</p>
+<p><a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 135</span>And
+though our actress gives thee that sweet gaze<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where spirit and matter mingle in liquid
+blue&mdash;<br />
+That face, where pity through the frolic plays&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That form, whose lines of light Love&rsquo;s pencil
+drew&mdash;<br />
+That voice whose music seems a new caress<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whenever passion makes a new transition<br />
+From key to key of joy or quaint distress&mdash;<br />
+That sigh, when, now, thy fairy&rsquo;s loveliness<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Leaves thee alone to mourn Love&rsquo;s vanished
+vision:</p>
+<p>Still art thou Pierrot&mdash;naught but Pierrot ever;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For is not this the very word of Fate:<br />
+&lsquo;No mortal, clown or king, shall e&rsquo;er dissever<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; His present glory from his past estate&rsquo;?<br />
+Yet be thou wise and dry those foolish tears;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The clown&rsquo;s first kiss was needed, not the
+clown,<br />
+By her, who, fired by hopes and chilled by fears,<br />
+Sought but a kiss like thine for years on years:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Be wise, I say, and wander back to town.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Recurring to the Marston gatherings, I reproduce here, from
+the same unpublished story to which I have already alluded, the
+following interesting account of them and of other social
+reunions of the like kind.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Many of those who have reached life&rsquo;s
+meridian, or passed it, will remember the sudden rise, a quarter
+of a century ago, of Rossetti, Swinburne, and William
+Morris&mdash;poets who seemed for a time to threaten the
+ascendency of Tennyson himself.&nbsp; Between this galaxy and the
+latest generation of poets there rose, culminated, and apparently
+set, another&mdash;the group which it was the foolish fashion to
+call &lsquo;the pre-Raphaelite poets,&rsquo; some of whom
+yielded, or professed to yield, to the influence of Rossetti,
+some to that of William Morris, and some to that of
+Swinburne.&nbsp; Round them all, however, there was the aura of
+Baudelaire or else of Gautier.&nbsp; These&mdash;though, as in
+all such <a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+136</span>cases, nature had really made them very unlike each
+other&mdash;formed themselves into a set, or rather a sect, and
+tried apparently to become as much like each other as possible,
+by studying French models, selecting subjects more or less in
+harmony with the French temper, getting up their books after the
+fashion that was as much approved then as contemporary fashions
+in books are approved now, and by various other means.&nbsp; They
+had certain places of meeting, where they held high converse with
+themselves.&nbsp; One of these was the hospitable house, in
+Fitzroy Square, of the beloved and venerable painter, Mr. Madox
+Brown, whose face, as he sat smiling upon his Eisteddfod,
+radiating benevolence and encouragement to the unfledged bards he
+loved, was a picture which must be cherished in many a grateful
+memory now.&nbsp; Another was the equally hospitable house, in
+the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, where reigned the dramatist,
+Westland Marston, and where his blind poet-boy Philip
+lived.&nbsp; Here O&rsquo;Shaughnessy would come with a glow of
+triumph on his face, which indicated clearly enough what he was
+carrying in his pocket&mdash;something connecting him with the
+divine Th&eacute;ophile&mdash;a letter from the Gallic Olympus
+perhaps, or a presentation copy sent from the very top of the
+Gallic Parnassus.&nbsp; It was on one of these occasions that
+Rossetti satirically advised one of the cenacle to quit so poor a
+language as that of Shakespeare and write entirely in French,
+which language Morris immediately defined as &lsquo;nosey
+Latin.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is a pity that some literary veteran does
+not give his reminiscences of those Marston nights, or rather
+Marston mornings, for the symposium began at about twelve and
+went on till nearly six&mdash;those famous gatherings of poets,
+actors, and painters, enlinking the days of Macready, Phelps,
+Miss Glyn, Robert Browning, Dante Rossetti, and R. H. <a
+name="page137"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 137</span>Horne, with
+the days of poets, actors, and painters like Mr. Swinburne,
+Morris, and Mr. Irving.&nbsp; Yet these pre-Raphaelite bards had
+another joy surpassing even that of the Chalk Farm symposium,
+that of assisting at those literary and artistic feasts which
+Rossetti used occasionally to give at Cheyne Walk.&nbsp;
+Generosity and geniality incarnate was the mysterious
+poet-painter to those he loved; and if the budding bard yearned
+for sympathy, as he mostly does, he could get quite as much as he
+deserved, and more, at 16 Cheyne Walk.&nbsp; To say that any
+artist could take a deeper interest in the work of a friend than
+in his own seems bold, yet it could be said of Rossetti.&nbsp;
+The mean rivalries of the literary character that so often make
+men experienced in the world shrink away from it, found no place
+in that great heart.&nbsp; To hear him recite in his musical
+voice the sonnet or lyric of some unknown bard or
+bardling&mdash;recite it in such a way as to lend the lines the
+light and music of his own marvellous genius, while the bard or
+bardling listened with head bowed low, so that the flush on his
+cheek and the moisture in his eye should not be seen&mdash;this
+was an experience that did indeed make the bardic life
+&lsquo;worth living.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+138</span>Chapter X<br />
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI</h2>
+<blockquote><p>Thou knowest that island, far away and lone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In spray of music and the breezes shake<br />
+O&rsquo;er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,<br />
+While that sweet music echoes like a moan<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the island&rsquo;s heart, and sighs around the
+lake,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,<br />
+A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.</p>
+<p>Life&rsquo;s ocean, breaking round thy senses&rsquo; shore,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Struck golden song, as from the strand of Day:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay&mdash;<br
+/>
+Pain&rsquo;s blinking snake around the fair isle&rsquo;s core,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play<br
+/>
+Around thy lovely island evermore.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I am now brought to a portion of my study which may well give
+me pause&mdash;the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+Rossetti.&nbsp; The latest remarks upon them are, I think, the
+best; they are by Mr. A. C. Benson in his monograph on Rossetti
+in the &lsquo;English Men of Letters&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It would be impossible to exaggerate the
+value of his friendship for Rossetti.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton
+understood him, sympathized with him, and with self-denying and
+unobtrusive delicacy shielded him, so far as any one can be
+shielded, from the rough contact of the world.&nbsp; <a
+name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 139</span>It was for
+a long time hoped that Mr. Watts-Dunton would give the memoir of
+his great friend to the world, but there is such a thing as
+knowing a man too well to be his biographer.&nbsp; It is,
+however, an open secret that a vivid sketch of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+personality has been given to the world in Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s well-known romance &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;
+where the artist D&rsquo;Arcy is drawn from Rossetti. . . .&nbsp;
+Though singularly independent in judgment, it is clear that, at
+all events in the later years of his life, Rossetti&rsquo;s taste
+was, unconsciously, considerably affected by the critical
+preferences of Mr. Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; I have heard it said by
+one <a name="citation139"></a><a href="#footnote139"
+class="citation">[139]</a> who knew them both well that it was
+often enough for Mr. Watts-Dunton to express a strong opinion for
+Rossetti to adopt it as his own, even though he might have
+combated it for the moment. . . .</p>
+<p>At the end of each part [of &lsquo;Rose Mary&rsquo;] comes a
+curious lyrical outburst called the Beryl-songs, the chant of the
+imprisoned spirits, which are intended to weld the poem together
+and to supply connections.&nbsp; It is said that Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, when he first read the poem in proof, said to
+Rossetti that the drift was too intricate for an ordinary
+reader.&nbsp; Rossetti took this to heart, and wrote the
+Beryl-songs to bridge the gaps; Mr. Watts-Dunton, on being shown
+them, very rightly disapproved, and said humorously that they
+turned a fine ballad into a bastard opera.&nbsp; Rossetti, who
+was ill at the time, was so much disconcerted and upset at the
+criticism, that Mr. Watts-Dunton modified his judgment, and the
+interludes were printed.&nbsp; But at a later day Rossetti
+himself <a name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+140</span>came round to the opinion that they were
+inappropriate.&nbsp; They are curiously wrought, rhapsodical,
+irregular songs, with fantastic rhymes, and were better away. . .
+.</p>
+<p>Then he began to settle down into the production of the
+single-figure pictures, of which Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote that
+&lsquo;apart from any question of technical shortcomings, one of
+Rossetti&rsquo;s strongest claims to the attention of posterity
+was that of having invented, in the three-quarter length pictures
+painted from one face, a type of female beauty which was akin to
+none other, which was entirely new, in short&mdash;and which, for
+wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex
+dramatic design, was unique in the art of the world.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p140b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Pandora.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;"
+title=
+"Pandora.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;"
+src="images/p140s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>It is well known that Rossetti wished his life&mdash;if
+written at all&mdash;to be written by Mr. Watts-Dunton, unless
+his brother should undertake it.&nbsp; It is also well known that
+the brother himself wished it, but pressure of other matters
+prevented Mr. Watts-Dunton from undertaking it.&nbsp; I expected
+difficulties in approaching with regard to the delicate subject
+of his relations with Rossetti, but I was not prepared to find
+them so great as they have proved to be.&nbsp; When I wrote to
+him and asked him whether the portrait of D&rsquo;Arcy in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was to be accepted as a portrait of
+Rossetti, and when I asked him to furnish me with some materials
+and facts to form the basis of this chapter, I received from him
+the following letter:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">My dear Mr.
+Douglas</span>,&mdash;I have never myself affirmed that
+D&rsquo;Arcy was to be taken as an actual portrait of
+Rossetti.&nbsp; Even if I thought that a portrait of him could be
+given in any form of imaginative literature, <a
+name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 141</span>I have
+views of my own as to the propriety of giving actual portraits of
+men with whom a novelist or poet has been brought into
+contact.&nbsp; It is quite impossible for an imaginative writer
+to avoid the imperious suggestions of his memory when he is
+conceiving a character.&nbsp; Thousands of times in a year does
+one come across critical remarks upon the prototypes of the
+characters of such great novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
+the Bront&euml;s, George Eliot, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy,
+and the rest.&nbsp; And I believe that every one of these writers
+would confess that his prominent characters were suggested to him
+by living individuals or by individuals who figure in
+history&mdash;but suggested only.&nbsp; And as to the ethics of
+so dealing with friends and acquaintances I have also views of my
+own.&nbsp; These are easily stated.&nbsp; The closer the
+imaginative writer gets to the portrait of a friend, or even of
+an acquaintance, the more careful must he be to set his subject
+in a genial and even a generous light.&nbsp; It would be a
+terrible thing if every man who has been a notable figure in life
+were to be represented as this or that at the sweet will of
+everybody who has known him.&nbsp; Generous treatment, I say, is
+demanded of every writer who makes use of the facets of character
+that have struck him in his intercourse with friend or
+acquaintance.&nbsp; I will give you an instance of this.&nbsp;
+When I drew De Castro in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; I made use of my
+knowledge of a certain individual.&nbsp; Now this individual,
+although a man of quite extraordinary talents, brilliance, and
+personal charm, bore not a very good name, because he was driven
+to live upon his wits.&nbsp; He had endowments so great and so
+various that I cannot conceive any line of life in which he was
+not fitted to excel&mdash;but it was his irreparable misfortune
+to have been trained to no business and no profession, and to
+have been <a name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+142</span>thrown upon the world without means, and without useful
+family connections.&nbsp; Such a man must either sink beneath the
+oceanic waves of London life, or he must make a struggle to live
+upon his wits.&nbsp; This individual made that struggle&mdash;he
+struck out with a vigour that, as far as I know, was without
+example in London society.&nbsp; He got to know, and to know
+intimately, men like Ruskin, G. F. Watts, D. G. Rossetti, Mr. W.
+M. Rossetti, William Morris, Mr. Swinburne, Sir Edward Burne
+Jones, Cruikshank, and I know not what important people
+besides.&nbsp; When he was first brought into touch with the
+painters, he knew nothing whatever of art; in two or three years,
+as I have heard Rossetti say, he was a splendid
+&lsquo;connoisseur.&rsquo;&nbsp; If he had been brought up as a
+lawyer he must have risen to the top of the profession.&nbsp; If
+he had been brought up as an actor he must, as I have heard a
+dramatist say, have risen to the top.&nbsp; But from his very
+first appearance in London he was driven to live upon his
+wits.&nbsp; And here let me say that this man, who was a bitter
+unfriend of my own, because I was compelled to stand in the way
+of certain dealings of his, but whom I really could have liked if
+he had not been obliged to live upon his wits at the expense of
+certain friends of mine, formed the acquaintance of the great men
+I have enumerated, not so much from worldly motives, as I
+believe, as from real admiration.&nbsp; But being driven to live
+upon his wits, he had not sufficient moral strength to afford a
+conscience, and the queerest stories were told&mdash;some of them
+true enough&mdash;of his dealings with those great men.&nbsp;
+Whistler&rsquo;s anecdotes of him at one period set many a table
+in a roar; and yet so winsome was the man that after a time he
+became as intimate with Whistler as ever.&nbsp; If he had
+possessed a private income, and if that income had been carefully
+settled upon him, I believe <a name="page143"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 143</span>he would have been one of the most
+honest of men; I know he would have been one of the most
+generous.&nbsp; His conduct to the late Treffry Dunn, from whom
+he could not have expected the least return except that of
+gratitude, was proof enough of his generosity.&nbsp; Of course to
+make use of so strange a character as this was a great temptation
+to me when I wrote &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; But in what has
+been called my &lsquo;thumb-nail portrait of him,&rsquo; I
+treated the peccadilloes attributed to him in a playful and
+jocose way.&nbsp; It would have been quite wrong to have painted
+otherwise than in playful colours a character like this.&nbsp;
+Like every other man and woman in this world, he left behind him
+people who believed in him and loved him.&nbsp; It would have
+been cruel to wound these, and unfair to the man; and yet because
+I gave only a slight suggestion of his sublime quackery and
+supreme blarney, a writer who also knew something about him, but
+of course not a thousandth part of what I knew, said that I had
+tried my hand at depicting him in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; but with
+no great success.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to
+give a portrait of him: I simply used certain facets of his
+character to work out my story, and then dismissed him.&nbsp; On
+the other hand, where the character of a friend or acquaintance
+is noble, the imagination can work more freely&mdash;as in the
+case of Philip Aylwin, Cyril Aylwin, Wilderspin, Rhona Boswell,
+Winifred Wynne, Sinfi Lovell.&nbsp; And as to Rossetti, whom I
+have been charged by certain critics with having idealized in my
+picture of D&rsquo;Arcy, all I have to say on that point is
+this&mdash;that if the noble and fascinating qualities which
+Rossetti showed had been leavened with mean ones I should not, in
+introducing his character into a story, have considered it right
+or fair or generous to dwell upon those mean ones.&nbsp; But as a
+matter of <a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+144</span>fact, during my whole intercourse with him he displayed
+no such qualities.&nbsp; The D&rsquo;Arcy that I have painted is
+not one whit nobler, more magnanimous, wide-minded, and generous,
+than was D. G. Rossetti.&nbsp; As I have said on several
+occasions, he could and did take as deep an interest in a
+friend&rsquo;s work as in his own.&nbsp; And to benefit a friend
+was the greatest pleasure he had in life.&nbsp; I loved the man
+so deeply that I should never have introduced D&rsquo;Arcy into
+the novel had it not been in the hope of silencing the
+misrepresentations of him that began as soon as ever Rossetti was
+laid in the grave at Birchington, by depicting his character in
+colours as true as they were sympathetic.&nbsp; It has been the
+grievous fate of Rossetti to be the victim of an amount of
+detraction which is simply amazing and inscrutable.&nbsp; I
+cannot in the least understand why this is so.&nbsp; It is the
+great sorrow of my life.&nbsp; There is a fatality of detraction
+about his name which in its unreasonableness would be grotesque
+were it not heartrending.&nbsp; It would turn my natural optimism
+about mankind into pessimism were it not that another dear friend
+of mine&mdash;a man of equal nobility of character, and almost of
+equal genius, has escaped calumny altogether&mdash;William
+Morris.&nbsp; This matter is a painful puzzle to me.&nbsp; The
+only great man of my time who seems to have shared something of
+Rossetti&rsquo;s fate, is Lord Tennyson.&nbsp; There seems to be
+a general desire to belittle him, to exaggerate such angularities
+as were his, and to speak of that almost childlike simplicity of
+character which was an ineffable charm in him as springing from
+boorishness and almost from loutishness.&nbsp; On the other hand,
+another great genius, Browning, for whom I had and have the
+greatest admiration, seems to be as fortunate as Morris in
+escaping the detractor.&nbsp; But I am wandering from
+Rossetti.&nbsp; I do not <a name="page145"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 145</span>feel any impulse to write
+reminiscences of him.&nbsp; Too much has been written about him
+already&mdash;of late a great deal too much.&nbsp; The only thing
+written about him that has given me comfort&mdash;I may say joy,
+is this&mdash;it has been written by a man who knew him before I
+did, who knew him at the time he lost his wife.&nbsp; Mr. Val
+Prinsep, R.A., has declared that in Rossetti&rsquo;s relations
+with his wife there was nothing whatever upon which his
+conscience might reasonably trouble him.&nbsp; I do not remember
+the exact words, but this was the substance of them.&nbsp; Mr.
+Val Prinsep is a man of the highest standing, and he knew
+Rossetti intimately, and he has declared in print that Rossetti
+could have had no qualms of conscience in regard to his relations
+with his wife.&nbsp; This, I say, is a source of great comfort to
+me and to all who loved Rossetti.&nbsp; That he was whimsical,
+fanciful, and at times most troublesome to his friends, no one
+knows better than I do.</p>
+<p>No one, I say, is more competent to speak of the whims and the
+fancies and the troublesomeness of Rossetti than I am; and yet I
+say that he was one of the noblest-hearted men of his time, and
+lovable&mdash;most lovable.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of day upon
+the painful subject of the &ldquo;Buchanan affair.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Indeed, I have often thought it is a great pity that it is not
+allowed to die out.&nbsp; The only reason why it is still kept
+alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is impossible
+fully to understand Rossetti&rsquo;s nervous illness, about which
+so much has been said.&nbsp; I remember seeing in Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s essay on Congreve in &lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s
+Encyclop&aelig;dia&rsquo; a definition of envy as the
+&lsquo;literary leprosy.&rsquo;&nbsp; This phrase has often been
+quoted in reference <a name="page146"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 146</span>to the case of Buchanan, and also in
+reference to a recent and much more ghastly case between two
+intimate friends.&nbsp; Now, with all deference to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, I cannot accept it as a right and fair
+definition.&nbsp; It is a fact no doubt that the struggle in the
+world of art&mdash;whether poetry, music, painting, sculpture, or
+the drama&mdash;is unlike that of the mere strivers after wealth
+and position, inasmuch as to praise one man&rsquo;s artistic work
+is in a certain way to set it up against the work of
+another.&nbsp; Still, one can realize, without referring to
+Disraeli&rsquo;s &lsquo;Curiosities of Literature,&rsquo; that
+envy is much too vigorous in the artistic life.&nbsp; Now,
+whatever may have been the good qualities of Buchanan&mdash;and I
+know he had many good qualities&mdash;it seems unfortunately to
+be true that he was afflicted with this terrible disease of
+envy.&nbsp; There can be no question that what incited him to
+write the notorious article in the &lsquo;Contemporary
+Review&rsquo; entitled &lsquo;The Fleshly School of
+Poetry,&rsquo; was simply envy&mdash;envy and nothing else.&nbsp;
+It was during the time that Rossetti was suffering most
+dreadfully from the mental disturbance which seems really to have
+originated in this attack and the cognate attacks which appeared
+in certain other magazines, that the intimacy between Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and Rossetti was formed and cemented.&nbsp; And it
+is to this period that Mr. William Rossetti alludes in the
+following words: &ldquo;&lsquo;Watts is a hero of
+friendship&rsquo; was, according to Mr. Caine, one of my
+brother&rsquo;s last utterances, easy enough to be
+credited.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That he deserved these words I think none will deny; and that
+the friendship sprang from the depths of the nature of a man to
+whom the word &lsquo;friendship&rsquo; meant not what it
+generally means now, a languid sentiment, but what it meant in
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s time, a deep passion, is shown by what some
+deem the finest lines Mr. Watts-Dunton <a
+name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 147</span>ever
+wrote&mdash;I mean those lines which he puts into the mouth of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s Friend in &lsquo;Christmas at the
+Mermaid,&rsquo; lines part of which have been admirably turned
+into Latin by Mr. E. D. Stone, <a name="citation147"></a><a
+href="#footnote147" class="citation">[147]</a> and published by
+him in the second volume of that felicitous series of Latin
+translations,&rsquo; Florilegium Latinum&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&lsquo;MR. W.
+H.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>To sing the nation&rsquo;s song or do the deed<br />
+That crowns with richer light the motherland,<br />
+Or lend her strength of arm in hour of need<br />
+When fangs of foes shine fierce on every hand,<br />
+Is joy to him whose joy is working well&mdash;<br />
+Is goal and guerdon too, though never fame.<br />
+<a name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 148</span>Should
+find a thrill of music in his name;<br />
+Yea, goal and guerdon too, though Scorn should aim<br />
+Her arrows at his soul&rsquo;s high citadel.</p>
+<p>But if the fates withhold the joy from me<br />
+To do the deed that widens England&rsquo;s day,<br />
+Or join that song of Freedom&rsquo;s jubilee<br />
+Begun when England started on her way&mdash;<br />
+Withhold from me the hero&rsquo;s glorious power<br />
+To strike with song or sword for her, the mother,<br />
+And give that sacred guerdon to another,<br />
+Him will I hail as my more noble brother&mdash;<br />
+Him will I love for his diviner dower.</p>
+<p>Enough for me who have our Shakspeare&rsquo;s love<br />
+To see a poet win the poet&rsquo;s goal,<br />
+For Will is he; enough and far above<br />
+All other prizes to make rich my soul.<br />
+Ben names my numbers golden.&nbsp; Since they tell<br />
+A tale of him who in his peerless prime<br />
+Fled us ere yet one shadowy film of time<br />
+Could dim the lustre of that brow sublime,<br />
+Golden my numbers are: Ben praiseth well.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It seems to me to be needful to bear in mind these lines, and
+the extremely close intimacy between these two poet-friends in
+order to be able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of
+Buchanan in the following sonnet if, as some writers think,
+Buchanan was meant:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">THE OCTOPUS OF THE
+GOLDEN ISLES<br />
+&lsquo;<span class="smcap">what! will they even strike at
+me</span>?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Round many an Isle of Song, in seas serene,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With many a swimmer strove the poet-boy,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet strove in love: their strength, I say, was
+joy<br />
+To him, my friend&mdash;dear friend of godlike mien!<br />
+But soon he felt beneath the billowy green<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A monster moving&mdash;moving to destroy:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Limb after limb became the tortured toy<br />
+Of coils that clung and lips that stung unseen.</p>
+<p><a name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+149</span>&ldquo;And canst thou strike ev&rsquo;n me?&rdquo; the
+swimmer said,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As rose above the waves the deadly eyes,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Arms flecked with mouths that kissed in hellish
+wise,<br />
+Quivering in hate around a hateful head.&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I saw him fight old Envy&rsquo;s sorceries:<br />
+I saw him sink: the man I loved is dead!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Here we get something quite new in satire&mdash;something in
+which poetry, fancy, hatred, and contempt, are mingled.&nbsp; The
+sonnet appeared first in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; and
+afterwards in &lsquo;The Coming of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; If Buchanan
+or any special individual was meant, I doubt whether any man has
+a moral right to speak about another man in such terms as
+these.</p>
+<p>All the friends of Rossetti have remarked upon the
+extraordinary influence exercised upon him by Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; Lady Mount Temple, a great friend of the
+painter-poet, used to tell how when she was in his studio and
+found him in a state of great dejection, as was so frequently the
+case, she would notice that Rossetti&rsquo;s face would suddenly
+brighten up on hearing a light footfall in the hall&mdash;the
+footfall of his friend, who had entered with his
+latch-key&mdash;and how from that moment Rossetti would be
+another man.&nbsp; Rossetti&rsquo;s own relatives have recorded
+the same influence.&nbsp; I have often thought that the most
+touching thing in Mr. W. M. Rossetti&rsquo;s beautiful monograph
+of his brother is the following extract from his aged
+mother&rsquo;s diary at Birchington-on-Sea, when the poet is
+dying:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;March 28, Tuesday.&nbsp; Mr. Watts came
+down; Gabriel rallied marvellously.</p>
+<p>This is the last cheerful item which it is allowed me to
+record concerning my brother; I am glad that it stands associated
+with the name of Theodore Watts.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 150</span>Here
+is another excerpt from the brother&rsquo;s diary:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Gabriel had, just before Shields entered
+the drawing-room for me, given two violent cries, and had a
+convulsive fit, very sharp and distorting the face, followed by
+collapse.&nbsp; All this passed without my personal
+cognizance.&nbsp; He died 9.31 p.m.; the others&mdash;Watts,
+mother, Christina, and nurse, in room; Caine and Shields in and
+out; Watts at Gabriel&rsquo;s right side, partly supporting
+him.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>That Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s influence over Rossetti extended
+even to his art as a poet is shown by Mr. Benson&rsquo;s words
+already quoted.&nbsp; I must also quote the testimony of Mr. Hall
+Caine, who says, in his &lsquo;Recollections&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Rossetti, throughout the period of my
+acquaintance with him, seemed to me always peculiarly and, if I
+may be permitted to say so without offence, strangely liable to
+Mr. Watts&rsquo; influence in his critical estimates; and the
+case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I knew him to
+resist Mr. Watts&rsquo;s opinion upon a matter of poetical
+criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters
+to me, printed in Chapter VIII of this volume, will show.&nbsp; I
+had a striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the
+man whom I had heard and still hear spoken of as the most
+arrogant man of genius of his day, on one of the first occasions
+of my seeing him.&nbsp; He read out to me an additional stanza to
+the beautiful poem &lsquo;Cloud Confines.&rsquo;&nbsp; As he read
+it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it
+himself.&nbsp; But he surprised me by saying that he should not
+print it.&nbsp; On my asking him why, he said:</p>
+<p><a name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+151</span>&lsquo;Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the
+poem would be better without it.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Well, but you like it yourself,&rsquo; said I.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; he replied, &lsquo;but in a question of
+gain or loss to a poem I feel that Watts must be
+right.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And the poem appeared in &lsquo;Ballads and Sonnets&rsquo;
+without the stanza in question.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Here is another beautiful passage from Mr. Hall Caine&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Recollections&rsquo;&mdash;a passage which speaks as much
+for the writer as for the object of his enthusiasm:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly
+devotion to him and beneficial influence over him from that time
+forward are so well known, this must be considered by those who
+witnessed it to be almost without precedent or parallel even in
+the beautiful story of literary friendships, and it does as much
+honour to the one as to the other.&nbsp; No light matter it must
+have been to lay aside one&rsquo;s own long-cherished life-work
+and literary ambitions to be Rossetti&rsquo;s closest friend and
+brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world
+to be conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and
+long after them, down to his death, the friend that clung closer
+than a brother was with him, as he himself said, to protect, to
+soothe, to comfort, to divert, to interest and inspire
+him&mdash;asking, meantime, no better reward than the knowledge
+that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted out of
+sorrow.&nbsp; Among the world&rsquo;s great men the greatest are
+sometimes those whose names are least on our lips, and this is
+because selfish aims have been so subordinate in their lives to
+the welfare of others as to leave no time for the personal
+achievements that win personal distinction; but when the world <a
+name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 152</span>comes to
+the knowledge of the price that has been paid for the devotion
+that enables others to enjoy their renown, shall it not reward
+with a double meed of gratitude the fine spirits to whom ambition
+has been as nothing against fidelity of friendship.&nbsp; Among
+the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this: &lsquo;Watts is
+a hero of friendship&rsquo;; and indeed, he has displayed his
+capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship,
+that part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too
+often goes by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon
+being the gainer.&nbsp; If in the end it should appear that he
+has in his own person done less than might have been hoped for
+from one possessed of his splendid gifts, let it not be
+overlooked that he has influenced in a quite incalculable degree,
+and influenced for good, several of the foremost among those who
+in their turn have influenced the age.&nbsp; As Rossetti&rsquo;s
+faithful friend and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall,
+has often declared, there were periods when Rossetti&rsquo;s very
+life may be said to have hung upon Mr. Watts&rsquo; power to
+cheer and soothe.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This anecdote is also told by Mr. Caine:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Immediately upon the publication of his
+first volume, and incited thereto by the early success of it, he
+had written the poem &lsquo;Rose Mary,&rsquo; as well as two
+lyrics published at the time in &lsquo;The Fortnightly
+Review&rsquo;; but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent
+assaults of criticism, that he seemed definitely to lay aside all
+hope of producing further poetry, and, indeed, to become
+possessed of the delusion that he had for ever lost all power of
+doing so.&nbsp; It is an interesting fact, well known in his own
+literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was the result
+of a fortuitous occurrence.&nbsp; After one of <a
+name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 153</span>his most
+serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention
+from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which in an
+invalid&rsquo;s mind usually gather about his own too absorbing
+personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite
+solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet.&nbsp; The
+outcome was an effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognizable
+as the work of the author of the sonnets of &lsquo;The House of
+Life,&rsquo; but, with more shrewdness and friendliness (on this
+occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished measureless praise
+upon it and urged the poet to renewed exertion.&nbsp; One by one,
+at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and this
+exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine,
+with the result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his
+old dexterity and mastery of hand.&nbsp; The artifice had
+succeeded beyond every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed,
+the twofold end of improving the invalid&rsquo;s health by
+preventing his brooding over unhealthy matters, and increasing
+the number of his accomplished works.&nbsp; Encouraged by such
+results, the friend went on to induce Rossetti to write a ballad,
+and this purpose he finally achieved by challenging the
+poet&rsquo;s ability to compose in the simple, direct, and
+emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad proper, as
+distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction
+which he had hitherto worked in.&nbsp; Put upon his mettle, the
+outcome of this second artifice practised upon him was that he
+wrote &lsquo;The White Ship&rsquo; and afterwards &lsquo;The
+King&rsquo;s Tragedy.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation
+of poetic composition, and had recovered a healthy tone of body,
+before he became conscious of what was being done with him.&nbsp;
+It is a further amusing fact that one day he requested to be
+shown the first <a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+154</span>sonnet which, in view of the praise lavished upon it by
+the friend on whose judgment he reposed, had encouraged him to
+renewed effort.&nbsp; The sonnet was bad: the critic knew it was
+bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it
+carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to
+show it.&nbsp; Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless
+importunity, he returned it to its author, who, upon reading it,
+cried: &lsquo;You fraud!&nbsp; You said this sonnet was good, and
+it&rsquo;s the worst I ever wrote!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;The worst
+ever written would perhaps be a truer criticism,&rsquo; was the
+reply, as the studio resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem
+was committed to the flames.&nbsp; It would appear that to this
+occurrence we probably owe a large portion of the contents of the
+volume of 1881.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. William Rossetti is ever eager to testify to the
+beneficent effect of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s intimacy upon his
+brother; and quite lately Madox Brown&rsquo;s grandson, Mr. Ford
+Madox Hueffer, who, from his connection with the Rossetti family,
+speaks with great authority, wrote: &lsquo;In 1873 came Mr.
+Theodore Watts, without whose practical friendship and advice,
+and without whose literary aids and sustenance, life would have
+been from thenceforth an impracticable affair for
+Rossetti.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Hueffer speaks of the great change
+that came over Rossetti&rsquo;s work when he wrote &lsquo;The
+King&rsquo;s Tragedy&rsquo; and &lsquo;The White
+Ship&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It should be pointed out that &lsquo;The
+White Ship&rsquo; was one of Rossetti&rsquo;s last works, and
+that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narration, under the
+advice of Mr. Theodore Watts.&nbsp; In this he was undoubtedly on
+the right track, and the &lsquo;rhymed chronicles&rsquo; might
+have <a name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+155</span>disappeared had Rossetti lived long enough to revise
+the poem as sedulously as he did his earlier work, and to revise
+it with the knowledge of narrative-technique that the greater
+part of the poem shows was coming to be his.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It was impossible for a man of genius to live so secluded a
+life as Rossetti lived at Cheyne Walk and at Kelmscott for
+several years, without wild, unauthenticated stories getting
+about concerning him.&nbsp; Among other things Rossetti, whose
+courtesy and charm of manner were, I believe, proverbial, was now
+charged with a rudeness, or rather boorishness like that which
+with equal injustice, apparently, is now being attributed to
+Tennyson.&nbsp; Stories got into print about his rude bearing
+towards people, sometimes towards ladies of the most exalted
+position.&nbsp; And these apocryphal and disparaging legends
+would no doubt have been still more numerous and still more
+offensive, had it not been for the influence of his watchful and
+powerful friend.&nbsp; Here is an interesting letter which
+Rossetti addressed to the &lsquo;World,&rsquo; and which shows
+the close relations between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: right">&ldquo;16 <span
+class="smcap">Cheyne Walk</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Chelsea</span>, S.W.<br />
+December 28, 1878.</p>
+<p>My attention has been directed to the following paragraph
+which has appeared in the newspapers: &lsquo;A very disagreeable
+story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler&rsquo;s, whose
+works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess Louise
+in her zeal therefore, graciously sought them at the
+artist&rsquo;s studio, but was rebuffed by a &lsquo;Not at
+home&rsquo; and an intimation that he was not at the beck and
+call of princesses.&nbsp; I trust it is not true,&rsquo;
+continues the writer of the paragraph, &lsquo;that so medievally
+minded a gentleman is really a stranger <a
+name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 156</span>to that
+generous loyalty to rank and sex, that dignified
+obedience,&rsquo; etc.</p>
+<p>The story is certainly disagreeable enough; but if I am
+pointed out as the &lsquo;near neighbour of Mr.
+Whistler&rsquo;s&rsquo; who rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the
+Princess Louise, I can only say that it is a canard devoid of the
+smallest nucleus of truth.&nbsp; Her Royal Highness has never
+called upon me, and I know of only two occasions when she has
+expressed a wish to do so.&nbsp; Some years ago Mr. Theodore
+Martin spoke to me upon the subject, but I was at that time
+engaged upon an important work, and the delays thence arising
+caused the matter to slip through.&nbsp; And I heard no more upon
+the subject till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me
+that the Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him,
+and that he had then assured her that I should feel
+&lsquo;honoured and charmed to see her,&rsquo; and suggested her
+making an appointment.&nbsp; Her Royal Highness knew that Mr.
+Watts, as one of my most intimate friends, would not have thus
+expressed himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing;
+and had she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting
+in that &lsquo;generous loyalty&rsquo; which is due, not more to
+her exalted position, than to her well-known charm of character
+and artistic gifts.&nbsp; It is true that I do not run after
+great people on account of their mere social position, but I am,
+I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff the
+Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">D. G. ROSSETTI.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>At the very juncture in question Lord Lorne was suddenly and
+unexpectedly appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving
+England, Her Royal Highness <a name="page157"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 157</span>did not return until
+Rossetti&rsquo;s health had somewhat suddenly broken down, and it
+was impossible for him to see any but his most intimate
+friends.</p>
+<p>My account of the friendship between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+Rossetti would not be complete without the poem entitled,
+&lsquo;A Grave by the Sea,&rsquo; which I think may be placed
+beside Milton&rsquo;s &lsquo;Lycidas,&rsquo; Shelley&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Adonais,&rsquo; Matthew Arnold&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Thyrsis,&rsquo; and Swinburne&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ave Atque
+Vale,&rsquo; as one of the noblest elegies in our
+literature:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">A GRAVE BY THE SEA</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">I</p>
+<p>Yon sightless poet <a name="citation157"></a><a
+href="#footnote157" class="citation">[157]</a> whom thou
+leav&rsquo;st behind,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Above the grave he feels but cannot see,<br />
+Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,<br />
+Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Ah no!&mdash;For all his sobs, he seems to me<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Less lonely standing there, and nearer thee,<br />
+Than I&mdash;less lonely, nearer&mdash;standing blind!</p>
+<p>Free from the day, and piercing Life&rsquo;s disguise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That needs must partly enveil true heart from
+heart,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; His inner eyes may see thee as thou art<br />
+In Memory&rsquo;s land&mdash;see thee beneath the skies<br />
+Lit by thy brow&mdash;by those beloved eyes,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While I stand by him in a world apart.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">II</p>
+<p>I stand like her who on the glittering Rhine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Saw that strange swan which drew a fa&euml;ry
+boat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where shone a knight whose radiant forehead smote<br
+/>
+Her soul with light and made her blue eyes shine<br />
+<a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 158</span>For many
+a day with sights that seemed divine,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till that false swan returned and arched his
+throat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In pride, and called him, and she saw him float<br
+/>
+Adown the stream: I stand like her and pine.</p>
+<p>I stand like her, for she, and only she,<br />
+Might know my loneliness for want of thee.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,<br
+/>
+Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And then, departing like a vision thence,<br />
+Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">III</p>
+<p>Last night Death whispered: &lsquo;Death is but the name<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Man gives the Power which lends him life and
+light,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And then, returning past the coast of night,<br />
+Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.<br />
+What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaim<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Art thou not vanished&mdash;vanished from my
+sight&mdash;<br />
+Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?</p>
+<p>With Nature dumb, save for the billows&rsquo; moan,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Engirt by men I love, yet desolate&mdash;<br />
+Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; King&rsquo;d by my sorrow, made by grief so great<br
+/>
+That man&rsquo;s voice murmurs like an insect&rsquo;s
+drone&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">IV</p>
+<p>Last night Death whispered: &lsquo;Life&rsquo;s purblind
+procession,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Flickering with blazon of the human story&mdash;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Time&rsquo;s fen-flame over Death&rsquo;s dark
+territory&mdash;<br />
+Will leave no trail, no sign of Life&rsquo;s aggression.<br />
+Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Since Life is only Death&rsquo;s frail feudatory,<br
+/>
+How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 159</span>I
+answered thus: &lsquo;If Friendship&rsquo;s isle of palm<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Is but a vision, every loveliest leaf,<br />
+Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calm<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; This soul of mine in this most fiery grief?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,<br
+/>
+What balm in knowing that Love is Death&rsquo;s&mdash;what
+balm?&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">V</p>
+<p>Yea, thus I boldly answered Death&mdash;even I<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who have for boon&mdash;who have for deathless
+dower&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic
+power,<br />
+Filling with music earth and sea and sky:<br />
+&lsquo;O Death,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;not Love, but thou shalt
+die;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,<br
+/>
+Death striking Love but strikes to deify.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,<br />
+For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and
+dumb;<br />
+And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,<br />
+I watched&mdash;I listened for that voice of thine,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Though Reason said: &lsquo;Nor voice nor face can
+come.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Birchington</span>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <span
+class="smcap">Eastertide</span>, 1882.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton has written many magnificent sonnets, but the
+sonnet in this sequence beginning&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Last night Death whispered: &lsquo;Life&rsquo;s
+purblind procession,&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>is, I think, the finest of them all.&nbsp; The imaginative
+conception packed into these fourteen lines is cosmic in its
+sweep.&nbsp; In the metrical scheme the feminine rhymes of the
+octave play a very important part.&nbsp; They suggest pathetic
+suspense, mystery, yearning, hope, fear; they ask, they wonder,
+they falter.&nbsp; But in the sestet the words of destiny are
+calmly and coldly pronounced, and every rhyme clinches <a
+name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 160</span>the voice
+of doom, until the uttermost deep of despair is sounded in the
+iterated cry of the last line.&nbsp; The craftsmanship throughout
+is masterly.&nbsp; There is, indeed, one line which is not
+unworthy of being ranked with the great lines of English
+poetry:</p>
+<blockquote><p>Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in
+session.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Here by a bold use of the simple verb &lsquo;strikes&rsquo; a
+whole poem is hammered into six words.&nbsp; As to the
+interesting question of feminine rhymes, while I admit that they
+should never be used without an emotional mandate, I think that
+here it is overwhelming.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>I have tried to show the beauty of the friendship between
+these two rare spirits by means of other testimony than my own,
+for although I have been granted the honour of knowing
+Rossetti&rsquo;s &lsquo;friend of friends,&rsquo; I missed the
+equal honour of knowing Rossetti, save through that &lsquo;friend
+of friends.&rsquo;&nbsp; But to know Mr. Watts-Dunton seems
+almost like knowing Rossetti, for when at The Pines he begins to
+recall those golden hours when the poets used to hold converse,
+the soul of Rossetti seems to come back from the land of shadows,
+as his friend depicts his winsome ways, his nobility of heart,
+his generous interest in the work of others, that lovableness of
+nature and charm of personality which, if we are to believe Mr.
+Ford Madox Hueffer, worked, in some degree, ill for the
+poet.&nbsp; Mr. Hueffer, who, as a family connection, may be
+supposed to represent the family tradition about
+&lsquo;Gabriel,&rsquo; has some striking and pregnant words upon
+the injurious effect of Rossetti&rsquo;s being brought so much
+into contact with admirers from the time when Mr. Meredith and
+Mr. Swinburne were his housemates at Cheyne Walk.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Then came the &lsquo;Pre-Raphaelite&rsquo; poets like
+Philip <a name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+161</span>Marston, O&rsquo;Shaughnessy, and &lsquo;B.
+V.&rsquo;&nbsp; Afterwards there came a whole host of young men
+like Mr. William Sharp, who were serious admirers, and to-day are
+in their places or are dead or forgotten; and others again who
+came for the &lsquo;pickings.&rsquo;&nbsp; They were all more or
+less enthusiasts.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p161b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"&lsquo;The Green Dining Room,&rsquo; 16 Cheyne Walk.  (From a
+Painting by Dunn, at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"&lsquo;The Green Dining Room,&rsquo; 16 Cheyne Walk.  (From a
+Painting by Dunn, at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p161s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Mr. Hake, in &lsquo;Notes and Queries&rsquo; (June 7, 1902),
+says:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;With regard to the green room in which
+Winifred took her first breakfast at &lsquo;Hurstcote,&rsquo; I
+am a little in confusion.&nbsp; It seems to me more like the
+green dining-room in Cheyne Walk, decorated with antique mirrors,
+which was painted by Dunn, showing Rossetti reading his poems
+aloud.&nbsp; This is the only portrait of Rossetti that really
+calls up the man before me.&nbsp; As Mr. Watts-Dunton is the
+owner of Dunn&rsquo;s drawing, and as so many people want to see
+what Rossetti&rsquo;s famous Chelsea house was like inside, it is
+a pity he does not give it as a frontispiece to some future
+edition of &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; Unfortunately, Mr. G. F.
+Watts&rsquo;s picture, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was
+never finished, and I never saw upon Rossetti&rsquo;s face the
+dull, heavy expression which that portrait wears.&nbsp; I think
+the poet told me that he had given the painter only one or two
+sittings.&nbsp; As to the photographs, none of them is really
+satisfactory.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of
+the famous &lsquo;Green Dining Room&rsquo; at 16 Cheyne Walk, to
+which Mr. Hake refers.&nbsp; Mr. Hake also writes in the same
+article: &ldquo;With regard to the two circular mirrors
+surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy
+Grail, &lsquo;in old black oak frames carved with knights at
+tilt,&rsquo; I do not remember seeing these there.&nbsp; But they
+are evidently the mirrors <a name="page162"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 162</span>decorated with copies by Dunn of the
+lost Holy Grail frescoes once existing on the walls of the Union
+Reading-Room at Oxford.&nbsp; These beautiful decorations I have
+seen at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; but not elsewhere.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of
+one of these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+generously permitted to be specially taken for this book.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p162b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"One of the Carved Mirrors at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; decorated
+with Dunn&rsquo;s copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the
+Oxford Union"
+title=
+"One of the Carved Mirrors at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; decorated
+with Dunn&rsquo;s copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the
+Oxford Union"
+src="images/p162s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake&rsquo;s
+fascinating book of poetry, &lsquo;The New Day,&rsquo; which must
+live, if only for its reminiscences of the life poetic lived at
+Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">THE NEW DAY</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">I</p>
+<p>In the unbroken silence of the mind<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,<br />
+And life is back among the days behind&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The spectral days of that lamented love&mdash;<br />
+Days whose romance can never be repeated.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage
+gleaming,<br />
+We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.<br
+/>
+These vanished hours, where are they stored away?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?<br />
+Its utterances are swallowed up in day;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The gabled house, the mighty master gone.<br />
+Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall&mdash;<br />
+What dreams he of the days we there recall?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">II</p>
+<p>O, happy days with him who once so loved us!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We loved as brothers, with a single heart,<br />
+The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From Nature to her blazoned shadow&mdash;Art.<br />
+How often did we trace the nestling Thames<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From humblest waters on his course of might,<br />
+<a name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 163</span>Down
+where the weir the bursting current stems&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There sat till evening grew to balmy night,<br />
+Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,<br />
+That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Triumphal labours of the day to be.<br />
+The words were his: &lsquo;Such love can never die;&rsquo;<br />
+The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">III</p>
+<p>Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rill<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Still calls the flowers upon its misty bank<br />
+To stoop into the stream and drink their fill.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,<br
+/>
+Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.<br />
+Slowly a loosened weed another meets;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.<br />
+We are here surely if the world, forgot,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;<br
+/>
+We are here surely at this witching spot,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.<br />
+A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,<br />
+It is as if a play pervaded all.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">IV</p>
+<p>Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch&rsquo;s tender,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With many a speaking vision on the wall,<br />
+The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless
+brawl&mdash;<br />
+&rsquo;Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,<br />
+And Art grew fragrant in the glow of spring<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.<br />
+Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Fed by the waters of the forest stream;<br />
+Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where they so often fed the poet&rsquo;s dream;<br
+/>
+Or else was mingled the rough billow&rsquo;s glee<br />
+With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page164"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 164</span>V</p>
+<p>Remember how we roamed the Channel&rsquo;s shore,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And read aloud our verses, each in turn,<br />
+While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.<br
+/>
+Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to capture<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The potent word that makes a thought abiding,<br />
+And wings it upward to its place of rapture,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.<br />
+Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonder<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That art knew not the mighty reverie<br />
+That moves earth&rsquo;s spirit and her orb asunder,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While ocean&rsquo;s depths, even, seem a shallow
+sea.<br />
+Yet with rare genius could his hand impart<br />
+His own far-searching poesy to art.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of
+all.&nbsp; It makes me see the recluse in his studio, sitting
+snugly with his feet in the fender, when suddenly the door opens
+and the poet of Nature brings with him a new atmosphere&mdash;the
+salt atmosphere which envelops &lsquo;Mother Carey&rsquo;s
+Chicken,&rsquo; and the attenuated mountain air of Natura
+Benigna.&nbsp; And yet perhaps the description of</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage
+gleaming&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>is equally fascinating.</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more
+vigorous brush, has in his sonnet &lsquo;The Shadow on the Window
+Blind,&rsquo; made Kelmscott Manor and the poetic life lived
+there still more memorable:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Within this thicket&rsquo;s every leafy lair<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Though red behind their nests the moon has
+swum&mdash;<br />
+But still I see that shadow writing there!&mdash;<br />
+Poet, behind yon casement&rsquo;s ruddy square,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+165</span>Whose shadow tells me why you do not come&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,<br />
+Flying and singing through thine inch of air&mdash;</p>
+<p>Come thither, where on grass and flower and leaf<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Gleams Nature&rsquo;s scripture, putting Man&rsquo;s
+to shame:<br />
+&lsquo;Thy day,&rsquo; she says, &lsquo;is all too rich and
+brief&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thy game of life too wonderful a game&mdash;<br />
+To give to Art entirely or in chief:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Drink of these dews&mdash;sweeter than wine of
+Fame.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; too, is full of vivid pictures of
+Rossetti at Chelsea and Kelmscott.</p>
+<p>The following description of the famous house and garden, 16
+Cheyne Walk, has been declared by one of Rossetti&rsquo;s most
+intimate friends to be marvellously graphic and true:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;On sending in my card I was shown at once
+into the studio, and after threading my way between some pieces
+of massive furniture and pictures upon easels, I found
+D&rsquo;Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa.&nbsp; Seeing that
+he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in no mood
+to meet strangers.&nbsp; However, he sprang up and introduced me
+to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a
+peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was
+one of Mr. D&rsquo;Arcy&rsquo;s chief buyers.&nbsp; This
+gentleman bowed stiffly to me.</p>
+<p>He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the
+appearance of a stranger somewhat disconcerted him.</p>
+<p>After he was gone D&rsquo;Arcy said: &lsquo;A good
+fellow!&nbsp; One of my most important buyers.&nbsp; I should
+like you to know him, for you and I are going to be friends, I
+hope.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;He seems very fond of pictures,&rsquo; I said.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;A man of great taste, with a real love of art and
+music.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page166"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 166</span>A
+little while after this gentleman&rsquo;s departure, in came De
+Castro, who had driven up in a hansom.&nbsp; I certainly saw a
+flash of anger in his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished
+like lightning, and his manner became cordiality itself.&nbsp;
+Late as it was (it was nearly twelve), he pulled out his
+cigarette case, and evidently intended to begin the
+evening.&nbsp; As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been
+there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner.&nbsp;
+Evidently his m&eacute;tier was, as I had surmised, that of a
+professional talker.&nbsp; Talk was his stock-in-trade.</p>
+<p>The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk,
+kept pulling out his watch.&nbsp; It was evident that he wanted
+to be going, but was reluctant to leave me there.&nbsp; For my
+part, I frequently rose to go, but on getting a sign from
+D&rsquo;Arcy that he wished me to stay I sat down again.&nbsp; At
+last D&rsquo;Arcy said:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;You had better go now, De Castro&mdash;you have kept
+that hansom outside for more than an hour and a half; and
+besides, if you stay still daylight our friend here will stay
+longer, for I want to talk with him alone.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and
+left us.</p>
+<p>D&rsquo;Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a
+silence that became after a while rather awkward.&nbsp; He lay
+there, gazing abstractedly at the fireplace.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say
+the other night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him
+in some things.&nbsp; I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De
+Castro when I can&rsquo;t sleep is the chief of blessings.&nbsp;
+De Castro, however, is not so bad as he seems.&nbsp; A man may be
+a scandal-monger without being really malignant.&nbsp; I have
+known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a
+service.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 167</span>Next
+morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the
+servant if Mr. D&rsquo;Arcy had yet risen.&nbsp; On being told
+that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio, where I had
+spent the previous evening.&nbsp; After examining the pictures on
+the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out
+at the garden.&nbsp; It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed
+as to be a veritable wilderness.&nbsp; While I was marvelling why
+it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some
+animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon astonished to
+see that they belonged to a little Indian bull.&nbsp; My
+curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the
+creature.&nbsp; He seemed rather threatening at first, but after
+a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him.&nbsp; Then I
+left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary
+domain.&nbsp; It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine
+mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall.&nbsp; Soon I came
+across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black
+and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be
+a hedgehog.&nbsp; It was so tame that it did not curl up as I
+approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of
+nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout.&nbsp; As I
+walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several
+kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or
+in the Zoological Gardens.&nbsp; Wombats, kangaroos, and the
+like, formed a kind of happy family.</p>
+<p>My love of animals led me to linger in the garden.&nbsp; When
+I returned to the house I found that D&rsquo;Arcy had already
+breakfasted, and was at work in the studio.</p>
+<p>After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie.&nbsp; <a
+name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 168</span>Every man
+has one side of his character where the child remains.&nbsp; I
+have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a
+passion.&nbsp; The kind of amusement they can afford me is like
+none other.&nbsp; It is the self-consciousness of men and women
+that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing.&nbsp; I
+turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world
+of enjoyment.&nbsp; To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the
+funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of
+a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;And children,&rsquo; I said&mdash;&lsquo;do you like
+children?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Yes, so long as they remain like the young
+animals&mdash;until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that
+is very soon.&nbsp; Then their charm goes.&nbsp; Has it ever
+occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be
+if she were as unconscious as a young animal?&nbsp; What makes
+you sigh?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her
+&lsquo;Prince of the Mist&rsquo; on Snowdon.&nbsp; And I said to
+myself, &lsquo;How he would have been fascinated by a sight like
+that!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>My experience of men at that time was so slight that the
+opinion I then formed of D&rsquo;Arcy as a talker was not of much
+account.&nbsp; But since then I have seen very much of men, and I
+find that I was right in the view I then took of his
+conversational powers.&nbsp; When his spirits were at their
+highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a
+humourist.&nbsp; He had more than even Cyril Aylwin&rsquo;s
+quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer
+quality.&nbsp; To define it would be, of course, impossible, but
+I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at
+moments by animal spirits into rapid movements&mdash;so rapid,
+indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in
+him became wit.&nbsp; <a name="page169"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 169</span>Beneath the coruscations of this wit
+a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.</p>
+<p>His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play,
+but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not
+unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the
+least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every
+&lsquo;jeu d&rsquo;esprit&rsquo; seemed to leap from him
+involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain.&nbsp; A dull man
+like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities
+here.</p>
+<p>While he was talking he kept on painting.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+170</span>Chapter XII<br />
+WILLIAM MORRIS</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is natural after writing about
+Rossetti to think of William Morris.&nbsp; In my opinion the
+masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; monographs is the one upon
+him.&nbsp; Between these two there was an intimacy of the closest
+kind&mdash;from 1873 to the day of the poet&rsquo;s death.&nbsp;
+This, no doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s graphic
+power, accounts for the extraordinary vividness of the portrait
+of his friend.&nbsp; I have heard more than one eminent friend of
+William Morris say that from a few paragraphs of this monograph a
+reader gains a far more vivid picture of this fascinating man
+than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything else
+that has been published about him.&nbsp; It is a grievous loss to
+literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography
+of Morris is scarcely likely to write one.&nbsp; Morris, when he
+was busy in Queen&rsquo;s Square, used to be one of the most
+frequent visitors at the gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr.
+Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox Brown, and others, on
+Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were frequently
+together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint occupancy of
+the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti&rsquo;s death.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p172b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Kelmscott Manor.  (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)"
+title=
+"Kelmscott Manor.  (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)"
+src="images/p172s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; he did not
+contemplate that the Hurstcote of the story would immediately be
+identified with Kelmscott Manor.&nbsp; The <a
+name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 171</span>pictures of
+localities and the descriptions of the characters were so vivid
+that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and
+D&rsquo;Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti.&nbsp;
+Morris&rsquo;s passion for angling is slightly introduced in the
+later chapters of the book, and this is not surprising, for some
+of the happiest moments of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s life were
+spent at Kelmscott.&nbsp; Treffry Dunn&rsquo;s portrait of him,
+sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at
+Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered
+in the picture.</p>
+<p>Mr. Hake, in &lsquo;Notes and Queries&rsquo; (June 7, 1902)
+mentions some interesting facts with regard to &lsquo;Hurstcote
+Manor&rsquo; and Morris:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing
+very well, and with whom I have stayed at Kelmscott during the
+Rossetti period, is alluded to in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; (chap. lx.
+book xv.) as the &lsquo;enthusiastic angler&rsquo; who used to go
+down to &lsquo;Hurstcote&rsquo; to fish.&nbsp; At that time this
+fine old seventeenth century manor house was in the joint
+occupancy of Rossetti and Morris.&nbsp; Afterwards it was in the
+joint occupancy of Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the
+late F. S. Ellis, who, with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under
+Morris&rsquo;s will.&nbsp; The series of &lsquo;large attics in
+which was a number of enormous oak beams&rsquo; supporting the
+antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the
+ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young
+owls&mdash;a peculiar sound that had a special fascination for
+Rossetti; and after dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and I, would go to the attics to listen to them.</p>
+<p>With regard to &lsquo;Hurstcote&rsquo; I well knew &lsquo;the
+large bedroom, with low-panelled walls and the vast antique <a
+name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 172</span>bedstead
+made of black carved oak&rsquo; upon which Winifred Wynne
+slept.&nbsp; In fact, the only thing in the description of this
+room that I do not remember is the beautiful &lsquo;Madonna and
+Child,&rsquo; upon the frame of which was written &lsquo;Chiaro
+dell&rsquo; Erma&rsquo; (readers of &lsquo;Hand and Soul&rsquo;
+will remember that name).&nbsp; I wonder whether it is a Madonna
+by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr. Watts-Dunton, which was much
+admired by Leighton and others, and which has been
+exhibited.&nbsp; This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads by two
+or three steps to the tapestried room &lsquo;covered with old
+faded tapestry&mdash;so faded, indeed, that its general effect
+was that of a dull grey texture&rsquo;&mdash;depicting the story
+of Samson.&nbsp; Rossetti used the tapestry room as a studio, and
+I have seen in it the very same pictures that so attracted the
+attention of Winifred Wynne: the &lsquo;grand brunette&rsquo;
+(painted from Mrs. Morris) &lsquo;holding a pomegranate in her
+hand&rsquo;; the &lsquo;other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are
+glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up&rsquo;
+(painted from the same famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who
+appears in &lsquo;The Beloved&rsquo;), and the blonde
+&lsquo;under the apple blossoms&rsquo; (painted from a still more
+beautiful woman&mdash;Mrs. Stillman).&nbsp; These pictures were
+not permanently placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there
+(for retouching) on a certain occasion when I was visiting at
+Kelmscott.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at
+Kelmscott, was Morris&rsquo;s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton,
+Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge and
+Art Director of the South Kensington Museum&mdash;a man of
+extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of the foremost of
+the scholarly writers of our time, but who died
+prematurely.&nbsp; <a name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+173</span>Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s anecdotes of the
+causeries at Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself,
+are so interesting that it is a pity they have never been
+recorded in print.&nbsp; Middleton was one of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s collaborators in the ninth edition of the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo; to which he
+contributed the article on &lsquo;Rome,&rsquo; one of the finest
+essays in that work.</p>
+<p>Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions
+about his work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of
+his works which he ever took the trouble to read were the reviews
+by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And the poet, might well say this, for those who have studied, as
+I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon
+&lsquo;Sigurd,&rsquo; &lsquo;The House of the Wolfings,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;The Roots of the Mountains,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Glittering
+Plain,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Well at the World&rsquo;s End,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;The Tale of Beowulf,&rsquo; &lsquo;News from
+Nowhere,&rsquo; &lsquo;Poems by the Way,&rsquo; will be inclined
+to put them at the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s purely
+critical work.&nbsp; The &lsquo;Quarterly Review,&rsquo; in the
+article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations between Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable
+article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English Literature.&rsquo;&nbsp; I
+record these facts, not in order to depreciate the work of other
+men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going to make
+from Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s monograph in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and
+Death:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Each time that I saw him he declared, in
+answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever.&nbsp;
+And a comforting thought this is to us all&mdash;that Morris
+suffered no pain.&nbsp; To Death himself we may easily be
+reconciled&mdash;<a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+174</span>nay, we might even look upon him as Nature&rsquo;s
+final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the
+cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable
+mission.&nbsp; The thought that Morris&rsquo;s life had ended in
+the tragedy of pain&mdash;the thought that he to whom work was
+sport, and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered
+what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil&mdash;would
+have been intolerable almost.&nbsp; For among the thousand and
+one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature
+had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that
+Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him,
+&lsquo;Enjoy.&rsquo;&nbsp; Born in easy circumstances, though not
+to the degrading trouble of wealth&mdash;cherishing as his
+sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of
+them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius
+such as his&mdash;surrounded by friends, some of whom were among
+the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt
+of the earth&mdash;it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she
+touched him at all, never struck home.&nbsp; If it is true, as
+M&eacute;rim&eacute;e affirms, that men are hastened to maturity
+by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature?&nbsp; Who wanted
+him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained
+till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his
+brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first
+opened on the world?&nbsp; Enough for us to think that the man
+must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his
+sixty-third year dies young.&nbsp; Old age Morris could not have
+borne with patience.&nbsp; Pain would not have developed him into
+a hero.&nbsp; This beloved man, who must have died some day, died
+when his marvellous powers were at their best&mdash;and died
+without pain.&nbsp; The scheme of life and death does not seem so
+much awry, after all.</p>
+<p><a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 175</span>At
+the last interview but one that ever I had with him&mdash;it was
+in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work
+was turned out&mdash;he himself surprised me by leading the
+conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk
+about&mdash;the mystery of life and death.&nbsp; The conversation
+ended with these words of his: &lsquo;I have enjoyed my
+life&mdash;few men more so&mdash;and death in any case is
+sure.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reflections upon the wear and tear of
+genius:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It is difficult not to think that the cause
+of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces,
+especially of the imaginative faculty.&nbsp; When I talked to
+him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as
+his, he pooh-poohed the idea.&nbsp; &lsquo;Look at
+Gladstone,&rsquo; he would say, &lsquo;look at those wise owls
+your chancellors and your judges.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t they live all
+the longer for work?&nbsp; It is rust that kills men, not
+work.&rsquo;&nbsp; No doubt he was right in contending that in
+intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only
+faculty drawn upon is the &lsquo;dry light of
+intelligence,&rsquo; a prodigious amount of work may be achieved
+without any sapping of the sources of life.&nbsp; But is this so
+where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is
+greatly taxed?&nbsp; I doubt it.&nbsp; In all true imaginative
+production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a
+movement, not of &lsquo;the thinking machine&rsquo; only, but of
+the whole man&mdash;the whole &lsquo;genial&rsquo; nature of the
+worker&mdash;his imagination, his judgment, moving in an
+evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the
+part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of
+the soul.&nbsp; Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of <a
+name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 176</span>Charles
+Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature
+of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries
+out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true
+vis vit&aelig;.</p>
+<p>We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and
+its amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to
+withstand such a strain.&nbsp; Many are of opinion that
+&lsquo;The Lovers of Gudrun&rsquo; is his finest poem; he worked
+at it from four o&rsquo;clock in the morning till four in the
+afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750
+lines!&nbsp; Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like
+&lsquo;Sigurd.&rsquo;&nbsp; Think of the mingling of the drudgery
+of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision
+unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collating of the
+&lsquo;Volsunga Saga&rsquo; with the
+&lsquo;Nibelungenlied,&rsquo; the choosing of this point from the
+Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans,
+and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest
+epic of the nineteenth century.&nbsp; Was there not work enough
+here for a considerable portion of a poet&rsquo;s life?&nbsp; And
+yet so great is the entire mass of his work that
+&lsquo;Sigurd&rsquo; is positively overlooked in many of the
+notices of his writings which have appeared in the last few days
+in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three
+words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be
+dealt with fills up all the available space of a
+newspaper.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s critical acumen is nowhere more
+strikingly seen than in his remarks upon Morris&rsquo;s
+translation of the Odyssey:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Some competent critics are dissatisfied
+with Morris&rsquo;s translation; yet in a certain sense it is a
+triumph.&nbsp; The two specially Homeric qualities&mdash;those,
+indeed, which <a name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+177</span>set Homer apart from all other poets&mdash;are
+eagerness and dignity.&nbsp; Never again can they be fully
+combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek
+hexameters and by a Homer.&nbsp; That Tennyson could have given
+us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous
+fragment of the Iliad shows.&nbsp; Chapman&rsquo;s translations
+show that the eagerness also can be caught.&nbsp; Morris, of
+course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then,
+while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the
+dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire
+Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the
+eagerness as completely as Chapman&rsquo;s free-and-easy
+paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley&rsquo;s
+prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris&rsquo;s side as he wrote.
+. . .&nbsp; Morris&rsquo;s translation of the Odyssey and his
+translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word
+translation and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance
+which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would
+have occupied years with almost any other poet.&nbsp; But these
+two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original
+poems, such as &lsquo;The Defence of Guenevere,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Jason,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Earthly Paradise,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Love is Enough,&rsquo; &lsquo;Poems by the Way,&rsquo;
+etc.&nbsp; And then come his translations from the
+Icelandic.&nbsp; Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but
+not such translation as that in the &lsquo;Saga
+Library.&rsquo;&nbsp; Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr.
+Magnusson, what a work this is!&nbsp; Think of the imaginative
+exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a
+diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an
+English poem&mdash;for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in
+thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first
+requisite of a poem.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 178</span>In
+connection with William Morris, readers of &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; will recall the touching words in the
+&lsquo;Prefatory Note&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Had it not been for the intervention of
+matters of a peculiarly absorbing kind&mdash;matters which caused
+me to delay the task of collecting these verses&mdash;I should
+have been the most favoured man who ever brought out a volume of
+poems, for they would have been printed by William Morris, at the
+Kelmscott Press.&nbsp; As that projected edition of his was
+largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the subscribers
+is, I am told, required from me.&nbsp; Among the friends who saw
+much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of
+his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that
+he would die&mdash;myself.&nbsp; To me he seemed human vitality
+concentrated to a point of quenchless light; and when the
+appalling truth that he must die did at last strike through me, I
+had no heart and no patience to think about anything in
+connection with him but the loss that was to come upon us.&nbsp;
+And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my verses in
+one of Mr. Lane&rsquo;s inviting little volumes will be dimmed
+and marred by the thought that Morris&rsquo;s name also might
+have been, and is not, on the imprint.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; is an instance of that artistic
+conscientiousness which up to a certain point is of inestimable
+value to the poet, but after that point is reached, baffles
+him.&nbsp; The poem had been read in fragments and deeply admired
+by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved.&nbsp;
+Certain fragments of it had appeared in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; and other journals, but <a
+name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 179</span>the
+publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing to the fact
+that certain portions of it had been lent and lost.&nbsp; Morris
+not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an
+&eacute;dition de luxe of the book, but he actually took the
+trouble to get a full list of subscribers, and insisted upon
+allowing the author a magnificent royalty.&nbsp; Nothing,
+however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book
+until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the
+generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then,
+when the book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which
+robbed us of one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth
+century.&nbsp; And even after Morris&rsquo;s death the
+poet&rsquo;s executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis and
+the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were
+willing and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems
+should be brought out.&nbsp; Subsequently, when a large portion
+of the lost poems was found, the volume was published by Mr. John
+Lane.&nbsp; This anecdote alone explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is
+never tired of dwelling upon the nobility of Morris&rsquo;s
+nature, and upon his generosity in small things as well as in
+large.</p>
+<p>Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject
+is the following.&nbsp; When Morris published his first volume in
+the Kelmscott Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy
+of the book.&nbsp; He also sent him a presentation copy of the
+second and third.&nbsp; But knowing how small was the profit at
+this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott Press, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these presentation
+copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest
+against such extravagance.&nbsp; Mrs. Morris assured him that it
+would be perfectly useless to do so.&nbsp; <a
+name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 180</span>But when
+the edition of Keats was coming out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined
+to grapple with the matter, and one Sunday afternoon when he was
+at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber
+to the Keats, and I give my commission for it in the presence of
+witnesses.&nbsp; I am a paying subscriber to the
+Keats.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;All right, old chap, you&rsquo;re a
+subscriber.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the
+Keats; and when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the
+following Sunday afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had
+been made.&nbsp; Morris laughed.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;All right, there&rsquo;s no mistake&mdash;that is my
+presentation copy of Keats.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was
+being discussed&mdash;the marvellous Chaucer with
+Burne-Jones&rsquo;s illustrations&mdash;Mr. Watts-Dunton knew
+that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and probably
+sunk, and he said to Morris:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Now, Morris, I&rsquo;m going to talk to you seriously
+about the Chaucer.&nbsp; I know that it&rsquo;s going to be a
+dead loss to you, and I do really and seriously hope that you do
+not contemplate anything so wild as to send me a presentation
+copy of that book.&nbsp; You know my affection for you, and you
+know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me
+pain to accept it.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to
+stay my hand, for, between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some
+money over it; but the Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned
+Jones and I are going to join in the presentation of a copy to
+Algernon Swinburne.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>After this Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s mind was set at rest, as
+he told Mrs. Morris.&nbsp; But when Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s <a
+name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 181</span>copy
+reached &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; it was accompanied by another
+one&mdash;&lsquo;Theodore Watts-Dunton from William
+Morris.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton also tells.&nbsp; Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess
+a copy of &lsquo;The Golden Legend,&rsquo; bought the Kelmscott
+edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris this.&nbsp;
+Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What!&nbsp; Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of
+mine!&nbsp; Why I thought he did not care for black letter
+reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy of every book I
+brought out.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent
+to &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for
+Mr. Swinburne.</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about &lsquo;The Water of the
+Wondrous Isles,&rsquo; tells this amusing story:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled
+into seeing and hearing the great poet-singer Stead, whose
+rhythms have had such a great effect upon the &lsquo;art
+poetic,&rsquo; the author of &lsquo;The Perfect Cure,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s Daddy this and Daddy that,&rsquo; and other
+brilliant lyrics.&nbsp; A friend with whom Morris had been
+spending the evening, and who had been talking about poetic
+energy and poetic art in relation to the chilly reception
+accorded to &lsquo;Sigurd,&rsquo; persuaded him&mdash;much
+against his will&mdash;to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr.
+Stead, whose performance consisted of singing a song, the burden
+of which was &lsquo;I&rsquo;m a perfect cure!&rsquo; while he
+leaped up into the air without bending his legs and twirled round
+like a dervish.&nbsp; &lsquo;What made you bring me to see this
+damned tomfoolery?&rsquo; Morris grumbled; and on being told that
+it <a name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 182</span>was
+to give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest, without
+poetic art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way
+out.&nbsp; If Morris were now alive&mdash;and all England will
+sigh, &lsquo;Ah, would he were!&rsquo;&mdash;he would confess,
+with his customary emphasis, that the poet had nothing of the
+slightest importance to learn, even from the rhythms of Mr.
+Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses that were
+beyond the powers of the &lsquo;Great Vance.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+183</span>Chapter XIII<br />
+THE &lsquo;EXAMINER&rsquo;</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Long</span> before Mr. Watts-Dunton
+printed a line, he was a prominent figure in the literary and
+artistic sets in London; but, as Mr. Hake has said, it was merely
+as a conversationalist that he was known.&nbsp; His conversation
+was described by Rossetti as being like that of no other person
+moving in literary circles, because he was always enunciating new
+views in phrasings so polished that, to use Rossetti&rsquo;s
+words, his improvized locutions were as perfect as &lsquo;fitted
+jewels.&rsquo;&nbsp; Those who have been privileged to listen to
+his table-talk will attest the felicity of the image.&nbsp;
+Seldom has so great a critic had so fine an audience.&nbsp;
+Rossetti often lamented that Theodore Watts&rsquo; spoken
+criticism had never been taken down in shorthand.&nbsp; For a
+long time various editors who had met him at Rossetti&rsquo;s, at
+Madox Brown&rsquo;s, at Westland Marston&rsquo;s, at
+Whistler&rsquo;s breakfasts, and at the late Lord
+Houghton&rsquo;s, endeavoured to persuade him to make practical
+use in criticism of the ideas that flowed in a continuous stream
+from his lips.&nbsp; But, as Rossetti used to affirm, he was the
+one man of his time who, with immense literary equipment, was
+without literary ambition.&nbsp; This peculiarity of his was
+eloquently described by the late Dr. Gordon Hake in his
+&lsquo;New Day&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>You say you care not for the people&rsquo;s
+praise,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That poetry is its own recompense;<br />
+You care not for the wreath, the dusty bays,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Given to the whirling wind and hurried hence.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page184"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 184</span>The
+first editor who secured Theodore Watts, after repeated efforts
+to do so, was the late Professor Minto, and this only came about
+because during his editorship of the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; both
+he and Watts resided in Danes Inn, and were constantly seeing
+each other.</p>
+<p>It was Minto who afterwards declared that &ldquo;the articles
+in the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; and the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; are goldmines, in which we others
+are apt to dig unconsciously without remembering that the nuggets
+are Theodore Watts&rsquo;s, who is too lazy to peg out his
+claim.&rdquo;&nbsp; The first article by him that appeared in
+Minto&rsquo;s paper attracted great attention and roused great
+curiosity.&nbsp; This indeed is not surprising, for, as I found
+when I read it, it was as remarkable for pregnancy of thought and
+of style as the latest and ripest of his essays.&nbsp; A friend
+of his, belonging to the set in which he moved, who remembers the
+appearance of this article, has been kind enough to tell me the
+following anecdote in connection with it.&nbsp; The contributors
+to the paper at that time consisted of Minto, Dr Garnett,
+Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, &lsquo;Scholar&rsquo; Williams, Comyns
+Carr, Walter Pollock, Duffield (the translator of &lsquo;Don
+Quixote&rsquo;), Professor Sully, Dr. Marston, William Bell
+Scott, William Black, and many other able writers.&nbsp; On the
+evening of the day when Theodore Watts&rsquo;s first article
+appeared, there was a party at the house of William Bell Scott in
+Chelsea, and every one was asking who this new contributor
+was.&nbsp; It was one of the conditions under which the article
+was written that its authorship was to be kept a secret.&nbsp;
+Bell Scott, who took a great interest in the
+&lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; was especially inquisitive about the new
+writer.&nbsp; After having in vain tried to get from Minto the
+name of the writer, he went up to Watts, and said: &ldquo;I would
+give almost anything to know who the writer <a
+name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 185</span>is who
+appears in the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; for the first time
+today.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;What makes you inquire about
+it?&rdquo; said Watts.&nbsp; &ldquo;What is the interest
+attaching to the writer of such fantastic stuff as that?&nbsp;
+Surely it is the most mannered writing that has appeared in the
+&lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; for a long time!&rdquo;&nbsp; Then,
+turning to Minto, he said: &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t think, Minto,
+what made you print it at all.&rdquo;&nbsp; Scott, who had a most
+exalted opinion of Watts as a critic, was considerably abashed at
+this, and began to endeavour to withdraw some of his enthusiastic
+remarks.&nbsp; This set Minto laughing aloud, and thus the secret
+got out.</p>
+<p>From that hour Watts became the most noticeable writer among a
+group of critics who were all noticeable.&nbsp; Week after week
+there appeared in this historic paper criticism as fine as had
+ever appeared in it in the time of Leigh Hunt, and as brilliant
+as had appeared in it in the time of Fonblanque.&nbsp; At this
+time Minto used to entertain his contributors on Monday evening
+in the room over the publisher&rsquo;s office in the Strand, and
+I have been told by one who was frequently there that these
+smoking symposia were among the most brilliant in London.&nbsp;
+One can well imagine this when one remembers the names of those
+who used to attend the meetings.</p>
+<p>It was through the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; that Watts formed
+that friendship with William Black which his biographer, Sir
+Wemyss Reid, alludes to.&nbsp; Between these two there was one
+subject on which they were especially in sympathy&mdash;their
+knowledge and love of nature.&nbsp; At that time Black was
+immensely popular.&nbsp; In personal appearance there was, I am
+told, a superficial resemblance between the two, and they were
+constantly being mistaken for each other; and yet, when they were
+side by side, it was evident that the large, dark moustache and
+the black eyes were almost the only points of resemblance between
+them.</p>
+<p><a name="page186"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 186</span>It
+was at the then famous house in Gower Street of Mr. Justin
+McCarthy that Black and Mr. Watts-Dunton first met.&nbsp;
+Speaking as an Irishman of a younger but not, I fear, of so
+genial a generation, I hear tantalizing accounts of the popular
+gatherings at the home of the most charming and the most
+distinguished Irishman of letters in the London of that time,
+where so many young men of my own country were welcomed as warmly
+as though they had not yet to win their spurs.&nbsp; No one
+speaks more enthusiastically of the McCarthy family than Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, who seems to have been on terms of friendship with
+them almost as soon as he settled in London.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was always a lover of McCarthy&rsquo;s novels, but
+on his first visit to Gower Street Mr. McCarthy was, as usual,
+full of the subject not of his own novels, but of another
+man&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He urged his new friend to read &lsquo;Under
+the Greenwood Tree,&rsquo; almost forcing him to take the book
+away with him, which he did: this was the way in which Mr.
+Watts-Dunton became for the first time acquainted with a story
+which he always avers is the only book that has ever revived the
+rich rustic humour of Shakespeare&rsquo;s early comedies.&nbsp; A
+perfect household of loving natures, warm Irish hearts, bright
+Irish intellects, cultivated and rare, according to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s testimony, was that little family in Gower
+Street.&nbsp; I think he will pardon me for repeating one quaint
+little story about himself and Black in connection with this
+first visit to the McCarthys.&nbsp; On entering the room Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was much struck with what appeared to be real
+musical genius in a bright-eyed little lady who was delighting
+the party with her music.&nbsp; This was at the period in his own
+life which Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his &lsquo;music-mad
+period.&rsquo;&nbsp; And after a time he got <a
+name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 187</span>talking
+with the lady.&nbsp; He was a little surprised that he was at
+once invited by the musical lady to go to a gathering at her
+house.&nbsp; But he was as much pleased as surprised to be so
+welcomed, and incontinently accepted the invitation.&nbsp; It
+never entered his mind that he had been mistaken for another man,
+until the other man entered the room and came up to the
+lady.&nbsp; She, on her part, began to look in an embarrassed way
+from one to the other of the two swarthy, black-moustached
+gentlemen.&nbsp; She had mistaken Mr. Watts-Dunton for William
+Black, with whom her acquaintance was but slight.&nbsp; The
+contretemps caused much amusement when the husband of the lady,
+an eminent novelist, who knew Mr. Watts-Dunton well, introduced
+him to his wife.&nbsp; I do not know what was the end of the
+comedy, but no doubt it was a satisfactory one.&nbsp; It could
+not be otherwise among such people as Justin McCarthy would be
+likely to gather round him.</p>
+<p>At that time, to quote the words of the same friend of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, Watts used frequently to meet at Bell Scott&rsquo;s
+and Rossetti&rsquo;s Professor Appleton, the editor of the
+&lsquo;Academy.&rsquo;&nbsp; The points upon which these two
+touched were as unlike the points upon which Watts and William
+Black touched as could possibly be.&nbsp; They were both students
+of Hegel; and when they met, Appleton, who had Hegel on the
+brain, invariably drew Watts aside for a long private talk.&nbsp;
+People used to leave them alone, on account of the remoteness of
+the subject that attracted the two.&nbsp; Watts had now made up
+his mind that he would devote himself to literature, and, indeed,
+his articles in the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; showed that he had
+only to do so to achieve a great success.&nbsp; Appleton rarely
+left Watts without saying, &ldquo;I do wish you would write for
+the &lsquo;Academy.&rsquo;&nbsp; I want you to let me send you
+all <a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 188</span>the
+books on the transcendentalists that come to the
+&lsquo;Academy,&rsquo; and let me have articles giving the pith
+of them at short intervals.&rdquo;&nbsp; This invitation to
+furnish the &lsquo;Academy&rsquo; with a couple of columns
+condensing the spirit of many books about subjects upon which
+only a handful of people in England were competent to write,
+seemed to Watts a grotesque request, seeing that he was at this
+very time the leading writer on the &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; and
+was being constantly approached by other editors.&nbsp; It was
+consequently the subject of many a joke between Minto, William
+Black, Watts, and the others present at the famous
+&lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; gatherings.&nbsp; After a while Mr. Norman
+MacColl, who was then the editor of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; invited Watts to take an important
+part in the reviewing for the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+At first he told the editor that there were two obstacles to his
+accepting the invitation&mdash;one was that the work that he was
+invited to do was largely done by his friend Marston, and that,
+although he would like to join him, he scarcely saw his way, on
+account of the &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; which was ready to take
+all the work he could produce.&nbsp; On opening the matter to Dr
+Marston, that admirably endowed writer would not hear of
+Watts&rsquo;s considering him in the matter.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; was then, as now, the leading
+literary organ in Europe, and the editor&rsquo;s offer was, of
+course, a very tempting one, and Watts was determined to tell
+Minto about it.&nbsp; And this he did.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, Minto,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it rests entirely
+with you whether I shall write in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; or not.&rdquo;&nbsp; Minto, between
+whom and Watts there was a deep affection, made the following
+reply:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Theodore, I need not say that it will not be a
+good day for the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; when you join the <a
+name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+189</span>&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; is a struggling paper which could not live
+without being subsidized by Peter Taylor, and it is not four
+months ago since Leicester Warren said to me that he and all the
+other readers of the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; looked eagerly for
+the &lsquo;T. W.&rsquo; at the foot of a literary article.&nbsp;
+The &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; is both a powerful and a wealthy
+paper.&nbsp; In short, it will injure the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo;
+when your name is associated with the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; But to be the leading voice
+of such a paper as that is just what you ought to be, and I
+cannot help advising you to entertain MacColl&rsquo;s
+proposal.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In consequence of this Mr. Watts-Dunton closed with Mr.
+MacColl&rsquo;s offer, and his first article in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; appeared on July 8, 1876.</p>
+<h2><a name="page190"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+190</span>Chapter XIV<br />
+THE &lsquo;ATHEN&AElig;UM&rsquo;</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> the first review which Mr.
+Watts-Dunton contributed to the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; has
+been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any
+other of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire.&nbsp;
+It has the additional interest, I believe, of being the most
+rapidly executed piece of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton
+ever achieved.&nbsp; Mr. MacColl, having secured the new writer,
+tried to find a book for him, and failed, until Mr. Watts-Dunton
+asked him whether he intended to give an article upon
+Skelton&rsquo;s &lsquo;Comedy of the Noctes
+Ambrosian&aelig;.&rsquo;&nbsp; The editor said that he had not
+thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that, if
+Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to
+him.&nbsp; As the article was wanted on the following day, it was
+dictated as fast as the amanuensis&mdash;not a shorthand
+writer&mdash;could take it down.</p>
+<p>It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one
+of his great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays
+on Victor Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as
+any:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Is it really that the great squeezing of
+books has at last begun?&nbsp; Here, at least, is the
+&lsquo;Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;&rsquo; squeezed into one
+volume.</p>
+<p>Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of
+which, as far as we remember, is this.&nbsp; <a
+name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 191</span>The library
+of the Indian kings was composed of so many volumes that a
+thousand camels were necessary to remove it.&nbsp; But once on a
+time a certain prince who loved reading much and other pleasures
+more, called a Brahmin to him, and said: &lsquo;Books are good, O
+Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of both these goods
+a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin, which of these
+two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard to say;
+but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze &rsquo;em!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The Brahmin, understanding well what the order to &lsquo;squeeze
+&rsquo;em&rsquo; meant (for he was a bookman himself, and knew
+that, as there goes much water and little flavour to the making
+of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words and few thoughts to
+the making of a very big book), set to work, aided by many
+scribes&mdash;striking out all the idle words from every book in
+the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted it
+was found that ten camels could carry that library without
+ruffling a hair.&nbsp; And therefore the Brahmin was appointed
+&lsquo;Grand Squeezer&rsquo; of the realm.&nbsp; Ages after this,
+another prince, who loved reading much and other pleasures a good
+deal more, called the Grand Squeezer of his time and said:
+&lsquo;Thy duties are neglected, O Grand Squeezer!&nbsp; Thy life
+depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thereupon
+the Grand Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and
+squeezed and squeezed till the whole library became at last a
+load that a foal would have laughed at, for it consisted but of
+one book, a tiny volume, containing four maxims.&nbsp; Yet the
+wisdom in the last library was the wisdom in the first.</p>
+<p>The appearance of Mr. Skelton&rsquo;s condensation of the
+&lsquo;Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;&rsquo; reminds us of this story,
+and of a certain solemn warning we always find it our <a
+name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 192</span>duty to
+administer to those who show a propensity towards the baneful
+coxcombry of authorship&mdash;the warning that the literature of
+our country is already in a fair way of dying for the want of a
+Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary be appointed
+within the next ten years, it will be smothered by itself.&nbsp;
+Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension to
+those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call &lsquo;the writing
+fellows,&rsquo; for adding to the camel&rsquo;s burden, instead
+of distributing the same amount among an army of diligent and
+well-selected squeezers.&nbsp; We say an army of squeezers, for
+it is not merely that almost every man, woman, and child among us
+who can write, prints, while nobody reads, and, to judge from the
+&lsquo;spelling bees,&rsquo; nobody even spells, but that the
+fecundity of man as a &lsquo;writing animal&rsquo; is on the
+increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself.&nbsp; This
+is the alarming thing.&nbsp; Where are we to find so many
+squeezers?&nbsp; Nay, in many cases there needs a separate
+sub-squeezer for the writer&rsquo;s every book.&nbsp; Take, for
+instance, the case of the Carlyle squeezer&mdash;what more could
+be expected from him in a lifetime than that he should squeeze
+&lsquo;Frederick the Great&rsquo;&mdash;that enormous, rank and
+pungent &lsquo;haggis&rsquo; from which, properly squeezed, such
+an ocean would flow of &lsquo;oniony liquid&rsquo; that compared
+with it the famous &lsquo;haggis-deluge&rsquo; of the
+&lsquo;Noctes&rsquo; which nearly drowned in gravy
+&lsquo;Christopher,&rsquo; &lsquo;the Shepherd,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Tickler&rsquo; in Ambrose&rsquo;s parlour, would be, both
+for quantity and flavour, but &lsquo;a beaker full of the sweet
+South&rsquo;?&nbsp; Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr.
+Carlyle; what would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor,
+or of Southey, to the squeezing of the tremendous Professor
+Wilson&mdash;the mighty Christopher, who for about thirty years
+literally <a name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+193</span>talked in type upon every matter of which he had any
+knowledge, and upon every matter of which he had none; whose
+&lsquo;words, words, words&rsquo; are, indeed, as Hallam, with
+unconscious irony, says, &lsquo;as the rush of mighty
+waters&rsquo;?</p>
+<p>What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard
+to guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, &lsquo;if what is said
+be not to the purpose, a single word is already too
+much.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his
+manipulations upon the &lsquo;Noctes
+Ambrosian&aelig;.&rsquo;&nbsp; He loves the memory of the fine
+old Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers
+that are too timid of grip.&nbsp; In squeezing Professor Wilson
+you cannot overdo it.&nbsp; There are certain parts we should
+have especially liked squeezed away; and among these&mdash;will
+Mr. Skelton pardon us?&mdash;are the &lsquo;amazingly
+humourous&rsquo; ones, such as the &lsquo;opening of the
+haggis,&rsquo; which, Mr. Skelton tells us, &lsquo;manifests the
+humour of conception as well as the humour of character, in a
+measure that has seldom been surpassed by the greatest
+masters&rsquo;; &lsquo;the amazing humour&rsquo; of which
+consists in the Shepherd&rsquo;s sticking his supper knife into a
+&lsquo;haggis&rsquo; (a sheep&rsquo;s paunch filled with the
+&lsquo;pluck&rsquo; minced, with suet, onions, salt, and pepper),
+and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy that the whole
+party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save themselves
+from being drowned in it!&nbsp; In truth, Mr. Skelton should have
+reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the
+Professor&rsquo;s twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of
+retaining, omit everything &lsquo;amazingly humourous,&rsquo; he
+will be the best Wilson-squeezer imaginable.</p>
+<p>Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Noctes&rsquo; are dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to <a
+name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 194</span>save them,
+squeezes away all the political events&mdash;so important once,
+so unimportant now&mdash;all the foolish laudation, and more
+foolish abuse of those who took part in them.&nbsp; He eliminates
+all the critiques upon all those &lsquo;greatest poems&rsquo; and
+those &lsquo;greatest novels of the age&rsquo; written by
+Christopher&rsquo;s friends&mdash;friends so famous once, so
+peacefully forgotten now.&nbsp; And he has left what he calls the
+&lsquo;Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;,&rsquo; i.e.
+&lsquo;that portion of the work which deals with or presents
+directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and
+character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it
+which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of
+literary, artistic, or political interest only.&rsquo;&nbsp; And,
+although Mr. Skelton uses thus the word &lsquo;comedy&rsquo; in
+its older and wider meaning, it is evident that it is as an
+&lsquo;amazing humourist&rsquo; that he would present to our
+generation the great Christopher North.&nbsp; And assuredly, at
+this the &lsquo;delighted spirit&rsquo; of Christopher smiles
+delightedly in Hades.&nbsp; For, however the &lsquo;Comic
+Muse&rsquo; may pout upon hearing from Mr. Skelton that
+&lsquo;the &ldquo;Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;&rdquo; belong to
+her,&rsquo; it is clear that the one great desire of
+Wilson&rsquo;s life was to cultivate her&mdash;was to be an
+&lsquo;amazing humourist,&rsquo; in short.&nbsp; It is clear,
+besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he most
+of all affected, that which we call technically
+&lsquo;Rabelaisian.&rsquo;&nbsp; To have gone down to posterity
+as the great English Rabelaisian of the nineteenth century,
+Christopher North would have freely given all his deserved fame
+as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds hard cash of
+which he was despoiled to boot.&nbsp; His personality was
+enormous.&nbsp; He had more of that demonic element&mdash;of
+which since Goethe&rsquo;s time we have heard so much&mdash;than
+any man in Scotland.&nbsp; Everybody seems to have been dominated
+<a name="page195"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 195</span>by
+him.&nbsp; De Quincey, with a finer intellect than even his
+own&mdash;and that is using strong language&mdash;looked up to
+him as a spaniel looks up to his master.&nbsp; It is positively
+ludicrous, while reading De Quincey&rsquo;s &lsquo;Autobiographic
+Sketches,&rsquo; to come again and again upon the na&iuml;ve
+refrain: &lsquo;I think so, so does Professor
+Wilson.&rsquo;&nbsp; Gigantic as was the egotism of the
+Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic
+egotism of Christopher North.&nbsp; In this, as in everything
+else, he was the opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since
+Burns, Sir Walter Scott.&nbsp; Scott&rsquo;s desire was to create
+eccentric humourous characters, but to remain the simple Scottish
+gentleman himself.&nbsp; Wilson&rsquo;s great ambition was to be
+an eccentric humourous character himself; for your superlative
+egotist has scarcely even the wish to create.&nbsp; He would like
+the universe to himself.&nbsp; If Wilson had created Falstaff,
+and if you had expressed to him your admiration of the
+truthfulness of that character, he would have taken you by the
+shoulder and said, with a smile: &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t you see, you
+fool, that Falstaff is I&mdash;John Wilson?&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and
+Tickler were John Wilson&mdash;as much Wilson as Kit North
+himself, or, rather, what he would have liked John Wilson to be
+considered.&nbsp; This determination to be a humourous character
+it was&mdash;and no lack of literary ambition&mdash;that caused
+him to squander his astonishing powers in the way that Mr.
+Skelton, and all of us who admire the man, lament.</p>
+<p>Many articles in &lsquo;Blackwood&rsquo;&mdash;notably the one
+upon Shakspeare&rsquo;s four great tragedies and the one in which
+he discusses Coleridge&rsquo;s poetry&mdash;show that his insight
+into the principles of literary art was true and deep&mdash;far
+too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this inexorable law,
+that nothing can live in literature <a name="page196"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 196</span>without form, nothing but humour;
+but that, let this flowery crown of literature show itself in the
+most formless kind of magazine-article or review-essay, and the
+writer is secure of his place according to his merits.</p>
+<p>Has Wilson secured such a place?&nbsp; We fear not; and if
+Skelton were to ask us, on our oath, why Wilson&rsquo;s fourteen
+volumes of brilliant, eloquent, and picturesque writing are
+already in a sadly moribund state, while such slight and
+apparently fugitive essays as the &lsquo;Coverley&rsquo; papers,
+the essays of Elia, and the hurried review articles of Sydney
+Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we fear that our
+answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that mere
+elaborated intellectual &lsquo;humour&rsquo; has the seeds of
+dissolution in it from the beginning, while temperamental humour
+alone can live; and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not
+temperamentally a humourist at all, and certainly not
+temperamentally a Rabelaisian.&nbsp; But let us, by way of excuse
+for this rank blasphemy, say what precise meaning we attach to
+the word &lsquo;Rabelaisian&rsquo;&mdash;though the subject is so
+wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.&nbsp;
+Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will
+venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of
+temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic
+humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the
+dramatist&mdash;the comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the
+lawless abandonment of mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of
+health and animal spirits, with a strong recognition of the
+absurdity of human life and the almighty joke of the
+Cosmos&mdash;a mood which in literature is rarer than in
+life&mdash;rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the
+common and characteristic accompaniments of the literary
+temperament.</p>
+<p><a name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 197</span>Of
+Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing.&nbsp;
+For this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take
+root, save in the most un-egotistic souls.&nbsp; It belongs to
+the Chaucers, the Shakspeares, the Moli&egrave;res, the Addisons,
+the Fieldings, the Steeles, the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the
+George Eliots&mdash;upon whom the rich tides of the outer life
+come breaking and drowning the egotism and yearning for
+self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.&nbsp; Among
+these&mdash;to whom to create is everything&mdash;Sterne would
+perhaps have been greatest of all had he never known Hall
+Stevenson, and never read Rabelais; while Dickens&rsquo;s growth
+was a development from Rabelaisianism to Cervantism.&nbsp; But
+surely so delicate a critic as Mr. Skelton has often proved
+himself to be, is not going to seriously tell us that there is
+one ray of dramatic humour to be found in Wilson.&nbsp; Why, the
+man had not even the mechanical skill of varying the locutions
+and changing the styles of his two or three characters.&nbsp;
+Even the humourless Plato could do that.&nbsp; Even the
+humourless Landor could do that.&nbsp; But, strip the
+&lsquo;Shepherd&rsquo;s&rsquo; talk of its Scottish accent and it
+is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose rush in
+the &lsquo;Recreations&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Essays&rsquo; we are
+so familiar with.&nbsp; While, as to his clumsy caricature of the
+sesquipedalian language of De Quincey, that is such obtrusive
+caricature that illusion seems to be purposely destroyed, and the
+&lsquo;Opium-Eater&rsquo; becomes a fantastic creature of Farce,
+and not of Comedy at all.</p>
+<p>The &lsquo;amazing humour&rsquo; of Wilson, then, is not
+Cervantic.&nbsp; Is it Rabelaisian?&nbsp; Again, we fear
+not.&nbsp; Very likely the genuine Rabelaisian does not commonly
+belong to the &lsquo;writing fellows&rsquo; at all.&nbsp; We have
+had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our
+time.&nbsp; <a name="page198"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+198</span>One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful
+and a pathetic hatred.&nbsp; The other was a drunken cobbler, who
+loved it with a beautiful and a pathetic love.&nbsp; And we have
+just heard from one of our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian
+is, at this moment, to be found&mdash;where he ought to be
+found&mdash;at Stratford-on-Avon.&nbsp; This is
+interesting.&nbsp; Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so
+there were Rabelaisians, even among the &lsquo;writing
+fellows,&rsquo; before Rabelais; the greatest of them, of course,
+being Aristophanes, though, from all we hear, it may be
+reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of getting
+damages out of Eupolis for libel, &lsquo;in a duck-pond drowned
+him,&rsquo; he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the
+very first rank.&nbsp; But we can only judge from what we have;
+and, to say nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the
+&lsquo;Birds&rsquo; alone puts Aristophanes at the top of all
+pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians.&nbsp; But when those immortal words
+came from that dying bed at Meudon: &lsquo;Let down the curtain;
+the farce is done,&rsquo; they were prophetic as regards the
+literary Rabelaisians&mdash;prophetic in this, that no writer has
+since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood&mdash;the mood, that
+is, of the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles
+huge piles of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine.&nbsp;
+Yet, if his mantle has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a
+corner of it has dropped upon several; for the great Cur&eacute;
+divides his qualities among his followers impartially, giving but
+one to each, like the pine-apple in the &lsquo;Paradise of
+Fruits,&rsquo; from which every other fruit in the garden drew
+its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits
+with stealing theirs.&nbsp; Among a few others, it may be said
+that the cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however,
+earnestness half stifled it) Sterne, and <a
+name="page199"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 199</span>Richter;
+while the animal spirits&mdash;the love of life&mdash;the fine
+passion for victuals and drink&mdash;has fallen to several more,
+notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of &lsquo;John
+Buncle&rsquo;; to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the
+&lsquo;Jolly Beggars&rsquo;), to John Skinner, the author of
+&lsquo;Tullochgorum.&rsquo;&nbsp; Shakspeare, having everything,
+has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as
+Cervantism.&nbsp; Some of the scenes in &lsquo;Henry the
+Fourth&rsquo; and &lsquo;Henry the Fifth&rsquo; are rich with
+it.&nbsp; So is &lsquo;Twelfth Night,&rsquo; to go no
+further.&nbsp; Dickens&rsquo;s Rabelaisianism stopped with
+&lsquo;Pickwick.&rsquo;&nbsp; If Hood&rsquo;s gastric fluid had
+been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the greatest
+Rabelaisian since Rabelais.&nbsp; A good man, if his juices are
+right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into
+Rabelaisianism.&nbsp; Neither can you simulate it without coming
+to grief.&nbsp; Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature
+is, alas! full, and this is how the simulators come to grief;
+simulated cosmic humour becomes the self-conscious grimacing and
+sad posture-making of the harlequin sage, such as we see in those
+who make life hideous by imitating Mr. Carlyle.&nbsp; This is
+bad.&nbsp; But far worse is simulated animal spirits, i.e.
+jolly-doggism.&nbsp; This is insupportable.&nbsp; For we ask the
+reader&mdash;who may very likely have been to an
+undergraduates&rsquo; wine-party, or to a medical students&rsquo;
+revel, or who may have read the &lsquo;Noctes
+Ambrosian&aelig;&rsquo;&mdash;we seriously and earnestly ask him
+whether, among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary
+life, there is anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.</p>
+<p>And now we come reluctantly to the point.&nbsp; It breaks our
+heart to say to Mr. Skelton&mdash;for we believed in Professor
+Wilson once&mdash;it breaks our heart to say that Wilson&rsquo;s
+Rabelaisianism is nothing but jolly-doggism of <a
+name="page200"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 200</span>the most
+prepense, affected, and piteous kind.&nbsp; In reading the
+&lsquo;Noctes&rsquo; we feel, as Jefferson&rsquo;s Rip van Winkle
+must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the
+Katskill mountains.&nbsp; We say to ourselves, &lsquo;How
+comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless,
+marrowless spectres wouldn&rsquo;t pretend to be jolly&mdash;if
+they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and
+their ghostly liquor!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small
+endowment of the great master&rsquo;s humour, their animal
+spirits are genuine.&nbsp; They do not hop, skip, and jump for
+effect.&nbsp; Their friskiness is the friskiness of the retriever
+puppy when let loose; of the urchin who runs shrieking against
+the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue that all creatures
+know, &lsquo;I live, I live, I live!&rsquo;&nbsp; But, whatever
+might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow
+ring about the literary cheerfulness of the &lsquo;Noctes&rsquo;
+that, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary,
+makes us think that he was at heart almost a melancholy man; that
+makes us think that the real Wilson is the Wilson of the
+&lsquo;Isle of Palms,&rsquo; &lsquo;The City of the
+Plague,&rsquo; of the &lsquo;Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,&rsquo;
+of the &lsquo;Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,&rsquo; Wilson,
+the Wordsworthian, the lover of Nature, whom Jeffrey describes
+when he says that &lsquo;almost the only passions with which his
+poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our
+nature&mdash;tender compassion&mdash;confiding affection, and
+gentleness and sorrow.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care
+protagonist, a good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw
+the whole cockney army if necessary.&nbsp; This kind of man he
+may have been&mdash;Mr. Skelton inferentially says he was; all we
+know is that his writings <a name="page201"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 201</span>lead us to think he was playing a
+part.&nbsp; A temperamental humourist, we say decidedly, he was
+not.</p>
+<p>Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book?&nbsp; In a
+certain sense no doubt humour may be found there.&nbsp; Just as
+science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of
+pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we
+live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the
+same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important
+elements common to all human kind is humour.&nbsp; And, if a man
+takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within
+him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is
+his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more
+deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his
+wit.&nbsp; Now, Wilson&rsquo;s intellect was exceedingly and
+wonderfully fine.&nbsp; As strong as it was swift, it could fly
+over many a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned
+by not a few of those who now-a-days would underrate him,
+dropping a rain of diamonds from his wings like the fabulous bird
+of North Cathay.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes
+Inn and saw the author of it.&nbsp; Appleton was in a state of
+great excitement, and indeed of great rage, for at that time
+there was considerable rivalry between the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Academy.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You belong to us,&rdquo; said Appleton.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The &lsquo;Academy&rsquo; is the proper place for
+you.&nbsp; You and I have been friends for a long time, and so
+have Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the
+enemy&rsquo;s camp.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And shall I tell you why I have joined the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; in place of the
+&lsquo;Academy&rsquo;?&rdquo; said <a name="page202"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 202</span>Watts; &ldquo;it is simply because
+MacColl invited me, and you did not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For months and months I have been urging you to write
+in the &lsquo;Academy,&rsquo;&rdquo; said Appleton.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That is true, no doubt,&rdquo; said Watts, &ldquo;but
+while MacColl offered me an important post on his paper, and in
+the literary department, too, you invited me to do the drudgery
+of melting down into two columns books upon metaphysics.&nbsp; It
+is too late, my dear boy, it is too late.&nbsp; If to join the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; is to go into the camp of the
+Philistines, why, then, a Philistine am I.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John
+Skelton was then called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I
+know they were friends afterwards.&nbsp; Shirley, in his
+&lsquo;Reminiscences&rsquo; of Rossetti, like most of his
+friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the
+poet-painter.&nbsp; I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+besides cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as
+a man, is a genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays.&nbsp; I have
+heard him say more than once that Skelton&rsquo;s style had a
+certain charm for him, and he could not understand why
+Skelton&rsquo;s position is not as great as it deserves to
+be.&nbsp; &lsquo;Scotsmen,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;often complain
+that English critics are slow to do them justice.&nbsp; This idea
+was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol&rsquo;s
+life.&nbsp; He really seemed to think that he was languishing and
+withering under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known
+as the Savile Club.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, however, there is
+nothing whatever in the idea that a Scotsman does not fight on
+equal terms with the Englishman in the great literary cockpit of
+London.&nbsp; To say the truth, the Scottish cock <a
+name="page203"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 203</span>is really
+longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can more than
+take care of himself.&nbsp; For my part, with the exception of
+Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are
+either Irish, Scottish, or Welsh.&nbsp; But I have sometimes
+thought that if Skelton had been an Englishman and moved in
+English sets, he would have taken an enormously higher position
+than he has secured, for he would have been more known among
+writers, and the more he was known the more he was
+liked.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>As will be seen further on, before the review of the
+&lsquo;Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;&rsquo; appeared, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton had contributed to the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;
+an article on &lsquo;The Art of Interviewing.&rsquo;&nbsp; From
+this time forward he became the chief critic of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; and for nearly a quarter of a
+century&mdash;that is to say, until he published &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love,&rsquo; when he practically, I think, ceased to
+write reviews of any kind&mdash;he enriched its pages with
+critical essays the peculiar features of which were their daring
+formulation of first principles, their profound generalizations,
+their application of modern scientific knowledge to the phenomena
+of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic
+style&mdash;a style so personal that, as Groome said in the
+remarks quoted in an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.</p>
+<p>As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with
+some fulness upon these criticisms, because the relation between
+his critical and his creative work is of the closest kind.&nbsp;
+Indeed, it has been said by Rossetti that &lsquo;the subtle and
+original generalizations upon the first principles of poetry
+which illumine his writings could only have come to him by a
+duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own
+poetry.&rsquo;&nbsp; The <a name="page204"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 204</span>great critics of poetry have nearly
+all been great poets.&nbsp; Rossetti used humourously to call him
+&lsquo;The Symposiarch,&rsquo; and no doubt the influence of his
+long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at Kelmscott
+Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr.
+Marston&rsquo;s, Madox Brown&rsquo;s, and Mrs. Procter&rsquo;s,
+may be traced in his writings.&nbsp; For his most effective
+criticism has always the personal magic of the living voice,
+producing on the reader the winsome effect of spontaneous
+conversation overheard.&nbsp; Its variety of manner, as well as
+of subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary
+criticism.&nbsp; In it are found racy erudition, powerful
+thought, philosophical speculation, irony silkier than the silken
+irony of M. Anatole France, airily mischievous humour, and a
+perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit.&nbsp; To the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; he contributed essays upon all sorts
+of themes such as &lsquo;The Poetic Interpretation of
+Nature,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Troubadours and
+Trouv&egrave;res,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Children of the Open
+Air,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Gypsies,&rsquo; &lsquo;Cosmic
+Humour,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Effect of Evolution upon
+Literature.&rsquo;&nbsp; And although the most complete and most
+modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the
+vast ocean of the &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia
+Britannica,&rsquo; there are still divers who are aware of its
+existence, as is proved by the latest appreciation of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work, that contributed by Madame Galimberti,
+the accomplished wife of the Italian minister, to the
+&lsquo;Rivista d&rsquo; Italia.&rsquo;&nbsp; In this article she
+makes frequent allusions to the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;
+articles, and quotes freely from them.&nbsp; Rossetti once said
+that &lsquo;the reason why Theodore Watts was so little known
+outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity
+as eagerly as other men sought fame&rsquo;; but although his
+indifference to literary reputation is so <a
+name="page205"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 205</span>invincible
+that it has baffled all the efforts of all his friends to
+persuade him to collect his critical essays, his influence over
+contemporary criticism has been and is and will be profound.</p>
+<p>There is no province of pure literature which his criticism
+leaves untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates.&nbsp;
+His treatise in the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo;
+on &lsquo;Poetry&rsquo; is alone sufficient to show how deep has
+been his study of poetic principles.&nbsp; The essay on the
+&lsquo;Sonnet,&rsquo; too, which appeared in
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Encyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; is admitted by
+critics of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the
+subject.&nbsp; It has been much discussed by foreign critics,
+especially by Dr. Karl Leutzner in his treatise, &lsquo;Uber das
+Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; are admirably expressed in the
+following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B. Burgin, who
+approached him as the representative of the
+&lsquo;Idler.&rsquo;&nbsp; The allusion to the &lsquo;smart
+slaters&rsquo; will be sufficient to indicate the approximate
+date of the interview.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Having read your treatise on poetry in the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo; which, it is said,
+has been an influence in every European literature, I want to ask
+whether a critic so deeply learned in all the secrets of poetic
+art, and who has had the advantages of comparing his own opinions
+with those of all the great poets of his time, takes a hopeful or
+despondent view of the condition of English poetry at the present
+moment.&nbsp; There are those who run down the present generation
+of poets, but on this subject the men who are really entitled to
+speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.&nbsp; <a
+name="page206"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 206</span>It would be
+valuable to know whether our leading critic is in sympathy with
+the poetry of the present hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading
+critic.&nbsp; To say the truth, I am often amused, and often
+vexed, at the grotesque misconception that seems to be afloat as
+to my relation to criticism.&nbsp; Years ago, Russell Lowell told
+me that all over the United States I was identified with every
+paragraph of a certain critical journal in which I sometimes
+write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are so often made
+upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same misconception
+seems to be spreading in England&mdash;attacks which the smiling
+and knowing public well understands to spring from writing men
+who have not been happy in their relations with the
+reviewers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It has been remarked that you never answer any attack
+in the newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do not believe in answering attacks.&nbsp; The
+public, as I say, knows that there is a mysterious and
+inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm to bite with the fangs of
+the adder, and every attack upon a writer does him more good than
+praise would do.&nbsp; But, as a matter of fact, I have no
+connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of
+letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his
+meditations upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the
+form of a review.&nbsp; It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving
+expression to one&rsquo;s excogitations, and although I do
+certainly contrive to put careful criticisms into my articles, I
+cannot imagine more unbusinesslike reviewing than mine.&nbsp; Yet
+it has one good quality, I think&mdash;it is never
+unkindly.&nbsp; I never will take a book for review unless I can
+say something in its favour, and a good deal in its
+favour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page207"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+207</span>&ldquo;Then you never practise the smart
+&lsquo;slating&rsquo; which certain would-be critics indulge
+in?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never!&nbsp; In the first place, it would afford me no
+pleasure to give pain to a young writer.&nbsp; In the next place,
+this &lsquo;smart slating,&rsquo; as you call it, is the very
+easiest thing of achievement in the world.&nbsp; Give me the aid
+of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as many miles
+of such smart &lsquo;slating&rsquo; as could be achieved by any
+six of the smart slaters.&nbsp; A charming phrase of yours,
+&lsquo;smart slaters&rsquo;!&nbsp; But I leave such work to them,
+as do all the really true critics of my time&mdash;men to whom
+the insolence which the smart slaters seem to mistake for wit
+would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they hold such
+work in contempt.&nbsp; Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for
+instance.&nbsp; Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours
+every day of his valuable life are wasted on &lsquo;leader&rsquo;
+writing, but there is in any one of his literary essays more wit
+and humour than could be achieved by all the smart writers
+combined; and yet how kind is he! going out of his way to see
+merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.&nbsp; Or take Grant
+Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.&nbsp; While
+the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by
+making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor
+little spiteful brow, Grant Allen&rsquo;s good-natured sayings
+have the very wit that the unlucky sweater and
+&lsquo;slater&rsquo; is trying for.&nbsp; Read what he said about
+William Watson, and see how kind he is.&nbsp; Compare his
+geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers.&nbsp; Again,
+take Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of
+letters in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with
+the scurrility of the smart writers.&nbsp; But it was not, I
+suppose, of such as they that you came to talk about.&nbsp; You
+are asking me whether I am in sympathy with the <a
+name="page208"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 208</span>younger
+writers of my time.&nbsp; My answer is that I cannot imagine any
+one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.&nbsp; In spite of
+the disparity of years between me and the youngest of them, I
+believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal
+friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their
+work and their aims.&nbsp; No doubt there are some points in
+which they and I agree to differ.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what about our contemporary novelists?&nbsp;
+Perhaps you do not give attention to fiction?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give attention to novels!&nbsp; Why, if I did not, I
+should not give attention to literature at all.&nbsp; In a true
+and deep sense all pure literature is fiction&mdash;to use an
+extremely inadequate and misleading word as a substitute for the
+right phrase, &lsquo;imaginative representation.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The Iliad,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Odyssey,&rsquo; &lsquo;The
+&AElig;neid,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Divina Commedia,&rsquo; are
+fundamentally novels, though in verse, as certainly novels as is
+the latest story by the most popular of our writers.&nbsp; The
+greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old Burmese
+parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and the
+mustard-seed.&nbsp; A time which has given birth to such
+novelists as many of ours of the present day is a great, and a
+very great, time for the English novel.&nbsp; Criticism will have
+to recognize, and at once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands
+plump in the front rank of the &lsquo;literature of power,&rsquo;
+and if criticism does not so recognize it, so much the worse for
+criticism, I think.&nbsp; That the novel will grow in importance
+is, I say, quite certain.&nbsp; In such a time as ours (as I have
+said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing
+boy&mdash;it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large
+enough for the growing limbs of life.&nbsp; The novel is more
+flexible; it can be stretched to fit the muscles as they
+swell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page209"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+209</span>&ldquo;I will conclude by asking you what I have asked
+another eminent critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in
+criticism?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, there I am a &lsquo;galled jade&rsquo; that must
+needs &lsquo;wince&rsquo; a little.&nbsp; No doubt I write
+anonymously myself, but that is because I have not yet mastered
+that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my writing
+seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity.&nbsp; The chief
+argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any
+scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once
+clothed with the journal&rsquo;s own authority&mdash;and the same
+applies, of course, to the dishonest critic; and this is surely
+very serious.&nbsp; With regard to dishonest criticism it is
+impossible for the most wary editor to be always on his guard
+against it.&nbsp; An editor cannot read all the books, nor can he
+know the innumerable ramifications of the literary world.&nbsp;
+When Jones asks him for Brown&rsquo;s book for review, the editor
+cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it
+up irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack
+comes in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of
+Jones&rsquo;s name, but that of the journal.</p>
+<p>In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be
+known, but not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed
+but that great injustice may flow from this.&nbsp; I myself have
+more than once heard a good book spoken of with contempt in
+London Society, and heard quoted the very words of some hostile
+review which I have known to be the work of a spiteful foe of the
+writer of the book, or of some paltry fellow who was quite
+incompetent to review anything.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Now that the day of the &lsquo;smart slaters&rsquo; is over,
+it is interesting to read in connection with these obiter dicta
+<a name="page210"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 210</span>the
+following passage from the article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on
+the seventieth birthday of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo;
+spoke of its record and its triumphs:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The enormous responsibility of anonymous
+criticism is seen in every line contributed by the Maurice and
+Sterling group who spoke through its columns.&nbsp; Even for
+those who are behind the scenes and know that the critique
+expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is difficult not to
+be impressed by the accent of authority in the editorial
+&lsquo;we.&rsquo;&nbsp; But with regard to the general public,
+the reader of a review article finds it impossible to escape from
+the authority of the &lsquo;we,&rsquo; and the power of a single
+writer to benefit or to injure an author is so great that none
+but the most deeply conscientious men ought to enter the ranks of
+the anonymous reviewers.&nbsp; These were the views of Maurice
+and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the best writers of
+our time there can be no doubt.&nbsp; Some very illustrious men
+have given very emphatic expression to them.&nbsp; On a certain
+memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne Walk,
+one of the guests related an anecdote of his having accidentally
+met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced himself, and
+told how he had stood &lsquo;dividing the swift mind&rsquo; as to
+whether he could or could not offer the man his hand.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I think I should have offered him mine,&rsquo; said
+Rossetti, &lsquo;although no one detests his offence more than I
+do.&rsquo;&nbsp; And then the conversation ran upon the question
+as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old friends could
+not shake hands.&nbsp; &lsquo;There is one kind of
+miscreant,&rsquo; said Rossetti, &lsquo;whom you have forgotten
+to name&mdash;a miscreant who in kind of meanness and infamy
+cannot well be beaten, the man who in an anonymous <a
+name="page211"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 211</span>journal
+tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when he knows it to
+be good.&nbsp; That is the man who should never defile my hand by
+his touch.&nbsp; By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I
+must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not,
+taste bread and salt with him.&nbsp; I would quietly get up and
+go.&rsquo;&nbsp; Tennyson, on afterwards being told this story,
+said, &lsquo;And who would not do the same?&nbsp; Such a man has
+been guilty of sacrilege&mdash;sacrilege against
+art.&rsquo;&nbsp; Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the
+first volume of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; worked on the
+great principle that the critic&rsquo;s primary duty is to seek
+and to bring to light those treasures of art and literature that
+the busy world is only too apt to pass by.&nbsp; Their pet
+abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his
+coadjutors; and from its commencement the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; has striven to avoid slashing and
+smart writing.&nbsp; A difficult thing to avoid, no doubt, for
+nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar
+slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever.&nbsp;
+Of all forms of writing, the founders of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; held the shallow, smart style to be
+the cheapest and also the most despicable.&nbsp; And here again
+the views of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; have remained
+unchanged.&nbsp; The critic who works &lsquo;without a conscience
+or an aim&rsquo; knows only too well that it pays to pander to
+the most lamentable of all the weaknesses of human
+nature&mdash;the love that people have of seeing each other
+attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats
+itself.&nbsp; For although man has a strong instinct for
+admiration&mdash;else had he never reached his present position
+in the conscious world&mdash;he has, running side by side with
+this instinct, another strong instinct&mdash;the instinct for
+contempt.&nbsp; A reviewer&rsquo;s ridicule poured upon a writer
+<a name="page212"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+212</span>titillates the reader with a sense of his own
+superiority.&nbsp; It is by pandering to this lower instinct that
+the unprincipled journalist hopes to kill two birds with one
+stone&mdash;to gratify his own malignity and low-bred love of
+insolence, and to make profit while doing so.&nbsp; Although
+cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is far
+more likely to be found where there is no talent at all.&nbsp;
+Many brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely,
+if ever, have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for
+a smart saying.&nbsp; One of these writers&mdash;the greatest wit
+of the nineteenth century&mdash;used to say, in honest
+disparagement of what were considered his own prodigious powers
+of wit, &lsquo;I will engage in six lessons to teach any man to
+do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks it worth his
+while to learn.&rsquo;&nbsp; And the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; at the time when Hood was reviewing
+Dickens in its columns, could have said the same thing.&nbsp; The
+smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and among
+the low-minded insolence needs no teaching.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there
+is always a kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the
+work, a contributor should &lsquo;come down a cropper&rsquo; over
+some matter of fact, and open the door to troublesome
+correspondence.&nbsp; As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the
+mysterious &lsquo;we&rsquo; must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or
+where is the authority of the oracle?&nbsp; When a contributor
+&lsquo;comes down a cropper,&rsquo; although the matter may be of
+infinitesimal importance, the editor cannot, it seems, and never
+could (except during the imperial regime of the &lsquo;Saturday
+Review&rsquo; under Cook) refuse to insert a correction.&nbsp;
+Now, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, &lsquo;the smaller the
+intelligence, the greater joy does it feel in <a
+name="page213"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 213</span>setting
+other intelligences right.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have been told that it
+was a tradition in the office of the &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; and
+also in the office of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; that
+Theodore Watts had not only never been known to &lsquo;come down
+a cropper,&rsquo; but had never given the &lsquo;critical
+gnats&rsquo; a chance of pretending that he had to.&nbsp; One
+day, however, in an article on Frederick Tennyson&rsquo;s poems,
+speaking of the position that the poet Alexander Smith occupied
+in the early fifties, and contrasting it with the position that
+he held at the time the article was written, Mr. Watts-Dunton
+affirmed that once on a time Smith&mdash;the same Smith whom
+&lsquo;Z&rsquo; (the late William Allingham) had annihilated in
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;&mdash;had been admired by Alfred
+Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer had
+compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith&rsquo;s with the metaphors
+of Shakespeare.&nbsp; The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial,
+and on the next Monday morning the editor got the following curt
+note from the great man:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Will the writer of the review of Mr.
+Frederick Tennyson&rsquo;s poems, which was published in your
+last number, please say where I have compared the metaphors of
+Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Herbert
+Spencer</span>.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable
+contributor had at last &lsquo;come down a cropper,&rsquo; sent a
+proof of Spencer&rsquo;s note to Mr. Watts-Dunton, and intimated
+that it had better be printed without any editorial comment at
+all.&nbsp; Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last &lsquo;come
+down a cropper,&rsquo; this would have been the wisest
+plan.&nbsp; But he returned <a name="page214"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 214</span>the proof of the letter to the
+editor, with the following footnote added to it:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer
+printed in one of the magazines an essay dealing with the laws of
+cause and effect in literary art&mdash;an essay so searching in
+its analyses, and so original in its method and conclusions, that
+the workers in pure literature may well be envious of science for
+enticing such a leader away from their ranks&mdash;and it is many
+years since we had the pleasure of reading it.&nbsp; Our memory
+is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in which he introduced
+such metaphors by Alexander Smith as &lsquo;I speared him with a
+jest,&rsquo; etc.&nbsp; Our only object, however, in alluding to
+the subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism
+of the hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean
+sentences as this&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&mdash;My
+drooping sails<br />
+Flap idly &rsquo;gainst the mast of my intent;<br />
+I rot upon the waters when my prow<br />
+Should grate the golden isles&mdash;</p>
+<p>had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and
+favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said,
+&lsquo;Of course the article was Theodore Watts&rsquo;s.&nbsp; I
+had forgotten entirely what I had said about Shakspeare and
+Alexander Smith.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that
+combination of critical insight, faultless memory, and genial
+courtesy, which distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s writings,
+I think I should select this bland postscript to Spencer&rsquo;s
+letter.</p>
+<p><a name="page215"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+215</span>Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr.
+Watts-Dunton always wrote his essays is connected with Robert
+Louis Stevenson.&nbsp; It occurred in connection with
+&lsquo;Kidnapped.&rsquo;&nbsp; I will quote here Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s own version of the anecdote, which will be
+found in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; review of the Edinburgh
+edition of Stevenson&rsquo;s works.&nbsp; The playful allusion to
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;s&rsquo; kindness is very
+characteristic:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Of Stevenson&rsquo;s sweetness of
+disposition and his good sense we could quote many instances; but
+let one suffice.&nbsp; When &lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo; appeared,
+although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of giving
+high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we
+refused to be scared from making certain strictures.&nbsp; It
+occurred to us that while some portions of the story were full of
+that organic detail of which Scott was such a master, and without
+which no really vital story can be told, it was not so with
+certain other parts.&nbsp; From this we drew the conclusion that
+the book really consisted of two distinct parts, two stories
+which Stevenson had tried in vain to weld into one.&nbsp; We
+surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of Balfour and Alan
+Breck were written first, and that then the writer, anxious to
+win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power is so
+great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story on
+the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding
+one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the
+villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping
+him and sending him off to the plantations.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; whose kindness towards all writers,
+poets and prosemen, great and small, has won for it such an
+infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its usual kind and
+gentle way.&nbsp; This aroused the wrath of the
+Stevensonians.&nbsp; <a name="page216"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 216</span>Yet we were not at all surprised to
+get from the author of &lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo; himself a charming
+letter.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This letter appears in Stevenson&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Letters,&rsquo; and by the courtesy of Mr. Sidney Colvin
+and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it
+here:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="smcap">Skerryvore</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Bournemouth</span>.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Dear Mr. Watts</span>,&mdash;The sight of
+the last &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; reminds me of you, and of
+my debt now too long due.&nbsp; I wish to thank you for your
+notice of &lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo;; and that not because it was
+kind, though for that also I valued it; but in the same sense as
+I have thanked you before now for a hundred articles on a hundred
+different writers.&nbsp; A critic like you is one who fights the
+good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would fain hope not
+all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in
+vain.</p>
+<p>What you say of the two parts in &lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo; was
+felt by no one more painfully than by myself.&nbsp; I began it,
+partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved,
+David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in
+another world.&nbsp; But there was the cursed beginning, and a
+cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles the Butcher
+was plainly audible tapping at the back door.&nbsp; So it had to
+go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one
+part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay.&nbsp; For a man
+of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private
+means, and not too much of that frugality which is the
+artist&rsquo;s proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons
+look very golden: the days of professional literature very
+hard.&nbsp; Yet I do not so far deceive myself as to think I
+should change my character by changing my epoch; the sum of
+virtue in our books is in a relation of equality to the sum of <a
+name="page217"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 217</span>virtues in
+ourselves; and my &lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo; was doomed, while still
+in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the thing it
+is.</p>
+<p>And now to the more genial business of defence.&nbsp; You
+attack my fight on board the &lsquo;Covenant,&rsquo; I think it
+literal.&nbsp; David and Alan had every advantage on their side,
+position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of
+merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at
+all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the
+roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and
+food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved
+out.&nbsp; The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen
+would have ever ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe
+they would not; still the illusion of numbers and the authority
+of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify the
+extremity.&mdash;I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere
+admirer,</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Robert Louis
+Stevenson</span>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson,
+of his personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and
+Stevenson, on his part, in conversation never failed to speak of
+himself, as in this letter he subscribes himself, as Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sincere admirer.&nbsp; But Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s admiration of Stevenson&rsquo;s work was
+more tempered with judgment than was the admiration of some
+critics, who afterwards, when he became too successful,
+disparaged him.&nbsp; Greatly as he admired
+&lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo; and &lsquo;Catriona,&rsquo; there were
+certain of Stevenson&rsquo;s works for which his admiration was
+qualified, and certain others for which he had no admiration at
+all.&nbsp; His strictures upon the story which seems to have been
+at first the main source of Stevenson&rsquo;s popularity,
+&lsquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,&rsquo; were much resented <a
+name="page218"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 218</span>at the time
+by those insincere and fickle worshippers to whom I have already
+alluded.&nbsp; Yet these strictures are surely full of wisdom,
+and they specially show that wide sweep over the entire field of
+literature which is characteristic of all his criticism.&nbsp; As
+they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will
+quote them here:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Take the little story &lsquo;Dr. Jekyll and
+Mr. Hyde,&rsquo; the laudatory criticism upon which is in bulk,
+as regards the story itself, like the comet&rsquo;s tail in
+relation to the comet.&nbsp; On its appearance as a story, a
+&lsquo;shilling shocker&rsquo; for the railway bookstalls, the
+critic&rsquo;s attention was directed to its vividness of
+narrative and kindred qualities, and though perfectly conscious
+of its worthlessness in the world of literary art, he might well
+be justified in comparing it to its advantage with other stories
+of its class and literary standing.&nbsp; But when it is offered
+as a classic&mdash;and this is really how it is offered&mdash;it
+has to be judged by critical canons of a very different
+kind.&nbsp; It has then to be compared and contrasted with
+stories having a like motive&mdash;stories that deal with an idea
+as old as the oldest literature&mdash;as old, no doubt, as those
+primeval days when man awoke to the consciousness that he is a
+moral and a responsible being&mdash;stories whose temper has
+always been up to now of the loftiest kind.</p>
+<p>It is many years since, in writing of the &lsquo;Parables of
+Buddhaghosha,&rsquo; it was our business to treat at length of
+the grand idea of man&rsquo;s dual nature, and the many beautiful
+forms in which it has been embodied.&nbsp; We said then that,
+from the lovely modern story of Ars&egrave;ne Houssaye, where a
+young man, starting along life&rsquo;s road, sees on a lawn a
+beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards&mdash;when sin has
+soiled him&mdash;finds that she was his own soul, stained <a
+name="page219"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 219</span>now by his
+own sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely
+modern story of Edgar Poe, &lsquo;William Wilson,&rsquo; up to
+the earliest allegories upon the subject, no writer or
+story-teller had dared to degrade by gross treatment a motive of
+such universal appeal to the great heart of the &lsquo;Great Man,
+Mankind.&rsquo;&nbsp; We traced the idea, as far as our knowledge
+went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and found, as
+we then could truly affirm, that this motive&mdash;from the
+ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all
+motives&mdash;had been always treated with a nobility and a
+greatness that did honour to literary art.&nbsp; Manu, after
+telling us that &lsquo;single is each man born into the
+world&mdash;single dies,&rsquo; implores each one to
+&lsquo;collect virtue,&rsquo; in order that after death he may be
+met by the virtuous part of his dual self, a beautiful companion
+and guide in traversing &lsquo;that gloom which is so hard to be
+traversed.&rsquo;&nbsp; Fine as this is, it is surpassed by an
+Arabian story we then quoted (since versified by Sir Edwin
+Arnold)&mdash;the story of the wicked king who met after death a
+frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her to be only
+a part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own evil
+deeds.&nbsp; And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory
+in Arda Viraf, in which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid
+pleasant trees whose fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part
+of his own dual nature, a beautiful maiden, who says to him,
+&lsquo;O youth, I am thine own actions.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And we instanced other stories and allegories equally
+beautiful, in which this supreme thought has been treated as
+poetically as it deserves.&nbsp; It was left for Stevenson to
+degrade it into a hideous tale of murder and Whitechapel
+mystery&mdash;a story of astonishing brutality, in which the
+separation of the two natures of the man&rsquo;s soul is effected
+not by psychological development, and not by the &lsquo;awful <a
+name="page220"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+220</span>alchemy&rsquo; of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as
+in all the previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of
+some supposed new drug.</p>
+<p>If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation
+of De Quincey&rsquo;s &lsquo;Murder considered as One of the Fine
+Arts,&rsquo; it tells poorly for Stevenson&rsquo;s sense of
+humour.&nbsp; If it is meant as a serious allegory, it is an
+outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive with which
+most literatures have been enriched.&nbsp; That a story so coarse
+should have met with the plaudits that &lsquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde&rsquo; met with at the time of its publication&mdash;that it
+should now be quoted in leading articles of important papers
+every few days, while all the various and beautiful renderings of
+the motive are ignored&mdash;what does it mean?&nbsp; Is it a
+sign that the &lsquo;shrinkage of the world,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;solidarity of civilisation,&rsquo; making the record of
+each day&rsquo;s doings too big for the day, has worked a great
+change in our public writers?&nbsp; Is it that they not only have
+no time to think, but no time to read anything beyond the
+publications of the hour?&nbsp; Is it that good work is unknown
+to them, and that bad work is forced upon them, and that in their
+busy ignorance they must needs accept it and turn to it for
+convenient illustration?&nbsp; That Stevenson should have been
+impelled to write the story shows what the &lsquo;Suicide
+Club&rsquo; had already shown, that underneath the apparent
+health which gives such a charm to &lsquo;Treasure Island&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;Kidnapped,&rsquo; there was that morbid strain which
+is so often associated with physical disease.</p>
+<p>Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest
+of all writers since Chaucer&mdash;Walter Scott&mdash;Stevenson
+might have been in the ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of
+fiction and the stage who do their best to make life
+hideous.&nbsp; It must be remembered that <a
+name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 221</span>he was a
+critic first and a creator afterwards.&nbsp; He himself tells us
+how critically he studied the methods of other writers before he
+took to writing himself.&nbsp; No one really understood better
+than he Hesiod&rsquo;s fine saying that the muses were born in
+order that they might be a forgetfulness of evils and a truce
+from cares.&nbsp; No one understood better than he
+Joubert&rsquo;s saying, &lsquo;Fiction has no business to exist
+unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one
+aim is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the
+mere frightful reality.&rsquo;&nbsp; And for the most part he
+succeeded in keeping down the morbid impulses of a spirit
+imprisoned and fretted in a crazy body.</p>
+<p>Save in such great mistakes as &lsquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde,&rsquo; and a few other stories, Stevenson acted upon
+Joubert&rsquo;s excellent maxim.&nbsp; But Scott, and Scott
+alone, is always right in this matter&mdash;right by
+instinct.&nbsp; He alone is always a delight.&nbsp; If all art is
+dedicated to joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher
+and more serious problem than how to make men happy, then the
+&lsquo;Waverley Novels&rsquo; are among the most precious things
+in the literature of the world.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always
+speaks warmly is Browning.&nbsp; Among the many good anecdotes I
+have heard him relate in this connection, I will give one.&nbsp;
+I do not think that he would object to my doing so.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It is one of my misfortunes,&rdquo; said
+he, &ldquo;to be not fully worthy (to use the word of a very dear
+friend of mine), of Browning&rsquo;s poetry.&nbsp; Where I am
+delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative and
+intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements
+in a general way not pleasing to my ear.&nbsp; When a <a
+name="page222"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 222</span>certain
+book of his came out&mdash;I forget which&mdash;it devolved upon
+me to review it.&nbsp; Certain eccentricities in it, for some
+reason or another, irritated me, and I expressed my irritation in
+something very like chaff.&nbsp; A close friend of mine, a
+greater admirer of Browning than I am myself&mdash;in fact, Mr.
+Swinburne&mdash;chided me for it, and I feel that he was
+right.&nbsp; On the afternoon following the appearance of the
+article I was at the Royal Academy private view, when Lowell came
+up to me and at once began talking about the review.&nbsp;
+Lowell, I found, was delighted with it&mdash;said it was the most
+original and brilliant thing that had appeared for many
+years.&nbsp; &lsquo;But,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;You&rsquo;re a
+brave man to be here where Browning always comes.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Then, looking round the room, he said: &lsquo;Why there he is,
+and his sister immediately on the side opposite to us.&nbsp;
+Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Slip away!&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;to avoid
+Browning!&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t know him as well as I do, after
+all!&nbsp; Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if we
+stand here for a minute or two.&nbsp; Miss Browning, whose eyes
+are looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought
+to speak to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she
+will see me.&nbsp; And then you will see her turn her head to
+Browning&rsquo;s ear and tell him something.&nbsp; And then
+Browning will come straight across to me and be more charming and
+cordial than he is in a general way, supposing that be
+possible.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No, I don&rsquo;t believe it.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;If you were not such a Boston Puritan,&rsquo; I said,
+&lsquo;I would ask you what will you bet that I am
+wrong.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied,
+Miss Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn
+and whisper in Browning&rsquo;s ear, <a name="page223"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 223</span>and Browning did come straight
+across the room to us; and this is what he said, speaking to me
+before he spoke to the illustrious American&mdash;a thing which
+on any other occasion he would scarcely have done:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Now,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;you&rsquo;re not going to
+put me off with generalities any longer.&nbsp; You promised to
+write and tell me when you could come to luncheon.&nbsp; You have
+never done so&mdash;you will never do so, unless I fix you with a
+distinct day.&nbsp; Will you come to-morrow?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I shall be delighted,&rsquo; I said.&nbsp; And he
+turned to Lowell and exchanged a few friendly words with him.</p>
+<p>After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said:
+&lsquo;Well, this is wonderful.&nbsp; You would have won the
+bet.&nbsp; How do you explain it?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I explain it by Browning&rsquo;s greatness of soul and
+heart.&nbsp; His position is so great, and mine is so small, that
+an unappreciative review of a poem of his cannot in the least
+degree affect him.&nbsp; But he knows that I am an honest man, as
+he has frequently told Tennyson, Jowett, and others.&nbsp; He
+wishes to make it quite apparent that he feels no anger towards a
+man who says what he thinks about a poem.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to
+turn to the bound volume of my &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; and
+read the article on &lsquo;Ferishtah&rsquo;s Fancies,&rsquo;
+which I imagine must have been the review in question.&nbsp; This
+is what I read:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The poems in this volume can only be
+described as parable-poems&mdash;parable-poems, not in the sense
+that they are capable of being read as parables (as is said to be
+the case with the &lsquo;Rub&aacute;&rsquo;iy&aacute;t&rsquo; of
+Omar Khayy&agrave;m), but parable-poems in the sense that they
+must be read <a name="page224"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+224</span>as parables, or they show no artistic raison
+d&rsquo;&ecirc;tre at all.</p>
+<p>Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable
+poem?&nbsp; It is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and
+dancing, like the young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall.&nbsp;
+Or rather, it is to imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the
+lissome body of Esmeralda, and set the preacher strumming a
+gypsy&rsquo;s tambourine.&nbsp; Though in the pure parable the
+intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so absolutely as
+in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses it, yet it
+does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere with
+that entire abandon&mdash;that emotional freedom&mdash;which
+seems necessary to the very existence of song.&nbsp; Indeed, if
+poetry must, like Wordsworth&rsquo;s ideal John Bull, &lsquo;be
+free or die&rsquo;; if she must know no law but that of her own
+being (as the doctrine of &lsquo;L&rsquo;art pour
+l&rsquo;art&rsquo; declares); if she must not even seem to know
+<i>that</i> (as the doctrine of bardic inspiration implies), but
+must bend to it apparently in tricksy sport alone&mdash;how can
+she&mdash;&lsquo;the singing maid with pictures in her
+eyes&rsquo;&mdash;mount the pulpit, read the text, and deliver
+the sermon?</p>
+<p>In European literature how many parable poems should we find
+where the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly
+strife?&nbsp; But we discussed all this in speaking of prose
+parables, comparing the stories of the Prodigal Son and
+Kis&aacute;gotam&iacute; with even such perfect parable poetry as
+that of Jami.&nbsp; We said then what we reiterate now: that to
+sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius of
+a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order&mdash;a
+genius rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a
+certain Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot
+in floriculture.&nbsp; Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental
+fancies, and being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy <a
+name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 225</span>with a
+certain fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar
+with the Persian story we allude to, the famous story of
+&lsquo;Poetry and Cabbages.&rsquo;&nbsp; Still, we will record it
+here for a certain learned society.</p>
+<p>The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without
+flowers, and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than
+cabbages.&nbsp; So the Angels of the Water Pot, watering the
+T&ucirc;ba Tree (whose fruit becomes flavoured according to the
+wishes of the feeder), said one to another, &lsquo;The eyes of
+those poor cabbage growers down there may well be horny and dim,
+having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon; for as to the
+earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in colour
+unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they are
+too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so
+very intent upon cabbages.&rsquo;&nbsp; So the Angels of the
+Water Pot, who sit on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains,
+began fashioning flowers out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel
+sang to them; and the words of his song were the mottoes that
+adorn the bowers of heaven.&nbsp; So bewitching, however, were
+the strains of the singer&mdash;for not only has Israfel a lute
+for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the
+poet&mdash;</p>
+<p>Breathe a stream of otto and balm,<br />
+Which through a woof of living music blown<br />
+Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?</p>
+<p>&mdash;so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished,
+that the angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his
+coloured and perfumed words upon the petals.&nbsp; And this was
+how the Angels of the Water Pot made flowers, and this is the
+story of &lsquo;Poetry and Cabbages.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is
+nothing less than the celestial charactery of <a
+name="page226"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 226</span>heaven, and
+is consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very
+few&mdash;that is to say, the eyes of those mortals who are
+&lsquo;of the race of Israfel.&rsquo;&nbsp; To common
+eyes&mdash;the eyes of the ordinary human
+cabbage-grower&mdash;what, indeed, is that angelic caligraphy
+with which the petals of the flowers are ornamented?&nbsp;
+Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful veins and scents and
+colours.</p>
+<p>But who are &lsquo;of the race of Israfel&rsquo;?&nbsp; Not
+the prosemen, certainly, as any Western critic may see who will
+refer to Kircher&rsquo;s idle nonsense about the &lsquo;Alphabet
+of the Angels&rsquo; in his &lsquo;&AElig;dipus
+Egyptiacus.&rsquo;&nbsp; Are they, then, the poets?&nbsp; This is
+indeed a solemn query.&nbsp; &lsquo;If,&rsquo; says Feridun,
+&lsquo;the mottoes that adorn the bowers of Heaven have been
+correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall be nameless,
+what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of hell in
+that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of
+Israfel&mdash;the parable-poet&mdash;the poet to whom truth
+comes, not in any way as reasoned conclusions, not even as golden
+gnomes, but comes symbolized in concrete shapes of vital beauty;
+the poet in whose work the poetic form is so part and parcel of
+the ethical lesson which vitalizes it that this ethical lesson
+seems not to give birth to the music and the colour of the poem,
+but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of these, and to be
+as inseparable from them as the &lsquo;morning breath&rsquo; of
+the Sab&aelig;an rose is inalienable from the innermost
+petals&mdash;&lsquo;the subtle odour of the rose&rsquo;s
+heart,&rsquo; which no mere chemistry of man, but only the
+morning breeze, can steal.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous
+for Mr. Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and <a
+name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 227</span>we have
+only to contrast it&mdash;or its richness and its
+rareness&mdash;with the na&iuml;ve, simple, unadorned style of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; to realize how wide is the range of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton as a master of the fine shades of literary
+expression.</p>
+<h2><a name="page228"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+228</span>Chapter XV<br />
+THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">And</span> now begins the most difficult
+and the most responsible part of my task&mdash;the selection of
+one typical essay from the vast number of essays expressing more
+or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to all Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; I can, of course, give only one,
+for already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions
+far beyond those originally intended for it.&nbsp; Naturally, I
+thought at first that I would select one of the superb articles
+on Victor Hugo&rsquo;s works, such for instance as &lsquo;La
+Leg&eacute;nde des Si&egrave;cles,&rsquo; or that profound one on
+&lsquo;La Religion des Religion.&rsquo;&nbsp; But, after a while,
+when I had got the essay typed and ready for inclusion, I changed
+my mind.&nbsp; I thought that one of those wonderful essays upon
+Oriental subjects which had called forth writings like those of
+Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better.&nbsp; Finally, I
+decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full of
+profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible,
+that it was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the
+Bible in Europe and in America.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton has often
+been urged to reprint this essay as a brief text-book for
+scholastic use, but he has never done so.&nbsp; It will be noted
+by readers of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; that even so far back as the
+publication of this article in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um &lsquo;,
+in 1877, Mr. Watts-Dunton&mdash;to judge from the allusion in it
+to &lsquo;Nin-ki-gal, <a name="page229"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 229</span>the Queen of
+Death&rsquo;&mdash;seems to have begun to draw upon Philip
+Aylwin&rsquo;s &lsquo;Veiled Queen&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;There is not, in the whole of modern
+history, a more suggestive subject than that of the persistent
+attempts of every Western literature to versify the Psalms in its
+own idiom, and the uniform failure of these attempts.&nbsp; At
+the time that Sternhold was &lsquo;bringing&rsquo; the Psalms
+into &lsquo;fine Englysh meter&rsquo; for Henry the Eighth and
+Edward the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind
+of work for their own monarchs&mdash;notably Clement Marot for
+Francis the First.&nbsp; And it has been going on ever since,
+without a single protest of any importance having been entered
+against it.&nbsp; This is astonishing, for the Bible, even from
+the point of view of the literary critic, is a sacred book.&nbsp;
+Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come, and a
+literary journal may be its proper medium.</p>
+<p>A great living savant has characterized the Bible as &lsquo;a
+collection of the rude imaginings of Syria,&rsquo; &lsquo;the
+worn-out old bottle of Judaism into which the generous new wine
+of science is being poured.&rsquo;&nbsp; The great savant was
+angry when he said so.&nbsp; The &lsquo;new wine&rsquo; of
+science is a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the
+respect it gets from us; so do those who make it and serve it
+out; they have so much intelligence; they are so honest and so
+fearless.&nbsp; But whatever may become of their wine in a few
+years, when the wine-dealers shall have passed away, when the
+savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of Chald&aelig;a,&mdash;the
+&lsquo;old bottle&rsquo; is going to be older yet,&mdash;the
+Bible is going to be eternal.&nbsp; For that which decides the
+vitality of any book is precisely that which decides the value of
+any human soul&mdash;not the knowledge it contains, but simply
+the attitude it assumes <a name="page230"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 230</span>towards the universe, unseen as well
+as seen.&nbsp; The attitude of the Bible is just that which every
+soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always
+assume&mdash;that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as
+this&mdash;that of a noble humility before a God such as He
+&lsquo;in whose great Hand we stand.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is
+why&mdash;like Alexander&rsquo;s mirror&mdash;like that most
+precious &lsquo;Cup of Jemsh&icirc;d,&rsquo; imagined by the
+Persians&mdash;the Bible reflects to-day, and will reflect for
+ever, every wave of human emotion, every passing event of human
+life&mdash;reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great and
+simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was
+written.&nbsp; Coming from the Vernunft of Man, it goes straight
+to the Vernunft.&nbsp; This is the kind of literature that never
+does die: a fact which the world has discovered long ago.&nbsp;
+For the Bible is Europe&rsquo;s one book.&nbsp; And with regard
+to Asia, as far back as the time of Chrysostom it could have been
+read in languages Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian, Ethiopic,
+Scythian, and Samaritan; now it can be read in every language,
+and in almost every dialect, under the sun.</p>
+<p>And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the
+Psalms.&nbsp; Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is
+not wonderful; the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they
+can find it possible to sing so badly.&nbsp; It is not wonderful
+that the court of Francis I should yearn to sing Psalms; the
+wonderful thing is that they should find it in their hearts to
+sing Marot&rsquo;s Psalms when they might have sung
+David&rsquo;s&mdash;that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a
+fashionable jig, &lsquo;O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine
+indignation&rsquo;; and that Anthony, King of Navarre, could sing
+to the air of a dance of Poitou, &lsquo;Stand up, O Lord, to
+revenge my quarrel.&rsquo;&nbsp; For, although it is given to the
+very frogs, says Pascal, to <a name="page231"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 231</span>find music in their own croaking,
+the ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a
+peculiar convolution.</p>
+<p>In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad,
+from the English point of view; but then the English, having
+Hopkins in various incarnations, are fastidious.</p>
+<p>When Lord Macaulay&rsquo;s tiresome New Zealander has done
+contemplating the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the
+deserted British Museum to study us through our books&mdash;what
+volume can he take as the representative one&mdash;what book,
+above all others, can the ghostly librarian select to give him
+the truest, the profoundest insight into the character of the
+strange people who had made such a great figure in the
+earth?&nbsp; We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him
+the English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of
+the Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its
+most exalted and its most abject phases.&nbsp; That in the same
+volume can be found side by side the beauty and pathos of the
+English Litany, the grandeur of the English version of the Psalms
+and the effusions of Brady and Tate&mdash;masters of the art of
+sinking compared with whom Rous is an inspired bard&mdash;would
+be adequate evidence that the Church using it must be a British
+Church&mdash;that British, most British, must be the public
+tolerating it.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and
+Passion; by thy Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious
+Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost,
+God Lord, deliver us.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Among Western peoples there is but one that could have <a
+name="page232"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 232</span>uttered in
+such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest
+music are so mysteriously blended&mdash;blended so divinely that
+the man who can utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion
+deep enough to touch close upon the fount of tears must be
+differently constituted from some of us.&nbsp; Among Western
+peoples there is, we say, but one that could have done this; for
+as M. Taine has well said:&mdash;&lsquo;More than any race in
+Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and energy
+of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit.&nbsp; Enthusiasm is
+their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with
+admiration as their ancient deities inspired them with
+fury.&rsquo;&nbsp; And now listen to this:&mdash;</p>
+<p>When we, our wearied limbs to rest,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sat down by proud Euphrates&rsquo; stream,<br />
+We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And Zion was our mournful theme.</p>
+<p>Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could
+have thus degraded the words: &lsquo;By the rivers of Babylon,
+there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered
+Zion.&rsquo;&nbsp; For, to achieve such platitude there is
+necessary an element which can only be called the &lsquo;Hopkins
+element,&rsquo; an element which is quite an insular birthright
+of ours, a characteristic which came over with the &lsquo;White
+Horse,&rsquo;&mdash;that &lsquo;dull and greasy coarseness of
+taste&rsquo; which distinguishes the British mind from all
+others; that &lsquo;&auml;chtbrittische
+Beschr&auml;nktheit,&rsquo; which Heine speaks of in his tender
+way.&nbsp; The Scottish version is rough, but Brady and
+Tate&rsquo;s inanities are worse than Rous&rsquo;s roughness.</p>
+<p>Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one
+and the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence
+can it come?&nbsp; It is, indeed, <a name="page233"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 233</span>singular that no one has ever
+dreamed of taking the story of the English Prayer-book, with
+Brady and Tate at the end, and using it as a key to unlock that
+puzzle of puzzles which has set the Continental critics writing
+nonsense about us for generations:&mdash;&lsquo;What is it that
+makes the enormous, the fundamental, difference between English
+literature&mdash;and all other Western literatures&mdash;Teutonic
+no less than Latin or Slavonic?&rsquo;&nbsp; The simple truth of
+the matter is, that the British mind has always been bipartite as
+now&mdash;has always been, as now, half sublime and half homely
+to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired by
+David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk
+schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took
+such of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and
+doggerellized them.&nbsp; For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many
+and various incarnations, has been singing unctuously in these
+islands ever since the introduction of Christianity, and before;
+for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he is Anglo-Saxon deafness
+to music and blindness to beauty.&nbsp; When St. Augustine landed
+here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins, a heathen
+then, in possession of the soil.</p>
+<p>There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine
+says.&nbsp; The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which
+is indigenous, much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous
+too; but they have by nature none of the Hebraic style.&nbsp;
+But, somehow, here is the difference between us and the
+Continentals; that, though style is born of taste&mdash;though le
+style c&rsquo;est la race; and though the Anglo-Saxon started, as
+we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone; yet, just as instinct
+may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of many years&mdash;just
+as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows <a
+name="page234"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 234</span>not why,
+because his ancestors were taught to point before him&mdash;so
+may the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the
+soil be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand
+years.&nbsp; The result of all this is, that the English,
+notwithstanding their deficiency of artistic instinct and
+coarseness of taste, have the Great Style, not only in poetry,
+sometimes, but in prose sometimes when they write emotively, as
+we see in the English Prayer-book, in parts of Raleigh&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;History of the World,&rsquo; in Jeremy Taylor&rsquo;s
+sermons, in Hall&rsquo;s &lsquo;Contemplations,&rsquo; and other
+such books of the seventeenth century.</p>
+<p>The Great Style is far more easily recognized than
+defined.&nbsp; To define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn
+to real life.&nbsp; When we say of an individual in real life
+that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an
+impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as
+distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which
+we call manner.&nbsp; The difference is fundamental.&nbsp; It is
+the same in literature; style is unconscious power or
+grace&mdash;manner is conscious power or grace.&nbsp; But the
+Great Style, both in literature and in life, is unconscious power
+and unconscious grace in one.</p>
+<p>And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural
+expression of a national temper?&nbsp; Not to the Celt, we think,
+as Mr. Arnold does.&nbsp; Not, indeed, to those whose languages,
+complex of syntax and alive with self-conscious inflections,
+bespeak the scientific knowingness of the Aryan mind&mdash;not,
+certainly, to those who, though producing &AElig;schylus, turned
+into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians, but to the
+descendants of Shem,&mdash;the only gentleman among all the sons
+of Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the
+face of God and live, can see not much else.&nbsp; The Great <a
+name="page235"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 235</span>Style, in a
+word, is Semitic.&nbsp; It would be a mistake to call it
+Asiatic.&nbsp; For though two of its elements, unconsciousness
+and power, are, no doubt, plentiful enough in India, the element
+of grace is lacking, for the most part.&nbsp; The Vedic hymns are
+both nebulous and unemotive as compared with Semitic hymns, and,
+on the other hand, such a high reach of ethical writing as even
+that noble and well-known passage from Manu, beginning,
+&lsquo;Single is each man born into the world, single he
+dies,&rsquo; etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when
+compared with the ethical parts of Scripture.&nbsp; The Persians
+have the grace always, the power often, but the unconsciousness
+almost never.&nbsp; We might perhaps say that there were those in
+Egypt once who came near to the great ideal.&nbsp; That
+description of the abode of &lsquo;Nin-ki-gal,&rsquo; the Queen
+of Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British
+Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite.&nbsp;
+Conscious power and conscious grace are Hellenic, of
+course.&nbsp; That there is a deal of unconsciousness in Homer is
+true; but, put his elaborate comparisons by the side of the fiery
+metaphors of the sacred writers, and how artificial he
+seems.&nbsp; And note that, afterwards, when he who approached
+nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the Furies,
+Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the
+Nile.&nbsp; It is to the Latin races&mdash;some of
+them&mdash;that has filtered Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as
+in Dante, the Great Style has been occasionally caught, it comes
+not from the Hellenic fountain, but straight from the Hebrew.</p>
+<p>What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races
+have&mdash;unconsciousness; often unconscious power; mostly,
+however, unconscious brutalit&eacute;.&nbsp; Sublime as is the
+Northern mythology, it is vulgar too.&nbsp; The Hopkins
+element,&mdash;the dull and stupid homeliness,&mdash;the coarse
+<a name="page236"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+236</span>grotesque, mingle with and mar its finest
+effects.&nbsp; Over it all the atmosphere is that of
+pantomime&mdash;singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and
+Wagner&rsquo;s libretti.&nbsp; Even that great final conflict
+between gods and men and the swarming brood of evil on the plain
+of Wigrid, foretold by the V&ouml;lu-seeress, when from
+Y&ouml;tunland they come and storm the very gates of
+Asgard;&mdash;even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and
+vulgar picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an
+oyster, and digesting the universe to chaos.&nbsp; But, out of
+the twenty-three thousand and more verses into which the Bible
+has been divided, no one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great
+Style allows the stylist to touch upon any subject with no risk
+of defilement.&nbsp; This is why style in literature is
+virtue.&nbsp; Like royalty, the Great Style &lsquo;can do no
+wrong.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have
+by far the largest endowment.&nbsp; They wanted another element,
+in short, not the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater
+mistake than that of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on
+Teutonism and live; as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold&mdash;two of
+the finest and most delicate minds of modern times&mdash;can
+testify.</p>
+<p>But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long
+before the Bishops&rsquo; Bible or Coverdale&rsquo;s Bible; long
+before even Aldhelm&rsquo;s time&mdash;Hebraism had been flowing
+over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon mind.&nbsp; From the time when
+C&aelig;dmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep beneath the stars
+by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the Biblical story,
+Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic.&nbsp; Yet, in
+a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was
+steeped had been Hebraism at second hand&mdash;that of <a
+name="page237"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 237</span>the Vulgate
+mainly&mdash;till Tyndale&rsquo;s time, or rather till the
+present Authorized Version of the Bible appeared in 1611.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;There is no book,&rsquo; says Selden, &lsquo;so translated
+as the Bible for the purpose.&nbsp; If I translate a French book
+into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into
+French-English.&nbsp; &ldquo;Il fait froid,&rdquo; I say,
+&rsquo;tis cold, not it makes cold; but the Bible is rather
+translated into English words than into English phrase, The
+Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that language is
+kept.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal
+accuracy&mdash;importation of Hebraisms&mdash;was not of itself
+enough to produce a translation in the Great Style&mdash;a
+translation such as this, which, as Coleridge says, makes us
+think that &lsquo;the translators themselves were
+inspired.&rsquo;&nbsp; To reproduce the Great Style of the
+original in a Western idiom, the happiest combination of
+circumstances was necessary.&nbsp; The temper of the people
+receiving must, notwithstanding all differences of habitation and
+civilization, be elementally in harmony with that of the people
+giving; that is, it must be poetic rather than
+ratiocinative.&nbsp; Society must not be too complex&mdash;its
+tone must not be too knowing and self-glorifying.&nbsp; The
+accepted psychology of the time must not be the psychology of the
+scalpel&mdash;the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics of
+newspaper cynicism; above all, enthusiasm and vulgarity must not
+be considered synonymous terms.&nbsp; Briefly, the tone of the
+time must be free of the faintest suspicion of nineteenth century
+flavour.&nbsp; That this is the kind of national temper necessary
+to such a work might have been demonstrated by an argument a
+priori.&nbsp; It was the temper of the English nation when the
+Bible was translated.&nbsp; That noble heroism&mdash;born of
+faith in God and belief in the high duties of man&mdash;which we
+have lost for the hour&mdash;<a name="page238"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 238</span>was in the very atmosphere that hung
+over the island.&nbsp; And style in real life, which now, as a
+consequence of our loss, does not exist at all among Englishmen,
+and only among a very few Englishwomen&mdash;having given place
+in all classes to manner&mdash;flourished then in all its
+charm.&nbsp; And in literature it was the same: not even the
+euphuism imported from Spain could really destroy or even
+seriously damage the then national sense of style.</p>
+<p>Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation,
+what must that be?&nbsp; Evidently it must be some kind of form
+which can do all the high work that is generally left to metrical
+language, and yet must be free from any soup&ccedil;on of that
+&lsquo;artifice,&rsquo; in the &lsquo;abandonment&rsquo; of
+which, says an Arabian historian, &lsquo;true art alone
+lies.&rsquo;&nbsp; For, this is most noteworthy, that of
+literature as an art, the Semites show but small conception, even
+in Job.&nbsp; It was too sacred for that&mdash;drama and epic in
+the Aryan sense were alike unknown.</p>
+<p>But if the translation must not be metrical in the common
+acceptation of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not
+say logical prose; for all prose, however high may be its
+flights, however poetic and emotive, must always be logical
+underneath, must always be chained by a logical chain, and
+earth-bound like a captive balloon; just as poetry, on the other
+hand, however didactic and even ratiocinative it may become, must
+always be steeped in emotion.&nbsp; It must be neither verse nor
+prose, it seems.&nbsp; It must be a new movement
+altogether.&nbsp; The musical movement of the English Bible is a
+new movement; let us call it &lsquo;Bible Rhythm.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And the movement was devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of
+modern miracles.&nbsp; Thanks to Difficulty&mdash;thanks to the
+conflict between what Selden calls &lsquo;Hebrew phrase and
+English phrase,&rsquo; the translators fashioned, or rather, <a
+name="page239"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 239</span>Difficulty
+fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor wholly
+the other&mdash;a movement which, for music, for variety,
+splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of
+English poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of
+the modern world&mdash;a movement, indeed, which is a form of art
+of itself&mdash;but a form in which &lsquo;artifice&rsquo; is
+really &lsquo;abandoned&rsquo; at last.&nbsp; This rhythm it is
+to which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book,
+and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches
+perhaps being in the Psalms&mdash;this rhythm it is which the
+Hopkinses and Rouses have&mdash;improved!&nbsp; It would not be
+well to be too technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest
+literary importance just now, and it is necessary to explain
+clearly what we mean.</p>
+<p>Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of
+what is technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is
+expectation and the fulfilment of expectation.&nbsp; In rhymed
+verse this is obvious: having familiarized ourselves with the
+arrangement of the poet&rsquo;s rhymes, we take pleasure in
+expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to this
+arrangement.&nbsp; In blank verse the law of expectation is less
+apparent.&nbsp; Yet it is none the less operative.&nbsp; Having
+familiarized ourselves with the poet&rsquo;s rhythm, having found
+that iambic foot succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the
+iambic waves have begun to grow monotonous, variations
+occur&mdash;trochaic, anap&aelig;stic, dactylic&mdash;according
+to the law which governs the ear of this individual
+poet;&mdash;we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals
+these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are
+fulfilled.&nbsp; And our delight is augmented if also our
+expectations with regard to c&aelig;suric effects are realized in
+the same proportions.&nbsp; Having, for instance, learned, half
+unconsciously, that the poet has <a name="page240"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 240</span>an ear for a particular kind of
+pause; that he delights, let us say, to throw his pause after the
+third foot of the sequence,&mdash;we expect that, whatever may be
+the arrangement of the early pauses with regard to the initial
+foot of any sequence,&mdash;there must be, not far ahead, that
+climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses
+have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the
+reader shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future
+flights.&nbsp; And when this expectation of c&aelig;suric effects
+is thus gratified, or gratified in a more subtle way, by an
+arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which obviates the necessity
+of the too frequent recurrence of this final third-foot pause,
+the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result.&nbsp; In other
+words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from poetry
+is in the recognition of law.&nbsp; The more obvious and
+formulated is the law,&mdash;nay, the more arbitrary and
+Draconian,&mdash;the more pleasure it gives to the uncultivated
+ear.&nbsp; This is why uneducated people may delight in rhyme,
+and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is why the
+savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in such
+unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom.&nbsp; But, as the ear
+becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law
+should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law
+itself may become a tyranny and a burden.&nbsp; He who will read
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays chronologically, as far as that is
+practicable, from &lsquo;Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost&rsquo;
+to the &lsquo;Tempest,&rsquo; will have no difficulty in seeing
+precisely what we mean.&nbsp; In literature, as in social life,
+the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom
+that is lawful.&nbsp; Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are
+a recognized music apart from a recognized
+law&mdash;&lsquo;artifice&rsquo; so completely abandoned that we
+forget we are in the realm of art&mdash;pauses so divinely set
+that <a name="page241"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+241</span>they seem to be &lsquo;wood-notes wild,&rsquo; though
+all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious law
+too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties
+infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties
+that are unexpected.&nbsp; There is a metre, to be sure, but it
+is that of the &lsquo;moving music which is life&rsquo;; it is
+the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of him who
+speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the passions
+which are passing into the words.&nbsp; And if this is so in
+other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where
+&lsquo;the flaming steeds of song,&rsquo; though really kept
+strongly in hand, seem to run reinless as &lsquo;the wild horses
+of the wind&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page242"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+242</span>Chapter XVI<br />
+A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> reaching of a decision as to
+what article to select as typical of what I may call &lsquo;The
+Renascence of Wonder&rsquo; essays gave me so much trouble that
+when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an
+essay typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism dealing with
+what he calls &lsquo;the laws of cause and effect in literary
+art&rsquo; it naturally occurred to me to write to him asking for
+a suggestive hint or two.&nbsp; In response to my letter I got a
+thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection for a
+friend took entire precedence of his own work:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">My dear Mr.
+Douglas</span>,&mdash;The selections from my critiques must
+really be left entirely to yourself.&nbsp; They are to illustrate
+your own critical judgment upon my work, and not mine.&nbsp;
+Overwhelmed as I am with avocations which I daresay you little
+dream of, for me to plunge into the countless columns of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; in quest of articles of mine which
+I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden at the
+present moment.&nbsp; I can think of only one article which I
+should specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in
+part&mdash;not on account of any merit in it which I can recall,
+but because it was the means of bringing me into contact with one
+of the most delightful men and one of the most splendidly <a
+name="page243"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 243</span>equipped
+writers of our time, whose sudden death shocked and grieved me
+beyond measure.&nbsp; A few days after the article appeared, the
+then editor of the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; Mr. MacColl, the
+dear friend with whom I was associated for more than twenty
+years, showed me a letter that he had received from Traill.&nbsp;
+It was an extremely kind letter.&nbsp; Among the many generous
+things that Traill said was this&mdash;that it was just the kind
+of review article which makes the author regret that he had not
+seen it before his book appeared.&nbsp; I wrote to Traill in
+acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not until a good
+while after this that we met at the Incorporated Authors&rsquo;
+Society dinner.&nbsp; At the table where I was sitting, and
+immediately opposite me, sat a gentleman whose countenance,
+especially when it was illuminated by conversation with his
+friends, perfectly charmed me.&nbsp; Although there was not the
+smallest regularity in his features, the expression was so genial
+and so winsome that I had some difficulty in persuading myself
+that it was not a beautiful face after all, and his smile was
+really quite irresistible.&nbsp; The contrast between his black
+eyebrows and whiskers and the white hair upon his head gave him a
+peculiarly picturesque appearance.&nbsp; Another thing I noticed
+was a boyish kind of lisp, which somehow, I could not say why,
+gave to the man an added charm.&nbsp; I did not know it was
+Traill, but after the dinner was over, when I was saying to
+myself, &lsquo;That is a man I should like to know,&rsquo; a
+friend who sat next him&mdash;I forget who it was&mdash;brought
+him round to me and introduced him as &lsquo;Mr.
+Traill.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;You and I ought to know each
+other,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;for, besides having many tastes in
+common, we live near each other.&rsquo;&nbsp; And then I found
+that he lived near the &lsquo;Northumberland Arms,&rsquo; between
+<a name="page244"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 244</span>Putney
+and Barnes.&nbsp; I think that he must have seen how greatly I
+was drawn to him, for he called at The Pines in a few
+days&mdash;I think, indeed, it was the very next day&mdash;and
+then began a friendship the memory of which gives me intense
+pleasure, and yet pleasure not unmixed with pain, when I recall
+his comparatively early and sudden death.&nbsp; I used to go to
+his gatherings, and it was there that I first met several
+interesting men that I had not known before.&nbsp; One of them, I
+remember, was Mr. Sidney Low, then the editor of the &lsquo;St.
+James&rsquo;s Gazette.&rsquo;&nbsp; And I also used to meet there
+interesting men whom I had known before, such as the late Sir
+Edwin Arnold, whose &lsquo;Light of Asia,&rsquo; and other such
+works, I had reviewed in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I do not hesitate for a moment to say that Traill was a man of
+genius.&nbsp; Had he lived fifty years earlier, such a writer as
+he who wrote &lsquo;The New Lucian,&rsquo; &lsquo;Recaptured
+Rhymes,&rsquo; &lsquo;Saturday Songs,&rsquo; &lsquo;The
+Canaanitish Press&rsquo; and &lsquo;Israelitish Questions,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;the Life of Sterne,&rsquo; and the brilliant articles in
+the &lsquo;Saturday Review&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Pall Mall
+Gazette,&rsquo; would have made an unforgettable mark in
+literature.&nbsp; But there is no room for anybody now&mdash;no
+room for anybody but the very, very few.&nbsp; When he was about
+starting &lsquo;Literature,&rsquo; he wrote to me, and a
+gratifying letter it was.&nbsp; He said that, although he had no
+desire to wean me from the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; he
+should be delighted to receive anything from me when I chanced to
+be able to spare him something.&nbsp; It was always an aspiration
+of mine to send something to a paper edited by so important a
+literary figure&mdash;a paper, let me say, that had a finer,
+sweeter tone than any other paper of my time&mdash;I mean, that
+tone of fine geniality upon which I have often commented, that
+tone without which, &lsquo;there can be no true
+criticism.&rsquo;&nbsp; A certain <a name="page245"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 245</span>statesman of our own period, who had
+pursued literature with success, used to say (alluding to a paper
+of a very different kind, now dead), that the besetting sin of
+the literary class is that lack of gentlemanlike feeling one
+towards another which is to be seen in all the other educated
+classes.&nbsp; This might have been so then, but, through the
+influence mainly of &lsquo;Literature&rsquo; and H. D. Traill, it
+is not so now.&nbsp; Many people have speculated as to why a
+literary journal, edited by such a man, and borne into the
+literary arena on the doughty back of the &lsquo;Times,&rsquo;
+did not succeed.&nbsp; I have a theory of my own upon that
+subject.&nbsp; Although Traill&rsquo;s hands were so full of all
+kinds of journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is
+a mistake to suppose that his own journal was badly edited.&nbsp;
+It was well edited, and it had a splendid staff, but several
+things were against it.&nbsp; It confined itself to literature,
+and did not, as far as I remember, give its attention to much
+else.&nbsp; Its price was sixpence; but its chief cause of
+failure was what I may call its &lsquo;personal
+appearance.&rsquo;&nbsp; If personal appearance is an enormously
+powerful factor at the beginning of the great human struggle for
+life, it is at the first quite as important a factor in the life
+struggle of a newspaper or a magazine.&nbsp; When the
+&lsquo;Saturday Review&rsquo; was started, its personal
+appearance&mdash;something quite new then&mdash;did almost as
+much for it as the brilliant writing.&nbsp; It was the same with
+the &lsquo;Pall Mall Gazette&rsquo; when it started.&nbsp;
+Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a great deal in
+clothes.&nbsp; Now, as I told Traill when we were talking about
+this, &lsquo;Literature&rsquo; in appearance seemed an uninviting
+cross between the &lsquo;Law Times&rsquo; and &lsquo;The
+Lancet&rsquo;&mdash;it seemed difficult to connect the
+unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a <a
+name="page246"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+246</span>business-like looking sheet as that.&nbsp; Traill
+laughed, but ended by saying that he believed there was a great
+deal in that notion of mine.&nbsp; Some one was telling me the
+other day that Traill, who died only about four years ago, was
+beginning to be forgotten.&nbsp; I should be sorry indeed to
+think that.&nbsp; All that I can say is that for a book such as
+yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about
+Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea
+as any that Traill&rsquo;s own delightful whimsical imagination
+could have pictured.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s wishes, and I
+do this with the more alacrity because there is this connection
+between the essay on Sterne and the imaginative work&mdash;the
+theory of absolute humour exemplified in Mrs. Gudgeon is very
+brilliantly expounded in the article.&nbsp; It was a review of
+Traill&rsquo;s &lsquo;Sterne,&rsquo; in the &lsquo;English Men of
+Letters,&rsquo; and it appeared in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; of November 18, 1882.&nbsp; I will
+quote the greater part of it:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Contemporary humour, for the most part,
+even among cultivated writers, is in temper either cockney or
+Yankee, and both Sterne and Cervantes are necessarily more talked
+about than studied, while Addison as a humorist is not even
+talked about.&nbsp; In gauging the quality of poetry&mdash;in
+finding for any poet his proper place in the poetic
+heavens&mdash;there is always uncertainty and difficulty.&nbsp;
+With humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear
+steadily in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of
+incongruous relations, and that the quality of every man&rsquo;s
+humour depends upon the kind of incongruity which he recognizes
+and finds laughable.&nbsp; If, for instance, he shows himself to
+<a name="page247"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 247</span>have no
+sense of any incongruities deeper than those disclosed by the
+parodist and the punster, his relation to the real humourist and
+the real wit is that of a monkey to a man; for although the real
+humourist may descend to parody, and the real wit may descend to
+punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and the parody are charged
+with some deeper and richer intent.&nbsp; Again, if a man&rsquo;s
+sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is confined
+to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between
+individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is
+surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt&mdash;according, at
+least, to the general acceptation of that word, though a
+caricaturist according to a definition of humour and caricature
+which we once ventured upon in these columns; but his humour is
+jejune, and delightful to the Philistine only.&nbsp; If, like
+that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree) Fielding, Thackeray,
+and Dickens, a writer&rsquo;s sense of the incongruous is deeper
+than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill calls
+&lsquo;the irony of human intercourse,&rsquo; he is indeed a
+humourist, and in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist,
+yet not necessarily of the greatest; for just as the greatest
+poet must have a sense of the highest and deepest harmonies
+possible for the soul of man to apprehend, so the greatest
+humourist must have a sense of the highest and deepest
+incongruities possible.&nbsp; And it will be found that these
+harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very
+&lsquo;order of the universe&rsquo; itself and the mind of
+man.&nbsp; In certain temperaments the eternal incongruities
+between man&rsquo;s mind and the scheme of the universe produce,
+no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Novalis; but to other
+temperaments&mdash;to a Rabelais or Sterne, for
+instance&mdash;the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into
+disorder, turns <a name="page248"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+248</span>it into something like that boisterous joke which to
+most temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some
+&lsquo;paradis artificiel.&rsquo;&nbsp; Great as may be the
+humourist whose sense of irony is that of &lsquo;human
+intercourse,&rsquo; if he has no sense of this much deeper
+irony&mdash;the irony of man&rsquo;s intercourse with the
+universal harmony itself&mdash;he cannot be ranked with the very
+greatest.&nbsp; Of this irony in the order of things Aristophanes
+and Rabelais had an instinctive, while Richter had an
+intellectual enjoyment.&nbsp; Of Swift and Carlyle it might be
+said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible
+apprehension of it.&nbsp; And if we should find that this quality
+exists in &lsquo;Tristram Shandy,&rsquo; how high, then, must we
+not place Sterne!&nbsp; And if we should find that Cervantes
+deals with the &lsquo;irony of human intercourse&rsquo; merely,
+and that his humour is, with all its profundity, terrene, what
+right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne?&nbsp; Why is
+the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is
+based so melancholy?&nbsp; Because it only sees the farce from
+the human point of view.&nbsp; The sad smile of Cervantes is the
+tearful humour of a soul deeply conscious of man&rsquo;s
+ludicrous futility in his relations to his fellow-man.&nbsp; But
+while the futilities of &lsquo;Don Quixote&rsquo; are tragic
+because terrene, the futilities of &lsquo;Tristram Shandy&rsquo;
+are comic because they are derived from the order of
+things.&nbsp; It is the great humourist Circumstance who causes
+Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock at the most inopportune moment,
+and who, stooping down from above the constellations, interferes
+to flatten Tristram&rsquo;s nose.&nbsp; And if Circumstance
+proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end a
+benevolent king; and hence all is well.</p>
+<p>While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to
+gauge a humourist and find his proper place, it <a
+name="page249"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 249</span>is not easy
+to bring Sterne under a classification.&nbsp; In Sterne&rsquo;s
+writings every kind of humour is to be found, from a style of
+farce which even at Crazy Castle must have been pronounced too
+wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as Addison&rsquo;s, and
+as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare&rsquo;s.&nbsp; In loving
+sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is
+outdone by Sterne in his &lsquo;fat, foolish
+scullion.&rsquo;&nbsp; Lower than the Dogberry type there is a
+type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to whom the
+mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph.&nbsp; While
+the news of Bobby&rsquo;s death, announced by Obadiah in the
+kitchen, suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself
+that must follow such a sad calamity to the &lsquo;fat, foolish
+scullion,&rsquo; scrubbing her pans on the floor, it merely
+recalls the great triumphant fact of her own life, and
+consequently to the wail that &lsquo;Bobby is certainly
+dead&rsquo; her soul merely answers as she scrubs, &lsquo;So am
+not I.&rsquo;&nbsp; In four words that scullion lives for
+ever.</p>
+<p>Sterne&rsquo;s humour, in short, is Shakespearean and
+Rabelaisian, Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we
+find a place for such a Proteus?&nbsp; So great is the plasticity
+of genius, so readily at first does it answer to impressions from
+without, that in criticizing its work it is always necessary
+carefully to pierce through the method and seek the essential
+life by force of which methods can work.&nbsp; Sterne having, as
+a student of humourous literature, enjoyed the mirthful abandon
+of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of Cervantes, it was
+inevitable that his methods should oscillate between that of
+Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on the other, and
+that at first this would be so without Sterne&rsquo;s natural
+endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or
+Cervantic, that is to say, <a name="page250"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 250</span>either lyric or dramatic, either the
+humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic
+meditation.&nbsp; But the more deeply we pierce underneath his
+methods, the more certainly shall we find that he was by nature
+the very Proteus of humour which he pretended to be.&nbsp; And
+after all this is the important question as regards Sterne.&nbsp;
+Lamb&rsquo;s critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly seen than
+in that sentence where he speaks of his own &lsquo;self-pleasing
+quaintness.&rsquo;&nbsp; When any form of art departs in any way
+from symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask
+concerning it is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial
+and histrionic?&nbsp; That which pleases the producer may perhaps
+not please us; but if we feel that it does not really and truly
+please the artist himself, the artist becomes a mountebank, and
+we turn away in disgust.&nbsp; In the humourous portions of
+Sterne&rsquo;s work there is, probably, not a page, however
+nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and therefore,
+bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an
+offence. . . .</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Yorickism&rsquo; is, there is scarcely need to say, the
+very opposite of the humour of Swift.&nbsp; One recognizes that
+the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to love; the other
+recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to
+hate.&nbsp; One recognizes that among these absurd things there
+is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so lovable as a
+man; the other recognizes that there is nothing else so absurd
+and (because so absurd) so hateful as a man.&nbsp; The
+intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in the
+temperament&mdash;the temperament of Jaques and the temperament
+of Apemantus.&nbsp; And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is
+difficult to say which fate is more terrible, Swift&rsquo;s or
+Carlyle&rsquo;s&mdash;that of the man whose heart must needs <a
+name="page251"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 251</span>yearn
+towards a race which his piercing intellect bids him hate, or
+that of the man, religious, conscientious, and good, who would
+fain love his fellows and cannot.&nbsp; It is idle for men of
+this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick.&nbsp; It needs
+the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in a
+roar, or of him who, in the words of the &lsquo;cadet of the
+house of Keppoch,&rsquo; was &lsquo;sometimes called Tristram
+Shandy and sometimes Yorick, a very great favourite of the
+gentlemen.&rsquo;&nbsp; Sterne, like Jaques and Hamlet, deals
+with &lsquo;the irony of human intercourse,&rsquo; but what he
+specially recognizes is a deeper irony still&mdash;the irony of
+man&rsquo;s intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony
+of the intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the
+physical being&mdash;the irony, in short, of man&rsquo;s position
+amid these natural conditions of life and death.&nbsp; It is in
+the apprehension of this anomaly&mdash;a spiritual nature
+enclosed in a physical nature&mdash;that Sterne&rsquo;s strength
+lies.</p>
+<p>Man, the &lsquo;fool of nature,&rsquo; prouder than Lucifer
+himself, yet &lsquo;bounded in a nutshell,&rsquo; brother to the
+panniered donkey, and held of no more account by the winds and
+rains of heaven than the poor little &lsquo;beastie&rsquo; whose
+house is ruined by the ploughshare&mdash;here is, indeed, a
+creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at
+and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter!&nbsp;
+There is nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower
+animals, because they are in entire harmony with their natural
+surroundings; there is nothing more absurd in the existence and
+the natural functions of a horse or a cow than in the existence
+and the natural functions of the grass upon which they feed; but
+imagine a spiritual being so placed, so surrounded, and so
+functioned, and you get an absurdity compared with which all
+other absurdities are <a name="page252"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 252</span>non-existent, or, at least, are fit
+quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist.&nbsp; That
+Sterne&rsquo;s donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of
+certain natural functions on the part of his unconscious
+progenitors, that he should continue to hold his place by the
+exercise on his own part of certain other natural functions, is
+in no way absurd, and contains in it no material for humoristic
+treatment.&nbsp; To render him absurd you must bring him into
+relation with man; you must clap upon his back panniers of human
+devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human cook.&nbsp;
+Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is tried
+by human standards.&nbsp; But to Yorick it is not so much the
+donkey who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the
+panniers and cooked the macaroons.&nbsp; All other humour is thin
+compared with this.&nbsp; Besides, it never grows old.&nbsp; It
+is difficult, no doubt, to think that the humour of Cervantes
+will ever lose its freshness; but the kind of humour we have
+called Yorickism will be immortal, for no advance in human
+knowledge can dim its lustre.&nbsp; Certainly up to the present
+moment the anomaly of man&rsquo;s position upon the planet is not
+lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and
+development.&nbsp; On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted
+in speaking of Thoreau.&nbsp; If man was a strange and anomalous
+&lsquo;piece of work&rsquo; as Hamlet knew him under the old
+cosmogony, what a &lsquo;piece of work&rsquo; does he appear
+now!&nbsp; He has the knack of advancing and leaving the
+woodchucks behind, but how has he done it?&nbsp; By the fact of
+his being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding
+conditions.&nbsp; A contented conservatism is the primary
+instinct of the entire animal kingdom, and if any species should
+change, it is not (as Lamarck once supposed) from any
+&lsquo;inner yearning&rsquo; for progress, but <a
+name="page253"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 253</span>because it
+was pushed on by overmastering circumstances.&nbsp; An ungulate
+becomes the giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old
+condition and yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven
+from grass to leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck
+or starve.&nbsp; But man really has this yearning for progress,
+and, because he is out of harmony with everything, he advances
+till at last he turns all the other creatures into food or else
+into weight-carriers, and outstrips them so completely that he
+forgets he is one of them.&nbsp; If Uncle Toby&rsquo;s
+progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the fly
+that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to
+buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain
+Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing
+speech of the captain as he opens the window gains an added
+humour, for it is the fly that should patronize and take pity
+upon the man.</p>
+<p>And while Sterne&rsquo;s abiding sense of the struggle between
+man&rsquo;s spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical
+nature accounts for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour,
+it greatly accounts for his indecencies too.&nbsp; Sterne had
+that instinct for idealizing women, and the entire relations
+between the sexes which accompanies the poetic temperament.&nbsp;
+To such natures the spiritual side of sexual relations is ever
+present; and as a consequence of this the animal side never loses
+with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was enveloped in
+their boyish days.&nbsp; Not that we are going to justify
+Sterne&rsquo;s indecencies.&nbsp; Coleridge&rsquo;s remark that
+the pleasure Sterne got from his double entendre was akin to
+&lsquo;that trembling daring with which a child touches a hot
+teapot because it has been forbidden,&rsquo; partly explains, but
+it does not excuse, Sterne&rsquo;s transgressions <a
+name="page254"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+254</span>herein.&nbsp; The fact seems to be that if we divide
+love into the passion of love, the sentiment of love, and the
+appetite of love, and inquire which of these was really known to
+Sterne, we shall come to what will seem to most readers the
+paradoxical conclusion that it was the sentiment only.&nbsp;
+There is abundant proof of this.&nbsp; In the &lsquo;Letter to
+the Earl of &mdash;,&rsquo; printed by his daughter, after
+dilating upon the manner in which the writing of the
+&lsquo;Sentimental Journey&rsquo; has worn out both his spirits
+and body, he says: &lsquo;I might indeed solace myself with my
+wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been a
+sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the
+contrary.&nbsp; The world has imagined because I wrote
+&ldquo;Tristram Shandy&rdquo; that I was myself more Shandian
+than I really ever was.&rsquo;&nbsp; Upon this passage Mr. Traill
+has the pertinent remark: &lsquo;The connubial affections are
+here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to
+the sentimental emotions&mdash;as the lower to the higher.&nbsp;
+To indulge the former is to be &ldquo;Shandian,&rdquo; that is to
+say, coarse and carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in
+other words, to spend one&rsquo;s days in semi-erotic
+languishings over the whole female sex indiscriminately, is to
+show spirituality and taste.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, to men of this
+kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious
+double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more
+animal temperament.&nbsp; The incongruity between the ideal and
+the actual relations brings poignant distress at first, and
+afterwards a sense of irresistible absurdity.&nbsp; Originally
+the fascination of repulsion, it becomes the fascination of
+attraction, and it is not at all fanciful to say that in Uncle
+Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne (quite unconsciously to himself
+perhaps) realized to his own mind those two <a
+name="page255"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 255</span>opposite
+sides of man&rsquo;s nature whose conflict in some form or
+another was ever present to Sterne&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; And, as we
+say, it has a deep relation to the kind of humour with which
+Sterne was so richly endowed.&nbsp; After one of his most
+sentimental flights, wherein the spiritual side of man is
+absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a sudden revulsion
+(which at first was entirely natural, if even self-conscious
+afterwards).&nbsp; The incongruity of all this sentiment with
+man&rsquo;s actual condition as an animal strikes him with
+irresistible force, and he says to man, &lsquo;What right have
+you in that galley after all&mdash;you who came into the world in
+this extremely unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency
+of functions which are if possible more unspiritual and more
+absurd still?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with
+sexual matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but
+rather far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of
+this great and eternal incongruity of man&rsquo;s
+existence&mdash;the conflict of a spiritual nature and such
+aspirations as man&rsquo;s with conditions entirely
+physical.&nbsp; And perhaps the only truly philosophical
+definition of the word &lsquo;indecency&rsquo; would be this:
+&lsquo;A painful and shocking contrast of man&rsquo;s spiritual
+with his physical nature.&rsquo;&nbsp; When Hamlet, with his
+finger on Yorick&rsquo;s skull, declares that his &lsquo;gorge
+rises at it,&rsquo; and asks if Alexander&rsquo;s skull
+&lsquo;smelt so,&rsquo; he shocks us as deeply in a serious way
+as Sterne in his allusion to the winding up of the clock shocks
+us in a humourous way, and to express the sensation they each
+give there is, perhaps, no word but
+&lsquo;indecent.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the
+metaphysical meaning of humour.&nbsp; In order to show what are
+his opinions upon wit, I think I shall do well to turn from the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; articles, and to quote from <a
+name="page256"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 256</span>the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; a few sentences upon
+wit, and upon the distinction between comedy and farce.&nbsp; For
+the obvious reason that the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; articles
+are buried in oblivion, and the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia
+Britannica&rsquo; articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it
+is from the former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of
+the most important parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work are to
+be found in the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia
+Britannica.&rsquo;&nbsp; Perhaps, however, I had better introduce
+my citations by saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+connection with that work.</p>
+<p>The story of the way in which he came to write in the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia&rsquo; has been often told by Prof.
+Minto.&nbsp; At the time when the ninth edition was started, he
+and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and were
+seeing each other constantly.&nbsp; When Minto was writing his
+articles upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that
+Baynes would be delighted to get work from him.&nbsp; But at that
+time Mr. Watts-Dunton had got more critical work in hand than he
+wanted, and besides he had already a novel and a body of poetry
+ready for the press, and wished to confine his energies to
+creative work.&nbsp; Besides this, he felt, as he declared, that
+he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike
+pedestrian style of an encyclop&aelig;dia.&nbsp; But when the
+most important treatise in the literary department of the
+work&mdash;the treatise on Poetry&mdash;was wanted, a peculiar
+difficulty in selecting the writer was felt.&nbsp; The article in
+the previous edition had been written by David Macbeth Moir,
+famous under the name of &lsquo;Delta&rsquo; as the author of
+&lsquo;The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Moir&rsquo;s article was intelligent enough, but quite inadequate
+to such a work as the publishers of <a name="page257"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 257</span>the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia&rsquo;
+aspired to make.&nbsp; A history of Poetry was, of course, quite
+impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the
+principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as
+exemplified by the poetry of the great literatures.&nbsp; It was
+decided, according to Minto&rsquo;s account, that there were but
+three men, that is to say, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and
+Theodore Watts, who could produce this special kind of work, the
+other critics being entirely given up to the historic method of
+criticism.&nbsp; The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes went to
+London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and
+explaining exactly what was wanted.</p>
+<p>I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier
+choice.&nbsp; Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love&rsquo; in the &lsquo;Saturday Review&rsquo; has
+written very luminously upon this subject.&nbsp; He tells us
+that, wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant
+fragment, owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the
+space that could be given to it.&nbsp; The truth is that the
+essay is but the introduction to an exhaustive discussion of what
+the writer believes to be the most important event in the history
+of all poetry&mdash;the event discussed under the name of
+&lsquo;The Renascence of Wonder.&rsquo;&nbsp; The introduction to
+the third volume of the new edition of Chambers&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English Literature&rsquo; is but a
+bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s writings upon this
+subject.&nbsp; It has been said over and over again that since
+the best critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our
+literature to equal this treatise on Poetry.&nbsp; It has been
+exhaustively discussed in England, America, and on the Continent,
+especially in Germany, where it has been compared to the critical
+system of Goethe.&nbsp; Those who <a name="page258"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 258</span>have not read it will be surprised
+to hear that it is not confined to the formulating of
+generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent passages on
+human life and human conduct.</p>
+<p>It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist,
+Vanbrugh, that Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous
+distinction between comedy and farce:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;In order to find and fix Vanbrugh&rsquo;s
+place among English comic dramatists, an examination of the very
+basis of the comedy of repartee inaugurated by Etheredge would be
+necessary, and, of course, such an examination would be
+impossible here.&nbsp; It is chiefly as a humourist, however,
+that he demands attention.</p>
+<p>Given the humorous temperament&mdash;the temperament which
+impels a man to get his enjoyment by watching the harlequinade of
+life, and contrasting it with his own ideal standard of good
+sense, which the harlequinade seems to him to mock and
+challenge&mdash;given this temperament, then the quality of its
+humourous growth depends of course on the quality of the
+intellectual forces by means of which the temperament gains
+expression.&nbsp; Hence it is very likely that in original
+endowment of humour, as distinguished from wit, Vanbrugh was
+superior to Congreve.&nbsp; And this is saying a great deal: for,
+while Congreve&rsquo;s wit has always been made much of, it has,
+since Macaulay&rsquo;s time, been the fashion among critics to do
+less than justice to his humour&mdash;a humour which, in such
+scenes as that in &lsquo;Love for Love,&rsquo; where Sir Sampson
+Legend discourses upon the human appetites and functions, moves
+beyond the humour of convention and passes into natural
+humour.&nbsp; It is, however, in spontaneity, in a kind of
+lawless merriment, almost Aristophanic in its verve, that
+Vanbrugh&rsquo;s <a name="page259"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+259</span>humour seems so deep and so fine, seems indeed to
+spring from a fountain deeper and finer and rarer than
+Congreve&rsquo;s.&nbsp; A comedy of wit, like every other drama,
+is a story told by action and dialogue, but to tell a story
+lucidly and rapidly by means of repartee is exceedingly
+difficult, not but that it is easy enough to produce
+repartee.&nbsp; But in comic dialogue the difficulty is to move
+rapidly and yet keep up the brilliant ball-throwing demanded in
+this form; and without lucidity and rapidity no drama, whether of
+repartee or of character, can live.&nbsp; Etheredge, the father
+of the comedy of repartee, has at length had justice done to him
+by Mr. Gosse.&nbsp; Not only could Etheredge tell a story by
+means of repartee alone: he could produce a tableau too; so could
+Congreve, and so also could Vanbrugh; but often&mdash;far too
+often&mdash;Vanbrugh&rsquo;s tableau is reached, not by fair
+means, as in the tableau of Congreve, but by a surrendering of
+probability, by a sacrifice of artistic fusion, by an inartistic
+mingling of comedy and farce, such as Congreve never indulges
+in.&nbsp; Jeremy Collier was perfectly right, therefore, in his
+strictures upon the farcical improbabilities of the
+&lsquo;Relapse.&rsquo;&nbsp; So farcical indeed are the tableaux
+in that play that the broader portions of it were (as Mr.
+Swinburne discovered) adapted by Voltaire and acted at Sceaux as
+a farce.&nbsp; Had we space here to contrast the
+&lsquo;Relapse&rsquo; with the &lsquo;Way of the World,&rsquo; we
+should very likely come upon a distinction between comedy and
+farce such as has never yet been drawn.&nbsp; We should find that
+farce is not comedy with a broadened grin&mdash;Thalia with her
+girdle loose and run wild&mdash;as the critics seem to
+assume.&nbsp; We should find that the difference between the two
+is not one of degree at all, but rather one of kind, and that
+mere breadth of fun has nothing to do with the question.&nbsp; No
+doubt the fun of <a name="page260"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+260</span>comedy may be as broad as that of farce, as is shown
+indeed by the celebrated Dogberry scenes in &lsquo;Much Ado about
+Nothing&rsquo; and by the scene in &lsquo;Love for Love&rsquo;
+between Sir Sampson Legend and his son, alluded to above; but
+here, as in every other department of art, all depends upon the
+quality of the imaginative belief that the artist seeks to arrest
+and secure.&nbsp; Of comedy the breath of life is dramatic
+illusion.&nbsp; Of farce the breath of life is mock
+illusion.&nbsp; Comedy, whether broad or genteel, pretends that
+its mimicry is real.&nbsp; Farce, whether broad or genteel, makes
+no such pretence, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up
+between itself and the audience, says, &lsquo;My acting is all
+sham, and you know it.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, while Vanbrugh was apt
+too often to forget this the fundamental difference between
+comedy and farce, Congreve never forgot it, Wycherly
+rarely.&nbsp; Not that there should be in any literary form any
+arbitrary laws.&nbsp; There is no arbitrary law declaring that
+comedy shall not be mingled with farce, and yet the fact is that
+in vital drama they cannot be so mingled.&nbsp; The very laws of
+their existence are in conflict with each other, so much so that
+where one lives the other must die, as we see in the drama of our
+own day.&nbsp; The fact seems to be that probability of incident,
+logical sequence of cause and effect, are as necessary to comedy
+as they are to tragedy, while farce would stifle in such an
+air.&nbsp; Rather, it would be poisoned by it, just as comedy is
+poisoned by what farce flourishes on; that is to say,
+inconsequence of reasoning&mdash;topsy-turvy logic.&nbsp; Born in
+the fairy country of topsy-turvy, the logic of farce would be
+illogical if it were not upside-down.&nbsp; So with coincidence,
+with improbable accumulation of convenient events&mdash;farce can
+no more exist without these than comedy can exist with
+them.&nbsp; Hence we affirm that <a name="page261"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 261</span>Jeremy Collier&rsquo;s strictures on
+the farcical adulterations of the &lsquo;Relapse&rsquo; pierce
+more deeply into Vanbrugh&rsquo;s art than do the criticisms of
+Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt.&nbsp; In other words, perhaps the same
+lack of fusion which mars Vanbrugh&rsquo;s architectural ideas
+mars also his comedy.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Without for a moment wishing to institute comparisons between
+the merit of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s literary articles and the
+merit of other literary articles by other contemporary writers, I
+may at least say that between his articles and theirs the
+difference is not one of degree, it is one of kind.&nbsp; Theirs
+are compact, business-like compressions of facts admirably fitted
+for an Encyclop&aelig;dia.&nbsp; No attempt is made to formulate
+generalizations upon the principles of literary art, and this
+must be said in their praise&mdash;they are faultless as articles
+in a book of reference.&nbsp; But no student of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work who turns over the pages of an article
+in the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; can fail after
+reading a few sentences to recognize the author.&nbsp;
+Generalizations, hints of daring theories, novel and startling
+speculations, graze each other&rsquo;s heels, until one is
+dazzled by the display of intellectual brilliance.&nbsp; That his
+essays are out of place in an Encyclop&aelig;dia may be true, but
+they seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating
+idiosyncrasy upon their coldly impersonal environment.</p>
+<h2><a name="page262"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+262</span>Chapter XVII<br />
+&lsquo;THE LIFE POETIC&rsquo;</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p262b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"&lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;  (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)"
+title=
+"&lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;  (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)"
+src="images/p262s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>I have been allowed to enrich this volume with photographs of
+&lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; and of some of the exquisite works of art
+therein.&nbsp; But it is unfortunate for me that I am not allowed
+to touch upon what are the most important relations of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s life&mdash;important though so many of them
+are.&nbsp; I mean his intimacy with the poet whose name is now
+beyond doubt far above any other name in the contemporary world
+of letters.&nbsp; I do not sympathize with the
+hyper-sensitiveness of eminent men with regard to privacy.&nbsp;
+The inner chamber of what Rossetti calls the &lsquo;House of
+Life&rsquo; should be kept sacred.&nbsp; But Rossetti&rsquo;s own
+case shows how impossible it is in these days to keep those
+recesses inviolable.&nbsp; The fierce light that beats upon men
+of genius grows fiercer and fiercer every day, and it cannot be
+quenched.&nbsp; This was one of my arguments when I first
+answered Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s own objection to the appearance
+of this monograph.&nbsp; The times have changed since he was a
+young man.&nbsp; Then publicity was shunned like a plague by
+poets and by painters.&nbsp; If such men wish the light to be
+true as well as fierce, they must allow their friends to
+illuminate their &lsquo;House of Life&rsquo; by the lamp of
+truth.&nbsp; If Rossetti during his lifetime had allowed one of
+his friends who knew the secrets of his &lsquo;House of
+Life&rsquo; to write about him, we might have been spared those
+<a name="page263"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 263</span>canards
+about him and the wife he loved which were rife shortly after his
+death.&nbsp; Byron&rsquo;s reluctance to take payment for his
+poetry was not a more belated relic of an old quixotism than is
+this dying passion for privacy.&nbsp; Publicity may be an evil,
+but it is an inevitable evil, and great men must not let the
+wasps and the gadflies monopolize its uses.&nbsp; It may be a
+reminiscence of an older and a nobler social temper, the temper
+under the influence of which Rossetti in 1870 said that he felt
+abashed because a paragraph had appeared in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; announcing the fact that a book from
+him was forthcoming.&nbsp; But that temper has gone by for
+ever.&nbsp; We live now in very different times.&nbsp; Scores
+upon scores of unauthorized and absolutely false paragraphs about
+eminent men are published, especially about these two friends who
+have lived their poetic life together for more than a quarter of
+a century.&nbsp; Only the other day I saw in a newspaper an
+offensive descriptive caricature of Mr. Swinburne, of his dress,
+etc.&nbsp; It is interesting to recall the fact that mendacious
+journalism was the cause of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s very first
+contribution to the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; before he wrote
+any reviews at all.&nbsp; At that time the offenders seem to have
+been chiefly Americans.&nbsp; The article was not a review, but a
+letter signed &lsquo;Z,&rsquo; entitled &lsquo;The Art of
+Interviewing,&rsquo; and it appeared in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; of March 11, 1876.&nbsp; As it
+shows the great Swinburne myth in the making, I will reproduce
+this merry little skit:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Alas! there is none of us without
+his skeleton-closet,&rsquo; said a great writer to one who was
+congratulating him upon having reached the goal for which he had,
+from the first, set out.&nbsp; &lsquo;My skeleton bears the
+dreadful name of &ldquo;American Interviewer.&rdquo;&nbsp; Pity
+me!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Is he <a name="page264"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 264</span>an American with a diary in his
+pocket?&rsquo; was the terrified question always put by another
+man of genius, whenever you proposed introducing a stranger to
+him.&nbsp; But this was in those ingenuous Parker-Willisian days
+when the &lsquo;Interviewer&rsquo; merely invented the
+dialogue&mdash;not the entire dramatic action&mdash;not the
+interview itself.&nbsp; Primitive times! since when the
+&lsquo;Interviewer&rsquo; has developed indeed!&nbsp; His
+dramatic inspiration now is trammelled by none of those foolish
+and arbitrary conditions which&mdash;whether his scene of action
+was at the &lsquo;Blue Posts&rsquo; with Thackeray, or in the
+North with Scottish lords&mdash;vexed and bounded the noble soul
+of the great patriarch of the tribe.&nbsp; Uncribbed, uncabined,
+unconfined, the &lsquo;Interviewer&rsquo; now invents, not merely
+the dialogue, but the &lsquo;situation,&rsquo; the place, the
+time&mdash;the interview itself.&nbsp; Every dramatist has his
+favourite character&mdash;Sophocles had his; Shakspeare had his;
+Schiller had his; the &lsquo;Interviewer&rsquo; has his.&nbsp;
+Mr. Swinburne has, for the last two or three years,
+been&mdash;for some reason which it might not be difficult to
+explain&mdash;the &lsquo;Interviewer&rsquo;s&rsquo; special
+favourite.&nbsp; Moreover, the accounts of the interviews with
+him are always livelier than any others, inasmuch as they are
+accompanied by brilliant fancy-sketches of his personal
+appearance&mdash;sketches which, if they should not gratify him
+exactly, would at least astonish him; and it is surely something
+to be even astonished in these days.&nbsp; Some time ago, for
+instance, an American lady journalist, connected with a
+&lsquo;Western newspaper,&rsquo; made her appearance in London,
+and expressed many &lsquo;great desires,&rsquo; the greatest of
+all her &lsquo;desires&rsquo; being to know the author of
+&lsquo;Atalanta,&rsquo; or, if she could not know him, at least
+to &lsquo;see him.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The Fates, however, were not kind to the lady.&nbsp; The
+author of &lsquo;Atalanta&rsquo; had quitted London.&nbsp; She
+did <a name="page265"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 265</span>not
+see him, therefore&mdash;not with her bodily eyes could she see
+him.&nbsp; Yet this did not at all prevent her from
+&lsquo;interviewing&rsquo; him.&nbsp; Why should it?&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;soul hath eyes and ears&rsquo; as well as the
+body&mdash;especially if the soul is an American soul, with a
+mission to &lsquo;interview.&rsquo;&nbsp; There soon appeared in
+the lady&rsquo;s Western newspaper a graphic account of one of
+the most interesting interviews with this poet that has ever yet
+been recorded.&nbsp; Mr. Swinburne&mdash;though at the time in
+Scotland&mdash;&lsquo;called&rsquo; upon the lady at her rooms in
+London; but, notwithstanding this unexampled feat of courtesy, he
+seems to have found no favour in the lady&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; She
+&lsquo;misliked him for his complexion.&rsquo;&nbsp; Evidently it
+was nothing but good-breeding that prevented her from telling the
+bard, on the spot, that he was physically an unlovely bard.&nbsp;
+His manners, too, were but so-so; and the Western lady was
+shocked and disgusted, as well she might be.&nbsp; In the midst
+of his conversation, for example, he called out frantically for
+&lsquo;pen and ink.&rsquo;&nbsp; He had become suddenly and
+painfully &lsquo;afflated.&rsquo;&nbsp; When furnished with pen
+and ink he began furiously writing a poem, beating the table with
+his left hand and stamping the floor with both feet as he did
+so.&nbsp; Then, without saying a word, he put on his hat and
+rushed from the room like a madman!&nbsp; This account was copied
+into other newspapers and into the magazines.&nbsp; It is, in
+fact, a piece of genuine history now, and will form valuable
+material for some future biographer of the poet.&nbsp; The
+stubborn shapelessness of facts has always distressed the
+artistically-minded historian.&nbsp; But let the American
+&lsquo;Interviewer&rsquo; go on developing thus, and we may look
+for History&rsquo;s becoming far more artistic and symmetrical in
+future.&nbsp; The above is but one out of many instances of the
+art of interviewing.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page266"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 266</span>It is
+all very well to say that irresponsible statements of this kind
+are not in the true sense of the word believed by readers; they
+create an atmosphere of false mist which destroys altogether the
+picture of the poet&rsquo;s life which one would like to
+preserve.&nbsp; And I really think that it would have been better
+if I or some one else among the friends of the poets had been
+allowed to write more freely about the beautiful and intellectual
+life at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;&nbsp; But I am forbidden to do
+this, as the following passage in a letter which I have received
+from Mr. Watts-Dunton will show:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;I cannot have anything about our life at
+&lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; put into print, but I will grant you
+permission to give a few reproductions of the interesting works
+of art here, for many of them may have a legitimate interest for
+the public on account of their historic value, as having come to
+me from the magician of art, Rossetti.&nbsp; And I assure you
+that this is a concession which I have denied to very many
+applicants, both among friends and others.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p266b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Lacquer
+Cabinet"
+title=
+"A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Lacquer
+Cabinet"
+src="images/p266s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s allusion to the Rossetti mementoes
+requires a word of explanation.&nbsp; Rossetti, it seems, was
+very fond of surprising his friends by unexpected tokens of
+generosity.&nbsp; I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say that during
+the week when he was moving into &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; he
+spent as usual Wednesday night at 16 Cheyne Walk, and he and
+Rossetti sat talking into the small hours.&nbsp; Next morning
+after breakfast he strolled across to Whistler&rsquo;s house to
+have a talk with the ever-interesting painter, and this resulted
+in his getting home two hours later than usual.&nbsp; On reaching
+the new house he saw a waggon standing in <a
+name="page267"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 267</span>front of
+it.&nbsp; He did not understand this, for the furniture from the
+previous residence had been all removed.&nbsp; He went up to the
+waggon, and was surprised to find it full of furniture of a
+choice kind.&nbsp; But there was no need for him to give much
+time to an examination of the furniture, for he found he was
+familiar with every piece of it.&nbsp; It had come straight from
+Rossetti&rsquo;s house, having been secretly packed and sent off
+by Dunn on the previous day.&nbsp; Some of the choicest things at
+&lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; came in this way.&nbsp; Not a word had
+Rossetti said about this generous little trick on the night
+before.&nbsp; The superb Chinese cabinet, a photograph of which
+appears in this book, belonged to Rossetti.&nbsp; It seems that
+on a certain occasion Frederick Sandys, or some one else, told
+Rossetti that the clever but ne&rsquo;er-do-well artist, George
+Chapman, had bought of a sea-captain, trading in Chinese waters,
+a wonderful piece of lacquer work of the finest
+period&mdash;before the Manchu pig-tail time.&nbsp; The captain
+had bought it of a Frenchman who had aided in looting the
+Imperial Palace.&nbsp; Rossetti, of course, could not rest until
+he had seen it, and when he had seen it, he could not rest until
+he had bought it of Chapman; and it was taken across to 16 Cheyne
+Walk, where it was greatly admired.&nbsp; The captain had
+barbarously mutilated it at the top in order to make it fit in
+his cabin, and it remained in that condition for some
+years.&nbsp; Afterwards Rossetti gave it to Mr. Watts-Dunton, who
+got it restored and made up by the wonderful amateur carver, the
+late Mr. T. Keynes, who did the carving on the painted cabinet
+also photographed for this book.&nbsp; There is a long and
+interesting story in connection with this piece of Chinese
+lacquer, but I have no room to tell it here.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p268b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Summer at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;&mdash;I"
+title=
+"Summer at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;&mdash;I"
+src="images/p268s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>All I am allowed to say about the relations between <a
+name="page268"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 268</span>Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and Mr. Swinburne is that the friendship began in
+1872, that it soon developed into the closest intimacy, not only
+with the poet himself, but with all his family.&nbsp; In 1879 the
+two friends became house-mates at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; Putney
+Hill, and since then they have never been separated, for Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s visits to the Continent, notably those with
+the late Dr. Hake recorded in &lsquo;The New Day,&rsquo; took
+place just before this time.&nbsp; The two poets thenceforth
+lived together, worked together; saw their common friends
+together, and travelled together.&nbsp; In 1882, after the death
+of Rossetti they went to the Channel Islands, staying at St.
+Peter&rsquo;s Port, Guernsey, for some little time, and then at
+Petit Bot Bay.&nbsp; Their swims in this beautiful bay Mr.
+Watts-Dunton commemorated in two of the opening sonnets of
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">NATURE&rsquo;S FOUNTAIN
+OF YOUTH</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">(A MORNING
+SWIM OFF GUERNSEY WITH A FRIEND)</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As if the Spring&rsquo;s fresh groves should
+change and shake<br />
+To dark green woods of Orient terebinth,<br />
+Then break to bloom of England&rsquo;s hyacinth,<br />
+So &rsquo;neath us change the waves, rising to take<br />
+Each kiss of colour from each cloud and flake<br />
+Round many a rocky hall and labyrinth,<br />
+Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,<br />
+Show how the sea&rsquo;s fine rage dares make and break.<br />
+Young with the youth the sea&rsquo;s embrace can lend,<br />
+Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,<br />
+Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,<br />
+Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,<br />
+Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend<br />
+Over the magic wonders of the world</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page269"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 269</span>THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE&rsquo;S
+FRAGRANCY</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">(THE
+TIRING-ROOM IN THE ROCKS)</span></p>
+<p>These are the &lsquo;Coloured Caves&rsquo; the sea-maid
+built;<br />
+Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,<br />
+For she must fly at every tide&rsquo;s return,<br />
+And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.<br />
+Outside behold the bay, each headland gilt<br />
+With morning&rsquo;s gold; far off the foam-wreaths burn<br />
+Like fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearn<br />
+Up sand more soft than Avon&rsquo;s sacred silt.<br />
+And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,<br />
+From lips of may or rose or eglantine,<br />
+Comes with the language of a breath benign,<br />
+Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,<br />
+Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,<br />
+Like scent of sea-weed rich of morn and brine.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The two friends afterwards went to Sark.&nbsp; A curious
+incident occurred during their stay in the island.&nbsp; The two
+poet-swimmers received a bravado challenge from
+&lsquo;Orion&rsquo; Horne, who was also a famous swimmer, to swim
+with him round the whole island of Sark!&nbsp; I need hardly say
+that the absurd challenge was not accepted.</p>
+<p>During the cruise Mr. Swinburne conceived and afterwards wrote
+some glorious poetry.&nbsp; In the same year the two friends went
+to Paris, as I have already mentioned, to assist at the Jubilee
+of &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse.&rsquo;&nbsp; Since then their
+love of the English coasts and the waters which wash them, seems
+to have kept them in England.&nbsp; For two consecutive years
+they went to Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast, for bathing.&nbsp;
+It was there that Mr. Swinburne wrote some of his East Anglian
+poems, and it was there that Mr. Watts-Dunton conceived the East
+coast parts of &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was during one of
+these visits that Mr. Swinburne first made the acquaintance of
+Grant Allen, who had long been an intimate friend of <a
+name="page270"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 270</span>Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The two, indeed, were drawn together
+by the fact that they both enjoyed science as much as they
+enjoyed literature.&nbsp; It was a very interesting meeting, as
+Grant Allen had long been one of Swinburne&rsquo;s most ardent
+admirers, and his social charm, his intellectual sweep and
+brilliance, made a great impression on the poet.&nbsp; Since then
+their visits to the sea have been confined to parts of the
+English Channel, such as Eastbourne, where they were near
+neighbours of Rossetti&rsquo;s friends, Lord and Lady Mount
+Temple, between whom and Mr. Watts-Dunton there had been an
+affectionate intimacy for many years&mdash;but more notably
+Lancing, whither they went for three consecutive years.&nbsp; For
+several years they stayed during their holiday with Lady Mary
+Gordon, an aunt of Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s, at &lsquo;The
+Orchard,&rsquo; Niton Bay, Isle of Wight.&nbsp; During the hot
+summer of 1904 they were lucky enough to escape to Cromer, where
+the temperature was something like twenty degrees lower than that
+of London.&nbsp; A curious incident occurred during this visit to
+Cromer.&nbsp; One day Mr. Watts-Dunton took a walk with another
+friend to &lsquo;Poppy-land,&rsquo; where he and Mr. Swinburne
+had previously stayed, in order to see there again the landslips
+which he has so vividly described in &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+While they were walking from &lsquo;Poppyland&rsquo; to the old
+ruined churchyard called &lsquo;The Garden of Sleep,&rsquo; they
+sat down for some time in the shade of an empty hut near the
+cliff.&nbsp; Coming back Mr. Watts-Dunton said that the cliff
+there was very dangerous, and ought to be fenced off, as the
+fatal land-springs were beginning to show their work.&nbsp; Two
+or three weeks after this a portion of the cliff at that point,
+weighing many thousands of tons, fell into the sea, and the hut
+with it.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p270b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Chinese Divan
+described in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;"
+title=
+"A Corner in &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; showing the Chinese Divan
+described in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;"
+src="images/p270s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>A friendship so affectionate and so long as the friendship <a
+name="page271"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 271</span>between
+these two poets is perhaps without a parallel in
+literature.&nbsp; It has been frequently and beautifully
+commemorated.&nbsp; When Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s noble poem,
+&lsquo;By the North Sea,&rsquo; was published, it was prefaced by
+this sonnet:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">TO WALTER THEODORE
+WATTS</p>
+<p><span class="GutSmall">&lsquo;WE ARE WHAT SUNS AND WINDS AND
+WATERS MAKE US.&rsquo;</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: right">Landor.</p>
+<p>Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The spirit of man fulfilling&mdash;these create<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That joy wherewith man&rsquo;s life grown
+passionate<br />
+Gains heart to hear and sense to read and faith<br />
+To know the secret word our Mother saith<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Death as the shadow cast by life on fate,<br />
+Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.</p>
+<p>Brother, to whom our Mother, as to me,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Is dearer than all dreams of days undone,<br />
+This song I give you of the sovereign three<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That are, as life and sleep and death are, one:<br
+/>
+A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where nought of man&rsquo;s endures before the
+sun.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>1882 was a memorable year in the life of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; The two most important volumes of poetry
+published in that year were dedicated to him.&nbsp;
+Rossetti&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ballads and Sonnets,&rsquo; the book
+which contains the chief work of his life, bore the following
+inscription:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">TO</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THEODORE WATTS</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR
+ME,</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THESE FEW MORE PAGES</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.</span></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page272"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 272</span>A few
+weeks later Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s &lsquo;Tristram of
+Lyonesse,&rsquo; the volume which contains what I regard as his
+ripest and richest poetry, was thus inscribed:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">TO MY BEST FRIEND</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THEODORE WATTS</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">I DEDICATE IN THIS BOOK</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE BEST I HAVE TO GIVE HIM.</span></p>
+<p>Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That twice have made keen April&rsquo;s clarion
+sound<br />
+Since here we first together saw and heard<br />
+Spring&rsquo;s light reverberate and reiterate word<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shine forth and speak in season.&nbsp; Life stands
+crowned<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Here with the best one thing it ever found,<br />
+As of my soul&rsquo;s best birthdays dawns the third.</p>
+<p>There is a friend that as the wise man saith<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Hath time not shown, through days
+like waves at strife<br />
+This truth more sure than all things else but death,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; This pearl most perfect found in all the sea<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That washes toward your feet these
+waifs of life.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">The Pines</span>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>April</i>,
+1882.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But the finest of all these words of affection are perhaps
+those opening the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the magnificent
+Collected Edition of Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s poems issued by
+Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1904:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;To my best and dearest friend I dedicate
+the first collected edition of my poems, and to him I address
+what I have to say on the occasion.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Once also Mr. Watts-Dunton dedicated verses of his own to Mr.
+Swinburne, to wit, in 1897, when he published <a
+name="page273"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 273</span>that
+impassioned lyric in praise of a nobler and larger Imperialism,
+the &lsquo;Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater
+Britain&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;TO OUR GREAT
+CONTEMPORARY WRITER OF<br />
+PATRIOTIC POETRY,<br />
+ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.</p>
+<p>You and I are old enough to remember the time when, in the
+world of letters at least, patriotism was not so fashionable as
+it is now&mdash;when, indeed, love of England suggested
+Philistinism rather than &lsquo;sweetness and light.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Other people, such as Frenchmen, Italians, Irishmen, Hungarians,
+Poles, might give voice to a passionate love of the land of their
+birth, but not Englishmen.&nbsp; It was very curious, as I
+thought then, and as I think now.&nbsp; And at that period love
+of the Colonies was, if possible, even more out of fashion than
+was love of England; and this temper was not confined to the
+&lsquo;cultured&rsquo; class.&nbsp; It pervaded society and had
+an immense influence upon politics.&nbsp; On one side the
+Manchester school, religiously hoping that if the Colonies could
+be insulted so effectually that they must needs (unless they
+abandoned all self-respect) &lsquo;set up for themselves,&rsquo;
+the same enormous spurt would be given to British trade which
+occurred after the birth of the United States, bade the Colonies
+&lsquo;cut the painter.&rsquo;&nbsp; On the other hand the old
+Tories and Whigs, with a few noble exceptions, having never
+really abandoned the old traditions respecting the unimportance
+of all matters outside the parochial circle of European
+diplomacy, scarcely knew where the Colonies were situated on the
+map.</p>
+<p>There was, however, in these islands one person who saw as
+clearly then as all see now the infinite importance of the
+expansion of England to the true progress of <a
+name="page274"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+274</span>mankind&mdash;the Great Lady whose praises in this
+regard I have presumed to sing in the opening stanza of these
+verses.</p>
+<p>I may be wrong, but I, who am, as you know, no courtier,
+believe from the bottom of my heart that without the influence of
+the Queen this expansion would have been seriously delayed.&nbsp;
+Directly and indirectly her influence must needs be enormous,
+and, as regards this matter, it has always been
+exercised&mdash;energetically and even eagerly exercised&mdash;in
+one way.&nbsp; This being my view, I have for years been urging
+more than one friend clothed with an authority such as I do not
+possess to bring the subject prominently before the people of
+England at a time when England&rsquo;s expansion is a phrase in
+everybody&rsquo;s mouth.&nbsp; I have not succeeded.&nbsp; Let
+this be my apology for undertaking the task myself and for
+inscribing to you, as well as to the men of Greater Britain,
+these lines.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p274b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Summer at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;&mdash;II"
+title=
+"Summer at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;&mdash;II"
+src="images/p274s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>I feel that it is a great privilege to be able to present to
+my readers beautiful photogravures and photographs of interiors
+and pictures and works of art at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Many of the pictures and other works of art at &lsquo;The
+Pines&rsquo; are mementoes of a most interesting kind.</p>
+<p>Among these is the superb portrait of Madox Brown, at this
+moment hanging in the Bradford Exhibition.&nbsp; Madox Brown
+painted it for the owner.&nbsp; An interesting story is connected
+with it.&nbsp; One day, not long after Mr. Watts-Dunton had
+become intimate with Madox Brown, the artist told him he
+specially wanted his boy Nolly to read to him a story that he had
+been writing, and asked him to meet the boy at dinner.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nolly been writing a story!&rsquo; exclaimed Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.</p>
+<p><a name="page275"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+275</span>&lsquo;I understand your smile,&rsquo; said Madox
+Brown; &lsquo;but you will find it better than you
+think.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>At this time Oliver Madox Brown seemed a loose-limbed
+hobbledehoy, young enough to be at school.&nbsp; After dinner
+Oliver began to read the opening chapters of the story in a not
+very impressive way, and Mr. Watts-Dunton suggested that he
+should take it home and read it at his leisure.&nbsp; This was
+agreed to.&nbsp; Pressure of affairs prevented him from taking it
+up for some time.&nbsp; At last he did take it up, but he had
+scarcely read a dozen pages when he was called away, and he asked
+a member of his family to gather up the pages from the sofa and
+put them into an escritoire.&nbsp; On his return home at a very
+late hour he found the lady intently reading the manuscript, and
+she declared that she could not go to bed till she had finished
+it.</p>
+<p>On the next day Mr. Watts-Dunton again took up the manuscript,
+and was held spellbound by it.&nbsp; It was a story of passion,
+of intense love, and intense hate, told with a crude power that
+was irresistible.</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton knew Smith Williams (the reader of Smith,
+Elder &amp; Co.), whose name is associated with &lsquo;Jane
+Eyre.&rsquo;&nbsp; He showed it to Williams, who was greatly
+struck by it, but pointed out that it terminated in a violent
+scene which the novel-reading public of that time would not like,
+and asked for a concluding scene less daring.&nbsp; The ending
+was modified, and the story, when it appeared, attracted very
+great attention.&nbsp; Madox Brown was so grateful to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton for his services in the matter that he insisted on
+expressing his gratitude in some tangible form.&nbsp; Miss Lucy
+Madox Brown (afterwards Mrs. W. M. Rossetti) was consulted, and
+at once suggested a portrait of the painter, painted by
+himself.&nbsp; This was done, and the result was the masterpiece
+which <a name="page276"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+276</span>has been so often exhibited.&nbsp; From that moment
+Oliver Madox Brown took his place in the literary world of his
+time.&nbsp; The mention of Oliver Madox Brown will remind the
+older generation of his friendship with Philip Bourke Marston,
+the blind poet, one of the most pathetic chapters in literary
+annals.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p276b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"&lsquo;Picture for a Story.&rsquo;  (Face and Instrument
+designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)"
+title=
+"&lsquo;Picture for a Story.&rsquo;  (Face and Instrument
+designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)"
+src="images/p276s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Although Rossetti never fulfilled his intention of
+illustrating what he called &lsquo;Watts&rsquo;s magnificent star
+sonnet,&rsquo; he began what would have been a superb picture
+illustrating Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sonnet, &lsquo;The Spirit
+of the Rainbow.&rsquo;&nbsp; He finished a large charcoal drawing
+of it, which is thus described by Mr. William Sharp in his book,
+&lsquo;Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a Record and a
+Study&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It represents a female figure standing in a
+gauzy circle composed of a rainbow, and on the frame is written
+the following sonnet (the poem in question by Mr.
+Watts-Dunton):</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">THE WOOD-HAUNTER&rsquo;S DREAM</p>
+<p>The wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;Though meads are sweet when
+flowers at morn uncurl,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And woods are sweet with
+nightingale and merle,<br />
+Where are the dreams that flush&rsquo;d thy childish bed?<br />
+The Spirit of the Rainbow thou would&rsquo;st wed!&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I rose, I found her&mdash;found a rain-drenched
+girl<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearl<br
+/>
+Coloured the rain above her golden head.</p>
+<p>But when I stood by that sweet vision&rsquo;s side<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I saw no more the Rainbow&rsquo;s lovely stains;<br
+/>
+To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The sun showed naught but dripping woods and
+plains:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;God gives the world the Rainbow, her
+the rains,&rsquo;<br />
+The wood-sprite laugh&rsquo;d, &lsquo;Our seeker finds a
+bride!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page277"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+277</span>Rossetti meant to have completed the design with the
+&lsquo;woods and plains&rsquo; seen in perspective through the
+arch; and the composition has an additional and special interest
+because it is the artist&rsquo;s only successful attempt at the
+wholly nude&mdash;the &lsquo;Spirit&rsquo; being extremely
+graceful in poise and outline.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>I am able to give a reproduction of another of
+Rossetti&rsquo;s beautiful studies which has never been
+published, but which has been very much talked about.&nbsp; Many
+who have seen it at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; agree with the late
+Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest
+of all his female faces.&nbsp; It is thus described by Mr.
+William Sharp: &ldquo;The drawing, which, for the sake of a name,
+I will call &lsquo;Forced Music,&rsquo; represents a nude
+half-figure of a girl playing on a medi&aelig;val stringed
+instrument elaborately ornamented.&nbsp; The face is of a type
+unlike that of any other of the artist&rsquo;s subjects, and
+extraordinarily beautiful.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of
+the girl in the version of the picture here reproduced, are by
+Dunn.&nbsp; These two exquisite drawings were made from the same
+girl, who never sat for any other pictures.&nbsp; Her face has
+been described as being unlike that of any other of
+Rossetti&rsquo;s models and yet combining the charm of them
+all.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from
+giving any personal description of him.&nbsp; For my part I do
+not sympathize with this extreme sensitiveness and dislike to
+having one&rsquo;s personal characteristics described <a
+name="page278"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 278</span>in
+print.&nbsp; What is there so dreadful or so sacred in mere
+print?&nbsp; The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I
+think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed
+matter there was &lsquo;a great gulf fixed.&rsquo;&nbsp; Both Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr. Swinburne must be aware that as
+soon as they have left any gathering of friends or strangers,
+remarks&mdash;delicate enough, no doubt&mdash;are made about
+them, as they are made about every other person who is talked
+about in ever so small a degree.&nbsp; Not so very long ago I
+remained in a room after Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it.&nbsp;
+Straightway there were the freest remarks about him, not in the
+least unkind, but free.&nbsp; Some did not expect to see so dark
+a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him
+to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her
+reminiscences, described his dark-brown eyes as
+&lsquo;green&rsquo;&mdash;through a printer&rsquo;s error, no
+doubt.&nbsp; Some then began to contrast his appearance with that
+of his absent friend, Mr. Swinburne&mdash;and so on, and so
+on.&nbsp; Now, what is the difference between being thus
+discussed in print and in conversation?&nbsp; Merely that the
+printed report reaches a wider&mdash;a little
+wider&mdash;audience.&nbsp; That is all.&nbsp; I do not think it
+is an unfair evasion of his prohibition to reproduce one of the
+verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in the papers.&nbsp;
+Some energetic gentleman&mdash;possibly some one living in the
+neighbourhood&mdash;took the following &lsquo;Kodak&rsquo; of
+him.&nbsp; It appeared in &lsquo;M.A.P.&rsquo; and it is really
+as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could be painted.&nbsp;
+In years to come, when he and I and the &lsquo;Kodaker&rsquo; are
+dead, it may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I
+have written about him:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Every, or nearly every, morning, as the
+first glimmer <a name="page279"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+279</span>of dawn lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon
+Common a man, whose skin has been tanned by sun and wind to the
+rich brown of the gypsies he loves so well; his forehead is
+round, and fairly high; his brown eyes and the brow above them
+give his expression a piercing appearance.&nbsp; For the rest,
+his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and thick
+moustache are partially shot with grey.&nbsp; But he looks not a
+day over forty-five.&nbsp; Generally he carries a book.&nbsp;
+Often, however, he turns from it to watch the birds and the
+rabbits.&nbsp; For&mdash;it will be news to lie-abeds of the
+district&mdash;Wimbledon Common is lively with rabbits, revelling
+in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere the rush for the
+morning train begins, will all have vanished until the moon rises
+again.&nbsp; To him, morning, although he has seen more sunrises
+than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious
+pageant.&nbsp; This usually solitary figure is that of Mr.
+Theodore Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the
+famous poet, novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health
+and vigour.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their
+visits to the sea-side.&nbsp; One place of retreat used to be the
+residence of the late Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men
+were down, or one of his country places, such as Boar&rsquo;s
+Hill.</p>
+<p>I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton
+talk about the famous Master of Balliol.&nbsp; I have heard Mr.
+Swinburne recall the great admiration which Jowett used to
+express for Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s intellectual powers and
+various accomplishments.&nbsp; There was no one, I have heard Mr.
+Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem.&nbsp; That air
+of the college don, which has been described by certain of
+Jowett&rsquo;s friends, <a name="page280"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 280</span>left the Master entirely when he was
+talking to Mr. Watts-Dunton.</p>
+<p>Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s life
+were these visits with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett&rsquo;s house,
+where he had the opportunity of meeting some of the most
+prominent men of the time.&nbsp; He has described the Balliol
+dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to
+them.&nbsp; I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of
+Jowett which appeared in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; of
+December 22, 1894.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It may seem difficult to imagine many
+points of sympathy between the poet of &lsquo;Atalanta&rsquo; and
+the student of Plato and translator of Thucydides; and yet the
+two were bound to each other by ties of no common strength.&nbsp;
+They took expeditions into the country together, and Mr.
+Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at
+Jowett&rsquo;s quiet autumnal retreat at Boar&rsquo;s Hill.&nbsp;
+The Master of Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of
+drawing to himself the admiration of men of poetic genius.&nbsp;
+To say which poet admired and loved him most
+deeply&mdash;Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr.
+Swinburne&mdash;would be difficult.&nbsp; He seemed to join their
+hands all round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not
+the result of the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part
+of Jowett.&nbsp; He was always quite as frank in telling a poet
+what he disliked in his verses as in telling him what he
+liked.&nbsp; And although the poets of our own epoch are,
+perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times past, and are
+as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after all, in
+virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are poets,
+and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to <a
+name="page281"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+281</span>straightforward men like Jowett.&nbsp; That
+Jowett&rsquo;s judgment in artistic matters, and especially in
+poetry, was born&eacute; no one knew better than himself, and he
+had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical subjects he
+must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and this alone
+gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would
+otherwise have been allowed to him.&nbsp; For, notwithstanding
+the Oxford epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no
+man could be more modest than he upon subjects of which he had
+only the ordinary knowledge.&nbsp; He was fond of quoting
+Hallam&rsquo;s words that without an exhaustive knowledge of
+details there can be no accurate induction; and where he saw that
+his interlocutor really had special knowledge, he was singularly
+diffident about expressing his opinion.&nbsp; They are not so far
+wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to secure the
+loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the Victorian
+epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a great and
+a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble and
+most truly lovable.&nbsp; The kind of restraint in social
+intercourse resulting from what has been called his taciturnity
+passed so soon as his interlocutor realized (which he very
+quickly did) that Jowett&rsquo;s taciturnity, or rather his lack
+of volubility, arose from the peculiarly honest nature of one who
+had no idea of talking for talking&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; If a
+proper and right response to a friend&rsquo;s remark chanced to
+come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to deliver
+it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to be
+adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of
+keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the
+shallow or uneducated man.&nbsp; It is, however, extremely
+difficult to write reminiscences of men so taciturn as
+Jowett.&nbsp; In <a name="page282"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+282</span>order to bring out one of Jowett&rsquo;s pithy sayings,
+the interlocutor who would record it has also to record the words
+of his own which awoke the saying, and then it is almost
+impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were
+the visits that the two friends used to pay to Jowett&rsquo;s
+rural retreat at Boar&rsquo;s Hill, about three miles from
+Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the riches of the
+dramatic room in the Bodleian.&nbsp; The two poets used to spend
+the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with
+the Master to Boar&rsquo;s Hill.&nbsp; Every reader of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry will remember the following
+sonnets:&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR&rsquo;S
+HILL<br />
+To A. C. S.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">I</p>
+<blockquote><p>One after one they go; and glade and heath,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They made so dear, are haunted by the hours<br />
+Once musical of those who sleep beneath;<br />
+One after one does Sorrow&rsquo;s every wreath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And Love and Memory from each loss of ours<br />
+Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.</p>
+<p>Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield<br />
+The friend with whom we walk through mead and field<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To-day as on that day when last we parted,<br />
+Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?<br />
+Love shapes a presence out of Memory&rsquo;s dream,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">II</p>
+<p>Can he be dead?&nbsp; We walk through flowery ways<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From Boar&rsquo;s Hill down to Oxford, fain to
+know<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page283"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+283</span>What nugget-gold, in drift of Time&rsquo;s long
+flow,<br />
+The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;<br />
+He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Still talks of Plato while the scene below<br />
+Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.</p>
+<p>Can he be dead?&nbsp; He shares our homeward walk,<br />
+And by the river you arrest the talk<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To see the sun transfigure ere he sets<br />
+The boatmen&rsquo;s children shining in the wherry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,<br />
+Making the clumsy craft an angel&rsquo;s ferry.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">III</p>
+<p>The river crossed, we walk &rsquo;neath glowing skies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through grass where cattle feed or stand and
+stare<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With burnished coats, glassing the coloured
+air&mdash;<br />
+Fading as colour after colour dies:<br />
+We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We win the scholar&rsquo;s nest&mdash;his simple
+fare<br />
+Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.</p>
+<p>Can he be dead?&nbsp; His heart was drawn to you.<br />
+Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The poet&rsquo;s heart of gold that gives the
+spell!<br />
+Can he be dead?&nbsp; Your heart being drawn to him,<br />
+How shall ev&rsquo;n Death make that dear presence dim<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For you who loved him&mdash;us who loved him
+well?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton
+has always loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill.&nbsp; Not the
+least interesting among the beautiful friendships between Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his illustrious contemporaries is that between
+himself and Mr. George Meredith.&nbsp; Mr. William Sharp can
+speak with authority on this subject, being himself the intimate
+friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; <a name="page284"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 284</span>Speaking of Swinburne&rsquo;s
+championship, in the &lsquo;Spectator,&rsquo; of Meredith&rsquo;s
+first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the &lsquo;Pall
+Mall Magazine,&rsquo; of December 1901, says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Among those who read and considered&rdquo;
+[Meredith&rsquo;s work] &ldquo;was another young poet, who had,
+indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the most promising
+of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . .&nbsp; If the
+letter signed &lsquo;A. C. Swinburne&rsquo; had not appeared,
+another signed &lsquo;Theodore Watts&rsquo; would have been
+published, to the like effect.&nbsp; It was not long before the
+logic of events was to bring George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne,
+and Theodore Watts into personal communion.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet
+was the article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; on &lsquo;Poems and Lyrics of the
+Joy of Earth.&rsquo;&nbsp; After this appeared articles
+appreciative of Meredith&rsquo;s prose fiction by W. E. Henley
+and others.&nbsp; But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who led the
+way.&nbsp; The most touching of all the testimonies of love and
+admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr Watts-Dunton,
+or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed
+to him on his seventy-fourth birthday.&nbsp; It appeared in the
+&lsquo;Saturday Review&rsquo; of February 15, 1902:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">TO GEORGE MEREDITH<br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">(ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH
+BIRTHDAY)</span></p>
+<p>This time, dear friend&mdash;this time my birthday greeting<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Comes heavy of funeral tears&mdash;I think of
+you,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And say, &lsquo;&rsquo;Tis evening with
+him&mdash;that is true&mdash;<br />
+But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;<br />
+Still he is spared&mdash;while Spring and Winter, meeting,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Clasp hands around the roots &rsquo;neath frozen
+dew&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To see the &lsquo;Joy of Earth&rsquo; break forth
+anew,<br />
+And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page285"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+285</span>Love&rsquo;s remnant melts and melts; but, if our
+days<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Are swifter than a weaver&rsquo;s shuttle, still,<br
+/>
+Still Winter has a sun&mdash;a sun whose rays<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,<br />
+And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The allusion to &lsquo;funeral tears&rsquo; was caused by one
+of the greatest bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained
+in recent years, namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he
+wrote for the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have not the
+honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often heard Mr.
+Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration the
+fine charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought
+and style of his conversation.</p>
+<p>But the most memorable friendship that during their joint
+occupancy of &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was
+that with Tennyson.</p>
+<p>I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the
+subject of Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain
+incongruities between the external facets of Tennyson&rsquo;s
+character and the &lsquo;abysmal deeps&rsquo; of his personality,
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet&rsquo;s son, is the only man
+living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the
+great poet.&nbsp; Not only is he himself a poet who must be
+placed among his contemporaries nearest to his more illustrious
+friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Tennyson from their
+first meeting there was an especial sympathy.&nbsp; So long ago
+as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his seventy-first
+birthday.&nbsp; It attracted much attention, and although it was
+not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it,
+as well he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet
+could pay to another:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page286"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+286</span><span class="smcap">To Alfred Tennyson, on his
+publishing, in his seventy-first year, the most richly various
+volume of English verse that has appeared in his own
+century</span>.</p>
+<p>Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose magic waters to a flood expand,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,<br />
+The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.<br />
+From honeyed flowers,&mdash;from balm of zephyr-wings,&mdash;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From fiery blood of gems, <a
+name="citation286"></a><a href="#footnote286"
+class="citation">[286]</a> through all the land,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The river draws;&mdash;then, in one rainbow-band,<br
+/>
+Ten leagues of nectar o&rsquo;er the ocean flings.</p>
+<p>Rich with the riches of a poet&rsquo;s years,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Stained in all colours of Man&rsquo;s destiny,<br />
+So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The misty main, and, taking now the sea,<br />
+Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The ashen billows of Eternity.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the
+Laureate at a garden party, and they fraternized at once.&nbsp;
+Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open invitation to Aldworth and
+Farringford whenever he could go, and this invitation came after
+his very first stay at Aldworth.&nbsp; One point in which he does
+not agree with Coleridge (in the &lsquo;Table Talk&rsquo;) or
+with Mr. Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson&rsquo;s ear was
+defective at the very first.&nbsp; He contends that if Tennyson
+in his earlier poems seemed to show a defective ear, it was
+always when in the great struggle between the demands of mere
+metrical music and those of the other great requisites of poetry,
+thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best
+occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield.&nbsp;
+As an illustration of Tennyson&rsquo;s sensibility to the most <a
+name="page287"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 287</span>delicate
+nuances of metrical music, I remember at one of those charming
+&lsquo;symposia&rsquo; at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; hearing Mr.
+Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English poet who gave
+the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of
+Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he
+gave of this.&nbsp; It referred to the two sonnets upon
+&lsquo;The Omnipotence of Love&rsquo; in the universe which I
+have always considered to be the keynote of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;The Coming of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; These sonnets
+appeared in an article called &lsquo;The New Hero&rsquo; in the
+&lsquo;English Illustrated Magazine&rsquo; in 1883.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the
+article reached him.&nbsp; The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has often averred, has so much literary insight that
+if he had not been the son of the greatest poet of his time, he
+would himself have taken a high position in literature) read out
+in one of the little Aldworth bowers to his father and to Miss
+Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets.&nbsp; Tennyson, who was a
+severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in
+criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in
+one of the lines of one of the sonnets which he must
+challenge.&nbsp; The line was this:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering
+trees.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially
+praised by two other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William
+Morris, to whom the sonnet had been read in manuscript.&nbsp;
+Tennyson&rsquo;s criticism was that there were too many sibilants
+in the line, and that although, other things being equal,
+&lsquo;scents&rsquo; might be more accurate than
+&lsquo;scent,&rsquo; this was a case where the claims of music
+ought to be dominant over other claims.&nbsp; The present Lord
+Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they <a
+name="page288"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 288</span>were right,
+and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting
+&lsquo;scent&rsquo; in place of &lsquo;scents.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson&rsquo;s
+sensibility to criticism was the result, not of imperious
+egotism, but of a kind of morbid modesty.&nbsp; Tennyson used to
+say that &ldquo;to whatsoever exalted position a poet might
+reach, he was not &lsquo;born to the purple,&rsquo; and that if
+the poet&rsquo;s mind was especially plastic he could never shake
+off the reminiscence of the time when he was nobody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the
+summer-house at Aldworth to read to him &lsquo;Becket,&rsquo;
+then in manuscript.&nbsp; Although another visitor, whom he
+esteemed very highly, both as a poet and an old friend, was
+staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer to read the
+play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone.&nbsp; And this no doubt was
+because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism.&nbsp;
+Freedom of criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr.
+Watts-Dunton is the most outspoken on the subject of the
+poet&rsquo;s art.&nbsp; The entire morning was absorbed in the
+reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, &lsquo;the remarks upon
+poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made
+the fortune of any critic.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>On the subject of what has been called Tennyson&rsquo;s
+gaucherie and rudeness to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax
+very indignant.&nbsp; &lsquo;There was to me,&rsquo; he said,
+&lsquo;the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson&rsquo;s
+bluntness.&nbsp; I would there were a leaven of Tennyson&rsquo;s
+single-mindedness in the society of the present day.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as
+Tennyson&rsquo;s rudeness to women shows how entirely the man was
+misunderstood.&nbsp; Mrs. Oliphant has stated that Tennyson, <a
+name="page289"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 289</span>in his own
+house, after listening in silence to an interchange of amiable
+compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson, said abruptly,
+&lsquo;What liars you women are!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I seem to
+hear,&rsquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &lsquo;Tennyson utter the
+exclamation&mdash;utter it in that tone of humourous playfulness,
+followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized the rudeness as
+entirely as Douglas Jerrold&rsquo;s laugh neutralized the sting
+of his satire.&nbsp; For such an incident to be cited as instance
+of Tennyson&rsquo;s rudeness to women is ludicrous.&nbsp; When I
+knew him I was, if possible, a more obscure literary man than I
+now am, and he treated me with exactly the same manly respect
+that he treated the most illustrious people.&nbsp; I did not feel
+that I had any claim to such treatment, for he was, beyond doubt,
+the greatest literary figure in the world of that time.&nbsp;
+There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which
+springs up after a period of laudation.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of
+stricture upon Tennyson&rsquo;s work was that, considering his
+enormous powers as a poet, he seemed deficient in the gift of
+inventing a story:&mdash;&ldquo;The stanzas beginning, &lsquo;O,
+that &rsquo;twere possible&rsquo;&mdash;the nucleus of
+&lsquo;Maud&rsquo;&mdash;appeared originally in &lsquo;The
+Tribute.&rsquo;&nbsp; They were the finest lines that Tennyson
+ever wrote&mdash;right away the finest.&nbsp; They suggested some
+superb story of passion and mystery; and every reader was
+compelled to make his own guess as to what the story could
+possibly be.&nbsp; In an evil moment some friend suggested that
+Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story.&nbsp; A
+person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson
+might perhaps have invented an adequate story&mdash;might perhaps
+have invented a dozen adequate stories; but he could not have
+invented a worse story <a name="page290"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 290</span>than the one used by Tennyson in the
+writing of his monodrama.&nbsp; But think of the poetic riches
+poured into it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton
+once made in regard to &lsquo;The Princess.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Shakspeare,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is the only poet who
+has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of
+which is fanciful.&nbsp; The extremely insincere story of
+&lsquo;The Princess&rsquo; is filled with such noble passages of
+sincere poetry as &lsquo;Tears, idle tears,&rsquo; &lsquo;Home
+they brought her warrior dead,&rsquo; etc., passages which
+unfortunately lose two-thirds of their power through the
+insincere setting.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the
+&lsquo;Magazine of Art&rsquo; invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write
+an article upon the portraits of Tennyson.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton
+consulted the poet upon this project, and he agreed, promising to
+aid in the selection of the portraits.&nbsp; The result was two
+of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been
+written&mdash;in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without
+a knowledge of these articles no student of Tennyson can be
+properly equipped.&nbsp; It is tantalizing that they have never
+been reprinted.&nbsp; Tennyson died before their appearance, and
+this, of course, added to the general interest felt in them.</p>
+<p>After Tennyson&rsquo;s death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two
+penetrating essays upon Tennyson in the &lsquo;Nineteenth
+Century,&rsquo; one of them being his reminiscences of Tennyson
+as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a
+nature-poet in reference to evolution.&nbsp; It will be a great
+pity if these essays too are not reprinted.&nbsp; Mr. Knowles,
+the editor, also included Mr. Watts-Dunton among the friends of
+Tennyson who were invited to write memorial verses on his death
+for the <a name="page291"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+291</span>&lsquo;Nineteenth Century.&rsquo;&nbsp; To this series
+Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one
+of the several poems upon Tennyson not published in &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love&rsquo; volume, which, I may note in passing,
+contains &lsquo;What the Silent Voices Said,&rsquo; the fine
+&lsquo;sonnet sequence&rsquo; commemorating the burial of
+Tennyson:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">IN WESTMINSTER
+ABBEY</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">&lsquo;<span class="smcap">The
+crowd in the abbey was very great</span>.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">Morning Newspaper.</p>
+<p>I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What others saw not&mdash;his lov&rsquo;d face
+sublime<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime<br />
+Of Tennyson&rsquo;s long day that grows not old;<br />
+And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And, &lsquo;Who art thou,&rsquo; the music seemed to
+chime,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;To mourn that King of song whose throne
+is Time?&rsquo;<br />
+Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.</p>
+<p>Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow&rsquo;s shame:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;So great he was, striving in simple strife<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With Art alone to lend all beauty life&mdash;<br />
+So true to Truth he was, whatever came&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; So fierce against the false when lies were
+rife&mdash;<br />
+That love o&rsquo;erleapt the golden fence of Fame.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was one of the few friends of the poet, including
+Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll,
+and others, who contributed reminiscences of him to the
+&lsquo;Life.&rsquo;&nbsp; In a few sentences he paints this
+masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled,
+&lsquo;Impressions: 1883&ndash;1892&rsquo; <a
+name="citation291"></a><a href="#footnote291"
+class="citation">[291]</a>:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti&rsquo;s
+was a peculiarly winning personality, but no one has been in the
+least able <a name="page292"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+292</span>to say why.&nbsp; Nothing is easier, however, than to
+find the charm of Tennyson.&nbsp; It lay in a great veracity of
+soul: it lay in a simple single-mindedness, so childlike that,
+unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of poems as
+marvellous for exquisite art as for inspiration, you could not
+have supposed but that all subtleties&mdash;even those of poetic
+art&mdash;must be foreign to a nature so simple.</p>
+<p>Working in a language like ours&mdash;a language which has to
+be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art&mdash;how
+can this great, inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered
+artist of &lsquo;The Princess,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Palace of
+Art,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Day-Dream,&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Dream of
+Fair Women&rsquo;?</p>
+<p>Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he
+said&mdash;viz. that it was the thing he thought.&nbsp; Behind
+his uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid
+courtesy of the grand old type.&nbsp; As he stood at the porch of
+Aldworth meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye&mdash;as he
+stood there, tall far beyond the height of average men, his skin
+showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind&mdash;as he stood
+there, no one could mistake him for anything but a great
+forthright English gentleman.&nbsp; Always a man of an
+extraordinary beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the
+beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen.&nbsp; He was the most
+hospitable of men.&nbsp; It was very rare indeed for him to part
+from a guest without urging him to return, and generally with the
+words, &lsquo;Come whenever you like.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Tennyson&rsquo;s knowledge of nature&mdash;nature in every
+aspect&mdash;was simply astonishing.&nbsp; His passion for
+&lsquo;stargazing&rsquo; has often been commented upon by readers
+of his poetry.&nbsp; Since Dante, no poet in any land has so
+loved the stars.&nbsp; He had an equal delight in watching the <a
+name="page293"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 293</span>lightning;
+and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when
+I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite
+of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning.&nbsp;
+For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong, and it is
+especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that he
+passed away in the light he so much loved&mdash;in a room where
+there was no artificial light&mdash;nothing to quicken the
+darkness but the light of the full moon, which somehow seems to
+shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in
+England.</p>
+<p>In a country having a composite language such as ours it may
+be affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of
+poetry: one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other
+appealing to the few who are sensitive to the felicitous
+expression of deep thought and to the true beauties of poetic
+art.</p>
+<p>Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his
+use of what Dante calls the &lsquo;sieve for noble words&rsquo;
+his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and
+Keats.&nbsp; His felicities of thought and of diction in the
+great passages seem little short of miraculous, and there are so
+many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of
+as being a kind of inspired improvisatore.&nbsp; That he was not
+an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the
+trouble to compare the first edition of &lsquo;Romeo and
+Juliet&rsquo; with the received text, the first sketch of
+&lsquo;The Merry Wives of Windsor&rsquo; with the play as we now
+have it, and the &lsquo;Hamlet&rsquo; of 1603 with the
+&lsquo;Hamlet&rsquo; of 1604, and with the still further varied
+version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of
+1623.&nbsp; Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining
+the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing
+both <a name="page294"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 294</span>to
+the commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few,
+stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare&rsquo;s time no
+one has met with anything like Tennyson&rsquo;s success in
+effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy
+with poetry in England.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page295"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+295</span>Chapter XVIII<br />
+AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS</h2>
+<p>I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+literary friendships would be incomplete without a word or two
+upon his American friends.&nbsp; There is a great deal of
+interest in the story of the first meeting between him and James
+Russell Lowell.&nbsp; Shortly after Lowell had accepted the post
+of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at
+dinner.&nbsp; During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat
+attracted by the conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him
+but one.&nbsp; He observed that the gentleman seemed to talk as
+if he wished to entice him into the conversation.&nbsp; The
+gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English
+writers&mdash;Dickens, Thackeray, and others.&nbsp; As the dinner
+wore on, his conversation left literary names and took up
+political ones, and he was equally severe upon the prominent
+political figures of the time, and also upon the prominent
+political men of the previous generation&mdash;Palmerston, Lord
+John Russell, and the like.&nbsp; Then the name of the Alabama
+came up; the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to
+be an American), dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of
+England in letting the Alabama escape.&nbsp; This diatribe he
+concluded thus: &lsquo;You know we owe England
+nothing.&rsquo;&nbsp; In saying this he again looked at Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, manifestly addressing his remarks to him.</p>
+<p><a name="page296"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 296</span>These
+attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at
+last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for
+the first time, he said: &ldquo;Pardon me, sir, but there you are
+wrong.&nbsp; You owe England a very great deal, for I see you are
+an American.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do we owe England?&rdquo; said the gentleman, whom
+Mr. Watts-Dunton now began to realize was no other than the newly
+appointed American Minister.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You owe England,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;for an infinity
+of good feeling which you are trying to show is quite
+unreciprocated by Americans.&nbsp; So kind is the feeling of
+English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the
+middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over
+English people themselves.&nbsp; They are petted and made much
+of, until at last it has come to this, that the very fact of a
+person&rsquo;s being American is a letter of
+introduction.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so
+penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began
+to pause in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped
+the little duel between the two.&nbsp; After the ladies had
+retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were very sharp upon me just now, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not in the least,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You were making an onslaught on my poor little island, and
+you really seemed as though you were addressing your conversation
+to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; replied Mr. Lowell, &ldquo;I will confess
+that I did address my conversation partially to you; you are, I
+think, Mr. Theodore Watts.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That is my little name,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I really don&rsquo;t see why that
+should induce you to <a name="page297"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 297</span>address your conversation to
+me.&nbsp; I suppose it is because absurd paragraphs have often
+appeared in the American newspapers stating that I am strongly
+anti-American in my sympathies.&nbsp; An entire mistake!&nbsp; I
+have several charming American friends, and I am a great admirer
+of many of your most eminent writers.&nbsp; But I notice that
+whensoever an American book is severely handled in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; the article is attributed to
+me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do not think,&rdquo; said Mr. Lowell, &ldquo;that you
+are a lover of my country, but I am not one of those who
+attribute to you articles that you never wrote.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and
+became more confidential.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will tell you something
+that, I think, will not be altogether unpleasant to you.&nbsp;
+When I came to take up my permanent residence in London a short
+time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about London and
+Londoners, and I said to him: &lsquo;There is one man whom I very
+much want to meet.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;You!&rsquo; said he,
+&lsquo;why, you can meet anybody from the royal family
+downwards.&nbsp; Who is the man you want to meet?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;It is a man in the literary world,&rsquo; said I,
+&lsquo;and I have no doubt you can introduce me to him.&nbsp; It
+is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in the
+&ldquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; My friend
+laughed.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well, it is curious,&rsquo; he replied:
+&lsquo;that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot
+introduce you to.&nbsp; I scarcely know him, and, besides, not
+long ago he passed strictures on my writing which I don&rsquo;t
+much approve of.&rsquo;&nbsp; Does that interest you?&rdquo;
+added Mr. Lowell.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very much,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would it interest you to know that ever since your
+first article in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; I have read
+every article you have written?&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page298"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+298</span>&ldquo;Very much,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would it interest you to know that on reading your
+first article I said to a friend of mine: &lsquo;At last there is
+a new voice in English criticism?&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very much,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But you must first tell me what that article was, for I
+don&rsquo;t believe there is one of my countrymen who could do
+so.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That article,&rdquo; said Lowell, &ldquo;was an essay
+upon the &lsquo;Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;,&rsquo; and
+it opened with an Oriental anecdote.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;that does
+interest me very much.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I will go further,&rdquo; said Lowell: &ldquo;every
+line you have written in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; has
+been read by me, and often re-read.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;I confess to
+being amazed, for I assure you that in my own country, except
+within a narrow circle of friends, my name is absolutely
+unknown.&nbsp; And I must add that I feel honoured, for it is not
+a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for
+some of your critical essays.&nbsp; But still, I don&rsquo;t
+quite forgive you for your onslaught upon my poor little
+island!&nbsp; My sympathies are not strongly John Bullish, and
+they tell me that my verses are more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon in
+temper.&nbsp; But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way, and I
+don&rsquo;t quite forgive you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each
+other.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you come to see me,&rdquo; said Lowell,
+&ldquo;at the Embassy?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know where it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you ought to know!&rdquo; said Lowell.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Another proof of the stout sufficiency of the English
+temper&mdash;<a name="page299"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+299</span>not to know where the American Embassy is!&nbsp; It is
+in Lowndes Square.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then he named the number.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;that is next
+door to Miss Swinburne, aunt of the poet, a perfectly marvellous
+lady, possessing the vitality of the Swinburne family&mdash;a
+lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the open air at
+I don&rsquo;t know what age of life&mdash;something like
+eighty.&nbsp; She was a friend of Turner&rsquo;s, and is the
+possessor of some of Turner&rsquo;s finest works.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you actually go next door, and don&rsquo;t know
+where the American Embassy is!&nbsp; A crowning proof of the
+insolent self-sufficiency of the English temper!&nbsp; However,
+as you come next door, won&rsquo;t you come and see
+me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall be delighted,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton;
+&ldquo;but I am perfectly sure you can spare no time to see an
+obscure literary man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; said Lowell, &ldquo;I always
+reserve to myself an hour, from five to six, when I see nobody
+but a friend over a cigarette.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and
+spent an hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an
+institution, this hour over a cigarette once a week.</p>
+<p>This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of
+recalling the way in which Lowell&rsquo;s Anglophobia became
+milder and milder, &lsquo;fine by degrees and beautifully
+less,&rsquo; until at last it entirely vanished.&nbsp; Then it
+was followed by something like Anglo-mania.&nbsp; Lowell began to
+talk with the greatest appreciation of a thousand English
+institutions and ways which he would formerly have
+deprecated.&nbsp; The climax of this revolution was reached when
+Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull <a
+name="page300"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 300</span>than I am
+that I have ceased to be able to follow you.&nbsp; The English
+ladies are&mdash;let us say, charming; English gentlemen
+are&mdash;let us say, charming, or at least some of them.&nbsp;
+Everything is charming!&nbsp; But there is one thing you cannot
+say a word for, and that is our detestable climate.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in
+the world!&rdquo; said Lowell.&nbsp; &ldquo;I positively cannot
+live out of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;you and I
+will cease to talk about England and John Bull, if you
+please.&nbsp; I cannot follow you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted
+that with all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of
+his loyalty to his own country.&nbsp; There never was a stauncher
+American than James Russell Lowell.&nbsp; Let one unjust word be
+said about America, and he was a changed man.&nbsp; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling
+between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due
+mainly to Lowell.&nbsp; Indeed, he expressed this conviction in
+one of his finest sonnets.&nbsp; It appeared in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; after Lowell&rsquo;s death, and it
+has been frequently reprinted in the United States.&nbsp; It now
+appears in &lsquo;The Coming of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was
+addressed &lsquo;To Britain and America: On the Death of James
+Russell Lowell,&rsquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And those far fountains whence, through glorious
+years,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Your fathers drew, for Freedom&rsquo;s pioneers,<br
+/>
+Your English speech, your dower of English blood&mdash;<br />
+Ye ask to-day, in sorrow&rsquo;s holiest mood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When all save love seems film&mdash;ye ask in
+tears&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;How shall we honour him whose name
+endears<br />
+The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page301"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 301</span>Your
+hands he joined&mdash;those fratricidal hands,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Once trembling, each, to seize a brother&rsquo;s
+throat:<br />
+How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Between you still?&mdash;Keep Love&rsquo;s bright
+sails afloat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For Lowell&rsquo;s sake, where once ye strove and
+smote<br />
+On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s feelings towards America, which were once
+supposed to be hostile.&nbsp; Apart from his intimacy with
+Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence Stedman,
+Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most
+cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin
+Abbey, Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many
+prominent Americans.&nbsp; Between Whistler and himself there was
+an intimacy so close that during several years they saw each
+other nearly every day.&nbsp; That was before Whistler&rsquo;s
+genius had received full recognition.&nbsp; I may recall that
+during a certain controversy concerning Whistler&rsquo;s
+animosity against the Royal Academy the following letter from Mr.
+Watts-Dunton appeared in the &lsquo;Times&rsquo; of August 12,
+1903:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;In the &lsquo;Times&rsquo; of to-day Mr. G.
+D. Leslie, R.A., says: &lsquo;I was on friendly terms with
+Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never heard him at any
+time testify animosity against the Academy or its
+members.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty
+years, but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so
+intimate that during part of this period we met almost every
+day.&nbsp; Indeed, at one time we were jointly engaged on a
+weekly periodical called &lsquo;Piccadilly,&rsquo; for which Du
+Maurier designed the cover, and for which Whistler furnished his
+very first lithographs, <a name="page302"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 302</span>by the valuable aid of Mr. T.
+Way.&nbsp; During that time there were not many days when he
+failed to &lsquo;testify animosity&rsquo; against the Academy and
+its members.&nbsp; To say the truth, the testifications on this
+subject by &lsquo;Jimmy,&rsquo; as he was then called, were a
+little afflictive to his friends.&nbsp; Whether he was right or
+wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified to
+express an opinion.</p>
+<p>May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my
+admiration of your New York Correspondent&rsquo;s amazingly vivid
+portrait of one of the most vivid personalities of our
+time?&nbsp; It is a masterpiece. . . . &rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most
+appreciative estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; I am tempted to quote it
+nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with American
+literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words of
+mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s feelings towards
+Americans:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;As a personality Bret Harte seems to have
+exercised a great charm over his intimate friends, and I am not
+in the least surprised at his being a favourite.&nbsp; It is many
+years since I last saw him.&nbsp; I think it must have been at a
+club dinner given by William Black; but I have a very vivid
+remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have been more
+than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred to me
+that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles
+Dickens, might have been an admirable actor.&nbsp; On that
+account the following incident is worth recording.&nbsp; A friend
+of mine, an American poet, who at that time was living in London,
+brought him to my chambers, and did me the honour of introducing
+me to him.&nbsp; Bret Harte had read something <a
+name="page303"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 303</span>about the
+London music-halls, and proposed that we should all three take a
+drive round the town and see something of them.&nbsp; At that
+time these places took a very different position in public
+estimation from what they appear to be doing now.&nbsp; People
+then considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very
+inane, as, indeed, they were, and were shy about going to
+them.&nbsp; I hope they have improved now, for they seem to have
+become quite fashionable.&nbsp; Our first visit was to the
+Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one or two songs that gave
+the audience immense delight&mdash;some comic, some more comic
+from being sentimental-maudlin.&nbsp; And we saw one or two
+shapeless women in tights.&nbsp; Then we went to the
+&lsquo;Oxford,&rsquo; and saw something on exactly the same
+lines.&nbsp; In fact, the performers seemed to be the same as
+those we had just been seeing.&nbsp; Then we went to other places
+of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to the
+distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women
+seemed to be finding so amusing.&nbsp; At that time, indeed, the
+almost only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the
+theatres was that at Evans&rsquo;s supper-rooms, where, under the
+auspices of the famous Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh
+rarebit while listening to the &lsquo;Chough and Crow&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;The Men of Harlech,&rsquo; given admirably by
+choir-boys.&nbsp; Years passed before I saw Bret Harte
+again.&nbsp; I met him at a little breakfast party, and he amused
+those who sat near him by giving an account of what he had seen
+at the music-halls&mdash;an account so graphic that I think a
+fine actor was lost in him.&nbsp; He not only vivified every
+incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every performer in a
+peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the humour of
+it.&nbsp; His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson
+of &lsquo;Rip Van Winkle&rsquo; <a name="page304"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 304</span>fame.&nbsp; This proved to me what a
+genius he had for accurate observation, and also what a
+remarkable memory for the details of a scene.&nbsp; His death has
+touched English people very deeply.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte&mdash;easy to say that
+he was a disciple of Dickens&mdash;easy to say that in richness,
+massiveness, and variety he fell far short of his great and
+beloved master.&nbsp; No one was so ready to say all this and
+more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte himself.&nbsp; For of all the
+writers of his time he was perhaps the most modest, the most
+unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where he believed
+honour to be due.</p>
+<p>But the comparison between the English and American
+story-tellers must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of
+the latter.&nbsp; If Dickens showed great superiority to Bret
+Harte on one side of the imaginative writer&rsquo;s equipment,
+there were, I must think, other sides of that equipment on which
+the superiority was Bret Harte&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of
+universal criticism Bret Harte&rsquo;s reputation will be found
+to be of the usual ephemeral kind.&nbsp; It is, of course,
+impossible to speak on such matters with anything like
+confidence.&nbsp; But it does seem to me that Bret Harte&rsquo;s
+reputation is more likely than is generally supposed to ripen
+into what we call fame.&nbsp; For in his short stories&mdash;in
+the best of them, at least&mdash;there is a certain note quite
+indescribable by any adjective&mdash;a note which is, I believe,
+always to be felt in the literature that survives.&nbsp; The
+charge of not being original is far too frequently brought
+against the imaginative writers of America.&nbsp; What do we mean
+by &lsquo;originality&rsquo;?&nbsp; Scott did not invent the
+historic method.&nbsp; Dickens simply carried the method of
+Smollett further, and with wider range.&nbsp; <a
+name="page305"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 305</span>Thackeray
+is admittedly the nineteenth century Fielding.&nbsp; Perhaps,
+indeed, there is but one absolutely original writer of prose
+fiction of the nineteenth century&mdash;Nathaniel
+Hawthorne.&nbsp; By original I mean simply original.&nbsp; I do
+not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his
+epoch.&nbsp; But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a
+fiction in which the material world and the spiritual world were
+not merely brought into touch, but were positively intermingled
+one with the other.</p>
+<p>Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material
+for literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly
+fascinating kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it
+adequately.&nbsp; This is what I mean: in the wonderful history
+of the nineteenth century there are no more picturesque figures
+than those goldseekers&mdash;those &lsquo;Argonauts&rsquo; of the
+Pacific slope&mdash;who in 1848 and 1849 showed the world what
+grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call
+&lsquo;the Anglo-Saxon race.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Australian
+gold-diggers of 1851 who followed them, although they were
+picturesque and sturdy too, were not exactly of the strain of the
+original Argonauts.&nbsp; The romance of the thing had been in
+some degree worn away.&nbsp; The land of the Golden Fleece had
+degenerated into a Tom Tiddler&rsquo;s Ground.&nbsp; Moreover,
+the Tom Tiddler&rsquo;s Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a
+comparatively easy distance from the Antipodean centre of
+civilization.&nbsp; &lsquo;Canvas Town&rsquo; could easily be
+reached from Sydney.&nbsp; But to reach the Golden Fleece sought
+by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer had before
+him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind.&nbsp; Every
+Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of
+gold.&nbsp; He must either trek overland&mdash;that is to say,
+over those vast prairies and then over those vast mountain <a
+name="page306"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 306</span>chains
+which to men of the time of Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up
+the limitless &lsquo;far West&rsquo; regions which only a few
+pioneers had dared to cross&mdash;or else he must take a journey,
+equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy vessel in
+which he could get a passage.&nbsp; It follows that for an
+adventurer to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece
+at all implied in itself that grit which adventurers of the
+Anglo-Saxon type are generally supposed to show in a special
+degree.&nbsp; What kind of men these Argonauts were, and what
+kind of life they led, the people of the Eastern states of
+America and the people of England had for years been trying to
+gather from newspaper reports and other sources; but had it not
+been for the genius of Bret Harte this most picturesque chapter
+of nineteenth-century history would have been obliterated and
+forgotten.&nbsp; Thanks to the admirable American writer whom
+England had the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many
+years, those wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the
+Sierra Nevada are as familiar to us as is Dickens&rsquo;s
+London.&nbsp; Surely those who talk of Bret Harte as being
+&lsquo;Dickens among the Californian pines&rsquo; do not consider
+what their words imply.&nbsp; It is true, no doubt, that there
+was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens and the
+temperament of Bret Harte.&nbsp; They both held the same
+principles of imaginative art, they both felt that the function
+of the artist is to aid in the emancipation of man by holding
+before him beautiful ideals; both felt that to give him any kind
+of so-called realism which lowers man in his
+aspirations&mdash;which calls before man&rsquo;s imagination
+degrading pictures of his &lsquo;animal origin&rsquo;&mdash;is to
+do him a disservice.&nbsp; For man has still a long journey
+before he reaches the goal.&nbsp; Yet though they were both by
+instinct idealists as regards character-drawing, they both <a
+name="page307"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 307</span>sought to
+give their ideals a local habitation and a name by surrounding
+those ideals with vividly painted real accessories, as real as
+those of the ugliest realist.</p>
+<p>With regard to Bret Harte&rsquo;s Argonauts and the romantic
+scenery in which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a
+bold thing to say whether Dickens could or could not have painted
+them, and whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or
+would not have been as good as Bret Harte&rsquo;s pictures.&nbsp;
+But Dickens never did paint these Argonauts; he never had the
+chance of painting them.&nbsp; Bret Harte did paint them, and
+succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens succeeded in painting certain
+classes of London life.&nbsp; Now, assuredly, I should have never
+dreamt of instituting a comparison of this kind between two of
+the most delightful writers and the most delightful men that have
+lived in my time had not critics been doing so to the
+disparagement of one of them.&nbsp; But if one of these writers
+must be set up against another, I feel that something should be
+said upon the other side of the question&mdash;I feel that
+something should be said on those points where the American had
+the advantage.&nbsp; Take the question of atmosphere, for
+instance.&nbsp; Let us not forget how enormously important is
+atmosphere in any imaginative picture of life.&nbsp; Without
+going so far as to say that atmosphere is as important, or nearly
+as important, as character, let me ask, What was it that captured
+the readers of &lsquo;Robinson Crusoe&rsquo;?&nbsp; Was it the
+character of Defoe&rsquo;s hero, or was it the scenery and the
+atmosphere in which he placed him?&nbsp; Again, see what an
+important part scenery and atmosphere played in &lsquo;The Lay of
+the Last Minstrel,&rsquo; in &lsquo;The Lady of the Lake,&rsquo;
+in &lsquo;Marmion,&rsquo; and in &lsquo;Waverley.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And surely it was the atmosphere of Byron&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Giaour,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Bride of Abydos,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;The Corsair,&rsquo; that mainly gave <a
+name="page308"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 308</span>these poems
+their vogue.&nbsp; And, in a certain sense, it may be said that
+Dickens gave to his readers a new atmosphere, for he was the
+first to explore what was something new to the reading
+world&mdash;the great surging low-life of London and the life of
+the lower stratum of its middle class.&nbsp; It seems that the
+pure novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and
+picturesque atmosphere.&nbsp; It was natural for England to look
+to American writers to enrich English literature with a new
+imaginative atmosphere, and she did not look in vain.&nbsp; But,
+notwithstanding all that had been done by writers like Brockden
+Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and others to bring American
+atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave us an atmosphere that
+was American and yet as new as though the above-mentioned writers
+had never written.&nbsp; He had the advantage of depicting a
+scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his predecessors as
+it was unlike everything else in the world.&nbsp; It is doubtful
+whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as the
+mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and
+Canada.</p>
+<p>Every one is born with an instinct for loving some particular
+kind of scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the
+birth-environment as is generally supposed.&nbsp; It would have
+been of no avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty
+canons, peaks, and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had
+had a natural genius for loving and depicting them; and this,
+undoubtedly, he had, as we see by the effect upon us of his
+descriptions.&nbsp; Once read, his pictures are never
+forgotten.&nbsp; But it was not merely that the scenery and
+atmosphere of Bret Harte&rsquo;s stories are new&mdash;the point
+is that the social mechanism in which his characters move is also
+new.&nbsp; And if it cannot be denied that in temperament his
+characters are allied to the characters of Dickens, we <a
+name="page309"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 309</span>must not
+make too much of this.&nbsp; Notwithstanding all the freshness
+and newness of Dickens&rsquo;s characters they were entirely the
+slaves of English sanctions.&nbsp; Those incongruities which gave
+them their humourous side arose from their contradicting the
+English social sanctions around them.&nbsp; But in Bret
+Harte&rsquo;s Argonauts we get characters that move entirely
+outside those sanctions of civilization with which the reader is
+familiar.&nbsp; And this is why the violent contrasts in his
+stories seem, somehow, to be better authenticated than do the
+equally violent contrasts in Dickens&rsquo;s stories.&nbsp; Bret
+Harte&rsquo;s characters are amenable to no laws except the
+improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is either the
+six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch.&nbsp; And yet underlying
+this apparent lawlessness there is that deep
+&lsquo;law-abidingness&rsquo; which the late Grant Allen despised
+as being &lsquo;the Anglo-Saxon characteristic.&rsquo;&nbsp; To
+my mind, indeed, there is nothing so new, fresh, and piquant in
+the fiction of my time as Bret Harte&rsquo;s pictures of the
+mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right outside all
+the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own peculiar
+instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.</p>
+<p>We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from
+the old sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good
+deal of that natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was
+surrendered by the first human compact in order to secure its
+substitute, civil liberty.&nbsp; We get vivid pictures of the
+racial qualities which enable the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots
+and flourish in almost every square mile of the New World that
+lies in the temperate zone.&nbsp; Let a group of this great race
+of universal squatters be the dwellers in Roaring Camp, or a
+party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a &lsquo;no
+man&rsquo;s land,&rsquo; or even a gang of mutineers from <a
+name="page310"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 310</span>the Bounty,
+it is all one as regards their methods as squatters.&nbsp; The
+moment that the mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they
+improvise a code of laws something like the camp laws of Bret
+Harte&rsquo;s Argonauts, and the code on the whole works
+well.</p>
+<p>Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary
+excellence of the presentation, Bret Harte&rsquo;s pictures of
+the Anglo-Saxon in these conditions will, even as documents, pass
+into literature.&nbsp; And again, year by year, as nature is
+being more and more studied, are what I may call the open-air
+qualities of literature being more sought after.&nbsp; This
+accounts in a large measure for the growing interest in a writer
+once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if there should be
+any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of Dickens, it
+will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.</p>
+<p>Bret Harte&rsquo;s stories give the reader a sense of the open
+air second only to Borrow&rsquo;s own pictures.&nbsp; And if I am
+right in thinking that the love of nature and the love of
+open-air life are growing, this also will secure a place in the
+future for Bret Harte.</p>
+<p>And now what about his power of creating new
+characters&mdash;not characters of the soil merely, but dramatic
+characters?&nbsp; Well, here one cannot speak with quite so much
+confidence on behalf of Bret Harte; and here he showed his great
+inferiority to Dickens.&nbsp; Dickens, of course, used a larger
+canvas&mdash;gave himself more room to depict his subjects.</p>
+<p>If Bret Harte&rsquo;s scenes and characters seem somewhat
+artificial, may it not be often accounted for by the fact that he
+wrote short stories and not long novels?&nbsp; For it is very
+difficult in a short story to secure the freedom and flexibility
+of movement which belong to nature&mdash;the last perfection of
+imaginative art.</p>
+<p><a name="page311"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 311</span>All
+artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of
+selection.&nbsp; In actual life we form our own picture of a
+character not by having the traits selected for us and presented
+to us in a salient way, as in art, but by selecting in a
+semi-conscious way for ourselves from the great mass of
+characteristics presented to us by nature.&nbsp; The shorter the
+story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence the more
+rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of
+course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story
+from which a long novel may be free.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page312"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+312</span>Chapter XIX<br />
+WALES</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p312b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd"
+title=
+"Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd"
+src="images/p312s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is impossible within the space
+at my command to follow Mr. Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through
+those Continental journeys described by Dr. Hake in &lsquo;The
+New Day.&rsquo;&nbsp; I can best show the impression that Alpine
+scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; But with regard to Wales, it seems
+necessary that a word or two should be said, for it is a fact
+that the Welsh nation has accepted &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as the
+representative Welsh novel.&nbsp; And this is not surprising,
+because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere
+as though he had been born upon her soil.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Arvon&rsquo; edition is thus dedicated:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my
+very dear friend, this edition of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is
+affectionately inscribed.</p>
+<p>It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read
+the proofs of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;used to read them in the
+beautiful land the story endeavours to depict&mdash;that the wish
+came to me to inscribe it to you, whose paraphrases of &lsquo;The
+Lament of Llywarch H&euml;n,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Lament of
+Urien,&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Song of the Graves&rsquo; have so
+entirely caught the old music of Kymric romance.</p>
+<p>When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that &lsquo;love
+of the wind&rsquo; which is such a fascinating characteristic <a
+name="page313"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 313</span>of the
+Snowdonian girls I had only to recall that poetic triumph, your
+paraphrase of Taliesin&rsquo;s &lsquo;Song of the
+Wind&rsquo;&mdash;</p>
+<p>Oh, most beautiful One!<br />
+In the wood and in the mead,<br />
+How he fares in his speed!<br />
+And over the land,<br />
+Without foot, without hand,<br />
+Without fear of old age,<br />
+Or Destiny&rsquo;s rage.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;* * *</p>
+<p>His banner he flings<br />
+O&rsquo;er the earth as he springs<br />
+On his way, but unseen<br />
+Are its folds; and his mien,<br />
+Rough or fair, is not shown,<br />
+And his face is unknown.</p>
+<p>Had I anticipated that &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; would achieve a
+great success among the very people for whom I wrote it, I should
+without hesitation have asked you to accept the dedication at
+that time.&nbsp; But I felt that it would seem like endeavouring
+to take a worldly advantage of your friendship to ask your
+permission to do this&mdash;to ask you to stand literary sponsor,
+as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the great Kymric race
+with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so grandly
+associated.&nbsp; For although my heart had the true
+&lsquo;Kymric beat&rsquo;&mdash;if love of Wales may be taken as
+an indication of that &lsquo;beat&rsquo;&mdash;the privilege of
+having been born on the sacred soil of the Druids could not be
+claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital presentation of
+that organic detail, which is the first requisite in all true
+imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting.&nbsp;
+You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; <a name="page314"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 314</span>would win the hearts of your
+countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your generous nature; I
+knew also if I may say it, your affection for me.&nbsp; How could
+I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the kind
+thought?</p>
+<p>But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there
+is, if I am to accept the words of another Welsh writer,
+&lsquo;scarcely any home in Wales where a well-thumbed copy of
+&ldquo;Aylwin&rdquo; is not to be found,&rsquo; and now that
+thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as I
+know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the
+story of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time
+has come when I may look for the pleasure of associating your
+name with the book.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p314b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Moel Siabod and the River Lledr"
+title=
+"Moel Siabod and the River Lledr"
+src="images/p314s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<blockquote><p>Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne
+is not an idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the
+characteristics of the race to which you belong&mdash;know it far
+too well to dream of asking that question.&nbsp; There are not
+many people, I think, who know the Kymric race so intimately as I
+do; and I have said on a previous occasion what I fully meant and
+mean, that, although I have seen a good deal of the races of
+Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways at the top of them
+all.&nbsp; They combine, as I think, the poetry, the music, the
+instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the other
+Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity of
+the very different race to which they are so closely linked by
+circumstance&mdash;the race whom it is the fashion to call the
+Anglo-Saxon.&nbsp; And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one
+who knows them as you and I do can fail to be struck by it
+continually.&nbsp; Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh
+girl as I have found her&mdash;affectionate, warm-hearted, <a
+name="page315"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+315</span>self-sacrificing, and brave.&nbsp; And I only wish that
+my power to do justice to her and to the country that gave her
+birth had been more adequate.&nbsp; There are, however, writers
+now among you whose pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can
+hold their own with almost anything in contemporary fiction; and
+to them I look for better work than mine in the same rich
+field.&nbsp; Although I am familiar with the Alps and the other
+mountain ranges of Europe, in their wildest and most beautiful
+recesses, no hill scenery has for me the peculiar witchery of
+that around Eryri.&nbsp; And what race in Europe has a history so
+poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours?&nbsp; That such a
+country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such an
+atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is
+with me a matter of fervid faith.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As to the descriptions of North Wales in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;
+they are now almost classic; especially the descriptions of the
+Swallow Falls and the Fairy Glen.&nbsp; Long before
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was published, Welsh readers had been
+delighted with the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; article
+containing the description of Mr. Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell
+walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon at break of day.</p>
+<p>Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not
+finer than the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the
+nobly symbolic conclusion of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;We were now at the famous spot where the
+triple echo is best heard, and we began to shout like two
+children in the direction of Llyn Ddu&rsquo;r Arddu.&nbsp; And
+then our talk naturally fell on Knockers&rsquo; Llyn and the
+echoes <a name="page316"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+316</span>to be heard there.&nbsp; She then took me to another
+famous sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to
+be five thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers&rsquo;
+Anvil.&nbsp; While we lingered here Winnie gave me as
+many-anecdotes and legends of this stone as would fill a little
+volume.&nbsp; But suddenly she stopped.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Look!&rsquo; she said, pointing to the sunset.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I have seen that sight only once before.&nbsp; I was with
+Sinfi.&nbsp; She called it &ldquo;The Dukkeripen of the
+Tr&uacute;shul.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance,
+falling on the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes
+and vapoury films floating and trailing above, turning them at
+first into a ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy
+fire.&nbsp; A horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance
+of the sunset fell upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as
+though a long slip from the slate quarries had been laid across
+the west, became for a moment a deep lavender colour, and then
+purple, and then red-gold.&nbsp; But what Winnie was pointing at
+was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where the sun had now sunk
+behind the horizon.&nbsp; Shooting up from the cliffs where the
+sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of clouds and
+seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and
+Sinfi Lovell took on the morning when the search for Winifred
+began was a source of speculation, notably in &lsquo;Notes and
+Queries.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with this point in
+the preface to the twenty-second edition:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;in regard
+to &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; has given me so much pleasure as the way
+in which it has been received <a name="page317"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 317</span>both by my Welsh friends and my
+Romany friends.&nbsp; I little thought, when I wrote it, that
+within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it
+would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so
+well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the
+eloquent and famous &lsquo;Gypsy Smith,&rsquo; and described by
+him as &lsquo;the most trustworthy picture of Romany life in the
+English language, containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest
+representative of the Gypsy girl.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Since the first appearance of the book there have been many
+interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals,
+upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of
+Snowdon.</p>
+<p>A very picturesque letter appeared in &lsquo;Notes and
+Queries&rsquo; on May 3, 1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a
+query by E. W., which I will give myself the pleasure of quoting
+because it describes the writer&rsquo;s ascent of Snowdon
+(accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen, late of
+Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that taken
+by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent
+spectacle that was seen by them:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a
+few moments was entirely gone.&nbsp; So marvellous a
+transformation scene, and so immense a prospect, I have never
+beheld since.&nbsp; For the first and only time in my life I saw
+from one spot almost the whole of North and Mid-Wales, a good
+part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland and
+Ireland.&nbsp; The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth
+walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for
+even a briefer view than that.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer
+says:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Only from Glaslyn would the description in
+&ldquo;Aylwin&rdquo; <a name="page318"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 318</span>of y Wyddfa standing out against the
+sky &ldquo;as narrow and as steep as the sides of an acorn&rdquo;
+be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of Glaslyn
+this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance of
+the mountain.&nbsp; We must suppose the action of the story to
+have taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry
+on Snowdon.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p318b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Snowdon and Glaslyn"
+title=
+"Snowdon and Glaslyn"
+src="images/p318s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<blockquote><p>With regard, however, to the question here raised,
+I can save myself all trouble by simply quoting the admirable
+remarks of Sion o Ddyli in the same number of &lsquo;Notes and
+Queries&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;None of us are very likely to succeed in
+&ldquo;placing&rdquo; this llyn, because the author of
+&ldquo;Aylwin,&rdquo; taking a privilege of romance often taken
+by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks in
+idealising the scene and adapting it to his story.&nbsp; It may
+be, indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is
+merely a rough translation of the gipsies&rsquo; name for it, the
+&ldquo;Knockers&rdquo; being gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence
+&ldquo;Coblynau&rdquo;&mdash;goblins.&nbsp; If so, the name
+itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure
+the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide.&nbsp; In any case, the
+only point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or
+perhaps llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite
+ideal picture), is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig;
+and I imagine the actual scene lies about a mile south from
+Glaslyn, while it owes something at least of its colouring in the
+book to that strange lake.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Knockers,&rdquo; it
+must be remembered, usually depend upon the existence of a mine
+near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings where the dropping
+of water or other subterranean noises produce the curious
+phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the
+Snowdon chapters of &ldquo;Aylwin.&rdquo;&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page319"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 319</span>In
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his
+readers little pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The peasants and farmers all knew me.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)&rsquo; they would
+say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them.&nbsp; &lsquo;How
+is my heart, indeed!&rsquo;&nbsp; I would sigh as I went on my
+way.</p>
+<p>Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set
+foot in the Principality.&nbsp; Before I left it there was
+scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of
+the Snowdonian country.&nbsp; Never a trace of Winifred could I
+find.</p>
+<p>At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to
+Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could
+reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on
+that morning.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the
+following description of the little Welsh girl and her
+fascinating lisp:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Would you like to come in our
+garden?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s such a nice garden.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I could resist her no longer.&nbsp; That voice would have
+drawn me had she spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the
+lost Zamzummin.&nbsp; To describe it would of course be
+impossible.&nbsp; The novelty of her accent, the way in which she
+gave the &lsquo;h&rsquo; in &lsquo;which,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;what,&rsquo; and &lsquo;when,&rsquo; the Welsh rhythm of
+her intonation, were as bewitching to me as the timbre of her
+voice.&nbsp; And let me say here, once for all, that when I sat
+down to write this narrative, I determined to give the English
+reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions were
+deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh <a
+name="page320"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+320</span>diminutives; but I soon abandoned the attempt in
+despair.&nbsp; I found that to use colloquial Welsh with effect
+in an English context is impossible without wearying English
+readers and disappointing Welsh ones.</p>
+<p>Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which
+this book will go out to the world.&nbsp; While a story-teller
+may reproduce, by means of orthographical devices, something of
+the effect of Scottish accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such
+devices are powerless to represent Welsh accent.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page321"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+321</span>Chapter XX<br />
+IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span> the interesting subjects
+touched upon in the last four chapters have led me far from the
+subject of &lsquo;The Renascence of Wonder.&rsquo;&nbsp; In its
+biographical sketch of Mr. Watts-Dunton the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; says:
+&ldquo;Imaginative glamour and mysticism are prominent
+characteristics both of &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; and the novel in particular has had its
+share in restoring the charms of pure romance to the favour of
+the general public.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is high praise, but I hope
+to show that it is deserved.&nbsp; When it was announced that a
+work of prose fiction was about to be published by the critic of
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; what did Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s readers expect?&nbsp; I think they expected
+something as unlike what the story turned out to be as it is
+possible to imagine.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;easy authoritative
+greatness and comprehensiveness of style&rsquo; 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 <a
+name="page322"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 322</span>scores of
+articles signed by the writer&rsquo;s style as indubitably as if
+they had been signed by his name.&nbsp; I think everybody
+cherished this expectation: everybody took it for granted that
+heaps of those &lsquo;intellectual nuggets&rsquo; about which
+Minto talked would smother the writer as a story-teller, that the
+book as literature would be admirable&mdash;but as a novel a
+failure.&nbsp; Great as was Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;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.&nbsp; They expected it to fail as a marketable
+novel&mdash;to fail in that &lsquo;artistic convincement&rsquo;
+of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself so often written.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;a love story of intense
+passion, which yet by some magic art was as convincingly
+realistic as any one of those &lsquo;flat-footed&rsquo;
+sermon-stories which the late W. E. Henley was wont to
+deride.</p>
+<p>In fact, from this point of view &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is a
+curiosity of literature.&nbsp; The truth seems to be, however,
+that, as one of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s most intimate friends
+has said, its style represents one facet only of
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s character.&nbsp; Like most of us, he has a
+dual existence&mdash;one half of him is the romantic youth, Henry
+Aylwin, the other half is the world-wise philosopher of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Now I have views of my own upon this duality.&nbsp;
+I think that if the brilliant worldly writing of the mass of his
+work be examined, it will be found to be a &lsquo;shot&rsquo;
+texture scintillating with various hues <a
+name="page323"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 323</span>where
+sometimes repressed passion and sometimes mysticism and dreams
+are constantly shining through the glossy silk of the
+style.&nbsp; Sometimes from the smooth, even flow of the
+criticisms gleams of a passion far more intense than anything in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; will flash out.&nbsp; I will cite a passage
+in his critical writings wherein he discusses the inadequacy of
+language to express the deepest passion:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;As compared with sculpture and painting the
+great infirmity of poetry, as an &lsquo;imitation&rsquo; of
+nature, is of course that the medium is always and of necessity
+words&mdash;even when no words could, in the dramatic situation,
+have been spoken.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;Agamemnon,&rsquo; or the wailings of Lear
+over the dead Cordelia.&nbsp; Even when writing the words uttered
+by &OElig;dipus, 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.&nbsp; What human sounds could render the agony of
+Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as we see them in the
+sculptor&rsquo;s <a name="page324"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+324</span>rendering?&nbsp; Not articulate speech at all; not
+words, but wails.&nbsp; It is the same with hate; it is the same
+with love.&nbsp; We are not speaking merely of the unpacking of
+the heart in which the angry warriors of the &lsquo;Ilaid&rsquo;
+indulge.&nbsp; Even such subtle writing as that of &AElig;schylus
+and Sophocles falls below the work of the painter.&nbsp; Hate,
+though voluble perhaps as Clyt&aelig;mnestra&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+own last complexion&mdash;whiteness as of iron at the
+melting-point&mdash;when the heart has grown far too big to be
+&lsquo;unpacked&rsquo; at all, and even the bitter epigrams of
+hate&rsquo;s own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier&rsquo;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.&nbsp; But this is just what cannot be rendered
+by an art whose medium consists solely of words.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Could any one reading this passage doubt that the real work of
+the writer was to write poetry and not criticism?</p>
+<p>But this makes it necessary for me to say a word upon the
+question of the style of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;a question
+that has often been discussed.&nbsp; The fascination of the story
+is largely due to the magnetism of its style.&nbsp; And yet how
+undecorated, not to say how plain, the style in the more level
+passages often is!&nbsp; When the story was first written the
+style glittered with literary ornament.&nbsp; But the author
+deliberately struck out many of the poetic passages.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I often think of these words
+when I labour in the sweat of my brow to <a
+name="page325"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 325</span>read the
+word-twisting of precious writers!&nbsp; It is then that I think
+of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; for &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; It was
+clearly Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s idea that what such a story
+needed was mastery over &lsquo;artistic
+convincement.&rsquo;&nbsp; He has more than once commented on the
+acuteness of Edgar Poe&rsquo;s remark that in the expression of
+true passion there is always something of the
+&lsquo;homely.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is one long
+unbroken cry of passion, mostly in a &lsquo;homely key,&rsquo;
+but this &lsquo;homely key&rsquo; is left for loftier keys
+whenever the proper time for the change comes.&nbsp; In beginning
+to write, the author seems to have felt that &lsquo;The
+Renascence of Wonder&rsquo; and the quest of beauty, although
+adequately expressed in the poetry of the newest romantic
+school&mdash;that of Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne&mdash;had
+only found its way into imaginative prose through the highly
+elaborate technique of his friend, George Meredith.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; But to belong to &lsquo;the mock
+Meredithians&rsquo; is not a matter of very great glory.&nbsp; No
+one adores the work of Mr. Meredith <a name="page326"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 326</span>more than I do, though my admiration
+is not without a certain leaven of distress at his literary
+self-consciousness.&nbsp; I say this with all reverence.&nbsp;
+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 &lsquo;King Henry the
+Fourth&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;I prithee now, deliver them like a man
+of this world.&rsquo;&nbsp; I can imagine how the great humourist
+must smile when the dolt, who once found &lsquo;obscurity&rsquo;
+in his most lucid passages, praises him for the defects of his
+qualities, and calls upon all other writers to write
+Meredithese.</p>
+<p>To be a classic&mdash;to be immortal&mdash;it is necessary for
+an imaginative writer to deliver his message like &lsquo;a man of
+this world.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Dr. Johnson said
+that all work which lives is without eccentricity.&nbsp; Now,
+entranced as I have been, ever since I was a boy, by
+Meredith&rsquo;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.&nbsp; But I seldom
+succeed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I adore him, I say,
+and although I do not know him personally, I love him.&nbsp; We
+all love him: and when <a name="page327"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 327</span>I am in a very charitable mood, I
+can even forgive him for having begotten the &lsquo;mock
+Meredithians.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s sake
+deliver their gifts like &lsquo;men of this world.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; 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 na&iuml;vet&eacute; of diction of which his critical
+writings had shown no sign, to carry his beautiful dreams into
+Philistia itself.&nbsp; Never was there a bolder enterprise, and
+never was there a greater success.&nbsp; That
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; would appeal strongly to imaginative minds
+was certain, for it was written by &lsquo;the most widely
+cultivated writer in the English belles lettres of our
+time.&rsquo;&nbsp; But the strange thing is that a story so full
+of romance, poetry, and beauty, should also appeal to other
+minds.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; But it is necessary to explain why
+the most poetical romance written within the last century is also
+one of the most popular.&nbsp; It was in part owing to its
+simplicity of diction, its na&iuml;vet&eacute; of utterance, and
+its freedom from superfluous literary ornamentation.&nbsp; I do
+not as a rule like using a foreign word when an English word will
+do the same work, but neither &lsquo;artlessness,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;candour&rsquo; nor &lsquo;simplicity&rsquo; seem to
+express the unique charm of the style of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; so
+completely <a name="page328"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+328</span>as does the word
+&lsquo;na&iuml;vet&eacute;.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was by
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;, I believe, that he carried the Renascence of
+Wonder into quarters which his great brothers in the Romantic
+movement could never reach.</p>
+<p>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 &lsquo;working portions&rsquo; of his
+narrative in a style as unbookish at times as if he had written
+in the pre-Meredithian epoch.&nbsp; Having set out to convince
+his readers of the truth of what he was telling them, he
+determined to sacrifice all literary
+&lsquo;self-indulgence&rsquo; to that end.&nbsp; I do not
+recollect that any critic, when the book came out, noted
+this.&nbsp; But if &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; had been a French book
+published in France, the na&iuml;ve style adopted by the
+autobiographer would have been recognized by the critics as the
+crowning proof of the author&rsquo;s dramatic genius.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Difficult as was
+Thackeray&rsquo;s tour de force in &lsquo;Esmond,&rsquo; it was
+nothing to the tour de force of &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+tale is told &lsquo;as though inspired by the very spirit of
+youth&rsquo; because the hero was a youth when he told it.&nbsp;
+It is hard to imagine a writer past the meridian of life being
+able to write a story &lsquo;more flushed with the glory and the
+passion and the wonder of youth than any other in English
+fiction.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It should be noted that whenever the incidents become
+especially tragic or romantic or weird or poetic, the
+&lsquo;homeliness&rsquo; of the style goes&mdash;the style at
+once rises <a name="page329"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+329</span>to the occasion, it becomes not only rich, but too rich
+for prose.&nbsp; I have now and then heard certain word-twisters
+of second-hand Meredithese speak of the &lsquo;baldness&rsquo; of
+the style of &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was written.&nbsp; It occurs in a passage on
+the greatest of all rich writers, Shakespeare:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;In the quality of richness Shakespeare
+stood quite alone till the publication of
+&lsquo;Endymion.&rsquo;&nbsp; Till then it was &lsquo;Eclipse
+first&mdash;the rest nowhere.&rsquo;&nbsp; When we think of
+Shakespeare, it is his richness more than even his higher
+qualities that we think of first.&nbsp; In reading him, we feel
+at every turn that we have come upon a mind as rich as
+Marlowe&rsquo;s Moor, who</p>
+<p>Without control can pick his riches up,<br />
+And in his house heap pearls, like pebble-stones.</p>
+<p>Nay, he is richer still; he can, by merely looking at the
+&lsquo;pebble-stones,&rsquo; turn them into pearls for himself,
+like the changeling child recovered from the gnomes in the
+Rosicrucian story.&nbsp; His riches burden him.&nbsp; And no
+wonder: it is stiff flying with the ruby hills of
+Badakhsh&acirc;n on your back.&nbsp; 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&mdash;every gem in every planet from here to
+Neptune&mdash;and yet win his goal.&nbsp; Now, in the matter of
+richness this is the great difference between him and Keats, the
+wings of whose imagination, a&euml;rial at starting, and only
+iridescent like the sails of a dragon-fly, seem to change as he
+goes&mdash;become overcharged with beauty, in fact&mdash;abloom
+&lsquo;with splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth&rsquo;s
+deep-damasked wings.&rsquo;&nbsp; Or, rather, it may be <a
+name="page330"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 330</span>said that
+he seems to start sometimes with Shakespeare&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I will give a few instances of passages in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; quite as rich as this.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s curse upon her beloved head:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Winifred picked up the sea weed and made a
+necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it
+would please me.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t it a lovely colour?&rsquo; she said, as it
+glistened in the moonlight.&nbsp; &lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t it just as
+beautiful and just as precious as if it were really made of the
+jewels it seems to rival?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It is as red as the reddest ruby,&rsquo; I replied,
+putting out my hand and grasping the slippery substance.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Would you believe,&rsquo; said Winnie, &lsquo;that I
+never saw a ruby in my life?&nbsp; And now I particularly want to
+know all about rubies.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Why do you want particularly to know?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Because,&rsquo; said Winifred, &lsquo;my father, when
+he wished me to come out for a walk, had been talking a great
+deal about rubies.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Your father had been talking about rubies,
+Winifred&mdash;how very odd!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said Winifred, &lsquo;and he talked about
+diamonds too.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">The Curse</span>!&rsquo; I
+murmured, and clasped her to my breast.&nbsp; &lsquo;Kiss me,
+Winifred!&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page331"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 331</span>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.&nbsp; As I took in the import of those innocent
+words, falling from Winifred&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Another instance occurs in Wilderspin&rsquo;s ornate
+description of his great picture, &lsquo;Faith and
+Love&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Imagine yourself standing in an
+Egyptian city, where innumerable lamps of every hue are
+shining.&nbsp; It is one of the great lamp-f&ecirc;tes of Sais,
+which all Egypt has come to see.&nbsp; There, in honour of the
+feast, sits a tall woman, covered by a veil.&nbsp; But the
+painting is so wonderful, Mr. Aylwin, that, though you see a
+woman&rsquo;s face expressed behind the veil&mdash;though you see
+the warm flesh-tints and the light of the eyes through the
+a&euml;rial film&mdash;you cannot judge of the character of the
+face&mdash;you cannot see whether it is that of woman in her
+noblest, or woman in her basest, type.&nbsp; The eyes sparkle,
+but you cannot say whether they sparkle with malignity or
+benevolence&mdash;whether they are fired with what Philip Aylwin
+calls &ldquo;the love-light of the seventh heaven,&rdquo; or are
+threatening with &ldquo;the hungry flames of the seventh
+hell!&rdquo;&nbsp; There she sits in front of a portico, while,
+asleep, with folded wings, is crouched on one side of her the <a
+name="page332"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 332</span>figure of
+Love, with rosy feathers, and on the other the figure of Faith,
+with plumage of a deep azure.&nbsp; Over her head, on the
+portico, are written the words:&mdash;&ldquo;I am all that hath
+been, is, and shall be, and no mortal hath uncovered my
+veil.&rdquo;&nbsp; The tinted lights falling on the group are
+shed, you see, from the rainbow-coloured lamps of Sais, which are
+countless.&nbsp; But in spite of all these lamps, Mr. Aylwin, no
+mortal can see the face behind that veil.&nbsp; And why?&nbsp;
+Those who alone could uplift it, the figures folded with
+wings&mdash;Faith and Love&mdash;are fast asleep, at the great
+Queen&rsquo;s feet.&nbsp; When Faith and Love are sleeping there,
+what are the many-coloured lamps of science!&mdash;of what use
+are they to the famished soul of man?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;A striking idea!&rsquo; I exclaimed.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Your father&rsquo;s,&rsquo; replied Wilderspin, in a
+tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my
+father&rsquo;s spectre stood before him.&nbsp; &lsquo;It
+symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at,
+and the great and good John Ruskin scorns.&nbsp; But this design
+is only the predella beneath the picture &ldquo;Faith and
+Love.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now look at the picture itself, Mr.
+Aylwin,&rsquo; he continued, as though it were upon an easel
+before me.&nbsp; &lsquo;You are at Sais no longer: you are now,
+as the architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the
+sea.&nbsp; In the light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax
+tapers, a procession is moving through the streets.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her breast by
+a tasselled knot,&mdash;<a name="page333"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 333</span>an azure-coloured tunic bordered
+with silver stars,&mdash;and an upper garment of the colour of
+the moon at moon-rise.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip Aylwin
+gave to the world!&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Having, with much difficulty, opened the
+door, I entered the crypt.&nbsp; The atmosphere, though not
+noisome, was heavy, and charged with an influence that worked an
+extraordinary effect upon my brain and nerves.&nbsp; It was as
+though my personality were becoming dissipated, until at last it
+was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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, <a name="page334"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 334</span>those of Tom Wynne; at another the
+leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril&rsquo;s studio.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;It is an illusion,&rsquo; I said, as I closed my
+eyes to shut it out; &lsquo;it is an illusion, born of opiate
+fumes or else of an over-taxed brain and an exhausted
+stomach.&rsquo;&nbsp; Yet it disturbed me as much as if my reason
+had accepted it as real.&nbsp; Against this foe I seemed to be
+fighting towards my father&rsquo;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.&nbsp; The candle fell
+from my lantern, and I was in darkness.&nbsp; As I sat there I
+passed into a semi-conscious state.&nbsp; I saw sitting at the
+apex of a towering pyramid, built of phosphorescent human bones
+that reached far, far above the stars, the &lsquo;Queen of Death,
+Nin-ki-gal,&rsquo; scattering seeds over the earth below.&nbsp;
+At the pyramid&rsquo;s base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl
+pleading with the Queen of Death:</p>
+<p>What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?<br />
+Have pity, O Queen of Queens!</p>
+<p>I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon
+reached the coffin resting on a stone table.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Then I paused; for to raise the loosened lid
+(knowing as I did that it was only the blood&rsquo;s inherited
+follies that had conquered my rationalism and induced me to
+disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a
+giant.&nbsp; Moreover, the fantastic terror of old
+Lantoff&rsquo;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 <a
+name="page335"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+335</span>Winnie&rsquo;s father and mine seemed to hang in the
+air&mdash;a fascinating mirage of ghastly horror . . .</p>
+<p>At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and
+pushed the lid violently on one side . . .</p>
+<p>The &lsquo;sweet odours and divers kinds of spices&rsquo; of
+the Jewish embalmer rose like a gust of incense&mdash;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.&nbsp; Never had any
+odour so delighted my senses; never had any sensuous influence so
+soothed my soul.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>I opened my eyes.&nbsp; I looked into the coffin.&nbsp; The
+face (which had been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted
+mine.&nbsp; &lsquo;Fenella Stanley!&rsquo; I cried, for the great
+transfigurer Death had written upon my father&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed.&nbsp; I knew not
+what or why.&nbsp; But never since the first human prayer was
+breathed did there rise to heaven a supplication so incoherent
+and so wild as mine.&nbsp; Then I rose, and laying <a
+name="page336"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 336</span>my hand
+upon my father&rsquo;s cold brow, I said: &lsquo;You have
+forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long
+agony.&nbsp; They were but the voice of intolerable misery
+rebelling against itself.&nbsp; You, who suffered so
+much&mdash;who know so well those flames burning at the
+heart&rsquo;s core&mdash;those flames before which all the forces
+of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and
+wind&mdash;you have forgiven me.&nbsp; You who knew the meaning
+of the wild word Love&mdash;you have forgiven your suffering son,
+stricken like yourself.&nbsp; You have forgiven me, father, and
+forgiven him, the despoiler of your tomb: you have removed the
+curse, and his child&mdash;his innocent child&mdash;is
+free.&rsquo; . . .</p>
+<p>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: &lsquo;Do I, then, really believe
+that she was under a curse?&nbsp; Do I really believe that my
+restoring the amulet has removed it?&nbsp; Have I really come to
+this?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Throughout all these proceedings&mdash;yes, even amidst that
+prayer to Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead
+father&mdash;had my reason been keeping up that scoffing at my
+heart which I have before described.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>My last instance shall be from D&rsquo;Arcy&rsquo;s letter, in
+which he records the marvellous events that led to his meeting
+with Winifred:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; I
+saw then that your sufferings had been very great, and since that
+time they must have been tenfold greater.&nbsp; <a
+name="page337"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 337</span>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.&nbsp; As Job&rsquo;s faith was tried by Heaven, so has
+your love been tried by the power which you call
+&lsquo;circumstance&rsquo; and which Wilderspin calls &lsquo;the
+spiritual world.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I, alas! have long known that the tragedy of
+tragedies is the death of a beloved mistress, or a beloved
+wife.&nbsp; 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
+&lsquo;love&rsquo; really means.&nbsp; 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&mdash;about the final beneficence of
+Death&mdash;that &lsquo;reasonable moderator and equipoise of
+justice,&rsquo; as Sir Thomas Browne calls him.&nbsp; Equipoise
+of justice indeed!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The
+Elizabethans are full of this nonsense; but where does
+Shakespeare, with all his immense philosophical power, ever show
+this temper of acquiescence?&nbsp; All his impeachments of Death
+have the deep ring of personal feeling&mdash;dramatist though he
+was.&nbsp; 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&mdash;how shall he
+confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down?&nbsp; 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, <a name="page338"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 338</span>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.&nbsp;
+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 &lsquo;Vale, vale, in
+&aelig;ternum vale&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+Whether he did wisely or unwisely in striking them out is an
+interesting question for criticism.</p>
+<p>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 &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; I do
+not doubt that Mr. Watts-Dunton was quite right in acting upon
+Coleridge&rsquo;s theory; for, notwithstanding the
+&lsquo;fairy-like beauty&rsquo; of the story it is as convincing
+as a story told upon a prosaic subject by Defoe.&nbsp; 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
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; are more fully observed than in
+&lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Madame Galimberti says in the &lsquo;Rivista
+d&rsquo;Italia&rsquo;:&mdash;&ldquo;&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was
+begun in verse, and was written in prose only when the plot,
+taking, so to say, the poet by the <a name="page339"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 339</span>hand, showed the necessity of a form
+more in keeping with the nature of the work; and in &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love,&rsquo; in which the facts are condensed so as to
+give full relief to the philosophical motive, the result is, in
+my opinion, more perfect.&rdquo; <a name="citation339"></a><a
+href="#footnote339" class="citation">[339]</a>&nbsp; My remarks
+upon &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; will show that I agree with
+the accomplished wife of the Italian Minister in placing it above
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as a satisfactory work of art, but that is
+because I consider &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; the most
+important as well as the most original poem that has been
+published for many years.</p>
+<p>Madame Galimberti touches here upon a very important subject
+for the literary student.&nbsp; I may say for myself that I have
+invariably spoken of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as a poem, and I have
+done so deliberately.&nbsp; Indeed, I think the fact that it is a
+poem is at once its strength and its weakness.&nbsp; It does not
+come under the critical canons that are applied to a prose novel
+or romance.&nbsp; 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,
+&lsquo;Hold, enough!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In one of his essays on Morris, Mr. Watts-Dunton asks,
+&lsquo;What is poetic prose?&rsquo;&nbsp; And then follows a
+passage which must always be borne in mind when criticizing
+&lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;On no subject in literary criticism,&rdquo;
+says he, &ldquo;has <a name="page340"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 340</span>there been a more persistent
+misconception than upon this.&nbsp; What is called poetic prose
+is generally rhetorical prose, and between rhetoric and poetry
+there is a great difference.&nbsp; Poetical prose, we take it, is
+that kind of prose which above all other kinds holds in suspense
+the essential qualities of poetry.&nbsp; If &lsquo;eloquence is
+heard and poetry overheard,&rsquo; where shall be placed the
+tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and
+highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin?&nbsp; Grand and beautiful
+are such periods as these, no doubt, but prose to be truly
+poetical must move far away from them.&nbsp; It must, in a word,
+have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except
+metre.&nbsp; We have, indeed, said before that while the
+poet&rsquo;s object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of
+c&aelig;suric 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&rsquo;s vehicle, but at the same time to avoid the
+expectancy of metrical bars.&nbsp; The moment that the regular
+bars assert themselves and lead the reader&rsquo;s ears to expect
+other bars of the like kind, sincerity ends.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has given us the best of all canons
+for answering the question, &lsquo;What is a poem as
+distinguished from other forms of imaginative
+literature?&rsquo;&nbsp; In his essay on Poetry he
+says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Owing to the fact that the word
+<i>&pi;&omicron;&iota;&eta;&tau;&#942;&sigmaf;</i> (first used to
+designate the poetic artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle
+seems to have assumed that the indispensable basis of poetry is
+invention.&nbsp; 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 <a name="page341"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 341</span>verses.&nbsp; Indeed, he said as
+much as this.&nbsp; Of epic poetry he declared emphatically that
+it produces its imitations either by mere articulate words or by
+metre superadded.&nbsp; 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
+<i>&pi;&omicron;&#943;&eta;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf;</i>.&nbsp; Only,
+while Aristotle considered
+<i>&pi;&omicron;&#943;&eta;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf;</i> to be an
+imitation of the facts of nature, Plato considered it to be an
+imitation of the dreams of man.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The Aristotelian theory as
+to invention, however, dominated all criticism after as well as
+before Dionysius.&nbsp; When Bacon came to discuss the subject
+(and afterwards), the only division between the poetical <a
+name="page342"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 342</span>critics was
+perhaps between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato as
+to what poetry should, and what it should not, imitate.&nbsp; It
+is curious to speculate as to what would have been the result had
+the poets followed the critics in this matter.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;Wuthering Heights&rsquo; and &lsquo;Jane
+Eyre,&rsquo; where we get absolutely all that Aristotle requires
+for a poem.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Now, if this be so in regard to those great romances, it must
+be still more so with regard to &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; where
+beauty and nothing but beauty seems to be the be-all and the
+end-all of the work.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p342b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff.  (From an Oil
+Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff.  (From an Oil
+Painting at &lsquo;The Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p342s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>As &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was begun in metre, it would be very
+interesting to know on what lines the metre was
+constructed.&nbsp; Readers of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; have been
+struck with the music of the opening sentences, which are given
+as an extract from Philip Aylwin&rsquo;s book, &lsquo;The Veiled
+Queen&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Those who in childhood have had solitary
+communings with the sea know the sea&rsquo;s prophecy.&nbsp; They
+know that there is a deeper sympathy between the sea and the soul
+of man than other people dream of.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 <a name="page343"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 343</span>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.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Many a reader will echo the words of a writer in &lsquo;Notes
+and Queries,&rsquo; who says that this passage has haunted him
+since first he read it: I know it haunted me after I read
+it.&nbsp; But I wonder how many critics have read this passage in
+connection with Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s metrical studies which
+have been carried on in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; during
+more than a quarter of a century.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;a metrical art in which the emotions govern the
+metrical undulations.&nbsp; And I take the above passage and the
+following to be examples of what the movement in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; would have been if he had not abandoned the
+project of writing the story in metre:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Then quoth the Ka&rsquo;dee, laughing until
+his grinders appeared: &lsquo;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&mdash;<a
+name="page344"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 344</span>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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Quoth Ja&rsquo;afar, bowing low his head: &lsquo;Bold is the
+donkey-driver, O Ka&rsquo;dee! and bold the Ka&rsquo;dee who
+dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve&mdash;not knowing
+in any wise the mind of Allah&mdash;not knowing in any wise his
+own heart and what it shall some day suffer.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is a
+singular thing, by the bye, that writer after writer of late has
+been arguing over and over again Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+arguments, and seems to be saying a new thing by using the word
+&lsquo;stress&rsquo; for &lsquo;accent.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Stress&rsquo; may or may not be a better word than
+&lsquo;accent,&rsquo; the word used by Coleridge, and after him
+by Mr. Watts-Dunton, but the idea conveyed is one and the
+same.&nbsp; I, for my part, believe that rare as new ideas may be
+in creative work, they are still rarer in criticism.</p>
+<h2><a name="page345"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+345</span>Chapter XXI<br />
+THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">And</span> now a word upon the imaginative
+power of &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; Very much has been written
+both in England and on the Continent concerning the source of the
+peculiar kind of &lsquo;imaginative vividness&rsquo; shown in the
+story.&nbsp; The rushing narrative, as has been said, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Upon this artistic method very little has been
+written save what I myself said when it first appeared.&nbsp; If
+the unequalled grip of the story upon the reader had been secured
+by methods as primitive, as unconscious as those of &lsquo;Jane
+Eyre&rsquo; and &lsquo;Wuthering Heights,&rsquo; I should
+estimate the pure, unadulterated imaginative force at work even
+more highly than I now do.&nbsp; But, as a critic, I must always
+inquire whether or not a writer&rsquo;s imaginative vision is
+strengthened by constructive power.&nbsp; I must take into
+account the aid that the imagination of the writer has received
+from his mere self-conscious artistic skill.&nbsp; Now it is not
+to praise &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; 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 <a
+name="page346"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 346</span>times to
+subtlety.&nbsp; I have heard the greatest of living poets mention
+&lsquo;Tom Jones,&rsquo; &lsquo;Waverley,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as three great novels whose reception by the
+outside public has been endorsed by criticism.&nbsp; One of the
+signs of Scott&rsquo;s unique genius was the way in which he
+invented and carried to perfection the method of moving towards
+the d&eacute;nouement by dialogue as much as by narrative.&nbsp;
+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 &lsquo;Waverley.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s name is associated.&nbsp; But in
+&lsquo;Waverley&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Scott&rsquo;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.&nbsp; In &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; 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&mdash;an aid which Charlotte and Emily Bront&euml; 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 &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+with that in &lsquo;Jane Eyre&rsquo; and &lsquo;Wuthering
+Heights.&rsquo;&nbsp; On the <a name="page347"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 347</span>whole, no one seems to have studied
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; from all points of view with so much insight
+as Madame Galimberti, unless it be M. Jacottet in &lsquo;La
+Semaine Litt&eacute;raire.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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&mdash;indeed, long before
+they are introduced at all.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They come surrounded by real
+accessories.&nbsp; They win our sympathy or else our dislike as
+soon as we see them and hear them speak.&nbsp; The dramatic
+scenes between Jane Eyre and Rochester would miss half their
+effect were it not for the picture of Jane as a child.&nbsp; In
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; This kind of perfection of the
+novelist&rsquo;s art, in these days when stories are written to
+pass through magazines and newspapers, seemed impossible till
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; appeared.&nbsp; It is curious to speculate
+as to what would have been the success of the opening chapters of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; if an instalment of the story had first made
+its appearance in a magazine.</p>
+<p>One of the most remarkable features of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is
+<a name="page348"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 348</span>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.&nbsp; Striking and new as the story is, there
+is nothing mechanical about the structure.&nbsp; The characters
+are not, to use a well known phrase of the author&rsquo;s,
+&lsquo;plot-ridden&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; Perhaps in order to show what I mean I
+ought to go a little into detail here.&nbsp; In &lsquo;Man and
+Wife,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; Many instances of the same sacrifice of
+everything to plot occur in most of Collins&rsquo;s other
+stories, and as to the &lsquo;long arm of coincidence&rsquo; he
+not only avails himself of that arm whenever it is convenient to
+do so, but he positively revels in his slavery to it.&nbsp; In
+&lsquo;Armadale,&rsquo; for instance, besides scores of monstrous
+improbabilities, such as the ship &lsquo;La Grace de Dieu&rsquo;
+coming to Scotland expressly that Allan Armadale should board her
+and have a dream upon her, and such as Midwinter&rsquo;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&mdash;such as that of
+making a family connection of Armadale&rsquo;s rescue Miss Gwilt
+from drowning and get drowned himself, and thus bring about the
+devolution of the property upon Allan <a name="page349"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 349</span>Armadale&mdash;an entirely
+superfluous coincidence, for the working power of this incident
+could have been secured in countless other ways.&nbsp; &lsquo;No
+Name&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; It is the same with Bulwer Lytton&rsquo;s
+novels.&nbsp; In &lsquo;Night and Morning,&rsquo; for instance,
+people are tossed against each other in London, the country, or
+Paris at every moment whensoever the story demands it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Let his presence be required,
+and we know that he will certainly turn up to put things
+right.&nbsp; But in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; which has been well
+called by a French critic, &lsquo;a novel without a
+villain,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; Another
+thing to note is that in spite of the strange, new scenes in
+which the characters move, they all display that &lsquo;softness
+of touch&rsquo; upon which the author has himself written so
+eloquently in one of his articles in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; I must find room to quote his
+words on this interesting subject:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page350"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+350</span>&ldquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;&aelig;sthetic, ethic, or political.</p>
+<p>One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome
+softness of touch in character drawing.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In the imaginative literature of England the two
+great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are
+Addison and Sterne.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Close upon Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery
+almost every portrait is painted with a Gainsborough
+softness.&nbsp; Scarcely one is limned with those hard lines
+which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of
+Dickens.&nbsp; After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it
+be Mrs. Gaskell.&nbsp; We are not in this article dealing with,
+or even alluding to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say
+what novelists follow Mrs. Gaskell.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page351"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 351</span>Read
+in the light of these remarks the characters in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; become still more interesting to the
+critic.&nbsp; Observe how soft is the touch of the writer
+compared with that of a novelist of real though eccentric genius,
+Charles Reade.&nbsp; Now and again in Reade&rsquo;s portraits we
+get softness, as in the painting of the delightful Mrs. Dodd and
+her daughter, but it is very rare.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>On the appearance of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; But vividness is not always
+truth.&nbsp; Some wondered whether the gypsies were true, when
+&lsquo;up and spake&rsquo; the famous Tarno Rye himself, Groome,
+the greatest authority on gypsies in the world, and said they
+were true to the life.&nbsp; Following him, &lsquo;up and
+spake&rsquo; Gypsy Smith, and proclaimed them to be &lsquo;the
+only pictures of the gypsies that were true.&rsquo;&nbsp; Some
+wondered whether the painters and Bohemians were rightly painted,
+when &lsquo;up and spake&rsquo; Mr. Hake&mdash;more intimately
+acquainted with them than any living man left save W. M. Rossetti
+and Mr. Sharp&mdash;and said the pictures were as true as
+photographs.&nbsp; But <a name="page352"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 352</span>before I pass on I must devote a few
+parenthetical words to the most curious thing connected with this
+matter.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The Aylwin
+family, as Madame Galimberti has hinted, belonged to the only
+patriciate which either Landor or Disraeli recognized: the old
+landed untitled gentry.&nbsp; The best delineator of this class
+is, of course, Whyte Melville.&nbsp; But those who have read Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s remarks upon Byron in Chambers&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English Literature&rsquo; will
+understand how thoroughly he too has studied this most
+interesting class.&nbsp; The hero himself, in spite of all his
+eccentricity and in spite of all his Bohemianism, is a
+patrician&mdash;a patrician to the very marrow.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;There is not throughout Aylwin&rsquo;s narrative&mdash;a
+narrative running to something under 200,000 words&mdash;a single
+wrong note.&rsquo;&nbsp; This opinion I heard expressed by a very
+eminent writer, who from his own birth and environment can speak
+with authority.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;the drunken organist who
+violated my father&rsquo;s tomb&rsquo;; the way in which he says
+that &lsquo;if society rejects him and his wife, he shall reject
+society&rsquo;;&mdash;all this shows a mastery over
+&lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo; in depicting this kind of
+character such as not even Whyte Melville has equalled.&nbsp;
+Henry Aylwin&rsquo;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 <a
+name="page353"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 353</span>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).&nbsp; Then there is that wonderful aunt, of whom we see so
+little but whose influence is so great and so mischievous.&nbsp;
+What a type is she of the meaner and more withered branch of a
+patrician tree!&nbsp; But the picture of Lord Sleaford is by far
+the most vivid portrait of a nobleman that has appeared in any
+novel since &lsquo;Lothair.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thackeray never
+&lsquo;knocked off&rsquo; a nobleman so airily and so
+unconsciously as this delightful lordling, whose portrait Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has &lsquo;blown&rsquo; upon his canvas in the true
+Gainsborough way.&nbsp; I wish I could have got permission to
+give more than a bird&rsquo;s-eye glance at Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s wide experience of all kinds of life, but I
+can only touch upon what the reading public is already familiar
+with.&nbsp; At one period of his life&mdash;the period during
+which he and Whistler were brought together&mdash;the period when
+&lsquo;Piccadilly,&rsquo; 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
+&lsquo;Society.&rsquo;&nbsp; It has been said that &lsquo;for a
+few years not even &ldquo;Dicky Doyle&rdquo; or Jimmy Whistler
+went about quite so much as Theodore Watts.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have
+seen Whistler&rsquo;s presentation copy of the first edition of
+&lsquo;The Gentle Art of Making Enemies&rsquo; with this
+inscription:&mdash;&lsquo;To Theodore Watts, the
+Worldling.&rsquo;&nbsp; Below this polite flash of persiflage the
+famous butterfly flaunts its elusive wings.&nbsp; But this was
+only Whistler&rsquo;s fun.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton was never, we
+may be sure, a worldling.&nbsp; Still one wonders that the most
+romantic of poets ever fell so low as to go into
+&lsquo;Society&rsquo; with a big S.&nbsp; 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 <a
+name="page354"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 354</span>the
+professional and scientific classes, he thought he would study
+the butterflies too.&nbsp; However, he seems soon to have got
+satiated, for he suddenly dropped out of the smart
+Paradise.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s patriciate
+through it all.</p>
+<p>In my essay upon Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English Literature,&rsquo; I made this
+remark:&mdash;&ldquo;Notwithstanding the vogue of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; there is no doubt that it is on his poems,
+such as &lsquo;The Coming of Love,&rsquo; &lsquo;Christmas at the
+Mermaid,&rsquo; &lsquo;Prophetic Pictures at Venice,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;John the Pilgrim,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Omnipotence of
+Love,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Three Fausts,&rsquo; &lsquo;What the
+Silent Voices Said,&rsquo; &lsquo;Apollo in Paris,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;The Wood-haunters&rsquo; Dream,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Octopus
+of the Golden Isles,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Last Walk with Jowett from
+Boar&rsquo;s Hill,&rsquo; and &lsquo;Omar Khayy&agrave;m,&rsquo;
+that Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s future position will mainly
+rest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I did not say this rashly.&nbsp; But in order to justify my
+opinion I must quote somewhat copiously from Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s remarks upon absolute and relative vision,
+in the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica.&rsquo;&nbsp; It has
+been well said that &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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 <a
+name="page355"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 355</span>be that
+vision which is more or less conditioned by the personal
+temperament of the writer.&nbsp; And then follows a long
+discussion of various great imaginative works in which the two
+kinds of vision are seen:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;For the achievement of most imaginative
+work relative vision will suffice.&nbsp; If we consider the
+matter thoroughly, in many forms&mdash;which at first sight might
+seem to require absolute vision&mdash;we shall find nothing but
+relative vision at work.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s own live in the imagined
+situation.&nbsp; In the very highest reaches of imaginative
+writing art seems to become art no longer&mdash;it seems to
+become the very voice of Nature herself.&nbsp; 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 na&iuml;ve, pathetic, and winsome character.&nbsp; Put
+the cry into the mouth of the irascible and passionate Lear, and
+it would be entirely out of keeping.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Now, the difference between &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is this, that in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+the impulse is, <a name="page356"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+356</span>or seems to be, lyrical, and therefore too egoistic for
+absolute vision to be achieved.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For there is
+nothing that he says or does that is not inevitable from the
+nature of the character placed in the dramatic situation.&nbsp;
+Those who are as familiar as I am with Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+prose writings outside &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; find it extremely
+difficult to identify the brilliant critic of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; full of ripe wisdom and sagacity,
+with the impassioned boy of the story.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But, matters being as
+they are with regard to the identification of the hero of the
+prose story with the author, it is to &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; that we must for the most part turn for proof that
+the writer is possessed of absolute vision.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In no poetry of our time can there be seen more
+of that absolute vision so lucidly discoursed upon in the
+foregoing extract.&nbsp; From her first love-letter <a
+name="page357"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 357</span>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.&nbsp; Percy Aylwin lives also with almost equal
+vitality.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>With regard to &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; Among the many letters from
+strangers that reached the author when &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; first
+appeared was one from a person who, like Henry Aylwin, had been
+made lame by accident.&nbsp; This gentleman said that he felt
+sure that the author of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; had also been lame,
+and gave several instances from the story which had made him come
+to this conclusion.&nbsp; One was the following:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Shall we go and get some
+strawberries?&rsquo; she said, as we passed to the back of the
+house.&nbsp; &lsquo;They are quite ripe.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But my countenance fell at this.&nbsp; I was obliged to tell
+her that I could not stoop.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ah! but I can, and I will pluck them and give them to
+you.&nbsp; I should like to do it.&nbsp; Do let me, there&rsquo;s
+a good boy.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I consented, and hobbled by her side to the verge of the
+strawberry-beds.&nbsp; But when I foolishly tried to follow her,
+I stuck ignominiously, with my crutches sunk deep in the soft
+mould of rotten leaves.&nbsp; Here was a trial for the conquering
+hero of the coast.&nbsp; I <a name="page358"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 358</span>looked into her face to see if there
+was not, at last, a laugh upon it.&nbsp; That cruel human laugh
+was my only dread.&nbsp; To everything but ridicule I had
+hardened myself; but against that I felt helpless.</p>
+<p>I looked into her face to see if she was laughing at my
+lameness.&nbsp; No: her brows were merely knit with anxiety as to
+how she might best relieve me.&nbsp; This surpassingly beautiful
+child, then, had evidently accepted me&mdash;lameness and
+all&mdash;crutches and all&mdash;as a subject of peculiar
+interest.</p>
+<p>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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As a matter of fact, however, the author never had been
+lame.</p>
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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?</p>
+<p>The best and briefest way of answering this question is to
+confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my
+father&rsquo;s book, its strange theories and revelations, but
+what I did.&nbsp; I read the book all day long: I read it all the
+next day.&nbsp; I cannot say what days passed.&nbsp; One night I
+resumed my wanderings in the streets for <a
+name="page359"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 359</span>an hour or
+two, and then returned home and went to bed&mdash;but not to
+sleep.&nbsp; For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral
+voices could be quelled&mdash;till the sound of Winnie&rsquo;s
+song in the street could be stopped in my ears.&nbsp; 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&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will
+find that materialism is intolerable&mdash;is hell
+itself&mdash;to the heart that has known a passion like
+mine.&nbsp; You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to
+believe in the word &ldquo;never&rdquo;!&nbsp; You will find that
+you dare not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers
+the heart a ray of hope.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat
+in a waking dream.</p>
+<p>The bright light of morning was pouring through the
+window.&nbsp; I gave a start of horror, and cried, &lsquo;Whose
+face?&rsquo;&nbsp; Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a
+bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast.&nbsp;
+That strange wild light upon the face, as if the pains at the
+heart were flickering up through the flesh&mdash;where had I seen
+it?&nbsp; For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his
+bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull
+lineaments.&nbsp; But upon the picture of &lsquo;The Sibyl&rsquo;
+in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,&rsquo; I
+exclaimed.</p>
+<p>Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.</p>
+<p>And then Sinfi Lovell&rsquo;s voice seemed murmuring in <a
+name="page360"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 360</span>my ears,
+&lsquo;Fenella Stanley&rsquo;s dead and dust, and that&rsquo;s
+why she can make you put that cross in your feyther&rsquo;s tomb,
+and she will, she will.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my
+skin.&nbsp; Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points
+as I sat and gazed in the glass.&nbsp; Slowly a sensation arose
+on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new.&nbsp; I
+was feeling the facets.&nbsp; But the tears trickling down, salt,
+through my moustache were tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell
+seemed again murmuring, &lsquo;For good or for ill, you must dig
+deep to bury your daddy.&rsquo; . . .</p>
+<p>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&mdash;what agonies were mine as I sat there sobbing the one
+word &lsquo;Winnie&rsquo;&mdash;could be understood by myself
+alone, the latest blossom of the passionate blood that for
+generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins. . . .</p>
+<p>I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I
+did.&nbsp; 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)&mdash;scoffing, as an Asiatic
+malefactor will sometimes scoff at the executioner whose pitiless
+and conquering saw is severing his bleeding body in twain.&nbsp;
+I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella Stanley as I wrapped
+the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a hand-valise:
+&lsquo;Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to
+consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a
+deserted church.&nbsp; To take any one into our confidence would
+be impossible; we must go alone.&nbsp; But to open the tomb and
+close it again, and leave no trace of what <a
+name="page361"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 361</span>has been
+done, will require all our skill.&nbsp; And as burglars&rsquo;
+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.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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 &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; If he has
+not that dash, and I certainly never heard that he has, and
+neither Groome&rsquo;s words in the &lsquo;Bookman&rsquo; nor
+&lsquo;Gypsy Smith&rsquo;s&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; It was this that struck the
+late Grant Allen so forcibly.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On this most interesting subject no one can speak
+but himself, and he has not spoken.&nbsp; But here is what he has
+said upon the similarity and the contrast between Percy and Henry
+Aylwin:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Certain parts of &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; were written about the same time as
+&lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; The two Aylwins, Henry and Percy,
+were then very distinct in my own mind; they are very distinct
+now.&nbsp; And I confess that the possibility of their being
+confounded with each other <a name="page362"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 362</span>had never occurred to me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I say there must needs be this
+similarity, because the ancestress was Romany.&nbsp; 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
+&lsquo;the prepotency of transmission&rsquo; in races is
+specially strong&mdash;so strong, indeed, that evidences of
+Romany blood in a family may be traced down for several
+generations.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The intensity of the love-passion in each
+assumes a spiritualizing and mystical form.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page363"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+363</span>Chapter XXII<br />
+A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> thing seems clear to me: having
+fully intended to make Winifred the heroine of
+&lsquo;Alwyn&rsquo; round whom the main current of interest
+should revolve, the author failed to do so.&nbsp; And the reason
+of his failure is that Winifred has to succumb to the superior
+vitality of Sinfi&rsquo;s commanding figure.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s dominance over the Welsh
+heroine; and this explains what readers have sometimes said about
+his &lsquo;unkindness to Sinfi.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the
+reader&rsquo;s heroine.&nbsp; When Madox Brown read the story in
+manuscript, he became greatly enamoured of Sinfi, and talked
+about her constantly.&nbsp; It was the same with Mr. Swinburne,
+who says that &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is the only novel he ever read
+in manuscript, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it
+in type.&nbsp; Mr. George Meredith in a letter
+said:&mdash;&ldquo;I am in love with Sinfi.&nbsp; Nowhere can
+fiction <a name="page364"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+364</span>give us one to match her, not even the
+&lsquo;Kriegspiel&rsquo; heroine, who touched me to the
+deeps.&nbsp; Winifred&rsquo;s infancy has infancy&rsquo;s
+charm.&nbsp; The young woman is taking.&nbsp; But all my heart
+has gone to Sinfi.&nbsp; Of course it is part of her character
+that her destiny should point to the glooms.&nbsp; The sun comes
+to me again in her conquering presence.&nbsp; I could talk of her
+for hours.&nbsp; The book has this defect,&mdash;it leaves in the
+mind a cry for a successor.&rdquo;&nbsp; And the author of
+&lsquo;Kriegspiel&rsquo; himself, F. H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as
+the true heroine of the story.&nbsp; &ldquo;In Sinfi
+Lovell,&rdquo; says he, &ldquo;Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have
+scored a magnificent success had he achieved nothing more than
+this most splendid figure&mdash;supremely clever but utterly
+illiterate, eloquent but ungrammatical, heroic but altogether
+womanly.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s sacrifice that &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; should take
+its place in literature.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That
+admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in the
+&lsquo;Daily News&rsquo; that &lsquo;Sinfi Lovell is one of the
+most finished studies of its type and kind in all romantic
+literature.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p364b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh.  (From a Painting at &lsquo;The
+Pines.&rsquo;)"
+title=
+"Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh.  (From a Painting at &lsquo;The
+Pines.&rsquo;)"
+src="images/p364s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel
+Berners.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;Anglo-Saxon road girl&rsquo; with a
+special antagonism to Romany girls.&nbsp; Grand as is the
+character of Borrow&rsquo;s Isopel Berners, she is not in the
+least like Sinfi Lovell.&nbsp; And I may add that she is not
+really like any other of the heroic women who figure in Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s gallery of noble women.&nbsp; <a
+name="page365"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 365</span>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.&nbsp; There is nothing in
+them of Isopel&rsquo;s hysterical tears.&nbsp; Once only does
+Sinfi, in the nobility of her affection for Aylwin, yield to
+weakness.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sympathy with this kind
+of woman is apparent in his eulogy of
+&lsquo;Shirley&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s&mdash;tenderness.&nbsp; 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, &lsquo;Kiss me, Hardy,&rsquo; when
+dying on board the &lsquo;Victory&rsquo;&mdash;just as it was an
+English gentleman who on the burning &lsquo;Amazon,&rsquo; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page366"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 366</span>But
+Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, in his sonnet, &lsquo;Brynhild on
+Sigurd&rsquo;s Funeral Pyre,&rsquo; so powerfully illustrated by
+Mr. Byam Shaw, has given us in fourteen lines a picture of
+feminine courage and stoicism that puts even Charlotte
+Bront&euml;&rsquo;s picture of Shirley in the shade:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>With blue eyes fixed on joy and sorrow past,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Tall Brynhild stands on Sigurd&rsquo;s funeral
+pyre;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She stoops to kiss his mouth, though forks of
+fire<br />
+Rise fighting with the reek and wintry blast;<br />
+She smiles, though earth and sky are overcast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With shadow of wings that shudder of Asgard&rsquo;s
+ire;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She weeps, but not because the gods conspire<br />
+To quell her soul and break her heart at last.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Odin,&rdquo; she cries, &ldquo;it is for gods to
+droop!&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Heroes! we still have man&rsquo;s all-sheltering
+tomb,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where cometh peace at last, whate&rsquo;er may
+come:<br />
+Fate falters, yea, the very Norns shall stoop<br />
+Before man&rsquo;s courage, naked, bare of hope,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Standing against all Hell and Death and Doom.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Rhona Boswell, too, under all her playful humour, is of this
+strain, as we see in that sonnet on &lsquo;Kissing the
+Maybuds&rsquo; in &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; (given on page
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page406">406</a></span> of
+this book).</p>
+<p>As Groome&rsquo;s remarks upon &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was another Romany scholar,
+spoken of with enthusiasm by Groome&mdash;I allude to <a
+name="page367"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 367</span>Mr.
+Sampson, of Liverpool, who has since edited Borrow&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Romany Rye&rsquo; for Messrs. Methuen, and who is said to
+know more of Welsh Romany than any Englishman ever knew
+before.&nbsp; At that time, however, he was almost unknown.&nbsp;
+Finally, there was Groome himself, whose articles in the
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Encyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; had proclaimed
+him to be the greatest living gypsologist.&nbsp; The editor of
+the &lsquo;Bookman,&rsquo; being anxious to get a review of the
+book from the most competent writer he could find, secured Groome
+himself.&nbsp; I can give only a few sentences from the
+review.&nbsp; Groome, it will be seen, does not miss the
+opportunity of flicking in his usual satirical manner the
+omniscience of some popular novelists:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Novelty and truth,&rdquo; he says,
+&ldquo;are &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;s&rsquo; chief characteristics, a
+rare combination nowadays.&nbsp; Our older novelists&mdash;those
+at least still held in remembrance&mdash;wrote only of what they
+knew, or of what they had painfully mastered.&nbsp; Defoe,
+Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Jane Austen, Scott,
+Dickens, Thackeray, the Bront&euml;s, 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.&nbsp; But now we have changed
+all that; the maximum of achievement seldom rises above school
+board nescience.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One
+of the most popular lays the scene of a story in Paris: the Seine
+there is tidal, it rolls a murdered corpse upwards.&nbsp; In
+another work by her a gambler shoots himself in a cab.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I trust,&rsquo; cries a friend who has heard the shot,
+&lsquo;he has missed.&rsquo;&nbsp; <a name="page368"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 368</span>&lsquo;No,&rsquo; says a second
+friend, &lsquo;he was a dead shot.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. X. writes a
+realistic novel about betting.&nbsp; It is crammed with weights,
+acceptances, and all the rest of it; but, alas! on an early page
+a servant girl wins 12<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i> at 7 to 1.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Y. takes her heroine to a Scottish deer-forest: it is full of
+primeval oaks.&nbsp; Mrs. Z. sends her hero out
+deerstalking.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I have drawn
+upon memory for these six examples, but subscribers to
+Mudie&rsquo;s should readily recognize the books I mean; they
+have sold by thousands on thousands.&nbsp; &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+is not such as these.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Many readers have expressed the desire to know something about
+the prototypes of Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell.&nbsp; The
+following words from the Introduction to the 20th edition (called
+the &lsquo;Snowdon Edition&rsquo;) may therefore be read with
+interest:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Although Borrow belonged to a different
+generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friendship in his
+later years&mdash;during the time when he lived in Hereford
+Square.&nbsp; When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out
+an edition of &lsquo;Lavengro,&rsquo; I prefaced that delightful
+book by a few desultory remarks upon Borrow&rsquo;s gypsy
+characters.&nbsp; On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the
+most remarkable &lsquo;Romany Chi&rsquo; that had ever been met
+with in the part of East Anglia known to Borrow and
+myself&mdash;Sinfi <a name="page369"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+369</span>Lovell.&nbsp; I described her playing on the
+crwth.&nbsp; I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I
+contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon
+road-girl Isopel Berners.</p>
+<p>Since the publication of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love&rsquo; I have received very many letters from
+English and American readers inquiring whether &lsquo;the Gypsy
+girl described in the introduction to &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; is
+the same as the Sinfi Lovell of &ldquo;Aylwin,&rdquo; and also
+whether &lsquo;the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story
+is the same as the Rhona of &ldquo;The Coming of
+Love?&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; The evidence of the reality of Rhona so
+impressed itself upon the reader that on the appearance of
+Rhona&rsquo;s first letter in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo;
+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,&mdash;near her death indeed,&mdash;urging
+me to tell her whether Rhona&rsquo;s love-letter was not a
+versification of a real letter from a real gypsy to her
+lover.&nbsp; As it was obviously impossible for me to answer the
+queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the
+Sinfi of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and the Sinfi described in my
+introduction to &lsquo;Lavengro&rsquo; are one and the same
+character&mdash;except that the story of the child Sinfi&rsquo;s
+weeping for the &lsquo;poor dead Gorgios&rsquo; in the
+churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the
+gypsies, not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell.&nbsp; Sinfi is the
+character alluded to in the now famous sonnet describing
+&lsquo;the walking lord of gypsy lore,&rsquo; Borrow; by his most
+intimate friend, Dr. Gordon Hake.</p>
+<p>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
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of Love,&rsquo; my <a
+name="page370"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 370</span>pictures of
+Romany life seem a little idealized.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Times,&rsquo; in a kindly notice of &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love,&rsquo; said that the kind of gypsies there depicted are a
+very interesting people, &lsquo;unless the author has flattered
+them unduly.&rsquo;&nbsp; Those who best knew the gypsy women of
+that period will be the first to aver that I have not flattered
+them unduly.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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 &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; many years before
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was published.&nbsp; 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:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;There is no surer test of genuine nature
+instinct than this.&nbsp; Anybody can love sunshine.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And, if it may be said
+that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be said of
+the French!&nbsp; None but a born child of the tent could ever
+have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written
+in &lsquo;Les Travailleurs de la Mer,&rsquo; as though they were
+the ministers of Ahriman.&nbsp; &lsquo;From Ormuzd, not from
+Ahriman, ye come.&rsquo;&nbsp; And here, indeed, is the
+difference between the two nationalities.&nbsp; Love of the wind
+has made England what she is; dread of the wind has greatly
+contributed to make France what she is.&nbsp; The winds are the
+breathings of the Great Mother.&nbsp; Under the &lsquo;olden
+spell&rsquo; of dumbness, nature can yet speak to us by her
+winds.&nbsp; It is they that express her every mood, and, if her
+mood is rough at times, her <a name="page371"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 371</span>heart is kind.&nbsp; This is why the
+true child of the open-air&mdash;never mind how much he may
+suffer from the wind&mdash;loves it, loves it as much when it
+comes and &lsquo;takes the ruffian billows by the top&rsquo; to
+the peril of his life, as when it comes from the sweet
+South.&nbsp; In the wind&rsquo;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.&nbsp; It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes
+about the wind, and that which the wind so loves&mdash;the
+snow.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page372"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+372</span>Chapter XXIII<br />
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">And</span> now as to the real inner
+meaning of &lsquo;Alwyin,&rsquo; about which so much has been
+written.&nbsp; &ldquo;&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;&rdquo; says Groome,
+&ldquo;is a passionate love-story, with a mystical id&eacute;e
+m&egrave;re.&nbsp; For the entire dramatic action revolves around
+a thought that is coming more and more to the front&mdash;the
+difference, namely, between a materialistic and a spiritualistic
+cosmogony.&rdquo;&nbsp; And Dr. Nicoll, in his essay on
+&ldquo;The Significance of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;&rdquo; in the
+&lsquo;Contemporary Review,&rsquo; says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Every serious student will see at a glance
+that &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is a concrete expression of the
+author&rsquo;s criticism of life and literature, and
+even&mdash;though this must be said with more reserve&mdash;a
+concrete expression of his theory of the universe.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Throughout all his writings there is evidence of
+a mental struggle as severe as George Eliot&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Those who have followed Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s writings in the &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; and
+in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; must have observed with what
+passionate eagerness he insisted <a name="page373"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 373</span>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.&nbsp; As every experiment of
+every biologist has failed to do so, a new spiritualist cosmogony
+must be taught.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And yet the student of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; 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&mdash;that what to Philip Aylwin and his disciples
+seems so mystical is all explained by the operation of natural
+laws.&nbsp; This theory reminds me of a saying of Goethe&rsquo;s
+about the enigmatic nature of all true and great works of
+art.&nbsp; I forget the exact words, but they set me thinking
+about the chameleon-like iridescence of great poems and
+dramas.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>With regard to the fountain-head of all the mysticism of the
+story, Philip Aylwin, much has been said.&nbsp; Philip is the
+real protagonist of the story&mdash;he governs, as I have said,
+the entire dramatic action from his grave, and illustrates at
+every point Sinfi Lovell&rsquo;s saying, &lsquo;You must dig deep
+to bury your daddy.&rsquo;&nbsp; Everything that occurs seems to
+be the result of the father&rsquo;s speculations, and the effect
+of them upon other minds like that of his son and that of
+Wilderspin.</p>
+<p>The appearance of this new epic of spiritual love came at
+exactly the right moment&mdash;came when a new century was about
+to dawn which will throw off the trammels of old modes of
+thought.&nbsp; While I am writing these lines Mr. Balfour at the
+British Association has been expounding what must be called
+&lsquo;Aylwinism,&rsquo; and (as I shall show in the last chapter
+of this book) <a name="page374"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+374</span>saying in other words what Henry Aylwin&rsquo;s father
+said in &lsquo;The Veiled Queen.&rsquo;&nbsp; In the preface to
+the edition of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; in the &lsquo;World&rsquo;s
+Classics&rsquo; the author says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The heart-thought of this book being the
+peculiar doctrine in Philip Aylwin&rsquo;s &lsquo;Veiled
+Queen,&rsquo; and the effect of it upon the fortunes of the hero
+and the other characters, the name &lsquo;The Renascence of
+Wonder&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; But
+eventually I decided, and I think from the worldly point of view
+wisely, to give it simply the name of the hero.</p>
+<p>The important place in the story, however, taken by this
+creed, did not escape the most acute and painstaking of the
+critics.&nbsp; Madame Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate
+study of the book which she made in the &lsquo;Rivista
+d&rsquo;Italia,&rsquo; gave great attention to its central idea;
+so did M. Maurice Muret, in the &lsquo;Journal des
+D&eacute;bats&rsquo;; so did M. Henri Jacottet in &lsquo;La
+Semaine Litt&eacute;raire.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Baker, again, in his
+recently published &lsquo;Guide to Fiction,&rsquo; described
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as &ldquo;an imaginative romance of modern
+days, the moral idea of which is man&rsquo;s attitude in face of
+the unknown, or, as the writer puts it, &lsquo;the renascence of
+wonder.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; With regard to the phrase itself, in
+the introduction to the latest edition of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;the twenty-second edition&mdash;I made
+the following brief reply to certain questions that have been
+raised by critics both in England and on the Continent concerning
+it.&nbsp; The phrase, I said, &lsquo;The Renascence of
+Wonder,&rsquo; &lsquo;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 <a name="page375"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 375</span>expression reached its culmination
+in the poems and pictures of Rossetti.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, &lsquo;The one
+great event of my life has been the reading of &ldquo;The Veiled
+Queen,&rdquo; your father&rsquo;s book of inspired wisdom upon
+the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of man.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And further on he says that his own great picture symbolical of
+this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin&rsquo;s
+vignette.&nbsp; Since the original writing of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; many years ago, I have enlarged upon its
+central idea in the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo;
+in the introductory essay to the third volume of
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Cyclop&aelig;dia of English
+Literature,&rsquo; and in other places.&nbsp; Naturally,
+therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed.&nbsp; 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
+&lsquo;Renascence of Wonder in Religion.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton then quotes Dr. Nicoll&rsquo;s remarks upon
+the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt
+Fund.&nbsp; He shows how men came to see &lsquo;once more the
+marvel of the universe and the romance of man&rsquo;s
+destiny.&nbsp; They became aware of the spiritual world, of the
+supernatural, of the lifelong struggle of soul, of the power of
+the unseen.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately
+be used as a motto for &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and also for its
+sequel &lsquo;The Coming of Love: Rhona Boswell&rsquo;s
+Story.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>When &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; first appeared, the
+editor of a well-known journal sent it to me for review.&nbsp; I
+read it: never shall I forget that reading.&nbsp; I was in
+Ireland at the time&mdash;an Irish Wedding Guest at an Irish
+Wedding.&nbsp; Now <a name="page376"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+376</span>an Irish Wedding is more joyous than any novel, and
+Irish girls are lovelier than any romance.&nbsp; A duel between
+Life and Literature!&nbsp; Picture it!&nbsp; Behold the Irish
+Wedding Guest spell-bound by a story-teller as cunning as
+&lsquo;The Ancient Mariner&rsquo; himself!&nbsp; He heareth the
+bridal music, but Aylwin continueth his tale: he cannot choose
+but hear, until &lsquo;The Curse&rsquo; of the &lsquo;The
+Moonlight Cross&rsquo; of the Gnostics is finally expiated, and
+Aylwin and Winnie see in the soul of the sunset &lsquo;The
+Dukkeripen of the Trush&ugrave;l,&rsquo; the blessed Cross of
+Rose and Gold.&nbsp; Amid the &lsquo;merry din&rsquo; of the
+Irish Wedding Feast the Irish Wedding Guest read and wrote.&nbsp;
+And among other lyrical things, he said that &lsquo;since
+Shakespeare created Ophelia there has been nothing in literature
+so moving, so pathetic, so unimaginably sorrowful as the madness
+of Winnie Wynne.&rsquo;&nbsp; And he also said that &ldquo;the
+majority of readers will delight in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The &lsquo;newspaper cynics&rsquo; that once were and
+perhaps still are strong, I have always defied and always will
+defy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <a
+name="page377"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 377</span>We are not
+afraid and we are not ashamed of being enthusiastic.&nbsp; This,
+also, I hope, will be a note of the twentieth century.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The truth is that the real vogue of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as a message to the soul is only
+beginning.&nbsp; Five years have elapsed since the publication of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;Arvon
+Edition,&rsquo; not to speak of the vast issue in sixpenny
+form.</p>
+<p>I will now quote the words of a very accomplished scholar and
+critic upon the inner meaning of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+generally.&nbsp; They appeared in the &lsquo;Saturday
+Review&rsquo; of October 1904, and they show that the interest in
+the book, so far from waning, is increasing:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; How &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; ever
+came to be a popular success is hard indeed to understand.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; How did a book, notable for its poetry and
+subtlety of thought, come to appeal to an English public?&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; And undoubtedly its Welsh
+reception has been the more intelligent; it has been welcomed
+there for the qualities that most deserved <a
+name="page378"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 378</span>a welcome;
+while in England we fear that in many quarters it has rather been
+welcomed in spite of them.&nbsp; The average English man and
+woman do not like mystery and distrust poetry.&nbsp; They have
+little sympathy with the &lsquo;renascence of wonder,&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp; We are glad to have them, for they
+illustrate further the intellectual motive of the book.&nbsp; We
+are of those who do not care to take &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; merely
+as a novel.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>These words remind me of two reviews of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;
+one by Mr. W. P. Ryan, a fellow-countryman of mine, which was
+published when &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; first appeared, the other by
+an eminent French writer.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>But &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; has yet other sides.&nbsp; It is a
+vital and seizing story.&nbsp; The girl-heroine is a beautiful
+presentment, and the struggle with destiny, when, believing in
+the efficacy of a mystic&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A less expert pioneer <a name="page379"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 379</span>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 &lsquo;she should have died hereafter.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Death came on her like an untimely frost,<br />
+Upon the fairest flower of all the field.</p>
+<p>or</p>
+<p>Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,</p>
+<p>is worth an afternoon of emphasis, a night of mystical
+elaboration.</p>
+<p>Incidentally, the Celtic and Romany types of character reveal
+their essence.&nbsp; Here, too, the author preserves the artistic
+unities.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Their story is all realistic, and yet it
+leaves the flavour of a fairy tale of Regeneration.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s love, and Winnie&rsquo;s rapture, and
+Snowdon&rsquo;s magic, and Sinfi&rsquo;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&mdash;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.&nbsp;
+In idyll, despair or tragedy, the beauty of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+is that always the song of the divine in <a
+name="page380"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 380</span>humanity is
+beneath it.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>In execution, &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; is far above the
+accomplished English novel-work of latter years; as a conception
+of life it surely transcends all.&nbsp; The &lsquo;schools&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>With equal eloquence M. Jacottet on the same day wrote about
+&ldquo;Aylwin&rdquo; in &lsquo;La Semaine
+Litt&eacute;raire&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; 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 <a name="page381"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 381</span>book in vogue should be Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s romance&mdash;the most idealistic, the
+farthest removed from the modern Anglo-Saxon conception of life
+that he could possibly conceive.&nbsp; But this fact has often
+been observable in literary history.&nbsp; Is not the true charm
+of letters that of giving to the soul respite from the
+brutalities of contemporary events?&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page382"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+382</span>Chapter XXIV<br />
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> character of Mrs. Gudgeon in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; stands as entirely alone among humourous
+characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs.
+Partridge.&nbsp; In my own review of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; I thus
+noted the entirely new kind of humour which characterizes
+it:&mdash;&ldquo;To one aspect of this book we have not yet
+alluded, namely, its humour.&nbsp; Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the
+drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is
+inimitable, with her quaint saying: &lsquo;I shall die
+a-larfin&rsquo;, they say in Primrose Court, and so I
+shall&mdash;unless I die a-crying.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; Few
+critics have done justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the
+&lsquo;Times&rsquo; said: &lsquo;In Mrs. Gudgeon, one of his
+characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what
+seems to be a new comic figure,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Saturday
+Review&rsquo; singled her out as being the triumph of the
+book&rdquo;.&nbsp; Could she really have been a real
+character?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;With regard to the most original character of the
+story,&rdquo; says Mr. Hake, &ldquo;those who knew
+Clement&rsquo;s Inn, where I myself once resided, and
+Lincoln&rsquo;s Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify Mrs.
+<a name="page383"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 383</span>Gudgeon,
+who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market.&nbsp;
+Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper.&nbsp; At one
+time, I believe&mdash;but I am not certain about this&mdash;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.&nbsp; Her
+constant phrase was &lsquo;I shall die
+o&rsquo;-laughin&rsquo;&mdash;I know I shall!&rsquo;&nbsp; On
+account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her
+inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed
+to be an Irishwoman.&nbsp; But she was not; she was cockney to
+the marrow.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation383"></a><a href="#footnote383"
+class="citation">[383]</a>&nbsp; But, of course, this interesting
+costermonger could have only suggested our unique Mrs.
+Gudgeon.</p>
+<p>She shows that it is possible to paint a low-class humourist
+as rich in the new cosmic humour as any one of Dickens&rsquo;s is
+rich in the old terrene humour, and yet without one Dickensian
+touch.&nbsp; The difficulty of achieving this feat is manifested
+every day, both in novels and on the stage.&nbsp; 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 anap&aelig;sts.&nbsp; But there is in all that Mrs.
+Gudgeon says or does a profundity of humour so much deeper than
+<a name="page384"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 384</span>the
+humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it wins her a separate niche in our
+gallery of humourous women.&nbsp; The chief cause of the delight
+which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she illustrates Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s theory of absolute humour as distinguished
+from relative humour&mdash;a theory which delighted me in those
+boyish days in Ireland, to which I have already alluded.&nbsp; I
+have read his words on this theme so often that I think I could
+repeat them as fluently as a nursery rhyme.&nbsp; In their
+original form I remember that the word &lsquo;caricature&rsquo;
+took the place of the phrase &lsquo;relative humour.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I do not think there is anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+writings so suggestive and so profound, and to find in reading
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; that they were suggested to him by a real
+living character was exhilarating indeed.</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;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,
+&lsquo;The Renascence of Wonder.&rsquo;&nbsp; I think Mrs.
+Gudgeon is a cockney Anacharsis in petticoats.&nbsp; 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,
+&lsquo;Now this is laughable by nature, the other by
+art.&rsquo;&nbsp; I will now quote the essay on absolute and
+relative humour:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; The quality which I
+have called absolute humour is popularly supposed to be the
+characteristic and special temper of the English.&nbsp; The
+bustling, money <a name="page385"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+385</span>grubbing, rank-worshipping British slave of convention
+claims to be the absolute humourist!&nbsp; It is very
+amusing.&nbsp; The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is
+the temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of &lsquo;contentment
+with things as they be,&rsquo; who, when the children wake him up
+from his sleep in the sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and
+climb over his &lsquo;thick rotundity of belly,&rsquo;
+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&rsquo;s largess, the
+exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet
+rains and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain
+side.&nbsp; Between this and relative humour how wide is the
+gulf!</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Relative humour
+laughs at the breach of the accustomed laws of nature and the
+conventional laws of man, which laws it accepts as final.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;laws which are the relative
+humourist&rsquo;s standard.&nbsp; Absolute humour, in a word, is
+based on metaphysics&mdash;relative humour on experience.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The absolute humourist has so long been saying to
+himself, &lsquo;What a whimsical idea is the human nose!&rsquo;
+that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the child&rsquo;s
+laughter <a name="page386"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+386</span>on seeing it turned upside down.&nbsp; So with
+convention and its codes of etiquette&mdash;from the pompous
+harlequinade of royalty&mdash;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.&nbsp;
+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&mdash;up to the
+apparently meaningless dance of the planets round the
+sun&mdash;up again to that greater and more meaningless waltz of
+suns round the centre&mdash;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&mdash;these &lsquo;bipeds&rsquo; which, though
+&lsquo;featherless&rsquo; are proved to be not &lsquo;plucked
+fowls&rsquo;; these proud, high-thinking organisms&mdash;stomachs
+with heads, arms, and legs as useful appendages&mdash;these
+countless little &lsquo;me&rsquo;s,&rsquo; so all alike and yet
+so unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be <i>the</i> me,
+the only true original me, round whom all other <i>me&rsquo;s</i>
+revolve&mdash;so overwhelmed is the absolute humourist with the
+whim of all this&mdash;with the incongruity, that is, of the
+normal itself&mdash;with the &lsquo;almighty joke&rsquo; of the
+Cosmos as it is&mdash;that he sees nothing &lsquo;funny&rsquo; in
+departures <a name="page387"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+387</span>from laws which to him are in themselves the very
+quintessence of fun.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;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&mdash;who will, some
+day, show us the meaning of that which now seems so
+meaningless.&nbsp; With Charles Lamb he feels, in short, that
+humour &lsquo;does not go out with life&rsquo;; and in answer to
+Elia&rsquo;s question, &lsquo;Can a ghost laugh?&rsquo; he says,
+&lsquo;Assuredly, if there be ghosts at all,&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+And naturally what is such a perennial source of amusement to the
+absolute humourist he gets to love.&nbsp; Mere representation,
+therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of art.&nbsp;
+Exaggeration offends him.&nbsp; Nothing to him is so rich as the
+real.&nbsp; He pronounces Tennyson&rsquo;s &lsquo;Northern
+Farmer&rsquo; or the public-house scene in &lsquo;Silas
+Marner&rsquo; to be more humourous than the trial scene in
+&lsquo;Pickwick.&rsquo;&nbsp; Wilkie&rsquo;s realism he finds
+more humourous <a name="page388"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+388</span>than the funniest cartoon in the funniest comic
+journal.&nbsp; And this mood is as much opposed to satire as to
+relative humour.&nbsp; Of all moods the rarest and the
+finest&mdash;requiring, indeed, such a &lsquo;blessed mixing of
+the juices&rsquo; as nature cannot every day achieve&mdash;it is
+the mood of each one of those fatal &lsquo;Paradis
+Artificiels,&rsquo; the seeking of which has devastated the human
+race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of Villon; of Walter Mapes in
+the following verse:&mdash;</p>
+<p>Meum est propositum in taberna mori,<br />
+Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,<br />
+Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,<br />
+Deus sit propitius huic potatori.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; If I were asked what character in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; shows the most unmistakable genius, I should
+reply, &lsquo;Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs.
+Gudgeon!&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page389"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+389</span>Chapter XXV<br />
+GORGIOS AND ROMANIES</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> publication of &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love&rsquo; in book form preceded that of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; by about a year, but it had been appearing
+piecemeal in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; since 1882.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;So far as regards Rhona Boswell&rsquo;s
+story,&rdquo; says Mr. Watts-Dunton, &ldquo;&lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; is a sequel to &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&nbsp; If the
+allusions to Rhona&rsquo;s lover, Percy Aylwin, in the prose
+story have been, in some degree, misunderstood by some
+readers&mdash;if there is any danger of Henry Aylwin, the hero of
+the novel, being confounded with Percy Aylwin, the hero of this
+poem&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>The fact is that the motive of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;dealing only as it does with that
+which is elemental and unchangeable in man&mdash;is of so
+entirely poetic a nature that I began to write it in verse.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; This was before I had written any
+prose at all&mdash;yes, it is so long ago as that.&nbsp; And
+when, afterwards, I began to write criticism, I had (for certain
+reasons&mdash;important then, but of no importance now) abandoned
+the idea of offering the novel to the <a name="page390"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 390</span>outside public at all.&nbsp; Among
+my friends it had been widely read, both in manuscript and in
+type.</p>
+<p>But with regard to Romany women, Henry Aylwin&rsquo;s feeling
+towards them was the very opposite of Percy&rsquo;s.&nbsp; 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&mdash;an attraction which
+did not exist between Borrow and the gypsy women with whom he was
+brought into contact&mdash;I was thinking specially of the
+character depicted here under the name of Percy Aylwin.&nbsp; And
+I asked then the question&mdash;Supposing Borrow to have been
+physically drawn with much power towards any woman, could she
+possibly have been Romany?&nbsp; Would she not rather have been
+of the Scandinavian type?&mdash;would she not have been what he
+used to call a &lsquo;Brynhild&rsquo;?&nbsp; From many
+conversations with him on this subject, I think she must
+necessarily have been a tall blonde of the type of Isopel
+Berners&mdash;who, by-the-by, was much more a portrait of a
+splendid East-Anglian road-girl than is generally imagined.&nbsp;
+And I think, besides, that Borrow&rsquo;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 &lsquo;scenic characters.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>When he comes to delineate a heroine, she is the superb Isopel
+Berners&mdash;that is to say, she is physically (and indeed
+mentally, too), the very opposite of the Romany chi.&nbsp; It was
+here, as I happen to know, that Borrow&rsquo;s sympathies were
+with Henry Aylwin far more than with Percy Aylwin.</p>
+<p>The type of the Romany chi, though very delightful to Henry
+Aylwin as regards companionship, had no physical <a
+name="page391"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 391</span>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 &lsquo;Gorgie&rsquo; could possess.&nbsp; 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&mdash;attractions that made
+her universally admired by the best judges of female beauty as
+being the most splendid &lsquo;face-model&rsquo; of her time, and
+as being in form the grandest woman ever seen in the
+studios&mdash;attractions that upon Henry Aylwin seem to have
+made almost no impression.</p>
+<p>There is no accounting for this, as there is no accounting for
+anything connected with the mysterious witchery of sex.&nbsp; And
+again, the strong inscrutable way in which some gypsy girls are
+drawn towards a &lsquo;Tarno Rye&rsquo; (as a young English
+gentleman is called), is quite inexplicable.&nbsp; Some have
+thought&mdash;and Borrow was one of them&mdash;that it may arise
+from that infirmity of the Romany Chal which causes the girls to
+&lsquo;take their own part&rsquo; without appealing to their
+men-companions for aid&mdash;that lack of masculine chivalry
+among the men of their own race.</p>
+<p>And now for a word or two upon a matter in connection with
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; which
+interests me more deeply.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>One of the great racial specialities of the Romany <a
+name="page392"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 392</span>is the
+superiority of the women to the men.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In everything that goes to make nobility of
+character this superiority is equally noticeable.&nbsp; To
+imagine a gypsy hero is, I will confess, rather difficult.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>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
+&lsquo;take punishment&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>The courage of a gypsy woman, on the other hand, has passed
+into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Those, however, who knew Sinfi Lovell may think
+with me that this state of things may simply be the result of
+opportunity and training.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page393"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+393</span>Chapter XXVI<br />
+&lsquo;THE COMING OF LOVE&rsquo;</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton
+in Chambers&rsquo;s &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English
+Literature&rsquo; I devoted most of my space to &lsquo;The Coming
+of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; I put the two great romantic poems
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; and &lsquo;Christmas at the
+&ldquo;Mermaid&rdquo;&rsquo; far above everything he has
+done.&nbsp; I think I see both in the conception and in the
+execution of these poems the promise of immortality&mdash;if
+immortality can be predicted of any poems of our time.&nbsp; In
+reading them one remembers in a flash Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+own noble words about the poetic impulse:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;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&mdash;</p>
+<p>I started once, or seemed to start, in pain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,<br />
+As when a great thought strikes along the brain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And flushes all the cheek.</p>
+<p>Whatsoever may be the poet&rsquo;s &lsquo;knowledge of his
+art,&rsquo; into this mood he must always pass before he can
+write a truly poetic line.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;inspiration&rsquo;
+indeed.&nbsp; No man can write a line of genuine poetry <a
+name="page394"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 394</span>without
+having been &lsquo;born again&rsquo; (or, as the true rendering
+of the text says, &lsquo;born from above&rsquo;); 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.&nbsp; Hence, with all Mrs. Browning&rsquo;s metrical
+blemishes, the splendour of her metrical triumphs at her
+best.</p>
+<p>For what is the deep distinction between poet and
+proseman?&nbsp; A writer may be many things besides a poet; he
+may be a warrior like &AElig;schylus, 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&mdash;the world&rsquo;s
+knowingness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its
+ambition&mdash;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.&nbsp; What such a man produces may
+greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not so greatly as
+it delights and astonishes himself.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;to see with Sophocles
+that nothing, not even poetry <a name="page395"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 395</span>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&mdash;to see with Milton that
+the high quality of man&rsquo;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&mdash;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 &lsquo;await the chisel of the sculptor&rsquo; in
+all the marble hills.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp; In this respect alone, apart from its
+great originality, &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; is a
+curiosity of literature.&nbsp; I know nothing in the least like
+the history of this poem.&nbsp; It was written, circulated in
+manuscript among the very elite of English letters, and indeed
+partly published in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; very nearly
+a quarter of a century ago.&nbsp; I have before alluded to Mrs.
+Chandler Moulton&rsquo;s introduction to Philip Bourke
+Marston&rsquo;s poems, where she says that it was Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry which won for him the friendship of
+Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne.&nbsp; Yet for lustre
+after lustre it was persistently withheld from the public;
+cenacle after poetic cenacle rose, prospered and faded away, and
+still <a name="page396"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+396</span>this poet, who was talked of by all the poets and
+called &lsquo;the friend of all the poets,&rsquo; kept his work
+back until he had passed middle age.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is now in its sixth
+edition.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But, as I have said,
+it is not in the least surprising that, notwithstanding
+Rossetti&rsquo;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&mdash;it is only the true
+critics who see in the right perspective a poet who has so
+perversely neglected his chances.&nbsp; If his time of
+recognition has not yet fully come, this generation is not to
+blame.&nbsp; The poet can blame only himself, although to judge
+by Rossetti&rsquo;s words, and by the following lines from Dr.
+Hake&rsquo;s &lsquo;New Day,&rsquo; he is indifferent to
+that:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>You tell me life is all too rich and brief,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Too various, too delectable a game,<br />
+To give to art, entirely or in chief;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And love of Nature quells the thirst for fame.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The &lsquo;parable poet&rsquo; 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:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page397"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+397</span>You who in youth the cone-paved forest sought,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Musing until the pines to musing fell;<br />
+You who by river-path the witchery caught<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of waters moving under stress of spell;<br />
+You who the seas of metaphysics crossed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And yet returned to art&rsquo;s consoling
+haven&mdash;<br />
+Returned from whence so many souls are lost,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With wisdom&rsquo;s seal upon your forehead
+graven&mdash;<br />
+Well may you now abandon learning&rsquo;s seat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And work the ore all seek, not many find;<br />
+No sign-post need you to direct your feet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; You draw no riches from another&rsquo;s mind.<br />
+Hail Nature&rsquo;s coming; bygone be the past;<br />
+Hail her New Day; it breaks for man at last.</p>
+<p>Fulfil the new-born dream of Poesy!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Give her your life in full, she turns from
+less&mdash;<br />
+Your life in full&mdash;like those who did not die,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Though death holds all they sang in dark duress.<br
+/>
+You, knowing Nature to the throbbing core,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; You can her wordless prophecies rehearse.<br />
+The murmers others heard her heart outpour<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Swell to an anthem in your richer verse.<br />
+If wider vision brings a wider scope<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For art, and depths profounder for emotion,<br />
+Yours be the song whose master-tones shall ope<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A new poetic heaven o&rsquo;er earth and ocean.<br
+/>
+The New Day comes apace; its virgin fame<br />
+Be yours, to fan the fiery soul to flame.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Indeed, he has often said to me: &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; For my part, I have been a student of English
+poetry all my life&mdash;it is my chief subject of
+study&mdash;and I predict that when poetic imagination is again
+perceived to be the supreme poetic gift, Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+genius will be acclaimed.&nbsp; In respect of <a
+name="page398"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 398</span>imaginative
+power, apart from the other poetic qualities&mdash;&lsquo;the
+power of seeing a dramatic situation and flashing it upon the
+physical senses of the listener,&rsquo; none of his
+contemporaries have surpassed him.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; And, if we are to judge by the vogue of
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; and &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; in
+Wales, the Welsh people seem to see it very clearly.&nbsp; Take,
+for instance, the sonnet called &lsquo;The Mirrored Stars&rsquo;
+again, given on page 29.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>In order fully to understand &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo;
+it is necessary to bear in mind a distinction between the two
+kinds of poetry upon which Mr. Watts-Dunton has often
+dwelt.&nbsp; &ldquo;There are,&rdquo; he tells us, &ldquo;but two
+kinds of poetry, but two kinds of art&mdash;that which
+interprets, and that which represents.&nbsp; &lsquo;Poetry is
+apparent pictures of unapparent realities,&rsquo; says the
+Eastern mind through Zoroaster; &lsquo;the highest, the only
+operation of art is representation (Gestaltung),&rsquo; says the
+Western mind through Goethe.&nbsp; Both are right.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Madame Galimberti has called Mr. Watts-Dunton &lsquo;the poet of
+the sunrise&rsquo;: There are richer descriptions of sunrise in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; than in
+any other writer I know.&nbsp; &ldquo;Few poets,&rdquo; Mr.
+Watts-Dunton says, &ldquo;have been successful in painting a
+sunrise, for the simple reason that, save through the
+bed-curtains, they do not often see one.&nbsp; They think that
+all they have to do is to paint a sunset, which they sometimes do
+see, and call it a sunrise.&nbsp; They are entirely mistaken,
+however; the two phenomena are both <a name="page399"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 399</span>like and unlike.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; shows that independence of
+contemporary vogues and influences which characterizes all Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+It was as a poet that his energies were first exercised, but this
+for a long time was known only to his poetical friends.&nbsp; His
+criticism came many years afterwards, and, as Rossetti used to
+say, &lsquo;his critical work consists of generalizations of his
+own experience in the poet&rsquo;s workshop.&rsquo;&nbsp; For
+many years he was known only in his capacity as a critic.&nbsp;
+James Russell Lowell is reported to have said: &lsquo;Our ablest
+critics hitherto have been 18-carat; Theodore Watts goes nearer
+the pure article.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. William Sharp, in his study of
+Rossetti, says: &lsquo;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&rsquo;s
+literary judgment than seems characteristic with so dominant and
+individual an intellect as that of Rossetti.&nbsp; Although the
+latter knew well the sonnet-literature of Italy and England, and
+was a much-practised master of the heart&rsquo;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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; are
+vitally connected with the poet&rsquo;s peculiar critical
+message.&nbsp; Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin may be regarded as
+the embodiment of his philosophy of life.&nbsp; The very
+popularity <a name="page400"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+400</span>of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;Contemporary Review,&rsquo; M.
+Maurice Muret in the &lsquo;Journal des D&eacute;bats,&rsquo; and
+other thoughtful writers.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In both the romance and the
+poem the theme is love at war with death.&nbsp; Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+in his preface to the illustrated edition of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It is a story written as a comment on
+Love&rsquo;s warfare with death&mdash;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&mdash;or thinks he has
+lost&mdash;a woman whose love was the only light of his
+world&mdash;when his soul is torn from his body, as it were, and
+whisked off on the wings of the &lsquo;viewless winds&rsquo;
+right away beyond the farthest star, till <a
+name="page401"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 401</span>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.&nbsp; It was to
+depict this phase of human emotion that both &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; were written.&nbsp; They
+were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer&rsquo;s
+soul, sent out into the strange and busy battle of the
+world&mdash;sent out to find, if possible, another soul or two to
+whom the watcher was, without knowing it, akin.&nbsp; In
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; the problem is symbolized by the victory of
+love over sinister circumstance, whereas in the poem it is
+symbolized by a mystical dream of &lsquo;Natura
+Benigna.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; 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, &lsquo;Mother
+Carey&rsquo;s Chicken.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Gazing at
+her beauty, Percy stands dazzled and forgets the petrel.&nbsp; It
+is symbolical of the inner meaning of the story that the bird now
+flies away through the half-open door.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The first kiss
+between the two lovers is thus described:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page402"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+402</span>If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,<br />
+Is heaven a dream?&nbsp; Is she I claspt a dream?<br />
+Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam<br />
+And miles of furze shine yellow down the West?<br />
+I seem to clasp her still&mdash;still on my breast<br />
+Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.<br />
+I think she kissed these lips, for now they seem<br />
+Scarce mine: so hallowed of the lips they pressed.<br />
+Yon thicket&rsquo;s breath&mdash;can that be eglantine?<br />
+Those birds&mdash;can they be Morning&rsquo;s choristers?<br />
+Can this be Earth?&nbsp; Can these be banks of furze?<br />
+Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!<br />
+I seem to know them, though this body of mine<br />
+Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Percy stays with the gypsies, and the gypsy-girl, Rhona,
+teaches him Romany.&nbsp; This arouses the jealousy of a gypsy
+rival&mdash;Herne the &lsquo;Scollard.&rsquo;&nbsp; Percy
+Aylwin&rsquo;s family afterwards succeeds in separating him from
+her, and he is again sent to sea.&nbsp; While cruising among the
+coral islands he receives the letter from Rhona which paints her
+character with unequalled vividness:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">RHONA&rsquo;S
+LETTER</p>
+</blockquote>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams the day</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>When Herne the Scollard come and said to
+me,</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>He s off, that rye o yourn, gone clean
+away</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p style="text-align: center">gentleman</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>Till swallow-time; hes left this letter:
+see.</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>In dreams I heerd the bee and grasshopper,</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>Like on that mornin, buz in Rington
+Hollow,</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>Shell live till swallow-time and then shell
+mer,</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p style="text-align: center">die</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><blockquote><p>For never will a rye come back to her</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+<td><blockquote><p style="text-align: center">gentleman</p>
+</blockquote>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wot leaves her till the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>All night I heerd them bees and
+grasshoppers;</p>
+<p>All night I smelt the breath o grass and may,</p>
+<p>Mixed sweet wi&rsquo; smells o honey from the furze</p>
+<p>Like on that mornin when you went away;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="page403"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+403</span>All night I heerd in dreams my daddy sal,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">laugh</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">girl-whole</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>O Bozzles breed&mdash;tans, vardey, greis, and
+all&mdash;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">tents: waggons: horses</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>To see dat tarno rye o hern palall</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">back</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wots left her till the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>I woke and went a-walkin on the ice</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>All white with snow-dust, just like sparklin loon,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">salt</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And soon beneath the stars I heerd a vice,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A vice I knowed and often, often shoon;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">hear</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>An then I seed a shape as thin as tuv;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">smoke</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>I knowed it wur my blessed mammy s mollo. <a
+name="citation403a"></a><a href="#footnote403a"
+class="citation">[403a]</a></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">spirit</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>He s thinkin on you; don t you go and rove;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">weep</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>You ll see him at the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the grass</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>When he wur gone, and freeze the brooklets gillies;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">songs</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>There wornt no smell, dear, in the sweetest cas,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">hay</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And when the summer brought the water-lilies,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And when the sweet winds waved the golden giv,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">wheat</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The skies above em seemed as bleak and kollo <a
+name="citation403b"></a><a href="#footnote403b"
+class="citation">[403b]</a></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">black</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>As now, when all the world seems frozen yiv.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">snow</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The months are long, but mammy says you ll live</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver throat</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Will meet the stonechat in the buddin whin,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie ull float</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">song</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>From light-green boughs through leaves a-peepin thin;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The wheat-ear soon ull bring the willow-wren,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And then the fust fond nightingale ull follow,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Still out at sea, the spring is in our glen;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Come, darlin, wi the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="page404"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+404</span>And she wur gone!&nbsp; And then I read the words</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>They made the Christmas sing with summer birds,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And spring-leaves shine on every frozen tree;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And when the dawnin kindled Rington spire,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and lollo</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>red</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o fire,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Another night, I sez, has brought him nigher;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And soon the bull-pups found me on the Pool&mdash;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>You know the way they barks to see me slide&mdash;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>But when the skatin bors o Rington scool</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Comed on, it turned my head to see em glide.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>I seemed to see you twirlin on your skates,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And somethin made me clap my hans and hollo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">cutting</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>But when I woke-like&mdash;Im the gal wot waits</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Comin seemed ringin in the Christmas-chime;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>In beads o frost along the nets o rime,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And when the pups began to bark and play,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock and wallow</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Among the snow and fling it up like spray,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>I says to them, You know who rote to say</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o December</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o spring</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups, remember;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>If not&mdash;for me no singin birds ull sing:</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">cuckoo</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, <a name="citation404"></a><a
+href="#footnote404" class="citation">[404]</a> over hill and
+hollow:</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="page405"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+405</span>Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>For her wot waits the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your han</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">mine own</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>To that fine rawni rowin on the river;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">lady</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>I ll never call that lady a chovihan</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">witch</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Nor yit a mumply gorgie&mdash;I&rsquo;ll forgive her.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">miserable Gentile</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Come back&mdash;or, say the word, and I will follow</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Your footfalls round the world: Ill leave this life</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>(Ive flung away a-ready that ere knife)&mdash;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>I m dyin for the comin o the swallow.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very
+moment when &lsquo;the Schollard,&rsquo; maddened by the
+discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy that night, has drawn his
+knife upon the girl under the starlight by the river-bank.&nbsp;
+Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle on
+the other side without being able to go to Rhona&rsquo;s
+assistance.&nbsp; But the girl hurls her antagonist into the
+water, and he is drowned.&nbsp; There are other
+witnesses&mdash;the stars, whose reflected light, according to a
+gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the
+drowned man sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the
+deed.&nbsp; For a Romany woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty
+is death.&nbsp; Nevertheless, Rhona marries Percy.&nbsp; I will
+quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in the tent at
+dawn:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>The young light peeps through yonder trembling
+chink<br />
+The tent&rsquo;s mouth makes in answer to a breeze;<br />
+The rooks outside are stirring in the trees<br />
+Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.<br />
+I hear the earliest anvil&rsquo;s tingling clink<br />
+From Jasper&rsquo;s forge; the cattle on the leas<br />
+Begin to low.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s waking by degrees:<br />
+<a name="page406"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+406</span>Sleep&rsquo;s rosy fetters melt, but link by link.<br
+/>
+What dream is hers?&nbsp; Her eyelids shake with tears;<br />
+The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:<br />
+She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:<br />
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll never leave me now?&nbsp; There is but
+you;<br />
+I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,<br />
+&lsquo;The Dukkeripen o&rsquo; stars comes ever
+true.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She rises, startled by a wandering bee<br />
+Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:<br />
+She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,<br />
+And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy<br />
+Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree&mdash;<br />
+Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,<br />
+Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl&mdash;<br />
+The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,<br />
+And says, &lsquo;This bride of yours, I know her well,<br />
+And so do all the birds in all the bowers<br />
+Who mix their music with the breath of flowers<br />
+When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.<br />
+See, on the curtain of the morning haze<br />
+The Future&rsquo;s finger writes of happy days.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Rhona, half-hidden by &lsquo;the branches of the hawthorn
+tree,&rsquo; stretches up to kiss the white and green May buds
+overhanging the bridal tent, while Percy Aylwin stands at the
+tent&rsquo;s mouth and looks at her:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Can this be she, who, on that fateful day<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken
+things<br />
+From Rhona&rsquo;s eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?<br />
+Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Kissing the buds for &lsquo;luck o&rsquo;
+love&rsquo; it brings,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While from the dingle grass the skylark springs<br
+/>
+And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls
+the branches<br />
+apart, and clasps her in his arms.</p>
+<p><a name="page407"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 407</span>Can
+she here, covering with her childish kisses<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; These pearly buds&mdash;can she so soft, so
+tender,<br />
+So shaped for clasping&mdash;dowered of all
+love-blisses&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send
+her,<br />
+An angel storming hell, through death&rsquo;s abysses,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where never a sight could fright or power could bend
+her?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the
+lovers are on the river she reads the scripture of the
+stars.&nbsp; I must give here the sonnet quoted on page
+29:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,<br
+/>
+And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;<br />
+The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,<br />
+Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.<br />
+We rowed&mdash;we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears<br />
+An angel&rsquo;s, yet with woman&rsquo;s dearer wiles;<br />
+But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles<br />
+And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.</p>
+<p>What shaped those shadows like another boat<br />
+Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?<br />
+There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,<br />
+While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;<br />
+We wept&mdash;we kissed&mdash;while starry fingers wrote,<br />
+And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in
+which Percy confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its
+menace.&nbsp; The stars write in the river:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is
+strong.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Percy reads the rune and answers:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>I read your rune: is there no pity, then,<br />
+In Heav&rsquo;n that wove this net of life for men?<br />
+Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?<br />
+Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; King that can do no wrong!<br />
+Ah!&nbsp; Night seems opening!&nbsp; There, above the skies,<br
+/>
+<a name="page408"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 408</span>Who sits
+upon that central sun for throne<br />
+Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,<br />
+Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,<br />
+Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?<br />
+Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes<br />
+Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal<br />
+Of infinite light, &rsquo;tis Love that stands immortal,<br />
+The King of Kings.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering
+Rhona&rsquo;s secret, secretly slay her.&nbsp; Percy, having
+returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to find her grave.&nbsp;
+Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona should
+drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into
+the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called &lsquo;Natura
+Maligna,&rsquo; which has been much discussed by the
+critics:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold<br />
+Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;<br />
+By glacier-brink she stood&mdash;by cataract-spray&mdash;<br />
+When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.<br />
+At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,<br />
+And if a footprint shone at break of day,<br />
+My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:<br />
+&lsquo;&rsquo;Tis hers whose hand God&rsquo;s mightier hand doth
+hold.&rsquo;<br />
+I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,<br />
+Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,<br />
+When lo, she stood! . . .&nbsp; God made her let me pass,<br />
+Then felled the bridge! . . .&nbsp; Oh, there in sallow light,<br
+/>
+There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,<br />
+And all my wondrous days as in a glass.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique
+in poetry.&nbsp; Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; of February 5, 1881: &ldquo;Even
+in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu Puritan
+(Saivite) would address to Kali (&lsquo;the malignant&rsquo;) <a
+name="page409"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 409</span>or Parvati
+(&lsquo;the mountaineer&rsquo;).&nbsp; It is to be delivered from
+her that Hindus shriek to God in the delirium of their
+fear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his
+hut, while New Year&rsquo;s morning is breaking:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Through Fate&rsquo;s mysterious warp another
+weft<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of days is cast; and see!&nbsp; Time&rsquo;s
+star-built throne,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From which he greets a new-born year, is shown<br />
+Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!<br />
+Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of all that was its music&mdash;stand alone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Remembering happy hours for ever flown,<br />
+Impatient of the leaden minutes left&mdash;</p>
+<p>The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,<br />
+Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Barren and foolish, and I cry, &lsquo;No grain,<br
+/>
+No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!&rsquo;<br />
+And yet I cannot join the dead&mdash;and live.</p>
+<p>Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In England, heedless of the knells they ring<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling<br />
+Each to the other ere you say adieu!&mdash;<br />
+I seem to hear their chimes&mdash;the chimes we knew<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Greeting a New Year&rsquo;s Day as bright of wing<br
+/>
+As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.</p>
+<p>If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Could bring the past and make it live again,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,<br />
+And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And with the past bring her I weep in vain&mdash;<br
+/>
+Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[The clouds move away and show
+the<br />
+stars in dazzling brightness.</p>
+<p>Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page410"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+410</span>My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove&mdash;<br
+/>
+They bring the mighty Mother&rsquo;s new-year greeting:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;All save great Nature is a vision
+fleeting&rsquo;&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; So says the scripture of those orbs above.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;All, all,&rsquo; I cry, &lsquo;except
+man&rsquo;s dower of love!&mdash;<br />
+Love is no child of Nature&rsquo;s mystic cheating!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And yet it comes again, the old desire<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To read what yonder constellations write<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; On river and ocean&mdash;secrets of the
+night&mdash;<br />
+To feel again the spirit&rsquo;s wondering fire<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me
+quite,<br />
+To catch the master-note of Nature&rsquo;s lyre.</p>
+<p>New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And yet they say to me, most sorely stung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By Fate and Death, &lsquo;Nature is ever young,<br
+/>
+Clad in new riches, as each morning&rsquo;s gold<br />
+Blooms o&rsquo;er a blasted land: be thou consoled:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;<br
+/>
+The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;</p>
+<p>The Past has given to man a wondrous world,<br />
+But curtains of old Night were being upcurled<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime<br
+/>
+In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of Youth&rsquo;s fresh runners in the lists of
+Time.<br />
+Arise, and drink the wine of Nature&rsquo;s light!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true
+reading of &lsquo;The Promise of the Sunrise&rsquo; and the
+revelation of &lsquo;Natura Benigna&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:<br
+/>
+Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;<br />
+Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how<br />
+Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.<br />
+&lsquo;Sorrow,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;has made me old, my dear;<br
+/>
+&rsquo;Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:<br />
+Beneath my load a seraph&rsquo;s neck might bow,<br />
+<a name="page411"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 411</span>Vigils
+like mine would blanch an angel&rsquo;s hair.&rsquo;<br />
+Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!<br />
+I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes&mdash;<br />
+I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove<br />
+Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;<br />
+But when upon my neck she fell, my love,<br />
+Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And now &lsquo;Natura Benigna&rsquo; reveals to him her mystic
+consolation:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>What power is this?&nbsp; What witchery wins my
+feet<br />
+To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,<br />
+All silent as the emerald gulfs below,<br />
+Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?<br />
+What thrill of earth and heaven&mdash;most wild, most
+sweet&mdash;<br />
+What answering pulse that all the senses know,<br />
+Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow<br />
+Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?<br />
+Mother, &rsquo;tis I, reborn: I know thee well:<br />
+That throb I know and all it prophesies,<br />
+O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell<br />
+Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!<br />
+Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell<br />
+The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This is not the pathetic fallacy.&nbsp; It is the poetic
+interpretation of the latest discovery of science, to wit, that
+dead matter is alive, and that the universe is an infinite
+stammering and whispering, that may be heard only by the
+poet&rsquo;s finer ear.</p>
+<p>The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the
+originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry, both in subject
+and in form.&nbsp; The originality of any poet is seen, not in
+fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in new and original
+treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the
+language.&nbsp; In &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; the poet has
+invented a new poetic form.&nbsp; Its object is to combine <a
+name="page412"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 412</span>the
+advantages and to avoid the disadvantages of lyrical narrative,
+of poetic drama, of the prose novel, and of the prose play.&nbsp;
+In Tennyson&rsquo;s &lsquo;Maud&rsquo; and in Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s other lyrical drama, &ldquo;Christmas at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid,&rsquo;&rdquo; the special functions of all the
+above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form.&nbsp; The
+story is told by brief pictures.&nbsp; In &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love&rsquo; this method reaches its perfection.&nbsp; Lyrics,
+songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets, are used according to an
+inner law of the poet&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; The exaltation of these
+moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative
+being summarized in bare prose.&nbsp; The interplay of thought,
+mood, and passion is revealed wholly by swift lyrical
+visions.&nbsp; In Dante&rsquo;s &lsquo;Vita Nuova&rsquo; a method
+something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind
+of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante&rsquo;s poems
+are all sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music
+like that in &lsquo;The Coming of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; Here the
+very &lsquo;rhyme-colour&rsquo; and the subtle variety of vowel
+sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical
+composition.&nbsp; Wagner&rsquo;s music is the only modern
+art-form which is comparable with the metrical architecture of
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love,&rsquo; and &ldquo;Christmas at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; No one can fully understand
+the rhythmic triumph of these great poems who has not studied it
+by the light of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s theory of elaborate
+rhythmic effects in music formulated in his treatise on Poetry in
+the &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica&rsquo;&mdash;a theory
+which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with
+the art of music, is still developing.&nbsp; Both these lyrical
+dramas ought to be carefully studied by all students of English
+metres.</p>
+<p>The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity,
+<a name="page413"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 413</span>but an
+extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic
+poetry.&nbsp; It is remarkable that in this new and difficult
+form the poet has achieved in Rhona Boswell a feat of
+characterization quite without parallel under such
+conditions.&nbsp; Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to
+hang her portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary
+heroines of poetry.&nbsp; But if, for the sake of comparison,
+Rhona be set beside Tennyson&rsquo;s Maud, the difference is
+startling.&nbsp; Maud does not tingle with personality.&nbsp; She
+is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of &lsquo;creamy
+English girls.&rsquo;&nbsp; Rhona, on the other hand, is
+nervously alive with personality.&nbsp; One makes pictures of her
+in one&rsquo;s brain&mdash;pictures that never become blurred,
+pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic
+heroines.&nbsp; How much of this is due to the poetic form?&nbsp;
+Could Rhona have lived so intensely in a novel or a play?&nbsp; I
+do not think so.&nbsp; At any rate, she lives with incomparable
+vitality in this lyrical drama-novel, and therefore the poetic
+vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is well worth the
+study of critics and craftsmen.&nbsp; Mr. Kernahan has called
+attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative.&nbsp;
+Perhaps this defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and
+more romantic prose like that of the opening of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; which would lead the imagination insensibly
+from one situation or mood to another.</p>
+<p>In connection with the opening sonnets of &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love,&rsquo; a very interesting point of criticism presents
+itself.&nbsp; These sonnets, in which Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the
+story of the girl who lived in the Casket lighthouse, appeared in
+the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; a week after Mr. Swinburne and
+he returned from a visit to the Channel Islands.&nbsp; They
+record a real incident.&nbsp; Some <a name="page414"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 414</span>time afterwards Mr. Swinburne
+published in the &lsquo;English Illustrated Magazine&rsquo; his
+version of the story, a splendid specimen of his sonorous
+rhythms.</p>
+<p>Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s version of the story may interest the
+reader:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF
+NATURA MALIGNA<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">(THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE
+CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)</span></p>
+<p>Amid the Channel&rsquo;s wiles and deep decoys,<br />
+Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,<br />
+A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree<br />
+Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:<br />
+The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys<br />
+Were hers.&nbsp; At last she sailed to Alderney,<br />
+But there she pined.&nbsp; &lsquo;The bustling world,&rsquo; said
+she,<br />
+&lsquo;Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.&rsquo;<br />
+The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,<br />
+Had winds for sponsor&mdash;one proud rock for nurse,<br />
+Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse<br />
+All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:<br />
+The cold bright sea was hers for universe<br />
+Till o&rsquo;er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.</p>
+<p>But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:&mdash;<br />
+Her lover&rsquo;s boat was out; her ears were dinned<br />
+With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind<br />
+That shook the troubled sun&rsquo;s red canopy.<br />
+Even while she prayed the storm&rsquo;s high revelry<br />
+Woke petrel, gull&mdash;all revellers winged and finned&mdash;<br
+/>
+And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,<br />
+And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.<br />
+&lsquo;My songs are louder, child, than prayers of
+thine,&rsquo;<br />
+The Mother sang.&nbsp; &lsquo;Thy sea-boy waged no strife<br />
+With Hatred&rsquo;s poison, gangrened Envy&rsquo;s
+knife&mdash;<br />
+With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,<br />
+Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,<br />
+Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page415"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 415</span>Two
+poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature
+than these poems on the same subject by two intimate
+friends.&nbsp; It seems impossible that the two writers could
+ever have read each other&rsquo;s work or ever have known each
+other well.&nbsp; The point which I wish to emphasize is that two
+poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers,
+they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each
+other every day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large
+portion of the evening in each other&rsquo;s society; and yet
+when they sit down at their desks they may be as far asunder as
+the poles.&nbsp; From this we may perhaps infer that among the
+many imaginable divisions of writers there is this one: there are
+men who can collaborate and men who cannot.</p>
+<p>Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of
+this poem.&nbsp; I may mention that the other day I came across a
+little book called &lsquo;Authors that have Influenced me,&rsquo;
+and found that Mr. Rider Haggard instanced the opening section of
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love,&rsquo; &lsquo;Mother Carey&rsquo;s
+Chicken,&rsquo; as being the piece of writing that had influenced
+him more than all others.&nbsp; I think this is a compliment, for
+the originality of invention displayed in &lsquo;King
+Solomon&rsquo;s Mines&rsquo; and &lsquo;She&rsquo; sets Rider
+Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree
+with Mr. Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story
+that is new and also good is a rare achievement.</p>
+<p>I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like
+to give to Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s miscellaneous sonnets.&nbsp;
+Some of them have had a great vogue: for instance, &lsquo;John
+the Pilgrim.&rsquo;&nbsp; Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker,
+A.R.A., as will be seen, has done <a name="page416"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 416</span>full justice to the imaginative
+strength of the subject.&nbsp; It is no exaggeration to say that
+there is a simple grandeur in this design which Mr. Hacker has
+seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister power of Natura Benigna
+being symbolized by the desert waste and nature&rsquo;s mockery
+by the mirage:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,<br />
+Claspt in a silvery river&rsquo;s winding maze:<br />
+&lsquo;Water, water!&nbsp; Blessed be God!&rsquo; he says,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And totters gasping toward those happy isles.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Then all is fled!&nbsp; Over the sandy piles<br />
+The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;God heard me not,&rsquo; says he, &lsquo;blessed be
+God!&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And dies.&nbsp; But as he nears the pearly
+strand,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Heav&rsquo;n&rsquo;s outer coast where waiting
+angels stand,<br />
+He looks below: &lsquo;Farewell, thou hooded clod,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:<br />
+God heard my prayer for life&mdash;blessed be God!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p416b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"&lsquo;John the Pilgrim.&rsquo;  (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)"
+title=
+"&lsquo;John the Pilgrim.&rsquo;  (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)"
+src="images/p416s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been
+called an epic in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make
+it obscure, or gnarled, or affected; and the motive adumbrates
+the whole history of religious faith from Job to Jesus Christ,
+from Moses to Mahomet.&nbsp; The rhymes in this sonnet illustrate
+my own theory as to the rhymer&rsquo;s luck, good and ill.&nbsp;
+To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have
+been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the
+luck of &lsquo;chamomiles&rsquo; and &lsquo;isles,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;chamomiles&rsquo; giving the picture of the flowers, and
+&lsquo;isles&rsquo; giving the false vision of the mirage.&nbsp;
+The same thing is notable in the case of another amazing tour de
+force, &lsquo;The Bedouin Child&rsquo; (see p. 448), where the <a
+name="page417"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 417</span>same verbal
+parsimony is exemplified.&nbsp; Without the fortunate rhyme-words
+&lsquo;pashas,&rsquo; &lsquo;camel-maws,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;claws&rsquo; in the octave, the picture could not have
+been given in less than a dozen lines.</p>
+<p>The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry and that
+of Coleridge has been frequently discussed.&nbsp; It has the same
+romantic glamour and often the same music, as far as the music of
+decasyllabic lines can call up the music of the ravishing
+octosyllabics of &lsquo;Christabel.&rsquo;&nbsp; This at least I
+know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,&mdash;he owns the
+true wizard of romance as master.&nbsp; I do not think that any
+one of his sonnets affords me quite the unmixed delight which I
+find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and his friend George Meredith
+is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the author as follows:
+&lsquo;The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive
+analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about
+through volumes of essays and not so paint him.&nbsp; There is
+Coleridge!&nbsp; But whence the source of your story&mdash;if
+anything of such aptness could have been other than dreamed after
+a draught of Xanadu&mdash;I cannot tell.&nbsp; It is new to
+me.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to
+present the reader with the &lsquo;pure amber&rsquo;
+itself:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>I see thee pine like her in golden story<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The gates thrown open&mdash;saw the sunbeams
+play,<br />
+With only a web &rsquo;tween her and summer&rsquo;s glory;<br />
+Who, when that web&mdash;so frail, so transitory,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It broke before her breath&mdash;had fallen away,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Saw other webs and others rise for aye<br />
+Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.</p>
+<p>Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That woke Romance, the queen, to reign
+afresh&mdash;<br />
+<a name="page418"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 418</span>Had been
+but preludes from that lyre of thine,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Could thy rare spirit&rsquo;s wings have pierced the
+mesh<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,<br />
+But lets the poet see how heav&rsquo;n can shine.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Here again the verbal parsimony is notable.&nbsp; I defy any
+one to find anything like it except in Dante, the great master of
+verbal parsimony.&nbsp; There are only six adjectives in the
+whole sonnet.&nbsp; Every word is cunningly chosen, not for
+ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning.&nbsp; The metrical
+structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising imagery
+until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a
+sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall.&nbsp;
+Metrical students will delight in the double rhymes of the
+octave, which play so great a part in the suspensive music.</p>
+<p>I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things,
+as well as one of the wisest, done by the editor of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; was that of printing Rhona&rsquo;s
+letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at the foot
+of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the
+poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona.&nbsp; It certainly
+showed immense confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet
+the poems were a great success.&nbsp; The best thing said about
+Rhona has been said by Mr. George Meredith: &ldquo;I am in love
+with Rhona, not the only one in that.&nbsp; When I read her
+love-letter in the &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; I had the regret
+that the dialect might cause its banishment from
+literature.&nbsp; Reading the whole poem through, I see that it
+is as good as salt to a palate.&nbsp; We are the richer for it,
+and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now
+printed.&rdquo;&nbsp; And, discussing &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love,&rsquo; Meredith wrote: &lsquo;I will not speak of the tours
+de <a name="page419"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 419</span>force
+except to express a bit of astonishment at the dexterity which
+can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of the
+work.&rsquo;&nbsp; Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry is so consummate that it is concealed
+from the reader.&nbsp; There is no sense of difficulty overcome,
+no parade of artifice.&nbsp; Yet the metrical structure of the
+very poem which seems the simplest is actually the
+subtlest.&nbsp; &lsquo;Rhona&rsquo;s Love Letter&rsquo; is
+written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern, each stanza of
+eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of a
+sonnet.&nbsp; But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a
+na&iuml;ve, unconscious charm that the reader forgets the
+rhyme-scheme altogether, and does not realize that this
+spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour are produced by the
+most elaborate art.</p>
+<p>I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+poetry.&nbsp; There can be no doubt that he is the most original
+poet since Coleridge, not merely in verbal, metrical, and
+rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the deeper quality of imaginative
+energy.&nbsp; By &lsquo;the most original poet&rsquo; I do not
+mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once
+what I mean.&nbsp; Poe&rsquo;s &lsquo;Raven&rsquo; is more
+&lsquo;original&rsquo; than Shelley&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Epipsychidion,&rsquo; but it is not so great.&nbsp; In my
+article on Blake in Chambers&rsquo;s &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of
+English Literature,&rsquo; I pointed out that there are greater
+poets than Blake (or Donne) but none more original.&nbsp; There
+are many poets who possess that ordinary kind of imagination
+which is mainly a perpetual matching of common ideas with common
+metaphors.&nbsp; But few poets have the rarer kind of imagination
+which creates not only the metaphor but also the idea, and then
+fuses both into one piece of beauty.&nbsp; Now Mr. Watts-Dunton
+has this <a name="page420"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+420</span>supreme gift.&nbsp; He uses the symbol to suggest ideas
+which cannot be suggested otherwise.&nbsp; His theory of the
+universe is optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with
+sombre threads.&nbsp; He sees the dualism of Nature, and he shows
+her alternately as malignant and as benignant.&nbsp; Indeed, he
+has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the two great
+sonnets, &lsquo;Natura Maligna&rsquo; and &lsquo;Natura
+Benigna,&rsquo; which I have already quoted.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona
+Boswell.&nbsp; Upon this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some
+pregnant remarks in the introduction to the later editions of the
+poem:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;But it is with regard to the humour of
+gypsy women that Gorgio readers seem to be most sceptical.&nbsp;
+The humourous endowment of most races is found to be more
+abundant and richer in quality among the men than among the
+women.&nbsp; But among the Romanies the women seem to have taken
+humour with the rest of the higher qualities.</p>
+<p>A question that has been most frequently asked me in
+connection with my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls
+really the esprit and the humourous charm that you attribute to
+them?&nbsp; My answer to this question shall be a quotation from
+Mr. Groome&rsquo;s delightful book, &lsquo;Gypsy
+Folk-Tales.&rsquo;&nbsp; Speaking of the Romany chi&rsquo;s
+incomparable piquancy, he says:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a
+folk-tale impromptu.&nbsp; She had been to a pic-nic in a
+four-in-hand with &ldquo;a lot o&rsquo; real tip-top
+gentry&rdquo;; and &ldquo;Reia,&rdquo; she said to me afterwards,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you the comicalest thing as ever
+was.&nbsp; We&rsquo;d pulled up to put the brake on, and there
+was a p&uacute;ro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) <a
+name="page421"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 421</span>come and
+looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard.&nbsp; I could
+see he&rsquo;d his eye upon me.&nbsp; And home he&rsquo;d go,
+that old hedgehog, to his wife, and &lsquo;Missus,&rsquo;
+he&rsquo;d say, &lsquo;what d&rsquo;ye think?&nbsp; I seen a
+little gypsy gal just now in a coach and four horses&rsquo;; and
+&lsquo;Dabla,&rsquo; she&rsquo;d say, &lsquo;sawkumni &rsquo;as
+varde kenaw&rsquo;&rdquo; [&lsquo;Bless us! every one now keeps a
+carriage&rsquo;].&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona
+Boswell, I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from
+Mr. Groome, that it might well have been she.&nbsp; Although
+there is as great a difference between one Romany chi and another
+as between one English girl and another, there is a strange and
+fascinating kinship between the humour of all gypsy girls.&nbsp;
+No three girls could possibly be more unlike than Sinfi Lovell,
+Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr. Groome gives his
+anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the fanciful
+humour of them all.&nbsp; The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak
+for itself in these pages&mdash;where, however, the passionate
+and tragic side of her character and her story dominates
+everything.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page422"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+422</span>Chapter XXVII<br />
+&ldquo;CHRISTMAS AT THE &lsquo;MERMAID&rsquo;&rdquo;</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Second</span> in importance to &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love&rsquo; among Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poems is the
+poem I have already mentioned&mdash;the poem which Mr. Swinburne
+has described as &lsquo;a great lyrical
+epic&rsquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Christmas at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; The originality of this
+wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of &lsquo;The Coming
+of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; No other writer would have dreamed of
+depicting the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a
+golden skeleton in the form of one of the burnt Incas, called up
+by &lsquo;the righteous sea,&rsquo; and squatting grimly at the
+prow of Medina&rsquo;s flag-ship.&nbsp; Here we get &lsquo;The
+Renascence of Wonder&rsquo; indeed.&nbsp; Some Aylwinians put it
+at the head of all his writings.&nbsp; The exploit of David Gwynn
+is accepted by Motley and others as historic, but it needed the
+co-operation of the Golden Skeleton to lift his narrative into
+the highest heaven of poetry.&nbsp; Extremely unlike &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love&rsquo; as it is in construction, it is built on
+the same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; the remarks I have made upon a
+desideratum in poetic art&mdash;that is to say, it is cast in a
+form which gives as much scope to the dramatic instinct at work
+as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from the
+restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped.&nbsp;
+The poem was written, or mainly written, during one of those
+visits <a name="page423"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+423</span>which, as I have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to
+pay to Stratford-on-Avon.&nbsp; The scene is laid, however, in
+London, at that famous &lsquo;Mermaid&rsquo; tavern which haunts
+the dreams of all English poets:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;With the exception of Shakespeare, who has
+quitted London for good, in order to reside at New Place,
+Stratford-on-Avon, which he has lately rebuilt, all the members
+of the &lsquo;Mermaid&rsquo; Club are assembled at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid&rsquo; Tavern.&nbsp; At the head of the table sits
+Ben Jonson dealing out wassail from a large bowl.&nbsp; At the
+other end sits Raleigh, and at Raleigh&rsquo;s right hand, the
+guest he had brought with him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh
+seaman, now an elderly man, whose story of his exploits as a
+galley-slave in crippling the Armada before it reached the
+Channel had, years before, whether true or false, given him in
+the low countries a great reputation, the echo of which had
+reached England.&nbsp; Raleigh&rsquo;s desire was to excite the
+public enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the
+sea, and generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which
+had already become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps,
+among such choice spirits as those associated with the
+&lsquo;Mermaid&rsquo; club.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It opens with a chorus:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+Where he goes with fondest face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br />
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Where?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Then Ben Jonson rises, fills the cup with wassail and drinks
+to Shakespeare, and thus comments upon his absence:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page424"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+424</span>That he, the star of revel, bright-eyed Will,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With life at golden summit, fled the town<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And took from Thames that light to dwindle down<br
+/>
+O&rsquo;er Stratford farms, doth make me marvel still.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Then he calls upon Shakespeare&rsquo;s most intimate
+friend&mdash;the mysterious Mr. W. H. of the sonnets&mdash;to
+give them reminiscences of Shakespeare with a special reference
+to the memorable evening when he arrived at Stratford on quitting
+London for good and all.</p>
+<p>To the sixth edition of the poem Mr. Watts-Dunton prefixed the
+following remarks, and I give them here because they throw light
+upon his view of Shakespeare&rsquo;s friend:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Since the appearance of this volume, there
+has been a great deal of acute and learned discussion as to the
+identity of that mysterious &lsquo;friend&rsquo; of Shakespeare,
+to whom so many of the sonnets are addressed.&nbsp; But
+everything that has been said upon the subject seems to fortify
+me in the opinion that &lsquo;no critic has been able to
+identify&rsquo; that friend.&nbsp; Southampton seems at first to
+fit into the sacred place; so does Pembroke at first.&nbsp; But,
+after a while, true and unbiassed criticism rejects them
+both.&nbsp; I therefore feel more than ever justified in
+&lsquo;imagining the friend for myself.&rsquo;&nbsp; And this, at
+least, I know, that to have been the friend of Shakespeare, a man
+must needs have been a lover of nature;&mdash;he must have been a
+lover of England, too.&nbsp; And upon these two points, and upon
+another&mdash;the movement of a soul dominated by friendship as a
+passion&mdash;I have tried to show Shakespeare&rsquo;s probable
+influence upon his &lsquo;friend of friends.&rsquo;&nbsp; It
+would have been a mistake, however, to cast the sonnets in the
+same metrical mould as Shakespeare&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page425"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+425</span>Shakspeare&rsquo;s friend thus records what Shakespeare
+had told him about his return to Stratford:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>As down the bank he strolled through evening
+dew,<br />
+Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves<br />
+Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,<br />
+And all his happy childhood came to view;<br />
+He saw a child watching the birds that flew<br />
+Above a willow, through whose musky leaves<br />
+A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves<br />
+That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.<br />
+These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling<br />
+From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,<br />
+With power beyond all power of things beholden<br />
+Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk<br />
+Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,<br />
+And closed him in from all but willow musk.</p>
+<p>And then a child beneath a silver sallow&mdash;<br />
+A child who loved the swans, the moorhen&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;cheep&rsquo;&mdash;<br />
+Angled for bream where river holes were deep&mdash;<br />
+For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,<br />
+Or ate the &lsquo;fairy cheeses&rsquo; of the mallow,<br />
+And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep<br />
+Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep<br />
+In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;<br />
+And then a child to whom the water-fairies<br />
+Sent fish to &lsquo;bite&rsquo; from Avon&rsquo;s holes and
+shelves,<br />
+A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,<br />
+The flower-sprites sent the bees and &lsquo;sunshine
+elves&rsquo;;<br />
+Then, in the shifting vision&rsquo;s sweet vagaries,<br />
+He saw two lovers walking by themselves&mdash;</p>
+<p>Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain<br />
+Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy<br />
+Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,<br />
+Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain&mdash;<br />
+Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain<br />
+By sudden silence, &lsquo;lest his plaint should
+cloy&rsquo;&mdash;<br />
+Knew when the skylark&rsquo;s changing note of joy<br />
+<a name="page426"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 426</span>Saith,
+&lsquo;Now will I return to earth again&rsquo;&mdash;<br />
+Knew every warning of the blackbird&rsquo;s shriek,<br />
+And every promise of his joyful song&mdash;<br />
+Knew what the magpie&rsquo;s chuckle fain would speak;<br />
+And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,<br />
+Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,<br />
+Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.<br />
+He heard her say, &lsquo;The birds attest our troth!&rsquo;<br />
+Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may<br />
+Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray<br />
+Round summer&rsquo;s royal field of golden cloth<br />
+Shines o&rsquo;er the buttercups like snowy froth,<br />
+And that sweet skylark on his azure way,<br />
+And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:<br />
+&lsquo;We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.&rsquo;<br />
+And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory,<br />
+River and church, grows rosier with our story!<br />
+This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,<br />
+Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!<br />
+They breathe&mdash;o&rsquo;er mead and stream they
+breathe&mdash;the blessing.<br />
+&lsquo;We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>When Mr. &lsquo;W. H.&rsquo; sits down, the friend and brother
+of another great poet, Christopher Marlowe, who had been sitting
+moody and silent, oppressed by thoughts of the dead man, many of
+whose unfriends were at the gathering, recites these lines
+&lsquo;On Seeing Kit Marlowe Slain at Deptford&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&rsquo;Tis Marlowe falls!&nbsp; That last lunge
+rent asunder<br />
+Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe&rsquo;s life,<br />
+Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heaven at strife,<br />
+Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!<br />
+Heav&rsquo;n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,<br />
+If Fate&rsquo;s hand guided yonder villain&rsquo;s knife<br />
+Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife<br />
+With dower of poets&mdash;song and love and wonder.<br />
+Or was it Chance?&nbsp; Shakspeare, who art supreme<br />
+O&rsquo;er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe&rsquo;s sight<br />
+<a name="page427"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 427</span>To
+pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height<br />
+Where man and men and gods and all that seem<br />
+Are Nature&rsquo;s mutterings in her changeful dream&mdash;<br />
+Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>After they have all drunk in silence to the memory of Marlowe,
+Marlowe&rsquo;s friend speaks:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Where&rsquo;er thou art, &lsquo;dead
+Shepherd,&rsquo; look on me;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;<br />
+Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Then Raleigh rises, and the great business of the evening
+begins with the following splendid chorus:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">(Turning to David Gwynn)</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wherever billows foam<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Briton fights at home:<br />
+His hearth is built of water&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Water blue and green;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There&rsquo;s never a wave of ocean<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind can set in motion<br />
+That shall not own our England&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Own our England queen. <a name="citation427"></a><a
+href="#footnote427" class="citation">[427]</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The guest I bring to-night<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Had many a goodly fight<br />
+On seas the Don hath found&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page428"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 428</span><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Hath found for English sails;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And once he dealt a blow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Against the Don to show<br />
+What mighty hearts can move&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Can move in leafy Wales.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who hast a heart akin<br />
+To England&rsquo;s own brave hearts&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Brave hearts where&rsquo;er they beat;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And tell the Mermaid how<br />
+A galley-slave struck hard&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Struck hard the Spanish fleet.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Where he goes with fondest
+face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye,
+brightest hair:<br />
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Upon being thus called forth the old sea-dog rises, and tells
+a wonderful story indeed, the &lsquo;story of how he and the
+Golden Skeleton crippled the Great Armada sailing
+out&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;A galley lie&rsquo; they called my tale;
+but he<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales:<br />
+The man, I say, who helped to keep you free<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page429"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+429</span>Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.<br />
+Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,<br
+/>
+Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire<br />
+Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Stands asking here Truth&rsquo;s one reward,
+belief!</p>
+<p>And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; This tale of mine&mdash;shall tell, in future
+days,<br />
+How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For England when she moved in perilous ways;<br />
+But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From loins of men whose ghosts have still the
+sea&mdash;<br />
+Doth England&mdash;she who loves the loudest tongue&mdash;<br />
+Remember mariners whose deeds are sung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By waves where flowed their blood to keep her
+free?</p>
+<p>I see&mdash;I see ev&rsquo;n now&mdash;those ships of Spain<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Gathered in Tagus&rsquo; mouth to make the
+spring;<br />
+I feel the cursed oar, I toil again,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys
+sing;<br />
+And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing
+out&mdash;<br />
+Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,<br />
+Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.</p>
+<p>And one we call the &lsquo;Princess,&rsquo; one the
+&lsquo;Royal,&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;Diana&rsquo; one; but &rsquo;tis the
+fell &lsquo;Basana&rsquo;<br />
+Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;<br />
+For by their help Hope whispers me that I&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whom ten hours&rsquo; daily travail at a stretch<br
+/>
+Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die&mdash;<br />
+May strike once more where flags of England fly,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.</p>
+<p>True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Again I feel the lash that tears my back;<br />
+Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Answered by boatswain&rsquo;s laugh and
+scourge&rsquo;s crack;<br />
+Again I feel the pang when trying to choke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page430"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+430</span>Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread<br />
+Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,<br />
+They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.</p>
+<p>By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And mighty waves assault our trembling galley<br />
+With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And soldiers cry, &lsquo;What saint shall bid her
+rally?&rsquo;<br />
+Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Dons to free them from the metal tether<br />
+By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;<br />
+Some shout, in answer to the billows&rsquo; roar,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;The Dons and we will drink brine-wine
+together.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Bring up the slave,&rsquo; I hear the captain cry,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;Who sank the golden galleon &ldquo;El
+Dorado,&rdquo;<br />
+The dog can steer.&rsquo;<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Here sits the dog,&rsquo; quoth I,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;Who sank the ship of Commodore
+Medrado!&rsquo;<br />
+With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:<br />
+&lsquo;Hearken, thou pirate&mdash;bold Medrado&rsquo;s
+bane!&mdash;<br />
+Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; If thou canst take the galley through this
+sea.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ay! ay!&rsquo; quoth I.&nbsp; The fools unlock me
+straight!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And then &rsquo;tis I give orders to the Don,<br />
+Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose winning game I know hath just begun.<br />
+I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night<br />
+Oh then I see beneath the galley&rsquo;s beak<br />
+A glow like Spanish <i>auto&rsquo;s</i> ruddy reek&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!</p>
+<p>A skeleton, but yet with living eyes&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold&mdash;<br
+/>
+Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And round his brow, of high imperial mould,<br />
+A burning circle seems to shake and shine,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page431"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+431</span>Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,<br />
+Throwing a radiance o&rsquo;er the foam-lit brine:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;&rsquo;Tis God&rsquo;s Revenge,&rsquo;
+methinks.&nbsp; &lsquo;Heaven sends for sign<br />
+That bony shape&mdash;that Inca&rsquo;s diadem.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>At first the sign is only seen of me,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But well I know that God&rsquo;s Revenge hath
+come<br />
+To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous
+foam.<br />
+Quoth I, &lsquo;How fierce soever be the levin<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Spain&rsquo;s hand can hurl&mdash;made mightier
+still for wrong<br />
+By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven&mdash;<br />
+Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is
+strong.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The dog can steer,&rsquo; I laugh; &lsquo;yea,
+Drake&rsquo;s men know<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.&rsquo;<br
+/>
+Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Some &rsquo;neath the hatches, some beside the
+slaves,<br />
+And bid them stack their muskets all in piles<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Beside the foremast, covered by a sail,<br />
+The captives guess my plan&mdash;I see their smiles<br />
+As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and
+pale.</p>
+<p>I say, they guess my plan&mdash;to send beneath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The soldiers to the benches where the slaves<br />
+Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hate&rsquo;s nails and teeth more keen than Spanish
+glaives,<br />
+Then wait until the tempest&rsquo;s waxing might<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,<br
+/>
+Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite<br />
+The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.</p>
+<p>Past Ferrol Bay each galley &rsquo;gins to stoop,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shuddering before the Biscay demon&rsquo;s
+breath.<br />
+Down goes a prow&mdash;down goes a gaudy poop:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;The Don&rsquo;s &ldquo;Diana&rdquo;
+bears the Don to death,&rsquo;<br />
+Quoth I, &lsquo;and see the &ldquo;Princess&rdquo; plunge and
+wallow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Down purple trough, o&rsquo;er snowy crest of
+foam:<br />
+<a name="page432"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 432</span>See!
+see! the &ldquo;Royal,&rdquo; how she tries to follow<br />
+By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to
+roam.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Now, three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,<br />
+Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,<br
+/>
+Each rower murmuring o&rsquo;er my whispered plan,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,<br />
+&lsquo;Rise, every man, to tear to death his man&mdash;<br />
+Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When God&rsquo;s Revenge sings loud to ocean&rsquo;s
+lyre.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Taller the spectre grows &rsquo;mid ocean&rsquo;s din;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:<br />
+I give the sign: the slaves cry, &lsquo;Ho for Gwynn!&rsquo;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;Teach them,&rsquo; quoth I, &lsquo;the
+way we grip in Wales.&rsquo;<br />
+And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I win the key&mdash;let loose a storm of slaves:<br
+/>
+&lsquo;When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,&rsquo;<br
+/>
+They cry; &lsquo;sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or drink to England&rsquo;s Queen in foaming
+waves.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>We leap adown the hatches; in the dark<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We stab the Dons at random, till I see<br />
+A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be<br />
+A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Then, lo: a bony shape with lifted hands&mdash;<br
+/>
+A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,<br />
+O&rsquo;ertopping groans, o&rsquo;ertopping Ocean&rsquo;s
+quire&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A skeleton with Inca&rsquo;s diadem stands!</p>
+<p>It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,<br />
+When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sniffing man&rsquo;s flesh at roast for Christ His
+sake.<br />
+The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They cross their foreheads, but they dare not
+speak.<br />
+Anon the spectre, when the strife is o&rsquo;er,<br />
+<a name="page433"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 433</span>Melts
+from the dark, then glimmers as before,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Burning upon the conquered galley&rsquo;s beak.</p>
+<p>And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The &lsquo;Royal&rsquo; bearing down upon our
+craft&mdash;<br />
+Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.<br />
+I take the helm; I put the galley near:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.<br />
+Amid the &lsquo;Royal&rsquo;s&rsquo; din I laugh to hear<br />
+The curse of many a British mutineer,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The crack, crack, crack of boatswain&rsquo;s biting
+scourge.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ye scourge in vain,&rsquo; quoth I, &lsquo;scourging
+for life<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Slaves who shall row no more to save the
+Don&rsquo;;<br />
+For from the &lsquo;Royal&rsquo;s&rsquo; poop, above the
+strife,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!<br />
+&lsquo;What! is it thou, Pirate of &ldquo;El Dorado&rdquo;?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He shouts in English tongue.&nbsp; And there,
+behold!<br />
+Stands he, the devil&rsquo;s commodore, Medrado.<br />
+&lsquo;Ay! ay!&rsquo; quoth I, &lsquo;Spain owes me one
+strappado<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For scuttling Philip&rsquo;s ship of stolen
+gold.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;I come for that strappado now,&rsquo; quoth I.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;What means yon thing of burning
+bones?&rsquo; he saith.<br />
+&lsquo;&rsquo;Tis God&rsquo;s Revenge cries, &ldquo;Bloody Spain
+shall die!&rdquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The king of El Dorado&rsquo;s name is Death.<br />
+Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I cry; &lsquo;strong hands are stretched to save you
+now;<br />
+Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.&rsquo;<br />
+But when the &lsquo;Royal,&rsquo; captured, rides adrift,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.</p>
+<p>When all are slain, the tempest&rsquo;s wings have fled,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:<br />
+Far down the offing glows a spot of red,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; My soul knows well it hath that Inca&rsquo;s
+form.<br />
+&lsquo;It lights,&rsquo; quoth I, &lsquo;the red cross banner of
+Spain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There on the flagship where Medina sleeps&mdash;<br
+/>
+Hell&rsquo;s banner, wet with sweat of Indian&rsquo;s pain,<br />
+And tears of women yoked to treasure train,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Scarlet of blood for which the New World
+weeps.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page434"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 434</span>There
+on the dark the flagship of the Don<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To me seems luminous of the spectre&rsquo;s glow;<br
+/>
+But soon an arc of gold, and then the sun,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Rise o&rsquo;er the reddening billows, proud and
+slow;<br />
+Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That take all shifting colours as they shake,<br />
+I see the great Armada coil and twist<br />
+Miles, miles along the ocean&rsquo;s amethyst,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like hell&rsquo;s old snake of hate&mdash;the winged
+snake.</p>
+<p>And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That snake accursed, with wings which swell and
+puff<br />
+Before the slackening horses of the wind,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.<br />
+&lsquo;Behold,&rsquo; quoth I, &lsquo;their floating citadels,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The same the priests have vouched for
+musket-proof,<br />
+Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,<br />
+That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yea, sailed from Tagus&rsquo; mouth, for
+Christ&rsquo;s behoof.</p>
+<p>For Christ&rsquo;s behoof they sailed: see how they go<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With that red skeleton to show the way<br />
+There sitting on Medina&rsquo;s stem aglow&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;<br />
+Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,<br />
+Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,<br />
+Their trucks, their flags&mdash;behold them, how they
+pass&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With God&rsquo;s Revenge for figurehead&mdash;to
+Doom!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Then Ben Jonson, the symposiarch, rises and calls upon Raleigh
+to tell the story of the defeat of the Great Armada.&nbsp; I can
+give only a stanza or two and the chorus:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The choirboys sing the matin song,<br />
+When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard&rsquo;s right.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He drives the wing&mdash;a huddled throng&mdash;<br
+/>
+Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page435"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+435</span>While galleon hurtles galeasse,<br />
+And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As scythes cut down the summer grass,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Drake closes on the writhing mass,<br />
+Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Skimming the waves.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,<br />
+Running from ship to ship like living things.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,<br />
+Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through smoke we see their chiefs encased<br />
+In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And once I see within a waist<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Wild English captives ashen-faced,<br />
+Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+In purple weals.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[<span class="smcap">David
+Gwynn</span> here leaps up, pale and panting, and<br />
+bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from <span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span><br />
+sits down again.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Don fights well, but fights not now<br
+/>
+The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To pluck the gold from off the brow,<br />
+Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He hunts not now the Indian maid<br />
+With bloodhound&rsquo;s bay&mdash;Peru&rsquo;s confiding
+daughter,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who saw in flowery bower or glade<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The stranger&rsquo;s god-like cavalcade,<br />
+And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro&rsquo;s trade<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Of rape and slaughter.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,<br
+/>
+Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,<br />
+Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,<br />
+Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like any wolf that tears his cage!<br />
+&rsquo;Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Till set of sun!</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a name="page436"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 436</span>Their troops, superfluous as their
+gold,<br />
+Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Are packed away in every hold&mdash;<br />
+Targets of flesh for every English gun&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till, like Pizarro&rsquo;s halls of blood,<br />
+Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Reddening the waves for many a rood,<br />
+As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Before the wind.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The chief leit-motiv of the poem is the metrical idea that
+whenever a stanza ends with the word &lsquo;sea,&rsquo; Ben
+Jonson and the rest of the jolly companions break into this
+superb chorus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The
+sea!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus did England fight;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And shall not England smite<br />
+With Drake&rsquo;s strong stroke in battles yet to be?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And while the winds have power<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shall England lose the dower<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She won in that great hour&mdash;<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+The sea?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada
+is driven out to the open sea.&nbsp; He sits down, and Gwynn,
+worked into a frenzy of excitement, now starts up and finishes
+the story in the same metre, but in quite a different
+spirit.&nbsp; In Gwynn&rsquo;s fevered imagination the skeleton
+which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed
+Armada to its destruction:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Gwynn</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;With towering sterns, with golden stems<br
+/>
+That totter in the smoke before their foe,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I see them pass the mouth of Thames,<br />
+With death above the billows, death below!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who leads them down the tempest&rsquo;s path,<br />
+<a name="page437"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 437</span>From
+Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Past many a Scottish hill and strath,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; All helpless in the wild wind&rsquo;s wrath,<br />
+Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+The Skeleton!</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At length with toil the cape is passed,<br
+/>
+And faster and faster still the billows come<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To coil and boil till every mast<br />
+Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I see, I see, where galleons pitch,<br />
+That Inca&rsquo;s bony shape burn on the waves,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While Mother Carey, Orkney&rsquo;s witch,<br />
+Waves to the Spectre&rsquo;s song her lantern-switch<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+O&rsquo;er ocean-graves.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The glimmering crown of Scotland&rsquo;s
+head<br />
+They pass.&nbsp; No foe dares follow but the storm.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Spectre, like a sunset red,<br />
+Illumines mighty Wrath&rsquo;s defiant form,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And makes the dreadful granite peak<br />
+Burn o&rsquo;er the ships with brows of prophecy;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yea, makes that silent countenance speak<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Above the tempest&rsquo;s foam and reek,<br />
+More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Tyrants, ye die!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,<br />
+Writes &lsquo;God&rsquo;s Revenge&rsquo; on waves that climb and
+dash,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Foaming right up the sand-built piles,<br />
+Where ships are hurled.&nbsp; It sings amid the crash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yea, sings amid the tempest&rsquo;s roar,<br />
+Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And yells of captives chained to oar,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And cries of those who strike for shore,<br />
+&lsquo;Spain&rsquo;s murderous breath of blood shall foul no
+more<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+The righteous sea!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been
+often quoted in anthologies:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><a
+name="page438"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 438</span>WASSAIL
+CHORUS</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+Where he goes with fondest face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br />
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&rsquo;Tis by Devon&rsquo;s glorious
+halls,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Whence, dear Ben, I come again:<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bright with golden roofs and walls&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; El Dorado&rsquo;s rare
+domain&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Seem those halls when sunlight launches<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shafts of gold through leafless branches,<br />
+Where the winter&rsquo;s feathery mantle blanches<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Field and farm and lane.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where he goes with fondest face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br
+/>
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Drayton</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&rsquo;Tis where Avon&rsquo;s wood-sprites
+weave<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Through the boughs a lace of
+rime,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While the bells of Christmas Eve<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Fling for Will the
+Stratford-chime<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; O&rsquo;er the river-flags embossed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Rich with flowery runes of frost&mdash;<br />
+O&rsquo;er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed&mdash;<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Strains of olden time.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where he goes with fondest face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br
+/>
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page439"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 439</span><span
+class="smcap">Shakspeare&rsquo;s Friend</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&rsquo;Tis, methinks, on any ground<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Where our Shakspeare&rsquo;s feet
+are set.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; With his blithest coronet:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Friendship&rsquo;s face he loveth well:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis a countenance whose
+spell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sheds a balm o&rsquo;er every mead and dell<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where we used to fret.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where he goes with fondest face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br />
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Heywood</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;More than all the pictures, Ben,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Winter weaves by wood or
+stream,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Christmas loves our London, when<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Rise thy clouds of
+wassail-steam&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Clouds like these, that, curling, take<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Forms of faces gone, and wake<br />
+Many a lay from lips we loved, and make<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+London like a dream.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Chorus</span></p>
+<p>Christmas knows a merry, merry place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where he goes with fondest face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br />
+Tell the Mermaid where is that one place<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Where?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">Ben
+Jonson</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Love&rsquo;s old songs shall never die,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet the new shall suffer proof;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Love&rsquo;s old drink of Yule brew I,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Wassail for new love&rsquo;s
+behoof:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Drink the drink I brew, and sing<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page440"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+440</span>Till the berried branches swing,<br />
+Till our song make all the Mermaid ring&mdash;<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Yea, from rush to roof.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">Finale</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Christmas loves this merry, merry
+place:&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Christmas saith with fondest
+face<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Brightest eye, brightest hair:<br
+/>
+Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Rare!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of &lsquo;The
+Coming of Love,&rsquo; fine as it is, was overshadowed by the
+wild and romantic poem which lends its name to the volume.&nbsp;
+But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his beautiful series,
+&lsquo;Flowers of Parnassus,&rsquo; where it was charmingly
+illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue
+considerably.&nbsp; There is no doubt that for originality, for
+power, and for music, &ldquo;Christmas at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid&rsquo;&rdquo; is enough to form the base of any
+poet&rsquo;s reputation.&nbsp; It has been enthusiastically
+praised by some of the foremost writers of our time.&nbsp; I have
+permission to print only one of the letters in its praise which
+the author received, but that is an important one, as it comes
+from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;I have been beginning Christmas, in a way,
+by reading over the fire your delightful little &lsquo;Christmas
+at the &ldquo;Mermaid&rdquo;&rsquo; which it was most kind of you
+to send.&nbsp; I was carried back right into Armada times by
+David Gwynn&rsquo;s vivid story: it seems remarkable that you
+should have had the conjuring power to raise up those old years
+so brightly in your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them
+to readers in such high relief of three dimensions, as one may
+say.</p>
+<p><a name="page441"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 441</span>The
+absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest
+touches of the poem: it throws one into a &lsquo;humourous
+melancholy&rsquo;&mdash;and we feel him, in some curious way,
+more than if he had been there.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="page442"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+442</span>Chapter XXVIII<br />
+CONCLUSION</h2>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Assuredly</span>,&rsquo; says Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, &lsquo;there is no
+profession so courageous as that of the pen.&rsquo;&nbsp; Well,
+in coming to the end of my task&mdash;a task which has been a
+labour of love&mdash;I wish I could feel confident that I have
+not been too courageous&mdash;that I have satisfactorily done
+what I set out to do.&nbsp; But I have passed my four-hundred and
+fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a
+child&rsquo;s bucket into a sea of ideas that has no limit.&nbsp;
+Out of scores upon scores of articles buried in many periodicals
+I have been able to give three or four from the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; none from the
+&lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; and none out of the &lsquo;Nineteenth
+Century,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Fortnightly Review,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Harper&rsquo;s Magazine,&rsquo; etc.&nbsp; Still, I have
+been able to show that a large proportion of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s scattered writings preaches the same
+peculiar doctrine in a ratiocinative form which in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; is
+artistically enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest
+importance at the present time, when science seems to be
+revealing a system of the universe so deeply opposed to the
+system which in the middle of the last century seemed to be
+revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s is
+making a very deep impression upon the generation to which I
+belong.&nbsp; If it should be said that in speaking for the
+younger generation I am speaking for a pigmy race (and I
+sometimes fear that we are pigmies <a name="page443"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 443</span>when I remember the stature of our
+fathers), I am content to appeal to one of the older generation,
+who has spoken words in praise of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet,
+which would demand even my courage to echo.&nbsp; I mean Dr.
+Gordon Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, &lsquo;The New
+Day,&rsquo; was published in 1890.&nbsp; It was these remarkable
+sonnets which moved Frank Groome to dub Mr. Watts-Dunton
+&lsquo;homo ne quidem unius libri,&rsquo; a literary celebrity
+who had not published a single book.&nbsp; I have already
+referred to &lsquo;The New Day,&rsquo; but I have not given an
+adequate account of this sonnet-sequence.&nbsp; In their nobility
+of spirit, their exalted passion of friendship, their
+single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not think they
+have ever been surpassed.&nbsp; It is a fine proof of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s genius for friendship that he should be able
+unconsciously to enlink himself to the souls of his seniors, his
+coevals and his juniors, and that there should be between him and
+the men of three generations, equal links of equal
+affection.&nbsp; But I must not lay stress on the whimsies of
+chronology and the humours of the calendar, for all Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friends are young, and the youngest of them,
+Mr. George Meredith, is the oldest.&nbsp; The youthfulness of
+&lsquo;The New Day&rsquo; makes it hard to believe that it was
+written by a septuagenarian.&nbsp; The dedication is full of the
+fine candour of a romantic boy:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;To &lsquo;W. T. W.,&rsquo; the friend who
+has gone with me through the study of Nature, accompanied me to
+her loveliest places at home and in other lands, and shared with
+me the reward she reserves for her ministers and interpreters, I
+dedicate this book.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The following sonnet on &lsquo;Friendship&rsquo; expresses a
+very rare mood and a very high ideal:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page444"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+444</span>Friendship is love&rsquo;s full beauty unalloyed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With passion that may waste in selfishness,<br />
+Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.<br />
+It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With cheery look that makes a winter bright;<br />
+It saves the hope from falling to the ground,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And turns the restless pillow towards the light.<br
+/>
+To be another&rsquo;s in his dearest want,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At struggle with a thousand racking throes,<br />
+When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Is that which friendship&rsquo;s soothing hand
+bestows:<br />
+How joyful to be joined in such a love,&mdash;<br />
+We two,&mdash;may it portend the days above!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine
+order.&nbsp; Many English and American critics have highly
+praised them, but not too highly.&nbsp; This venerable
+&lsquo;parable poet&rsquo; did not belong to my generation.&nbsp;
+Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s generation.&nbsp;
+His day was the day before yesterday, and yet he wrote these
+sonnets when he was past seventy, not to glorify himself, but to
+glorify his friend.&nbsp; They are one long impassioned appeal to
+that friend to come forward and take his place among his
+peers.&nbsp; The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of
+the most bewildering enigmas of literature.&nbsp; I have already
+quoted what Gordon Hake says about the man who when the
+&lsquo;New Day&rsquo; was written had not published a single
+book.</p>
+<p>With regard to the unity binding together all Mr.
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s writings, I can, at least, as I have shown
+in the Introduction, speak with the authority of a careful
+student of them.&nbsp; With the exception of the late Professor
+Strong, who when &lsquo;The Coming of Love&rsquo; appeared, spoke
+out so boldly upon this subject in &lsquo;Literature,&rsquo; <a
+name="page445"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 445</span>I doubt if
+anyone has studied those writings more carefully than I have; and
+yet the difficulty of discovering the one or two quotable essays
+which more than the others expound and amplify their central
+doctrine has been so great that I am dubious as to whether, in
+the press of my other work, I have achieved my aim as
+satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by
+another&mdash;especially by Professor Strong, had he not died
+before he could write his promised essay upon the inner thought
+of &lsquo;Aylwinism&rsquo; in the &lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of
+English Literature.&rsquo;&nbsp; But, even if I have failed
+adequately to expound the gospel of &lsquo;Aylwinism,&rsquo; it
+is undeniable that, since the publication of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;
+(whether as a result of that publication or not), there has been
+an amazing growth of what may be called the transcendental
+cosmogony of &lsquo;Aylwinism.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;the &lsquo;Arvon&rsquo; illustrated
+edition&mdash;says:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;When &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was in type, the
+author, getting alarmed at its great length, somewhat mercilessly
+slashed into it to shorten it, and the more didactic parts of the
+book went first.&nbsp; Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has restored one or
+two of these excised passages, notably one in which he summarizes
+his well-known views of the &lsquo;great Renascence of Wonder,
+which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and
+the beginning of the nineteenth.&rsquo;&nbsp; In one of these
+passages he has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour&rsquo;s
+speculations at the recent meeting of the British
+Association.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Something like the same remark was made in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; of September 3, 1904:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The writer has restored certain didactic
+passages of <a name="page446"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+446</span>the story which were eliminated before the publication
+of the book, owing to its great length.&nbsp; Though the teaching
+of the book is complete without the restorations, it seems a pity
+that they were ever struck out, because they appear to have
+anticipated the striking remarks of Mr. Balfour at the British
+Association the other day, to say nothing of the utterances of
+certain scientific writers who have been discussing the
+transcendental side of Nature.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and &lsquo;The
+Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; refer are excerpts from &lsquo;The Veiled
+Queen,&rsquo; by Aylwin&rsquo;s father.&nbsp; The first of these
+comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called &lsquo;The
+Revolving Cage of Circumstance&rsquo; and runs thus:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;The one important fact of the
+twentieth century will be the growth and development of that
+great Renascence of Wonder which set in in Europe at the close of
+the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.</p>
+<p>The warring of the two impulses governing man&mdash;the
+impulse of wonder and the impulse of acceptance&mdash;will occupy
+all the energies of the next century.</p>
+<p>The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its
+infancy has to come back&mdash;has to triumph&mdash;before the
+morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn.</p>
+<p>But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from
+those in which it was exercised in the past.&nbsp; The
+materialism, which at this moment seems to most thinkers
+inseparable from the idea of evolution, will go.&nbsp; Against
+their own intentions certain scientists are showing that the
+spiritual force called life is the maker and not the creature of
+organism&mdash;is a something outside the <a
+name="page447"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 447</span>material
+world, a something which uses the material world as a means of
+phenomenal expression.</p>
+<p>The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in
+the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the
+cold, when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell
+him that &ldquo;the principle of all certitude&rdquo; is not and
+cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses,
+indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably
+man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor
+smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes,
+ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so
+deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless,
+soundless&mdash;a phantasmagoric show&mdash;a deceptive series of
+undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not,
+according to the organism upon which they fall.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets
+about &lsquo;the Omnipotence of Love,&rsquo; which showed, beyond
+doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at
+least, a very original poet.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The second restored excerpt from &lsquo;The Veiled
+Queen&rsquo; comes in at the end of the chapter called &lsquo;The
+Magic of Snowdon,&rsquo; and runs thus:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;I think, indeed, that I had passed into
+that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my
+father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin:&mdash;</p>
+<p>With love I burn: the centre is within me;<br />
+While in a circle everywhere around me<br />
+Its Wonder lies&mdash;</p>
+<p>that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on
+the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and
+heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined <a
+name="page448"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 448</span>to govern
+the entire drama of my life, &lsquo;The Veiled Queen.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The omnipotence of love&mdash;its power of knitting
+together the entire universe&mdash;is, of course, best understood
+by the Oriental mind.&nbsp; Just after the loss of my dear wife I
+wrote the following poem called &ldquo;The Bedouin Child,&rdquo;
+dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl
+children, and I translated it into Arabic.&nbsp; Among these
+Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
+daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.</p>
+<p>Ily&agrave;s the prophet, lingering &rsquo;neath the moon,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Heard from a tent a child&rsquo;s heart-withering
+wail,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Mixt with the message of the nightingale,<br />
+And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,<br />
+A little maiden dreaming there alone.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She babbled of her father sitting pale<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &rsquo;Neath wings of Death&mdash;&rsquo;mid sights
+of sorrow and bale,<br />
+And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor child, plead on,&rdquo; the succouring prophet
+saith,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While she, with eager lips, like one who tries<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries<br />
+To Heaven for help&mdash;&ldquo;Plead on; such pure
+love-breath,<br />
+Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That, in the Desert, fan thy father&rsquo;s
+eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Seven sons await the morning vultures&rsquo;
+claws;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &rsquo;Mid empty water-skins and camel maws<br />
+The father sits, the last of all the band.<br />
+He mutters, drowsing o&rsquo;er the moonlit sand,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &ldquo;Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all
+pashas;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or, if the wings are Death&rsquo;s, why Azraeel
+draws<br />
+A childless father from an empty land.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page449"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+449</span>&ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; saith a Voice, &ldquo;the wind of
+Azraeel&rsquo;s wings<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A child&rsquo;s sweet breath has stilled: so God
+decrees:&rdquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A camel&rsquo;s bell comes tinkling on the
+breeze,<br />
+Filling the Bedouin&rsquo;s brain with bubble of springs<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering
+trees,<br />
+Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but
+&ldquo;the superficial film&rdquo; of the immensity of God, and
+that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within
+the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference.&nbsp;
+Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined
+to Asia.&nbsp; The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element
+of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards Sufism,
+could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as
+theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
+Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the
+tune of universal love and beauty.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has
+said that the method of depicting the power of love in them is
+sublime.&nbsp; &lsquo;The Slave girl&rsquo;s Progress to
+Paradise,&rsquo; however, is equally powerful and equally
+original.&nbsp; The feeling in the &lsquo;Bedouin Child&rsquo;
+and in &lsquo;The Slave Girl&rsquo;s Progress to Paradise&rsquo;
+is exactly like that which inspires &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; When Percy sees Rhona&rsquo;s message in the
+sunrise he exclaims:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>But now&mdash;not all the starry Virtues seven<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor
+Night.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And morning says, &lsquo;Love hath such godlike
+might<br />
+That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,<br />
+Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,<br />
+Were quelled by doom, Love&rsquo;s high-creative leaven<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Could light new worlds.&rsquo;&nbsp; If, then, this
+Lord of Fate,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page450"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+450</span>When death calls in the stars, can re-create,<br />
+Is it a madman&rsquo;s dream that Love can show<br />
+Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And build again my heaven?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately
+affirmed in the words of &lsquo;The Spirit of the Sunrise,&rsquo;
+addressed to the bereaved poet:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Though Love be mocked by Death&rsquo;s obscene
+derision,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Love still is Nature&rsquo;s truth and Death her
+lie;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,<br />
+To taste the fell destroyer&rsquo;s crowning spite<br />
+That blasts the soul with life&rsquo;s most cruel sight,<br />
+Corruption&rsquo;s hand at work in Life&rsquo;s transition:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still
+retain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her body&rsquo;s image pictured in thy brain;<br />
+The flowers above her weave the only shroud<br />
+Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Rhona!&nbsp; Behold the
+vision!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Some may call this too mystical&mdash;some may dislike it on
+other accounts&mdash;but few will dream of questioning its
+absolute originality.</p>
+<p>Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour&rsquo;s to which
+the passages quoted from &lsquo;The Veiled Queen&rsquo; have been
+compared.&nbsp; In his presidential address to the British
+Association, entitled, &lsquo;Reflections suggested by the New
+Theory of Matter,&rsquo; he said:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;We claim to found all our scientific
+opinions on experience: and the experience on which we found our
+theories of the physical universe is our sense of perception of
+that universe.&nbsp; That is experience; and in this region of
+belief there is no other.&nbsp; Yet the conclusions which thus
+profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all
+appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge <a
+name="page451"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 451</span>of reality
+is based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in
+describing it to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are
+abstracted from anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us
+to believe and nature compels us to employ.</p>
+<p>Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply
+the premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the
+physical world.&nbsp; It is they which tell us there is a
+physical world; it is on their authority that we learn its
+character.&nbsp; But in order of causation they are effects due
+(in part) to the constitution of our orders of sense.&nbsp; What
+we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen, but on
+our eyes.&nbsp; What we hear depends, not merely on what there is
+to hear, but on our ears.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any
+idea that is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is
+afterwards accepted as a simple truth.&nbsp; One of the reviewers
+of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; was much amused by the description of the
+hero&rsquo;s emotions when he stood in the lower room of Mrs.
+Gudgeon&rsquo;s cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by
+Winifred&rsquo;s corpse, stretched upon a squalid
+mattress:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;At the sight of the squalid house in which
+Winifred had lived and died I passed into a new world of
+horror.&nbsp; Dead matter had become conscious, and for a second
+or two it was not the human being before me, but the rusty iron,
+the broken furniture, the great patches of brick and dirty mortar
+where the plaster had fallen from the walls,&mdash;it was these
+which seemed to have life&mdash;a terrible life&mdash;and to be
+talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the
+triumph of evil over good.&nbsp; I knew that the woman was still
+speaking, but for a time I heard no <a name="page452"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 452</span>sound&mdash;my senses could receive
+no impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and
+yet living matter around me.&nbsp; Not an object there that did
+not seem charged with the wicked message of the heartless
+Fates.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&lsquo;Fancy,&rsquo; said the reviewer, &lsquo;any man out of
+Bedlam feeling as if dead matter were alive!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Well, apart from the psychological subtlety of this passage,
+our critic must have been startled by the declaration lately made
+by a sane man of science, that there is no such thing as dead
+matter&mdash;and that every particle of what is called dead
+matter is alive and shedding an aura around it!</p>
+<p>Had the mass of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s scattered writings
+been collected into volumes, or had a representative selection
+from them been made, their unity as to central idea with his
+imaginative work, and also the importance of that central idea,
+would have been brought prominently forward, and then there would
+have been no danger of his contribution to the latest
+movement&mdash;the anti-materialistic movement&mdash;of English
+thought and English feeling being left unrecognized.&nbsp; Lost
+such teachings as his never could have been, for, as Minto said
+years ago, their colour tinges a great deal of the literature of
+our time.&nbsp; The influence of the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; not only in England, but also in
+America and on the Continent, was always very great&mdash;and
+very great of course must have been the influence of the writer
+who for a quarter of a century spoke in it with such
+emphasis.&nbsp; Therefore, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had himself
+collected or selected his essays, or if he had allowed any of his
+friends to collect or select them, this book of mine would not
+have been written, for more competent hands would have undertaken
+the task.&nbsp; But a study of work which, originally <a
+name="page453"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 453</span>issued in
+fragments, now lies buried &lsquo;full fathom five&rsquo; in the
+columns of various journals, could, I felt, be undertaken only by
+a cadet of letters like myself.&nbsp; There are many of us
+younger men who express views about Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s work
+which startle at times those who are unfamiliar with it.&nbsp;
+And I, coming forward for the moment as their spokesman, have
+long had the desire to justify the faith that is in us, and in
+the wide and still widening audience his imaginative work has
+won.&nbsp; But I doubt if I should have undertaken it had I
+realized the magnitude of the task.&nbsp; For it must be
+remembered that the articles, called &lsquo;reviews,&rsquo; are
+for the most part as unlike reviews as they can well be.&nbsp; No
+matter what may have been the book placed at the head of the
+article, it was used merely as an opportunity for the writer to
+pour forth generalizations upon literature and life, or upon the
+latest scientific speculations, or upon the latest reverie of
+philosophy, in a stream, often a torrent, coruscating with
+brilliancies, and alive with interwoven colours like that of the
+river in the mountains of Kaf described in his birthday sonnet to
+Tennyson.&nbsp; Take, for instance, that great essay on the
+Psalms which I have used as the key-note of this study.&nbsp; The
+book at the head of the review was not, as might have been
+supposed, a discourse learned, or philosophical, or emotional,
+upon the Psalms&mdash;but a little unpretentious metrical version
+of the Psalms by Lord Lorne.&nbsp; Only a clear-sighted and
+daring editor would have printed such an article as a
+review.&nbsp; But I doubt if there ever was a more prescient
+journalist than he who sat in the editorial chair at that
+time.&nbsp; A man of scholarly accomplishments and literary
+taste, he knew that an article such as this would be a huge
+success; would resound through the world of letters.&nbsp; The
+article, I believe, <a name="page454"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 454</span>was more talked about in literary
+circles than any book that had come out during that month.</p>
+<p>Again, take that definition of humour which I seized upon
+(page 384) to illustrate my exposition of that wonderful
+character in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;&mdash;Mrs. Gudgeon, a
+definition that seems, as one writer has said, to make all other
+talk about humour cheap and jejune.&nbsp; It is in a review of an
+extremely futile history of humour.&nbsp; Now let the reader
+consider the difficult task before a writer in my
+position&mdash;the task of searching for a few among the
+innumerable half-remembered points of interest that turn up in
+the most unexpected places.&nbsp; Of course, if the space
+allotted to me by my publishers had been unlimited, and if my
+time had been unlimited, I should have been able to give so large
+a number of excerpts from the articles as to make my selection
+really representative of what has been called the &ldquo;modern
+Sufism of &lsquo;Aylwin.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; But in this regard
+my publishers have already been as liberal and as patient as
+possible.&nbsp; After all, the best, as well as the easiest way,
+to show that &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love,&rsquo; are but the imaginative expression of a poetic
+religion familiar to the readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+criticism for twenty-five years, is to quote an illuminating
+passage upon the subject from one of the articles in the
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um.&rsquo;&nbsp; Moreover, I shall thus escape
+what I confess I dread&mdash;the sight of my own prose at the end
+of my book in juxtaposition to the prose of a past master of
+English style:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The time has not yet arrived for poetry to
+utilize even the results of science; such results as are offered
+to her are dust and ashes.&nbsp; Happily, however, nothing in
+science is permanent save mathematics.&nbsp; As a great man <a
+name="page455"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 455</span>of science
+has said, &lsquo;everything is provisional.&rsquo;&nbsp; Dr.
+Erasmus Darwin, following the science of his day, wrote a long
+poem on the &lsquo;Loves of the Plants,&rsquo; by no means a
+foolish poem, though it gave rise to the &lsquo;Loves of the
+Triangles,&rsquo; and though his grandson afterwards discovered
+that the plants do not love each other at all, but, on the
+contrary, hate each other furiously&mdash;&lsquo;struggle for
+life&rsquo; with each other, &lsquo;survive&rsquo; against each
+other&mdash;just as though they were good men and
+&lsquo;Christians.&rsquo;&nbsp; But if a poet were to set about
+writing a poem on the &lsquo;Hates of the Plants,&rsquo; nothing
+is more likely than that, before he could finish it, Mr. Darwin
+will have discovered that the plants do love after all; just
+as&mdash;after it was a settled thing that the red tooth and claw
+did all the business of progression&mdash;he delighted us by
+discovering that there was another factor which had done half the
+work&mdash;the enormous and very proper admiration which the
+females have had for the males from the very earliest forms
+upwards.&nbsp; In such a case, the &lsquo;Hates of the
+Plants&rsquo; would have become &lsquo;inadequate.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Already, indeed, there are faint signs of the physicists
+beginning to find out that neither we nor the plants hate each
+other quite so much as they thought, and that Nature is not quite
+so bad as she seems.&nbsp; &lsquo;She is an &AElig;olian
+harp,&rsquo; says Novalis, &lsquo;a musical instrument whose
+tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And after all there are higher strings within us just as real as
+those which have caused us to &lsquo;survive,&rsquo; and poetry
+is right in ignoring &lsquo;interpretations,&rsquo; and giving us
+&lsquo;Earthly Paradises&rsquo; instead.&nbsp; She must wait, it
+seems; or rather, if this aspiring &lsquo;century&rsquo; will
+keep thrusting these unlovely results of science before her eyes,
+she must treat them as the beautiful girl Kis&#257;gotam&#299;
+treated the ugly pile of charcoal.&nbsp; A certain rich man woke
+up one morning and found that all his enormous wealth was <a
+name="page456"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 456</span>turned to a
+huge heap of charcoal.&nbsp; A friend who called upon him in his
+misery, suspecting how the case really stood, gave him certain
+advice, which he thus acted upon.&nbsp; &lsquo;The Thuthe,
+following his friend&rsquo;s instructions, spread some mats in
+the bazaar, and, piling them upon a large heap of his property
+which was turned into charcoal, pretended to be selling it.&nbsp;
+Some people, seeing it, said, &ldquo;Why does he sell
+charcoal?&rdquo;&nbsp; Just at this time a young girl, named
+Kis&#257;gotam&#299;, who was worthy to be owner of the property,
+and who, having lost both her parents, was in a wretched
+condition, happened to come to the bazaar on some business.&nbsp;
+When she saw the heap, she said, &ldquo;My lord Thuthe, all the
+people sell clothes, tobacco, oil, honey, and treacle; how is it
+that you pile up gold and silver for sale?&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+Thuthe said, &ldquo;Madam, give me that gold and
+silver.&rdquo;&nbsp; Kis&#257;gotam&#299;, taking up a handful of
+it, brought it to him.&nbsp; What the young girl had in her hand
+no sooner touched the Thuthe&rsquo;s hand than it became gold and
+silver.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I cannot find a clearer note for the close of this book than
+that which sounds in one of the latest and one of the finest of
+Mr. Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sonnets.&nbsp; It was composed on the
+last night of the Nineteenth Century, a century which will be
+associated with many of the dear friends Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+lost, and, as I must think, associated also with himself.&nbsp;
+The lines have a very special charm for me, because they show the
+turn which the poet&rsquo;s noble optimism has taken; they show
+that faith in my own generation which for so many years has
+illumined his work, and which has endeared him to us all.&nbsp; I
+wish I could be as hopeful as this nineteenth century poet with
+regard to the poets who will carry the torch of <a
+name="page457"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 457</span>imagination
+and romance through the twentieth century; but whether or not
+there are any poets among us who are destined to bring in the
+Golden Fleece, it is good to see &lsquo;the Poet of the
+Sunrise&rsquo; setting the trumpet of optimism to his lips, and
+heralding so cheerily the coming of the new argonauts:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">THE ARGONAUTS OF THE
+NEW AGE</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">the
+poet</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[In starlight, listening to the
+chimes in the<br />
+distance, which sound clear through the<br />
+leafless trees.</p>
+<p>Say, will new heroes win the &lsquo;Fleece,&rsquo; ye
+spheres<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who&mdash;whether around some King of Suns ye
+roll<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or move right onward to some destined goal<br />
+In Night&rsquo;s vast heart&mdash;know what Great Morning
+nears?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">the
+stars</span></p>
+<p>Since Love&rsquo;s Star rose have nineteen hundred years<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Written such runes on Time&rsquo;s remorseless
+scroll,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Impeaching Earth&rsquo;s proud birth, the human
+soul,<br />
+That we, the bright-browed stars, grow dim with tears.</p>
+<p>Did those dear poets you loved win Light&rsquo;s release?<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What &lsquo;ship of Hope&rsquo; shall sail to such a
+world?</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">[The night passes, and morning
+breaks<br />
+gorgeously over the tree top.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">the
+poet</span></p>
+<p>Ye fade, ye stars, ye fade with night&rsquo;s decease!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Above yon ruby rim of clouds empearled&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There, through the rosy flags of morn
+unfurled&mdash;<br />
+I see young heroes bring Light&rsquo;s &lsquo;Golden
+Fleece.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">The
+End</span></p>
+<h2><a name="page459"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+459</span>Index</h2>
+<p>Abbey, Edwin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page122">122</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Abershaw, Jerry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page100">100</a></span></p>
+<p>Abiogenesis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span></p>
+<p>Absolute humour: see Humour, absolute and relative</p>
+<p>Accent, English verse governed by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page344">344</a></span></p>
+<p>Acceptance, instinct of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span>; Horace as poet of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span></p>
+<p>Acton, Lord, place given &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page5">5</a></span></p>
+<p>Actors, two types of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+<p>Actresses, English prejudice against, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>Adams, Davenport, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Addison, &lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo; in portraiture, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page350">350</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Adonais,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;&AElig;neid,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>&AElig;schylus, reference to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page45">45</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page324">324</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Agamemnon,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span></p>
+<p>Alabama, Lowell and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span></p>
+<p>Aldworth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+<p>Allen, Grant, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page309">309</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page361">361</a></span></p>
+<p>Allingham, William, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page213">213</a></span></p>
+<p>Ambition v. Nature-Worship, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page103">103</a></span></p>
+<p>America, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friends in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page295">295</a></span>; his
+feelings towards, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page297">297</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Anacharsis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page384">384</a></span></p>
+<p>Anap&aelig;sts, Swinburne and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page383">383</a></span></p>
+<p>Anglomania and Anglophobia, Lowell&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page299">299</a></span></p>
+<p>Anglo-Saxon, law-abidingness of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page309">309</a></span>; conception of life, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page381">381</a></span></p>
+<p>Animals, man&rsquo;s sympathy with <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>&ndash;9,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span>&ndash;86</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Anne Boleyn,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of
+Lilian Adelaide Neilson&rsquo;s acting in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p>Anonymity in criticism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span></p>
+<p>Anthropology, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p>Apemantus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>Appleton, Prof., Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reminiscences
+of:&mdash;met at Bell Scott&rsquo;s and Rossetti&rsquo;s; Hegel
+on the brain; asks Watts to write for &lsquo;Academy,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page187">187</a></span>;
+wants him to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page188">188</a></span>; in a
+rage; Watts explains why he has gone into enemy&rsquo;s camp,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page201">201</a></span>; a
+Philistine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page202">202</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Arda Viraf,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page219">219</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Argonauts of the New Age,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page457">457</a></span></p>
+<p>Argyll, Duchess of: see Louise, Princess</p>
+<p>Argyll, Duke of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span>: see Lorne, Marquis of</p>
+<p>Aristocrats, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>Aristotle, unities of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page341">341</a></span></p>
+<p>Armada, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page423">423</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Armadale,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page348">348</a></span></p>
+<p>Arnold, Sir Edwin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page219">219</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span></p>
+<p>Arnold, Matthew, &lsquo;The Scholar Gypsy,&rsquo;
+Borrow&rsquo;s criticism of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span>; Rhona Boswell and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page114">114</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Artifice, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page239">239</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page460"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+460</span>Athen&aelig;um, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>&ndash;4; editor of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page10">10</a></span>; seventieth
+birthday of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>&ndash;213; influence of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page452">452</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s connection with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page188">188</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page212">212</a></span>&ndash;27,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page315">315</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page418">418</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page454">454</a></span></p>
+<p>Augustanism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span>; pyramid of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page23">23</a></span></p>
+<p>Austen, Jane, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Australia&rsquo;s Mother,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ave Atque Vale,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Avon, River, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s love for, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Aylwin</span>,&rsquo; Renascence of
+Wonder exemplified in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>; popularity of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span>; principles of
+romantic art expressed in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page8">8</a></span>; Justin McCarthy&rsquo;s opinion of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Renascence of Wonder,&rsquo; original title of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page11">11</a></span>; attempted
+identification of characters in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>; &lsquo;Veiled Queen,&rsquo;
+dominating influence of author, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page56">56</a></span>; Cyril Aylwin, identification with
+A. E. Watts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span>; genesis of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span>; nervous
+phases in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span>; D&rsquo;Arcy, identification with
+Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page139">139</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>&ndash;45; description of Rossetti
+in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span>&ndash;169; landslip in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span>; Welsh
+acceptation of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page312">312</a></span>&ndash;318; Snowdon ascent, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page317">317</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Encyc. Brit.&rsquo; on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page321">321</a></span>; na&iuml;vet&eacute; in style of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page328">328</a></span>;
+youthfulness of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page328">328</a></span>; richness in style, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page330">330</a></span>&ndash;38;
+Galimberti, Mme., criticism of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page338">338</a></span>; &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;
+canons observed in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page338">338</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page343">343</a></span>; begun in metre, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page342">342</a></span>; critical
+analysis of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page345">345</a></span>&ndash;362; &lsquo;softness of
+touch&rsquo; in portraiture, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page351">351</a></span>; love-passion, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page362">362</a></span>; Swinburne
+on, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page363">363</a></span>;
+Meredith on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page364">364</a></span>; Groome on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span>; novel of
+the two Bohemias, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page368">368</a></span>; editions of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page368">368</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page377">377</a></span>; enigmatic
+nature of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span>; Dr. Nicoll on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page375">375</a></span>; Celtic
+element in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page378">378</a></span>; Jacottet on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page380">380</a></span>; two
+heroines of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page363">363</a></span>; spirituality of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page372">372</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page375">375</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page378">378</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page380">380</a></span>; inner
+meaning of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page372">372</a></span>&ndash;81; heart-thought of
+contained in the &lsquo;Veiled Queen,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Saturday Review&rsquo; on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page377">377</a></span>; motive of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page389">389</a></span>,
+&lsquo;Arvon&rsquo; edition, restoration of excised passages,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page445">445</a></span>&ndash;50; modern Sufism of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page454">454</a></span>; quotations
+from, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page330">330</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page331">331</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page333">333</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page336">336</a></span></p>
+<p>Aylwin, Cyril, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span></p>
+<p>Aylwin, Henry, at 16 Cheyne Walk, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span>; autobiographical element in,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page322">322</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page356">356</a></span>; see
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;; his mother, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page352">352</a></span></p>
+<p>Aylwin, Philip: see Watts, J. O.</p>
+<p>Aylwin, Percy, contrasted with Henry Aylwin, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page361">361</a></span>; the part
+he plays in the &lsquo;Coming of Love,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page401">401</a></span>&ndash;11;
+autobiographical element in&mdash;see description of Swinburne
+swimming, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+<p>Aylwinism, Mr. Balfour and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page446">446</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page450">450</a></span>; growth of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page445">445</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Bacon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page43">43</a></span></p>
+<p>Badakhsh&acirc;n, ruby hills of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page329">329</a></span></p>
+<p>Balfour, A. J., Aylwinism and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page446">446</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page450">450</a></span></p>
+<p>Ballads, old, wonder in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ballads and Sonnets,&rsquo; Rossetti&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page271">271</a></span></p>
+<p>Balliol, Jowett&rsquo;s dinner parties at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page280">280</a></span></p>
+<p>Balzac, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span></p>
+<p>Banville, his &lsquo;Le Baiser,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page133">133</a></span></p>
+<p>Basevi, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page95">95</a></span></p>
+<p>Bateson, Mary, her paper on Crab House Nunnery, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span></p>
+<p>Baudelaire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page135">135</a></span></p>
+<p>Baynes, invites Watts to write for &lsquo;Encyc. Brit.,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page256">256</a></span>&ndash;7</p>
+<p><a name="page461"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+461</span>Beddoes, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Bedouin Child, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page448">448</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Belfast News-Letter,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Belle Dame Sans Merci, La,&rsquo; wonder and mystery
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span></p>
+<p>Bell, Mackenzie: on Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s study of music: see
+&lsquo;Poets and Poetry of the Century,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>: also
+&lsquo;Shadow on the Window Blind&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Bells, The,&rsquo; Watts on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+<p>Benson, A. C, his monograph on Rossetti, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page138">138</a></span>&ndash;40</p>
+<p>Berners, Isopel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page364">364</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page369">369</a></span></p>
+<p>Beryl-Songs, in &lsquo;Rose Mary,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page139">139</a></span>&ndash;40</p>
+<p>Betts Bey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page85">85</a></span></p>
+<p>Bible, The, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s essay on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span>&ndash;41</p>
+<p>Bible Rhythm, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page238">238</a></span></p>
+<p>Biogenesis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span></p>
+<p>Bird, Dr., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page306">306</a></span></p>
+<p>Birdwood, Sir George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page409">409</a></span></p>
+<p>Bisset, animal trainer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span></p>
+<p>Black, William, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friendship
+with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span>; their resemblance to each other,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page185">185</a></span>; an
+amusing mistake, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span></p>
+<p>Blackstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page23">23</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page309">309</a></span></p>
+<p>Blank verse, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page239">239</a></span></p>
+<p>Boar&rsquo;s Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span></p>
+<p>Bodleian, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span></p>
+<p>Body, its functions&mdash;humour of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Bognor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page91">91</a></span></p>
+<p>Bohemians, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>Bohemias, Novel of the Two, &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; as, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page368">368</a></span></p>
+<p>Borrow, George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>; method of learning languages, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s description of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page95">95</a></span>&ndash;106, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page108">108</a></span>&ndash;16;
+characteristics of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span>&ndash;106, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page368">368</a></span>; his gypsy
+women scenic characters, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page390">390</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+reminiscences of:&mdash;his first meeting with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page95">95</a></span>; his shyness,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page99">99</a></span>; Watts
+attacks it; tries Bamfylde Moore Carew; then tries beer, the
+British bruiser, philology, Ambrose Gwinett, etc., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page100">100</a></span>; a stroll
+in Richmond Park; visit to &lsquo;Bald-Faced Stag&rsquo;; Jerry
+Abershaw&rsquo;s sword; his gigantic green umbrella, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page101">101</a></span>&ndash;2;
+tries Whittlesea Mere; Borrow&rsquo;s surprise; vipers of Norman
+Cross; Romanies and vipers, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page104">104</a></span>; disclaims taint of
+printers&rsquo; ink; &lsquo;Who are you?&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page105">105</a></span>; an East
+Midlander; the Shales Mare, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span>; Cromer sea best for swimming;
+rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page106">106</a></span>; goes to a
+gypsy camp; talks about Matthew Arnold&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Scholar-Gypsy,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span>; resolves to try it on gypsy
+woman; watches hawk and magpie, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span>; meets Perpinia Boswell;
+&lsquo;the popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page110">110</a></span>; Rhona
+Boswell, girl of the dragon flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to
+smoke, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span>; description of Rhona, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page113">113</a></span>; the
+Devil&rsquo;s Needles; reads Glanville&rsquo;s story; Rhona bored
+by Arnold, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span>; hatred of tobacco, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page115">115</a></span>; last sight
+of Borrow on Waterloo Bridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page115">115</a></span>; sonnet on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span></p>
+<p>Boswell, Perpinia, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span>&ndash;12</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Boswell, Rhona</span>, her
+&lsquo;Haymaking Song,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span>&ndash;5; her prototype, first
+meeting with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page63">63</a></span>; description from
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page64">64</a></span>; East Anglia and &lsquo;Cowslip
+Land&rsquo; linked by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span>; description of in unpublished
+romance, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span>&ndash;15; her beauty, <a
+name="page462"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 462</span><span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page113">113</a></span>; courageous
+nature of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page366">366</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page406">406</a></span>; presented dramatically, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page356">356</a></span>; type of
+English heroine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page366">366</a></span>; Tennyson&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Maud&rsquo; compared with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page413">413</a></span>; George Meredith on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page418">418</a></span>; humour of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page421">421</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Rhona&rsquo;s Letter,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page402">402</a></span>&ndash;5; rhyme-pattern of same,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page419">419</a></span></p>
+<p>Boswell, Sylvester, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span></p>
+<p>Bounty, mutineers of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page310">310</a></span></p>
+<p>Boxhill, Meredith&rsquo;s house at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page283">283</a></span></p>
+<p>Bracegirdle, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Breath of Avon: To English-speaking Pilgrims on
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s Birthday,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+<p>British Association, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page445">445</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page450">450</a></span></p>
+<p>Bront&euml;, Charlotte and Emily, Nature instinct of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>; novels of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page346">346</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Brown, Charles Brockden, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page308">308</a></span></p>
+<p>Brown, Lucy Madox: see Rossetti, Mrs. W. M.</p>
+<p>Brown, Madox, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>; his Eisteddfod, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page136">136</a></span>; portrait
+of, story connected with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page274">274</a></span></p>
+<p>Brown, Oliver Madox, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page274">274</a></span>&ndash;6</p>
+<p>Browne, Sir Thomas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page337">337</a></span></p>
+<p>Browning, Robert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span>; compared with Victor Hugo, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page126">126</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page144">144</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reminiscences of:&mdash;chaffs him in
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;; chided by Swinburne, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page222">222</a></span>, sees him
+at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him to slip away;
+bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell astonished at his
+magnanimity, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span>&ndash;23; the review in question,
+&lsquo;Ferishtah&rsquo;s Fancies,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page223">223</a></span>&ndash;26</p>
+<p>Brynhild, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Brynhild on Sigurd&rsquo;s Funeral Pyre,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page366">366</a></span></p>
+<p>Buchanan, Robert, his attacks on Rossetti, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page145">145</a></span>&ndash;6;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s impeachment of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Buddhaghosha,&rsquo; Parables of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page218">218</a></span></p>
+<p>Buddhism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p>Bull, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page300">300</a></span></p>
+<p>Burbage, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
+<p>Burgin, G. B., his interview with Watts-Dunton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Burns, Robert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span></p>
+<p>Butler, Bishop, share in Renascence of Wonder, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page22">22</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;B.V.,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Byles the Butcher,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page215">215</a></span>&ndash;16</p>
+<p>Byron, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page307">307</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;By the North Sea,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page271">271</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Caine, Hall, Rossetti &lsquo;Recollections&rsquo; by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page150">150</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page151">151</a></span>&ndash;4</p>
+<p>Calderon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page219">219</a></span></p>
+<p>Cam, Ouse and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Cambridge Chronicle,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page51">51</a></span></p>
+<p>Cambridge University, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>; George Dyer, Frend, Hammond and,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page40">40</a></span>; Prince
+of Wales at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page67">67</a></span></p>
+<p>Campbell, Lady Archibald, open-air plays organized by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Capri girl, Rhona Boswell like, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span></p>
+<p>Carew, Bamfylde Moore, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span></p>
+<p>Carlyle, Thomas, River Ouse, libellous description of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page28">28</a></span>; his heresy
+of &lsquo;work,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page68">68</a></span>&ndash;71; &lsquo;Frederick the
+Great,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page192">192</a></span></p>
+<p>Carr, Comyns, contributor to &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Casket Lighthouse, girl in&mdash;poems by Swinburne and
+Watts-Dunton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page413">413</a></span></p>
+<p>Cathay, pyramid of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Catriona,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page217">217</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Caught in the Ebbing Tide,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span></p>
+<p>Cavendish, Ada, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Celebrities of the Century,&rsquo; memoir of
+Watts-Dunton in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span></p>
+<p>Celtic temper, &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page313">313</a></span>&ndash;15;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page378">378</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page398">398</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page463"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+463</span>Cervantes, Watts-Dunton on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page197">197</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page246">246</a></span>&ndash;52;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+<p>Chalk Farm, Westland Marston&rsquo;s theatrical reunions at,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page117">117</a></span>;
+Parnassians at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page135">135</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Cyclop&aelig;dia of English
+Literature,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s &lsquo;Renascence of
+Wonder&rsquo; article, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page20">20</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>; Douglas, James, article on
+Watts-Dunton by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page393">393</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Encyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; article on
+Watts-Dunton in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s contributions
+to, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>;
+Sonnet, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s essay on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Chamisso, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+<p>Channel Islands, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span>&ndash;9</p>
+<p>Chapman, George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+<p>Chaucer, his place in English poetry, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page43">43</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page294">294</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page394">394</a></span></p>
+<p>Chelsea, Rossetti&rsquo;s residence at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page137">137</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page155">155</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page162">162</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page165">165</a></span></p>
+<p>Cheyne Walk, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span>: see Chelsea</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Children of the Open Air,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page96">96</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page98">98</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span></p>
+<p>Children, Rossetti on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page168">168</a></span></p>
+<p>Chinese Cabinet, Rossetti&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Christabel,&rsquo; wonder and mystery of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span>; quotation
+from, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page20">20</a></span></p>
+<p>Christmas, &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo; and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page93">93</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span>; Rosicrucian,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Christmas Tree at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; The,&rdquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Christmas at the &lsquo;Mermaid,&rsquo;&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page32">32</a></span>; metrical
+construction of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page422">422</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s preface to
+sixth edition, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page424">424</a></span>; written at Stratford-on-Avon,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page423">423</a></span>;
+opening chorus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page423">423</a></span>; description of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s return to Stratford-on-Avon, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page425">425</a></span>&ndash;26;
+quotations from, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page423">423</a></span>&ndash;40; chief leit-motiv of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page436">436</a></span>;
+Wassail Chorus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page438">438</a></span>; &lsquo;The Golden
+Skeleton,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page428">428</a></span>&ndash;34, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page436">436</a></span>&ndash;37;
+Raleigh and the Armada, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page434">434</a></span>&ndash;36; letter from Thomas Hardy
+about, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page440">440</a></span>&ndash;41</p>
+<p>Circumstance, as villain, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page125">125</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page349">349</a></span>; as humourist, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page248">248</a></span>; as
+harlequin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Civilization, definition of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page71">71</a></span></p>
+<p>Climate, English, Lowell on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page300">300</a></span></p>
+<p>Clive, Kitty, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>Cockerell, Sydney C., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span></p>
+<p>Coincidence, long arm of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page348">348</a></span></p>
+<p>Cole, Herbert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page440">440</a></span></p>
+<p>Coleridge, S. T., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page19">19</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page20">20</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poetry,
+kinship to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page417">417</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page419">419</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page324">324</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page338">338</a></span>; on accent in verse, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page344">344</a></span></p>
+<p>Coleridge, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s Sonnet to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page417">417</a></span>;
+Meredith&rsquo;s opinion of same, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page417">417</a></span></p>
+<p>Collaboration, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page415">415</a></span></p>
+<p>Collier, Jeremy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>Collier, John P., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page55">55</a></span></p>
+<p>Collins, Wilkie, fiction of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page348">348</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Colonies, Watts-Dunton on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page273">273</a></span></p>
+<p>Colvin, Sidney, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p>Com&eacute;die Fran&ccedil;aise: see Th&eacute;&acirc;tre
+Fran&ccedil;aise</p>
+<p>Comedy: and Farce, distinction between, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page258">258</a></span>; of
+repartee, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Coming of Love, The</span>&rsquo;:
+Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>; popularity of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span>; principles of
+Romantic Art explained in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page8">8</a></span>; humour in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page24">24</a></span>; locality of
+Gypsy Song, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span>; publication of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page178">178</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page389">389</a></span>; history
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page395">395</a></span>;
+inner meaning of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page400">400</a></span>; form of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page411">411</a></span>; opening
+sonnets, incident connected with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page413">413</a></span>; quotations from, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page402">402</a></span>&ndash;11,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page450">450</a></span>;
+references to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page5">5</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page361">361</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page376">376</a></span></p>
+<p>Common Prayer, Book of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p>Congreve, his wit and humour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page258">258</a></span>&ndash;60</p>
+<p><a name="page464"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+464</span>Convincement, artistic, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span></p>
+<p>Coombe, open-air plays at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Cooper, Fenimore, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page306">306</a></span></p>
+<p>Corkran, Miss, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span></p>
+<p>Corneille, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Cosmic humour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page204">204</a></span></p>
+<p>Cosmogony, New, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span>; see Renascence of Wonder, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page373">373</a></span></p>
+<p>Cosmos, joke of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page386">386</a></span></p>
+<p>Cowper, W., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span></p>
+<p>Cowslip Country, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s association with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page32">32</a></span></p>
+<p>Craigie, Mrs., intellectual energy of the provinces asserted
+by, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page325">325</a></span></p>
+<p>Criticism, anonymity in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>; new ideas in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page344">344</a></span></p>
+<p>Cromer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span>; Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Cromwell, Oliver, Slepe Hall, supposed residence at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>; his elder
+wine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span>&ndash;7</p>
+<p>Cruikshank, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Cyclop&aelig;dia of English Literature&rsquo;: see
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Cyclop&aelig;dia&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Daddy this and Daddy that, It&rsquo;s,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+<p>Dana, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page371">371</a></span></p>
+<p>Dante, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page412">412</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page418">418</a></span></p>
+<p>D&rsquo;Arcy (see Rossetti, D. G.), character in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; originally &lsquo;Gordon&rsquo; (Gordon
+Hake), <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page91">91</a></span>;
+Rossetti as prototype of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page91">91</a></span>&ndash;2, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page139">139</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page140">140</a></span>&ndash;45,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page165">165</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page336">336</a></span></p>
+<p>Darwin, Charles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page52">52</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page97">97</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page455">455</a></span></p>
+<p>Darwin, Erasmus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page455">455</a></span></p>
+<p>Death, Pain and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;D&eacute;bats, Journal des,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page400">400</a></span></p>
+<p>De Castro, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page141">141</a></span>&ndash;43, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page166">166</a></span>: see
+Howell, C. A.</p>
+<p>Decorative renascence, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>Deerfoot, the Indian, race won at Cambridge by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Defence of Guinevere,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>Defoe, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page307">307</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>De Lisle, Leconte, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Demon Lover, The,&rsquo; wonder and mystery expressed
+by, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span></p>
+<p>D&eacute;nouement in fiction, dialogue and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
+<p>De Quincey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page197">197</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page220">220</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span></p>
+<p>Dereham, Borrow as, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page95">95</a></span></p>
+<p>Destiny, in drama, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page125">125</a></span></p>
+<p>Devil&rsquo;s Needles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p>Dialect in poetry&mdash;Meredith on Rhona Boswell&rsquo;s
+letters, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page418">418</a></span></p>
+<p>Dialogue in fiction, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
+<p>Dichtung, Wahrheit and, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span></p>
+<p>Dickens, Lowell&rsquo;s strictures on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page295">295</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page325">325</a></span>; hardness
+of touch in portraiture, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page350">350</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page384">384</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Dickens returns on Christmas Day,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page93">93</a></span></p>
+<p>Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on the sibilant in poetry, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page287">287</a></span>; substance
+and form in poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page341">341</a></span></p>
+<p>Disraeli, &lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo; in St. Aldegonde,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page351">351</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Divina Commedia,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+criticism of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span></p>
+<p>Dogs, telepathy and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span>&ndash;6</p>
+<p>D&ouml;ppelganger idea, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span></p>
+<p>Drama, surprise in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page120">120</a></span>; famous actors and actresses,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page117">117</a></span>;
+table talk about &lsquo;The Bells&rsquo; and &lsquo;Rip Van
+Winkle,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span>: see Actors, Actresses,
+&AElig;schylus, Banville, Burbage, Comedy and Farce, Congreve,
+Etheredge, Ford, Garrick, Got, Hamlet, Hugo, Kean, Marlowe,
+Robson, Shakspeare, Sophocles, Cyril Tourneur, Vanbrugh, Webster,
+Wells, Wycherley</p>
+<p>Dramatic method in fiction, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
+<p>Drayton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page438">438</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page465"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 465</span>Drury
+Lane, ragged girl in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span></p>
+<p>Dryden, the first great poet of &lsquo;acceptance,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page25">25</a></span></p>
+<p>Du Chaillu, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Duffield, contributor to &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Dukkeripen, The Lovers&rsquo;, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span></p>
+<p>Dumas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
+<p>Du Maurier, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Dunn, Treffry, De Castro&rsquo;s conduct to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page143">143</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s portrait painted by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span>; drawings
+by, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page277">277</a></span></p>
+<p>Dunton, family of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span></p>
+<p>Dyer, George, St. Ives and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Earthly Paradise, The,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>East Anglia, gypsies of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page63">63</a></span>; Omar Khayy&agrave;m and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page79">79</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page72">72</a></span>&ndash;85;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poem on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span>&ndash;5; road-girls in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page390">390</a></span></p>
+<p>Eastbourne, Swinburne and Watts visit, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>East Enders, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>Eliot, George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page372">372</a></span></p>
+<p>Ellis, F. S., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span></p>
+<p>Emerson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page8">8</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s connection with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page256">256</a></span>; his Essay
+on Poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page393">393</a></span>; on Vanbrugh, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page258">258</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia, Chambers&rsquo;s&rsquo;: see
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Encyc.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>England, its beloved dingles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span>&ndash;70; Borrow and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page102">102</a></span>; love of
+the wind and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page370">370</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;English Illustrated Magazine,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page287">287</a></span></p>
+<p>Epic method in fiction, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
+<p>Erckmann-Chatrian, &lsquo;Juif Polonais&rsquo; by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+<p>Erskine, his pet leeches, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Esmond,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page328">328</a></span></p>
+<p>Etheredge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; contributors to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s articles in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Fairy Glen,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page315">315</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Faith and Love,&rsquo; Wilderspin&rsquo;s picture,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page331">331</a></span></p>
+<p>Falstaff, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+<p>Farce, comedy and, distinction between, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page258">258</a></span></p>
+<p>Farringford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Father Christmas in Famine Street,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+<p>Febvre, as Saltabadil, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+<p>Fens, the, description of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page62">62</a></span></p>
+<p>Feridun, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ferishtah&rsquo;s Fancies,&rsquo; Watts&rsquo;s review
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page223">223</a></span></p>
+<p>Ferridoddin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page447">447</a></span></p>
+<p>Fiction, genius at work in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page7">7</a></span>; importance of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page208">208</a></span>; beauty in,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page221">221</a></span>;
+atmosphere in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page308">308</a></span>; &lsquo;artistic
+convincement&rsquo; in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>; methods of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page345">345</a></span> et seq.;
+epic and dramatic methods in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page346">346</a></span>; &lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo;
+in, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page349">349</a></span>
+et seq.</p>
+<p>Fielding, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page305">305</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page321">321</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page347">347</a></span>; &lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo;
+in, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page350">350</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Findlay, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>FitzGerald, Edward, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s Omarian poems,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span>&ndash;1</p>
+<p>Fitzroy Square, Madox Brown&rsquo;s symposia at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page136">136</a></span>&ndash;7</p>
+<p>Flaubert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Fleshly School of Poetry,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span>&ndash;46</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Florilegium Latinum,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page147">147</a></span></p>
+<p>Fonblanque, Albany, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+<p>Ford, spirit of wonder in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Fortnightly Review,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page442">442</a></span></p>
+<p>Foxglove bells, fairies and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page74">74</a></span></p>
+<p>France, Anatole, irony of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page204">204</a></span></p>
+<p>France, dread of the wind, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page370">370</a></span></p>
+<p>Fraser, the brothers, water-colour drawings by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page33">33</a></span></p>
+<p>Freedom, modern, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page71">71</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page466"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+466</span>French Revolution, its relation to the Renascence of
+Wonder, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span></p>
+<p>Frend, William, revolt against English Church, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page40">40</a></span></p>
+<p>Friendship, passion of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page146">146</a></span>&ndash;48; sonnet (Dr. Gordon
+Hake), <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page444">444</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Gainsborough, &lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo; in portraits by,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page350">350</a></span></p>
+<p>Galimberti, Alice, her appreciation of Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+work, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page204">204</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page338">338</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page339">339</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page347">347</a></span></p>
+<p>Gamp, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page384">384</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Garden of Sleep,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Garnett, Dr., his views on &lsquo;Renascence of Wonder,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page11">11</a></span>;
+contributions to &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Garrick, David, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+<p>Gaskell, Mrs., softness of touch, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page350">350</a></span></p>
+<p>Gautier, Th&eacute;ophile, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page135">135</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>Gawtry, in &lsquo;Night and Morning,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page349">349</a></span></p>
+<p>Gelert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span>&ndash;5</p>
+<p>Genius, wear and tear of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+<p>Gentility, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Gentle Art of Making Enemies,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>German music, fascination of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>German romanticists, the terrible-grotesque in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page126">126</a></span></p>
+<p>Gestaltung, Goethe on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page398">398</a></span></p>
+<p>Ghost, laughter of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Gladstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+<p>Glamour, Celtic, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page313">313</a></span>&ndash;15; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page378">378</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Glittering Plain,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Glyn, Miss, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>God as beneficent Showman, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Goethe, his critical system, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s treatise on
+Poetry compared to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span>; his theory as to enigmatic nature
+of great works of art, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page394">394</a></span>; Gestaltung in art, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page398">398</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Golden Hand, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Gordon,&rsquo; Dr. G. Hake as, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page91">91</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page95">95</a></span></p>
+<p>Gordon, Lady Mary, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s visits
+to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Gorgios and Romanies, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page389">389</a></span></p>
+<p>Gosse, Edmund, contributes to &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span>; his study
+of Etheredge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>Got, M., Watts on his acting in &lsquo;Le Roi
+s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+<p>Grande dame, Aylwin&rsquo;s mother as type of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page352">352</a></span></p>
+<p>Grant, James, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Graphic,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page100">100</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Grave by the Sea, A,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Great Thoughts,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page61">61</a></span></p>
+<p>Grecian Saloon, Robson at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
+<p>Greek mind, the, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page44">44</a></span></p>
+<p>Green Dining Room at 16 Cheyne Walk, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p>Groome, F. H., account of J. K. Watts by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span>; intimacy
+with Watts-Dunton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page68">68</a></span>; Watts-Dunton and the gypsies, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page72">72</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s obituary notice of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page79">79</a></span>; on gypsies
+in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page351">351</a></span>; &lsquo;Kriegspiel,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page364">364</a></span>; his review
+of &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page372">372</a></span>; gypsy humour&mdash;anecdote,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page420">420</a></span></p>
+<p>Grotesque, the terrible-, in art, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span></p>
+<p>Gryengroes: see Gypsies</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Gudgeon, Mrs</span>.,&rsquo; humour
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span>&ndash;84, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page388">388</a></span>; prototype
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page383">383</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Guide to Fiction,&rsquo; Baker&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span></p>
+<p>Gwinett, Ambrose, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span></p>
+<p>Gwynn, David, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page423">423</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Gypsy Folk-tales,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page420">420</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Gypsy Heather,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span></p>
+<p>Gypsies, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s acquaintance with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page67">67</a></span>;
+superstitions of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span>; &lsquo;prepotency of
+transmission&rsquo; in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page362">362</a></span>; in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; Groome
+on, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; gypsy characters of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page368">368</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Times&rsquo; on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page370">370</a></span>; superiority <a
+name="page467"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 467</span>of gypsy
+women to men, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page392">392</a></span>; characteristics of same, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page390">390</a></span>; music,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page392">392</a></span>;
+humour of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page420">420</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Hacker, Arthur, A.R.A., illustration of &lsquo;John the
+Pilgrim&rsquo; by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page415">415</a></span></p>
+<p>Haggard, Rider, telepathy and dumb animals, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s influence on writings of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page415">415</a></span></p>
+<p>Haggis, the stabbing of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+<p>Hake, Gordon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span>; &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; connection
+with, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page90">90</a></span>;
+physician to Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span>&ndash;91; his view of
+Rossetti&rsquo;s melancholia and remorse&mdash;cock and bull
+stories about ill-treatment of his wife, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page91">91</a></span>; physician to
+Lady Ripon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span>; Borrow and Watts-Dunton introduced
+by, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page95">95</a></span>;
+poems connected with Watts-Dunton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span>; &lsquo;The New Day&rsquo; (see that
+title)</p>
+<p>Hake, Thomas St. E., author&rsquo;s gratitude for assistance
+from, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page10">10</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page11">11</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page12">12</a></span>; &lsquo;Notes
+and Queries,&rsquo; papers on &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span>; J. O. Watts
+identified with Philip Aylwin by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page51">51</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page56">56</a></span>; account of J. O. Watts by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page57">57</a></span>; A. E. Watts,
+description by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>; &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; genesis of,
+account by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span>; account of his father&rsquo;s
+relations with Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span>&ndash;91; Hurstcote and Cheyne Walk,
+&lsquo;green dining room,&rsquo; identified by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span>; William
+Morris, facts concerning, given by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+<p>Hallam, Henry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page281">281</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Hamlet,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+<p>Hammond, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span>&ndash;1</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Hand and Soul,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Hardy, Thomas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>; letter from, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page440">440</a></span>&ndash;41</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Harper&rsquo;s Magazine,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page122">122</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page442">442</a></span></p>
+<p>Harte, Bret, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s estimate of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page302">302</a></span>&ndash;11; histrionic gifts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span>; meeting
+with; drive round London music-halls, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page303">303</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Holborn,&rsquo; &lsquo;Oxford&rsquo;; Evans&rsquo;s
+supper-rooms; Paddy Green; meets him again at breakfast; a fine
+actor lost, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page303">303</a></span></p>
+<p>Hartley, on sexual shame, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page255">255</a></span></p>
+<p>Hawk and magpie, Borrow and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+<p>Hawthorne, Nathaniel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page305">305</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Haymaking Song,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page34">34</a></span></p>
+<p>Hazlitt, W., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page261">261</a></span></p>
+<p>Hegel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page187">187</a></span></p>
+<p>Heine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+<p>Heminge and Condell, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+<p>Hemingford Grey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span></p>
+<p>Hemingford Meadow, description, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span></p>
+<p>Henley, W. E., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page284">284</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page322">322</a></span></p>
+<p>Herder, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page19">19</a></span></p>
+<p>Herkomer, Prof. H., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page100">100</a></span></p>
+<p>Herne, the &lsquo;Scollard,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page402">402</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page405">405</a></span></p>
+<p>Herodotus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span></p>
+<p>Hero, English type of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Hero, New,&rsquo; The, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page287">287</a></span></p>
+<p>Heroines, &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; a story with two, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page363">363</a></span></p>
+<p>Hesiod, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page221">221</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page394">394</a></span></p>
+<p>Heywood, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page439">439</a></span></p>
+<p>Higginson, Col., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Hodgson, Earl, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span></p>
+<p>Homer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page355">355</a></span></p>
+<p>Hood, Thomas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+<p>Hopkins, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page233">233</a></span></p>
+<p>Horne, R. H., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page137">137</a></span>; challenge to Swinburne and
+Watts-Dunton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span></p>
+<p>Hotei, Japanese god of contentment, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page385">385</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;House of the Wolfings,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Houssaye, Ars&egrave;ne, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page468"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+468</span>Houghton, Lord, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page183">183</a></span></p>
+<p>Howell, Charles Augustus, prototype of De Castro, q.v.</p>
+<p>Hueffer, Dr. F., Wagner exponent, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s intimacy with,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>Hueffer, Ford Madox, testimony to the friendship of
+Watts-Dunton and Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+<p>Hugo, Victor, &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page123">123</a></span>&ndash;30;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sonnet to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span>; dread of the wind, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page370">370</a></span></p>
+<p>Humboldt, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page45">45</a></span></p>
+<p>Humour, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s definition of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page196">196</a></span>; absolute
+and relative, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page23">23</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page384">384</a></span>; cosmic, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page204">204</a></span>; renascence
+of wonder in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page242">242</a></span>; metaphysical meaning of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span>&ndash;55</p>
+<p>Hunt, Holman, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page19">19</a></span></p>
+<p>Hunt, Leigh, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page261">261</a></span></p>
+<p>Hunt, Rev. J., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page49">49</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Idler,&rsquo; interview with Watts-Dunton in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Illuminated Magazine,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page55">55</a></span></p>
+<p>Imagination, lyrical and dramatic, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page356">356</a></span>&ndash;61</p>
+<p>Imaginative power in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page345">345</a></span></p>
+<p>Imaginative representation, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page398">398</a></span></p>
+<p>Imperialism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page273">273</a></span></p>
+<p>Incongruity, basis of humour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page385">385</a></span></p>
+<p>Indecency, definition of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page255">255</a></span></p>
+<p>Ingelow, Jean, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page369">369</a></span></p>
+<p>Interviewing, skit on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page263">263</a></span></p>
+<p>Ireland, hero-worship in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page3">3</a></span></p>
+<p>Irony, Anatole France&rsquo;s, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page204">204</a></span>; in human intercourse, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page251">251</a></span></p>
+<p>Irving, Sir Henry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page137">137</a></span></p>
+<p>Isis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page332">332</a></span></p>
+<p>Isle of Wight, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Jacottet, Henri, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page347">347</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page374">374</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page380">380</a></span></p>
+<p>J&aacute;mi, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page21">21</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Jane Eyre,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page342">342</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page345">345</a></span></p>
+<p>Japanese, race development of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p>Jaques, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Jason,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>Jefferson, Joseph, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span></p>
+<p>Jeffrey, Francis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Jenyns, Soame, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Jerrold, Douglas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span></p>
+<p>Jessopp, Dr., &lsquo;Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,&rsquo;
+reference to Dunton family in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span></p>
+<p>Jewish-Arabian Renascence: see Renascence</p>
+<p>&lsquo;John the Pilgrim,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page416">416</a></span></p>
+<p>Johnson, Dr., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page326">326</a></span></p>
+<p>Jolly-doggism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page199">199</a></span></p>
+<p>Jones, Sir Edward Burne, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page180">180</a></span></p>
+<p>Jonson, Ben, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page423">423</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Joseph and His Brethren,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page55">55</a></span></p>
+<p>Joubert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page221">221</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Journal des D&eacute;bats,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span></p>
+<p>Journalism, mendacious, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page263">263</a></span></p>
+<p>Jowett, Benjamin, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friendship with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page279">279</a></span>; pen
+portrait of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page280">280</a></span>; see &lsquo;Last Walk from
+Boar&rsquo;s Hill,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater
+Britain,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Juif-Polonais,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Kaf, mountains of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page453">453</a></span></p>
+<p>Kean, Edmund, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+<p>Keats, John, spirit of wonder in poetry of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page293">293</a></span>; richness
+of style, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page329">329</a></span></p>
+<p>Kelmscott Manor, Rossetti&rsquo;s residence at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page155">155</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page162">162</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page164">164</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page165">165</a></span>;
+identification of Hurstcote with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>; causeries at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Kelmscott Press, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+<p>Kernahan, Coulson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page56">56</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page413">413</a></span></p>
+<p>Kew, Lord, Thackeray&rsquo;s, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>Keynes, T., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page469"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+469</span>Khayy&agrave;m, Omar, &lsquo;Toast to,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page79">79</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page81">81</a></span>; Sonnet on,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page81">81</a></span>;
+&lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; Groome and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Kidnapped,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s review of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page215">215</a></span>; letter
+from Stevenson concerning same, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;King Lear,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page355">355</a></span></p>
+<p>Kis&#257;gotam&#299;, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page456">456</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Kissing the May Buds,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page406">406</a></span></p>
+<p>Knight, Joseph, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page60">60</a></span>; as dramatic
+critic, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page122">122</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span></p>
+<p>Knowles, James, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span>: see also &lsquo;Nineteenth
+Century&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Kriegspiel,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page364">364</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Kubla Khan,&rsquo; wonder and mystery of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page20">20</a></span></p>
+<p>Kymric note, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page313">313</a></span>&ndash;15</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Lamb, Charles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page41">41</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page59">59</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Lancing, Swinburne and Watts visit, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Landor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page271">271</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page352">352</a></span></p>
+<p>Landslips at Cromer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Lane, John, wishes to compile bibliography of
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s articles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>; publication of &lsquo;Coming of
+Love,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page396">396</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page440">440</a></span></p>
+<p>Lang, Andrew, critical work of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page415">415</a></span></p>
+<p>Language, inadequacy of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Language of Nature&rsquo;s Fragrancy,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page269">269</a></span></p>
+<p>Laocoon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Last Walk from Boar&rsquo;s Hill, The,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page282">282</a></span></p>
+<p>Latham, Dr. R. G., acquaintance with J. O. Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Lavengro,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page368">368</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Lear, King,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page355">355</a></span></p>
+<p>Le Gallienne, R., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+<p>Leighton, Lord, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Leslie, G. D., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Leutzner, Dr. Karl, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Lever, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Lewis, Leopold, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+<p>Ligier, as Triboulet in &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
+<p>Lineham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page95">95</a></span></p>
+<p>Litany, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Literature,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page244">244</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Literature of power,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Liverpool Mercury,&rsquo; article on
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span></p>
+<p>Livingstone, J. K. Watts&rsquo;s friendship with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Llyn Coblynau, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page317">317</a></span></p>
+<p>London, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s life in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page87">87</a></span> et seq.; its
+low-class women, humourous pictures of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page383">383</a></span></p>
+<p>Lorne, Marquis of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page453">453</a></span>: see Argyll, Duke of</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Lothair,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>Louise, Princess (Duchess of Argyll), Rossetti&rsquo;s alleged
+rudeness to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page156">156</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Love brings Warning of Natura Maligna,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page414">414</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Love for Love,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page258">258</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page260">260</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Love is Enough,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>Love-passion in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page362">362</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Lovers of Gudrun,&rsquo; written in twelve hours, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Loves of the Plants,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page455">455</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Loves of the Triangles,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page455">455</a></span></p>
+<p>Lovell, Sinfi, Nature instinct of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Amazonian Sinfi,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page107">107</a></span>; true representation of gypsy
+girl, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page317">317</a></span>; Meredith&rsquo;s praise of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page363">363</a></span>; Groome on,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page364">364</a></span>;
+Richard Whiteing on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page364">364</a></span>; dominating character of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page363">363</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page365">365</a></span>; prototype
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page368">368</a></span>&ndash;9; beauty of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page391">391</a></span></p>
+<p>Low, Sidney, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page244">244</a></span></p>
+<p>Lowell, James Russell, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s critical
+work, appreciation of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page399">399</a></span>; sonnet on the death of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page300">300</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reminiscences of:&mdash;meets him at dinner,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page295">295</a></span>; <a
+name="page470"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 470</span>he attacks
+England; directs diatribe at Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page296">296</a></span>;
+recognition; cites Watts&rsquo;s first article, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page298">298</a></span>; his
+anglophobia turns into anglomania, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span>; likes English climate, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page300">300</a></span></p>
+<p>Lowestoft, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+<p>Luther, his pigs, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Lycidas,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page3">3</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Lyell (geologist), <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page45">45</a></span>; J. K. Watts&rsquo;s acquaintance
+with, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Lytton, Bulwer, novels of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page349">349</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>McCarthy, Justin, &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; criticism of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>; hospitality
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span></p>
+<p>MacColl, Norman, invites Watts-Dunton to write for
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page188">188</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page418">418</a></span></p>
+<p>Macready, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>Macrocosm, microcosm and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Madame Bovary,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>Madonna, by Parmigiano, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Magazine of Art,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span></p>
+<p>Magpie, hawk and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+<p>Maguelonne, Jeanne Samary as, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+<p>Man, final emancipation of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page47">47</a></span>: see also Renascence of Wonder,
+&lsquo;Aylwinism.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Man and Wife,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page348">348</a></span></p>
+<p>Manchester School, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page273">273</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Mankind, the Great Man,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page46">46</a></span></p>
+<p>Manns, August, Crystal Palace Concerts conducted by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>Manu, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page219">219</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;M.A.P.,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span></p>
+<p>Mapes, Walter, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page388">388</a></span></p>
+<p>Marcianus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page104">104</a></span></p>
+<p>Marlowe, Christopher, spirit of wonder in poetry of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page329">329</a></span>; friend of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page426">426</a></span></p>
+<p>Marot, Clement, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page229">229</a></span></p>
+<p>Marryat, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Marshall, John, medical adviser to Rossetti, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page152">152</a></span></p>
+<p>Marston, Dr. Westland:&mdash;symposia at Chalk Farm; famous
+actors and actresses, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>; table talk about &lsquo;The
+Bells&rsquo; and &lsquo;Rip Van Winkle,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page119">119</a></span>; on staff
+of &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span>; the sub-Swinburnians at the
+Marston Mornings; the divine Th&eacute;ophile; the Gallic
+Parnassus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>Marston, Philip Bourke, Louise Chandler Moulton&rsquo;s memoir
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span>; Oliver
+Madox Brown&rsquo;s friendship with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page276">276</a></span></p>
+<p>Martin, Sir Theodore, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page156">156</a></span></p>
+<p>Matter, dead, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page411">411</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page452">452</a></span>; new theory of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page451">451</a></span></p>
+<p>Meredith, George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friendship with,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page283">283</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page284">284</a></span>;
+literary style of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page328">328</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s Sonnet on
+Coleridge, opinion of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page417">417</a></span>; &lsquo;Coming of Love,&rsquo;
+opinion of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page418">418</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Meredith, &lsquo;To George, Sonnet, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page284">284</a></span></p>
+<p>Meredithians, mock, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Merry Wives of Windsor,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+<p>Methuen, A. M. S., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p>Metrical art, new, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page343">343</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page344">344</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page412">412</a></span></p>
+<p>Microcosm, of St. Ives, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span>&ndash;7; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>; characters
+in the, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>&ndash;60</p>
+<p>Middleton, Dr. J. H., his friendship with Morris, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page172">172</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,&rsquo; collaboration in,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Mill, John Stuart, education of, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s early
+education compared with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span></p>
+<p>Miller, Joaquin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Milton, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page3">3</a></span>; period of wonder in poetry ended
+with, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page25">25</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page471"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+471</span>Minto, Prof., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s connection
+with &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span>&ndash;88, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page256">256</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reminiscences of:&mdash;neighbours in Danes
+Inn; editing &lsquo;Examiner&rsquo;; secures Watts; first article
+appears; Bell Scott&rsquo;s party; Scott wants to know name of
+new writer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span>; Watts slates himself, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page185">185</a></span>;
+Minto&rsquo;s Monday evening symposia, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+<p>Moli&egrave;re, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Montaigne&mdash;value of leisure&mdash;quotation, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+<p>Morley, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page27">27</a></span></p>
+<p>Morris, Mrs., Rossetti&rsquo;s picture painted from, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page172">172</a></span>; reference
+to, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page179">179</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page180">180</a></span></p>
+<p>Morris, William, &lsquo;Quarterly Review&rsquo; article on,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s Cyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; article on,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Odyssey,&rsquo; his translation of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of poems by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span>; intimacy
+with Watts-Dunton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s monograph
+on, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>&ndash;77; indifference to
+criticism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>; anecdotes of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page179">179</a></span>&ndash;82;
+generosity of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span>; death of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page178">178</a></span>&ndash;79;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reminiscences of:&mdash;Marston mornings at
+Chalk Farm; &lsquo;nosey Latin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page136">136</a></span>; Wednesday
+evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston, Madox Brown and
+Morris, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>; at Kelmscott, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>; passion
+for angling, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span>; snoring of young owls, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span>; causeries
+at Kelmscott, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>; the only reviews he read, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span>; the little
+carpetless room, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span>; writes 750 lines in twelve hours,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span>; the
+crib on his desk, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span>; offers to bring out an
+&eacute;dition-de-luxe of Watts&rsquo;s poems; gets subscribers;
+a magnificent royalty, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span>; presentation copies; extravagant
+generosity; &lsquo;All right, old chap&rsquo;; &lsquo;Ned Jones
+and I,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page180">180</a></span>; &lsquo;Algernon pay &pound;10 for
+a book of mine!&rsquo;, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page181">181</a></span>; disgusted with Stead, the music
+hall singer and dancer; &lsquo;damned tomfoolery,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+<p>Moulton, Louise Chandler, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Mounet-Sully, as Fran&ccedil;ois I in Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page125">125</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Much Ado about Nothing,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page260">260</a></span></p>
+<p>Murchison, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page45">45</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page220">220</a></span></p>
+<p>Muret, Maurice, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page374">374</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page400">400</a></span></p>
+<p>Music, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s knowledge of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>Myers, F. W. H., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Natura Benigna,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page97">97</a></span>; the keynote of
+&lsquo;Aylwinism,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page411">411</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Natura Maligna,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page408">408</a></span>; Sir George Birdwood on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page409">409</a></span></p>
+<p>Natura Mystica, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nature&rsquo;s Fountain of Youth,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+<p>Nature, &lsquo;Poetic Interpretation of,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page204">204</a></span>; as
+humourist, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page386">386</a></span></p>
+<p>Nature-worship, Shintoism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page97">97</a></span>; ambition and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page103">103</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nature-worshippers,&rsquo; Dictionary for, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+<p>Neilson, Julia, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p>Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of
+her acting, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>&ndash;18</p>
+<p>Nelson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;New Day, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page107">107</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page162">162</a></span>&ndash;64, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page312">312</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page396">396</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page443">443</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page472"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 472</span>New
+Year, sonnets on morning of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page409">409</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;News from Nowhere,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nibelungenlied,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Nicol, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page202">202</a></span></p>
+<p>Nicoll, Dr. Robertson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page5">5</a></span>; collection of Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+essays suggested by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span>; &ldquo;Significance of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo;&rdquo; essay by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page372">372</a></span>; Renascence
+of Wonder in Religion, articles on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page375">375</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page445">445</a></span></p>
+<p>Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s appreciation
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Night and Morning,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page349">349</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nineteenth Century,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page442">442</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page235">235</a></span></p>
+<p>Niobe, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span></p>
+<p>Niton Bay, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;, Comedy of,&rsquo;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s review of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page190">190</a></span>&ndash;201; Lowell&rsquo;s opinion
+of same, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page298">298</a></span></p>
+<p>Norman Cross, vipers of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page104">104</a></span></p>
+<p>Norris, H. E., &lsquo;History of St. Ives&rsquo; (reference
+to), <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page25">25</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page40">40</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page51">51</a></span>; River Ouse,
+praise of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page28">28</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page29">29</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span></p>
+<p>North, Christopher: see Wilson, Professor</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Northern Farmer,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Norwich horse fair, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Notes and Queries,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page51">51</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page56">56</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page316">316</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page317">317</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page318">318</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Notre Dame de Paris,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page125">125</a></span></p>
+<p>Novalis, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page247">247</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page455">455</a></span></p>
+<p>Novel, importance of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span>; of manners, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page308">308</a></span>; see
+Fiction.</p>
+<p>Novelists, absurdities of popular, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Nutt, Alfred, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Octopus of the Golden Isles,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page148">148</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Odyssey,&rsquo; Morris&rsquo;s translation of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page176">176</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page208">208</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page341">341</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;&OElig;dipus Egyptiacus,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page226">226</a></span></p>
+<p>Olympic, Robson at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
+<p>Omar, Caliph, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
+<p>Omar Khayy&agrave;m Club, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page81">81</a></span></p>
+<p>Omarian Poems, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page78">78</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page79">79</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page80">80</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page81">81</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Omnipotence of Love.&rsquo;&nbsp; The, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page287">287</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Orchard, The,&rsquo; Niton Bay, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>O&rsquo;Shaughnessy, Arthur, &lsquo;Marston Nights,&rsquo;
+presence at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p>Ouse, River, poems on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page28">28</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page29">29</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span>; Carlyle&rsquo;s libel of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page28">28</a></span>&ndash;9</p>
+<p>Owen, Harry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page317">317</a></span></p>
+<p>Oxford Union, Rossetti&rsquo;s lost frescoes at, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page162">162</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Pain and Death, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Palgrave, F. T., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page291">291</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Pall Mall Gazette,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span></p>
+<p>Palmerston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span></p>
+<p>Pamphlet literature, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Pandora,&rsquo; Rossetti&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page21">21</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Pantheism&rsquo;: Dr. Hunt&rsquo;s book, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page49">49</a></span></p>
+<p>Parable poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span></p>
+<p>Paradis artificiel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page248">248</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page388">388</a></span></p>
+<p>Paragraph-mongers, Rossetti and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page155">155</a></span></p>
+<p>Parmigiano, Madonna by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Parsimony, verbal, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page418">418</a></span></p>
+<p>Partridge, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+<p>Patrick, Dr. David, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page5">5</a></span></p>
+<p>Penn, William, St. Ives, his death there, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Perfect Cure,&rsquo; The, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Peter Schlemihl,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+<p>Petit Bot Bay, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+<p>Phelps, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>Philistia, romance carried into, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page327">327</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page386">386</a></span></p>
+<p>Philistinism, actresses and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Piccadilly,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton writes for, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page301">301</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Pickwick,&rsquo; trial scene in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Pines, The,&rsquo; residence of Watts-Dunton and
+Swinburne: <a name="page473"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+473</span>Christmas at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span>&ndash;4; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page262">262</a></span> et seq.;
+works of art at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page266">266</a></span></p>
+<p>Plato, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page341">341</a></span></p>
+<p>Plot-ridden, &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; not, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page348">348</a></span></p>
+<p>Poe, Edgar Allan, on &lsquo;homely&rsquo; note in fiction,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page325">325</a></span>;
+&lsquo;The Raven,&rsquo; originality of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page419">419</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Poems by the Way,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page177">177</a></span></p>
+<p>Poetic prose: see Prose</p>
+<p><i>&pi;&omicron;&iota;&#942;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf;</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page341">341</a></span></p>
+<p><i>&pi;&omicron;&iota;&eta;&tau;&#942;&sigmaf;</i>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page340">340</a></span></p>
+<p>Poetry, wonder element in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>; English Romantic School, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page17">17</a></span>; humour in,
+question of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page24">24</a></span>; parables in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page224">224</a></span>; blank
+verse, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page239">239</a></span>; popular and artistic, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page293">293</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s Essay on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page354">354</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page393">393</a></span>; Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle,
+Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Bacon on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page340">340</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page341">341</a></span>; difference
+between prose and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page339">339</a></span>; rhetoric and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page340">340</a></span>; poetic
+impulse, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page393">393</a></span>; sincerity and, conscience in,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page394">394</a></span>;
+imagination in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page397">397</a></span>; Zoroaster&rsquo;s definition of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page398">398</a></span>;
+originality in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page419">419</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Poets and Poetry of the Century,&rsquo; Mackenzie
+Bell&rsquo;s study of Watts-Dunton in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span></p>
+<p>Pollock, Walter, contributor to &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Pope, Alexander, periwig poetry of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page25">25</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Poppyland,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton visits, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Portraiture, ethics of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page141">141</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page143">143</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Prayer to the Winds,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page81">81</a></span></p>
+<p>Pre-Raphaelite movement, definition of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>; poets, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page160">160</a></span>&ndash;61</p>
+<p>Priam, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page355">355</a></span></p>
+<p>Primitive poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span></p>
+<p>Prinsep, Val, his vindication of Rossetti, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page145">145</a></span></p>
+<p>Printers&rsquo; ink, taint of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+<p>Priory Barn, Robson at <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
+<p>Prize-fighters, gypsy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page392">392</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Prophetic Pictures at Venice,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span></p>
+<p>Prose, poetic, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page339">339</a></span>: difference between poetry and,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page339">339</a></span>; see
+also &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; Bible Rhythm, Common Prayer, Book of
+Litany; Manu; Ruskin</p>
+<p>Psalms, Watts-Dunton on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span>&ndash;41</p>
+<p>Publicity, evils of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page262">262</a></span></p>
+<p>Purnell, Thomas, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page59">59</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Quarterly Review,&rsquo; on Renascence of Wonder, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>&ndash;17; on
+friendship between Morris and Watts-Dunton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Queen Katherine, Watts&rsquo;s sonnet on Ellen Terry as, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page122">122</a></span></p>
+<p>Quickly, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Rabelais, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page196">196</a></span>&ndash;200, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Racine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Rainbow, The Spirit of the, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span></p>
+<p>Raleigh, Sir Walter, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page423">423</a></span>; on &lsquo;command of the
+sea,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page427">427</a></span></p>
+<p>Rappel, Le, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span></p>
+<p>Reade Charles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page348">348</a></span>; hardness of touch, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>Rehan, Ada, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>Reid, Sir Wemyss, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Relapse, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>Relative humour: see Humour, absolute and relative</p>
+<p>Religion, Renascence of Wonder in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page375">375</a></span>; poetic,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page455">455</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Reminiscence of Open-Air Plays,&rsquo; Epilogue, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page133">133</a></span></p>
+<p>Renascence, decorative, connection with pre-Raphaelite
+movement, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>Renascence, Jewish-Arabian, connection with instinct of
+wonder, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p>Renascence of religion, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span></p>
+<p>Renascence of Wonder, exemplified <a name="page474"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 474</span>in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>; origin of
+phrase, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page11">11</a></span>; meaning of phrase, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page13">13</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page17">17</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span>; Garnett
+on, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page11">11</a></span>,
+French Revolution, cause of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>; pre-Raphaelite movement, connection
+with, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s article on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page20">20</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>; in Philistia, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page327">327</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page328">328</a></span>; in
+religion, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page375">375</a></span>; &lsquo;Coming of Love,
+The,&rsquo; the most powerful expression of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page25">25</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s Treatise on Poetry, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page257">257</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; passages on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page446">446</a></span>; foreign critics on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page325">325</a></span></p>
+<p>Repartee, comedy of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<p>Representation, imaginative, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page398">398</a></span></p>
+<p>Rhetoric, Poetry and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span></p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Rhona Boswell</span>, see Boswell.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Rhona&rsquo;s Letter,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page402">402</a></span></p>
+<p>Rhyme colour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page412">412</a></span></p>
+<p>Rhys, Ernest, &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; dedicated to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page312">312</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Song of the Wind,&rsquo; paraphrase by; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page313">313</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page377">377</a></span></p>
+<p>Rhythm, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page239">239</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page412">412</a></span>: see Bible Rhythm</p>
+<p>Richardson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Richmond Park, Borrow in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page100">100</a></span></p>
+<p>Ripon, Lady, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page91">91</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Rip Van Winkle,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Rivista d&rsquo;Italia&rsquo;: see Galimberti,
+Madame</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Robinson Crusoe,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page307">307</a></span></p>
+<p>Robinson, F. W., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span></p>
+<p>Robson, actor, J. O. Watts&rsquo;s admiration for, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page57">57</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page127">127</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+<p>Rogers, S., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Roi s&rsquo;Amuse, Le,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page123">123</a></span></p>
+<p>Romanies, Gorgios and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page389">389</a></span>; see Gypsies</p>
+<p>Romantic movement, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span>&ndash;25</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Romany Rye,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Romeo and Juliet,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Roots of the Mountains,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Rose Mary,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s advice to
+Rossetti concerning, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page139">139</a></span></p>
+<p>Rosicrucian Christmas, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page94">94</a></span></p>
+<p>Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>; Watts-Dunton on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page17">17</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page18">18</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page21">21</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Spirit of Wonder&rsquo; expressed by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page18">18</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page19">19</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Pandora,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page21">21</a></span>; Poems of, lack of humour in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page24">24</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Watts&rsquo;s magnificent Star Sonnet,&rsquo; his
+appreciation of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page29">29</a></span>; Omar Khayy&agrave;m, translation
+discovered by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>; his insomnia; Dr. Hake as his
+physician; grief for his wife&rsquo;s death; his melancholia;
+cock-and-bull stories as to his treatment of his wife; their
+origin; wild and whirling words; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span>&ndash;91; stay at Roehampton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page91">91</a></span>; Cheyne Walk
+reunions, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page137">137</a></span>; Watts-Dunton, affection for,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page138">138</a></span>&ndash;69; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s
+influence on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page139">139</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page149">149</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page150">150</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span>; type of female beauty invented
+by, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page140">140</a></span>;
+dies in Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s arms, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page150">150</a></span>; illness of, anecdote concerning,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page153">153</a></span>;
+Watts Dunton&rsquo;s elegy on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span>; Cheyne Walk green dining-room,
+description, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s description
+of his house, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span>&ndash;69; his wit and humour,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page169">169</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Spirit of the Rainbow,&rsquo; illustration to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page276">276</a></span>; references
+to, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page262">262</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page263">263</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s reminiscences of:&mdash;at Marston symposia;
+the Gallic Parnassians; he advises the bardlings to write in
+French, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>; interest in work of others;
+reciting a bardling&rsquo;s sonnet, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page137">137</a></span>; wishes Watts to write his life,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page140">140</a></span>;
+letter to author about Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>; Charles Augustus Howell (De <a
+name="page475"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 475</span>Castro),
+Rossetti&rsquo;s opinion of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page142">142</a></span>; portrait as D&rsquo;Arcy in
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;; not idealized; ethics of portraiture of
+friend; amazing detraction of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page144">144</a></span>; too much written about him, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page145">145</a></span>; relations
+with his wife; Val Prinsep&rsquo;s testimony, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page145">145</a></span>;
+&lsquo;lovable&mdash;most lovable,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page145">145</a></span>; a pious
+fraud, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span>; alleged rudeness to Princess
+Louise, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page155">155</a></span>; attitude to a disgraced friend,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page210">210</a></span>; the
+dishonest critic; &lsquo;By God, if I met such a man,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page211">211</a></span>; a
+generous gift, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span>; dislike of publicity; abashed by
+an &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; paragraph, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page263">263</a></span></p>
+<p>Rossetti, W. M., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page149">149</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+<p>Rossetti, Mrs. W. M., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page275">275</a></span></p>
+<p>Rous, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+<p>Ruskin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span></p>
+<p>Russell, Lord John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span></p>
+<p>Ryan, W. P., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page378">378</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&lsquo;Salaman&rsquo; and &lsquo;Absal&rsquo; of J&aacute;mi,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page21">21</a></span></p>
+<p>Saltabadil, Febvre as, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+<p>St. Aldegonde, Disraeli&rsquo;s &lsquo;softness of
+touch&rsquo; in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>St. Francis of Assisi, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span></p>
+<p>St. Ives, birthplace of Watts-Dunton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page26">26</a></span>; old Saxon
+name for, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span>; George Dyer and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page40">40</a></span>&ndash;41;
+printing press at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page40">40</a></span>; Union Book Club,
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s speech at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page42">42</a></span>; History of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page51">51</a></span>; East Anglian
+sympathies of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page78">78</a></span></p>
+<p>St. Peter&rsquo;s Port, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton
+to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+<p>Sainte-Beuve, Watts-Dunton compared to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page399">399</a></span></p>
+<p>Sa&iuml;s, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page331">331</a></span></p>
+<p>Samary, Jeanne, as Maguelonne, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+<p>Sampson, Mr., Romany scholar, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Sancho Panza, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+<p>Sandys, Frederick, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+<p>Sark, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s visit to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page269">269</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Saturday Review,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page34">34</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page382">382</a></span></p>
+<p>Savile Club, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page202">202</a></span></p>
+<p>Schiller, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page221">221</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Scholar Gypsy, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span></p>
+<p>Schopenhauer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page247">247</a></span></p>
+<p>Science, man&rsquo;s good genius, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page47">47</a></span>&ndash;9</p>
+<p>Science, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s speech on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page42">42</a></span>&ndash;9</p>
+<p>Scott, Sir Walter, his humour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page195">195</a></span>; tribute to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page220">220</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page221">221</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page307">307</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page346">346</a></span>;
+&lsquo;softness of touch&rsquo; in portraiture, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page350">350</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Scott, William Bell, anecdote of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Scullion, Sterne&rsquo;s fat, foolish,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page249">249</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Semaine Litt&eacute;raire, La,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page347">347</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page374">374</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page380">380</a></span></p>
+<p>Sex, witchery of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page391">391</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Shadow on the Window Blind,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page164">164</a></span>: first
+printed in Mackenzie Bell&rsquo;s Study of Watts-Dunton in
+&lsquo;Poets and Poetry of the Century,&rsquo; q.v.</p>
+<p>Shakespeare, spirit of wonder in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page16">16</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page126">126</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span>; richness in style, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page328">328</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page355">355</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page382">382</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page394">394</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Shales mare,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+<p>Shandys, the two, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page350">350</a></span></p>
+<p>Sharp, William, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page29">29</a></span>; scenery and atmosphere of
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page276">276</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page284">284</a></span>; influence of Watts-Dunton on
+Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page399">399</a></span></p>
+<p>Shaw, Byam, &lsquo;Brynhild on Sigurd&rsquo;s Funeral
+Pyre,&rsquo; illustration of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page366">366</a></span></p>
+<p>Shaw, Dr. Norton, intimacy with J. K. Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Shelley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span>; &lsquo;Epipsychidion,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page419">419</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page476"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+476</span>Shintoism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p>Shirley: see Skelton, Sir John</p>
+<p>Shirley Essays, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page202">202</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Shirley,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>Shorter, Clement, his connection with Slepe Hall, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+<p>Sibilant, in poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>&ndash;88</p>
+<p>Siddons, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>Sidestrand, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page269">269</a></span></p>
+<p>Sidney, Sir Philip, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Sigurd,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page366">366</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Silas Marner,&rsquo; public-house scene in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Sinfi Lovell, see Lovell</p>
+<p>Skeleton, the Golden, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page422">422</a></span> et seq.</p>
+<p>Skelton, Sir John, his &lsquo;Comedy of the Noctes
+Ambrosian&aelig;,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s review of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page190">190</a></span>&ndash;201;
+Rossetti &lsquo;Reminiscences,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page202">202</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friendship with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page202">202</a></span></p>
+<p>Sleaford, Lord, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>Slepe Hall, Clement Shorter&rsquo;s connection with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span>; story told
+in connection with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span></p>
+<p>Sly, Christopher, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page388">388</a></span></p>
+<p>Smalley, G. W., his article on Whistler, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Smart set, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Smart slating,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page207">207</a></span></p>
+<p>Smetham, James: see Wilderspin</p>
+<p>Smith, Alexander, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page44">44</a></span>; Herbert Spencer and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page213">213</a></span></p>
+<p>Smith, Gypsy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page351">351</a></span></p>
+<p>Smith, Sydney, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page43">43</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page196">196</a></span></p>
+<p>Smollett, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page304">304</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Snowdon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page315">315</a></span></p>
+<p>Socrates, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page45">45</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Softness of touch&rsquo; in fiction, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page350">350</a></span></p>
+<p>Sonnet, The, Essay on, reference to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Sophocles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page323">323</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page394">394</a></span></p>
+<p>Sothern, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span></p>
+<p>Spencer, Herbert, Alexander Smith and,
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; anecdote, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>&ndash;14</p>
+<p>Spenser, Edmund, Spirit of Wonder in poetry of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>Spirit of Place, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Spirit of the Sunrise,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page450">450</a></span></p>
+<p>Sport, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span>&ndash;67; definition of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+<p>Sports, field, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>Squeezing of books, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span></p>
+<p>Sta&euml;l, Madame de, her struggle against tradition of 18th
+century, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span></p>
+<p>Stanley, Fenella, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page362">362</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page363">363</a></span></p>
+<p>Stead, William Morris and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+<p>Stedman, Clarence, his remarks on &lsquo;The Coming of
+Love,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span></p>
+<p>Sterne, his humour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span>&ndash;55; his indecencies, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page253">253</a></span>; his
+&lsquo;softness of touch,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page350">350</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Sternhold, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page229">229</a></span></p>
+<p>Stevenson, R. L., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of
+&lsquo;Kidnapped&rsquo; and &lsquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page215">215</a></span>&ndash;21; letter from, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p>Stillman, Mrs., Rossetti&rsquo;s picture painted from, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Stone, E. D., &ldquo;Christmas at the
+&lsquo;Mermaid,&rsquo;&rdquo; Latin translation by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page147">147</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Stories after Nature,&rsquo; Wells&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span>&ndash;55</p>
+<p>Stourbridge Fair, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>Strand, the symposium in the, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+<p>Stratford-on-Avon, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s poems on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page31">31</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page32">32</a></span>; see also
+&ldquo;Christmas at the &lsquo;Mermaid,&rsquo;&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page423">423</a></span></p>
+<p>Stress in poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page344">344</a></span></p>
+<p>Strong, Prof. A. S., references to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page5">5</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page132">132</a></span>; article on
+&lsquo;The Coming of Love,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page444">444</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page445">445</a></span></p>
+<p>Style, le, c&rsquo;est la race, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page233">233</a></span></p>
+<p>Style, the Great, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page234">234</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page477"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+477</span>Sufism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page449">449</a></span>; in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page454">454</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Suicide Club, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page220">220</a></span></p>
+<p>Sully, Professor, contributor to &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Sunrise, Poet of the, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page398">398</a></span></p>
+<p>Sunsets, in the Fens, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page62">62</a></span></p>
+<p>Surtees, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Swallow Falls, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page315">315</a></span></p>
+<p>Swift, his humour the opposite of Sterne&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<p>Swinburne, Algernon Charles, acquaintance with J. O. Watts,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span>;
+intercourse and friendship with Watts-Dunton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span>&ndash;74;
+&lsquo;Jubilee Greeting&rsquo; dedicated to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page273">273</a></span>; partly
+identified with Percy Aylwin, see description of his swimming,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span>;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page279">279</a></span>&ndash;84; at Th&eacute;&acirc;tre
+Fran&ccedil;aise, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span>; dedications to Watts-Dunton,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page271">271</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page272">272</a></span>;
+offensive newspaper caricatures of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page263">263</a></span>; championship of Meredith, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page284">284</a></span>; on
+&lsquo;Tom Jones,&rsquo; &lsquo;Waverley,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page346">346</a></span>; on &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page363">363</a></span>; references
+to, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page1">1</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page12">12</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page117">117</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page123">123</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page139">139</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page147">147</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page157">157</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page180">180</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page181">181</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page328">328</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page413">413</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Anecdotes of</span>:&mdash;chambers in Great James
+St., <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span>;
+never a playgoer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>; life at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page262">262</a></span> et
+seq.; the great Swinburne myth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page263">263</a></span>; the American lady journalist,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page264">264</a></span>; an
+imaginary interview, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page265">265</a></span>; an unlovely bard; painfully
+&lsquo;afflated&rsquo;; method of composition; &lsquo;stamping
+with both feet,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page265">265</a></span>; friendship with Watts began in
+1872, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span>; inseparable since; housemates at
+&lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;; visit to Channel Islands; swimming in
+Petit Bot Bay, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span>; Sark; &lsquo;Orion&rsquo;
+Horne&rsquo;s bravado challenge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>; visits Paris for Jubilee of
+&lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>; swimming at Sidestrand; meets
+Grant Allen, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>; visits Eastbourne, Lancing, Isle
+of Wight, Cromer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span>; visits to Jowett; Jowett&rsquo;s
+admiration of Watts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page279">279</a></span>; Balliol dinner parties, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page280">280</a></span>; at the
+Bodleian, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span>; great novels which are popular,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page273">273</a></span></p>
+<p>Swinburne, Miss, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span></p>
+<p>Symons, Arthur, &lsquo;Coming of Love,&rsquo; article on,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page257">257</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Table-Talk, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s, Rossetti on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page183">183</a></span></p>
+<p>Tabley, Lord de, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page277">277</a></span></p>
+<p>Taine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Tale of Beowulf,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Taliesin, &lsquo;Song of the Wind,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page313">313</a></span></p>
+<p>Talk on Waterloo Bridge,&rsquo; &lsquo;A, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span></p>
+<p>Tarno Rye, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page351">351</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page391">391</a></span></p>
+<p>Tate and Brady, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+<p>Telepathy, dogs and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span>&ndash;6</p>
+<p>Temple, Lord and Lady Mount, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+<p>Tenderness, in English hero, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Tennyson, Alfred, Birthday Address,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page32">32</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Tennyson, Alfred,&rsquo; sonnet to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page286">286</a></span></p>
+<p>Tennyson, Lord, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page144">144</a></span>; dishonest criticism, opinion of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page211">211</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friendship with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page285">285</a></span>;
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s criticism of and essays on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page289">289</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page290">290</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Memoir,&rsquo; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s contribution, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page291">291</a></span>; anecdotes
+concerning, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page287">287</a></span>&ndash;89; &lsquo;The
+Princess,&rsquo; defects of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span>; portraits of,
+Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s articles on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span>; &lsquo;Maud,&rsquo; compared with
+Rhona Boswell, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page413">413</a></span>; <a name="page478"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 478</span><span class="smcap">Watts-Dunton
+and</span>:&mdash;sympathy between him and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page285">285</a></span>; sonnet on
+birthday, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>; meeting at garden party; open
+invitation to Aldworth and Farringford; his ear not defective,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page286">286</a></span>;
+sensibility to delicate metrical nuances, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page287">287</a></span>; challenges
+a sibilant in a sonnet, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page287">287</a></span>; &lsquo;scent&rsquo; better than
+&lsquo;scents,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page287">287</a></span>; his morbid modesty, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page288">288</a></span>; a poet is
+not born to the purple, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page288">288</a></span>; reading &lsquo;Becket&rsquo; in
+summer-house; desired free criticism, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page288">288</a></span>; alleged
+rudeness to women, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span>; detraction of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page289">289</a></span>; could not
+invent a story, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span>; the nucleus of
+&lsquo;Maud,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span></p>
+<p>Terry, Ellen, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s friendship with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page117">117</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page121">121</a></span>; sonnet on,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page122">122</a></span></p>
+<p>Thackeray, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page305">305</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page328">328</a></span>; &lsquo;softness of touch,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page350">350</a></span>&ndash;53</p>
+<p>Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;aise, Swinburne and Watts at,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>&ndash;29</p>
+<p>Thicket, The, St. Ives, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span></p>
+<p>Thoreau, teaching of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span>; love of wind, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page371">371</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page442">442</a></span></p>
+<p>Thuthe, the, Kis&#257;got&aacute;m&#299; and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page455">455</a></span>&ndash;6</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Thyrsis,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Tieck, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page19">19</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Times,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page370">370</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Toast to Omar Khayy&aacute;m,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page79">79</a></span></p>
+<p>Tooke, Horne, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;T. P.&rsquo;s Weekly,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Torquemada,&rsquo; motif of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page125">125</a></span></p>
+<p>Tourneur, Cyril, &lsquo;spirit of wonder&rsquo; in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>Traill, H. D., his criticism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span>; Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s meeting
+with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span>; review of his
+&lsquo;Sterne,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page246">246</a></span>&ndash;55; his letter to MacColl,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page243">243</a></span>;
+meets him at dinner, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span>; picturesque appearance; boyish
+lisp; calls at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;; interesting figures at
+his gatherings; &lsquo;a man of genius&rsquo;; asks Watts to
+write for &lsquo;Literature&rsquo;; his geniality as an editor,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page244">244</a></span>; why
+&lsquo;Literature&rsquo; failed, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Travailleurs de la Mer, Les,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page370">370</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Treasure Island,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page220">220</a></span></p>
+<p>Triboulet, Got as, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span>&ndash;29</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Tribute, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Tristram of Lyonesse,&rsquo; dedicated to Watts-Dunton,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page272">272</a></span></p>
+<p>Troubadours and Trouv&egrave;res, The, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page204">204</a></span></p>
+<p>Trus&rsquo;hul, the Romany Cross, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span></p>
+<p>Turner, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span></p>
+<p>Twentieth Century, Cosmogony of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page373">373</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Ukko, the Sky God, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Under the Greenwood Tree,&rsquo; rustic humour of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page186">186</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Vacquerie, Auguste, &lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse&rsquo;
+produced by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span></p>
+<p>Vanbrugh, Irene, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>Vanbrugh, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s article on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page258">258</a></span></p>
+<p>Vance, the Great, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page182">182</a></span></p>
+<p>Vaughan, his &lsquo;Hours with the Mystics,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Veiled Queen, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page229">229</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page374">374</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page375">375</a></span></p>
+<p>Vernunft of Man, the Bible and the, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page230">230</a></span></p>
+<p>Verse, English, accent in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page344">344</a></span></p>
+<p>Vezin, Hermann, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page118">118</a></span>; Mrs., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page131">131</a></span></p>
+<p>Victoria, Queen, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s tribute to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page274">274</a></span></p>
+<p>Villain in Hugo&rsquo;s novels, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page125">125</a></span>; &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; a novel
+without a, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page349">349</a></span></p>
+<p>Villon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page388">388</a></span></p>
+<p>Virgil, wonder in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p><a name="page479"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+479</span>Vision, absolute and relative, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page354">354</a></span>; in
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page357">357</a></span> et seq.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Vita Nuova,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page412">412</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Volsunga Saga,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Voltaire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Wagner, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page412">412</a></span></p>
+<p>Wahrheit and Dichtung, in &lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span></p>
+<p>Wales, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s sympathy with, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page312">312</a></span>; popularity
+of &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page314">314</a></span>; descriptions of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page315">315</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page317">317</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page318">318</a></span>; Welsh
+accent, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page319">319</a></span>&ndash;20</p>
+<p>Wales, Prince of, anecdote of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page67">67</a></span></p>
+<p>Warburton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Wassail Chorus,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page438">438</a></span></p>
+<p>Waterloo Bridge, Borrow on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page115">115</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Water of the Wondrous Isles,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+<p>Watson, William, Grant Allen on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page207">207</a></span></p>
+<p>Watts, A. E., Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s brother, articled as
+solicitor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span>; Cyril Aylwin, identification with,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page87">87</a></span>; his
+humour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>; death, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+<p>Watts, G. F., Rossetti&rsquo;s portrait by, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p>Watts, James Orlando, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s uncle, identity of
+character with Philip Aylwin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page51">51</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page56">56</a></span>&ndash;60</p>
+<p>Watts, J. K., Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s father, account of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span>; scientific
+celebrities, intimacy with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span>&ndash;53; scientific reputation of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Watts, William K., description of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page160">160</a></span></p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Watts-Dunton, Theodore</span>, memoirs of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>;
+monograph on, reply to author&rsquo;s suggestion to write, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page7">7</a></span>; plan of same,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>;
+description of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page278">278</a></span>&ndash;9;
+Boyhood:&mdash;birthplace, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span>; Cromwell&rsquo;s elder wine, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page37">37</a></span>; Cambridge
+school-days, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page37">37</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page66">66</a></span>; St. Ives Union Book Club, speech
+delivered at, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page42">42</a></span>&ndash;49; family of Dunton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page53">53</a></span>; father and
+son&mdash;the double brain, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span>&ndash;5; as child critic, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page55">55</a></span>; interest in
+sport and athletics, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span>; Deerfoot and the Prince of Wales,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page67">67</a></span>; period
+of Nature study, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page67">67</a></span>; articled to solicitor, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page72">72</a></span>; Life in
+London:&mdash;solicitor&rsquo;s practice, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span>; life at
+Sydenham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span>; London Society, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page353">353</a></span>; interest
+in slum-life, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span>; connection with theatrical world,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>&ndash;35;
+Characteristics:&mdash;Love of animals, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span>&ndash;85;
+interest in poor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span>&ndash;4; conversational powers,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page183">183</a></span>;
+genius for friendship, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page443">443</a></span>; indifference to fame, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page3">3</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page183">183</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page204">204</a></span>; habit of
+early rising, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page279">279</a></span>; influence, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page22">22</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page452">452</a></span>; dual
+personality, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page322">322</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page356">356</a></span>; music, love of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page38">38</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span>; natural
+science, proficiency in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page38">38</a></span>; optimism, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page9">9</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page457">457</a></span>;
+identification with Henry Aylwin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page356">356</a></span>; Romany blood in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page361">361</a></span>;
+Writings:&mdash;&lsquo;Academy,&rsquo; invitation to write for,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page187">187</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um,&rsquo; invitation to write for, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page188">188</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page202">202</a></span>;
+contributions to, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page55">55</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page189">189</a></span>&ndash;201, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page204">204</a></span>; his
+treatise on Sonnet&mdash;Dr. Karl Leutzner on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span>; critical
+principles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span>; &lsquo;Encyclop&aelig;dia
+Britannica&rsquo; articles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page256">256</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span>&ndash;8; difference between prose
+and poetry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page339">339</a></span>; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page340">340</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page393">393</a></span>; poetic <a
+name="page480"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 480</span>style,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page323">323</a></span>;
+&lsquo;Examiner&rsquo; articles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span>; see also Minto; Critical
+Work:&mdash;Swinburne&rsquo;s opinion of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page1">1</a></span>; character of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page8">8</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page205">205</a></span>&ndash;208;
+critical and creative work, relation between, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page203">203</a></span>; critical
+and imaginative work interwoven, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page370">370</a></span>; School of Criticism founded,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>; Essays
+on Tennyson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page290">290</a></span>; Lowell on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page399">399</a></span>; Dramatic
+Criticism:&mdash;<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page120">120</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page123">123</a></span>&ndash;30; Poetry:&mdash;<span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page4">4</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page393">393</a></span>&ndash;441;
+Rossetti on, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page399">399</a></span>; Prose Writings:&mdash;character
+of, <span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page2">2</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page321">321</a></span>&ndash;25, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page327">327</a></span>&ndash;92,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page350">350</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page453">453</a></span>;
+richness of style, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page329">329</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page330">330</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page331">331</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page333">333</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page336">336</a></span>; unity of his writings, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page445">445</a></span>; American
+friends of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page295">295</a></span>&ndash;311; Gypsies, description of
+first meeting with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page61">61</a></span>; Friends, Reminiscences
+of:&mdash;<span class="smcap">Appleton, Prof</span>: at Bell
+Scott&rsquo;s and Rossetti&rsquo;s; Hegel on the brain; asks
+Watts to write for &lsquo;Academy,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page187">187</a></span>; wants him
+to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page188">188</a></span>; in a rage;
+Watts explains why he has gone into enemy&rsquo;s camp, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page201">201</a></span>; a
+Philistine, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page202">202</a></span>; <span class="smcap">Black,
+William</span>: resemblance to Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page185">185</a></span>; meeting at
+Justin McCarthy&rsquo;s, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span>; Watts mistaken for Black, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page186">186</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Borrow, George</span>: his first meeting with,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page95">95</a></span>; his
+shyness, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span>; Watts attacks it; tries Bamfylde
+Moore Carew; then tries beer, the British bruiser, philology,
+Ambrose Gwinett, etc., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page100">100</a></span>; a stroll in Richmond Park; visit
+to &lsquo;Bald-faced Stag&rsquo;; Jerry Abershaw&rsquo;s sword;
+his gigantic green umbrella, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span>&ndash;102; tries Whittlesea Mere;
+Borrow&rsquo;s surprise; vipers of Norman Cross; Romanies and
+vipers, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page104">104</a></span>; disclaims taint of
+printers&rsquo; ink; &lsquo;Who are you?&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page105">105</a></span>; an East
+Midlander; the Shales Mare, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span>; Cromer sea best for swimming;
+rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page106">106</a></span>; goes to a
+gypsy camp; talks about Matthew Arnold&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Scholar-Gypsy,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span>; resolves to try it on gypsy
+woman; watches hawk and magpie, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span>; meets Perpinia Boswell;
+&lsquo;the popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page110">110</a></span>; Rhona
+Boswell, girl of the dragon flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to
+smoke, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span>; description of Rhona, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page113">113</a></span>; the
+Devil&rsquo;s Needles; reads Glanville&rsquo;s story; Rhona bored
+by Arnold, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span>; hatred of tobacco, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page115">115</a></span>; last sight
+of Borrow on Waterloo Bridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page115">115</a></span>; sonnet on, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Brown, Madox</span>: <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page35">35</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>; anecdote about portrait of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page274">274</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Brown, Oliver Madox</span>: his novel, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page274">274</a></span>&ndash;6;
+<span class="smcap">Browning</span>: Watts chaffs him in
+&lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo;; chided by Swinburne, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page222">222</a></span>; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page223">223</a></span>&ndash;27;
+sees him at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him to
+slip away; bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell
+astonished at his magnanimity, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span>&ndash;23; the <a
+name="page481"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 481</span>review in
+question, &lsquo;Ferishtah&rsquo;s Fancies,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page223">223</a></span>&ndash;26;
+<span class="smcap">Groome, Frank</span>: a luncheon at
+&lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>; &lsquo;Old Fitz&rsquo;; patted on
+the head by, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>; see also <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page68">68</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page72">72</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page285">285</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page351">351</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page364">364</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page367">367</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page372">372</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page420">420</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Hake, Gordon</span>: Introduces Borrow, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page95">95</a></span>; see
+&lsquo;New Day&rsquo;; physician to Rossetti and to Lady Ripon,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span>&ndash;91; <span class="smcap">Harte,
+Bret</span>: Watts&rsquo;s estimate of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span>&ndash;11;
+histrionic gifts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page302">302</a></span>; meeting with; drive round London
+music halls, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page303">303</a></span>; &lsquo;Holborn,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Oxford&rsquo;; Evans&rsquo;s supper-rooms; Paddy Green;
+meets him again at breakfast; a fine actor lost, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page303">303</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Lowell, James Russell</span>: meets him at dinner,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page295">295</a></span>; he
+attacks England; directs diatribe at Watts; he retorts; a verbal
+duel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page296">296</a></span>; recognition; cites Watts&rsquo;s
+first article, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page298">298</a></span>; his anglophobia turns into
+anglomania, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page299">299</a></span>; likes English climate, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page300">300</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Marston, Westland</span>: symposia at Chalk Farm;
+famous actors and actresses, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span>; table talk about &lsquo;The
+Bells&rsquo; and &lsquo;Rip Van Winkle,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page119">119</a></span>; on staff
+of &lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span>; the sub-Swinburnians at the
+Marston mornings; the divine Th&eacute;ophile; the Gallic
+Parnassus, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>; <span class="smcap">Meredith,
+George</span>: <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page283">283</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page284">284</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page328">328</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page417">417</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page418">418</a></span>; <span class="smcap">Minto,
+Prof</span>.: neighbours in Danes Inn; editing
+&lsquo;Examiner&rsquo;; secures Watts; first article appears;
+Bell Scott&rsquo;s party; Scott wants to know name of new writer,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span>;
+Watts slates himself, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span>; Minto&rsquo;s Monday evening
+symposia, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span>; <span class="smcap">Morris,
+William</span>: Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; &lsquo;nosey
+Latin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>; Wednesday evenings at Danes Inn;
+Swinburne, Watts, Marston, Madox Brown and Morris, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span>; at
+Kelmscott, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span>; passion for angling, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span>; snoring of
+young owls, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span>; causeries at Kelmscott, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span>; the only
+reviews he read, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page173">173</a></span>; the little carpetless room, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page175">175</a></span>; writes 750
+lines in twelve hours, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>; the crib on his desk, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page177">177</a></span>; offers to
+bring out an &eacute;dition-de-luxe of Watts&rsquo;s poems; gets
+subscribers; a magnificent royalty, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span>; presentation copies; extravagant
+generosity; &lsquo;All right, old chap&rsquo;; &lsquo;Ned Jones
+and I,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page180">180</a></span>; &lsquo;Algernon pay &pound;10 for
+a book of mine!&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page181">181</a></span>; disgusted with Stead, the
+music-hall singer and dancer; &lsquo;damned tomfoolery,&rsquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page181">181</a></span>;
+<span class="smcap">Rossetti, Dante Gabriel</span>: at Marston
+symposia; the Gallic Parnassians; he advises the bardlings to
+write in French, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span>; interest in work of others;
+reciting a bardling&rsquo;s sonnet, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page137">137</a></span>; wishes Watts to write his life,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page140">140</a></span>;
+Swinburne on Watts&rsquo;s influence over, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page139">139</a></span>; letter to
+author about Rossetti, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>; Charles Augustus Howell (De
+Castro), Rossetti&rsquo;s opinion of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page142">142</a></span>; portrait
+as D&rsquo;Arcy in &lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo;; not idealized; ethics of
+portraiture of <a name="page482"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+482</span>friend; amazing detraction of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page144">144</a></span>; too much
+written about him, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span>; relations with his wife; Val
+Prinsep&rsquo;s testimony, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span>; &lsquo;lovable, most
+lovable,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span>; dies in Watts&rsquo;s arms, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page150">150</a></span>; a pious
+fraud, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span>; alleged rudeness to Princess
+Louise, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page155">155</a></span>; described in
+&lsquo;Aylwin,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span>&ndash;9; his wit and humour, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page169">169</a></span>; attitude
+to a disgraced friend, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>; the dishonest critic; &lsquo;By
+God, if I met such a man,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span>; a generous gift, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page267">267</a></span>; dislike of
+publicity; abashed by an &lsquo;Athen&aelig;um&rsquo; paragraph,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page263">263</a></span>;
+<span class="smcap">Swinburne, Algernon Charles</span>: James
+Orlando Watts and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page58">58</a></span>; chambers in Great James Street,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page89">89</a></span>; life
+at &lsquo;The Pines,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page262">262</a></span> et seq.; offensive newspaper
+caricature of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page263">263</a></span>; the great Swinburne myth, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page263">263</a></span>; the
+American lady journalist, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page264">264</a></span>; an imaginary interview, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page265">265</a></span>; an
+unlovely bard; painfully &lsquo;afflated&rsquo;; method of
+composition; &lsquo;stamping with both feet,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page265">265</a></span>; friendship
+with Watts began in 1872, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span>; inseparable since; housemates at
+&lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;; visit to Channel Islands; swimming in
+Petit Bot Bay, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span>; Sark; &lsquo;Orion&rsquo;
+Horne&rsquo;s bravado challenge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>; visits Paris for Jubilee of
+&lsquo;Le Roi s&rsquo;Amuse,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>; swimming at Sidestrand; meets
+Grant Allen, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span>; visits Eastbourne, Lancing, Isle
+of Wight, Cromer, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span>; sonnet to Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page271">271</a></span>; dedicates
+&lsquo;Tristram of Lyonesse&rsquo; to Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page272">272</a></span>; also
+Collected Edition of Poems, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page272">272</a></span>; visits to Jowett; Jowett&rsquo;s
+admiration of Watts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page279">279</a></span>; Balliol dinner parties, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page280">280</a></span>; at the
+Bodleian, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page282">282</a></span>; great novels which are popular,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page273">273</a></span>;
+champions Meredith, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page284">284</a></span>; <span class="smcap">Tennyson,
+Alfred</span>: friendship with, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page285">285</a></span>; sympathy between him and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page285">285</a></span>; sonnet on
+birthday, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page286">286</a></span>; meeting at garden party; open
+invitation to Aldworth and Farringford; his ear not defective,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page286">286</a></span>;
+sensibility to delicate metrical nuances, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page287">287</a></span>; challenges
+a sibilant in a sonnet, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page287">287</a></span>; &lsquo;scent&rsquo; better than
+&lsquo;scents,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page287">287</a></span>; his morbid modesty, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page288">288</a></span>; a poet is
+not born to the purple, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page288">288</a></span>; reading &lsquo;Becket&rsquo; in
+summer-house; desired free criticism, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page288">288</a></span>; alleged
+rudeness to women, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span>; detraction of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page289">289</a></span>; could not
+invent a story, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span>; the nucleus of
+&lsquo;Maud,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page289">289</a></span>; his articles on portraits of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page290">290</a></span>;
+<span class="smcap">Traill</span>, H. D.: reviews his
+&lsquo;Sterne&rsquo;; his letter to MacColl, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page243">243</a></span>; meets him
+at dinner, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span>; picturesque appearance; boyish
+lisp; calls at &lsquo;The Pines&rsquo;; interesting figures at
+his gatherings; &lsquo;a man of genius&rsquo;; asks Watts to
+write for &lsquo;Literature&rsquo;; his geniality as an editor,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page244">244</a></span>; why
+&lsquo;Literature&rsquo; failed, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span>; <span
+class="smcap">Whistler</span>, <span class="smcap">J.
+McNeill</span>: Cyril Aylwin not a portrait of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span>; anecdotes of
+De Castro, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page142">142</a></span>; neighbour of Rossetti, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page156">156</a></span>; close
+friendship with Watts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>; hostility to Royal Academy, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page301">301</a></span>&ndash;2;
+his first <a name="page483"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+483</span>lithographs, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>&ndash;2; engaged with Watts on
+&lsquo;Piccadilly,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span>; &lsquo;To Theodore Watts, the
+Worldling,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>Watts-Dunton, Theodore, Swinburne&rsquo;s sonnets to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page271">271</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page272">272</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Waverley,&rsquo; Swinburne on; its new dramatic method;
+cause of its success; imitated by Dumas, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
+<p>Way, T., Whistler&rsquo;s first lithographs, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page301">301</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+<p>Webster, &lsquo;Spirit of Wonder&rsquo; in, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Well at the World&rsquo;s End,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p>Wells, Charles, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span>&ndash;55</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Westminster Abbey, In&rsquo; (Burial of Tennyson),
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page291">291</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;W. H. Mr.,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page424">424</a></span>&ndash;26</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What the Silent Voices said,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page291">291</a></span></p>
+<p>Whewell, intimacy with J. K. Watts, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Whistler, J. McNeill:&mdash;Cyril Aylwin not a portrait of,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span>;
+anecdotes of De Castro, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page142">142</a></span>; neighbour of Rossetti, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page156">156</a></span>; close
+friendship with Watts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>; his first lithographs, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page301">301</a></span>&ndash;2;
+hostility to Royal Academy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>&ndash;2; engaged with Watts on
+&lsquo;Piccadilly,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page301">301</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span>; &lsquo;To Theodore Watts, the
+Worldling,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page353">353</a></span></p>
+<p>White, Gilbert, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page50">50</a></span></p>
+<p>Whiteing, Richard, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page364">364</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;White Ship, The,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+<p>Whittlesea Mere, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page104">104</a></span></p>
+<p>Whyte-Melville, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page352">352</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page367">367</a></span></p>
+<p>Wilderspin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page331">331</a></span>: see Smetham, James</p>
+<p>Wilkie, his realism, humour of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page387">387</a></span></p>
+<p>Williams,&rsquo; Scholar,&rsquo; contributor to
+&lsquo;Examiner,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Williams, Smith, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page275">275</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;William Wilson,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page219">219</a></span></p>
+<p>Willis, Parker, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page264">264</a></span></p>
+<p>Wilson, Professor, Watts-Dunton&rsquo;s essay on his
+&lsquo;Noctes Ambrosian&aelig;,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page190">190</a></span>&ndash;201</p>
+<p>Wimbledon Common, Borrow and, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span>; Watts-Dunton and, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page279">279</a></span></p>
+<p>Wind, love of the, Thoreau&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page370">370</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page371">371</a></span></p>
+<p>Women, as actresses, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page131">131</a></span>; heroic type of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page365">365</a></span></p>
+<p>Wonder: see Renascence of Wonder; old and new, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span>; Bible as
+great book of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span>; place in race development, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Wood-Haunter&rsquo;s Dream, The,&rsquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page276">276</a></span></p>
+<p>Wordsworth, William, definition of language, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page39">39</a></span>; his ideal
+John Bull, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page224">224</a></span></p>
+<p>Word-twisting, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page325">325</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page327">327</a></span></p>
+<p>Work, heresy of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;World,&rsquo; The, Rossetti&rsquo;s letter to, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page155">155</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;World&rsquo;s Classics,&rsquo; edition of
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; in, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page374">374</a></span></p>
+<p>&lsquo;Wuthering Heights,&rsquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page342">342</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page345">345</a></span></p>
+<p>Wynne, Winifred, character of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page314">314</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page315">315</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page363">363</a></span>; love of the wind, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page371">371</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Yarmouth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+<p>Yorickism, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Zoroaster, heresy of work, 68; definition of poetry, 398</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="gapshortline">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">Butler &amp; Tanner, The Selwood
+Printing Works, Frome, and London.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1"
+class="footnote">[1]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Studies in
+Prose.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2"
+class="footnote">[2]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Chambers&rsquo;s
+Encyclop&aelig;dia,&rsquo; vol. x., p. 581.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote34"></a><a href="#citation34"
+class="footnote">[34]</a>&nbsp; The meanings of the gypsy words
+are:</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>baval</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">wind</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>chaw</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">grass</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>chirikels</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">birds</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>dukkerin&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">fortune-telling</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>farmin&rsquo; ryes</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">farmers</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>gals</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">girls</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ghyllie</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">song</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ghyllie</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">song</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>gorgie</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Gentile woman</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>gorgies</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Gentiles</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>kairs</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">homes</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>kas</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">hay</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>kas-kairin&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">haymaking</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>kem</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">sun</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>lennor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">summer</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>puv</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">field</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Romany chies</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">gypsy girls</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Shoshus</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">hares </p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p><a name="footnote60"></a><a href="#citation60"
+class="footnote">[60]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Notes and Queries,&rsquo;
+August 2, 1902.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote73a"></a><a href="#citation73a"
+class="footnote">[73a]</a>&nbsp; Among the gypsies of all
+countries the happiest possible &lsquo;Dukkeripen&rsquo; (i.e.
+prophetic symbol of Natura Mystica) is a hand-shaped golden cloud
+floating in the sky.&nbsp; It is singular that the same idea is
+found among races entirely disconnected with them&mdash;the
+Finns, for instance, with whom Ukko, the &lsquo;sky god,&rsquo;
+or &lsquo;angel of the sunrise,&rsquo; was called the
+&lsquo;golden king&rsquo; and &lsquo;leader of the clouds,&rsquo;
+and his Golden Hand was more powerful than all the army of
+Death.&nbsp; The &lsquo;Golden Hand&rsquo; is sometimes called
+the Lover&rsquo;s Dukkeripen.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote73b"></a><a href="#citation73b"
+class="footnote">[73b]</a>&nbsp; Good-luck.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote74"></a><a href="#citation74"
+class="footnote">[74]</a>&nbsp; Child.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote76"></a><a href="#citation76"
+class="footnote">[76]</a>&nbsp; Pretty mouth.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote82"></a><a href="#citation82"
+class="footnote">[82]</a>&nbsp; A famous swimming dog belonging
+to the writer.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote88"></a><a href="#citation88"
+class="footnote">[88]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Notes and Queries,&rsquo;
+June 7, 1902.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote112"></a><a href="#citation112"
+class="footnote">[112]</a>&nbsp; Bosom.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote139"></a><a href="#citation139"
+class="footnote">[139]</a>&nbsp; I think I am not far wrong in
+saying that he whom Mr. Benson heard make this remark was a more
+illustrious poet than even D. G. Rossetti, the greatest poet
+indeed of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the author
+of &lsquo;Erechtheus&rsquo; and &lsquo;Atalanta in
+Calydon.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote147"></a><a href="#citation147"
+class="footnote">[147]</a>&nbsp; As Mr. Swinburne has pronounced
+Mr. Stone&rsquo;s translation to be in itself so fine as to be
+almost a work of genius, I will quote it here:&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align:
+center">&Theta;&epsilon;&iota;&omicron;&sigmaf;
+&#7936;&omicron;&iota;&delta;&#972;&sigmaf;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Felix, qui potuit gentem illustrare canendo,<br />
+quique decus patriae claris virtutibus addit<br />
+succurritque laboranti, tutamque periclis<br />
+eruit, hostilesque minas avertit acerbo<br />
+dente lacessitae; bene, quicquid fecerit audax,<br />
+explevisse iuvat: metam tenet ille quadrigis,<br />
+praemia victor habet, quamvis tuba vivida famae<br />
+ignoret titulos, vel si flammante sagitta<br />
+oppugnet Livor quam mens sibi muniit arcem.<br />
+quod si fata mihi virtutis gaudia tantae<br />
+invideant, nec fas Anglorum extendere fines<br />
+latius, et nitidae primordia libertatis,<br />
+Anglia cui praecepit iter, cantare poetae;<br />
+si numeris laudare meam vel marte Parentem<br />
+non mihi contingat, nec Divom adsumere vires<br />
+atque inconcessos sibi vindicet alter honores,<br />
+dignior ille mihi frater, quem iure saluto&mdash;<br />
+illum divino praestantem numine amabo.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="footnote157"></a><a href="#citation157"
+class="footnote">[157]</a>&nbsp; Philip Bourke Marston.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote286"></a><a href="#citation286"
+class="footnote">[286]</a>&nbsp; According to a Mohammedan
+tradition, the mountains of Kaf are entirely composed of gems,
+whose reflected splendours colour the sky.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote291"></a><a href="#citation291"
+class="footnote">[291]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Tennyson: A
+Memoir,&rsquo; by his son (1897), vol. ii. p. 479.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote339"></a><a href="#citation339"
+class="footnote">[339]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;Tanto &egrave; vero, che
+&lsquo;Aylwin&rsquo; fu cominciato a scrivere in versi, e mutato
+di forma soltanto quando l&rsquo;intreccio, in certo modo
+prendendo la mano al poeta, rese necessario un genere di sua
+natura meno astretto alla rappresentazione di scorcio; e che
+l&rsquo;Avvento d&rsquo;amore, ove le circostanze di fatto sono
+condensate in modo da dar pieno risalto al motivo filosofico,
+riesce una cosa, a mio credere, pi&ugrave; perfetta.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote383"></a><a href="#citation383"
+class="footnote">[383]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Notes and Queries,&rsquo;
+June 7, 1902.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote403a"></a><a href="#citation403a"
+class="footnote">[403a]</a>&nbsp; Mostly pronounced
+&lsquo;mullo,&rsquo; but sometimes in the East Midlands
+&lsquo;mollo.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote403b"></a><a href="#citation403b"
+class="footnote">[403b]</a>&nbsp; Mostly pronounced
+&lsquo;kaulo,&rsquo; but sometimes in the East Midlands
+&lsquo;kollo.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote404"></a><a href="#citation404"
+class="footnote">[404]</a>&nbsp; The gypsies are great observers
+of the cuckoo, and call certain spring winds &lsquo;cuckoo
+storms,&rsquo; because they bring over the cuckoo earlier than
+usual.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote427"></a><a href="#citation427"
+class="footnote">[427]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;England is a country that
+can never be conquered while the Sovereign thereof has the
+command of the sea.&rsquo;&mdash;<span
+class="smcap">Raleigh</span>.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
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+</pre></body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Theodore Watts-Dunton, by James Douglas
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Theodore Watts-Dunton
+       Poet, Novelist, Critic
+
+
+Author: James Douglas
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2013  [eBook #41792]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON***
+
+
+credit
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1904 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+  [Picture: Theodore Watts-Dunton, from a painting by Miss H. B. Norris]
+
+
+
+
+
+                          THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
+
+
+                           POET NOVELIST CRITIC
+
+                                    BY
+                              JAMES DOUGLAS
+
+              [Picture: Decorative graphic, Natura Benigna]
+
+                      WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+
+                           HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+
+                            27 PATERNOSTER ROW
+
+                                   1904
+
+
+
+
+SYNOPSIS
+
+                                                          PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                                 1
+                          CHAPTER I
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER                                    11
+                          CHAPTER II
+COWSLIP COUNTRY                                             26
+                         CHAPTER III
+THE CRITIC IN THE BUD                                       40
+                          CHAPTER IV
+CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM                                 50
+                          CHAPTER V
+EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES                               61
+                          CHAPTER VI
+SPORT AND WORK                                              65
+                         CHAPTER VII
+EAST ANGLIA                                                 72
+                         CHAPTER VIII
+LONDON                                                      87
+                          CHAPTER IX
+GEORGE BORROW                                               95
+                          CHAPTER X
+THE ACTED DRAMA                                            117
+                          CHAPTER XI
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI                                     138
+                         CHAPTER XII
+WILLIAM MORRIS                                             170
+                         CHAPTER XIII
+THE 'EXAMINER'                                             183
+                         CHAPTER XIV
+THE 'ATHENAEUM'                                            190
+                          CHAPTER XV
+THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER                                   228
+                         CHAPTER XVI
+A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR                                    242
+                         CHAPTER XVII
+'THE LIFE POETIC'                                          262
+                        CHAPTER XVIII
+AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS           295
+                         CHAPTER XIX
+WALES                                                      312
+                          CHAPTER XX
+IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE                             321
+                         CHAPTER XXI
+THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION                               345
+                         CHAPTER XXII
+A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES                                  363
+                        CHAPTER XXIII
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION                       372
+                         CHAPTER XXIV
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR                         382
+                         CHAPTER XXV
+GORGIOS AND ROMANIES                                       389
+                         CHAPTER XXVI
+'THE COMING OF LOVE'                                       393
+                        CHAPTER XXVIII
+"CHRISTMAS AT THE 'MERMAID'"                               422
+                        CHAPTER XXVIII
+CONCLUSION                                                 442
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+Theodore Watts-Dunton.  From a painting by Miss H.        Frontispiece
+B. Norris
+Reverie.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at 'The Pines'                    1
+The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.  (From a Water                    28
+Colour by Fraser at 'The Pines.')
+'The Thicket,' St. Ives.  (From a Water Colour by                   32
+Fraser at 'The Pines.')
+Slepe Hall: Cromwell's Supposed Residence at St.                    36
+Ives.  (From an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')
+'Evening Dreams with the Poets.'  (From an Oil                      68
+Painting at 'The Pines.')
+A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Painted and                    92
+Carved Cabinet
+A Letter Box on the Broads.  (From an Oil Painting                 114
+at 'The Pines.')
+Pandora.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at 'The Pines'                  140
+'The Green Dining Room,' 16 Cheyne Walk.  (From a                  161
+Painting by Dunn, at 'The Pines.')
+One of the Carved Mirrors at 'The Pines,'                          162
+decorated with Dunn's copy of the lost Rossetti
+Frescoes at the Oxford Union
+Kelmscott Manor.  (From a Water Colour by Miss May                 170
+Morris.)
+'The Pines.'  (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)                 262
+A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Lacquer                       266
+Cabinet
+Summer at 'The Pines'--I                                           268
+A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Chinese Divan                 270
+described in 'Aylwin'
+Summer at 'The Pines'--II                                          274
+'Picture for a Story.'  (Face and Instrument                       276
+designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)
+Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd                          312
+Moel Siabod and the River Lledr                                    314
+Snowdon and Glaslyn                                                318
+Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff.  (From                  342
+an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')
+Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh.  (From a Painting at                     364
+'The Pines.')
+'John the Pilgrim.'  (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)                    416
+
+NATURA BENIGNA
+
+
+   _What power is this_? _what witchery wins my feet_
+   _To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow_,
+   _All silent as the emerald gulfs below_,
+   _Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat_?
+   _What thrill of earth and heaven_--_most wild_, _most sweet_--
+   _What answering pulse that all the senses know_,
+   _Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow_
+   _Where_, _far away_, _the skies and mountains meet_?
+   _Mother_, '_tis I reborn_: _I know thee well_:
+   _That throb I know and all it prophesies_,
+   _O Mother and Queen_, _beneath the olden spell_
+   _Of silence_, _gazing from thy hills and skies_!
+   _Dumb Mother_, _struggling with the years to tell_
+   _The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes_.
+
+        [Picture: Reverie.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines]
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+    'It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide
+    circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full
+    acknowledged: that one thing was--to die.'--DOUGLAS JERROLD.
+
+ALTHOUGH in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living
+writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general
+reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it.
+
+Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong,
+Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source
+of his education.  He replied: "Cambridge, scholastically, and
+Watts-Dunton's articles in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and the
+'Athenaeum' from the purely literary point of view.  I have been a reader
+of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I
+should have been without them."  Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that
+he bought the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' simply to possess one
+article--Mr. Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry.  There are many other men
+of letters who would give similar testimony.  With regard to his critical
+work, Mr. Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on
+Poetry, describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as 'the first critic of our time,
+perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,' {1} a judgment
+which, according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's
+'Encyclopaedia,' Rossetti endorsed.  In this same article it is further
+said:--
+
+    "He came to exercise a most important influence on the art and
+    culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many
+    volumes--in the 'Examiner,' the 'Athenaeum' (since 1876), the
+    'Nineteenth Century,' the 'Fortnightly Review,' etc.--he has let year
+    after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always
+    dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous,
+    and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his.
+    But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he is only
+    ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and
+    other poems that, from the 'Athenaeum,' etc., have found their way
+    into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has
+    contributed to the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 'Chambers's
+    Encyclopaedia,' etc.  The chief note of his poetry--much of it
+    written in youth--is its individuality, the source of its inspiration
+    Nature and himself.  For he who of all men has most influenced his
+    brother poets has himself remained least influenced by them.  So,
+    too, his prose writings--literary mainly, but ranging also over
+    folk-lore, ethnology, and science generally--are marked as much by
+    their independence and originality as by their suggestiveness,
+    harmony, incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight.  They
+    have made him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not
+    Jeffrey, is a parallel." {2}
+
+These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, written before
+his theory of the 'Renascence of Wonder' was exemplified in 'Aylwin' and
+'The Coming of Love,' show, I think, that this book would have had a
+right to exist even if his critical writings had been collected into
+volumes; but as this collection has never been made, and I believe never
+will be made by the author, I feel that to do what I am now doing is to
+render the reading public a real service.  For many years he has been
+urged by his friends to collect his critical articles, but although
+several men of letters have offered to relieve him of that task, he has
+remained obdurate.
+
+Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was not an eager
+student of Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings.  Like most boys born with the
+itch for writing, I began to spill ink on paper in my third lustre.  The
+fermentation of the soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy,
+modelled upon 'Lycidas,' on the death of an indulgent aunt, also drove me
+to welter in drowsy critical journals.  By some humour of chance I
+stumbled upon the 'Athenaeum,' and there I found week by week writing
+that made me tingle with the rapture of discovery.  The personal magic of
+some unknown wizard led me into realms of gold and kingdoms of romance.
+I used to count the days till the 'Athenaeum' appeared in my Irish home,
+and I spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into
+ponderous tomes.  Well I remember the advent of the old, white-bearded
+Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes: even now I can smell the
+pungent odour of the damp paste and glue.  In those days I was a solitary
+bookworm, living far from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name
+of the magician who was carrying me into so 'many goodly states and
+kingdoms.'  With boyish audacity I wrote to the editor of the
+'Athenaeum,' begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naive
+appeal provoked a smile in Took's Court.  But although the editor was
+dumb, I exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials, 'J. D.,' under
+the solemn rubric, 'To Correspondents.'
+
+It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles with the
+unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the name of my hero,
+Theodore Watts.  Of course, the sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my
+execrable imitation of 'Australia's Mother' was printed in the 'Belfast
+News-Letter' I felt like Byron when he woke up and found himself famous.
+Afterwards, when I had plunged into the surf of literary London, I learnt
+that the writer who had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was
+well known in cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.
+
+There was, indeed, no account of him in print.  It was not till 1887 that
+I found a brief but masterly memoir in 'Celebrities of the Century.'  The
+article concluded with the statement that in the 'Athenaeum' and in the
+Ninth Edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' Mr. Watts-Dunton had
+'founded a school of criticism which discarded conventional authority,
+and sought to test all literary effects by the light of first principles
+merely.'  These words encouraged me, for they told me that as a boy I had
+not been wrong in thinking that I had discovered a master and a guide in
+literature.  Then came the memoir of Philip Bourke Marston by the
+American poetess, Louise Chandler Moulton, in which she described Mr.
+Watts-Dunton as 'a poet whose noble work won for him the intimate
+friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord Tennyson, and was the first
+link in that chain of more than brotherly love which binds him to
+Swinburne, his housemate at present and for many years past.'  I also
+came across Clarence Stedman's remarks upon the opening of 'The Coming of
+Love,' 'Mother Carey's Chicken,' first printed in the 'Athenaeum.'  He
+was enthusiastic about the poet's perception of 'Nature's grander
+aspects,' and spoke of his poetry as being 'quite independent of any bias
+derived from the eminent poets with whom his life has been closely
+associated.'
+
+When afterwards I made his acquaintance, our intercourse led to the
+formation of a friendship which has deepened my gratitude for the
+spiritual and intellectual guidance I have found in his writings for
+nearly twenty years.  Owing to the popularity of 'The Coming of Love' and
+of 'Aylwin'--which the late Lord Acton, in 'The Annals of Politics and
+Culture,' placed at the head of the three most important books published
+in 1898--Mr. Watts-Dunton's name is now familiar to every fairly educated
+person.  About few men living is there so much literary curiosity; and
+this again is a reason for writing a book about him.
+
+The idea of making an elaborate study of his work, however, did not come
+to me until I received an invitation from Dr. Patrick, the editor of
+Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' to write for that
+publication an article on Mr. Watts-Dunton--an article which had been
+allotted to Professor Strong, but which he had been obliged through
+indisposition to abandon at the last moment.  I undertook to do this.
+But within the limited space at my command I was able only very briefly
+to discuss his work as a poet.  Soon afterwards I was invited by my
+friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, to write a monograph upon Mr. Watts-Dunton
+for Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, and, if I should see my way to do so, to
+sound him on the subject.  My only difficulty was in approaching Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, for I knew how constantly he had been urged by the press to
+collect his essays, and how persistently he had declined to do so.
+Nevertheless, I wrote to him, telling him how gladly I should undertake
+the task, and how sure I was that the book was called for.  His answer
+was so characteristic that I must give it here:--
+
+    "MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,--It must now be something like fifteen years
+    since Mr. John Lane, who was then compiling a bibliography of George
+    Meredith, asked me to consent to his compiling a bibliography of my
+    articles in the 'Athenaeum' and elsewhere, and although I
+    emphatically declined to sanction such a bibliography, he on several
+    occasions did me the honour to renew his request.  I told him, as I
+    have told one or two other generous friends, that although I had put
+    into these articles the best criticism and the best thought at my
+    command, I considered them too formless to have other than an
+    ephemeral life.  I must especially mention the name of Mr. Alfred
+    Nutt, who for years has been urging me to let him publish a selection
+    from my critical essays.  I am really proud to record this, because
+    Mr. Nutt is not only an eminent publisher but an admirable scholar
+    and a man of astonishing accomplishments.  I had for years, let me
+    confess, cherished the idea that some day I might be able to take my
+    various expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon
+    poetry, and mould them into a coherent and, perhaps, into a
+    harmonious whole.  This alone would have satisfied me.  But year by
+    year the body of critical writing from my pen has grown, and I felt
+    and feel more and more unequal to the task of grappling with such a
+    mass.  To the last writer of eminence who gratified me by suggesting
+    a collection of these essays--Dr. Robertson Nicoll--I wrote, and
+    wrote it with entire candour, that in my opinion the view generally
+    taken of the value of them is too generous.  Still, they are the
+    result of a good deal of reflection and not a little research,
+    especially those in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and I am not so
+    entirely without literary aspiration as not to regret that, years
+    ago, when the mass of material was more manageable, I neglected to
+    collect them and edit them myself.  But the impulse to do this is now
+    gone.  Owing to the quite unexpected popularity of 'The Coming of
+    Love' and of 'Aylwin,' my mind has been diverted from criticism, and
+    plunged into those much more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction
+    in which I used to revel long before.  If you really think that a
+    selection of passages from the articles, and a critical examination
+    and estimate of the imaginative work would be of interest to any
+    considerable body of readers, I do not know why I should withhold my
+    consent.  But I confess, judging from such work of your own as I have
+    seen, I find it difficult to believe that it is worth your while to
+    enter upon any such task.
+
+    I agree with you that it is difficult to see how you are to present
+    and expound the principles of criticism advanced in the
+    'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' the 'Athenaeum,' etc., without discussing
+    those two imaginative works the writing of which inspired the canons
+    and generalizations in the critical work--'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of
+    Love.'  As regards 'Aylwin,' however, I cannot help wincing under the
+    thought that in these days when so much genius is at work in prose
+    fiction, your discussion will seem to give quite an undue prominence
+    to a writer who has published but one novel.  This I confess does
+    disturb me somewhat, and I wish you to bear well in mind this aspect
+    of the matter before you seriously undertake the book.  As to the
+    prose fiction of the present moment, I constantly stand amazed at its
+    wealth.  If, however, you do touch upon 'Aylwin,' I hope you will
+    modify those generous--too generous--expressions of yours which, I
+    remember, you printed in a review of the book when it first
+    appeared."
+
+After getting this sanction I set to work, and soon found that my chief
+obstacle was the superabundance of material, which would fill several
+folio volumes.  But although it is undoubtedly 'a mighty maze,' it is
+'not without a plan.'  In a certain sense the vast number of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's generalizations upon literature, art, philosophy, and what
+Emerson calls 'the conduct of life,' revolve round certain fixed
+principles which have guided me in the selection I have made.  I also
+found that to understand these principles of romantic art, it was
+necessary to make a thorough critical study of the romance, 'Aylwin,' and
+of the book of poems, 'The Coming of Love.'  I think I have made that
+study, and that I have connected the critical system with the imaginative
+work more thoroughly than has been done by any other writer, although the
+work of Mr. Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been acutely
+discussed, not only in England but also in France and in Italy.
+
+The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as that of his
+poetry and fiction.  He poured into his criticism the intellectual and
+imaginative force which other men pour into purely artistic channels, for
+he made criticism a vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his
+irony.  His criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime.  Their vitality
+is not impaired by the impermanence of their texts.  No critic has
+surpassed his universality of range.  Out of a full intellectual and
+imaginative life he has evolved speculations which cut deep not only into
+the fibre of modern thought but into the future of human development.
+Great teachers have their day and their disciples.  Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+day and disciples belong to the young future whose dawn some of us
+already descry.  For, as Mr. Justin McCarthy wrote of 'Aylwin,' 'it is
+inspired by the very spirit of youth,' and this is why so many of the
+younger writers are beginning to accept him as their guide.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life which, I
+think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the pessimists across
+the history of the soul of man.  That is the aspect of his work which
+calls for the comprehension of the new generation.  The old cosmogonies
+are dead; here is the new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse
+of wonder reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion
+of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna which no
+assaults of science can shake.
+
+But, although the main object of this book is to focus, as it were, the
+many scattered utterances of Mr. Watts-Dunton in prose and poetry upon
+the great subject of the Renascence of Wonder, I have interspersed here
+and there essays which do not touch upon this theme, and also excerpts
+from those obituary notices of his friends which formed so fascinating a
+part of his contributions to the 'Athenaeum.'  For, of course, it was
+necessary to give the charm of variety to the book.  Rossetti used to
+say, I believe, that there is one quality necessary in a poem which very
+many poets are apt to ignore--the quality of being amusing.  I have
+always thought that there is great truth in this, and I have also thought
+that the remark is applicable to prose no less than to poetry.  This is
+why I have occasionally enlivened these pages with extracts from his
+picturesque monographs; indeed, I have done more than this.  Not having
+known Mr. Watts-Dunton's great contemporaries myself, I have looked about
+me for the aid of certain others who did know them.  I have not hesitated
+to collect from various sources such facts and details connected with Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his friends as are necessarily beyond the scope of my
+own experience and knowledge.  Among these I must prominently mention one
+to whom I have been specially indebted for reminiscences of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and his circle.  This is Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, eldest son
+of the 'parable poet,' a gentleman of much too modest and retiring a
+disposition, who, from Mr. Watts-Dunton's first appearance in London
+right onwards, was brought into intimate relations with himself, his
+relatives, Rossetti, William Morris, Westland Marston, Philip Bourke
+Marston, Madox Brown, George Borrow, Stevenson, Minto, and many others.
+I have not only made free use of his articles, but I have had the
+greatest aid from him in many other respects, and it is my bare duty to
+express my gratitude to him for his services.  I have also to thank the
+editor of the 'Athenaeum' for cordially granting me permission to quote
+so freely from its columns; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging
+my debt to the many other publications from which I have drawn materials
+for this book.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER
+
+
+    "'The renascence of wonder,' to employ Mr. Watts-Dunton's appellation
+    for what he justly considers the most striking and significant
+    feature in the great romantic revival which has transformed
+    literature, is proclaimed by this very appellation not to be the
+    achievement of any one innovator, but a general reawakening of
+    mankind to a perception that there were more things in heaven and
+    earth than were dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy."--DR. R. GARNETT:
+    Monograph on Coleridge.
+
+UNDOUBTEDLY the greatest philosophical generalization of our time is
+expressed in the four words, 'The Renascence of Wonder.'  They suggest
+that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that set in
+after the publication of Darwin's great book.  This phrase, which I first
+became familiar with in his 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' article on
+Rossetti, seems really to have been used first in 'Aylwin.'  The story
+seems originally to have been called 'The Renascence of Wonder,' but the
+title was abandoned because the writer believed that an un-suggestive
+name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the practical
+point of view.  For the knowledge of this I am indebted to Mr. Hake, who
+says:--
+
+    "During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in Great James Street,
+    several of his friends had chambers in the same street, and among
+    them were my late father, Dr. Gordon Hake--Rossetti's friend and
+    physician--Mr. Watts-Dunton and myself.  Mr. Watts-Dunton, as is well
+    known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as a
+    writer.  I have heard him tell scores of stories full of plot and
+    character that have never appeared in print.  On a certain occasion
+    he was suffering from one of his periodical eye troubles that had
+    used occasionally to embarrass him.  He had just been telling Mr.
+    Swinburne the plot of a suggested story, the motive of which was the
+    'renascence of wonder in art and poetry' depicting certain well-known
+    characters.
+
+    I offered to act as his amanuensis in writing the story, and did so,
+    with the occasional aid of my father and brothers.  The story was
+    sent to the late F. W. Robinson, the novelist, then at the zenith of
+    his vogue, who declared that he 'saw a fortune in it,' and it was he
+    who advised the author to send it to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett.  As
+    far as I remember, the time occupied by the work was between five and
+    six months.  When a large portion of it was in type it was read by
+    many friends,--among others by the late Madox Brown, who thought some
+    of the portraits too close, as the characters were then all living,
+    except one, the character who figures as Cyril.  Although
+    unpublished, it was so well known that an article upon it appeared in
+    the 'Liverpool Mercury.'  This was more than twenty years ago."
+
+The important matter before us, however, is not when he first used this
+phrase, which has now become a sort of literary shorthand to express a
+wide and sweeping idea, but what it actually imports.  Fortunately Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has quite lately given us a luminous exposition of what the
+words do precisely mean.  Last year he wrote for that invaluable work,
+Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' the Introduction to
+volume iii., and no one can any longer say that there is any ambiguity in
+this now famous phrase:--
+
+    "As the storm-wind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty
+    billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the
+    effect of the French Revolution.  It was nothing less than a great
+    revived movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic
+    acceptance in all things, including literature and art.  To this
+    revival the present writer, in the introduction to an imaginative
+    work dealing with this movement, has already, for convenience' sake,
+    and in default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of
+    Wonder.  As was said on that occasion, 'The phrase, the Renascence of
+    Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing
+    man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious
+    life: the impulse of acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and
+    for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are--and the
+    impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.'
+    It would seem that something works as inevitably and as logically as
+    a physical law in the yearning which societies in a certain stage of
+    development show to get away, as far away as possible, from the
+    condition of the natural man; to get away from that despised
+    condition not only in material affairs, such as dress, domestic
+    arrangements and economies, but also in the fine arts and in
+    intellectual methods, till, having passed that inevitable stage, each
+    society is liable to suffer (even if it does not in some cases
+    actually suffer) a reaction, when nature and art are likely again to
+    take the place of convention and artifice.  Anthropologists have
+    often asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark
+    womb of some remote semi-human brain, which, by first stirring,
+    lifting, and vitalizing other potential and latent faculties, gave
+    birth to man?  Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a
+    vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder?  But certainly it is not
+    rash, as regards the races of man, to affirm that the more
+    intelligent the race the less it is governed by the instinct of
+    acceptance, and the more it is governed by the instinct of wonder,
+    that instinct which leads to the movement of challenge.  The
+    alternate action of the two great warring instincts is specially seen
+    just now in the Japanese.  Here the instinct of challenge which
+    results in progress became active up to a certain point, and then
+    suddenly became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have
+    full play, and then everything became crystallized.  Ages upon ages
+    of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were required
+    before the Mongolian savage was developed into the Japanese of the
+    period before the nature-worship of 'Shinto' had been assaulted by
+    dogmatic Buddhism.  But by that time the instinct of challenge had
+    resulted in such a high state of civilization that acceptance set in
+    and there was an end, for the time being, of progress.  There is no
+    room here to say even a few words upon other great revivals in past
+    times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian renascence of the
+    ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in philosophical
+    speculation, which had previously been arrested, was revived; when
+    the old sciences were revived; and when some modern sciences were
+    born.  There are, of course, different kinds of wonder."
+
+This passage has a peculiar interest for me, because I instinctively
+compare it with the author's speech delivered at the St. Ives old Union
+Book Club dinner when he was a boy.  It shows the same wide vision, the
+same sweep, and the same rush of eloquence.  It is in view of this great
+generalization that I have determined to quote that speech later.
+
+The essay then goes on in a swift way to point out the different kinds of
+wonder:--
+
+    "Primitive poetry is full of wonder--the naive and eager wonder of
+    the healthy child.  It is this kind of wonder which makes the 'Iliad'
+    and the 'Odyssey' so delightful.  The wonder of primitive poetry
+    passes as the primitive conditions of civilization pass; and then for
+    the most part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of
+    wonder--the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery of man's
+    life and the mystery of nature's theatre on which the human drama is
+    played--the wonder, in short, of AEschylus and Sophocles.  And among
+    the Romans, Virgil, though living under the same kind of Augustan
+    acceptance in which Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, is
+    full of this latter kind of wonder.  Among the English poets who
+    preceded the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed
+    there is no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he
+    can only be slightly touched upon.  He stands at the head of those
+    who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the
+    wonder of the 'world at hand.'  Of the poets whose wonder is of the
+    simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of
+    the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king.  But
+    it is not the wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in
+    the following sentences.  It is the spiritual wonder which in our
+    literature came afterwards.  It is that kind of wonder which filled
+    the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Webster, of
+    Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the old ballads: it is that poetical
+    attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen
+    powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which
+    man finds himself entangled, dominate it.  That this high temper
+    should have passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance
+    is quite inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction
+    of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract
+    from the Introduction to 'Aylwin.'  Perhaps the difference between
+    the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian
+    on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better
+    understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective
+    periods."
+
+Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and relative
+humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type of absolute
+humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in 'Aylwin.'
+
+I will now quote a passage from an article in the 'Quarterly Review' on
+William Morris by one of Morris's intimate friends:--
+
+    "The decorative renascence in England is but an expression of the
+    spirit of the pre-Raphaelite movement--a movement which has been
+    defined by the most eminent of living critics as the renascence of
+    the 'spirit of wonder' in poetry and art.  So defined, it falls into
+    proper relationship with the continuous development of English
+    literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last century and
+    a half, and is no longer to be considered an isolated phenomenon
+    called into being by an erratic genius.  The English Romantic school,
+    from its first inception with Chatterton, Macpherson, and the
+    publication of the Percy ballads, does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+    finely pointed out, aim merely at the revival of natural language; it
+    seeks rather to reach through art and the forgotten world of old
+    romance, that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of
+    which poets gain glimpses through
+
+             magic casements, opening on the foam
+    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
+
+In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:--
+
+    "It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that
+    mysterious side of nature and man's life which to other painters of
+    his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the
+    wings of sport.  It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity
+    as Dante's Dream, La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they
+    Met Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that
+    Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern
+    art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical
+    imitation of the facts of nature.
+
+    For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in
+    modern Europe, if it is not a mere passing mood, if it is really the
+    inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of
+    civilization (when the sanctions which have made and moulded society
+    are found to be not absolute and eternal, but relative, mundane,
+    ephemeral, and subject to the higher sanctions of unseen powers that
+    work behind 'the shows of things'), then perhaps one of the first
+    questions to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the
+    nineteenth century is, In what relation does he stand to the
+    newly-awakened spirit of romance?  Had he a genuine and independent
+    sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over Europe
+    had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation, prosaic
+    acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic materialism?  Or was his
+    apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence and awe the
+    result of artistic environment dictated to him by other and more
+    powerful and original souls around him?  I do not say that the mere
+    fact of a painter's or poet's showing but an imperfect sympathy with
+    the Renascence of Wonder is sufficient to place him below a poet in
+    whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, because we should then be
+    driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti above our great
+    realistic painters, and we should be driven to place a poet like the
+    author of 'The Excursion' and 'The Prelude' beneath a poet like the
+    author of 'The Queen's Wake'; but we do say that, other things being
+    equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be
+    judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement which we
+    call the Renascence of Wonder--call it so because the word
+    romanticism never did express it even before it had been vulgarized
+    by French poets, dramatists, doctrinaires, and literary harlequins.
+
+    To struggle against the prim traditions of the eighteenth century,
+    the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types instead of
+    character, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Balzac, and Hugo
+    struggled, was well.  But in studying Rossetti's works we reach the
+    very key of those 'high palaces of romance' which the English mind
+    had never, even in the eighteenth century, wholly forgotten, but
+    whose mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked.  Not all the
+    romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with
+    their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood
+    of romance) could equal the romantic spirit expressed in a single
+    picture or drawing of Rossetti's, such, for instance, as Beata
+    Beatrix or Pandora.
+
+    For while the French romanticists--inspired by the theories (drawn
+    from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck, and Herder--cleverly
+    simulated the old romantic feeling, the 'beautifully devotional
+    feeling' which Holman Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it: he
+    was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded
+    the great renascence of materialism that he might have lived and
+    worked amidst the old masters.  Hence, in point of design, so
+    original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in Lilith,
+    Hesterna Rosa, Michael Scott's Wooing, the Sea Spell, etc., we have
+    to turn to the sister art of poetry, where only we can find an
+    equally powerful artistic representation of the idea at the core of
+    the old romanticism--the idea of the evil forces of nature assailing
+    man through his sense of beauty.  We must turn, we say, not to
+    art--not even to the old masters themselves--but to the most perfect
+    efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery--to such ballads as
+    'The Demon Lover,' to Coleridge's 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan,' to
+    Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' for parallels to Rossetti's most
+    characteristic designs."
+
+These words about Coleridge recall to the students of Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+work a splendid illustration of the true wonder of the great poetic
+temper which he gives in the before-mentioned essay on The Renascence of
+Wonder in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature':--
+
+    "Coleridge's 'Christabel,' 'The Ancient Mariner,' and 'Kubla Khan'
+    are, as regards the romantic spirit, above--and far above--any work
+    of any other English poet.  Instances innumerable might be adduced
+    showing how his very nature was steeped in the fountain from which
+    the old balladists themselves drew, but in this brief and rapid
+    survey there is room to give only one.  In the 'Conclusion' of the
+    first part of 'Christabel' he recapitulates and summarizes, in lines
+    that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in succinctness of
+    statement, the entire story of the bewitched maiden and her terrible
+    foe which had gone before:--
+
+    A star hath set, a star hath risen,
+    O Geraldine! since arms of thine
+    Have been the lovely lady's prison.
+    O Geraldine! one hour was thine--
+    Thou'st had thy will!  By tairn and rill,
+    The night-birds all that hour were still.
+    But now they are jubilant anew,
+    From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!
+    Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!
+
+    Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the human
+    drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul of poetic
+    wonder.  So great is the maleficent power of the beautiful witch that
+    a spell is thrown over all Nature.  For an hour the very woods and
+    fells remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic consciousness of
+    her--
+
+    The night-birds all that hour were still.
+
+    When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare,
+    and 'the night-birds' are jubilant anew.  This is the very highest
+    reach of poetic wonder--finer, if that be possible, than the
+    night-storm during the murder of Duncan."
+
+And now let us turn again to the essay upon Rossetti from which I have
+already quoted:--
+
+    "Although the idea at the heart of the highest romantic poetry
+    (allied perhaps to that apprehension of the warring of man's soul
+    with the appetites of the flesh which is the basis of the Christian
+    idea), may not belong exclusively to what we call the romantic temper
+    (the Greeks, and also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less
+    familiar with it, as we see in the 'Salaman' and 'Absal' of Jami),
+    yet it became a peculiarly romantic note, as is seen from the fact
+    that in the old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its
+    logical expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all
+    romantic art.  But, in order to express this stupendous idea as fully
+    as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to adopt the
+    asceticism of the old masters?  This is the question that Rossetti
+    asked himself, and answered by his own progress in art."
+
+In the same article, Mr. Watts-Dunton discusses the crowning specimen of
+Rossetti's romanticism before it had, as it were, gone to seed and passed
+into pure mysticism, the grand design, 'Pandora,' of which he possesses
+by far the noblest version:--
+
+    "In it is seen at its highest Rossetti's unique faculty of treating
+    classical legend in the true romantic spirit.  The grand and sombre
+    beauty of Pandora's face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep
+    blue-grey eyes as she tries in vain to re-close the fatal box from
+    which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves
+    as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with
+    agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest
+    romantic mood."
+
+It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction of this
+masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too grateful.  The
+influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton's teachings is seen in the fact that the
+idea of the Renascence of Wonder has become expanded by theological
+writers and divines in order to include within its scope subjects
+connected with religion.  Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened
+its ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander White's
+'Appreciation' of Bishop Butler.  He quotes one of the Logia discovered
+by the explorers of the Egypt Fund:--'Let not him that seeketh cease from
+his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he
+shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have
+rest.'  He then points out that Bishop Butler was 'one of the first to
+share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of religion.'
+
+And now I must quote a passage alluding to the generalization upon
+absolute and relative humour which I shall give later when discussing the
+humour of Mrs. Gudgeon.  I shall not be able in these remarks to dwell
+upon Mr. Watts-Dunton as a humourist, but the extracts will speak for
+themselves.  Writing of the great social Pyramid of the Augustan age, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton says:--
+
+    "This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the symmetry which Blackstone
+    so much admired in the English constitution and its laws; and when,
+    afterwards, the American colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid
+    of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model.  At the base--patient
+    as the tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony--was the
+    people, born to be the base and born for nothing else.  Resting on
+    this foundation were the middle classes in their various strata, each
+    stratum sharply marked off from the others.  Then above these was the
+    strictly genteel class, the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in
+    dress if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of
+    right.  Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the
+    monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the sacred
+    structure save that a little--a very little--above him sat God, the
+    suzerain to whom the prayers even of the monarch himself were
+    addressed.  The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done a daring
+    thing, and an original thing, by striking off the apex of this
+    pyramid, and it might reasonably have been expected that the building
+    itself would collapse and crumble away.  But it did nothing of the
+    kind.  It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off--a structure to
+    serve afterwards as a model of the American and French pyramids, both
+    of which, though aspiring to be original structures, are really built
+    on exactly the same scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour as that
+    upon which the pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built.
+    Then came the Restoration: the apex was restored: the structure was
+    again complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever, stronger than
+    ever.
+
+    With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic
+    movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural
+    side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be
+    described realistically.  Yet we must not suppose that in the
+    eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations,
+    without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty
+    of gazing honestly in her face.  She does not work in that way.  In
+    the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a
+    great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk.  In the
+    period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will
+    give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the
+    greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen.  In the time of
+    Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a
+    diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable
+    insight and intellectual breadth that his generalizations cover not
+    only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual
+    limbs of so complex an epoch as the twentieth century."
+
+Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour is in prose
+fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got into romantic poetry,
+as he himself understood romantic poetry; for he did not class ballads
+like Kinmont Willie, where there are such superb touches of humour, among
+the romantic ballads.  And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked,
+his poems, like Morris's, are entirely devoid of humour, although both
+the poets were humourists.  But the readers of Rhona's Letters in 'The
+Coming of Love' will admit that a delicious humour can be imported into
+the highest romantic poetry.
+
+With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of
+English Literature,' I must conclude my remarks upon the keynote of all
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, whether imaginative or critical:--
+
+    "The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have
+    ended with Milton.  For Milton, although born only twenty-three years
+    before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs
+    properly to the period of romantic poetry.  He has no relation
+    whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and
+    which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain
+    contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by
+    Ben Jonson.  From the moment when Augustanism really began--in the
+    latter decades of the seventeenth century--the periwig poetry of
+    Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true
+    poets.  All the periwig poets became too 'polite' to be natural.  As
+    acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the
+    most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom
+    everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of
+    Cathay."
+
+One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the most
+powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in Rossetti's
+poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in 'Aylwin,' but in 'The Coming
+of Love.'  But in order fully to understand Mr. Watts-Dunton's work it is
+necessary to know something of his life-history, and thanks to the aid I
+have received from certain of his friends, and also to a little
+topographical work, the 'History of St. Ives,' by Mr. Herbert E. Norris,
+F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long before he
+was known in London.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+COWSLIP COUNTRY
+
+
+SOME time ago I was dipping into the 'official pictorial guides' of those
+three great trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the
+Great Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St.
+Ives--not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town in
+Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell spent those
+five years of meditation upon which his after life was nourished.  In the
+Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon these words: 'At Slepe Hall dwelt
+the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little
+Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace of Mr.
+Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the English sonnet and
+judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of poetry and art are familiar
+to lovers of our national literature.'  'Well,' I thought, when I found
+similar remarks in the other two guides, 'here at least is one case in
+which a prophet has honour in his own country.'  This set me musing over
+a subject which had often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the
+whimsical workings of the Spirit of Place.  To a poet, what are the
+advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a microcosm
+like St. Ives?  If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet were as great
+as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne, or as that of his dead
+friend, Rossetti, I should not have been surprised to find the place of
+his birth thus associated with his name.  But whether or not Rossetti was
+right in saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton 'had sought obscurity as other
+poets seek fame,' it is certain that until quite lately he neglected to
+claim his proper place among his peers.  Doubtless, as the 'Journal des
+Debats' has pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in
+subject and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique
+quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo through
+the world, there is one respect in which they were less lucky than their
+friend.  They were born in the macrocosm of London, where the Spirit of
+Place has so much to attend to that his memory can find but a small
+corner even for the author of 'The Blessed Damozel,' or for the author of
+'Atalanta in Calydon.'
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law
+repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country--Buttercup Land, as
+the Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good
+luck.  Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with
+Rhona Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess of
+the D'Urbervilles.  For the poet born in a microcosm becomes identified
+with it in the public eye, whereas the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom
+associated with his birthplace.
+
+To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater advantage
+in being born in a microcosm.  He sees the drama of life from a point of
+view entirely different from that of the novelist born in the macrocosm.
+The human microbe, or, as Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human
+cheese-mite in the macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other
+cheese-mite on the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe
+or every other cheese-mite in the round.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's work is saturated with memories of the Ouse.  Cowper
+had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who first
+flung the rainbow of romance over the river and over the sweet meadows of
+Cowslip Land, through which it flows.  In these lines he has described a
+sunset on the Ouse:--
+
+    More mellow falls the light and still more mellow
+    Around the boat, as we two glide along
+    'Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,
+    The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.
+    She knows the nightingales of 'Portobello';
+    Love makes her know each bird!  In all that throng
+    No voice seems like another: soul is song,
+    And never nightingale was like its fellow;
+    For, whether born in breast of Love's own bird,
+    Singing its passion in those islet bowers
+    Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers
+    The rosy river's glowing arms engird,
+    Or born in human souls--twin souls like ours--
+    Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.
+
+   [Picture: The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts.  (From a Water Colour by
+                         Fraser at 'The Pines.')]
+
+Now, will it be believed that this lovely river--so famous too among
+English anglers for its roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, and gudgeon--has
+been libelled?  Yes, it has been libelled, and libelled by no less a
+person than Thomas Carlyle.  Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath
+the reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:--
+
+    "There is, as far as I know, nothing like the Ouse elsewhere in
+    England.  I do not mean that our river surpasses or even equals in
+    picturesqueness such rivers as the Wye, the Severn, the Thames, but
+    that its beauty is unique.  There is not to be seen anywhere else so
+    wide and stately a stream moving so slowly and yet so clearly.
+    Consequently there is no other river which reflects with such beauty
+    the scenery of the clouds floating overhead.  This, I think, is owing
+    to the stream moving over a bottom which is both flat and gravelly.
+    When Carlyle spoke of the Ouse dragging in a half-stagnant way under
+    a coating of floating oils, he showed 'how vivid were his perceptive
+    faculties and also how untrustworthy.'  I have made a good deal of
+    enquiry into the matter of Carlyle's visit to St. Ives, and have
+    learnt that, having spent some time exploring Ely Cathedral in search
+    of mementoes of Cromwell, he rode on to St. Ives, and spent about an
+    hour there before proceeding on his journey.  Among the objects at
+    which he gave a hasty glance was the river, covered from the bridge
+    to the Holmes by one of those enormous fleets of barges which were
+    frequently to be seen at that time, and it was from the newly tarred
+    keels of this fleet of barges that came the oily exudation which
+    Carlyle, in his ignorance of the physical sciences and his contempt
+    for them, believed to arise from a greasy river-bottom.  And to this
+    mistake the world is indebted for this description of the Ouse, which
+    has been slavishly followed by all subsequent writers on Cromwell.
+    This is what makes strangers, walking along the tow-path of
+    Hemingford meadow, express so much surprise when, instead of seeing
+    the oily scum they expected, they see a broad mirror as clear as
+    glass, whose iridescence is caused by the reflection of the clouds
+    overhead and by the gold and white water lilies on the surface of the
+    stream."
+
+If the beauty of the Ouse inspired Mr. Norris to praise it so eloquently
+in prose, we need not wonder at the pictorial fascination of what
+Rossetti styled in a letter to a friend 'Watts's magnificent star
+sonnet':--
+
+    The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears,
+    And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
+    The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
+    Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
+    We rowed--we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
+    An angel's, yet with woman's dearer wiles;
+    But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
+    And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
+
+    What shaped those shadows like another boat
+    Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
+    There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
+    While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
+    We wept--we kissed--while starry fingers wrote,
+    And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
+
+According to Mr. Sharp, Rossetti pronounced this sonnet to be the finest
+of all the versions of the Doppelganger idea, and for many years he
+seriously purposed to render it in art.  It is easy to understand why
+Rossetti never carried out his intention, for the pictorial magic of the
+sonnet is so powerful that even the greatest of all romantic painters
+could hardly have rendered it on canvas.  Poetry can suggest to the
+imagination deeper mysteries than the subtlest romantic painting.
+
+No sonnet has been more frequently localized--erroneously localized than
+this.  It is often supposed to depict the Thames above Kew, but Mr.
+Norris says that 'every one familiar with Hemingford Meadow will see that
+it describes the Ouse backwater near Porto Bello, where the author as a
+young man was constantly seen on summer evenings listening from a canoe
+to the blackcaps and nightingales of the Thicket.'
+
+That excellent critic, Mr. Earl Hodgson, the editor of Dr. Gordon Hake's
+'New Day,' seems to think that the 'lily-isles' are on the Thames at
+Kelmscott, while other writers have frequently localized these
+'lily-isles' on the Avon at Stratford.  But, no doubt, Mr. Norris is
+right in placing them on the Ouse.
+
+This, however, gives me a good opportunity of saying a few words about
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's love of the Avon.  The sacred old town of
+Stratford-on-Avon has always been a favourite haunt of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's.  No poet of our time has shown a greater love of our
+English rivers, but he seems to love the Avon even more passionately than
+the Ouse.  He cannot describe the soft sands of Petit Bot Bay in Guernsey
+without bringing in an allusion to 'Avon's sacred silt.'  It was at
+Stratford-on-Avon that he wrote several of his poems, notably the two
+sonnets which appeared first in the 'Athenaeum,' and afterwards in the
+little volume, 'Jubilee Greetings at Spithead to the Men of Greater
+Britain.'  They are entitled 'The Breath of Avon: To English-speaking
+Pilgrims on Shakspeare's Birthday':--
+
+    Whate'er of woe the Dark may hide in womb
+    For England, mother of kings of battle and song--
+    Rapine, or racial hate's mysterious wrong,
+    Blizzard of Chance, or fiery dart of Doom--
+    Let breath of Avon, rich of meadow-bloom,
+    Bind her to that great daughter sever'd long--
+    To near and far-off children young and strong--
+    With fetters woven of Avon's flower perfume.
+    Welcome, ye English-speaking pilgrims, ye
+    Whose hands around the world are join'd by him,
+    Who make his speech the language of the sea,
+    Till winds of Ocean waft from rim to rim
+    The Breath of Avon: let this great day be
+    A Feast of Race no power shall ever dim.
+
+    From where the steeds of Earth's twin oceans toss
+    Their manes along Columbia's chariot-way;
+    From where Australia's long blue billows play;
+    From where the morn, quenching the Southern Cross,
+    Startling the frigate-bird and albatross
+    Asleep in air, breaks over Table Bay--
+    Come hither, pilgrims, where these rushes sway
+    'Tween grassy banks of Avon soft as moss!
+    For, if ye found the breath of Ocean sweet,
+    Sweeter is Avon's earthy, flowery smell,
+    Distill'd from roots that feel the coming spell
+    Of May, who bids all flowers that lov'd him meet
+    In meadows that, remembering Shakspeare's feet,
+    Hold still a dream of music where they fell.
+
+It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr. Watts-Dunton
+wrote the cantata, 'Christmas at the Mermaid,' a poem in which breathes
+the very atmosphere of Shakespeare's town.  There are no poetical
+descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the
+descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.
+
+  [Picture: 'The Thicket,' St. Ives.  (From a Water Colour by Fraser at
+                              'The Pines.')]
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes called, 'The
+Green Country,' is Hemingford Meadow, adjoining St. Ives.  It is a level
+tract of land on the banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of
+alluvium from the overflowings of the river.  In summer it is clothed
+with gay flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as
+a skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is a
+famous skating centre.  On the opposite side of the meadow is The
+Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely picture.  This, no doubt, is
+the scene described in one of Mr. Watts-Dunton's birthday addresses to
+Tennyson:--
+
+    Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.
+    There through the branches of the glittering trees
+    The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze
+    Sends forth methinks a thrill--a conscious thrill
+    That tells yon meadows by the steaming rill--
+    Where, o'er the clover waiting for the bees,
+    The mist shines round the cattle to their knees--
+    'Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!'
+
+The meadow leads to what the 'oldest rustic inhabitant' calls the 'First
+Hemingford,' or 'Hemingford Grey.'  The imagination of this same 'oldest
+inhabitant' used to go even beyond the First Hemingford to the Second
+Hemingford, and then of course came Ultima Thule!  The meadow has quite a
+wide fame among those students of nature who love English grasses in
+their endless varieties.  Owing to the richness of the soil, the
+luxuriant growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in
+England.  For years the two Hemingfords have been the favourite haunt of
+a group of landscape painters the chief of whom are the brothers Fraser,
+two of whose water-colours are reproduced in this book.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more advantage
+than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through Huntingdonshire into
+East Anglia.  It was not, however, near St. Ives, but in another somewhat
+distant part of Cowslip Country that the gypsies depicted in 'The Coming
+of Love' took an active part in haymaking.  But alas! in these times of
+mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer hope to see
+such a picture as that painted in the now famous gypsy haymaking song
+which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth of Rhona Boswell.  Moreover,
+the prosperous gryengroes depicted by Borrow and by the author of 'The
+Coming of Love' have now entirely vanished from the scene.  The present
+generation knows them not.  But it is impossible for the student of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's poetry to ramble along any part of Cowslip Country, with
+the fragrance of newly-made hay in his nostrils, without recalling this
+chant, which I have the kind permission of the editor of the 'Saturday
+Review' (April 19, 1902) to quote:--
+
+    Make the kas while the kem says, 'Make it!' {34}
+    Shinin' there on meadow an' grove,
+    Sayin, 'You Romany chies, you take it,
+    Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
+    Singin' the ghyllie the while you shake it
+    To lennor and love!'
+
+    Hark, the sharpenin' scythes that tingle!
+    See they come, the farmin' ryes!
+    'Leave the dell,' they say, 'an' pingle!
+    Never a gorgie, married or single,
+    Can toss the kas in dell or dingle
+    Like Romany chies.'
+    Make the kas while the kem says 'Make it!'
+
+    Bees are a-buzzin' in chaw an' clover
+    Stealin' the honey from sperrits o' morn,
+    Shoshus leap in puv an' cover,
+    Doves are a-cooin' like lover to lover,
+    Larks are awake an' a-warblin' over
+    Their kairs in the corn.
+    Make the kas while the kem says 'Make it!'
+
+    Smell the kas on the baval blowin'!
+    What is that the gorgies say?
+    Never a garden rose a-glowin',
+    Never a meadow flower a-growin',
+    Can match the smell from a Rington mowin'
+    Of new made hay.
+
+    All along the river reaches
+    'Cheep, cheep, chee!'--from osier an' sedge;
+    'Cuckoo, cuckoo!' rings from the beeches;
+    Every chirikel's song beseeches
+    Ryes to larn what lennor teaches
+    From copse an' hedge.
+    Make the kas while the kem says 'Make it!'
+
+    Lennor sets 'em singin' an' pairin',
+    Chirikels all in tree an' grass,
+    Farmers say, 'Them gals are darin',
+    Sometimes dukkerin', sometimes snarin';
+    But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin','
+    Toss the kas!
+
+    Make the kas while the kem says, 'Make it!'
+    Shinin' there on meadow an' grove,
+    Sayin', 'You Romany chies, you take it,
+    Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
+    Singin' the ghyllie the while you shake it
+    To lennor and love!'
+
+Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was Slepe, and
+that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a farmer for five years
+in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the late forties.  When Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's friend, Madox Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the
+scenery for his famous picture, 'Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,' he could
+present only an imaginary farm.
+
+Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being born in a
+microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing stories full of local
+colour and character which, according to friends of D. G. Rossetti, would
+keep the poet-painter up half the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr.
+Hake in his account of the origin of 'Aylwin' which I have already given.
+I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe Hall which I have heard
+Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would certainly make a good nucleus for
+a short story.  It is connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement
+Shorter, in some reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes:
+"My mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns by
+inheritance some freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe
+Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed.  At Slepe Hall, a
+picturesque building, she went to school in girlhood.  She remembers Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, the author of 'Aylwin,' who was also born at St. Ives, as a
+pretty little boy then unknown to fame."
+
+ [Picture: Slepe Hall: Cromwell's Supposed Residence at St. Ives.  (From
+                    an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')]
+
+When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they
+sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in
+building lots.  It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell
+was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older
+house whose cellars remained intact.  This was, of course, a tremendous
+event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the
+schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to
+watch the workmen in their task of demolition.  In the early stages of
+this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was
+centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found,
+whence Oliver Cromwell's ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his
+terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks
+about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds.  But no such
+secret chamber could be found.  When at length the work had proceeded so
+far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure
+was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact,
+Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it
+was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives,
+that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the
+world--
+
+    Imposteur a la Mecque et prophete a Medine.
+
+Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at
+the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that,
+before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to
+St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel
+friends, in Slepe Hall cellars.  No treasure turned up, but what was
+found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once
+christened 'Cromwell's wine' by the local humourist of the town, who was
+also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much
+interest as the boys in the exploration.  The workmen, of course, at once
+began knocking off the bottles' necks and drinking the wine, and were
+soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a
+teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to
+take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days
+that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell's wine and perhaps imbibed some of
+the Cromwellian spirit and pluck.  Consequently the young urchins carried
+off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called 'Oliver's
+Tree,' and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink.  The
+wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to
+have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous--elder
+wine.  Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was,
+he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell's
+elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, 'I was never even
+excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being
+drunk on Oliver Cromwell's elder-wine.'  The wine was probably about a
+century old.
+
+I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve
+was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time
+than is usual.  He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat
+elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly
+biology, and also art and music.  As has been said in the notice of him
+in 'Poets and Poetry of the Century,' he is one of the few contemporary
+poets with a scientific knowledge of music.  Owing to his father's
+passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this
+accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his
+writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the
+lower animals.
+
+Upon the subject of "the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase,
+'the dumb animals,'" Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often
+been eloquent about 'those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St.
+Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful
+animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe
+the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry
+like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could
+direct it to trace out any given name in the company.'
+
+    "Of course," he says, "the 'lower animals' are no more dumb than we
+    are.  With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape
+    from isolation--to get as close as may be to some other conscious
+    thing--which is a great factor of progress.  With them, as with us,
+    each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others
+    around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless
+    accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what
+    these signs and sounds shall be.  Those among us who have gone at all
+    underneath conventional thought and conventional expression--those
+    who have penetrated underneath conventional feeling--know that
+    neither thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all.  The
+    voice cannot do it, as we see by comparing one language with another.
+    Wordsworth calls language the incarnation of thought.  But the mere
+    fact of there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this.
+    If there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream
+    of, the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd.  Soul
+    cannot communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when
+    you can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a 'lower
+    animal,' interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with
+    them as it is with men.  Nay, with some temperaments and in some
+    moods, the communication is far, far closer.  'When I am assailed
+    with heavy tribulation,' said Luther, 'I rush out among my pigs
+    rather than remain alone by myself.'  And there is no creature that
+    does not at some points sympathize with man.  People have laughed at
+    Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed
+    upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used
+    to lavish his endearments.  Neither I nor my companion had a pet
+    passion for leeches.  Erskine probably knew leeches better than we,
+    for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of
+    which they know nothing.  Like most dog lovers, we had no special
+    love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge.  'I wish
+    women would purr when they are pleased,' said Horne Tooke to Rogers
+    once."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+THE CRITIC IN THE BUD
+
+
+ONE of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the
+nooks of old England and 'ould Ireland'; I have a propensity for
+'dawdling and dandering' among them whenever the occasion arises, and I
+am yielding to it here.
+
+Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been
+compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of
+brochures upon the surrounding villages.  One of these, called 'St. Ives
+and the Printing Press,' has greatly interested me, for it reveals the
+wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural
+districts lies ready for the picking up.  I am tempted to quote from
+this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell's time the temper which
+produced Cromwell has remained.  During the time when at Cambridge George
+Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond
+of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen's, revolted against the discipline and the
+doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the
+Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed.  The house whence
+issued these fulminations was the 'Old House' in Crown Street, now pulled
+down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton's father, having
+remained during all this time a printing office.  Mr. Norris gives a very
+picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the
+house, with its pointed roof, 'king posts' and panelling, reminding one
+of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices.  Mr. Norris also
+tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the 'Crown Inn,' that
+William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear
+the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens.  According to
+Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John
+Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton's father
+when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor.  A
+curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer
+addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the
+eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to
+Lamb, and inspired some of Elia's most delightful touches of humour.
+This poem of Dyer's opens thus:--
+
+    Though much I love th' AEolian lyre,
+       Whose varying sounds beguil'd my youthful day,
+       And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
+    In fabled groves, among th' Aonian choir:
+    Yet more on native fields, thro' milder skies,
+       Nature's mysterious harmonies delight:
+    There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
+       What is the moon's pale orb that cheer'd the lonesome night?
+    I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
+       Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
+       Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
+    And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
+    No purple Venus round my Hammond's bow'r,
+       No blue-ey'd graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
+    The king of gods here rains no golden show'r,
+       Nor have these lips e'er sipt Castilian dews.
+
+At the 'Old House' in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer's time,
+if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at
+this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his
+boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general.  Filled
+with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that
+boyish utterance.  It interests me much, because I seem to see in it
+adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I
+hope to enrich these pages.  I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking
+advantage of a lucky accident--the accident that a member of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown
+newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported.  In 1854, 'W. Theodore
+Watts,' as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be
+himself a member--if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just
+left it--on account of his father's great local reputation as a man of
+learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the
+toast, 'Science.'  In the 'Cambridge Chronicle' of that date the
+proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given
+to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by
+the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely
+improvized.  The subject which he discussed was 'The Influence of Science
+upon Modern Civilization':--
+
+    "It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical
+    lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs
+    straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches.  Now, of
+    all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most
+    hopeful one for humanity is physical science--that branch of the tree
+    which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to
+    bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present
+    wondrous state of development.  I am aware that the assertion that
+    Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by
+    many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person
+    young and inexperienced as myself.  It is heterodox; it clashes, for
+    instance, with the venerable superstition of 'the wisdom of the
+    ancients'--a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my
+    friend Mr. Wright's old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been
+    talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the
+    point:--
+
+    For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
+    Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
+    And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
+    Cometh all this new science that men lere.
+
+    But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom
+    in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply
+    abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients
+    more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy.  It is
+    the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong
+    only to individuals.  There can be no doubt that, of contemporary
+    individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and
+    is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with
+    generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact.  As
+    Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, 'Those who came
+    first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least
+    experience.  Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in
+    arms--chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under
+    Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the
+    white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are
+    prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can
+    supply.
+
+    And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own
+    English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity.  What, for instance,
+    was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans--what but the
+    wildest Astrology?  What schoolboy has not chuckled over the
+    ingenious old Herodotus's description of the sun being blown out of
+    the heavens?  Or again, at old Plutarch's veracious story of the
+    hedgehogs and the grapes?  Nay, there are absurdities enough in such
+    great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us
+    that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters
+    appertaining to the Physical Sciences.
+
+    Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the
+    ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence.  But
+    theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our
+    day--though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has
+    been proving to us lately--is, as essentially, the day of Science.  I
+    might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here--the constitution
+    of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking
+    as the soul of antiquity).  Was that scientific?  Surely not.
+
+    The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was
+    beauty, sensuous beauty.  This prevailing passion for the beautiful
+    exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said:
+    it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in
+    their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture.  The
+    productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful,
+    and, as such, will never fade and decay, for
+
+                     A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
+
+    Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that
+    Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity.
+    Athens was too imaginative and poetical.  Sparta was too warlike and
+    barbarous.  Rome was too sensual and gross.  It had to wait for the
+    steady Teutonic mind--the plodding brains of modern England and
+    modern Germany.  That Homer is the father of poetry--that AEschylus
+    is a wonder of sublimity--that Sophocles and Euripides are profound
+    masters of human passion and human pathos--that Aristophanes is an
+    exhaustless fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour--no one in
+    this room, or out of it, is more willing to admit than I am.  But is
+    that to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison
+    and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or
+    Aristotle?
+
+    The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied
+    through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius.  Every right
+    action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he
+    attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad
+    thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius.  And this was
+    not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and
+    breathing faith with him.  He believed it in his childhood, in his
+    youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the
+    deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of
+    Laocoon, around his giant brain.  Well, gentlemen, don't let us laugh
+    at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a
+    beautiful one, and typical of many great truths.  And I have often
+    thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than
+    Socrates.  I mean the great man--mankind.  He, too, has his good
+    genius and his evil genius.  The former we will designate science,
+    the latter we will call superstition.  For ages upon ages,
+    superstition has had the sway over him--that evil genius, who blotted
+    out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and
+    substituted all manner of blinding errors--errors which have made him
+    play
+
+    Such fantastic tricks before high heaven
+    As make the angels weep.
+
+    This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of
+    creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells
+    us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries.  In a word,
+    the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the
+    angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the
+    fiends.
+
+    But, at last, God has permitted man's long, long experience to be
+    followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient
+    enemy, and clasped the hands of Science--Science, that good genius
+    who makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the
+    ethereal lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns
+    king of the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of
+    Methusaleh into seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human
+    frame, and ranges through its most secret chambers, until at last
+    nothing, save the mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden;
+    who maps out all the nations of the earth; showing how the sable
+    Ethiopian, the dusky Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the
+    intellectual European, are but differently developed exemplars of the
+    same type of manhood, and warning man that he is still his 'brother's
+    keeper' now as in the primeval days of Cain and Abel.
+
+    The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his daedal wings up
+    into the starry night, there where 'God's name is writ in worlds,'
+    and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving
+    around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever
+    around the great central sun--'The Great White Throne of God!'
+
+    The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long
+    vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world
+    which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first,
+    as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious
+    course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid
+    mass, 'without form and void,' where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled
+    in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages,
+    having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had
+    intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life,
+    to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns,
+    compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable
+    dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder
+    of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious
+    forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian,
+    the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and
+    bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle
+    in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath
+    their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders,
+    the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and
+    the basest work of God--the creation of the thinking, reasoning,
+    sinning animal, Man.
+
+    And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing
+    and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand
+    work of developing the divinity within it.  I know, indeed, that it
+    is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will
+    decline and vanish, 'like the civilizations of old.'  But I venture
+    to deny it in toto.  From a human point of view, it is utterly
+    impossible.  And without going into the question (for I see the time
+    is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed
+    away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life
+    after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times
+    more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I
+    contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern
+    must of necessity be futile and fallacious.  And for this reason,
+    that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science
+    has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of
+    antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political
+    life, and come to its own conclusions.  So isolated, indeed, was one
+    nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of
+    each other's existence.  A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh,
+    was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for
+    Italy alone.  There was no science then to 'put a girdle round about
+    the earth' (as Puck says) 'in forty minutes.'  But now, a new idea
+    brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the
+    whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole
+    habitable globe--from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru.  I
+    am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the
+    ruler of the waves.  The day may come that will see her sink to a
+    second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe.  In
+    spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that
+    will see Russia the dominant power in Europe.  The day may come that
+    will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and
+    learning.  It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each
+    race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race--that the
+    negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian
+    race is now lording it over the negro.  Why not?  It would be only
+    equity.  But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of
+    nationalities.  I speak again of the great man, Mankind--the one
+    indivisible man that Science is making him.  He will never
+    retrograde, because 'matter and mind comprise the universe,' and
+    matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind--because good
+    must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made?  Henceforth his
+    road is onward--onward.  Science has helped to give him such a start
+    that nothing shall hold him back--nothing can hold him back--save a
+    fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God."
+
+But I am wandering from the subject of the 'Old House' in Crown Street
+and its connection with printing.  The last important book that was ever
+printed there was a very remarkable one.  It was the famous essay on
+Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton's friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that
+time a curate of the St. Ives Church--a book that was the result of an
+enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book,
+moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought.  It has
+passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM
+
+
+MRS. CRAIGIE has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that
+London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the
+provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the
+nation.  It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than
+that in which Theodore Watts grew up.  Indeed, his early life may be
+compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening
+and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of
+the Mill family.  Mr. Watts-Dunton's father was in many respects a very
+remarkable man.  'He was,' says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in
+Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 'a naturalist intimately connected with
+Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of
+considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert
+White of the Ouse valley.'  There is, as the 'Times' said in its review
+of 'Aylwin,' so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of
+the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made
+to identify all the characters.  Many of these guesses have been wrong;
+and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr.
+Hake, who, in two papers in 'Notes and Queries' identified many of the
+characters.  Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that
+the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the
+story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton's father.  Mr. Hake, however,
+tells us that this is not so.  Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the
+author's uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to
+say later.  I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable
+account of Mr. Watts-Dunton's father in Mr. Norris's 'History of St.
+Ives':--
+
+    "For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was
+    the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though
+    his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford
+    Abbots.  According to the following extracts from 'The Cambridge
+    Chronicle and University Journal' of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died
+    quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: 'We record with much regret
+    the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died
+    after an hour's illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he
+    had been taken after the seizure.  Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was
+    called in, but without avail.  At the inquest the post-mortem
+    examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing
+    fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions,
+    resulted in syncope.  Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back
+    to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme
+    heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of
+    death.
+
+    Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the
+    oldest solicitors in the county.  He had also devoted much time and
+    study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a
+    well-known figure in the scientific circles of London.  He was for
+    years connected with Section E of the British Association for the
+    Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee.  He read papers
+    on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other
+    Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles
+    of geology.  Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors,
+    and in the Association's reports upon this subject some of the most
+    interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by
+    Mr. Watts.  He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical
+    Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.'
+
+    Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last
+    moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he
+    had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the 'Antiquary'
+    for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire
+    Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months
+    after his death.  It was, however, not by Archaeology, but by his
+    geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation.
+    And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison,
+    Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the
+    geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton
+    Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied
+    by Mr. Matton.  In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is
+    mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr.
+    Watts at St. Ives.  Since his death there have been frequent
+    references to him as a man of 'encyclopaedic general knowledge.'
+
+    He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St.
+    Ives have been more liked or more generally respected.  His great
+    delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the
+    changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our
+    neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself.  On such occasions the
+    present writer has often met him and had many interesting
+    conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science."
+
+With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton's mother, the Duntons,
+although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in
+Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several
+generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic
+chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr.
+Jessopp in his charming essay, 'Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.'  This
+essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the
+Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, and treating of the Register
+of Crab House Nunnery.  In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother's
+to his father's name, by a deed in Chancery.
+
+I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in
+temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about
+Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend)
+used to tell.  When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets
+pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school
+library a copy of Wells's 'Stories after Nature,' and read them with
+great avidity.  Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was
+reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small
+family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to
+find, in a number of the 'Illuminated Magazine,' a periodical which his
+father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one
+of the 'Stories after Nature' reprinted with an illustration by the
+designer and engraver Linton.  He said to his father, 'Why, I have read
+this story before!'  'That is quite impossible,' said his father, 'quite
+impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number
+of a magazine.'  'I have read it before; I know all about it,' said the
+boy.  'As I do not think you untruthful,' said the father, 'I think I can
+explain your hallucination about this matter.'  'Do, father,' said the
+son.  'Well,' said the father, 'I do not know whether or not you are a
+poet.  But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams.  You have told me
+before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape
+that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.'  'Yes,
+father, that often occurs.'  'Well, the reason for that is this, as you
+will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology.
+The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each
+other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but
+it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things,
+one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the
+other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy
+hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.'  The
+explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.
+
+The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the
+father said, 'Well, Walter, have you read this before?'  'Yes,' said the
+boy falteringly, 'unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain,
+father.'  And so it went on from month to month.  When the boy had grown
+into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the
+literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells's
+'Joseph and His Brethren' and 'Stories after Nature.'  Rossetti was
+agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of 'Joseph
+and His Brethren,' he was very familiar with the 'Stories after Nature.'
+'Well,' said Mr. Watts-Dunton, 'they appeared in the "Illuminated
+Magazine."'  'Who should have thought,' said Rossetti, 'that the
+"Illuminated Magazine" in its moribund days, when Linton took it up,
+should have got down to St. Ives.  Its circulation, I think, was only a
+few hundreds.  Among Linton's manoeuvres for keeping the magazine alive
+was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells's "Stories after Nature"
+without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book
+form.'  'They did then appear in book form first?' said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+'Yes, but there can't have been over a hundred or two sold,' said
+Rossetti.  'I discovered it at the British Museum.'  'I read it at
+Cambridge in my school library,' said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  It was the
+startled look on Rossetti's face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell
+him the story about his father and the 'Illuminated Magazine.'
+
+It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to
+express himself in literature rather early.  But it will be new to many,
+and especially to the editor of the 'Athenaeum,' that as a mere child he
+contributed to its pages.  When he was a boy he read the 'Athenaeum,'
+which his father took in regularly.  One day he caught a correspondent of
+the 'Athenaeum'--no less a person than John P. Collier--tripping on a
+point of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance.  He
+had stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father's
+books.  He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing
+the blunder with youthful scorn.  In due time the correction was noted in
+the Literary Gossip of the journal.  Soon after, his father had occasion
+to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he
+said, 'Walter, have you been marking this book?'  'Yes, father.'  'But
+you know I object?'  'Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.'
+'Why,' said his father, 'somebody has been writing about this very
+passage to the "Athenaeum."'  'Yes, father,' replied the boy, red and
+ungrammatical with proud confusion, 'it was me.'  'You!' cried his
+astonished father, 'you!'  And thus the matter was explained.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his
+first contribution to the 'Athenaeum.'
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando
+Watts.  His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have
+made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism.  As I have already
+pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of
+Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero.  The importance of this character
+in 'Aylwin' is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find
+that the character of Philip is its motive power.  After his death,
+everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams,
+his fantasies and his whims.  This effect of making a man dominate from
+his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be
+unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some
+critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there
+they leave it.  What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls 'the tragic mischief' of the
+drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and
+mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of 'The Veiled Queen.'
+There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an
+interest.  He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish,
+and German.  And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover
+of the acted drama.  One of his stories in connection with acting is
+this.  A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission
+to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and
+sometimes Cromwell's Barn.  Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on
+returning home after the performance said, 'I have seen a little actor
+who is a real genius.  He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund
+Kean's acting.  I shall go and see him every night.  And he went.  The
+actor's name was Robson.  When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in
+London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the
+second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon.  He went to the theatre
+and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so
+impressed him down at St. Ives.  From that time he followed Robson to
+whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known
+figure among the playgoers of the Olympic.  He always contended that
+Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time.  Mr. Hake seems to
+have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in
+London:--
+
+    "He was," says Mr. Hake, "a man of extraordinary learning in the
+    academic sense of the word, and he possessed still more extraordinary
+    general knowledge.  He lived for many years the strangest kind of
+    hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts.  His two
+    great passions were philology and occultism, but he also took great
+    interest in rubbings from brass monuments.  He knew more, I think, of
+    those strange writers discussed in Vaughan's 'Hours with the Mystics'
+    than any other person--including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he
+    managed to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the
+    physical sciences, especially astronomy.  He seemed to be learning
+    languages up to almost the last year of his life.  His method of
+    learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow--that is
+    to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died, it is said
+    that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among
+    his books.  He used to express great contempt for Borrow's method of
+    learning languages from dictionaries only.  I do not think that any
+    one connected with literature--with the sole exception of Mr.
+    Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G. Latham--knew so much of him as I
+    did.  His personal appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin,
+    as described in the novel.  Although he never wrote poetry, he
+    translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese
+    poets.  I remember that he was an extraordinary admirer of Shelley.
+    His knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists was a
+    link between him and Mr. Swinburne.
+
+    At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum reading
+    room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed to know
+    anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he spoke to me
+    it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should disturb the other
+    readers, which in his eyes would have been a heinous offence.  For
+    very many years he had been extremely well known to the second-hand
+    booksellers, for he was a constant purchaser of their wares.  He was
+    a great pedestrian, and, being very much attached to the north of
+    London, would take long, slow tramps ten miles out in the direction
+    of Highgate, Wood Green, etc.  I have a very distinct recollection of
+    calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living
+    close to him in Percy Circus.  Books were piled up from floor to
+    ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember
+    where to find every book and what there was in it.  It is a singular
+    fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to
+    have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas
+    Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him 'the
+    scholar.'  How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that
+    surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must
+    have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the
+    north of London where 'the scholar' was taking his chop and bottle of
+    Beaune.  He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after
+    another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I
+    think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of 'Aylwin,'
+    and myself.  But at Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines,
+    when and where my father and I used to meet him.  His memory was so
+    powerful that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he
+    had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part.
+    He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to
+    the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life.  He
+    always reminded me of Charles Lamb's description of George Dyer.
+
+    Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only
+    of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent
+    to touch upon his inner life.  He was a still greater recluse than
+    the 'Philip Aylwin' of the novel.  I think I am right in saying that
+    he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of
+    age.  Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these
+    studies that he sympathized with the author of 'Aylwin's' friend, the
+    late Lord de Tabley.  I remember one story of his peculiarities which
+    will give an idea of the kind of man he was.  He had a brother, Mr.
+    William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him in every
+    way--strikingly good-looking, with great charm of manner and savoir
+    faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial
+    knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of
+    British military and naval exploits--where he was really learned.
+    Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a
+    parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great
+    volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in
+    the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until
+    at last he got to be called the 'walking encyclopaedia.'  The result
+    was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an
+    original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was
+    frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned
+    brother.  This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply
+    amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories
+    as to what people had said to him on this subject." {60}
+
+Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of one of his
+stories.  I may add that the editor of 'Notes and Queries,' Mr. Joseph
+Knight, knew James Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he 'can testify
+to the truth' of Mr. Hake's 'portraiture.'
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES
+
+
+ALTHOUGH an East Midlander by birth it seems to have been to East Anglia
+that Mr. Watts-Dunton's sympathies were most strongly drawn.  It was
+there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it was to East
+Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.
+
+On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the Hemingford side
+already described, the country, though not so lovely as the western side,
+is at first fairly attractive; but it becomes less and less so as it
+nears the Fens.  The Fens, however, would seem to have a charm of their
+own, and Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness
+that could hardly be surpassed.  It was here as a boy that he made
+friends with the Gryengroes--that superior variety of the Romanies which
+Borrow had known years before.  These gypsies used to bring their Welsh
+ponies to England and sell them at the fairs.  I must now go back for
+some years in order to enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton's graphic
+description of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country,
+which appeared in 'Great Thoughts' in 1903.
+
+    "I shall never forget my earliest recollections of them.  My father
+    used sometimes to drive in a dogcart to see friends of his through
+    about twelve miles of Fen country, and he used to take me with him.
+    Let me say that the Fen country is much more striking than is
+    generally supposed.  Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the
+    midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are divided
+    by dykes; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles.
+    This gives an importance to the skies such as is observed nowhere
+    else except on the open sea.  The flashing opalescent radiance of the
+    sea is apt to challenge the riches of the sky, and in a certain
+    degree tends to neutralize it; but in the Fen country the level,
+    monotonous greenery of the crops in summer, and, in autumn and
+    winter, the vast expanse of black earth, make the dome of the sky, by
+    contrast, so bright and glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams
+    and suggests a roof of rainbows; and in cloudy weather it seems
+    almost the only living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more
+    magical still.  And as to sunsets, I do not know of any, either by
+    land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen
+    country.  The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal
+    to do with it.  The sun frequently sets in a pageantry of gauzy
+    vapour of every colour, quite indescribable.
+
+    The first evening that I took one of these drives, while I was
+    watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps of
+    twitch-grass, set burning by the farm-labourers, which stretched
+    right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the dogcart and pointed
+    to a ruddy fire glowing, flickering, and smoking in an angle where a
+    green grassy drove-way met the dark-looking high-road some yards
+    ahead.  And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky
+    figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about.  'The
+    gypsies!' I said, in the greatest state of exultation, which soon
+    fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle and saw a lot of these
+    dusky people running and leaping like wild things towards the
+    dog-cart.  'Will they kill us, father?' I said.  'Kill us?  No,' he
+    said, laughing; 'they are friends of mine.  They've only come to lead
+    the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at it.'  They came
+    flocking up.  So far from the mare starting, as she would have done
+    at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome
+    the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose
+    with their tawny but well-shaped fingers, and caressing her neck.
+    Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw.
+    When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was fascinated by the
+    charm of the picture.  Outside the tents in front of the fire, over
+    which a kettle was suspended from an upright iron bar, which I
+    afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was spread a large dazzling white
+    table-cloth, covered with white crockery, among which glittered a
+    goodly number of silver spoons.  I afterwards learnt that to possess
+    good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons, was as 'passionate
+    a desire in the Romany chi as in the most ambitious farmer's wife in
+    the Fen country.'  It was from this little incident that my intimacy
+    with the gypsies dated.  I associated much with them in after life,
+    and I have had more experiences among them than I have yet had an
+    opportunity of recording in print."
+
+This pretty gypsy girl was the prototype, I believe, of the famous Rhona
+Boswell herself.
+
+It must of course have been after the meeting with Rhona in the East
+Midlands--supposing always that we are allowed to identify the novelist
+with the hero, a bold supposition--that Mr. Watts-Dunton again came
+across her--this time in East Anglia.  Whether this is so or not, I must
+give this picture of her from 'Aylwin':--
+
+    "It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie's friend,
+    Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl.  Graylingham Wood and
+    Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of
+    a superior kind of Gypsies called Gryengroes, that is to say,
+    horse-dealers.  Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell
+    them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands.  Thus it was that
+    Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales.  Compared
+    with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie
+    seemed quite a grave little person.  Rhona's limbs were always on the
+    move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions.  Her laugh
+    seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it
+    was impossible to mistake for any other.  The laughter of most Gypsy
+    girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona's laughter was a
+    sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards, when she
+    grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her.  It seemed
+    to emanate, not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame.
+    If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the
+    ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some
+    idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell.  Ah, what days they were!  Rhona
+    would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor, some
+    miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of
+    flowers that she had been weaving for herself.  This induced Winnie
+    to weave for herself a coronet of seaweeds, and an entire morning was
+    passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+SPORT AND WORK
+
+
+IT was at this period that, like so many young Englishmen who were his
+contemporaries, he gave attention to field sports, and took interest in
+that athleticism which, to judge from Wilkie Collins's scathing pictures,
+was quite as rampant and absurd then as it is in our own time.  It was
+then too that he acquired that familiarity with the figures prominent in
+the ring which startles one in his reminiscences of George Borrow.  But
+it will scarcely interest the readers of this book to dwell long upon
+this subject.  Nor have I time to repeat the humorous stories I have
+heard him tell about the queer characters who could then be met at St.
+Ives Fair (said to have been the largest cattle fair in England), and at
+another favourite resort of his, Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge.
+Stourbridge Fair still exists, but its glory was departing when Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was familiar with it; and now, possibly, it has departed for
+ever.  Of Cambridge and the entire county he tells many anecdotes.  Here
+is a specimen:--
+
+Once in the early sixties he and his brother and some friends were
+greatly exercised by the news that Deerfoot, the famous American Indian
+runner in whom Borrow took such an interest, was to run at Cambridge
+against the English champion.  When the day came, they drove to Cambridge
+in a dog-cart from St. Ives, about a dozen miles.  The race took place in
+a field called Fenner's Ground, much used by cricketers.  This is how, as
+far as I can recall the words, he tells the anecdote:--
+
+    "The place was crammed with all sorts of young men--'varsity men and
+    others.  There were not many young farmers or squires or yeomen
+    within a radius of a good many miles that did not put in an
+    appearance on that occasion.  The Indian won easily, and at the
+    conclusion of the race there was a frantic rush to get near him and
+    shake his hand.  The rush was so wild and so insensate that it
+    irritated me more than I should at the present moment consider it
+    possible to be irritated.  But I ought to say that at that time of my
+    life I had developed into a strangely imperious little chap.  I had
+    been over-indulged--not at home, but at the Cambridge school to which
+    I had been sent--and spoilt.  This seems odd, but it's true.  It was
+    the boys who spoilt me in a curious way--a way which will not be
+    understood by those who went to public schools like Eton, where the
+    fagging principle would have stood in the way of the development of
+    the curious relation between me and my fellow-pupils which I am
+    alluding to.  There is an inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct
+    in the genus homo which causes boys, without in the least knowing
+    why, to select one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and
+    spoil him, almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which
+    is so valuable in the social struggle for life that follows
+    school-days.  This kind of emperor I had been at that school.  It
+    indicated no sort of real superiority on my part; for I learnt that
+    immediately after I had left the vacant post it was filled by another
+    boy--filled for an equally inscrutable reason.  The result of it was
+    that I became (as I often think when I recall those days) the most
+    masterful young urchin that ever lived.  If I had not been so, I
+    could not have got into a fury at being jostled by a good-humoured
+    crowd.  My brother, who had not been so spoilt at school, was very
+    different, and kept urging me to keep my temper.  'It's capital fun,'
+    he said; 'look at this blue-eyed young chap jostling and being
+    jostled close to us.  He's fond of a hustle, and no mistake.  That's
+    the kind of chap I should like to know'; and he indicated a young
+    'varsity man of whose elbow at that moment I was unpleasantly
+    conscious, and who seemed to be in a state of delight at other elbows
+    being pushed into his ribs.  I soon perceived that certain men whom
+    he was with seemed angry, not on their own account, but on account of
+    this youth of the laughing lips and blue eyes.  As they were trying
+    to make a ring round him, 'Hanged if it isn't the Prince!' said my
+    brother.  'And look how he takes it!  Surely you can stand what he
+    stands!'  It was, in fact, the Prince of Wales, who had come to see
+    the American runner.  I needed only two or three years of buffeting
+    with the great life outside the schoolroom to lose all my
+    imperiousness and learn the essential lesson of give-and-take."
+
+For a time Mr. Watts-Dunton wavered about being articled to his father as
+a solicitor.  His love of the woods and fields was too great at that time
+for him to find life in a solicitor's office at all tolerable.  Moreover,
+it would seem that he who had been so precocious a student, and who had
+lived in books, felt a temporary revulsion from them, and an irresistible
+impulse to study Nature apart from books, to study her face to face.  And
+it was at this time that, as the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' remarks, he
+'moved much among the East Anglian gypsies, of whose superstitions and
+folklore he made a careful study.'  But of this period of his life I have
+but little knowledge.  Judging from Groome's remarks upon 'Aylwin' in the
+'Bookman,' he alone had Mr. Watts-Dunton's full confidence in the matter.
+So great was his desire to pore over the book of nature, there appears to
+have been some likelihood, perhaps I ought to say some danger, of his
+feeling the impulse which had taken George Borrow away from civilization.
+He seems, besides, to have shared with the Greeks and with Montaigne a
+belief in the value of leisure.  It was at this period, to judge from his
+writings, that he exclaimed with Montaigne, 'Have you known how to
+regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
+composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
+than he who has taken empires and cities.'  I suppose, however, that this
+was the time when he composed that unpublished 'Dictionary for
+Nature-worshippers,' from which he often used to quote in the
+'Athenaeum.'  There is nothing in his writings so characteristic as those
+definitions.  Work and Sport are thus defined: 'Work: that activity of
+mind or body which exhausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or
+health to the individual.  Sport: that activity of mind or body which, in
+exhausting the vital forces, yields pleasure and health to the
+individual.  The activity, however severe, of a born artist at his easel,
+of a born poet at his rhymings, of a born carpenter at his plane, is
+sport.  The activity, however slight, of the born artist or poet at the
+merchant's desk, is work.  Hence, to work is not to pray.  We have called
+the heresy of Work modern because it is the characteristic one of our
+time; but, alas! like all heresies, it is old.  It was preached by
+Zoroaster in almost Mr. Carlyle's words when Concord itself was in the
+woods and ere Chelsea was.'
+
+[Picture: 'Evening Dreams with the Poets.'  (From an Oil Painting at 'The
+                                Pines.')]
+
+In one of his books Mr. Watts-Dunton writes with great eloquence upon
+this subject:--
+
+    "How hateful is the word 'experience' in the mouth of the
+    litterateur.  They all seem to think that this universe exists to
+    educate them, and that they should write books about it.  They never
+    look on a sunrise without thinking what an experience it is; how it
+    is educating them for bookmaking.  It is this that so often turns the
+    true Nature-worshipper away from books altogether, that makes him
+    bless with what at times seems such malicious fervour those two great
+    benefactors of the human race, Caliph Omar and Warburton's cook.
+
+    In Thoreau there was an almost perpetual warring of the Nature
+    instinct with the Humanity instinct.  And, to say the truth, the
+    number is smaller than even Nature-worshippers themselves are
+    aware--those in whom there is not that warring of these two great
+    primal instincts.  For six or eight months at a time there are many,
+    perhaps, who could revel in 'utter solitude,' as companionship with
+    Nature is called; with no minster clock to tell them the time of day,
+    but, instead, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle in the
+    morning, the shifting of the shadows at noon, and the cawing of rooks
+    going home at sunset.  But then to these, there comes suddenly, and
+    without the smallest warning, a half-recognized but secretly sweet
+    pleasure in looking at the smooth high-road, and thinking that it
+    leads to the city--a beating of the heart at the sound of the distant
+    railway-whistle, as the train winds its way, like a vast gliding
+    snake, to the whirlpool they have left.
+
+    In order to realize the folly of the modern Carlylean heresy of work,
+    it is necessary to realize fully how infinitely rich is Nature, and
+    how generous, and consequently what a sacred duty as well as wise
+    resolve it is that, before he 'returns unto the ground,' man should
+    drink deeply while he may at the fountain of Life.  Let it be enough
+    for the Nature-worshipper to know that he, at least, has been
+    blessed.  Suppose he were to preach in London or Paris or New York
+    against this bastard civilization, and expatiate on Nature's largess,
+    of which it robs us?  Suppose he were to say to people to whom
+    opinion is the breath of life, 'What is it that this civilization of
+    yours can give you by way of compensation for that of which it robs
+    you?  Is it your art?  Is it your literature?  Is it your music?  Is
+    it your science?'  Suppose, for instance, he were to say to the
+    collector of Claudes, or Turners, or David Coxes: 'Your possessions
+    are precious undoubtedly, but what are even they when set against the
+    tamest and quietest sunrise, in the tamest and quietest district of
+    Cambridge or Lincoln, in this tame and quiet month, when, over the
+    treeless flat you may see, and for nothing, purple bar after purple
+    bar trembling along the grey, as the cows lift up their heads from
+    the sheet of silver mist in which they are lying?  How can you really
+    enjoy your Turners, you who have never seen a sunrise in your lives?'
+    Or suppose he were to say to the opera-goer: 'Those notes of your
+    favourite soprano were superb indeed; and superb they ought to be to
+    keep you in the opera-house on a June night, when all over the south
+    of England a thousand thickets, warm with the perfumed breath of the
+    summer night, are musical with the gurgle of the nightingales.'
+    Thoreau preached after this fashion, and was deservedly laughed at
+    for his pains.
+
+    Yet it is not a little singular that this heresy of the sacredness of
+    work should be most flourishing at the very time when the sophism on
+    which it was originally built is exploded; the sophism, we mean, that
+    Nature herself is the result of Work, whereas she is the result of
+    growth.  One would have thought that this was the very time for
+    recognizing what the sophism had blinded us to, that Nature's
+    permanent temper--whatever may be said of this or that mood of
+    hers--is the temper of Sport, that her pet abhorrence, which is said
+    to be a vacuum, is really Work.  We see this clearly enough in what
+    are called the lower animals--whether it be a tiger or a gazelle, a
+    ferret or a coney, a bat or a butterfly--the final cause of the
+    existence of every conscious thing is that it should sport.  It has
+    no other use than that.  For this end it was that 'the great Vishnu
+    yearned to create a world.'  Yet over the toiling and moiling world
+    sits Moloch Work; while those whose hearts are withering up with
+    hatred of him are told by certain writers to fall down before him and
+    pretend to love.
+
+    The worker of the mischief is, of course, civilization in excess, or
+    rather, civilization in wrong directions.  For this word, too, has to
+    be newly defined in the Dictionary before mentioned, where you will
+    find it thus given:--Civilization: a widening and enriching of human
+    life.  Bastard or Modern Western Civilization: the art of inventing
+    fictitious wants and working to supply them.  In bastard civilization
+    life becomes poorer and poorer, paltrier and paltrier, till at last
+    life goes out of fashion altogether, and is supplanted by work.  True
+    freedom is more remote from us than ever.  For modern Freedom is thus
+    defined: the exchange of the slavery of feudality for the slavery of
+    opinion.  Thoreau realized this, and tried to preach men back to
+    common-sense and Nature.  Here was his mistake--in trying to preach.
+    No man ever yet had the Nature-instinct preached into him."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+EAST ANGLIA
+
+
+WHATEVER may have been those experiences with the gryengroes which made
+Groome, when speaking of the gypsies of 'Aylwin,' say 'the author writes
+only of what he knows,' it seems to have been after his intercourse with
+the gypsies that he and a younger brother, Alfred Eugene Watts (elsewhere
+described), were articled as solicitors to their father.  His bent,
+however, was always towards literature, especially poetry, of which he
+had now written a great deal--indeed, the major part of the volume which
+was destined to lie unpublished for so many years.  But before I deal
+with the most important period of Mr. Watts-Dunton's life--his life in
+London--it seems necessary to say a word or two about his visits to East
+Anglia, and especially to the Norfolk coast.  There are some admirable
+remarks upon the East Coast in Mr. William Sharp's chapter on
+'Aylwinland' in 'Literary Geography,' and he notes the way in which Rhona
+Boswell links it with Cowslip Land; but he does not give examples of the
+poems which thus link it, such as the double roundel called 'The Golden
+Hand.'
+
+                            THE GOLDEN HAND {73a}
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    Do you forget that day on Rington strand
+    When, near the crumbling ruin's parapet,
+    I saw you stand beside the long-shore net
+    The gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?
+
+                                    RHONA
+
+    Do I forget?
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy band
+    Around your hair which shone as black as jet:
+    No fairy's crown of bloom was ever set
+    Round brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.
+
+    I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:
+    Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:
+    Love-lips (with one tattoo 'for dukkerin' {73b}) tanned
+    By sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.
+
+                                    RHONA
+
+       Do I forget?
+    The Golden Hand shone there: it's you forget,
+    Or p'raps us Romanies ondly understand
+    The way the Lover's Dukkeripen is planned
+    Which shone that second time when us two met.
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    Blest 'Golden Hand'!
+
+                                    RHONA
+
+    The wind, that mixed the smell o' violet
+    Wi' chirp o' bird, a-blowin' from the land
+    Where my dear Mammy lies, said as it fanned
+    My heart-like, 'Them 'ere tears makes Mammy fret.'
+    She loves to see her chavi {74} lookin' grand,
+    So I made what you call'd a coronet,
+    And in the front I put her amulet:
+    She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.
+
+                                    PERCY
+
+    Blest 'Golden Hand'!
+
+In the same way that the velvety green of Hunts is seen in the verses I
+have already quoted, so the softer side of the inland scenery of East
+Anglia is described in the following lines, where also we find an
+exquisite use of the East Anglian fancy about the fairies and the
+foxglove bells.
+
+At a waltz during certain Venetian revels after the liberation from the
+Austrian yoke, a forsaken lover stands and watches a lady whose
+child-love he had won in England:--
+
+    Has she forgotten for such halls as these
+       The domes the angels built in holy times,
+       When wings were ours in childhood's flowery climes
+    To dance with butterflies and golden bees?--
+    Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breeze
+       Shook out those English harebells' magic chimes
+       On that child-wedding morn, 'neath English limes,
+    'Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?
+
+    The love that childhood cradled--girlhood nursed--
+       Has she forgotten it for this dull play,
+       Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and sway
+    Like dancers in a telescope reversed?
+       Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,
+    'Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed'?
+
+    But was it this that bought her--this poor splendour
+       That won her from her troth and wild-flower wreath
+       Who 'cracked the foxglove bells' on Grayland Heath,
+    Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,
+    Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,
+       Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,
+       Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,
+    When Love grew grave--to hide her soul's surrender?
+
+Mr. Sharp has dwelt upon the striking way in which the scenery and
+atmosphere are rendered in 'Aylwin,' but this, as I think, is even more
+clearly seen in the poems.  And in none of these is it seen so vividly as
+in that exhilarating poem, 'Gypsy Heather,' published in the 'Athenaeum,'
+and not yet garnered in a volume.  This poem also shows his lyrical
+power, which never seems to be at its very best unless he is depicting
+Romany life and Romany passion.  The metre of this poem is as original as
+that of 'The Gypsy Haymaking Song,' quoted in an earlier chapter.  It has
+a swing like that of no other poem:--
+
+                                GYPSY HEATHER
+
+    'If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it'll show
+    him the selfsame heather where it wur born.'--SINFI LOVELL.
+
+    [Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the 'Petrel,' takes from his
+    pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south
+    seas, the Melbourne post had brought him--a letter from Rhona,
+    staying then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by
+    the Boswells, called 'Gypsy Heather.'  He takes from the envelope a
+    withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on
+    which Rhona has written the words, 'Remember Gypsy Heather.']
+
+                                      I
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Remember Jasper's camping-place
+       Where heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,
+    And scents of meadow, wood and chase,
+       Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?
+    Remember where, in Rington Furze,
+       I kissed her and she asked me whether
+    I 'thought my lips of teazel-burrs,
+    That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,
+    Felt nice on a rinkenny moey {76} like hers?'--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      II
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Remember her whom nought could tame
+       But love of me, the poacher-maiden
+    Who showed me once my father's game
+       With which her plump round arms were laden
+    Who, when my glances spoke reproach,
+       Said, "Things o' fur an' fin an' feather
+    Like coneys, pheasants, perch an' loach,
+    An' even the famous 'Rington roach,'
+    Wur born for Romany chies to poach!"--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                     III
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Atolls and reefs, you change, you change
+       To dells of England dewy and tender;
+    You palm-trees in yon coral range
+       Seem 'Rington Birches' sweet and slender
+    Shading the ocean's fiery glare:
+       We two are in the Dell together--
+    My body is here, my soul is there
+    With lords of trap and net and snare,
+    The Children of the Open Air,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      IV
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Its pungent breath is on the wind,
+       Killing the scent of tropic water;
+    I see her suitors swarthy skinned,
+       Who pine in vain for Jasper's daughter.
+    The 'Scollard,' with his features tanned
+       By sun and wind as brown as leather--
+    His forehead scarred with Passion's brand--
+    Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,
+    Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      V
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Now Rhona sits beneath the tree
+       That shades our tent, alone and weeping;
+    And him, the 'Scollard,' him I see:
+       From bush to bush I see him creeping--
+    I see her mock him, see her run
+       And free his pony from the tether,
+    Who lays his ears in love and fun,
+    And gallops with her in the sun
+    Through lace the gossamers have spun,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      VI
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    She reaches 'Rington Birches'; now,
+       Dismounting from the 'Scollard's' pony,
+    She sits alone with heavy brow,
+       Thinking, but not of hare or coney.
+    The hot sea holds each sight, each sound
+       Of England's golden autumn weather:
+    The Romanies now are sitting round
+    The tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;
+    Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                     VII
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    She's thinking of this withered spray
+       Through all the dance; her eyes are gleaming
+    Darker than night, yet bright as day,
+       While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;
+    I see the lips--the upper curled,
+       A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,
+    Whence--while the floating shawl is twirled,
+    As if a ruddy cloud were swirled--
+    Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                     VIII
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    In storm or calm, in sun or rain,
+       There's magic, Rhona, in the writing
+    Wound round these flowers whose purple stain
+       Dims the dear scrawl of Love's inditing:
+    Dear girl, this spray between the leaves
+        (Now fading like a draggled feather
+    With which the nesting song-bird weaves)
+    Makes every wave the vessel cleaves
+    Seem purple of heather as it heaves,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+                                      IX
+
+             Remember Gypsy Heather?
+    Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of home
+       Are everywhere; the skylark winging
+    Through amber cloud-films till the dome
+       Seems filled with love, our love, a-singing.
+    The sea-wind seems an English breeze
+       Bearing the bleat of ewe and wether
+    Over the heath from Rington Leas,
+    Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,
+    You taught me Romany 'neath the trees,--
+             Gypsy Heather!
+
+Another reason that makes it necessary for me to touch upon the inland
+part of East Anglia is that I have certain remarks to make upon what are
+called 'the Omarian poems of Mr. Watts-Dunton.'  Although, as I have
+before hinted, St. Ives, being in Hunts, belongs topographically to the
+East Midlands, its sympathies are East Anglian.  This perhaps is partly
+because it is the extreme east of Hunts, and partly because the mouth of
+the Ouse is at Lynn: to those whom Mr. Norris affectionately calls St.
+Ivians and Hemingfordians, the seaside means Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Cromer,
+Hunstanton, and the towns on the Suffolk coast.  The splendour of Norfolk
+ale may also partly account for it.  This perhaps also explains why the
+famous East Anglian translator of Omar Khayyam would seem to have been
+known to a few Omarians on the banks of the Ouse and Cam as soon as the
+great discoverer of good things, Rossetti, pounced upon it in the penny
+box of a second-hand bookseller.  Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton's obituary
+notice of F. H. Groome in the 'Athenaeum' will recall these words:--
+
+    "It was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of
+    sympathy at 'The Pines' during that first luncheon; there was that
+    other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam.
+    We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps
+    all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be
+    esoteric.  And here was a guest who had been brought into actual
+    personal contact with the wonderful old 'Fitz.'  As a child of eight
+    he had seen him, talked with him, been patted on the head by him.
+    Groome's father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald's
+    most intimate friends.  This was at once a delightful and a powerful
+    link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when
+    he heard, as he soon did, the toast to 'Omar Khayyam,' none drank
+    that toast with more gusto than he.  The fact is, as the Romanies
+    say, true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first
+    sight."
+
+This is the poem alluded to: it is entitled, 'Toast to Omar Khayyam: An
+East Anglian echo-chorus inscribed to old Omarian Friends in memory of
+happy days by Ouse and Cam':--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    In this red wine, where memory's eyes seem glowing,
+       And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
+    And Norfolk's foaming nectar glittered, showing
+    What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
+    We drink to thee, right heir of Nature's knowing,
+                Omar Khayyam!
+
+                                      I
+
+    Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowing
+       Her scriptured orbs on Time's wide oriflamme,
+       Nature's proud blazon: 'Who shall bless or damn?
+    Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!'
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!
+
+                                      II
+
+    Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowing
+       Through Persian gardens, widened till it swam--
+       A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam--
+    Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,--
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!
+
+                                     III
+
+    Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,
+       And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,
+       And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,
+    And swish of scythe in Bredfield's dewy mowing?
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!
+
+                                      IV
+
+    'Twas Fitz, 'Old Fitz,' whose knowledge, farther going
+       Than lore of Omar, 'Wisdom's starry Cham,'
+       Made richer still thine opulent epigram:
+    Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.--
+             CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!
+
+                                      V
+
+    In this red wine, where Memory's eyes seem glowing,
+       And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
+    And Norfolk's foaming nectar glittered, showing
+    What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
+    We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!
+             Omar Khayyam!
+
+It was many years after this--it was as a member of another Omar Khayyam
+Club of much greater celebrity than the little brotherhood of Ouse and
+Cam--not large enough to be called a club--that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote
+the following well-known sonnet:--
+
+                             PRAYER TO THE WINDS
+
+    On planting at the head of FitzGerald's grave two rose-trees whose
+    ancestors had scattered their petals over the tomb of Omar Khayyam.
+
+    "My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon
+    it."
+
+                                            OMAR KHAYYAM TO KWAJAH NIZAMI.
+
+    Hear us, ye winds!  From where the north-wind strows
+       Blossoms that crown 'the King of Wisdom's' tomb,
+       The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,
+    Dreaming in seed of Love's ancestral rose,
+    To meadows where a braver north-wind blows
+       O'er greener grass, o'er hedge-rose, may, and broom,
+       And all that make East England's field-perfume
+    Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows.
+
+    Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!
+    This granite covers him whose golden mouth
+       Made wiser ev'n the Word of Wisdom's King:
+    Blow softly over Omar's Western herald
+       Till roses rich of Omar's dust shall spring
+    From richer dust of Suffolk's rare FitzGerald.
+
+I must now quote another of Mr. Watts-Dunton's East Anglian poems, partly
+because it depicts the weird charm of the Norfolk coast, and partly
+because it illustrates that sympathy between the poet and the lower
+animals which I have already noted.  I have another reason: not long ago,
+that good East Anglian, Mr. Rider Haggard interested us all by telling
+how telepathy seemed to have the power of operating between a dog and its
+beloved master in certain rare and extraordinary cases.  When the poem
+appeared in the 'Saturday Review' (December 20, 1902), it was described
+as 'part of a forthcoming romance.'  It records a case of telepathy
+between man and dog quite as wonderful as that narrated by Mr. Rider
+Haggard:--
+
+                          CAUGHT IN THE EBBING TIDE
+
+    The mightiest Titan's stroke could not withstand
+       An ebbing tide like this.  These swirls denote
+       How wind and tide conspire.  I can but float
+    To the open sea and strike no more for land.
+    Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sand
+       Her feet have pressed--farewell, dear little boat
+       Where Gelert, {82} calmly sitting on my coat,
+    Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!
+
+    All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:
+       Yet these air-pictures of the past that glide--
+       These death-mirages o'er the heaving tide--
+    Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,
+       Will break my heart.  I see them and I hear
+    As there they sit at morning, side by side.
+
+                               THE FIRST VISION
+
+    _With Raxton elms behind--in front the sea_,
+       _Sitting in rosy light in that alcove_,
+       _They hear the first lark rise o'er Raxton Grove_;
+    '_What should I do with fame_, _dear heart_?' _says he_.
+    '_You talk of fame_, _poetic fame_, _to me_
+       _Whose crown is not of laurel but of love_--
+       _To me who would not give this little glove_
+    _On this dear hand for Shakspeare's dower in fee_.
+
+    _While_, _rising red and kindling every billow_,
+       _The sun's shield shines_ '_neath many a golden spear_,
+    _To lean with you against this leafy pillow_,
+       _To murmur words of love in this loved ear_--
+    _To feel you bending like a bending willow_,
+       _This is to be a poet_--_this_, _my dear_!'
+
+    O God, to die and leave her--die and leave
+       The heaven so lately won!--And then, to know
+       What misery will be hers--what lonely woe!--
+    To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieve
+    Will make me a coward as I sink, and cleave
+       To life though Destiny has bid me go.
+       How shall I bear the pictures that will glow
+    Above the glowing billows as they heave?
+
+    One picture fades, and now above the spray
+       Another shines: ah, do I know the bowers
+       Where that sweet woman stands--the woodland flowers,
+    In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay--
+       That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hours
+    Wore angel-wings,--till portents brought dismay?
+
+                              THE SECOND VISION
+
+    _Proud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel_,
+       _She smiles on him_--_on him_, _the prouder giver_,
+       _As there they stand beside the sunlit river_
+    _Where petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel_:
+    _The chirping reed-birds_, _in their play or quarrel_,
+       _Make musical the stream where lilies quiver_--
+       _Ah_! _suddenly he feels her slim waist shiver_:
+    _She speaks_: _her lips grow grey_--_her lips of coral_!
+
+    '_From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are swaying_,
+       _The seeds of which that gypsy girl has spoken_--
+       '_Tis fairy grass_, _alas_! _the lover's token_.'
+    _She lifts her fingers to her forehead_, _saying_,
+       '_Touch the twin hearts_.'  _Says he_, ''_Tis idle playing_':
+       _He touches them_; _they fall_--_fall bruised and broken_.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    Shall I turn coward here who sailed with Death
+       Through many a tempest on mine own North Sea,
+       And quail like him of old who bowed the knee--
+    Faithless--to billows of Genesereth?
+    Did I turn coward when my very breath
+       Froze on my lips that Alpine night when he
+       Stood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,
+    While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?
+
+    Each billow bears me nearer to the verge
+       Of realms where she is not--where love must wait.--
+    If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urge
+       That friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,
+       To come and help me, or to share my fate.
+    Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.
+
+                             [The dog, plunging into the tide and striking
+                                towards him with immense strength, reaches
+                                                 him and swims round him.]
+
+    Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of paw
+       Here gazing like your namesake, 'Snowdon's Hound,'
+       When great Llewelyn's child could not be found,
+    And all the warriors stood in speechless awe--
+    Mute as your namesake when his master saw
+       The cradle tossed--the rushes red around--
+       With never a word, but only a whimpering sound
+    To tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.
+
+    In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,
+       Should I, brave friend, have needed other speech
+    Than this dear whimper?  Is there not a bond
+       Stronger than words that binds us each to each?--
+    But Death has caught us both.  'Tis far beyond
+       The strength of man or dog to win the beach.
+
+    Through tangle-weed--through coils of slippery kelp
+       Decking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyes
+       Shine true--shine deep of love's divine surmise
+    As hers who gave you--then a Titan whelp!
+    I think you know my danger and would help!
+       See how I point to yonder smack that lies
+       At anchor--Go!  His countenance replies.
+    Hope's music rings in Gelert's eager yelp!
+
+                                [The dog swims swiftly away down the tide.
+
+    Now, life and love and death swim out with him!
+       If he should reach the smack, the men will guess
+       The dog has left his master in distress.
+    You taught him in these very waves to swim--
+    'The prince of pups,' you said, 'for wind and limb'--
+       And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.
+
+                                    ENVOY
+
+    (The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the sand.)
+
+    'Twas in no glittering tourney's mimic strife,--
+       'Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,
+       While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,
+    And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife--
+    'Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,
+       Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove
+       Conquered and found his foe a soul to love,
+    Found friendship--Life's great second crown of life.
+
+    So I this morning love our North Sea more
+       Because he fought me well, because these waves
+    Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore
+       Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves
+       That yawned above my head like conscious graves--
+    I love him as I never loved before.
+
+In these days when so much is written about the intelligence of the lower
+animals, when 'Hans,' the 'thinking horse,' is 'interviewed' by eminent
+scientists, the exploit of the Second Gelert is not without interest.  I
+may, perhaps, mention a strange experience of my own.  The late Betts
+Bey, a well-known figure in St. Peter's Port, Guernsey, had a fine black
+retriever, named Caro.  During a long summer holiday which we spent in
+Guernsey, Caro became greatly attached to a friend, and Betts Bey
+presented him to her.  He was a magnificent fellow, valiant as a lion,
+and a splendid diver and swimmer.  He often plunged off the parapet of
+the bridge which spans the Serpentine.  Indeed, he would have dived from
+any height.  His intelligence was surprising.  If we wished to make him
+understand that he was not to accompany us, we had only to say, 'Caro, we
+are going to church!'  As soon as he heard the word 'church' his barks
+would cease, his tail would drop, and he would look mournfully resigned.
+One evening, as I was writing in my room, Caro began to scratch outside
+the door, uttering those strange 'woof-woofs' which were his canine
+language.  I let him in, but he would not rest.  He stood gazing at me
+with an intense expression, and, turning towards the door, waited
+impatiently.  For some time I took no notice of his dumb appeal, but his
+excitement increased, and suddenly a vague sense of ill seemed to pass
+from him into my mind.  Drawn half-consciously I rose, and at once with a
+strange half-human whine Caro dashed upstairs.  I followed him.  He ran
+into a bedroom, and there in the dark I found my friend lying
+unconscious.  It is well-nigh certain that Caro thus saved my friend's
+life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+LONDON
+
+
+BETWEEN Mr. Watts-Dunton and the brother who came next to him, before
+mentioned, there was a very great affection, although the difference
+between them, mentally and physically, was quite noticeable.  They were
+articled to their father on the same day and admitted solicitors on the
+same day, a very unusual thing with solicitors and their sons.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton afterwards passed a short term in one of the great
+conveyancing offices in London in order to become proficient in
+conveyancing.  His brother did the same in another office in Bedford Row;
+but he afterwards practised for himself.  Mr. A. E. Watts soon had a
+considerable practice as family solicitor and conveyancer.  Mr. Hake
+identifies him with Cyril Aylwin, but before I quote Mr. Hake's
+interesting account of him, I will give the vivid description of Cyril in
+'Aylwin':--
+
+    "Juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wideawake.  He
+    had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he
+    gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the
+    little crow's feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately
+    as being probably on the verge of thirty-five.  His figure was slim
+    and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall.  I should have
+    considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and
+    sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an
+    impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often
+    produce.  This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek
+    which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of
+    sedateness . . . but in the one glance I had got from those watchful,
+    sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to
+    them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable."
+
+Cyril Aylwin was at first thought to be a portrait of Whistler, which is
+not quite so outrageously absurd as the wild conjecture that William
+Morris was the original of Wilderspin.  Mr. Hake says:--
+
+    "I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been
+    inquired about more than any other in the book.  I knew him, I think,
+    even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group.  He was
+    a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton's--Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts.  He lived
+    at Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly
+    after I had met him at a wedding party.  Among the set in which I
+    moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist.
+    His style of humour always struck me as being more American than
+    English.  While bringing out humorous things that would set a dinner
+    table in a roar, he would himself maintain a perfectly unmoved
+    countenance.  And it was said of him, as 'Wilderspin' says of 'Cyril
+    Aylwin,' that he was never known to laugh." {88}
+
+After a time Mr. Watts-Dunton joined his brother, and the two practised
+together in London.  They also lived together at Sydenham.  Some time
+after this, however, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to abandon the law for
+literature.  The brothers migrated to Sydenham, because at that time Mr.
+Watts-Dunton pursued music with an avidity and interest which threatened
+for a time to interfere with those literary energies which it was now his
+intention to exercise.  At that time the orchestral concerts at the
+Crystal Palace under Manns, given every morning and every afternoon, were
+a great attraction to music lovers, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, who lived close
+by, rarely missed either the morning or the afternoon concert.  It was in
+this way that he became steeped in German music; and afterwards, when he
+became intimate with Dr. F. Hueffer, the musical critic of the 'Times,'
+and the exponent of Wagner in Great Britain, he became a thorough
+Wagnerian.
+
+It was during this time, and through the extraordinary social attractions
+of his brother, that Mr. Watts-Dunton began to move very much in London
+life, and saw a great deal of what is called London society.  After his
+brother's death he took chambers in Great James Street, close to Mr.
+Swinburne, with whom he had already become intimate.  And according to
+Mr. Hake, in his paper in 'T. P.'s Weekly' above quoted from, it was here
+that he wrote 'Aylwin.'  I have already alluded to his record of this
+most interesting event:--
+
+    "I have just read," he says, "with the greatest interest the article
+    in your number of Sept. 18, 1903, called 'How Authors Work Best.'
+    But the following sentence in it set me reflecting: 'Flaubert took
+    ten years to write and repolish "Madame Bovary," Watts-Dunton twenty
+    years to write, recast, and conclude "Aylwin."'  The statement about
+    'Aylwin' has often been made, and in these days of hasty production
+    it may well be taken by the author as a compliment; but it is as
+    entirely apocryphal as that about Scott's brother having written the
+    Waverley Novels, and as that about Bramwell Bronte having written
+    'Wuthering Heights.'  As to 'Aylwin,' I happen to be in a peculiarly
+    authoritative position to speak upon the genesis of this very popular
+    book.  If any one were to peruse the original manuscript of the story
+    he would find it in four different handwritings--my late father's,
+    and two of my brothers', but principally in mine.
+
+    Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that its
+    composition did not take twenty years to achieve.  It was dictated to
+    us."
+
+Dr. Gordon Hake is mainly known as the 'parable poet,' but as a fact he
+was a physician of extraordinary talent, who had practised first at Bury
+St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, until he partly retired to
+be private physician to the late Lady Ripon.  After her death he left
+practice altogether in order to devote himself to literature, for which
+he had very great equipments.  As 'Aylwin' touched upon certain subtle
+nervous phases it must have been a great advantage to the author to
+dictate these portions of the story to so skilled and experienced a
+friend.  The rare kind of cerebral exaltation into which Henry Aylwin
+passed after his appalling experience in the Cove, in which the entire
+nervous system was disturbed, was not what is known as brain fever.  The
+record of it in 'Aylwin' is, I understand, a literal account of a rare
+and wonderful case brought under the professional notice of Dr. Hake.
+
+As physician to Rossetti, a few years after the death of his beloved
+wife, Dr. Hake's services must have been priceless to the poet-painter;
+for, as is only too well known, Rossetti's grief for the death of his
+wife had for some time a devastating effect upon his mind.  It was one of
+the causes of that terrible insomnia to relieve himself from which he
+resorted to chloral, though later on the attacks upon him by certain foes
+intensified the distressing ailment.  The insomnia produced fits of
+melancholia, an ailment, according to the skilled opinion of Dr. Hake,
+more difficult than all others to deal with; for when the nervous system
+has sunk to a certain state of depression, the mind roams over the
+universe, as it were, in quest of imaginary causes for the depression.
+This accounts for the 'cock and bull' stories that were somewhat rife
+immediately after Rossetti's death about his having expressed remorse on
+account of his ill-treatment of his wife.  No one of his intimates took
+the least notice of these wild and whirling words.  For he would express
+remorse on account of the most fantastic things when the fits of
+melancholia were upon him; and when these fits were past he would smile
+at the foolish things he had said.  I get this knowledge from a very high
+authority, Dr. Hake's son--Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, before mentioned--who
+knew Rossetti intimately from 1871 until his death, having lived under
+the same roof with him at Cheyne Walk, Bognor and Kelmscott.  After
+Rossetti's most serious attack of melancholia, his relations and friends
+persuaded him to stay with Dr. Hake at Roehampton, and it was there that
+the terrible crisis of his illness was passed.
+
+It is interesting to know that in the original form of 'Aylwin' the
+important part taken in the development of the story by D'Arcy was taken
+by Dr. Hake, under the name of Gordon, and that afterwards, when all
+sorts of ungenerous things were written about Rossetti, D'Arcy was
+substituted for Gordon in order to give the author an opportunity of
+bringing out and showing the world the absolute nobility and charm of
+Rossetti's character.
+
+    [Picture: A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Painted and Carved
+                                 Cabinet]
+
+Among the many varieties of life which Mr. Watts-Dunton saw at this time
+was life in the slums; and this was long before the once fashionable
+pastime of 'slumming' was invented.  The following lines in Dr. Hake's
+'New Day' allude to the deep interest that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
+shown in the poor--shown years before the writers who now deal with the
+slums had written a line.  Artistically, they are not fair specimens of
+Dr. Gordon Hake's verses, but nevertheless it is interesting to quote
+them here:--
+
+    Know you a widow's home? an orphanage?
+          A place of shelter for the crippled poor?
+    Did ever limbless men your care engage
+       Whom you assisted of your larger store?
+    Know you the young who are to early die--
+       At their frail form sinks not your heart within?
+    Know you the old who paralytic lie
+       While you the freshness of your life begin?
+    Know you the great pain-bearers who long carry
+       The bullet in the breast that does not kill?
+    And those who in the house of madness tarry,
+       Beyond the blest relief of human skill?
+    These have you visited, all these assisted,
+    In the high ranks of charity enlisted.
+
+That Mr. Watts-Dunton has retained his interest in the poor is shown by
+the sonnet, 'Father Christmas in Famine Street,' which was originally
+printed as 'an appeal' on Christmas Eve in the 'Athenaeum':--
+
+    When Father Christmas went down Famine Street
+       He saw two little sisters: one was trying
+       To lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,
+    Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.
+
+    From out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweet
+       Leapt, as in answer to the other's sighing,
+       While came a murmur, 'Don't 'ee keep on crying--
+    I wants to die: you'll get my share to eat.'
+    Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the city
+    Hymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,
+       Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.
+    Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,
+        'They do His bidding--if in thrifty fashion:
+    They let the little children go to Him.'
+
+With this sonnet should be placed that entitled, 'Dickens Returns on
+Christmas Day':--
+
+    A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: 'Dickens dead?
+    Then will Father Christmas die too?'--June 9, 1870.
+
+    'Dickens is dead!'  Beneath that grievous cry
+       London seemed shivering in the summer heat;
+       Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:
+    'Dickens is dead!' said they, and hurried by;
+    Street children stopped their games--they knew not why,
+       But some new night seemed darkening down the street.
+       A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,
+    Cried, 'Dickens dead?  Will Father Christmas die?'
+
+    City he loved, take courage on thy way!
+       He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.
+    Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey--
+       Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,
+       Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears--
+    Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!
+
+Let me say here, parenthetically, that 'The Pines' is so far out of date
+that for twenty-five years it has been famous for its sympathy with the
+Christmas sentiment which now seems to be fading, as this sonnet shows:--
+
+                      THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT 'THE PINES.'
+
+    Life still hath one romance that naught can bury--
+       Not Time himself, who coffins Life's romances--
+       For still will Christmas gild the year's mischances,
+    If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry--
+    To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry--
+       To smile with eyes outshining by their glances
+       The Christmas tree--to dance with fairy dances
+    And crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.
+
+    And as to us, dear friend, the carols sung
+       Are fresh as ever.  Bright is yonder bough
+    Of mistletoe as that which shone and swung
+       When you and I and Friendship made a vow
+       That Childhood's Christmas still should seal each brow--
+    Friendship's, and yours, and mine--and keep us young.
+
+I may also quote from 'Prophetic Pictures at Venice' this romantic
+description of the Rosicrucian Christmas:--
+
+    (The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called 'The
+    Rosy Scar,' depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine
+    galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of
+    Rosenkreutz, as a 'rosy phantom.'  The Lover reads aloud the
+    descriptive verses on the frame.)
+
+    While Night's dark horses waited for the wind,
+       He stood--he shone--where Sunset's fiery glaives
+       Flickered behind the clouds; then, o'er the waves,
+    He came to them, Faith's remnant sorrow-thinned.
+    The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,
+       Cried, 'Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?
+       Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,
+    The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.'
+
+    All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;
+       Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,
+    Flushed the grey sky--flushed sea and sail and spar,
+       Flushed, blessing every slave's woe-wasted cheek.
+       Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:
+    'Sufferers, take heart!  Christ lends the Rosy Scar.'
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+GEORGE BORROW
+
+
+IT was not until 1872 that Mr. Watts-Dunton was introduced to Borrow by
+Dr. Gordon Hake, Borrow's most intimate friend.
+
+The way in which this meeting came about has been familiar to the readers
+of an autobiographical romance (not even yet published!) wherein Borrow
+appears under the name of Dereham, and Hake under the name of Gordon.
+But as some of these passages in a modified form have appeared in print
+in an introduction by Mr. Watts-Dunton to the edition of Borrow's
+'Lavengro,' published by Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., in 1893, there will be
+nothing incongruous in my quoting them here:--
+
+    "Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon
+    grew up an intimacy between us.  It has been my experience to learn
+    that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference
+    of age between friends of either sex.  At that time I do not think I
+    had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on
+    terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men,
+    each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father.  Basevi
+    was one of these: so was Lineham.  I daresay it was owing to some
+    idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young
+    fellows with whom I was brought into contact was mainly confined to
+    matters connected with field-sports.  I found it far easier to be
+    brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age
+    than with men.  But as Basevi told me that it was the same with
+    himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all.  When
+    Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any
+    difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same
+    with himself.
+
+    One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near
+    Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and
+    in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons
+    came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common,
+    evidently bound for the house.
+
+    'Dereham!' I said.  'Is there a man in the world I should so like to
+    see as Dereham?'
+
+    And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in
+    the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.
+
+    'Why do you want so much to see him?' asked Gordon.
+
+    'Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the
+    Open Air.'
+
+    Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant.  But it is
+    necessary here to explain what that meaning was.
+
+    We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the
+    picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels,
+    'Cook's excursions,' etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as
+    ever it was--perhaps rarer.  It was, we believed, quite an affair of
+    individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost.
+    That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is
+    known.  Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with
+    science.  The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the
+    man of science as rarely.  I wish I could define it.  In human
+    souls--in one, perhaps, as much as in another--there is always that
+    instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is
+    always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as
+    close as may be to some other conscious thing.  In most individuals
+    this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some
+    few it is not.  There are some in every country of whom it is the
+    blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to
+    some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to 'Natura Benigna'
+    herself, closer to her whom we now call 'Inanimate Nature,' than to
+    brother, sister, wife, or friend.  Darwin among English savants, and
+    Emily Bronte among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English
+    gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the 'Children
+    of the Open Air.'  But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of
+    his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing
+    pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Bronte, the sensitivity to
+    human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love
+    passion--disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct
+    with which they were undoubtedly endowed.  I was perfectly conscious
+    that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers--that is, I
+    was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a
+    free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion
+    to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child
+    of the Open Air.
+
+    Between the true 'Children of the Open Air' and their fellows there
+    are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other
+    barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to
+    overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the
+    attempt is not found to be worth the making.  For, what this kind of
+    Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not
+    the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to
+    touch her close, soul to soul--but another ego enisled like his
+    own--sensitive, shrinking, like his own--a soul which, love him as it
+    may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the
+    universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other
+    Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations.
+    But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon
+    Nature they lavish their love, 'a most equal love' that varies no
+    more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a
+    beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns.  To them a
+    Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a
+    mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah.  A
+    balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter's
+    sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious
+    life.
+
+    To the 'Child of the Open Air' life has but few ills; poverty cannot
+    touch him.  Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will
+    go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a
+    dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky,
+    the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep.  And as life goes on, love
+    of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature
+    seems 'to know him and love him' in her turn.
+
+    Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no
+    retreating, and we were introduced.
+
+    He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much
+    annoyed.  Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that
+    drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still.
+    My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling
+    of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible
+    barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully.  I knew from his books
+    that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way
+    directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he
+    considered that in these his own special directions lay all the
+    knowledge that was of any value.  Accordingly, what appeared to
+    Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was
+    its ignorance.  Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk
+    of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be
+    'prying,' though there I should have been quite at home.  I knew,
+    however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet
+    literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of
+    eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned,
+    and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction.  I
+    touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect.  Dereham
+    evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar
+    with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail.  Then I
+    touched upon beer, the British bruiser, 'gentility nonsense,' and
+    other 'nonsense'; then upon etymology--traced hoity-toityism to
+    'toit,' a roof--but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with
+    a withering smile.  I tried other subjects in the same direction, but
+    with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of
+    Ambrose Gwinett.  There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet
+    narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having
+    been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had
+    shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night,
+    escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and
+    afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been
+    hanged for murdering.  The truth was that Gwinett's supposed victim,
+    having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding
+    at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes' walk in
+    the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to
+    sea, where he had been in service ever since.  I introduced the
+    subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold's play upon it, and
+    at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.
+
+    We all went out of the house and looked over the common.  It chanced
+    that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the
+    sunken road opposite to Gordon's house.  These same gypsies, by the
+    by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared
+    in the 'Graphic.'  Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they
+    were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but
+    basket-makers.  After passing this group we went on the common.  We
+    did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty
+    figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them,
+    striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now
+    stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose
+    lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now
+    stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.
+
+    After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham's suggestion,
+    for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the
+    'Bald-Faced Stag' in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should
+    introduce me to Jerry Abershaw's sword, which was one of the special
+    glories of that once famous hostelry.  A divine summer day it was I
+    remember--a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been
+    tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from
+    an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at
+    the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
+
+    These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a
+    rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the
+    meadows on the left breathe more freely.  In a word, it was one of
+    those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was
+    Dereham's special delight.  He liked rain, but he liked it falling on
+    the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a
+    summer storm) he generally carried.  As we entered the Robin Hood
+    Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical
+    and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us
+    there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a
+    rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on
+    the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away.
+    Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in
+    connection with the rainbow--how, by making a 'trus'hul' (cross) of
+    two sticks, the Romany chi who 'pens the dukkerin can wipe the
+    rainbow out of the sky,' etc.  Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a
+    man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into
+    a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record,
+    upon the subject of the 'Spirit of the Rainbow' which I, as a child,
+    went out to find.
+
+    Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree.  I
+    found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar
+    with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers,
+    seemed to shine in the sun like metal.  Of course, I observed him
+    closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the
+    silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under
+    his arm, a true 'Child of the Open Air.'
+
+    'Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green
+    umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?' I murmured to
+    Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the
+    Park, said in a dreamy way, 'Old England!  Old England!'
+
+    It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham's
+    arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the
+    trees, 'Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?'  And then, calling to
+    mind the books he had written, I said: 'He went into the Dingle, and
+    lived alone--went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as
+    Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond.  He could enjoy living alone,
+    for the 'horrors' to which he was occasionally subject did not spring
+    from solitary living.  He was never disturbed by passion as was the
+    Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi
+    Lovell, and as Emily Bronte would certainly have been had she been
+    placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Bronte placed Shirley.'
+
+    'But the most damning thing of all,' said Gordon, 'is that umbrella,
+    gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.'
+
+    'Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,' said I.
+    'So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is
+    quite beyond his powers.  Picturesque he always is, powerful never.
+    No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story
+    finds himself able to realize from Dereham's description the misery
+    of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East
+    Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with
+    starvation staring him in the face.  It is not passion,' I said to
+    Gordon, 'that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the
+    Nature-worshipper.  It is Ambition!  His books show that he could
+    never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition.
+    To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was
+    as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander
+    Smith's poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.'
+
+    'Ambition and the green gamp,' said Gordon.  'But look, the rainbow
+    is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries;
+    and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the
+    light.'
+
+    But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open
+    Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human
+    kind which the 'Child of the Open Air' must needs lack.
+
+    Knowing Dereham's extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of
+    meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close
+    to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the
+    terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that
+    walk.  But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why
+    Dereham should at once take to me--reasons that had nothing whatever
+    to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
+
+    By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon
+    Dereham's character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
+
+    Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably
+    had their nests.  By the expression on Dereham's face as he stood and
+    gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
+
+    'Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was
+    drained?' I said.
+
+    'I should think so,' said he dreamily, 'and every kind of water
+    bird.'
+
+    Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, 'But how
+    do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?'
+
+    'You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of
+    Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.'
+
+    'I don't mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,' he said.
+
+    'No,' said I, 'but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at
+    Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.'
+
+    'Then you know Whittlesea Mere?' said Dereham, much interested.
+
+    'I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,' I
+    said, 'and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know
+    the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized.  He
+    was a generation before my time.  Indeed, I never was thrown much
+    across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of
+    the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.'
+
+    I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave
+    him Marcianus's story about the Moors being invulnerable to the
+    viper's bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected
+    child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper--as he, Dereham,
+    when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
+
+    'The gypsies,' said Dereham, 'always believed me to be a Romany.  But
+    surely you are not a Romany Rye?'
+
+    'No,' I said, 'but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it
+    has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and
+    low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?'
+
+    'I should think not,' said Dereham indignantly.
+
+    'But I hope you don't know the literary class among the rest.'
+
+    'Gordon is my only link to that dark world,' I said, 'and even you
+    don't object to Gordon.  I am purer than he, purer than you, from the
+    taint of printers' ink.'
+
+    He laughed.  'Who are you?'
+
+    'The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child
+    in short frocks,' I said, 'and have never yet found an answer.  But
+    Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself
+    with any such troublesome query.'
+
+    This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as
+    these had been able to take no part.  The humorous mystery of Man's
+    personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in
+    many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere.  At once he threw himself
+    into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly
+    vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
+    gypsies and East Anglia.
+
+    'You are an Englishman?' said Dereham.
+
+    'Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,' I said, using a
+    phrase of his own in one of his books--'if not a thorough East
+    Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.'
+
+    'Nearly,' said Dereham.
+
+    And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
+    'Shales mare,' a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who
+    could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk
+    farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and
+    when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare
+    with myself behind her in a dogcart--an East Anglian dogcart; when I
+    praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth,
+    Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most
+    buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told
+    him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the
+    rainbow he loved was 'the glassy Ouse' of East Anglia, and the only
+    place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was
+    the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing
+    that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East
+    Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment
+    we became friends.
+
+    Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance.  He
+    turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity
+    between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon
+    a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the
+    distance.
+
+    'It is on sand alone,' said Dereham, 'that the sea strikes its true
+    music--Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.'
+
+    'The best of the sea's lutes,' I said, 'is made by the sands of
+    Cromer.'"
+
+These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above
+quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus
+described by the 'Gordon' of the story in one of the sonnets in 'The New
+Day':--
+
+    And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!
+       How often 'mid the deer that grazed the park,
+    Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,
+       Made musical with many a soaring lark,
+    Have we not held brisk commune with him there,
+       While Lavengro, there towering by your side,
+    With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
+       Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
+    To tell the legends of the fading race--
+       As at the summons of his piercing glance,
+    Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
+       While you called up that pendant of romance
+    To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
+    Your Amazonian Sinfi's noble story!
+
+In the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and in Chambers' 'Cyclopaedia of
+English Literature,' and scattered through scores of articles in the
+'Athenaeum,' I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without
+number.  They afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man
+that exists or is ever likely to exist.  But, of course, it is quite
+impossible for me to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many
+more important figures waiting to be introduced.  Still, I must find room
+for the most brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush
+these pages with a colour which I feel they need.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+been described as the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in
+verse or in prose, and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but
+never, I think, is he so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.
+
+I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of gypsy life is
+to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England
+where East Anglia and the Midlands join.  It adds interest to the
+incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona
+Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow.  This also is a chapter from
+the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to
+be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow's books:--
+
+    "It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with
+    what Dereham called 'gypsy gold,' and the bright green of the foliage
+    showed scarcely a touch of bronze--at that very moment, indeed, when
+    the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and
+    the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their
+    half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy,
+    and pimpernel.  Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man
+    could give.  He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of
+    gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days.  In
+    conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I
+    chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume
+    of Matthew Arnold in which appears 'The Scholar-Gypsy.'  Dereham said
+    he well remembered my directing his attention to 'The Scholar-Gypsy.'
+    After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was
+    scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever
+    the merits of Matthew Arnold's poem might be, from any supposed
+    artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of
+    the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or
+    even understand its motive in the least degree.  I challenged this,
+    contending that howsoever Arnold's classic language might soar above
+    a gypsy's intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the
+    most illiterate person could grasp it.
+
+    'I wish,' said Dereham, 'you would come with me to the camp and try
+    the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp.
+    As to gypsy men,' said he, 'they are too prosaic to furnish a fair
+    test.'
+
+    We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became
+    very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense,
+    and many other pet subjects of his.  I already knew that he was no
+    lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the
+    'trumpery great,' although in other regards he was such a John Bull.
+    By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition.
+    As we were walking along, Dereham's eyes, which were as longsighted
+    as a gypsy's, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush
+    some distance off.  He stopped and said: 'At first I thought that
+    white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it's a
+    magpie,'--next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies' most famous bird.
+    On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the
+    leaves.  As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: 'It is
+    wounded--or else dying--or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?'
+    'Hawk!' said Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed
+    into the sky.  'The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his
+    quarry and made his meal.  I fancied he has himself been 'chivvied'
+    by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.'
+
+    And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that
+    speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk--one of the kind which takes its
+    prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands--was wheeling up
+    and up, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to
+    swoop at and devour it.  That the magpie had seen the hawk and had
+    been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident,
+    for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest
+    birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk.
+    Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.
+
+    As we were gazing at the bird a woman's voice at our elbows said,--
+
+    'It's lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie.  I shall stop
+    here till the hawk's flew away.'
+
+    We turned round, and there stood a fine young gypsy woman, carrying,
+    gypsy fashion, a weakly child that in spite of its sallow and wasted
+    cheek proclaimed itself to be hers.  By her side stood a young gypsy
+    girl.  She was beautiful--quite remarkably so--but her beauty was not
+    of the typical Romany kind.  It was, as I afterwards learned, more
+    like the beauty of a Capri girl.
+
+    She was bareheaded--there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her
+    head--her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a
+    gypsy girl's hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the
+    back of her neck and upon her shoulders.  In the tumbled tresses
+    glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.
+    They were small dead dragonflies, of the crimson kind called
+    'sylphs.'
+
+    To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known.  The woman with
+    the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what was her
+    connection, if any, with 'Boswell the Great'--I mean Sylvester
+    Boswell, the grammarian and 'well-known and popalated gypsy of
+    Codling Gap,' who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about
+    the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, 'on the
+    accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of
+    Nature's life.'
+
+    Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was Perpinia, and that the
+    other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, was the famous beauty of
+    the neighbourhood--Rhona Boswell, of whom many stories had reached
+    him with regard to Percy Aylwin, a relative of Rosamond's father.
+
+    After greeting the two, Dereham looked at the weakling child with the
+    deepest interest, and said to the mother: 'This chavo ought not to
+    look like that--with such a mother as you, Perpinia.'  'And with such
+    a daddy, too,' said she.  'Mike's stronger for a man nor even I am
+    for a woman'--a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; 'and as
+    to good looks, it's him as has got the good looks, not me.  But none
+    on us can't make it out about the chavo.  He's so weak and sick he
+    don't look as if he belonged to Boswell's breed at all.'
+
+    'How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?' said I, looking at
+    the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia's finely cut
+    lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.
+
+    'Can't say,' said she, laughing.
+
+    'About as many as she can afford to buy,' interrupted 'the beauty of
+    the Ouse,' as Rhona Boswell was called.  'That's all.  Mike don't
+    like her a-smokin'.  He says it makes her look like a old Londra
+    Irish woman in Common Garding Market.'
+
+    'You must not smoke another pipe,' said I to the mother--'not another
+    pipe till the child leaves the breast.'
+
+    'What?' said Perpinia defiantly.  'As if I could live without my
+    pipe!'
+
+    'Fancy Pep a-living without her baccy!' laughed Rhona.
+
+    'Your child can't live with it,' said I to Perpinia.  'That pipe of
+    yours is full of a poison called nicotine.'
+
+    'Nick what?' said Rhona, laughing.  'That's a new kind of nick.  Why,
+    you smoke yourself!'
+
+    'Nicotine,' said I.  'And the first part of Pep's body that the
+    poison gets into is her breast, and--'
+
+    'Gets into my burk,' {112} said Perpinia.  'Get along wi' ye.'
+
+    'Yes.'
+
+    'Do it pison Pep's milk?' said Rhona.
+
+    'Yes.'
+
+    'That ain't true,' said Perpinia--'can't be true.'
+
+    'It is true,' said I.  'If you don't give up that pipe for a time,
+    the child will die, or else be a ricketty thing all his life.  If you
+    do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your
+    husband can be.'
+
+    'Chavo agin pipe, Pep!' said Rhona.
+
+    'Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,' said Dereham, in that
+    hail-fellow-well-met tone of his, which he reserved for the
+    Romanies--a tone which no Romany could ever resist.  And he took it
+    gently from the woman's lips.  'Don't smoke any more till I come to
+    the camp and see the chavo again.'
+
+    'He be's a good friend to the Romanies,' said Rhona, in an appeasing
+    tone.
+
+    'That's true,' said the woman; 'but he's no business to take my pipe
+    out o' my mouth for all that.'
+
+    She soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain the
+    pipe.  Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty high-road
+    leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona.  Perpinia remained,
+    keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking
+    child.
+
+    It was determined now that Rhona was the very person to be used as
+    the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold's poem, for she was
+    exceptionally intelligent.  So instead of going to the camp, the
+    oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse,
+    and heather towards 'Kingfisher brook,' and when we reached it we sat
+    down on a fallen tree.
+
+    Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl so much,
+    in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a story either
+    told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from my pocket the
+    gypsy girl began to clap her hands.  Her anticipation of enjoyment
+    sent over her face a warm glow.
+
+    Her complexion, though darker than an English girl's, was rather
+    lighter than an ordinary gypsy's.  Her eyes were of an indescribable
+    hue; but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for me,
+    described it as a mingling of pansy purple and dark tawny.  The
+    pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped
+    and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both
+    above and below, and this had the peculiar effect of making the eyes
+    seem always a little contracted and just about to smile.  The great
+    size and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem
+    smaller than it really was; they also lessened the apparent size of
+    the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she
+    laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.
+
+    Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried,
+    'Look at the Devil's needles!  They're come to sew my eyes up for
+    killing their brothers.'
+
+    And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky
+    blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a
+    rainbow gauze, caught the sun as he swept dazzling by, did really
+    seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by
+    the lights shed from the girl's eyes.
+
+    'I dussn't set here,' said she.  'Us Romanies call this 'Dragon-fly
+    Brook.'  And that's the king o' the dragon-flies: he lives here.'
+
+    As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a
+    dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some
+    green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to
+    justify their Romany name and sew up the girl's eyes.
+
+    'The Romanies call them the Devil's needles,' said Dereham; 'their
+    business is to sew up pretty girls' eyes.'
+
+    In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while
+    sat down again to listen to the 'lil,' as she called the story.
+
+   [Picture: A Letter Box on the Broads.  (From an Oil Painting at 'The
+                                Pines.')]
+
+    Glanville's prose story, upon which Arnold's poem is based, was read
+    first.  In this Rhona was much interested.  But when I went on to
+    read to her Arnold's poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at
+    the lovely bits of description--for the country about Oxford is quite
+    remarkably like the country in which she was born--she looked sadly
+    bewildered, and then asked to have it all read again.  After a second
+    reading she said in a meditative way: 'Can't make out what the lil's
+    all about--seems all about nothink!  Seems to me that the pretty
+    sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o' her skin for joy makes
+    this 'ere gorgio want to cry.  What a rum lot gorgios is surely!'
+
+    And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility
+    of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and
+    laughing aloud.
+
+    'Let's go to the camp!' said Dereham.  'That was all true about the
+    nicotine--was it not?'
+
+    'Partly, I think,' said I, 'but not being a medical man I must not be
+    too emphatic.  If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for
+    any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.'
+
+    'Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,'
+    growled Dereham.  'Fancy kissing a woman's mouth that smelt of stale
+    tobacco--pheugh!'"
+
+After giving these two delightful descriptions of Borrow and his
+environment, I will now quote Mr. Watts-Dunton's description of their
+last meeting:--
+
+    'The last time I ever saw Borrow was shortly before he left London to
+    live in the country.  It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge,
+    where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking
+    splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and
+    boiling over the West End.  Borrow came up and stood leaning over the
+    parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be.  Like most
+    people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets.  Turner
+    could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could
+    not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun
+    and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose
+    above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the
+    sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a
+    golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and
+    clearest air--a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply.  I never
+    saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and
+    from its association with 'the last of Borrow' I shall never forget
+    it.'
+
+                        A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE
+                     THE LAST SIGHT OF GEORGE BORROW
+
+    We talked of 'Children of the Open Air,'
+       Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
+       Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
+    Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
+    Till, on a day, across the mystic bar
+       Of moonrise, came the 'Children of the Roof,'
+       Who find no balm 'neath evening's rosiest woof,
+    Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.
+
+    We looked o'er London where men wither and choke,
+       Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
+       And lore of woods and wild wind-prophecies--
+    Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
+    And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
+       Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.
+
+While the noble music of this double valediction in poetry and prose is
+sounding in our ears, my readers and I, 'with wandering steps and slow,'
+may also fitly take our reluctant leave of George Borrow.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+THE ACTED DRAMA
+
+
+IT was during the famous evenings in Dr. Marston's house at Chalk Farm
+that Mr. Watts-Dunton was for the first time brought into contact with
+the theatrical world.  I do not know that he was ever closely connected
+with that world, but in the set in which he specially moved at this time
+he seems to have been almost the only one who was a regular playgoer and
+first-nighter, for Rossetti's playgoing days were nearly over, and Mr.
+Swinburne never was a playgoer.  Mr. Watts-Dunton still takes, as may be
+seen in his sonnet to Ellen Terry, which I shall quote, a deep interest
+in the acted drama and in the acting profession, although of late years
+he has not been much seen at the theatres.  When, after a while, he and
+Minto were at work on the 'Examiner' Mr. Watts-Dunton occasionally,
+although I think rarely, wrote a theatrical critique for that paper.  The
+only one I have had an opportunity of reading is upon Miss Neilson--not
+the Miss Julia Neilson who is so much admired in our day; but the
+powerful, dark-eyed creole-looking beauty, Lilian Adelaide Neilson, who,
+after being a mill-hand and a barmaid, became a famous tragedian, and
+made a great impression in Juliet, and in impassioned poetical parts of
+that kind.  The play in which she appeared on that occasion was a play by
+Tom Taylor, called 'Anne Boleyn,' in which Miss Neilson took the part of
+the heroine.  It was given at the Haymarket in February 1876.  I do not
+remember reading any criticism in which so much admirable writing--acute,
+brilliant, and learned--was thrown away upon so mediocre a play.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's remarks upon Miss Neilson's acting were, however, not
+thrown away, for the subject seems to have been fully worthy of them; and
+I, who love the acted drama myself, regret that the actress's early death
+in 1880, robbed me of the pleasure of seeing her.  She was one of the
+actresses whom Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet on Sunday evenings at
+Marston's, and I have heard him say that her genius was as apparent in
+her conversation as in her acting.  Miss Corkran has recently sketched
+one of these meetings, and has given us a graphic picture of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton there, contrasting his personal appearance with that of Mr.
+Swinburne.  They must indeed have been delightful gatherings to a lover
+of the theatre, for there Miss Neilson, Miss Glyn, Miss Ada Cavendish,
+and others were to be met--met in the company of Irving, Sothern, Hermann
+Vezin, and many another famous actor.
+
+That Mr. Watts-Dunton had a peculiar insight into histrionic art was
+shown by what occurred on his very first appearance at the Marston
+evenings, whither he was taken by his friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, who used
+to tell the following story with great humour; and Rossetti also used to
+repeat it with still greater gusto.  I am here again indebted to his son,
+Mr. Hake--who was also a friend of Dr. Marston, Ada Cavendish, and
+others--for interesting reminiscences of these Marston evenings which
+have never been published.  Mr. Watts-Dunton at that time was, of course,
+quite unknown, except in a very small circle of literary men and artists.
+Three or four dramatic critics, several poets, and two actresses, one of
+whom was Ada Cavendish, were talking about Irving in 'The Bells,' which
+was a dramatization by a writer named Leopold Lewis of the 'Juif
+Polonais' of Erckmann-Chatrian.  They were all enthusiastically extolling
+Irving's acting; and this is not surprising, as all will say who have
+seen him in the part.  But while some were praising the play, others were
+running it down.  "What I say," said one of the admirers, "is that the
+motif of 'The Bells,' the use of the idea of a sort of embodied
+conscience to tell the audience the story and bring about the
+catastrophe, is the newest that has appeared in drama or fiction--it is
+entirely original."
+
+"Not entirely, I think," said a voice which, until that evening, was new
+in the circle.  They turned round to listen to what the dark-eyed young
+stranger, tanned by the sun to a kind of gypsy colour, who looked like
+William Black, quietly smoking his cigarette, had to say.
+
+"Not entirely new?" said one.  "Who was the originator, then, of the
+idea?"
+
+"I can't tell you that," said the interrupting voice, "for it occurs in a
+very old Persian story, and it was evidently old even then.  But
+Erckmann-Chatrian took it from a much later story-teller.  They adapted
+it from Chamisso."
+
+"Is that the author of 'Peter Schlemihl'?" said one.
+
+"Yes," replied Mr. Watts-Dunton, "but Chamisso was a poet before he was a
+prose writer, and he wrote a rhymed story in which the witness of a
+murder was the sunrise, and at dawn the criminal was affected in the same
+way that Matthias is affected by the sledge bells.  The idea that the
+sensorium, in an otherwise perfectly sane brain, can translate sights and
+sound into accusations of a crime is, of course, perfectly true, and in
+the play it is wonderfully given by Irving."
+
+"Well," said Dr. Marston, "that is the best account I have yet heard of
+the origin of 'The Bells.'"
+
+Then the voice of one of the disparagers of the play said: "There you
+are!  The very core of Erckmann-Chatrian's story and Lewis's play has
+been stolen and spoilt from another writer.  The acting, as I say, is
+superb--the play is rot."
+
+"Well, I do not think so," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  "I think it a new and
+a striking play."
+
+"Will you give your reasons, sir?" said Dr. Marston, in that
+old-fashioned courtly way which was one of his many charms.
+
+"Certainly," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "if it will be of any interest.  You
+recollect Coleridge's remarks upon expectation and surprise in drama.  I
+think it a striking play because I cannot recall any play in which the
+entire source of interest is that of pure expectation unadulterated by
+surprise.  From the opening dialogue, before ever the burgomaster
+appears, the audience knows that a murder has been committed, and that
+the murderer must be the burgomaster, and yet the audience is kept in
+breathless suspense through pure expectation as to whether or not the
+crime will be brought home to him, and if brought home to him, how."
+
+"Well," said the voice of one of the admirers of the play, "that is the
+best criticism of 'The Bells' I have yet heard."  After this the
+conversation turned upon Jefferson's acting of Rip Van Winkle, and many
+admirable remarks fell from a dozen lips.  When there was a pause in
+these criticisms, Dr. Marston turned to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said, "Have
+you seen Jefferson in 'Rip van Winkle,' sir?"
+
+"Yes, indeed," was the reply, "many times; and I hope to see it many more
+times.  It is wonderful.  I think it lucky that I have been able to see
+the great exemplar of what may be called the Garrick type of actor, and
+the great exemplar of what may be called the Edmund Kean type of actor."
+
+On being asked what he meant by this classification, Mr. Watts-Dunton
+launched out into one of those wide-sweeping but symmetrical monologues
+of criticism in which beginning, middle, and end, were as perfectly
+marked as though the improvization had been a well-considered essay--the
+subject being the style of acting typified by Garrick and the style of
+acting typified by Robson.  As this same idea runs through Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's criticism of Got in 'Le Roi s'Amuse' (which I shall quote
+later), there is no need to dwell upon it here.
+
+"As an instance," he said, "of Jefferson's supreme power in this line of
+acting, one might refer to Act II. of the play, where Rip mounts the
+Catskill Mountains in the company of the goblins.  Rip talks with the
+goblins one after the other, and there seems to be a dramatic dialogue
+going on.  It is not till the curtain falls that the audience realizes
+that every word spoken during that act came from the lips of Rip, so
+entirely have Jefferson's facial expression and intonation dramatized
+each goblin."
+
+Between Mr. Watts-Dunton and our great Shakespearean actress, Ellen
+Terry, there has been an affectionate friendship running over nearly a
+quarter of a century.  This is not at all surprising to one who knows
+Miss Terry's high artistic taste and appreciation of poetry.  Among the
+poems expressing that friendship, none is more pleasing than the sonnet
+that appeared in the 'Magazine of Art' to which Mr. Bernard Partridge
+contributed his superb drawing of Miss Terry in the part of Queen
+Katherine.  It is entitled, 'Queen Katherine: on seeing Miss Ellen Terry
+as Katherine in King Henry VIII':--
+
+    Seeking a tongue for tongueless shadow-land,
+       Has Katherine's soul come back with power to quell
+       A sister-soul incarnate, and compel
+    Its bodily voice to speak by Grief's command?
+    Or is it Katherine's self returns to stand
+       As erst she stood defying Wolsey's spell--
+       Returns with those vile wrongs she fain would tell
+    Which memory bore to Eden's amaranth strand?
+
+    Or is it thou, dear friend--this Queen, whose face
+       The salt of many tears hath scarred and stung?--
+       Can it be thou, whose genius, ever young,
+    Lighting the body with the spirit's grace,
+    Is loved by England--loved by all the race
+       Round all the world enlinked by Shakespeare's tongue!
+
+With one exception I do not find any dramatic criticisms by Mr.
+Watts-Dunton in the 'Athenaeum.'  Indeed, I should not expect to find him
+trenching upon the domain of the greatest dramatic critic of our time,
+Mr. Joseph Knight.  No one speaks with greater admiration of Mr. Knight
+than his friend of thirty years' standing, Mr. Watts-Dunton himself; and
+when an essay on 'King John' was required for the series of Shakespeare
+essays to accompany Mr. Edwin Abbey's famous illustrations in 'Harper's
+Magazine,' it was Mr. Knight whom Mr. Watts-Dunton invited to discuss
+this important play.  The exception I allude to is the criticism of
+Victor Hugo's 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' which appeared in the 'Athenaeum' of
+December 2, 1882.
+
+The way in which it came about that Mr. Watts-Dunton undertook for the
+'Athenaeum' so important a piece of dramatic criticism is interesting.
+In 1882 M. Vacquerie, the editor of 'Le Rappel,' a relative of Hugo's,
+and a great friend of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton, together with
+other important members of the Hugo cenacle, determined to get up a
+representation of 'Le Roi s'Amuse' on the jubilee of its first
+representation, since when it had never been acted.  Vacquerie sent two
+fauteuils, one for Mr. Swinburne and one for Mr. Watts-Dunton; and the
+two poets were present at that memorable representation.  Long before the
+appointed day there was on the Continent, from Paris to St. Petersburg,
+an unprecedented demand for seats; for it was felt that this was the most
+interesting dramatic event that had occurred for fifty years.
+
+Consequently the editor of the 'Athenaeum' for once invited his chief
+literary contributor to fill the post which the dramatic editor of the
+paper, Mr. Joseph Knight, generously yielded to him for the occasion, and
+the following article appeared:--
+
+                                                "Paris, November 23, 1882.
+
+    "I felt that the revival, at the Theatre Francais, of 'Le Roi
+    s'Amuse,' on the fiftieth anniversary of its original production,
+    must be one of the most interesting literary events of our time, and
+    so I found it to be.  Victor Hugo was there, sitting with his arms
+    folded across his breast, calm but happy, in a stage box.  He
+    expressed himself satisfied and even delighted with the acting.  The
+    poet's appearance was fuller of vitality and more Olympian than ever.
+    Between the acts he left the theatre and walked about in the square,
+    leaning on the arm of his illustrious poet friend and family
+    connection, Auguste Vacquerie, to whose kindness I was indebted for a
+    seat in the fauteuils d'orchestre, which otherwise I should have
+    found to be quite unattainable, so unprecedented was the demand for
+    places.  It is said that a thousand francs were given for a seat.
+    Never before was seen, even in a French theatre, an audience so
+    brilliant and so illustrious.  I did not, however, see any English
+    face I knew save that of Mr. Swinburne, who at the end of the third
+    act might have been seen talking to Hugo in his box.  Among the most
+    appreciative and enthusiastic of those who assisted at the
+    representation was the French poet, who perhaps in the nineteenth
+    century stands next to Hugo for intellectual massiveness, M. Leconte
+    de Lisle.  And I should say that every French poet and indeed every
+    man of eminence was there.
+
+    Considering the extraordinary nature of the piece, the cast was
+    perhaps as satisfactory as could have been hoped for.  Fond as is M.
+    Hugo of spectacular effects, and even of coups de theatre, no other
+    dramatist gives so little attention as he to the idiosyncrasies of
+    actors.  It is easy to imagine that Shakespeare in writing his lines
+    was not always unmindful of an actor like Burbage.  But in depicting
+    Triboulet, Hugo must have thought as little about the specialities of
+    Ligier, who took the part on the first night in 1832, as of the
+    future Got, who was to take it on the second night in 1882.  And the
+    same may be said of Blanche in relation to the two actresses who
+    successively took that part.  This is, I think, exactly the way in
+    which a dramatist should work.  The contrary method is not more
+    ruinous to drama as a literary form than to the actor's art.  To
+    write up to an actor's style destroys all true character-drawing;
+    also it ends by writing up to the actor's mere manner, who from that
+    moment is, as an artist, doomed.  On the whole, the performance
+    wanted more glow and animal spirits.  The Francois I of M.
+    Mounet-Sully was full of verve, but this actor's voice is so
+    exceedingly rich and emotional that the king seemed more poetic, and
+    hence more sympathetic to the audience, than was consistent with a
+    character who in a sense is held up as the villain of the piece.  The
+    true villain, here, however, as in 'Torquemada,' 'Notre Dame de
+    Paris,' 'Les Miserables,' and, indeed, in all Hugo's characteristic
+    works, is not an individual at all, but Circumstance.  Circumstance
+    placed Francis, a young and pleasure-loving king, over a licentious
+    court.  Circumstance gave him a court jester with a temper which, to
+    say the least of it, was peculiar for such times as those.
+    Circumstance, acting through the agency of certain dissolute
+    courtiers, thrust into the king's very bedroom the girl whom he loved
+    and who belonged to a class from whom he had been taught to expect
+    subservience of every kind.  The tragic mischief of the rape follows
+    almost as a necessary consequence.  Add to this the fact that
+    Circumstance contrives that the girl Maguelonne, instead of aiding
+    her more conscientious brother in killing the disguised king at the
+    bidding of 'the client who pays,' falls unexpectedly in love with
+    him; while Circumstance also contrives that Blanche shall be there
+    ready at the very spot at the very moment where and when she is
+    imperatively wanted as a substituted victim;--and you get the entire
+    motif of 'Le Roi s'Amuse'--man enmeshed in a web of circumstance, the
+    motif of 'Notre Dame de Paris,' the motif of 'Torquemada,' and, in a
+    certain deep sense, perhaps the proper motif in romantic drama.  For
+    when the vis matrix of classic drama, the supernatural interference
+    of conscious Destiny, was no longer available to the artist,
+    something akin to it--something nobler and more powerful than the
+    stage villain--was found to be necessary to save tragedy from sinking
+    into melodrama.  And this explains so many of the complexities of
+    Shakespeare.
+
+    In the dramas of Victor Hugo, however, the romantic temper has
+    advanced quite as far as it ought to advance not only in the use of
+    Circumstance as the final cause of the tragic mischief, but in the
+    use of the grotesque in alliance with the terrible.  The greatest
+    masters of the terrible-grotesque till we get to the German
+    romanticists were the English dramatists of the sixteenth and the
+    early portion of the seventeenth century, and of course by far the
+    greatest among these was Shakespeare.  For the production of the
+    effect in question there is nothing comparable to the scenes in
+    'Lear' between the king and the fool--scenes which seem very early in
+    his life to have struck Hugo more than anything else in literature.
+    Outside the Elizabethan dramatists, however, there can be no doubt
+    that (leaving out of the discussion the great German masters in this
+    line) Hugo is the greatest worker in the terrible-grotesque that has
+    appeared since Burns.  I need only point to Quasimodo and Triboulet
+    and compare them not merely with such attempts in this line as those
+    of writers like Beddoes, but even with the magnificent work of Mr.
+    Browning, who though far more subtle than Hugo is without his
+    sublimity and amazing power over chiaroscuro.  Now, the most
+    remarkable feature of the revival of 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' and that which
+    made me above all other reasons desirous to see it, was that the
+    character of Triboulet was to be rendered by an actor of rare and
+    splendid genius, but who, educated in the genteel comedy of modern
+    France and also in the social subtleties of Moliere, seemed the last
+    man in Paris to give that peculiar expression of the romantic temper
+    which I have called the terrible-grotesque.
+
+    That M. Got's success in a part so absolutely unsuited to him should
+    have been as great as it was is, in my judgment, the crowning success
+    of his life.  It is as though Thackeray, after completing 'Philip,'
+    had set himself to write a romance in the style of 'Notre Dame de
+    Paris,' and succeeded in the attempt.  Yet the success of M. Got was
+    relative only, I think.  The Triboulet was not the Triboulet of the
+    reader's own imaginings, but an admirable Triboulet of the Comedie
+    Francaise.  Perhaps, however, the truth is that there is not an actor
+    in Europe who could adequately render such a character as Triboulet.
+
+    This is what I mean: all great actors are divisible into two groups,
+    which are by temperament and endowment the exact opposites of each
+    other.  There are those who, like Garrick, producing their effects by
+    means of a self-dominance and a conservation of energy akin to that
+    of Goethe in poetry, are able to render a character, coldly indeed,
+    but with matchless verisimilitude in its every nuance.  And there are
+    those who, like Edmund Kean and Robson, 'live' in the character so
+    entirely that self-dominance and conservation of energy are not
+    possible, and who, whensoever the situation becomes very intense,
+    work miracles of representation by sheer imaginative abandon, but do
+    so at the expense of that delicacy of light and shade in the entire
+    conception which is the great quest of the actor as an artist.  And
+    if it should be found that in order to render Triboulet there is
+    requisite for the more intense crises of the piece the abandon of
+    Kean and Robson, and at the same time, for the carrying on of the
+    play, the calm, self-conscious staying power of Garrick, the
+    conclusion will be obvious that Triboulet is essentially an unactable
+    character.  I will illustrate this by an instance.  The reader will
+    remember that in the third act of 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' Triboulet's
+    daughter Blanche, after having been violated by the king at the
+    Louvre, rushes into the antechamber, where stands her father
+    surrounded by the group of sneering courtiers who, unknown both to
+    the king and to Triboulet, have abducted her during the night and set
+    her in the king's way.  When the girl tells her father of the
+    terrible wrong that has been done to her, he passes at once from the
+    mood of sardonic defiance which was natural to him into a state of
+    passion so terrible that a sudden and magical effect is produced: the
+    conventional walls between him, the poor despised court jester, and
+    the courtiers, are suddenly overthrown by the unexpected operation of
+    one of those great human instincts which make the whole world kin:--
+
+    TRIBOULET (faisant trois pas, et balayant du geste tous les seigneurs
+    inter dits).
+
+       Allez-vous-en d'ici!
+    Et, si le roi Francois par malheur se hasarde
+    A passer pres d'ici, (a Monsieur de Vermandois) vous etes de sa
+    garde,
+    Dites-lui de ne pas entrer,--que je suis la.
+
+    M. DE PIENNE.  On n'a jamais rien vu de fou comme cela.
+
+    M. DE GORDES (lui faisant signe de se retirer).  Aux fous comme aux
+    enfants on cede quelque chose.
+
+    Veillons pourtant, de peur d'accident.
+
+                                                             [Ils sortent.
+
+    TRIBOULET (s'asseyant sur le fauteuil du roi et relevant sa fille.)
+    Allons, cause.
+    Dis-moi tout.  (Il se retourne, et, apercevant Monsieur de Cosse, qui
+    est reste, il se leve a demi en lui montrant la porte).  M'avez-vous
+    en tendu, monseigneur?
+
+    M. DE COSSE (tout en se retirant comme subjugue par l'ascendant du
+    bouffon).  Ces fous, cela se croit tout permis, en honneur!
+
+                                                                 [Il sort.
+
+    Now in reading 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' startling as is the situation, it
+    does not seem exaggerated, for Victor Hugo's lines are adequate in
+    simple passion to effect the dramatic work, and the reader feels that
+    Triboulet was wrought up to the state of exaltation to which the
+    lines give expression, that nothing could resist him, and that the
+    proud courtiers must in truth have cowered before him in the manner
+    here indicated by the dramatist.  In literature the artist does not
+    actualize; he suggests, and leaves the reader's imagination free.
+    But an actor has to actualize this state of exaltation--he has to
+    bring the physical condition answering to the emotional condition
+    before the eyes of the spectator; and if he fails to display as much
+    of the 'fine frenzy' of passion as is requisite to cow and overawe a
+    group of cynical worldlings, the situation becomes forced and
+    unnatural, inasmuch as they are overawed without a sufficient cause.
+    That an actor like Robson could and would have risen to such an
+    occasion no one will doubt who ever saw him (for he was the very
+    incarnation of the romantic temper), but then the exhaustion would
+    have been so great that it would have been impossible for him to go
+    on bearing the entire weight of this long play as M. Got does.  The
+    actor requires, as I say, the abandon characteristic of one kind of
+    histrionic art together with the staying power characteristic of
+    another.  Now, admirable as is M. Got in this and in all scenes of
+    'Le Roi s'Amuse,' he does not pass into such a condition of exalted
+    passion as makes the retirement of the courtiers seem probable.  For
+    artistic perfection there was nothing in the entire representation
+    that surpassed the scenes between Saltabadil and Maguelonne in the
+    hovel on the banks of the Seine.  It would be difficult, indeed, to
+    decide which was the more admirable, the Saltabadil of M. Febvre or
+    the Maguelonne of Jeanne Samary.
+
+                           AT THE THEATRE FRANCAIS
+                              NOVEMBER 22, 1882
+
+    Poet of pity and scourge of sceptred crime--
+       Titan of light, with scarce the gods for peers--
+       What thoughts come to thee through the mist of years,
+    There sitting calm, master of Fate and Time?
+    Homage from every tongue, from every clime,
+       In place of gibes, fills now thy satiate ears.
+       Mine own heart swells, mine eyelids prick with tears
+    In very pride of thee, old man sublime!
+
+    And thou, the mother who bore him, beauteous France,
+       Round whose fair limbs what web of sorrow is spun!--
+    I see thee lift thy tear-stained countenance--
+       Victress by many a victory he hath won;
+    I hear thy voice o'er winds of Fate and Chance
+       Say to the conquered world: 'Behold my son!'
+
+I may mention here that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always shown the greatest
+admiration of the actor's art and the greatest interest in actors and
+actresses.  He has affirmed that 'the one great art in which women are as
+essential as men--the one great art in which their place can never be
+supplied by men--is in the acted drama, which the Greeks held in such
+high esteem that AEschylus and Sophocles acted as stage managers and
+show-masters, although the stage mask dispensed with much of the
+necessity of calling in the aid of women.'
+
+'Great as is the importance of female poets,' says Mr. Watts-Dunton, 'men
+are so rich in endowment, that literature would be a worthy expression of
+the human mind if there had been no Sappho and no Emily Bronte--no Mrs.
+Browning--no Christina Rossetti.  Great as is the importance of female
+novelists, men again are so rich in endowment that literature would be a
+worthy expression of the human mind if there had been no Georges Sand, no
+Jane Austen, no Charlotte Bronte, no George Eliot, no Mrs. Gaskell, no
+Mrs. Craigie.  As to painting and music, up to now women have not been
+notable workers in either of these departments, notwithstanding Rosa
+Bonheur and one or two others.  But, to say nothing of France, what in
+England would have been the acted drama, whether in prose or verse,
+without Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Hermann Vezin, Adelaide Neilson, Miss Glyn, in
+tragedy; without Mrs. Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Julia Neilson, Ellen
+Terry, Irene Vanbrugh and Ada Rehan in comedy?'
+
+People who run down actresses should say at once that the acted drama is
+not one of the fine arts at all.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has often expressed
+the opinion that there is in England a great waste of histrionic
+endowment among women, owing to the ignorant prejudice against the stage
+which even now is prevalent in England.  'An enormous waste of force,'
+says he, 'there is, of course, in other departments of intellectual
+activity, but nothing like the waste of latent histrionic powers among
+Englishwomen.'  And he supplies many examples of this which have come
+under his own observation, among which I can mention only one.
+
+'Some years ago,' he said to me, 'I was invited to go to see the
+performance of a French play given by the pupils of a fashionable school
+in the West End of London.  Apart from the admirable French accent of the
+girls I was struck by the acting of two or three performers who showed
+some latent dramatic talent.  I have always taken an interest in amateur
+dramatic performances, for a reason that Lady Archibald Campbell in one
+of her writings has well discussed, namely, that what the amateur actor
+or actress may lack in knowledge of stage traditions he or she will
+sometimes more than make up for by the sweet flexibility and abandon of
+nature.  The amateur will often achieve that rarest of all artistic
+excellencies, whether in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, or
+histrionics--naivete: a quality which in poetry is seen in its perfection
+in the finest of the writings of Coleridge; in acting, it is perhaps seen
+in its perfection in Duse.  Now, on the occasion to which I refer, one of
+these schoolgirl actresses achieved, as I thought, and as others thought
+with me, this rare and perfect flower of histrionics; and when I came to
+know her I found that she joined wide culture and an immense knowledge of
+Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Moliere with an innate gift for
+rendering them.  In any other society than that of England she would have
+gone on the stage as a matter of course, but the fatal prejudice about
+social position prevented her from following the vocation that Nature
+intended for her.  Since then I have seen two or three such cases, not so
+striking as this one, but striking enough to make me angry with
+Philistinism.'
+
+With this sympathy for histrionic art, it is not at all surprising that
+Mr. Watts-Dunton took the greatest interest in the open-air plays
+organized by Lady Archibald Campbell at Coombe.  I have seen a brilliant
+description of these plays by him which ought to have been presented to
+the public years ago.  It forms, I believe, a long chapter of an
+unpublished novel.  Turning over the pages of Davenport Adams's
+'Dictionary of the Drama,' which every lover of the theatre must regret
+he did not live to complete, I come accidentally upon these words: "One
+of the most recently printed epilogues is that which Theodore
+Watts-Dunton wrote for an amateur performance of Banville's 'Le Baiser'
+at Coombe, Surrey, in August, 1889."  And this reminds me that I ought to
+quote this famous epilogue here; for Professor Strong in his review of
+'The Coming of Love' in 'Literature' speaks of the amazing command over
+metre and colour and story displayed in the poem.  It is, I believe, the
+only poem in the English language in which an elaborate story is fully
+told by poetic suggestion instead of direct statement.
+
+                    A REMINISCENCE OF THE OPEN-AIR PLAYS.
+
+    Epilogue for the open-air performance of Banville's 'Le Baiser, in
+    which Lady Archibald Campbell took the part of 'Pierrot' and Miss
+    Annie Schletter the part of the 'Fairy.'--Coombe, August 9, 1889.
+
+                              TO PIERROT IN LOVE
+
+            The Clown whose kisses turned a Crone to a Fairy-queen
+
+    What dost thou here in Love's enchanted wood,
+       Pierrot, who once wert safe as clown and thief--
+    Held safe by love of fun and wine and food--
+       From her who follows love of Woman, Grief--
+    Her who of old stalked over Eden-grass
+       Behind Love's baby-feet--whose shadow threw
+    On every brook, as on a magic glass,
+    Prophetic shapes of what should come to pass
+       When tears got mixt with Paradisal dew?
+
+    Kisses are loved but for the lips that kiss:
+       Thine have restored a princess to her throne,
+    Breaking the spell which barred from fairy bliss
+       A fay, and shrank her to a wrinkled crone;
+    But, if thou dream'st that thou from Pantomime
+       Shalt clasp an angel of the mystic moon,
+    Clasp her on banks of Love's own rose and thyme,
+    While woodland warblers ring the nuptial-chime--
+       Bottom to thee were but a week buffoon.
+
+    When yonder fairy, long ago, was told
+       The spell which caught her in malign eclipse,
+    Turning her radiant body foul and old,
+       Would yield to some knight-errant's virgin lips,
+    And when, through many a weary day and night,
+       She, wondering who the paladin would be
+    Whose kiss should charm her from her grievous plight,
+    Pictured a-many princely heroes bright,
+       Dost thou suppose she ever pictured thee?
+
+    'Tis true the mischief of the foeman's charm
+       Yielded to thee--to that first kiss of thine.
+    We saw her tremble--lift a rose-wreath arm,
+       Which late, all veined and shrivelled, made her pine;
+    We saw her fingers rise and touch her cheek,
+       As if the morning breeze across the wood,
+    Which lately seemed to strike so chill and bleak
+    Through all the wasted body, bent and weak,
+       Were light and music now within her blood.
+
+    'Tis true thy kiss made all her form expand--
+       Made all the skin grow smooth and pure as pearl,
+    Till there she stood, tender, yet tall and grand,
+       A queen of Faery, yet a lovesome girl,
+    Within whose eyes--whose wide, new-litten eyes--
+       New-litten by thy kiss's re-creation--
+    Expectant joy that yet was wild surprise
+    Made all her flesh like light of summer skies
+       When dawn lies dreaming of the morn's carnation.
+
+    But when thou saw'st the breaking of the spell
+       Within whose grip of might her soul had pined,
+    Like some sweet butterfly that breaks the cell
+       In which its purple pinions slept confined,
+    And when thou heard'st the strains of elfin song
+       Her sisters sang from rainbow cars above her--
+    Didst thou suppose that she, though prisoned long,
+    And freed at last by thee from all the wrong,
+       Must for that kiss take Harlequin for lover?
+
+    Hearken, sweet fool!  Though Banville carried thee
+       To lawns where love and song still share the sward
+    Beyond the golden river few can see,
+       And fewer still, in these grey days, can ford;
+    And though he bade the wings of Passion fan
+       Thy face, till every line grows bright and human,
+    Feathered thy spirit's wing for wider span,
+    And fired thee with the fire that comes to man
+       When first he plucks the rose of Nature, Woman;
+
+    And though our actress gives thee that sweet gaze
+       Where spirit and matter mingle in liquid blue--
+    That face, where pity through the frolic plays--
+       That form, whose lines of light Love's pencil drew--
+    That voice whose music seems a new caress
+       Whenever passion makes a new transition
+    From key to key of joy or quaint distress--
+    That sigh, when, now, thy fairy's loveliness
+       Leaves thee alone to mourn Love's vanished vision:
+
+    Still art thou Pierrot--naught but Pierrot ever;
+       For is not this the very word of Fate:
+    'No mortal, clown or king, shall e'er dissever
+       His present glory from his past estate'?
+    Yet be thou wise and dry those foolish tears;
+       The clown's first kiss was needed, not the clown,
+    By her, who, fired by hopes and chilled by fears,
+    Sought but a kiss like thine for years on years:
+       Be wise, I say, and wander back to town.
+
+Recurring to the Marston gatherings, I reproduce here, from the same
+unpublished story to which I have already alluded, the following
+interesting account of them and of other social reunions of the like
+kind.
+
+    "Many of those who have reached life's meridian, or passed it, will
+    remember the sudden rise, a quarter of a century ago, of Rossetti,
+    Swinburne, and William Morris--poets who seemed for a time to
+    threaten the ascendency of Tennyson himself.  Between this galaxy and
+    the latest generation of poets there rose, culminated, and apparently
+    set, another--the group which it was the foolish fashion to call 'the
+    pre-Raphaelite poets,' some of whom yielded, or professed to yield,
+    to the influence of Rossetti, some to that of William Morris, and
+    some to that of Swinburne.  Round them all, however, there was the
+    aura of Baudelaire or else of Gautier.  These--though, as in all such
+    cases, nature had really made them very unlike each other--formed
+    themselves into a set, or rather a sect, and tried apparently to
+    become as much like each other as possible, by studying French
+    models, selecting subjects more or less in harmony with the French
+    temper, getting up their books after the fashion that was as much
+    approved then as contemporary fashions in books are approved now, and
+    by various other means.  They had certain places of meeting, where
+    they held high converse with themselves.  One of these was the
+    hospitable house, in Fitzroy Square, of the beloved and venerable
+    painter, Mr. Madox Brown, whose face, as he sat smiling upon his
+    Eisteddfod, radiating benevolence and encouragement to the unfledged
+    bards he loved, was a picture which must be cherished in many a
+    grateful memory now.  Another was the equally hospitable house, in
+    the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, where reigned the dramatist,
+    Westland Marston, and where his blind poet-boy Philip lived.  Here
+    O'Shaughnessy would come with a glow of triumph on his face, which
+    indicated clearly enough what he was carrying in his
+    pocket--something connecting him with the divine Theophile--a letter
+    from the Gallic Olympus perhaps, or a presentation copy sent from the
+    very top of the Gallic Parnassus.  It was on one of these occasions
+    that Rossetti satirically advised one of the cenacle to quit so poor
+    a language as that of Shakespeare and write entirely in French, which
+    language Morris immediately defined as 'nosey Latin.'  It is a pity
+    that some literary veteran does not give his reminiscences of those
+    Marston nights, or rather Marston mornings, for the symposium began
+    at about twelve and went on till nearly six--those famous gatherings
+    of poets, actors, and painters, enlinking the days of Macready,
+    Phelps, Miss Glyn, Robert Browning, Dante Rossetti, and R. H. Horne,
+    with the days of poets, actors, and painters like Mr. Swinburne,
+    Morris, and Mr. Irving.  Yet these pre-Raphaelite bards had another
+    joy surpassing even that of the Chalk Farm symposium, that of
+    assisting at those literary and artistic feasts which Rossetti used
+    occasionally to give at Cheyne Walk.  Generosity and geniality
+    incarnate was the mysterious poet-painter to those he loved; and if
+    the budding bard yearned for sympathy, as he mostly does, he could
+    get quite as much as he deserved, and more, at 16 Cheyne Walk.  To
+    say that any artist could take a deeper interest in the work of a
+    friend than in his own seems bold, yet it could be said of Rossetti.
+    The mean rivalries of the literary character that so often make men
+    experienced in the world shrink away from it, found no place in that
+    great heart.  To hear him recite in his musical voice the sonnet or
+    lyric of some unknown bard or bardling--recite it in such a way as to
+    lend the lines the light and music of his own marvellous genius,
+    while the bard or bardling listened with head bowed low, so that the
+    flush on his cheek and the moisture in his eye should not be
+    seen--this was an experience that did indeed make the bardic life
+    'worth living.'"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+    Thou knowest that island, far away and lone,
+       Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+       In spray of music and the breezes shake
+    O'er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+    While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+       In the island's heart, and sighs around the lake,
+       Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+    A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+    Life's ocean, breaking round thy senses' shore,
+       Struck golden song, as from the strand of Day:
+       For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay--
+    Pain's blinking snake around the fair isle's core,
+       Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+    Around thy lovely island evermore.
+
+I am now brought to a portion of my study which may well give me
+pause--the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti.  The latest
+remarks upon them are, I think, the best; they are by Mr. A. C. Benson in
+his monograph on Rossetti in the 'English Men of Letters':--
+
+    "It would be impossible to exaggerate the value of his friendship for
+    Rossetti.  Mr. Watts-Dunton understood him, sympathized with him, and
+    with self-denying and unobtrusive delicacy shielded him, so far as
+    any one can be shielded, from the rough contact of the world.  It was
+    for a long time hoped that Mr. Watts-Dunton would give the memoir of
+    his great friend to the world, but there is such a thing as knowing a
+    man too well to be his biographer.  It is, however, an open secret
+    that a vivid sketch of Rossetti's personality has been given to the
+    world in Mr. Watts-Dunton's well-known romance 'Aylwin,' where the
+    artist D'Arcy is drawn from Rossetti. . . .  Though singularly
+    independent in judgment, it is clear that, at all events in the later
+    years of his life, Rossetti's taste was, unconsciously, considerably
+    affected by the critical preferences of Mr. Watts-Dunton.  I have
+    heard it said by one {139} who knew them both well that it was often
+    enough for Mr. Watts-Dunton to express a strong opinion for Rossetti
+    to adopt it as his own, even though he might have combated it for the
+    moment. . . .
+
+    At the end of each part [of 'Rose Mary'] comes a curious lyrical
+    outburst called the Beryl-songs, the chant of the imprisoned spirits,
+    which are intended to weld the poem together and to supply
+    connections.  It is said that Mr. Watts-Dunton, when he first read
+    the poem in proof, said to Rossetti that the drift was too intricate
+    for an ordinary reader.  Rossetti took this to heart, and wrote the
+    Beryl-songs to bridge the gaps; Mr. Watts-Dunton, on being shown
+    them, very rightly disapproved, and said humorously that they turned
+    a fine ballad into a bastard opera.  Rossetti, who was ill at the
+    time, was so much disconcerted and upset at the criticism, that Mr.
+    Watts-Dunton modified his judgment, and the interludes were printed.
+    But at a later day Rossetti himself came round to the opinion that
+    they were inappropriate.  They are curiously wrought, rhapsodical,
+    irregular songs, with fantastic rhymes, and were better away. . . .
+
+    Then he began to settle down into the production of the single-figure
+    pictures, of which Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote that 'apart from any
+    question of technical shortcomings, one of Rossetti's strongest
+    claims to the attention of posterity was that of having invented, in
+    the three-quarter length pictures painted from one face, a type of
+    female beauty which was akin to none other, which was entirely new,
+    in short--and which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion,
+    unaided by complex dramatic design, was unique in the art of the
+    world."
+
+       [Picture: Pandora.  Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at 'The Pines']
+
+It is well known that Rossetti wished his life--if written at all--to be
+written by Mr. Watts-Dunton, unless his brother should undertake it.  It
+is also well known that the brother himself wished it, but pressure of
+other matters prevented Mr. Watts-Dunton from undertaking it.  I expected
+difficulties in approaching with regard to the delicate subject of his
+relations with Rossetti, but I was not prepared to find them so great as
+they have proved to be.  When I wrote to him and asked him whether the
+portrait of D'Arcy in 'Aylwin' was to be accepted as a portrait of
+Rossetti, and when I asked him to furnish me with some materials and
+facts to form the basis of this chapter, I received from him the
+following letter:--
+
+    "MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,--I have never myself affirmed that D'Arcy was
+    to be taken as an actual portrait of Rossetti.  Even if I thought
+    that a portrait of him could be given in any form of imaginative
+    literature, I have views of my own as to the propriety of giving
+    actual portraits of men with whom a novelist or poet has been brought
+    into contact.  It is quite impossible for an imaginative writer to
+    avoid the imperious suggestions of his memory when he is conceiving a
+    character.  Thousands of times in a year does one come across
+    critical remarks upon the prototypes of the characters of such great
+    novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot,
+    George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and the rest.  And I believe that
+    every one of these writers would confess that his prominent
+    characters were suggested to him by living individuals or by
+    individuals who figure in history--but suggested only.  And as to the
+    ethics of so dealing with friends and acquaintances I have also views
+    of my own.  These are easily stated.  The closer the imaginative
+    writer gets to the portrait of a friend, or even of an acquaintance,
+    the more careful must he be to set his subject in a genial and even a
+    generous light.  It would be a terrible thing if every man who has
+    been a notable figure in life were to be represented as this or that
+    at the sweet will of everybody who has known him.  Generous
+    treatment, I say, is demanded of every writer who makes use of the
+    facets of character that have struck him in his intercourse with
+    friend or acquaintance.  I will give you an instance of this.  When I
+    drew De Castro in 'Aylwin' I made use of my knowledge of a certain
+    individual.  Now this individual, although a man of quite
+    extraordinary talents, brilliance, and personal charm, bore not a
+    very good name, because he was driven to live upon his wits.  He had
+    endowments so great and so various that I cannot conceive any line of
+    life in which he was not fitted to excel--but it was his irreparable
+    misfortune to have been trained to no business and no profession, and
+    to have been thrown upon the world without means, and without useful
+    family connections.  Such a man must either sink beneath the oceanic
+    waves of London life, or he must make a struggle to live upon his
+    wits.  This individual made that struggle--he struck out with a
+    vigour that, as far as I know, was without example in London society.
+    He got to know, and to know intimately, men like Ruskin, G. F. Watts,
+    D. G. Rossetti, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, William Morris, Mr. Swinburne,
+    Sir Edward Burne Jones, Cruikshank, and I know not what important
+    people besides.  When he was first brought into touch with the
+    painters, he knew nothing whatever of art; in two or three years, as
+    I have heard Rossetti say, he was a splendid 'connoisseur.'  If he
+    had been brought up as a lawyer he must have risen to the top of the
+    profession.  If he had been brought up as an actor he must, as I have
+    heard a dramatist say, have risen to the top.  But from his very
+    first appearance in London he was driven to live upon his wits.  And
+    here let me say that this man, who was a bitter unfriend of my own,
+    because I was compelled to stand in the way of certain dealings of
+    his, but whom I really could have liked if he had not been obliged to
+    live upon his wits at the expense of certain friends of mine, formed
+    the acquaintance of the great men I have enumerated, not so much from
+    worldly motives, as I believe, as from real admiration.  But being
+    driven to live upon his wits, he had not sufficient moral strength to
+    afford a conscience, and the queerest stories were told--some of them
+    true enough--of his dealings with those great men.  Whistler's
+    anecdotes of him at one period set many a table in a roar; and yet so
+    winsome was the man that after a time he became as intimate with
+    Whistler as ever.  If he had possessed a private income, and if that
+    income had been carefully settled upon him, I believe he would have
+    been one of the most honest of men; I know he would have been one of
+    the most generous.  His conduct to the late Treffry Dunn, from whom
+    he could not have expected the least return except that of gratitude,
+    was proof enough of his generosity.  Of course to make use of so
+    strange a character as this was a great temptation to me when I wrote
+    'Aylwin.'  But in what has been called my 'thumb-nail portrait of
+    him,' I treated the peccadilloes attributed to him in a playful and
+    jocose way.  It would have been quite wrong to have painted otherwise
+    than in playful colours a character like this.  Like every other man
+    and woman in this world, he left behind him people who believed in
+    him and loved him.  It would have been cruel to wound these, and
+    unfair to the man; and yet because I gave only a slight suggestion of
+    his sublime quackery and supreme blarney, a writer who also knew
+    something about him, but of course not a thousandth part of what I
+    knew, said that I had tried my hand at depicting him in 'Aylwin,' but
+    with no great success.  As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to
+    give a portrait of him: I simply used certain facets of his character
+    to work out my story, and then dismissed him.  On the other hand,
+    where the character of a friend or acquaintance is noble, the
+    imagination can work more freely--as in the case of Philip Aylwin,
+    Cyril Aylwin, Wilderspin, Rhona Boswell, Winifred Wynne, Sinfi
+    Lovell.  And as to Rossetti, whom I have been charged by certain
+    critics with having idealized in my picture of D'Arcy, all I have to
+    say on that point is this--that if the noble and fascinating
+    qualities which Rossetti showed had been leavened with mean ones I
+    should not, in introducing his character into a story, have
+    considered it right or fair or generous to dwell upon those mean
+    ones.  But as a matter of fact, during my whole intercourse with him
+    he displayed no such qualities.  The D'Arcy that I have painted is
+    not one whit nobler, more magnanimous, wide-minded, and generous,
+    than was D. G. Rossetti.  As I have said on several occasions, he
+    could and did take as deep an interest in a friend's work as in his
+    own.  And to benefit a friend was the greatest pleasure he had in
+    life.  I loved the man so deeply that I should never have introduced
+    D'Arcy into the novel had it not been in the hope of silencing the
+    misrepresentations of him that began as soon as ever Rossetti was
+    laid in the grave at Birchington, by depicting his character in
+    colours as true as they were sympathetic.  It has been the grievous
+    fate of Rossetti to be the victim of an amount of detraction which is
+    simply amazing and inscrutable.  I cannot in the least understand why
+    this is so.  It is the great sorrow of my life.  There is a fatality
+    of detraction about his name which in its unreasonableness would be
+    grotesque were it not heartrending.  It would turn my natural
+    optimism about mankind into pessimism were it not that another dear
+    friend of mine--a man of equal nobility of character, and almost of
+    equal genius, has escaped calumny altogether--William Morris.  This
+    matter is a painful puzzle to me.  The only great man of my time who
+    seems to have shared something of Rossetti's fate, is Lord Tennyson.
+    There seems to be a general desire to belittle him, to exaggerate
+    such angularities as were his, and to speak of that almost childlike
+    simplicity of character which was an ineffable charm in him as
+    springing from boorishness and almost from loutishness.  On the other
+    hand, another great genius, Browning, for whom I had and have the
+    greatest admiration, seems to be as fortunate as Morris in escaping
+    the detractor.  But I am wandering from Rossetti.  I do not feel any
+    impulse to write reminiscences of him.  Too much has been written
+    about him already--of late a great deal too much.  The only thing
+    written about him that has given me comfort--I may say joy, is
+    this--it has been written by a man who knew him before I did, who
+    knew him at the time he lost his wife.  Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A., has
+    declared that in Rossetti's relations with his wife there was nothing
+    whatever upon which his conscience might reasonably trouble him.  I
+    do not remember the exact words, but this was the substance of them.
+    Mr. Val Prinsep is a man of the highest standing, and he knew
+    Rossetti intimately, and he has declared in print that Rossetti could
+    have had no qualms of conscience in regard to his relations with his
+    wife.  This, I say, is a source of great comfort to me and to all who
+    loved Rossetti.  That he was whimsical, fanciful, and at times most
+    troublesome to his friends, no one knows better than I do.
+
+    No one, I say, is more competent to speak of the whims and the
+    fancies and the troublesomeness of Rossetti than I am; and yet I say
+    that he was one of the noblest-hearted men of his time, and
+    lovable--most lovable."
+
+It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of day upon the painful
+subject of the "Buchanan affair."  Indeed, I have often thought it is a
+great pity that it is not allowed to die out.  The only reason why it is
+still kept alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is
+impossible fully to understand Rossetti's nervous illness, about which so
+much has been said.  I remember seeing in Mr. Watts-Dunton's essay on
+Congreve in 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia' a definition of envy as the
+'literary leprosy.'  This phrase has often been quoted in reference to
+the case of Buchanan, and also in reference to a recent and much more
+ghastly case between two intimate friends.  Now, with all deference to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, I cannot accept it as a right and fair definition.  It
+is a fact no doubt that the struggle in the world of art--whether poetry,
+music, painting, sculpture, or the drama--is unlike that of the mere
+strivers after wealth and position, inasmuch as to praise one man's
+artistic work is in a certain way to set it up against the work of
+another.  Still, one can realize, without referring to Disraeli's
+'Curiosities of Literature,' that envy is much too vigorous in the
+artistic life.  Now, whatever may have been the good qualities of
+Buchanan--and I know he had many good qualities--it seems unfortunately
+to be true that he was afflicted with this terrible disease of envy.
+There can be no question that what incited him to write the notorious
+article in the 'Contemporary Review' entitled 'The Fleshly School of
+Poetry,' was simply envy--envy and nothing else.  It was during the time
+that Rossetti was suffering most dreadfully from the mental disturbance
+which seems really to have originated in this attack and the cognate
+attacks which appeared in certain other magazines, that the intimacy
+between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti was formed and cemented.  And it is
+to this period that Mr. William Rossetti alludes in the following words:
+"'Watts is a hero of friendship' was, according to Mr. Caine, one of my
+brother's last utterances, easy enough to be credited."
+
+That he deserved these words I think none will deny; and that the
+friendship sprang from the depths of the nature of a man to whom the word
+'friendship' meant not what it generally means now, a languid sentiment,
+but what it meant in Shakespeare's time, a deep passion, is shown by what
+some deem the finest lines Mr. Watts-Dunton ever wrote--I mean those
+lines which he puts into the mouth of Shakespeare's Friend in 'Christmas
+at the Mermaid,' lines part of which have been admirably turned into
+Latin by Mr. E. D. Stone, {147} and published by him in the second volume
+of that felicitous series of Latin translations,' Florilegium Latinum':--
+
+                                 'MR. W. H.'
+
+    To sing the nation's song or do the deed
+    That crowns with richer light the motherland,
+    Or lend her strength of arm in hour of need
+    When fangs of foes shine fierce on every hand,
+    Is joy to him whose joy is working well--
+    Is goal and guerdon too, though never fame.
+    Should find a thrill of music in his name;
+    Yea, goal and guerdon too, though Scorn should aim
+    Her arrows at his soul's high citadel.
+
+    But if the fates withhold the joy from me
+    To do the deed that widens England's day,
+    Or join that song of Freedom's jubilee
+    Begun when England started on her way--
+    Withhold from me the hero's glorious power
+    To strike with song or sword for her, the mother,
+    And give that sacred guerdon to another,
+    Him will I hail as my more noble brother--
+    Him will I love for his diviner dower.
+
+    Enough for me who have our Shakspeare's love
+    To see a poet win the poet's goal,
+    For Will is he; enough and far above
+    All other prizes to make rich my soul.
+    Ben names my numbers golden.  Since they tell
+    A tale of him who in his peerless prime
+    Fled us ere yet one shadowy film of time
+    Could dim the lustre of that brow sublime,
+    Golden my numbers are: Ben praiseth well.
+
+It seems to me to be needful to bear in mind these lines, and the
+extremely close intimacy between these two poet-friends in order to be
+able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of Buchanan in the
+following sonnet if, as some writers think, Buchanan was meant:--
+
+                       THE OCTOPUS OF THE GOLDEN ISLES
+                     'WHAT! WILL THEY EVEN STRIKE AT ME?'
+
+    Round many an Isle of Song, in seas serene,
+       With many a swimmer strove the poet-boy,
+       Yet strove in love: their strength, I say, was joy
+    To him, my friend--dear friend of godlike mien!
+    But soon he felt beneath the billowy green
+       A monster moving--moving to destroy:
+       Limb after limb became the tortured toy
+    Of coils that clung and lips that stung unseen.
+
+    "And canst thou strike ev'n me?" the swimmer said,
+       As rose above the waves the deadly eyes,
+       Arms flecked with mouths that kissed in hellish wise,
+    Quivering in hate around a hateful head.--
+       I saw him fight old Envy's sorceries:
+    I saw him sink: the man I loved is dead!
+
+Here we get something quite new in satire--something in which poetry,
+fancy, hatred, and contempt, are mingled.  The sonnet appeared first in
+the 'Athenaeum,' and afterwards in 'The Coming of Love.'  If Buchanan or
+any special individual was meant, I doubt whether any man has a moral
+right to speak about another man in such terms as these.
+
+All the friends of Rossetti have remarked upon the extraordinary
+influence exercised upon him by Mr. Watts-Dunton.  Lady Mount Temple, a
+great friend of the painter-poet, used to tell how when she was in his
+studio and found him in a state of great dejection, as was so frequently
+the case, she would notice that Rossetti's face would suddenly brighten
+up on hearing a light footfall in the hall--the footfall of his friend,
+who had entered with his latch-key--and how from that moment Rossetti
+would be another man.  Rossetti's own relatives have recorded the same
+influence.  I have often thought that the most touching thing in Mr. W.
+M. Rossetti's beautiful monograph of his brother is the following extract
+from his aged mother's diary at Birchington-on-Sea, when the poet is
+dying:--
+
+    'March 28, Tuesday.  Mr. Watts came down; Gabriel rallied
+    marvellously.
+
+    This is the last cheerful item which it is allowed me to record
+    concerning my brother; I am glad that it stands associated with the
+    name of Theodore Watts.'
+
+Here is another excerpt from the brother's diary:--
+
+    'Gabriel had, just before Shields entered the drawing-room for me,
+    given two violent cries, and had a convulsive fit, very sharp and
+    distorting the face, followed by collapse.  All this passed without
+    my personal cognizance.  He died 9.31 p.m.; the others--Watts,
+    mother, Christina, and nurse, in room; Caine and Shields in and out;
+    Watts at Gabriel's right side, partly supporting him.'
+
+That Mr. Watts-Dunton's influence over Rossetti extended even to his art
+as a poet is shown by Mr. Benson's words already quoted.  I must also
+quote the testimony of Mr. Hall Caine, who says, in his
+'Recollections':--
+
+    "Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+    to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+    offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts' influence in his critical
+    estimates; and the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I
+    knew him to resist Mr. Watts's opinion upon a matter of poetical
+    criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
+    me, printed in Chapter VIII of this volume, will show.  I had a
+    striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I
+    had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius
+    of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him.  He read
+    out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem 'Cloud
+    Confines.'  As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently
+    was very fond of it himself.  But he surprised me by saying that he
+    should not print it.  On my asking him why, he said:
+
+    'Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+    without it.'
+
+    'Well, but you like it yourself,' said I.
+
+    'Yes,' he replied, 'but in a question of gain or loss to a poem I
+    feel that Watts must be right.'
+
+    And the poem appeared in 'Ballads and Sonnets' without the stanza in
+    question."
+
+Here is another beautiful passage from Mr. Hall Caine's
+'Recollections'--a passage which speaks as much for the writer as for the
+object of his enthusiasm:--
+
+    "As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him and
+    beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+    known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+    without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+    friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other.
+    No light matter it must have been to lay aside one's own
+    long-cherished life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti's
+    closest friend and brother, at a moment like the present, when he
+    imagined the world to be conspiring against him; but through these
+    evil days, and long after them, down to his death, the friend that
+    clung closer than a brother was with him, as he himself said, to
+    protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert, to interest and inspire
+    him--asking, meantime, no better reward than the knowledge that a
+    noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted out of sorrow.
+    Among the world's great men the greatest are sometimes those whose
+    names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish aims have
+    been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others as to
+    leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal
+    distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price
+    that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy
+    their renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the
+    fine spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of
+    friendship.  Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:
+    'Watts is a hero of friendship'; and indeed, he has displayed his
+    capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that
+    part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes
+    by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the
+    gainer.  If in the end it should appear that he has in his own person
+    done less than might have been hoped for from one possessed of his
+    splendid gifts, let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a
+    quite incalculable degree, and influenced for good, several of the
+    foremost among those who in their turn have influenced the age.  As
+    Rossetti's faithful friend and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John
+    Marshall, has often declared, there were periods when Rossetti's very
+    life may be said to have hung upon Mr. Watts' power to cheer and
+    soothe."
+
+This anecdote is also told by Mr. Caine:--
+
+    "Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited
+    thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem 'Rose
+    Mary,' as well as two lyrics published at the time in 'The
+    Fortnightly Review'; but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent
+    assaults of criticism, that he seemed definitely to lay aside all
+    hope of producing further poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of
+    the delusion that he had for ever lost all power of doing so.  It is
+    an interesting fact, well known in his own literary circle, that his
+    taking up poetry afresh was the result of a fortuitous occurrence.
+    After one of his most serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing
+    off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which
+    in an invalid's mind usually gather about his own too absorbing
+    personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite solicitation,
+    to try his hand afresh at a sonnet.  The outcome was an effort so
+    feeble as to be all but unrecognizable as the work of the author of
+    the sonnets of 'The House of Life,' but, with more shrewdness and
+    friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished
+    measureless praise upon it and urged the poet to renewed exertion.
+    One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and
+    this exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine,
+    with the result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his old
+    dexterity and mastery of hand.  The artifice had succeeded beyond
+    every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the twofold end of
+    improving the invalid's health by preventing his brooding over
+    unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished
+    works.  Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce
+    Rossetti to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by
+    challenging the poet's ability to compose in the simple, direct, and
+    emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad proper, as
+    distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which
+    he had hitherto worked in.  Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this
+    second artifice practised upon him was that he wrote 'The White Ship'
+    and afterwards 'The King's Tragedy.'
+
+    Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of
+    poetic composition, and had recovered a healthy tone of body, before
+    he became conscious of what was being done with him.  It is a further
+    amusing fact that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet
+    which, in view of the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose
+    judgment he reposed, had encouraged him to renewed effort.  The
+    sonnet was bad: the critic knew it was bad, and had from the first
+    hour of its production kept it carefully out of sight, and was now
+    more than ever unwilling to show it.  Eventually, however, by reason
+    of ceaseless importunity, he returned it to its author, who, upon
+    reading it, cried: 'You fraud!  You said this sonnet was good, and
+    it's the worst I ever wrote!'  'The worst ever written would perhaps
+    be a truer criticism,' was the reply, as the studio resounded with a
+    hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the flames.  It would
+    appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large portion of the
+    contents of the volume of 1881."
+
+Mr. William Rossetti is ever eager to testify to the beneficent effect of
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's intimacy upon his brother; and quite lately Madox
+Brown's grandson, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who, from his connection with
+the Rossetti family, speaks with great authority, wrote: 'In 1873 came
+Mr. Theodore Watts, without whose practical friendship and advice, and
+without whose literary aids and sustenance, life would have been from
+thenceforth an impracticable affair for Rossetti.'  Mr. Hueffer speaks of
+the great change that came over Rossetti's work when he wrote 'The King's
+Tragedy' and 'The White Ship':--
+
+    "It should be pointed out that 'The White Ship' was one of Rossetti's
+    last works, and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narration,
+    under the advice of Mr. Theodore Watts.  In this he was undoubtedly
+    on the right track, and the 'rhymed chronicles' might have
+    disappeared had Rossetti lived long enough to revise the poem as
+    sedulously as he did his earlier work, and to revise it with the
+    knowledge of narrative-technique that the greater part of the poem
+    shows was coming to be his."
+
+It was impossible for a man of genius to live so secluded a life as
+Rossetti lived at Cheyne Walk and at Kelmscott for several years, without
+wild, unauthenticated stories getting about concerning him.  Among other
+things Rossetti, whose courtesy and charm of manner were, I believe,
+proverbial, was now charged with a rudeness, or rather boorishness like
+that which with equal injustice, apparently, is now being attributed to
+Tennyson.  Stories got into print about his rude bearing towards people,
+sometimes towards ladies of the most exalted position.  And these
+apocryphal and disparaging legends would no doubt have been still more
+numerous and still more offensive, had it not been for the influence of
+his watchful and powerful friend.  Here is an interesting letter which
+Rossetti addressed to the 'World,' and which shows the close relations
+between him and Mr. Watts-Dunton:--
+
+                                            "16 CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA, S.W.
+                                                        December 28, 1878.
+
+    My attention has been directed to the following paragraph which has
+    appeared in the newspapers: 'A very disagreeable story is told about
+    a neighbour of Mr. Whistler's, whose works are not exhibited to the
+    vulgar herd; the Princess Louise in her zeal therefore, graciously
+    sought them at the artist's studio, but was rebuffed by a 'Not at
+    home' and an intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+    princesses.  I trust it is not true,' continues the writer of the
+    paragraph, 'that so medievally minded a gentleman is really a
+    stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that dignified
+    obedience,' etc.
+
+    The story is certainly disagreeable enough; but if I am pointed out
+    as the 'near neighbour of Mr. Whistler's' who rebuffed, in this rude
+    fashion, the Princess Louise, I can only say that it is a canard
+    devoid of the smallest nucleus of truth.  Her Royal Highness has
+    never called upon me, and I know of only two occasions when she has
+    expressed a wish to do so.  Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke
+    to me upon the subject, but I was at that time engaged upon an
+    important work, and the delays thence arising caused the matter to
+    slip through.  And I heard no more upon the subject till last summer,
+    when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the Princess, in conversation,
+    had mentioned my name to him, and that he had then assured her that I
+    should feel 'honoured and charmed to see her,' and suggested her
+    making an appointment.  Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as
+    one of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+    himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had she
+    called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in that
+    'generous loyalty' which is due, not more to her exalted position,
+    than to her well-known charm of character and artistic gifts.  It is
+    true that I do not run after great people on account of their mere
+    social position, but I am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man
+    who could rebuff the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+                                                          D. G. ROSSETTI."
+
+At the very juncture in question Lord Lorne was suddenly and unexpectedly
+appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+Highness did not return until Rossetti's health had somewhat suddenly
+broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most
+intimate friends.
+
+My account of the friendship between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti would
+not be complete without the poem entitled, 'A Grave by the Sea,' which I
+think may be placed beside Milton's 'Lycidas,' Shelley's 'Adonais,'
+Matthew Arnold's 'Thyrsis,' and Swinburne's 'Ave Atque Vale,' as one of
+the noblest elegies in our literature:--
+
+                              A GRAVE BY THE SEA
+
+                                      I
+
+    Yon sightless poet {157} whom thou leav'st behind,
+       Sightless and trembling like a storm-struck tree,
+       Above the grave he feels but cannot see,
+    Save with the vision Sorrow lends the mind,
+    Is he indeed the loneliest of mankind?
+       Ah no!--For all his sobs, he seems to me
+       Less lonely standing there, and nearer thee,
+    Than I--less lonely, nearer--standing blind!
+
+    Free from the day, and piercing Life's disguise
+       That needs must partly enveil true heart from heart,
+       His inner eyes may see thee as thou art
+    In Memory's land--see thee beneath the skies
+    Lit by thy brow--by those beloved eyes,
+       While I stand by him in a world apart.
+
+                                      II
+
+    I stand like her who on the glittering Rhine
+       Saw that strange swan which drew a faery boat
+       Where shone a knight whose radiant forehead smote
+    Her soul with light and made her blue eyes shine
+    For many a day with sights that seemed divine,
+       Till that false swan returned and arched his throat
+       In pride, and called him, and she saw him float
+    Adown the stream: I stand like her and pine.
+
+    I stand like her, for she, and only she,
+    Might know my loneliness for want of thee.
+       Light swam into her soul, she asked not whence,
+    Filled it with joy no clouds of life could smother,
+       And then, departing like a vision thence,
+    Left her more lonely than the blind, my brother.
+
+                                     III
+
+    Last night Death whispered: 'Death is but the name
+       Man gives the Power which lends him life and light,
+       And then, returning past the coast of night,
+    Takes what it lent to shores from whence it came.
+    What balm in knowing the dark doth but reclaim
+       The sun it lent, if day hath taken flight?
+       Art thou not vanished--vanished from my sight--
+    Though somewhere shining, vanished all the same?
+
+    With Nature dumb, save for the billows' moan,
+       Engirt by men I love, yet desolate--
+    Standing with brothers here, yet dazed and lone,
+       King'd by my sorrow, made by grief so great
+    That man's voice murmurs like an insect's drone--
+       What balm, I ask, in knowing that Death is Fate?
+
+                                      IV
+
+    Last night Death whispered: 'Life's purblind procession,
+       Flickering with blazon of the human story--
+       Time's fen-flame over Death's dark territory--
+    Will leave no trail, no sign of Life's aggression.
+    Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session,
+       Are weak as Man they mock with fleeting glory.
+       Since Life is only Death's frail feudatory,
+    How shall love hold of Fate in true possession?'
+
+    I answered thus: 'If Friendship's isle of palm
+       Is but a vision, every loveliest leaf,
+    Can Knowledge of its mockery soothe and calm
+       This soul of mine in this most fiery grief?
+       If Love but holds of Life through Death in fief,
+    What balm in knowing that Love is Death's--what balm?'
+
+                                      V
+
+    Yea, thus I boldly answered Death--even I
+       Who have for boon--who have for deathless dower--
+       Thy love, dear friend, which broods, a magic power,
+    Filling with music earth and sea and sky:
+    'O Death,' I said, 'not Love, but thou shalt die;
+       For, this I know, though thine is now the hour,
+       And thine these angry clouds of doom that lour,
+    Death striking Love but strikes to deify.'
+
+    Yet while I spoke I sighed in loneliness,
+    For strange seemed Man, and Life seemed comfortless,
+       And night, whom we two loved, seemed strange and dumb;
+    And, waiting till the dawn the promised sign,
+    I watched--I listened for that voice of thine,
+       Though Reason said: 'Nor voice nor face can come.'
+
+    BIRCHINGTON,
+             EASTERTIDE, 1882.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has written many magnificent sonnets, but the sonnet in
+this sequence beginning--
+
+    Last night Death whispered: 'Life's purblind procession,'
+
+is, I think, the finest of them all.  The imaginative conception packed
+into these fourteen lines is cosmic in its sweep.  In the metrical scheme
+the feminine rhymes of the octave play a very important part.  They
+suggest pathetic suspense, mystery, yearning, hope, fear; they ask, they
+wonder, they falter.  But in the sestet the words of destiny are calmly
+and coldly pronounced, and every rhyme clinches the voice of doom, until
+the uttermost deep of despair is sounded in the iterated cry of the last
+line.  The craftsmanship throughout is masterly.  There is, indeed, one
+line which is not unworthy of being ranked with the great lines of
+English poetry:
+
+    Yon moon that strikes the pane, the stars in session.
+
+Here by a bold use of the simple verb 'strikes' a whole poem is hammered
+into six words.  As to the interesting question of feminine rhymes, while
+I admit that they should never be used without an emotional mandate, I
+think that here it is overwhelming.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I have tried to show the beauty of the friendship between these two rare
+spirits by means of other testimony than my own, for although I have been
+granted the honour of knowing Rossetti's 'friend of friends,' I missed
+the equal honour of knowing Rossetti, save through that 'friend of
+friends.'  But to know Mr. Watts-Dunton seems almost like knowing
+Rossetti, for when at The Pines he begins to recall those golden hours
+when the poets used to hold converse, the soul of Rossetti seems to come
+back from the land of shadows, as his friend depicts his winsome ways,
+his nobility of heart, his generous interest in the work of others, that
+lovableness of nature and charm of personality which, if we are to
+believe Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, worked, in some degree, ill for the poet.
+Mr. Hueffer, who, as a family connection, may be supposed to represent
+the family tradition about 'Gabriel,' has some striking and pregnant
+words upon the injurious effect of Rossetti's being brought so much into
+contact with admirers from the time when Mr. Meredith and Mr. Swinburne
+were his housemates at Cheyne Walk.  "Then came the 'Pre-Raphaelite'
+poets like Philip Marston, O'Shaughnessy, and 'B. V.'  Afterwards there
+came a whole host of young men like Mr. William Sharp, who were serious
+admirers, and to-day are in their places or are dead or forgotten; and
+others again who came for the 'pickings.'  They were all more or less
+enthusiasts."
+
+ [Picture: 'The Green Dining Room,' 16 Cheyne Walk.  (From a Painting by
+                         Dunn, at 'The Pines.')]
+
+Mr. Hake, in 'Notes and Queries' (June 7, 1902), says:
+
+    "With regard to the green room in which Winifred took her first
+    breakfast at 'Hurstcote,' I am a little in confusion.  It seems to me
+    more like the green dining-room in Cheyne Walk, decorated with
+    antique mirrors, which was painted by Dunn, showing Rossetti reading
+    his poems aloud.  This is the only portrait of Rossetti that really
+    calls up the man before me.  As Mr. Watts-Dunton is the owner of
+    Dunn's drawing, and as so many people want to see what Rossetti's
+    famous Chelsea house was like inside, it is a pity he does not give
+    it as a frontispiece to some future edition of 'Aylwin.'
+    Unfortunately, Mr. G. F. Watts's picture, now in the National
+    Portrait Gallery, was never finished, and I never saw upon Rossetti's
+    face the dull, heavy expression which that portrait wears.  I think
+    the poet told me that he had given the painter only one or two
+    sittings.  As to the photographs, none of them is really
+    satisfactory."
+
+I am fortunate in being able to reproduce here the picture of the famous
+'Green Dining Room' at 16 Cheyne Walk, to which Mr. Hake refers.  Mr.
+Hake also writes in the same article: "With regard to the two circular
+mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy
+Grail, 'in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt,' I do not
+remember seeing these there.  But they are evidently the mirrors
+decorated with copies by Dunn of the lost Holy Grail frescoes once
+existing on the walls of the Union Reading-Room at Oxford.  These
+beautiful decorations I have seen at 'The Pines,' but not elsewhere."  I
+am sure that my readers will be interested in the photograph of one of
+these famous mirrors, which Mr. Watts-Dunton has generously permitted to
+be specially taken for this book.
+
+[Picture: One of the Carved Mirrors at 'The Pines,' decorated with Dunn's
+         copy of the lost Rossetti Frescoes at the Oxford Union]
+
+And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake's fascinating book of
+poetry, 'The New Day,' which must live, if only for its reminiscences of
+the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:--
+
+                                 THE NEW DAY
+
+                                      I
+
+    In the unbroken silence of the mind
+       Thoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,
+    And life is back among the days behind--
+       The spectral days of that lamented love--
+    Days whose romance can never be repeated.
+       The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,
+    We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,
+       His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.
+    These vanished hours, where are they stored away?
+       Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?
+    Its utterances are swallowed up in day;
+       The gabled house, the mighty master gone.
+    Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall--
+    What dreams he of the days we there recall?
+
+                                      II
+
+    O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
+       We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
+    The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
+       From Nature to her blazoned shadow--Art.
+    How often did we trace the nestling Thames
+       From humblest waters on his course of might,
+    Down where the weir the bursting current stems--
+       There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
+    Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand
+       Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
+    That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
+       Triumphal labours of the day to be.
+    The words were his: 'Such love can never die;'
+    The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.
+
+                                     III
+
+    Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rill
+       Still calls the flowers upon its misty bank
+    To stoop into the stream and drink their fill.
+       And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,
+    Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,
+       Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.
+    Slowly a loosened weed another meets;
+       They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.
+    We are here surely if the world, forgot,
+       Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;
+    We are here surely at this witching spot,--
+       Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.
+    A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,
+    It is as if a play pervaded all.
+
+                                      IV
+
+    Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch's tender,
+       With many a speaking vision on the wall,
+    The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,
+       Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl--
+    'Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,
+       Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,
+    And Art grew fragrant in the glow of spring
+       With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.
+    Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,
+       Fed by the waters of the forest stream;
+    Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,
+       Where they so often fed the poet's dream;
+    Or else was mingled the rough billow's glee
+    With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.
+
+                                      V
+
+    Remember how we roamed the Channel's shore,
+       And read aloud our verses, each in turn,
+    While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,
+       And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.
+    Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to capture
+       The potent word that makes a thought abiding,
+    And wings it upward to its place of rapture,
+       While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.
+    Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonder
+       That art knew not the mighty reverie
+    That moves earth's spirit and her orb asunder,
+       While ocean's depths, even, seem a shallow sea.
+    Yet with rare genius could his hand impart
+    His own far-searching poesy to art.
+
+The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all.  It makes
+me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the
+fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with
+him a new atmosphere--the salt atmosphere which envelops 'Mother Carey's
+Chicken,' and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna.  And yet
+perhaps the description of
+
+    'The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming'
+
+is equally fascinating.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush,
+has in his sonnet 'The Shadow on the Window Blind,' made Kelmscott Manor
+and the poetic life lived there still more memorable:--
+
+    Within this thicket's every leafy lair
+       A song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,
+       Though red behind their nests the moon has swum--
+    But still I see that shadow writing there!--
+    Poet, behind yon casement's ruddy square,
+       Whose shadow tells me why you do not come--
+       Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,
+    Flying and singing through thine inch of air--
+
+    Come thither, where on grass and flower and leaf
+       Gleams Nature's scripture, putting Man's to shame:
+    'Thy day,' she says, 'is all too rich and brief--
+       Thy game of life too wonderful a game--
+    To give to Art entirely or in chief:
+       Drink of these dews--sweeter than wine of Fame.'
+
+'Aylwin,' too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and
+Kelmscott.
+
+The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk,
+has been declared by one of Rossetti's most intimate friends to be
+marvellously graphic and true:--
+
+    "On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after
+    threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and
+    pictures upon easels, I found D'Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa.
+    Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in
+    no mood to meet strangers.  However, he sprang up and introduced me
+    to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a
+    peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one
+    of Mr. D'Arcy's chief buyers.  This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.
+
+    He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a
+    stranger somewhat disconcerted him.
+
+    After he was gone D'Arcy said: 'A good fellow!  One of my most
+    important buyers.  I should like you to know him, for you and I are
+    going to be friends, I hope.'
+
+    'He seems very fond of pictures,' I said.
+
+    'A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.'
+
+    A little while after this gentleman's departure, in came De Castro,
+    who had driven up in a hansom.  I certainly saw a flash of anger in
+    his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his
+    manner became cordiality itself.  Late as it was (it was nearly
+    twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to
+    begin the evening.  As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been
+    there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner.  Evidently
+    his metier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker.
+    Talk was his stock-in-trade.
+
+    The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept
+    pulling out his watch.  It was evident that he wanted to be going,
+    but was reluctant to leave me there.  For my part, I frequently rose
+    to go, but on getting a sign from D'Arcy that he wished me to stay I
+    sat down again.  At last D'Arcy said:
+
+    'You had better go now, De Castro--you have kept that hansom outside
+    for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still
+    daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with
+    him alone.'
+
+    De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left
+    us.
+
+    D'Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that
+    became after a while rather awkward.  He lay there, gazing
+    abstractedly at the fireplace.
+
+    'Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other
+    night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things.
+    I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can't sleep
+    is the chief of blessings.  De Castro, however, is not so bad as he
+    seems.  A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant.
+    I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.'
+
+    Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the
+    servant if Mr. D'Arcy had yet risen.  On being told that he had not,
+    I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous
+    evening.  After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I
+    walked to the window and looked out at the garden.  It was large, and
+    so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness.  While I
+    was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the
+    eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon
+    astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull.  My
+    curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature.
+    He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me
+    to go up to him and stroke him.  Then I left the Indian bull and
+    explored this extraordinary domain.  It was full of unkempt trees,
+    including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall.
+    Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of
+    black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to
+    be a hedgehog.  It was so tame that it did not curl up as I
+    approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness,
+    to stroke its pretty little black snout.  As I walked about the
+    garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such
+    as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens.
+    Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.
+
+    My love of animals led me to linger in the garden.  When I returned
+    to the house I found that D'Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at
+    work in the studio.
+
+    After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:
+
+    'No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie.  Every man has one side
+    of his character where the child remains.  I have a love of animals
+    which, I suppose, I may call a passion.  The kind of amusement they
+    can afford me is like none other.  It is the self-consciousness of
+    men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing.
+    I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of
+    enjoyment.  To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of
+    a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep
+    me for hours from being bored.'
+
+    'And children,' I said--'do you like children?'
+
+    'Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals--until they
+    become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon.  Then their
+    charm goes.  Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful
+    young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal?
+    What makes you sigh?'
+
+    My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her 'Prince of
+    the Mist' on Snowdon.  And I said to myself, 'How he would have been
+    fascinated by a sight like that!'
+
+    My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I
+    then formed of D'Arcy as a talker was not of much account.  But since
+    then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the
+    view I then took of his conversational powers.  When his spirits were
+    at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal
+    as a humourist.  He had more than even Cyril Aylwin's quickness of
+    repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality.  To define it
+    would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic
+    fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid
+    movements--so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be
+    merely fancy, in him became wit.  Beneath the coruscations of this
+    wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.
+
+    His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but
+    here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his
+    other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a
+    humourist of the first order; every 'jeu d'esprit' seemed to leap
+    from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain.  A dull man
+    like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.
+
+    While he was talking he kept on painting."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+WILLIAM MORRIS
+
+
+IT is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris.
+In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton's 'Athenaeum'
+monographs is the one upon him.  Between these two there was an intimacy
+of the closest kind--from 1873 to the day of the poet's death.  This, no
+doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton's graphic power, accounts for the
+extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend.  I have heard more
+than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs
+of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this
+fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything
+else that has been published about him.  It is a grievous loss to
+literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of
+Morris is scarcely likely to write one.  Morris, when he was busy in
+Queen's Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the
+gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox
+Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton
+were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint
+occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti's death.
+
+  [Picture: Kelmscott Manor.  (From a Water Colour by Miss May Morris.)]
+
+When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote 'Aylwin' he did not contemplate that the
+Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott
+Manor.  The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters
+were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and
+D'Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti.  Morris's passion for
+angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and
+this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's life were spent at Kelmscott.  Treffry Dunn's portrait of
+him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at
+Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the
+picture.
+
+Mr. Hake, in 'Notes and Queries' (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting
+facts with regard to 'Hurstcote Manor' and Morris:--
+
+    "Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom
+    I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to
+    in 'Aylwin' (chap. lx. book xv.) as the 'enthusiastic angler' who
+    used to go down to 'Hurstcote' to fish.  At that time this fine old
+    seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of
+    Rossetti and Morris.  Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of
+    Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who,
+    with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris's will.  The series of
+    'large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams' supporting
+    the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the
+    ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls--a
+    peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after
+    dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would
+    go to the attics to listen to them.
+
+    With regard to 'Hurstcote' I well knew 'the large bedroom, with
+    low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved
+    oak' upon which Winifred Wynne slept.  In fact, the only thing in the
+    description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful
+    'Madonna and Child,' upon the frame of which was written 'Chiaro
+    dell' Erma' (readers of 'Hand and Soul' will remember that name).  I
+    wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr.
+    Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and
+    which has been exhibited.  This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads
+    by two or three steps to the tapestried room 'covered with old faded
+    tapestry--so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a
+    dull grey texture'--depicting the story of Samson.  Rossetti used the
+    tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same
+    pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the
+    'grand brunette' (painted from Mrs. Morris) 'holding a pomegranate in
+    her hand'; the 'other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening
+    and laughing over the fruit she is holding up' (painted from the same
+    famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in 'The Beloved'), and
+    the blonde 'under the apple blossoms' (painted from a still more
+    beautiful woman--Mrs. Stillman).  These pictures were not permanently
+    placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on
+    a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott."
+
+Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott,
+was Morris's friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine
+Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South
+Kensington Museum--a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one
+of the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died
+prematurely.  Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton's anecdotes of the causeries at
+Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that
+it is a pity they have never been recorded in print.  Middleton was one
+of Mr. Watts-Dunton's collaborators in the ninth edition of the
+'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' to which he contributed the article on
+'Rome,' one of the finest essays in that work.
+
+Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his
+work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he
+ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the
+'Athenaeum.'  And the poet, might well say this, for those who have
+studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon 'Sigurd,'
+'The House of the Wolfings,' 'The Roots of the Mountains,' 'The
+Glittering Plain,' 'The Well at the World's End,' 'The Tale of Beowulf,'
+'News from Nowhere,' 'Poems by the Way,' will be inclined to put them at
+the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton's purely critical work.  The 'Quarterly
+Review,' in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations
+between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable
+article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of
+English Literature.'  I record these facts, not in order to depreciate
+the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going
+to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton's monograph in the 'Athenaeum.'
+
+The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death:--
+
+    "Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries,
+    that he suffered no pain whatever.  And a comforting thought this is
+    to us all--that Morris suffered no pain.  To Death himself we may
+    easily be reconciled--nay, we might even look upon him as Nature's
+    final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel
+    means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission.  The
+    thought that Morris's life had ended in the tragedy of pain--the
+    thought that he to whom work was sport, and generosity the highest
+    form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the
+    mortal coil--would have been intolerable almost.  For among the
+    thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief,
+    that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment,
+    and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, 'Enjoy.'
+    Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of
+    wealth--cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two
+    daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to
+    understand a genius such as his--surrounded by friends, some of whom
+    were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the
+    very salt of the earth--it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she
+    touched him at all, never struck home.  If it is true, as Merimee
+    affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted
+    Morris to be mature?  Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy
+    of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and
+    carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as
+    when they first opened on the world?  Enough for us to think that the
+    man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his
+    sixty-third year dies young.  Old age Morris could not have borne
+    with patience.  Pain would not have developed him into a hero.  This
+    beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous
+    powers were at their best--and died without pain.  The scheme of life
+    and death does not seem so much awry, after all.
+
+    At the last interview but one that ever I had with him--it was in the
+    little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned
+    out--he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a
+    subject he rarely chose to talk about--the mystery of life and death.
+    The conversation ended with these words of his: 'I have enjoyed my
+    life--few men more so--and death in any case is sure.'"
+
+It is in this same vivid word-picture that occur Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+reflections upon the wear and tear of genius:--
+
+    "It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death
+    was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the
+    imaginative faculty.  When I talked to him, as I often did, of the
+    peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea.
+    'Look at Gladstone,' he would say, 'look at those wise owls your
+    chancellors and your judges.  Don't they live all the longer for
+    work?  It is rust that kills men, not work.'  No doubt he was right
+    in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded
+    to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the 'dry light of
+    intelligence,' a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without
+    any sapping of the sources of life.  But is this so where that fusion
+    of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed?  I doubt
+    it.  In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey
+    pointed out many years ago, a movement, not of 'the thinking machine'
+    only, but of the whole man--the whole 'genial' nature of the
+    worker--his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of
+    lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the
+    part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul.  Hence
+    when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and
+    presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is
+    overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for
+    its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitae.
+
+    We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced, and its
+    amount, to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand
+    such a strain.  Many are of opinion that 'The Lovers of Gudrun' is
+    his finest poem; he worked at it from four o'clock in the morning
+    till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had
+    produced 750 lines!  Think of the forces at work in producing a poem
+    like 'Sigurd.'  Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the
+    Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in
+    our time; think, I say, of the collating of the 'Volsunga Saga' with
+    the 'Nibelungenlied,' the choosing of this point from the Saga-man,
+    and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing
+    the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the
+    nineteenth century.  Was there not work enough here for a
+    considerable portion of a poet's life?  And yet so great is the
+    entire mass of his work that 'Sigurd' is positively overlooked in
+    many of the notices of his writings which have appeared in the last
+    few days in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three
+    words; and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt
+    with fills up all the available space of a newspaper."
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's critical acumen is nowhere more strikingly seen than
+in his remarks upon Morris's translation of the Odyssey:--
+
+    "Some competent critics are dissatisfied with Morris's translation;
+    yet in a certain sense it is a triumph.  The two specially Homeric
+    qualities--those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other
+    poets--are eagerness and dignity.  Never again can they be fully
+    combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek
+    hexameters and by a Homer.  That Tennyson could have given us the
+    Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the
+    Iliad shows.  Chapman's translations show that the eagerness also can
+    be caught.  Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of
+    Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking
+    with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the
+    entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured
+    the eagerness as completely as Chapman's free-and-easy paraphrase,
+    and in a rendering as literal as Buckley's prose crib, which lay
+    frankly by Morris's side as he wrote. . . .  Morris's translation of
+    the Odyssey and his translation of Virgil, where he gives us an
+    almost word-for-word translation and yet throws over the poem a
+    glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the
+    modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet.
+    But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely
+    original poems, such as 'The Defence of Guenevere,' 'Jason,' 'The
+    Earthly Paradise,' 'Love is Enough,' 'Poems by the Way,' etc.  And
+    then come his translations from the Icelandic.  Mere translation is,
+    of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the 'Saga
+    Library.'  Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a
+    work this is!  Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the
+    language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so
+    concrete as to make each Saga an English poem--for poem each one is,
+    if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not
+    metre is the first requisite of a poem."
+
+In connection with William Morris, readers of 'The Coming of Love' will
+recall the touching words in the 'Prefatory Note':--
+
+    "Had it not been for the intervention of matters of a peculiarly
+    absorbing kind--matters which caused me to delay the task of
+    collecting these verses--I should have been the most favoured man who
+    ever brought out a volume of poems, for they would have been printed
+    by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press.  As that projected edition
+    of his was largely subscribed for, a word of explanation to the
+    subscribers is, I am told, required from me.  Among the friends who
+    saw much of that great poet and beloved man during the last year of
+    his life, there was one who would not and could not believe that he
+    would die--myself.  To me he seemed human vitality concentrated to a
+    point of quenchless light; and when the appalling truth that he must
+    die did at last strike through me, I had no heart and no patience to
+    think about anything in connection with him but the loss that was to
+    come upon us.  And, now, whatsoever pleasure I may feel at seeing my
+    verses in one of Mr. Lane's inviting little volumes will be dimmed
+    and marred by the thought that Morris's name also might have been,
+    and is not, on the imprint."
+
+As a matter of fact this incident in the publication of 'The Coming of
+Love' is an instance of that artistic conscientiousness which up to a
+certain point is of inestimable value to the poet, but after that point
+is reached, baffles him.  The poem had been read in fragments and deeply
+admired by that galaxy of poets among whom Mr. Watts-Dunton moved.
+Certain fragments of it had appeared in the 'Athenaeum' and other
+journals, but the publication of the entire poem had been delayed owing
+to the fact that certain portions of it had been lent and lost.  Morris
+not only offered to bring out at the Kelmscott Press an edition de luxe
+of the book, but he actually took the trouble to get a full list of
+subscribers, and insisted upon allowing the author a magnificent royalty.
+Nothing, however, would persuade Mr. Watts-Dunton to bring out the book
+until these lost portions could be found, and notwithstanding the
+generous urgings of Morris, the matter stood still; and then, when the
+book was ready, Morris was seized by that illness which robbed us of one
+of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century.  And even after
+Morris's death the poet's executors and friends, the late Mr. F. S. Ellis
+and the well-known bibliographer, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, were willing
+and even desirous that the Kelmscott edition of the poems should be
+brought out.  Subsequently, when a large portion of the lost poems was
+found, the volume was published by Mr. John Lane.  This anecdote alone
+explains why Mr. Watts-Dunton is never tired of dwelling upon the
+nobility of Morris's nature, and upon his generosity in small things as
+well as in large.
+
+Another favourite story of his in connection with this subject is the
+following.  When Morris published his first volume in the Kelmscott
+Press, he sent Mr. Watts-Dunton a presentation copy of the book.  He also
+sent him a presentation copy of the second and third.  But knowing how
+small was the profit at this time from the books issued by the Kelmscott
+Press, Mr. Watts-Dunton felt a little delicacy in taking these
+presentation copies, and told Mrs. Morris that she should gently protest
+against such extravagance.  Mrs. Morris assured him that it would be
+perfectly useless to do so.  But when the edition of Keats was coming
+out, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to grapple with the matter, and one
+Sunday afternoon when he was at Kelmscott House, he said to Morris:
+
+'Morris, I wish you to put my name down as a subscriber to the Keats, and
+I give my commission for it in the presence of witnesses.  I am a paying
+subscriber to the Keats.'
+
+'All right, old chap, you're a subscriber.'
+
+In spite of this there came the usual presentation copy of the Keats; and
+when Mr. Watts-Dunton was at Kelmscott House on the following Sunday
+afternoon, he told Morris that a mistake had been made.  Morris laughed.
+
+'All right, there's no mistake--that is my presentation copy of Keats.'
+
+But when at last the magnum opus of the Kelmscott Press was being
+discussed--the marvellous Chaucer with Burne-Jones's illustrations--Mr.
+Watts-Dunton knew that here a great deal of money was to be risked, and
+probably sunk, and he said to Morris:
+
+'Now, Morris, I'm going to talk to you seriously about the Chaucer.  I
+know that it's going to be a dead loss to you, and I do really and
+seriously hope that you do not contemplate anything so wild as to send me
+a presentation copy of that book.  You know my affection for you, and you
+know I speak the truth, when I tell you that it would give me pain to
+accept it.'
+
+'Well, old chap, very likely this time I shall have to stay my hand, for,
+between ourselves, I expect I shall drop some money over it; but the
+Chaucer will be at The Pines, because Ned Jones and I are going to join
+in the presentation of a copy to Algernon Swinburne.'
+
+After this Mr. Watts-Dunton's mind was set at rest, as he told Mrs.
+Morris.  But when Mr. Swinburne's copy reached 'The Pines' it was
+accompanied by another one--'Theodore Watts-Dunton from William Morris.'
+
+Another anecdote, illustrative of his generosity, Mr. Watts-Dunton also
+tells.  Mr. Swinburne, wishing to possess a copy of 'The Golden Legend,'
+bought the Kelmscott edition, and one day Mr. Watts-Dunton told Morris
+this.  Morris gave a start as though a sudden pain had struck him.
+
+'What!  Algernon pay ten pounds for a book of mine!  Why I thought he did
+not care for black letter reproductions, or I would have sent him a copy
+of every book I brought out.'
+
+And when he did bring out another book, two copies were sent to 'The
+Pines,' one for Mr. Watts-Dunton and one for Mr. Swinburne.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton, speaking about 'The Water of the Wondrous Isles,' tells
+this amusing story:--
+
+    "Once, many years ago, Morris was inveigled into seeing and hearing
+    the great poet-singer Stead, whose rhythms have had such a great
+    effect upon the 'art poetic,' the author of 'The Perfect Cure,' and
+    'It's Daddy this and Daddy that,' and other brilliant lyrics.  A
+    friend with whom Morris had been spending the evening, and who had
+    been talking about poetic energy and poetic art in relation to the
+    chilly reception accorded to 'Sigurd,' persuaded him--much against
+    his will--to turn in for a few seconds to see Mr. Stead, whose
+    performance consisted of singing a song, the burden of which was 'I'm
+    a perfect cure!' while he leaped up into the air without bending his
+    legs and twirled round like a dervish.  'What made you bring me to
+    see this damned tomfoolery?' Morris grumbled; and on being told that
+    it was to give him an example of poetic energy at its tensest,
+    without poetic art, he grumbled still more and shouldered his way
+    out.  If Morris were now alive--and all England will sigh, 'Ah, would
+    he were!'--he would confess, with his customary emphasis, that the
+    poet had nothing of the slightest importance to learn, even from the
+    rhythms of Mr. Stead, marked as they were by terpsichorean pauses
+    that were beyond the powers of the 'Great Vance.'"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+THE 'EXAMINER'
+
+
+LONG before Mr. Watts-Dunton printed a line, he was a prominent figure in
+the literary and artistic sets in London; but, as Mr. Hake has said, it
+was merely as a conversationalist that he was known.  His conversation
+was described by Rossetti as being like that of no other person moving in
+literary circles, because he was always enunciating new views in
+phrasings so polished that, to use Rossetti's words, his improvized
+locutions were as perfect as 'fitted jewels.'  Those who have been
+privileged to listen to his table-talk will attest the felicity of the
+image.  Seldom has so great a critic had so fine an audience.  Rossetti
+often lamented that Theodore Watts' spoken criticism had never been taken
+down in shorthand.  For a long time various editors who had met him at
+Rossetti's, at Madox Brown's, at Westland Marston's, at Whistler's
+breakfasts, and at the late Lord Houghton's, endeavoured to persuade him
+to make practical use in criticism of the ideas that flowed in a
+continuous stream from his lips.  But, as Rossetti used to affirm, he was
+the one man of his time who, with immense literary equipment, was without
+literary ambition.  This peculiarity of his was eloquently described by
+the late Dr. Gordon Hake in his 'New Day':--
+
+    You say you care not for the people's praise,
+       That poetry is its own recompense;
+    You care not for the wreath, the dusty bays,
+       Given to the whirling wind and hurried hence.
+
+The first editor who secured Theodore Watts, after repeated efforts to do
+so, was the late Professor Minto, and this only came about because during
+his editorship of the 'Examiner' both he and Watts resided in Danes Inn,
+and were constantly seeing each other.
+
+It was Minto who afterwards declared that "the articles in the 'Examiner'
+and the 'Athenaeum' are goldmines, in which we others are apt to dig
+unconsciously without remembering that the nuggets are Theodore Watts's,
+who is too lazy to peg out his claim."  The first article by him that
+appeared in Minto's paper attracted great attention and roused great
+curiosity.  This indeed is not surprising, for, as I found when I read
+it, it was as remarkable for pregnancy of thought and of style as the
+latest and ripest of his essays.  A friend of his, belonging to the set
+in which he moved, who remembers the appearance of this article, has been
+kind enough to tell me the following anecdote in connection with it.  The
+contributors to the paper at that time consisted of Minto, Dr Garnett,
+Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, 'Scholar' Williams, Comyns Carr, Walter Pollock,
+Duffield (the translator of 'Don Quixote'), Professor Sully, Dr. Marston,
+William Bell Scott, William Black, and many other able writers.  On the
+evening of the day when Theodore Watts's first article appeared, there
+was a party at the house of William Bell Scott in Chelsea, and every one
+was asking who this new contributor was.  It was one of the conditions
+under which the article was written that its authorship was to be kept a
+secret.  Bell Scott, who took a great interest in the 'Examiner,' was
+especially inquisitive about the new writer.  After having in vain tried
+to get from Minto the name of the writer, he went up to Watts, and said:
+"I would give almost anything to know who the writer is who appears in
+the 'Examiner' for the first time today."  "What makes you inquire about
+it?" said Watts.  "What is the interest attaching to the writer of such
+fantastic stuff as that?  Surely it is the most mannered writing that has
+appeared in the 'Examiner' for a long time!"  Then, turning to Minto, he
+said: "I can't think, Minto, what made you print it at all."  Scott, who
+had a most exalted opinion of Watts as a critic, was considerably abashed
+at this, and began to endeavour to withdraw some of his enthusiastic
+remarks.  This set Minto laughing aloud, and thus the secret got out.
+
+From that hour Watts became the most noticeable writer among a group of
+critics who were all noticeable.  Week after week there appeared in this
+historic paper criticism as fine as had ever appeared in it in the time
+of Leigh Hunt, and as brilliant as had appeared in it in the time of
+Fonblanque.  At this time Minto used to entertain his contributors on
+Monday evening in the room over the publisher's office in the Strand, and
+I have been told by one who was frequently there that these smoking
+symposia were among the most brilliant in London.  One can well imagine
+this when one remembers the names of those who used to attend the
+meetings.
+
+It was through the 'Examiner' that Watts formed that friendship with
+William Black which his biographer, Sir Wemyss Reid, alludes to.  Between
+these two there was one subject on which they were especially in
+sympathy--their knowledge and love of nature.  At that time Black was
+immensely popular.  In personal appearance there was, I am told, a
+superficial resemblance between the two, and they were constantly being
+mistaken for each other; and yet, when they were side by side, it was
+evident that the large, dark moustache and the black eyes were almost the
+only points of resemblance between them.
+
+It was at the then famous house in Gower Street of Mr. Justin McCarthy
+that Black and Mr. Watts-Dunton first met.  Speaking as an Irishman of a
+younger but not, I fear, of so genial a generation, I hear tantalizing
+accounts of the popular gatherings at the home of the most charming and
+the most distinguished Irishman of letters in the London of that time,
+where so many young men of my own country were welcomed as warmly as
+though they had not yet to win their spurs.  No one speaks more
+enthusiastically of the McCarthy family than Mr. Watts-Dunton, who seems
+to have been on terms of friendship with them almost as soon as he
+settled in London.  Mr. Watts-Dunton was always a lover of McCarthy's
+novels, but on his first visit to Gower Street Mr. McCarthy was, as
+usual, full of the subject not of his own novels, but of another man's.
+He urged his new friend to read 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' almost
+forcing him to take the book away with him, which he did: this was the
+way in which Mr. Watts-Dunton became for the first time acquainted with a
+story which he always avers is the only book that has ever revived the
+rich rustic humour of Shakespeare's early comedies.  A perfect household
+of loving natures, warm Irish hearts, bright Irish intellects, cultivated
+and rare, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton's testimony, was that little
+family in Gower Street.  I think he will pardon me for repeating one
+quaint little story about himself and Black in connection with this first
+visit to the McCarthys.  On entering the room Mr. Watts-Dunton was much
+struck with what appeared to be real musical genius in a bright-eyed
+little lady who was delighting the party with her music.  This was at the
+period in his own life which Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his 'music-mad
+period.'  And after a time he got talking with the lady.  He was a little
+surprised that he was at once invited by the musical lady to go to a
+gathering at her house.  But he was as much pleased as surprised to be so
+welcomed, and incontinently accepted the invitation.  It never entered
+his mind that he had been mistaken for another man, until the other man
+entered the room and came up to the lady.  She, on her part, began to
+look in an embarrassed way from one to the other of the two swarthy,
+black-moustached gentlemen.  She had mistaken Mr. Watts-Dunton for
+William Black, with whom her acquaintance was but slight.  The
+contretemps caused much amusement when the husband of the lady, an
+eminent novelist, who knew Mr. Watts-Dunton well, introduced him to his
+wife.  I do not know what was the end of the comedy, but no doubt it was
+a satisfactory one.  It could not be otherwise among such people as
+Justin McCarthy would be likely to gather round him.
+
+At that time, to quote the words of the same friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+Watts used frequently to meet at Bell Scott's and Rossetti's Professor
+Appleton, the editor of the 'Academy.'  The points upon which these two
+touched were as unlike the points upon which Watts and William Black
+touched as could possibly be.  They were both students of Hegel; and when
+they met, Appleton, who had Hegel on the brain, invariably drew Watts
+aside for a long private talk.  People used to leave them alone, on
+account of the remoteness of the subject that attracted the two.  Watts
+had now made up his mind that he would devote himself to literature, and,
+indeed, his articles in the 'Examiner' showed that he had only to do so
+to achieve a great success.  Appleton rarely left Watts without saying,
+"I do wish you would write for the 'Academy.'  I want you to let me send
+you all the books on the transcendentalists that come to the 'Academy,'
+and let me have articles giving the pith of them at short intervals."
+This invitation to furnish the 'Academy' with a couple of columns
+condensing the spirit of many books about subjects upon which only a
+handful of people in England were competent to write, seemed to Watts a
+grotesque request, seeing that he was at this very time the leading
+writer on the 'Examiner,' and was being constantly approached by other
+editors.  It was consequently the subject of many a joke between Minto,
+William Black, Watts, and the others present at the famous 'Examiner'
+gatherings.  After a while Mr. Norman MacColl, who was then the editor of
+the 'Athenaeum,' invited Watts to take an important part in the reviewing
+for the 'Athenaeum.'  At first he told the editor that there were two
+obstacles to his accepting the invitation--one was that the work that he
+was invited to do was largely done by his friend Marston, and that,
+although he would like to join him, he scarcely saw his way, on account
+of the 'Examiner,' which was ready to take all the work he could produce.
+On opening the matter to Dr Marston, that admirably endowed writer would
+not hear of Watts's considering him in the matter.  The 'Athenaeum' was
+then, as now, the leading literary organ in Europe, and the editor's
+offer was, of course, a very tempting one, and Watts was determined to
+tell Minto about it.  And this he did.
+
+"Now, Minto," he said, "it rests entirely with you whether I shall write
+in the 'Athenaeum' or not."  Minto, between whom and Watts there was a
+deep affection, made the following reply:
+
+"My dear Theodore, I need not say that it will not be a good day for the
+'Examiner' when you join the 'Athenaeum.'  The 'Examiner' is a struggling
+paper which could not live without being subsidized by Peter Taylor, and
+it is not four months ago since Leicester Warren said to me that he and
+all the other readers of the 'Examiner' looked eagerly for the 'T. W.' at
+the foot of a literary article.  The 'Athenaeum' is both a powerful and a
+wealthy paper.  In short, it will injure the 'Examiner' when your name is
+associated with the 'Athenaeum.'  But to be the leading voice of such a
+paper as that is just what you ought to be, and I cannot help advising
+you to entertain MacColl's proposal."
+
+In consequence of this Mr. Watts-Dunton closed with Mr. MacColl's offer,
+and his first article in the 'Athenaeum' appeared on July 8, 1876.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+THE 'ATHENAEUM'
+
+
+AS the first review which Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed to the 'Athenaeum'
+has been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any other
+of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire.  It has the
+additional interest, I believe, of being the most rapidly executed piece
+of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton ever achieved.  Mr. MacColl,
+having secured the new writer, tried to find a book for him, and failed,
+until Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him whether he intended to give an article
+upon Skelton's 'Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae.'  The editor said that
+he had not thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that,
+if Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to him.  As the
+article was wanted on the following day, it was dictated as fast as the
+amanuensis--not a shorthand writer--could take it down.
+
+It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one of his
+great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays on Victor
+Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as any:--
+
+    'Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun?
+    Here, at least, is the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' squeezed into one volume.
+
+    Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which,
+    as far as we remember, is this.  The library of the Indian kings was
+    composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to
+    remove it.  But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading
+    much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said:
+    'Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of
+    both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin,
+    which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard
+    to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze 'em!'  The Brahmin,
+    understanding well what the order to 'squeeze 'em' meant (for he was
+    a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little
+    flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words
+    and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work,
+    aided by many scribes--striking out all the idle words from every
+    book in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted
+    it was found that ten camels could carry that library without
+    ruffling a hair.  And therefore the Brahmin was appointed 'Grand
+    Squeezer' of the realm.  Ages after this, another prince, who loved
+    reading much and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand
+    Squeezer of his time and said: 'Thy duties are neglected, O Grand
+    Squeezer!  Thy life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.'
+    Thereupon the Grand Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and
+    squeezed and squeezed till the whole library became at last a load
+    that a foal would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book,
+    a tiny volume, containing four maxims.  Yet the wisdom in the last
+    library was the wisdom in the first.
+
+    The appearance of Mr. Skelton's condensation of the 'Noctes
+    Ambrosianae' reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn
+    warning we always find it our duty to administer to those who show a
+    propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship--the warning
+    that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying
+    for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary
+    be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by
+    itself.  Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension
+    to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call 'the writing
+    fellows,' for adding to the camel's burden, instead of distributing
+    the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected
+    squeezers.  We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that
+    almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints,
+    while nobody reads, and, to judge from the 'spelling bees,' nobody
+    even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a 'writing animal' is
+    on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself.  This
+    is the alarming thing.  Where are we to find so many squeezers?  Nay,
+    in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer's
+    every book.  Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle
+    squeezer--what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than
+    that he should squeeze 'Frederick the Great'--that enormous, rank and
+    pungent 'haggis' from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would
+    flow of 'oniony liquid' that compared with it the famous
+    'haggis-deluge' of the 'Noctes' which nearly drowned in gravy
+    'Christopher,' 'the Shepherd,' and 'Tickler' in Ambrose's parlour,
+    would be, both for quantity and flavour, but 'a beaker full of the
+    sweet South'?  Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what
+    would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to
+    the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson--the mighty
+    Christopher, who for about thirty years literally talked in type upon
+    every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of
+    which he had none; whose 'words, words, words' are, indeed, as
+    Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, 'as the rush of mighty waters'?
+
+    What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to
+    guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, 'if what is said be not to the
+    purpose, a single word is already too much.'
+
+    Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations
+    upon the 'Noctes Ambrosianae.'  He loves the memory of the fine old
+    Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that
+    are too timid of grip.  In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot
+    overdo it.  There are certain parts we should have especially liked
+    squeezed away; and among these--will Mr. Skelton pardon us?--are the
+    'amazingly humourous' ones, such as the 'opening of the haggis,'
+    which, Mr. Skelton tells us, 'manifests the humour of conception as
+    well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been
+    surpassed by the greatest masters'; 'the amazing humour' of which
+    consists in the Shepherd's sticking his supper knife into a 'haggis'
+    (a sheep's paunch filled with the 'pluck' minced, with suet, onions,
+    salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy
+    that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save
+    themselves from being drowned in it!  In truth, Mr. Skelton should
+    have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the
+    Professor's twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining,
+    omit everything 'amazingly humourous,' he will be the best
+    Wilson-squeezer imaginable.
+
+    Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be.  The 'Noctes' are
+    dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to save them, squeezes away all the
+    political events--so important once, so unimportant now--all the
+    foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in
+    them.  He eliminates all the critiques upon all those 'greatest
+    poems' and those 'greatest novels of the age' written by
+    Christopher's friends--friends so famous once, so peacefully
+    forgotten now.  And he has left what he calls the 'Comedy of the
+    Noctes Ambrosianae,' i.e. 'that portion of the work which deals with
+    or presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and
+    character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it
+    which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of
+    literary, artistic, or political interest only.'  And, although Mr.
+    Skelton uses thus the word 'comedy' in its older and wider meaning,
+    it is evident that it is as an 'amazing humourist' that he would
+    present to our generation the great Christopher North.  And
+    assuredly, at this the 'delighted spirit' of Christopher smiles
+    delightedly in Hades.  For, however the 'Comic Muse' may pout upon
+    hearing from Mr. Skelton that 'the "Noctes Ambrosianae" belong to
+    her,' it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson's life was to
+    cultivate her--was to be an 'amazing humourist,' in short.  It is
+    clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he
+    most of all affected, that which we call technically 'Rabelaisian.'
+    To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of
+    the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all
+    his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds
+    hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot.  His personality was
+    enormous.  He had more of that demonic element--of which since
+    Goethe's time we have heard so much--than any man in Scotland.
+    Everybody seems to have been dominated by him.  De Quincey, with a
+    finer intellect than even his own--and that is using strong
+    language--looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master.  It
+    is positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey's 'Autobiographic
+    Sketches,' to come again and again upon the naive refrain: 'I think
+    so, so does Professor Wilson.'  Gigantic as was the egotism of the
+    Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism
+    of Christopher North.  In this, as in everything else, he was the
+    opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter
+    Scott.  Scott's desire was to create eccentric humourous characters,
+    but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself.  Wilson's great
+    ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your
+    superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create.  He would
+    like the universe to himself.  If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if
+    you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that
+    character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a
+    smile: 'Don't you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I--John Wilson?'
+    He always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler
+    were John Wilson--as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather,
+    what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered.  This
+    determination to be a humourous character it was--and no lack of
+    literary ambition--that caused him to squander his astonishing powers
+    in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man,
+    lament.
+
+    Many articles in 'Blackwood'--notably the one upon Shakspeare's four
+    great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge's
+    poetry--show that his insight into the principles of literary art was
+    true and deep--far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this
+    inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form,
+    nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature
+    show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or
+    review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his
+    merits.
+
+    Has Wilson secured such a place?  We fear not; and if Skelton were to
+    ask us, on our oath, why Wilson's fourteen volumes of brilliant,
+    eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund
+    state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the
+    'Coverley' papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review
+    articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we
+    fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that
+    mere elaborated intellectual 'humour' has the seeds of dissolution in
+    it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live;
+    and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a
+    humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian.
+    But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what
+    precise meaning we attach to the word 'Rabelaisian'--though the
+    subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.
+    Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will
+    venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of
+    temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic
+    humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist--the
+    comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of
+    mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits,
+    with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the
+    almighty joke of the Cosmos--a mood which in literature is rarer than
+    in life--rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common
+    and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.
+
+    Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing.  For
+    this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save
+    in the most un-egotistic souls.  It belongs to the Chaucers, the
+    Shakspeares, the Molieres, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles,
+    the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots--upon whom the rich
+    tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and
+    yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.
+    Among these--to whom to create is everything--Sterne would perhaps
+    have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and
+    never read Rabelais; while Dickens's growth was a development from
+    Rabelaisianism to Cervantism.  But surely so delicate a critic as Mr.
+    Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously
+    tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in
+    Wilson.  Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying
+    the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters.
+    Even the humourless Plato could do that.  Even the humourless Landor
+    could do that.  But, strip the 'Shepherd's' talk of its Scottish
+    accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose
+    rush in the 'Recreations' and the 'Essays' we are so familiar with.
+    While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of
+    De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to
+    be purposely destroyed, and the 'Opium-Eater' becomes a fantastic
+    creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.
+
+    The 'amazing humour' of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic.  Is it
+    Rabelaisian?  Again, we fear not.  Very likely the genuine
+    Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the 'writing fellows' at all.
+    We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our
+    time.  One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a
+    pathetic hatred.  The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with
+    a beautiful and a pathetic love.  And we have just heard from one of
+    our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be
+    found--where he ought to be found--at Stratford-on-Avon.  This is
+    interesting.  Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there
+    were Rabelaisians, even among the 'writing fellows,' before Rabelais;
+    the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all
+    we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of
+    getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, 'in a duck-pond drowned
+    him,' he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very
+    first rank.  But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say
+    nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the 'Birds' alone puts
+    Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians.  But
+    when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: 'Let
+    down the curtain; the farce is done,' they were prophetic as regards
+    the literary Rabelaisians--prophetic in this, that no writer has
+    since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood--the mood, that is, of
+    the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles
+    of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine.  Yet, if his mantle
+    has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped
+    upon several; for the great Cure divides his qualities among his
+    followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in
+    the 'Paradise of Fruits,' from which every other fruit in the garden
+    drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits
+    with stealing theirs.  Among a few others, it may be said that the
+    cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half
+    stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits--the love
+    of life--the fine passion for victuals and drink--has fallen to
+    several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of 'John Buncle';
+    to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the 'Jolly Beggars'),
+    to John Skinner, the author of 'Tullochgorum.'  Shakspeare, having
+    everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as
+    Cervantism.  Some of the scenes in 'Henry the Fourth' and 'Henry the
+    Fifth' are rich with it.  So is 'Twelfth Night,' to go no further.
+    Dickens's Rabelaisianism stopped with 'Pickwick.'  If Hood's gastric
+    fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the
+    greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais.  A good man, if his juices are
+    right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into
+    Rabelaisianism.  Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief.
+    Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and
+    this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour
+    becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the
+    harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by
+    imitating Mr. Carlyle.  This is bad.  But far worse is simulated
+    animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism.  This is insupportable.  For we
+    ask the reader--who may very likely have been to an undergraduates'
+    wine-party, or to a medical students' revel, or who may have read the
+    'Noctes Ambrosianae'--we seriously and earnestly ask him whether,
+    among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is
+    anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.
+
+    And now we come reluctantly to the point.  It breaks our heart to say
+    to Mr. Skelton--for we believed in Professor Wilson once--it breaks
+    our heart to say that Wilson's Rabelaisianism is nothing but
+    jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind.  In
+    reading the 'Noctes' we feel, as Jefferson's Rip van Winkle must have
+    felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains.
+    We say to ourselves, 'How comparatively comfortable we should feel if
+    those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn't pretend to be jolly--if
+    they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their
+    ghostly liquor!'
+
+    Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of
+    the great master's humour, their animal spirits are genuine.  They do
+    not hop, skip, and jump for effect.  Their friskiness is the
+    friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who
+    runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue
+    that all creatures know, 'I live, I live, I live!'  But, whatever
+    might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring
+    about the literary cheerfulness of the 'Noctes' that, notwithstanding
+    all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at
+    heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real
+    Wilson is the Wilson of the 'Isle of Palms,' 'The City of the
+    Plague,' of the 'Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,' of the 'Lights and
+    Shadows of Scottish Life,' Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of
+    Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that 'almost the only
+    passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler
+    sympathies of our nature--tender compassion--confiding affection, and
+    gentleness and sorrow.'
+
+    He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a
+    good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney
+    army if necessary.  This kind of man he may have been--Mr. Skelton
+    inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us
+    to think he was playing a part.  A temperamental humourist, we say
+    decidedly, he was not.
+
+    Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book?  In a certain
+    sense no doubt humour may be found there.  Just as science tells us
+    that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same
+    elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so
+    is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest,
+    and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is
+    humour.  And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the
+    little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous,
+    the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary
+    skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more
+    telling his wit.  Now, Wilson's intellect was exceedingly and
+    wonderfully fine.  As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many
+    a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of
+    those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds
+    from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay."
+
+No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and
+saw the author of it.  Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and
+indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry
+between the 'Athenaeum' and the 'Academy.'
+
+"You belong to us," said Appleton.  "The 'Academy' is the proper place
+for you.  You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have
+Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy's camp."
+
+"And shall I tell you why I have joined the 'Athenaeum' in place of the
+'Academy'?" said Watts; "it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you
+did not."
+
+"For months and months I have been urging you to write in the 'Academy,'"
+said Appleton.
+
+"That is true, no doubt," said Watts, "but while MacColl offered me an
+important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you
+invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon
+metaphysics.  It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late.  If to join
+the 'Athenaeum' is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a
+Philistine am I."
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then
+called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends
+afterwards.  Shirley, in his 'Reminiscences' of Rossetti, like most of
+his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the
+poet-painter.  I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides
+cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a
+genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays.  I have heard him say more than
+once that Skelton's style had a certain charm for him, and he could not
+understand why Skelton's position is not as great as it deserves to be.
+'Scotsmen,' he said, 'often complain that English critics are slow to do
+them justice.  This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol's
+life.  He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering
+under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile
+Club.  As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the
+idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in
+the great literary cockpit of London.  To say the truth, the Scottish
+cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can
+more than take care of himself.  For my part, with the exception of
+Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish,
+Scottish, or Welsh.  But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had
+been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an
+enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been
+more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was
+liked.'
+
+As will be seen further on, before the review of the 'Comedy of the
+Noctes Ambrosianae' appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the
+'Athenaeum' an article on 'The Art of Interviewing.'  From this time
+forward he became the chief critic of the 'Athenaeum,' and for nearly a
+quarter of a century--that is to say, until he published 'The Coming of
+Love,' when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any
+kind--he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of
+which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound
+generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the
+phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic
+style--a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in
+an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.
+
+As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness
+upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his
+creative work is of the closest kind.  Indeed, it has been said by
+Rossetti that 'the subtle and original generalizations upon the first
+principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to
+him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own
+poetry.'  The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets.
+Rossetti used humourously to call him 'The Symposiarch,' and no doubt the
+influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at
+Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr.
+Marston's, Madox Brown's, and Mrs. Procter's, may be traced in his
+writings.  For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic
+of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of
+spontaneous conversation overheard.  Its variety of manner, as well as of
+subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism.  In it
+are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation,
+irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily
+mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit.  To
+the 'Athenaeum' he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as
+'The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,' 'The Troubadours and Trouveres,'
+'The Children of the Open Air,' 'The Gypsies,' 'Cosmic Humour,' 'The
+Effect of Evolution upon Literature.'  And although the most complete and
+most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the
+vast ocean of the 'Examiner,' the 'Athenaeum,' and the 'Encyclopaedia
+Britannica,' there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is
+proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, that
+contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian
+minister, to the 'Rivista d' Italia.'  In this article she makes frequent
+allusions to the 'Athenaeum' articles, and quotes freely from them.
+Rossetti once said that 'the reason why Theodore Watts was so little
+known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as
+eagerly as other men sought fame'; but although his indifference to
+literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts
+of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his
+influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be
+profound.
+
+There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves
+untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates.  His treatise in the
+'Encyclopaedia Britannica' on 'Poetry' is alone sufficient to show how
+deep has been his study of poetic principles.  The essay on the 'Sonnet,'
+too, which appeared in 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' is admitted by critics
+of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject.  It
+has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl
+Leutzner in his treatise, 'Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.'
+
+The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the 'Athenaeum' are
+admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B.
+Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the 'Idler.'  The
+allusion to the 'smart slaters' will be sufficient to indicate the
+approximate date of the interview.
+
+    "Having read your treatise on poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia
+    Britannica,' which, it is said, has been an influence in every
+    European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned
+    in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of
+    comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his
+    time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English
+    poetry at the present moment.  There are those who run down the
+    present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are
+    really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
+    It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in
+    sympathy with the poetry of the present hour."
+
+    "I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic.  To say
+    the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque
+    misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.
+    Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I
+    was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in
+    which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are
+    so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same
+    misconception seems to be spreading in England--attacks which the
+    smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing
+    men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers."
+
+    "It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the
+    newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd."
+
+    "I do not believe in answering attacks.  The public, as I say, knows
+    that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm
+    to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer
+    does him more good than praise would do.  But, as a matter of fact, I
+    have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of
+    letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations
+    upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a
+    review.  It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one's
+    excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful
+    criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike
+    reviewing than mine.  Yet it has one good quality, I think--it is
+    never unkindly.  I never will take a book for review unless I can say
+    something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour."
+
+    "Then you never practise the smart 'slating' which certain would-be
+    critics indulge in?"
+
+    "Never!  In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give
+    pain to a young writer.  In the next place, this 'smart slating,' as
+    you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world.
+    Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as
+    many miles of such smart 'slating' as could be achieved by any six of
+    the smart slaters.  A charming phrase of yours, 'smart slaters'!  But
+    I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my
+    time--men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to
+    mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they
+    hold such work in contempt.  Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for
+    instance.  Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day
+    of his valuable life are wasted on 'leader' writing, but there is in
+    any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be
+    achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he!
+    going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.
+    Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.
+    While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by
+    making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little
+    spiteful brow, Grant Allen's good-natured sayings have the very wit
+    that the unlucky sweater and 'slater' is trying for.  Read what he
+    said about William Watson, and see how kind he is.  Compare his
+    geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers.  Again, take
+    Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters
+    in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the
+    scurrility of the smart writers.  But it was not, I suppose, of such
+    as they that you came to talk about.  You are asking me whether I am
+    in sympathy with the younger writers of my time.  My answer is that I
+    cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.
+    In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of
+    them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal
+    friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work
+    and their aims.  No doubt there are some points in which they and I
+    agree to differ."
+
+    "And what about our contemporary novelists?  Perhaps you do not give
+    attention to fiction?"
+
+    "Give attention to novels!  Why, if I did not, I should not give
+    attention to literature at all.  In a true and deep sense all pure
+    literature is fiction--to use an extremely inadequate and misleading
+    word as a substitute for the right phrase, 'imaginative
+    representation.'  'The Iliad,' 'The Odyssey,' 'The AEneid,' 'The
+    Divina Commedia,' are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as
+    certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our
+    writers.  The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old
+    Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and
+    the mustard-seed.  A time which has given birth to such novelists as
+    many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time
+    for the English novel.  Criticism will have to recognize, and at
+    once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of
+    the 'literature of power,' and if criticism does not so recognize it,
+    so much the worse for criticism, I think.  That the novel will grow
+    in importance is, I say, quite certain.  In such a time as ours (as I
+    have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing
+    boy--it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough
+    for the growing limbs of life.  The novel is more flexible; it can be
+    stretched to fit the muscles as they swell."
+
+    "I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent
+    critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?"
+
+    "Well, there I am a 'galled jade' that must needs 'wince' a little.
+    No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not
+    yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my
+    writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity.  The chief
+    argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any
+    scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed
+    with the journal's own authority--and the same applies, of course, to
+    the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious.  With regard
+    to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to
+    be always on his guard against it.  An editor cannot read all the
+    books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary
+    world.  When Jones asks him for Brown's book for review, the editor
+    cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up
+    irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes
+    in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones's name,
+    but that of the journal.
+
+    In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but
+    not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great
+    injustice may flow from this.  I myself have more than once heard a
+    good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted
+    the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the
+    work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry
+    fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything."
+
+Now that the day of the 'smart slaters' is over, it is interesting to
+read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the
+article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the
+'Athenaeum,' spoke of its record and its triumphs:--
+
+    "The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every
+    line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through
+    its columns.  Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that
+    the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is
+    difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the
+    editorial 'we.'  But with regard to the general public, the reader of
+    a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of
+    the 'we,' and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an
+    author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men
+    ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers.  These were the
+    views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the
+    best writers of our time there can be no doubt.  Some very
+    illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them.  On a
+    certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne
+    Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having
+    accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced
+    himself, and told how he had stood 'dividing the swift mind' as to
+    whether he could or could not offer the man his hand.  'I think I
+    should have offered him mine,' said Rossetti, 'although no one
+    detests his offence more than I do.'  And then the conversation ran
+    upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old
+    friends could not shake hands.  'There is one kind of miscreant,'
+    said Rossetti, 'whom you have forgotten to name--a miscreant who in
+    kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an
+    anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when
+    he knows it to be good.  That is the man who should never defile my
+    hand by his touch.  By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I
+    must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste
+    bread and salt with him.  I would quietly get up and go.'  Tennyson,
+    on afterwards being told this story, said, 'And who would not do the
+    same?  Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege--sacrilege against
+    art.'  Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume
+    of the 'Athenaeum' worked on the great principle that the critic's
+    primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art
+    and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by.  Their
+    pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his
+    coadjutors; and from its commencement the 'Athenaeum' has striven to
+    avoid slashing and smart writing.  A difficult thing to avoid, no
+    doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar
+    slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever.  Of all
+    forms of writing, the founders of the 'Athenaeum' held the shallow,
+    smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable.  And
+    here again the views of the 'Athenaeum' have remained unchanged.  The
+    critic who works 'without a conscience or an aim' knows only too well
+    that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses
+    of human nature--the love that people have of seeing each other
+    attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself.
+    For although man has a strong instinct for admiration--else had he
+    never reached his present position in the conscious world--he has,
+    running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct--the
+    instinct for contempt.  A reviewer's ridicule poured upon a writer
+    titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority.  It is by
+    pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist
+    hopes to kill two birds with one stone--to gratify his own malignity
+    and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so.
+    Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is
+    far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all.  Many
+    brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever,
+    have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart
+    saying.  One of these writers--the greatest wit of the nineteenth
+    century--used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered
+    his own prodigious powers of wit, 'I will engage in six lessons to
+    teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks
+    it worth his while to learn.'  And the 'Athenaeum,' at the time when
+    Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same
+    thing.  The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and
+    among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching."
+
+Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a
+kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor
+should 'come down a cropper' over some matter of fact, and open the door
+to troublesome correspondence.  As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the
+mysterious 'we' must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the
+authority of the oracle?  When a contributor 'comes down a cropper,'
+although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor
+cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of
+the 'Saturday Review' under Cook) refuse to insert a correction.  Now, as
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, 'the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy
+does it feel in setting other intelligences right.'  I have been told
+that it was a tradition in the office of the 'Examiner,' and also in the
+office of the 'Athenaeum,' that Theodore Watts had not only never been
+known to 'come down a cropper,' but had never given the 'critical gnats'
+a chance of pretending that he had to.  One day, however, in an article
+on Frederick Tennyson's poems, speaking of the position that the poet
+Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with
+the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith--the same Smith whom 'Z'
+(the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the 'Athenaeum'--had been
+admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer
+had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith's with the metaphors of
+Shakespeare.  The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next
+Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great
+man:--
+
+    'Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson's poems,
+    which was published in your last number, please say where I have
+    compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?
+
+                                                         HERBERT SPENCER.'
+
+The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor
+had at last 'come down a cropper,' sent a proof of Spencer's note to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any
+editorial comment at all.  Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last
+'come down a cropper,' this would have been the wisest plan.  But he
+returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following
+footnote added to it:--
+
+    "It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the
+    magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in
+    literary art--an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original
+    in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature
+    may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from
+    their ranks--and it is many years since we had the pleasure of
+    reading it.  Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in
+    which he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as 'I speared
+    him with a jest,' etc.  Our only object, however, in alluding to the
+    subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the
+    hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as
+    this--
+
+             --My drooping sails
+    Flap idly 'gainst the mast of my intent;
+    I rot upon the waters when my prow
+    Should grate the golden isles--
+
+    had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and
+    favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer."
+
+Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, 'Of course
+the article was Theodore Watts's.  I had forgotten entirely what I had
+said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.'
+
+If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of
+critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which
+distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings, I think I should select this
+bland postscript to Spencer's letter.
+
+Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton
+always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson.  It
+occurred in connection with 'Kidnapped.'  I will quote here Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the
+'Athenaeum' review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson's works.  The
+playful allusion to the 'Athenaeum's' kindness is very characteristic:--
+
+    "Of Stevenson's sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could
+    quote many instances; but let one suffice.  When 'Kidnapped'
+    appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of
+    giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we
+    refused to be scared from making certain strictures.  It occurred to
+    us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic
+    detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really
+    vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts.
+    From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of
+    two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to
+    weld into one.  We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of
+    Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer,
+    anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power
+    is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story
+    on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding
+    one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the
+    villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him
+    and sending him off to the plantations.  The 'Athenaeum,' whose
+    kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small,
+    has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its
+    usual kind and gentle way.  This aroused the wrath of the
+    Stevensonians.  Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the
+    author of 'Kidnapped' himself a charming letter.'
+
+This letter appears in Stevenson's 'Letters,' and by the courtesy of Mr.
+Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it
+here:--
+
+                                                  SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.
+
+    DEAR MR. WATTS,--The sight of the last 'Athenaeum' reminds me of you,
+    and of my debt now too long due.  I wish to thank you for your notice
+    of 'Kidnapped'; and that not because it was kind, though for that
+    also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before
+    now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers.  A critic
+    like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity,
+    and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance,
+    surely not in vain.
+
+    What you say of the two parts in 'Kidnapped' was felt by no one more
+    painfully than by myself.  I began it, partly as a lark, partly as a
+    pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from
+    the canvas, and I found I was in another world.  But there was the
+    cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old
+    friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back
+    door.  So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to
+    me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay.  For a
+    man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private
+    means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist's
+    proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden:
+    the days of professional literature very hard.  Yet I do not so far
+    deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing
+    my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality
+    to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my 'Kidnapped' was doomed,
+    while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the
+    thing it is.
+
+    And now to the more genial business of defence.  You attack my fight
+    on board the 'Covenant,' I think it literal.  David and Alan had
+    every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good
+    conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first
+    attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have
+    taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms
+    and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.
+    The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever
+    ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not;
+    still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would
+    perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.--I am, dear Mr.
+    Watts, your very sincere admirer,
+
+                                                   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson, of his
+personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and Stevenson, on
+his part, in conversation never failed to speak of himself, as in this
+letter he subscribes himself, as Mr. Watts-Dunton's sincere admirer.  But
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's admiration of Stevenson's work was more tempered with
+judgment than was the admiration of some critics, who afterwards, when he
+became too successful, disparaged him.  Greatly as he admired 'Kidnapped'
+and 'Catriona,' there were certain of Stevenson's works for which his
+admiration was qualified, and certain others for which he had no
+admiration at all.  His strictures upon the story which seems to have
+been at first the main source of Stevenson's popularity, 'Dr. Jekyll and
+Mr. Hyde,' were much resented at the time by those insincere and fickle
+worshippers to whom I have already alluded.  Yet these strictures are
+surely full of wisdom, and they specially show that wide sweep over the
+entire field of literature which is characteristic of all his criticism.
+As they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will quote
+them here:--
+
+    "Take the little story 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' the laudatory
+    criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like
+    the comet's tail in relation to the comet.  On its appearance as a
+    story, a 'shilling shocker' for the railway bookstalls, the critic's
+    attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred
+    qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the
+    world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to
+    its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing.
+    But when it is offered as a classic--and this is really how it is
+    offered--it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different
+    kind.  It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having
+    a like motive--stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest
+    literature--as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke
+    to the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible
+    being--stories whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest
+    kind.
+
+    It is many years since, in writing of the 'Parables of Buddhaghosha,'
+    it was our business to treat at length of the grand idea of man's
+    dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been
+    embodied.  We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsene
+    Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life's road, sees on a
+    lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards--when sin has
+    soiled him--finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own
+    sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely modern
+    story of Edgar Poe, 'William Wilson,' up to the earliest allegories
+    upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by
+    gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart
+    of the 'Great Man, Mankind.'  We traced the idea, as far as our
+    knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and
+    found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive--from the
+    ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all
+    motives--had been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that
+    did honour to literary art.  Manu, after telling us that 'single is
+    each man born into the world--single dies,' implores each one to
+    'collect virtue,' in order that after death he may be met by the
+    virtuous part of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in
+    traversing 'that gloom which is so hard to be traversed.'  Fine as
+    this is, it is surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since
+    versified by Sir Edwin Arnold)--the story of the wicked king who met
+    after death a frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her
+    to be only a part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own
+    evil deeds.  And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in
+    Arda Viraf, in which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid
+    pleasant trees whose fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of
+    his own dual nature, a beautiful maiden, who says to him, 'O youth, I
+    am thine own actions.'
+
+    And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in
+    which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it
+    deserves.  It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous
+    tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery--a story of astonishing
+    brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man's
+    soul is effected not by psychological development, and not by the
+    'awful alchemy' of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the
+    previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed
+    new drug.
+
+    If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De
+    Quincey's 'Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,' it tells
+    poorly for Stevenson's sense of humour.  If it is meant as a serious
+    allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same
+    motive with which most literatures have been enriched.  That a story
+    so coarse should have met with the plaudits that 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+    Hyde' met with at the time of its publication--that it should now be
+    quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while
+    all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are
+    ignored--what does it mean?  Is it a sign that the 'shrinkage of the
+    world,' the 'solidarity of civilisation,' making the record of each
+    day's doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our
+    public writers?  Is it that they not only have no time to think, but
+    no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour?  Is it
+    that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon
+    them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and
+    turn to it for convenient illustration?  That Stevenson should have
+    been impelled to write the story shows what the 'Suicide Club' had
+    already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a
+    charm to 'Treasure Island' and 'Kidnapped,' there was that morbid
+    strain which is so often associated with physical disease.
+
+    Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all
+    writers since Chaucer--Walter Scott--Stevenson might have been in the
+    ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who
+    do their best to make life hideous.  It must be remembered that he
+    was a critic first and a creator afterwards.  He himself tells us how
+    critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to
+    writing himself.  No one really understood better than he Hesiod's
+    fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a
+    forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares.  No one understood
+    better than he Joubert's saying, 'Fiction has no business to exist
+    unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one aim
+    is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere
+    frightful reality.'  And for the most part he succeeded in keeping
+    down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a
+    crazy body.
+
+    Save in such great mistakes as 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' and a few
+    other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert's excellent maxim.  But
+    Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter--right by
+    instinct.  He alone is always a delight.  If all art is dedicated to
+    joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious
+    problem than how to make men happy, then the 'Waverley Novels' are
+    among the most precious things in the literature of the world."
+
+Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always speaks warmly
+is Browning.  Among the many good anecdotes I have heard him relate in
+this connection, I will give one.  I do not think that he would object to
+my doing so.
+
+    "It is one of my misfortunes," said he, "to be not fully worthy (to
+    use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning's poetry.
+    Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative
+    and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements
+    in a general way not pleasing to my ear.  When a certain book of his
+    came out--I forget which--it devolved upon me to review it.  Certain
+    eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I
+    expressed my irritation in something very like chaff.  A close friend
+    of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself--in fact, Mr.
+    Swinburne--chided me for it, and I feel that he was right.  On the
+    afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal
+    Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began
+    talking about the review.  Lowell, I found, was delighted with
+    it--said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had
+    appeared for many years.  'But,' said he, 'You're a brave man to be
+    here where Browning always comes.'  Then, looking round the room, he
+    said: 'Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side
+    opposite to us.  Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!'
+
+    'Slip away!' I said, 'to avoid Browning!  You don't know him as well
+    as I do, after all!  Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if
+    we stand here for a minute or two.  Miss Browning, whose eyes are
+    looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak
+    to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me.
+    And then you will see her turn her head to Browning's ear and tell
+    him something.  And then Browning will come straight across to me and
+    be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing
+    that be possible.'
+
+    'No, I don't believe it.'
+
+    'If you were not such a Boston Puritan,' I said, 'I would ask you
+    what will you bet that I am wrong.'
+
+    No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied, Miss
+    Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn and whisper
+    in Browning's ear, and Browning did come straight across the room to
+    us; and this is what he said, speaking to me before he spoke to the
+    illustrious American--a thing which on any other occasion he would
+    scarcely have done:
+
+    'Now,' said he, 'you're not going to put me off with generalities any
+    longer.  You promised to write and tell me when you could come to
+    luncheon.  You have never done so--you will never do so, unless I fix
+    you with a distinct day.  Will you come to-morrow?'
+
+    'I shall be delighted,' I said.  And he turned to Lowell and
+    exchanged a few friendly words with him.
+
+    After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: 'Well, this is
+    wonderful.  You would have won the bet.  How do you explain it?'
+
+    'I explain it by Browning's greatness of soul and heart.  His
+    position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative
+    review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him.  But
+    he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson,
+    Jowett, and others.  He wishes to make it quite apparent that he
+    feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.'"
+
+After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to turn to
+the bound volume of my 'Athenaeum' and read the article on 'Ferishtah's
+Fancies,' which I imagine must have been the review in question.  This is
+what I read:--
+
+    'The poems in this volume can only be described as
+    parable-poems--parable-poems, not in the sense that they are capable
+    of being read as parables (as is said to be the case with the
+    'Ruba'iyat' of Omar Khayyam), but parable-poems in the sense that
+    they must be read as parables, or they show no artistic raison d'etre
+    at all.
+
+    Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem?  It
+    is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the
+    young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall.  Or rather, it is to
+    imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda,
+    and set the preacher strumming a gypsy's tambourine.  Though in the
+    pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so
+    absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses
+    it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere
+    with that entire abandon--that emotional freedom--which seems
+    necessary to the very existence of song.  Indeed, if poetry must,
+    like Wordsworth's ideal John Bull, 'be free or die'; if she must know
+    no law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of 'L'art pour
+    l'art' declares); if she must not even seem to know _that_ (as the
+    doctrine of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it
+    apparently in tricksy sport alone--how can she--'the singing maid
+    with pictures in her eyes'--mount the pulpit, read the text, and
+    deliver the sermon?
+
+    In European literature how many parable poems should we find where
+    the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly strife?  But
+    we discussed all this in speaking of prose parables, comparing the
+    stories of the Prodigal Son and Kisagotami with even such perfect
+    parable poetry as that of Jami.  We said then what we reiterate now:
+    that to sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius
+    of a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order--a genius
+    rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a certain
+    Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot in
+    floriculture.  Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental fancies, and
+    being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy with a certain
+    fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar with the
+    Persian story we allude to, the famous story of 'Poetry and
+    Cabbages.'  Still, we will record it here for a certain learned
+    society.
+
+    The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers,
+    and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages.  So the
+    Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tuba Tree (whose fruit becomes
+    flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to
+    another, 'The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well
+    be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon;
+    for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in
+    colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they
+    are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so
+    very intent upon cabbages.'  So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit
+    on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers
+    out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words
+    of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven.  So
+    bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer--for not only has
+    Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the
+    poet--
+
+    Breathe a stream of otto and balm,
+    Which through a woof of living music blown
+    Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?
+
+    --so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the
+    angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and
+    perfumed words upon the petals.  And this was how the Angels of the
+    Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of 'Poetry and
+    Cabbages.'
+
+    But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is
+    nothing less than the celestial charactery of heaven, and is
+    consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very few--that is to
+    say, the eyes of those mortals who are 'of the race of Israfel.'  To
+    common eyes--the eyes of the ordinary human cabbage-grower--what,
+    indeed, is that angelic caligraphy with which the petals of the
+    flowers are ornamented?  Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful
+    veins and scents and colours.
+
+    But who are 'of the race of Israfel'?  Not the prosemen, certainly,
+    as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher's idle
+    nonsense about the 'Alphabet of the Angels' in his 'AEdipus
+    Egyptiacus.'  Are they, then, the poets?  This is indeed a solemn
+    query.  'If,' says Feridun, 'the mottoes that adorn the bowers of
+    Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall
+    be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of
+    hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?'
+
+    One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel--the
+    parable-poet--the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as
+    reasoned conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized
+    in concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic
+    form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it
+    that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the
+    colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of
+    these, and to be as inseparable from them as the 'morning breath' of
+    the Sabaean rose is inalienable from the innermost petals--'the
+    subtle odour of the rose's heart,' which no mere chemistry of man,
+    but only the morning breeze, can steal."
+
+It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous for Mr.
+Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and we have only to contrast it--or
+its richness and its rareness--with the naive, simple, unadorned style of
+'Aylwin' to realize how wide is the range of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a master
+of the fine shades of literary expression.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER
+
+
+AND now begins the most difficult and the most responsible part of my
+task--the selection of one typical essay from the vast number of essays
+expressing more or less fully the great heart-thought which gives life to
+all Mr. Watts-Dunton's work.  I can, of course, give only one, for
+already I see signs that this book will swell to proportions far beyond
+those originally intended for it.  Naturally, I thought at first that I
+would select one of the superb articles on Victor Hugo's works, such for
+instance as 'La Legende des Siecles,' or that profound one on 'La
+Religion des Religion.'  But, after a while, when I had got the essay
+typed and ready for inclusion, I changed my mind.  I thought that one of
+those wonderful essays upon Oriental subjects which had called forth
+writings like those of Sir Edwin Arnold, would serve my purpose better.
+Finally, I decided to choose an essay, which when it appeared was so full
+of profound learning upon the great book of the world, the Bible, that it
+was attributed to almost every great specialist upon the Bible in Europe
+and in America.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has often been urged to reprint this
+essay as a brief text-book for scholastic use, but he has never done so.
+It will be noted by readers of 'Aylwin' that even so far back as the
+publication of this article in the 'Athenaeum ', in 1877, Mr.
+Watts-Dunton--to judge from the allusion in it to 'Nin-ki-gal, the Queen
+of Death'--seems to have begun to draw upon Philip Aylwin's 'Veiled
+Queen':--
+
+    "There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive
+    subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western
+    literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform
+    failure of these attempts.  At the time that Sternhold was 'bringing'
+    the Psalms into 'fine Englysh meter' for Henry the Eighth and Edward
+    the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for
+    their own monarchs--notably Clement Marot for Francis the First.  And
+    it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any
+    importance having been entered against it.  This is astonishing, for
+    the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a
+    sacred book.  Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come,
+    and a literary journal may be its proper medium.
+
+    A great living savant has characterized the Bible as 'a collection of
+    the rude imaginings of Syria,' 'the worn-out old bottle of Judaism
+    into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.'  The
+    great savant was angry when he said so.  The 'new wine' of science is
+    a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets
+    from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much
+    intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless.  But whatever may
+    become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have
+    passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of
+    Chaldaea,--the 'old bottle' is going to be older yet,--the Bible is
+    going to be eternal.  For that which decides the vitality of any book
+    is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul--not the
+    knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the
+    universe, unseen as well as seen.  The attitude of the Bible is just
+    that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always
+    assume--that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as
+    this--that of a noble humility before a God such as He 'in whose
+    great Hand we stand.'  This is why--like Alexander's mirror--like
+    that most precious 'Cup of Jemshid,' imagined by the Persians--the
+    Bible reflects to-day, and will reflect for ever, every wave of human
+    emotion, every passing event of human life--reflect them as
+    faithfully as it did to the great and simple people in whose great
+    and simple tongue it was written.  Coming from the Vernunft of Man,
+    it goes straight to the Vernunft.  This is the kind of literature
+    that never does die: a fact which the world has discovered long ago.
+    For the Bible is Europe's one book.  And with regard to Asia, as far
+    back as the time of Chrysostom it could have been read in languages
+    Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan;
+    now it can be read in every language, and in almost every dialect,
+    under the sun.
+
+    And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms.
+    Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful;
+    the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible
+    to sing so badly.  It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I
+    should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should
+    find it in their hearts to sing Marot's Psalms when they might have
+    sung David's--that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable
+    jig, 'O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation'; and that Anthony,
+    King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, 'Stand
+    up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.'  For, although it is given to the
+    very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the
+    ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar
+    convolution.
+
+    In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the
+    English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in
+    various incarnations, are fastidious.
+
+    When Lord Macaulay's tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating
+    the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British
+    Museum to study us through our books--what volume can he take as the
+    representative one--what book, above all others, can the ghostly
+    librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into
+    the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure
+    in the earth?  We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the
+    English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the
+    Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most
+    exalted and its most abject phases.  That in the same volume can be
+    found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the
+    grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of
+    Brady and Tate--masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous
+    is an inspired bard--would be adequate evidence that the Church using
+    it must be a British Church--that British, most British, must be the
+    public tolerating it.
+
+    'By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy
+    Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and
+    Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver
+    us.'
+
+    Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in
+    such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music
+    are so mysteriously blended--blended so divinely that the man who can
+    utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch
+    close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from
+    some of us.  Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that
+    could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said:--'More than any
+    race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and
+    energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit.  Enthusiasm is
+    their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration
+    as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.'  And now listen to
+    this:--
+
+    When we, our wearied limbs to rest,
+       Sat down by proud Euphrates' stream,
+    We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,
+       And Zion was our mournful theme.
+
+    Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have
+    thus degraded the words: 'By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat
+    down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.'  For, to achieve such
+    platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the
+    'Hopkins element,' an element which is quite an insular birthright of
+    ours, a characteristic which came over with the 'White Horse,'--that
+    'dull and greasy coarseness of taste' which distinguishes the British
+    mind from all others; that 'achtbrittische Beschranktheit,' which
+    Heine speaks of in his tender way.  The Scottish version is rough,
+    but Brady and Tate's inanities are worse than Rous's roughness.
+
+    Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and
+    the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it
+    come?  It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking
+    the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end,
+    and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set
+    the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for
+    generations:--'What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental,
+    difference between English literature--and all other Western
+    literatures--Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?'  The simple
+    truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been
+    bipartite as now--has always been, as now, half sublime and half
+    homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired
+    by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk
+    schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such
+    of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them.
+    For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has
+    been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction
+    of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he
+    is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty.  When St.
+    Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins,
+    a heathen then, in possession of the soil.
+
+    There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says.
+    The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous,
+    much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by
+    nature none of the Hebraic style.  But, somehow, here is the
+    difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is
+    born of taste--though le style c'est la race; and though the
+    Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone;
+    yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of
+    many years--just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows
+    not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him--so
+    may the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil
+    be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years.  The
+    result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their
+    deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the
+    Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes
+    when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in
+    parts of Raleigh's 'History of the World,' in Jeremy Taylor's
+    sermons, in Hall's 'Contemplations,' and other such books of the
+    seventeenth century.
+
+    The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined.  To
+    define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life.  When we
+    say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean
+    that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or
+    unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or
+    conscious grace which we call manner.  The difference is fundamental.
+    It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or
+    grace--manner is conscious power or grace.  But the Great Style, both
+    in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace
+    in one.
+
+    And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression
+    of a national temper?  Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does.
+    Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive
+    with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness
+    of the Aryan mind--not, certainly, to those who, though producing
+    AEschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians,
+    but to the descendants of Shem,--the only gentleman among all the
+    sons of Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the
+    face of God and live, can see not much else.  The Great Style, in a
+    word, is Semitic.  It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic.  For
+    though two of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt,
+    plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the
+    most part.  The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as
+    compared with Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high
+    reach of ethical writing as even that noble and well-known passage
+    from Manu, beginning, 'Single is each man born into the world, single
+    he dies,' etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared
+    with the ethical parts of Scripture.  The Persians have the grace
+    always, the power often, but the unconsciousness almost never.  We
+    might perhaps say that there were those in Egypt once who came near
+    to the great ideal.  That description of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,'
+    the Queen of Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British
+    Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite.  Conscious power
+    and conscious grace are Hellenic, of course.  That there is a deal of
+    unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons
+    by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how
+    artificial he seems.  And note that, afterwards, when he who
+    approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the
+    Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the
+    Nile.  It is to the Latin races--some of them--that has filtered
+    Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has
+    been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain,
+    but straight from the Hebrew.
+
+    What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have--unconsciousness;
+    often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalite.
+    Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too.  The Hopkins
+    element,--the dull and stupid homeliness,--the coarse grotesque,
+    mingle with and mar its finest effects.  Over it all the atmosphere
+    is that of pantomime--singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner's
+    libretti.  Even that great final conflict between gods and men and
+    the swarming brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the
+    Volu-seeress, when from Yotunland they come and storm the very gates
+    of Asgard;--even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar
+    picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and
+    digesting the universe to chaos.  But, out of the twenty-three
+    thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no
+    one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist
+    to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement.  This is why
+    style in literature is virtue.  Like royalty, the Great Style 'can do
+    no wrong.'
+
+    Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far
+    the largest endowment.  They wanted another element, in short, not
+    the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that
+    of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live;
+    as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold--two of the finest and most delicate
+    minds of modern times--can testify.
+
+    But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before
+    the Bishops' Bible or Coverdale's Bible; long before even Aldhelm's
+    time--Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon
+    mind.  From the time when Caedmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep
+    beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the
+    Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic.
+    Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was
+    steeped had been Hebraism at second hand--that of the Vulgate
+    mainly--till Tyndale's time, or rather till the present Authorized
+    Version of the Bible appeared in 1611.  'There is no book,' says
+    Selden, 'so translated as the Bible for the purpose.  If I translate
+    a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into
+    French-English.  "Il fait froid," I say, 'tis cold, not it makes
+    cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into
+    English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that
+    language is kept.'
+
+    And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal
+    accuracy--importation of Hebraisms--was not of itself enough to
+    produce a translation in the Great Style--a translation such as this,
+    which, as Coleridge says, makes us think that 'the translators
+    themselves were inspired.'  To reproduce the Great Style of the
+    original in a Western idiom, the happiest combination of
+    circumstances was necessary.  The temper of the people receiving
+    must, notwithstanding all differences of habitation and civilization,
+    be elementally in harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it
+    must be poetic rather than ratiocinative.  Society must not be too
+    complex--its tone must not be too knowing and self-glorifying.  The
+    accepted psychology of the time must not be the psychology of the
+    scalpel--the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics of newspaper
+    cynicism; above all, enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered
+    synonymous terms.  Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the
+    faintest suspicion of nineteenth century flavour.  That this is the
+    kind of national temper necessary to such a work might have been
+    demonstrated by an argument a priori.  It was the temper of the
+    English nation when the Bible was translated.  That noble
+    heroism--born of faith in God and belief in the high duties of
+    man--which we have lost for the hour--was in the very atmosphere that
+    hung over the island.  And style in real life, which now, as a
+    consequence of our loss, does not exist at all among Englishmen, and
+    only among a very few Englishwomen--having given place in all classes
+    to manner--flourished then in all its charm.  And in literature it
+    was the same: not even the euphuism imported from Spain could really
+    destroy or even seriously damage the then national sense of style.
+
+    Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what
+    must that be?  Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do
+    all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and
+    yet must be free from any soupcon of that 'artifice,' in the
+    'abandonment' of which, says an Arabian historian, 'true art alone
+    lies.'  For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art,
+    the Semites show but small conception, even in Job.  It was too
+    sacred for that--drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike
+    unknown.
+
+    But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation
+    of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical
+    prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic
+    and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be
+    chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon;
+    just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even
+    ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion.  It
+    must be neither verse nor prose, it seems.  It must be a new movement
+    altogether.  The musical movement of the English Bible is a new
+    movement; let us call it 'Bible Rhythm.'  And the movement was
+    devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles.  Thanks to
+    Difficulty--thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls 'Hebrew
+    phrase and English phrase,' the translators fashioned, or rather,
+    Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor
+    wholly the other--a movement which, for music, for variety,
+    splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English
+    poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern
+    world--a movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself--but a
+    form in which 'artifice' is really 'abandoned' at last.  This rhythm
+    it is to which we referred as running through the English
+    Prayer-book, and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest
+    reaches perhaps being in the Psalms--this rhythm it is which the
+    Hopkinses and Rouses have--improved!  It would not be well to be too
+    technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest literary importance
+    just now, and it is necessary to explain clearly what we mean.
+
+    Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is
+    technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the
+    fulfilment of expectation.  In rhymed verse this is obvious: having
+    familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet's rhymes, we
+    take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to
+    this arrangement.  In blank verse the law of expectation is less
+    apparent.  Yet it is none the less operative.  Having familiarized
+    ourselves with the poet's rhythm, having found that iambic foot
+    succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun
+    to grow monotonous, variations occur--trochaic, anapaestic,
+    dactylic--according to the law which governs the ear of this
+    individual poet;--we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals
+    these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are
+    fulfilled.  And our delight is augmented if also our expectations
+    with regard to caesuric effects are realized in the same proportions.
+    Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has
+    an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say,
+    to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence,--we expect
+    that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard
+    to the initial foot of any sequence,--there must be, not far ahead,
+    that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses
+    have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader
+    shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights.  And when
+    this expectation of caesuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified
+    in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which
+    obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final
+    third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result.
+    In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from
+    poetry is in the recognition of law.  The more obvious and formulated
+    is the law,--nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian,--the more
+    pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear.  This is why uneducated
+    people may delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank
+    verse; this is why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme,
+    takes pleasure in such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom.
+    But, as the ear becomes more cultivated, it demands that these
+    indications of law should be more and more subtle, till at last
+    recognized law itself may become a tyranny and a burden.  He who will
+    read Shakespeare's plays chronologically, as far as that is
+    practicable, from 'Love's Labour's Lost' to the 'Tempest,' will have
+    no difficulty in seeing precisely what we mean.  In literature, as in
+    social life, the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny,
+    to freedom that is lawful.  Now the great features of Bible Rhythm
+    are a recognized music apart from a recognized law--'artifice' so
+    completely abandoned that we forget we are in the realm of
+    art--pauses so divinely set that they seem to be 'wood-notes wild,'
+    though all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious
+    law too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties
+    infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties that
+    are unexpected.  There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the
+    'moving music which is life'; it is the living metre of the surging
+    sea within the soul of him who speaks; it is the free effluence of
+    the emotions and the passions which are passing into the words.  And
+    if this is so in other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms,
+    where 'the flaming steeds of song,' though really kept strongly in
+    hand, seem to run reinless as 'the wild horses of the wind'?"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR
+
+
+THE reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of
+what I may call 'The Renascence of Wonder' essays gave me so much trouble
+that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay
+typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton's criticism dealing with what he calls 'the
+laws of cause and effect in literary art' it naturally occurred to me to
+write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two.  In response to my
+letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection
+for a friend took entire precedence of his own work:--
+
+    "MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,--The selections from my critiques must really
+    be left entirely to yourself.  They are to illustrate your own
+    critical judgment upon my work, and not mine.  Overwhelmed as I am
+    with avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge
+    into the countless columns of the 'Athenaeum,' in quest of articles
+    of mine which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden
+    at the present moment.  I can think of only one article which I
+    should specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in
+    part--not on account of any merit in it which I can recall, but
+    because it was the means of bringing me into contact with one of the
+    most delightful men and one of the most splendidly equipped writers
+    of our time, whose sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond
+    measure.  A few days after the article appeared, the then editor of
+    the 'Athenaeum,' Mr. MacColl, the dear friend with whom I was
+    associated for more than twenty years, showed me a letter that he had
+    received from Traill.  It was an extremely kind letter.  Among the
+    many generous things that Traill said was this--that it was just the
+    kind of review article which makes the author regret that he had not
+    seen it before his book appeared.  I wrote to Traill in
+    acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not until a good while
+    after this that we met at the Incorporated Authors' Society dinner.
+    At the table where I was sitting, and immediately opposite me, sat a
+    gentleman whose countenance, especially when it was illuminated by
+    conversation with his friends, perfectly charmed me.  Although there
+    was not the smallest regularity in his features, the expression was
+    so genial and so winsome that I had some difficulty in persuading
+    myself that it was not a beautiful face after all, and his smile was
+    really quite irresistible.  The contrast between his black eyebrows
+    and whiskers and the white hair upon his head gave him a peculiarly
+    picturesque appearance.  Another thing I noticed was a boyish kind of
+    lisp, which somehow, I could not say why, gave to the man an added
+    charm.  I did not know it was Traill, but after the dinner was over,
+    when I was saying to myself, 'That is a man I should like to know,' a
+    friend who sat next him--I forget who it was--brought him round to me
+    and introduced him as 'Mr. Traill.'  'You and I ought to know each
+    other,' he said, 'for, besides having many tastes in common, we live
+    near each other.'  And then I found that he lived near the
+    'Northumberland Arms,' between Putney and Barnes.  I think that he
+    must have seen how greatly I was drawn to him, for he called at The
+    Pines in a few days--I think, indeed, it was the very next day--and
+    then began a friendship the memory of which gives me intense
+    pleasure, and yet pleasure not unmixed with pain, when I recall his
+    comparatively early and sudden death.  I used to go to his
+    gatherings, and it was there that I first met several interesting men
+    that I had not known before.  One of them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney
+    Low, then the editor of the 'St. James's Gazette.'  And I also used
+    to meet there interesting men whom I had known before, such as the
+    late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose 'Light of Asia,' and other such works, I
+    had reviewed in the 'Athenaeum.'  I do not hesitate for a moment to
+    say that Traill was a man of genius.  Had he lived fifty years
+    earlier, such a writer as he who wrote 'The New Lucian,' 'Recaptured
+    Rhymes,' 'Saturday Songs,' 'The Canaanitish Press' and 'Israelitish
+    Questions,' 'the Life of Sterne,' and the brilliant articles in the
+    'Saturday Review' and the 'Pall Mall Gazette,' would have made an
+    unforgettable mark in literature.  But there is no room for anybody
+    now--no room for anybody but the very, very few.  When he was about
+    starting 'Literature,' he wrote to me, and a gratifying letter it
+    was.  He said that, although he had no desire to wean me from the
+    'Athenaeum,' he should be delighted to receive anything from me when
+    I chanced to be able to spare him something.  It was always an
+    aspiration of mine to send something to a paper edited by so
+    important a literary figure--a paper, let me say, that had a finer,
+    sweeter tone than any other paper of my time--I mean, that tone of
+    fine geniality upon which I have often commented, that tone without
+    which, 'there can be no true criticism.'  A certain statesman of our
+    own period, who had pursued literature with success, used to say
+    (alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead), that the
+    besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of gentlemanlike
+    feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all the other
+    educated classes.  This might have been so then, but, through the
+    influence mainly of 'Literature' and H. D. Traill, it is not so now.
+    Many people have speculated as to why a literary journal, edited by
+    such a man, and borne into the literary arena on the doughty back of
+    the 'Times,' did not succeed.  I have a theory of my own upon that
+    subject.  Although Traill's hands were so full of all kinds of
+    journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is a mistake to
+    suppose that his own journal was badly edited.  It was well edited,
+    and it had a splendid staff, but several things were against it.  It
+    confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as I remember,
+    give its attention to much else.  Its price was sixpence; but its
+    chief cause of failure was what I may call its 'personal appearance.'
+    If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor at the
+    beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the first
+    quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper or a
+    magazine.  When the 'Saturday Review' was started, its personal
+    appearance--something quite new then--did almost as much for it as
+    the brilliant writing.  It was the same with the 'Pall Mall Gazette'
+    when it started.  Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a
+    great deal in clothes.  Now, as I told Traill when we were talking
+    about this, 'Literature' in appearance seemed an uninviting cross
+    between the 'Law Times' and 'The Lancet'--it seemed difficult to
+    connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a
+    business-like looking sheet as that.  Traill laughed, but ended by
+    saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of
+    mine.  Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died
+    only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten.  I should
+    be sorry indeed to think that.  All that I can say is that for a book
+    such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about
+    Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as
+    any that Traill's own delightful whimsical imagination could have
+    pictured."
+
+Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton's wishes, and I do this with the
+more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on
+Sterne and the imaginative work--the theory of absolute humour
+exemplified in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article.
+It was a review of Traill's 'Sterne,' in the 'English Men of Letters,'
+and it appeared in the 'Athenaeum' of November 18, 1882.  I will quote
+the greater part of it:--
+
+    "Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated
+    writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and
+    Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while
+    Addison as a humorist is not even talked about.  In gauging the
+    quality of poetry--in finding for any poet his proper place in the
+    poetic heavens--there is always uncertainty and difficulty.  With
+    humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily
+    in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous
+    relations, and that the quality of every man's humour depends upon
+    the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable.  If,
+    for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities
+    deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his
+    relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey
+    to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and
+    the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and
+    the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent.  Again, if
+    a man's sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is
+    confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between
+    individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is
+    surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt--according, at least, to
+    the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according
+    to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon
+    in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the
+    Philistine only.  If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree)
+    Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer's sense of the incongruous
+    is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill
+    calls 'the irony of human intercourse,' he is indeed a humourist, and
+    in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily
+    of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of
+    the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to
+    apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest
+    and deepest incongruities possible.  And it will be found that these
+    harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very 'order of the
+    universe' itself and the mind of man.  In certain temperaments the
+    eternal incongruities between man's mind and the scheme of the
+    universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and
+    Novalis; but to other temperaments--to a Rabelais or Sterne, for
+    instance--the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder,
+    turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most
+    temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some 'paradis
+    artificiel.'  Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is
+    that of 'human intercourse,' if he has no sense of this much deeper
+    irony--the irony of man's intercourse with the universal harmony
+    itself--he cannot be ranked with the very greatest.  Of this irony in
+    the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive,
+    while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment.  Of Swift and Carlyle it
+    might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible
+    apprehension of it.  And if we should find that this quality exists
+    in 'Tristram Shandy,' how high, then, must we not place Sterne!  And
+    if we should find that Cervantes deals with the 'irony of human
+    intercourse' merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity,
+    terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne?  Why
+    is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is
+    based so melancholy?  Because it only sees the farce from the human
+    point of view.  The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a
+    soul deeply conscious of man's ludicrous futility in his relations to
+    his fellow-man.  But while the futilities of 'Don Quixote' are tragic
+    because terrene, the futilities of 'Tristram Shandy' are comic
+    because they are derived from the order of things.  It is the great
+    humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock
+    at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the
+    constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram's nose.  And if
+    Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end
+    a benevolent king; and hence all is well.
+
+    While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a
+    humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne
+    under a classification.  In Sterne's writings every kind of humour is
+    to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must
+    have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as
+    Addison's, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare's.  In loving
+    sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by
+    Sterne in his 'fat, foolish scullion.'  Lower than the Dogberry type
+    there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to
+    whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph.  While
+    the news of Bobby's death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen,
+    suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must
+    follow such a sad calamity to the 'fat, foolish scullion,' scrubbing
+    her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of
+    her own life, and consequently to the wail that 'Bobby is certainly
+    dead' her soul merely answers as she scrubs, 'So am not I.'  In four
+    words that scullion lives for ever.
+
+    Sterne's humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian,
+    Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for
+    such a Proteus?  So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at
+    first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing
+    its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the
+    method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can
+    work.  Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed
+    the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of
+    Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate
+    between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on
+    the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne's
+    natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or
+    Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the
+    humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation.  But
+    the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly
+    shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which
+    he pretended to be.  And after all this is the important question as
+    regards Sterne.  Lamb's critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly
+    seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own 'self-pleasing
+    quaintness.'  When any form of art departs in any way from
+    symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it
+    is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic?
+    That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we
+    feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the
+    artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust.  In the
+    humourous portions of Sterne's work there is, probably, not a page,
+    however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and
+    therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an
+    offence. . . .
+
+    'Yorickism' is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of
+    the humour of Swift.  One recognizes that the universe is rich in
+    things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the
+    universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate.  One recognizes
+    that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and
+    (because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that
+    there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as
+    a man.  The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in
+    the temperament--the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of
+    Apemantus.  And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to
+    say which fate is more terrible, Swift's or Carlyle's--that of the
+    man whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing
+    intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious,
+    conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot.
+    It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick.
+    It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in
+    a roar, or of him who, in the words of the 'cadet of the house of
+    Keppoch,' was 'sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick,
+    a very great favourite of the gentlemen.'  Sterne, like Jaques and
+    Hamlet, deals with 'the irony of human intercourse,' but what he
+    specially recognizes is a deeper irony still--the irony of man's
+    intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the
+    intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical
+    being--the irony, in short, of man's position amid these natural
+    conditions of life and death.  It is in the apprehension of this
+    anomaly--a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature--that
+    Sterne's strength lies.
+
+    Man, the 'fool of nature,' prouder than Lucifer himself, yet 'bounded
+    in a nutshell,' brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more
+    account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little
+    'beastie' whose house is ruined by the ploughshare--here is, indeed,
+    a creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at
+    and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter!  There is
+    nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because
+    they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is
+    nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a
+    horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the
+    grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed,
+    so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared
+    with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are
+    fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist.  That
+    Sterne's donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain
+    natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he
+    should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of
+    certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in
+    it no material for humoristic treatment.  To render him absurd you
+    must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back
+    panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human
+    cook.  Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is
+    tried by human standards.  But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey
+    who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and
+    cooked the macaroons.  All other humour is thin compared with this.
+    Besides, it never grows old.  It is difficult, no doubt, to think
+    that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the
+    kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no
+    advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre.  Certainly up to the
+    present moment the anomaly of man's position upon the planet is not
+    lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and
+    development.  On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in
+    speaking of Thoreau.  If man was a strange and anomalous 'piece of
+    work' as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a 'piece of
+    work' does he appear now!  He has the knack of advancing and leaving
+    the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it?  By the fact of his
+    being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions.
+    A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal
+    kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once
+    supposed) from any 'inner yearning' for progress, but because it was
+    pushed on by overmastering circumstances.  An ungulate becomes the
+    giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and
+    yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to
+    leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve.  But
+    man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of
+    harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the
+    other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips
+    them so completely that he forgets he is one of them.  If Uncle
+    Toby's progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the
+    fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to
+    buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain
+    Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of
+    the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is
+    the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.
+
+    And while Sterne's abiding sense of the struggle between man's
+    spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical nature accounts
+    for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour, it greatly accounts
+    for his indecencies too.  Sterne had that instinct for idealizing
+    women, and the entire relations between the sexes which accompanies
+    the poetic temperament.  To such natures the spiritual side of sexual
+    relations is ever present; and as a consequence of this the animal
+    side never loses with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was
+    enveloped in their boyish days.  Not that we are going to justify
+    Sterne's indecencies.  Coleridge's remark that the pleasure Sterne
+    got from his double entendre was akin to 'that trembling daring with
+    which a child touches a hot teapot because it has been forbidden,'
+    partly explains, but it does not excuse, Sterne's transgressions
+    herein.  The fact seems to be that if we divide love into the passion
+    of love, the sentiment of love, and the appetite of love, and inquire
+    which of these was really known to Sterne, we shall come to what will
+    seem to most readers the paradoxical conclusion that it was the
+    sentiment only.  There is abundant proof of this.  In the 'Letter to
+    the Earl of --,' printed by his daughter, after dilating upon the
+    manner in which the writing of the 'Sentimental Journey' has worn out
+    both his spirits and body, he says: 'I might indeed solace myself
+    with my wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been
+    a sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the
+    contrary.  The world has imagined because I wrote "Tristram Shandy"
+    that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.'  Upon this
+    passage Mr. Traill has the pertinent remark: 'The connubial
+    affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently,
+    opposed to the sentimental emotions--as the lower to the higher.  To
+    indulge the former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and
+    carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend
+    one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex
+    indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.'  Now, to men of
+    this kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious
+    double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more animal
+    temperament.  The incongruity between the ideal and the actual
+    relations brings poignant distress at first, and afterwards a sense
+    of irresistible absurdity.  Originally the fascination of repulsion,
+    it becomes the fascination of attraction, and it is not at all
+    fanciful to say that in Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne
+    (quite unconsciously to himself perhaps) realized to his own mind
+    those two opposite sides of man's nature whose conflict in some form
+    or another was ever present to Sterne's mind.  And, as we say, it has
+    a deep relation to the kind of humour with which Sterne was so richly
+    endowed.  After one of his most sentimental flights, wherein the
+    spiritual side of man is absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a
+    sudden revulsion (which at first was entirely natural, if even
+    self-conscious afterwards).  The incongruity of all this sentiment
+    with man's actual condition as an animal strikes him with
+    irresistible force, and he says to man, 'What right have you in that
+    galley after all--you who came into the world in this extremely
+    unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency of functions which
+    are if possible more unspiritual and more absurd still?'
+
+    No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with sexual
+    matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but rather
+    far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of this great
+    and eternal incongruity of man's existence--the conflict of a
+    spiritual nature and such aspirations as man's with conditions
+    entirely physical.  And perhaps the only truly philosophical
+    definition of the word 'indecency' would be this: 'A painful and
+    shocking contrast of man's spiritual with his physical nature.'  When
+    Hamlet, with his finger on Yorick's skull, declares that his 'gorge
+    rises at it,' and asks if Alexander's skull 'smelt so,' he shocks us
+    as deeply in a serious way as Sterne in his allusion to the winding
+    up of the clock shocks us in a humourous way, and to express the
+    sensation they each give there is, perhaps, no word but 'indecent.'"
+
+I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the metaphysical
+meaning of humour.  In order to show what are his opinions upon wit, I
+think I shall do well to turn from the 'Athenaeum' articles, and to quote
+from the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' a few sentences upon wit, and upon
+the distinction between comedy and farce.  For the obvious reason that
+the 'Athenaeum' articles are buried in oblivion, and the 'Encyclopaedia
+Britannica' articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it is from the
+former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of the most important
+parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work are to be found in the 'Encyclopaedia
+Britannica.'  Perhaps, however, I had better introduce my citations by
+saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton's connection with that work.
+
+The story of the way in which he came to write in the 'Encyclopaedia' has
+been often told by Prof. Minto.  At the time when the ninth edition was
+started, he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and
+were seeing each other constantly.  When Minto was writing his articles
+upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that Baynes would be
+delighted to get work from him.  But at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton had
+got more critical work in hand than he wanted, and besides he had already
+a novel and a body of poetry ready for the press, and wished to confine
+his energies to creative work.  Besides this, he felt, as he declared,
+that he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike
+pedestrian style of an encyclopaedia.  But when the most important
+treatise in the literary department of the work--the treatise on
+Poetry--was wanted, a peculiar difficulty in selecting the writer was
+felt.  The article in the previous edition had been written by David
+Macbeth Moir, famous under the name of 'Delta' as the author of 'The
+Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.'  Moir's article was intelligent enough,
+but quite inadequate to such a work as the publishers of the
+'Encyclopaedia' aspired to make.  A history of Poetry was, of course,
+quite impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the
+principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as exemplified by
+the poetry of the great literatures.  It was decided, according to
+Minto's account, that there were but three men, that is to say,
+Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Theodore Watts, who could produce this
+special kind of work, the other critics being entirely given up to the
+historic method of criticism.  The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes
+went to London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and
+explaining exactly what was wanted.
+
+I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier choice.
+Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on 'The Coming of Love' in the 'Saturday
+Review' has written very luminously upon this subject.  He tells us that,
+wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant fragment,
+owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the space that could be
+given to it.  The truth is that the essay is but the introduction to an
+exhaustive discussion of what the writer believes to be the most
+important event in the history of all poetry--the event discussed under
+the name of 'The Renascence of Wonder.'  The introduction to the third
+volume of the new edition of Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English
+Literature' is but a bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings upon
+this subject.  It has been said over and over again that since the best
+critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our literature to
+equal this treatise on Poetry.  It has been exhaustively discussed in
+England, America, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, where it
+has been compared to the critical system of Goethe.  Those who have not
+read it will be surprised to hear that it is not confined to the
+formulating of generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent
+passages on human life and human conduct.
+
+It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist, Vanbrugh, that
+Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous distinction between comedy
+and farce:--
+
+    "In order to find and fix Vanbrugh's place among English comic
+    dramatists, an examination of the very basis of the comedy of
+    repartee inaugurated by Etheredge would be necessary, and, of course,
+    such an examination would be impossible here.  It is chiefly as a
+    humourist, however, that he demands attention.
+
+    Given the humorous temperament--the temperament which impels a man to
+    get his enjoyment by watching the harlequinade of life, and
+    contrasting it with his own ideal standard of good sense, which the
+    harlequinade seems to him to mock and challenge--given this
+    temperament, then the quality of its humourous growth depends of
+    course on the quality of the intellectual forces by means of which
+    the temperament gains expression.  Hence it is very likely that in
+    original endowment of humour, as distinguished from wit, Vanbrugh was
+    superior to Congreve.  And this is saying a great deal: for, while
+    Congreve's wit has always been made much of, it has, since Macaulay's
+    time, been the fashion among critics to do less than justice to his
+    humour--a humour which, in such scenes as that in 'Love for Love,'
+    where Sir Sampson Legend discourses upon the human appetites and
+    functions, moves beyond the humour of convention and passes into
+    natural humour.  It is, however, in spontaneity, in a kind of lawless
+    merriment, almost Aristophanic in its verve, that Vanbrugh's humour
+    seems so deep and so fine, seems indeed to spring from a fountain
+    deeper and finer and rarer than Congreve's.  A comedy of wit, like
+    every other drama, is a story told by action and dialogue, but to
+    tell a story lucidly and rapidly by means of repartee is exceedingly
+    difficult, not but that it is easy enough to produce repartee.  But
+    in comic dialogue the difficulty is to move rapidly and yet keep up
+    the brilliant ball-throwing demanded in this form; and without
+    lucidity and rapidity no drama, whether of repartee or of character,
+    can live.  Etheredge, the father of the comedy of repartee, has at
+    length had justice done to him by Mr. Gosse.  Not only could
+    Etheredge tell a story by means of repartee alone: he could produce a
+    tableau too; so could Congreve, and so also could Vanbrugh; but
+    often--far too often--Vanbrugh's tableau is reached, not by fair
+    means, as in the tableau of Congreve, but by a surrendering of
+    probability, by a sacrifice of artistic fusion, by an inartistic
+    mingling of comedy and farce, such as Congreve never indulges in.
+    Jeremy Collier was perfectly right, therefore, in his strictures upon
+    the farcical improbabilities of the 'Relapse.'  So farcical indeed
+    are the tableaux in that play that the broader portions of it were
+    (as Mr. Swinburne discovered) adapted by Voltaire and acted at Sceaux
+    as a farce.  Had we space here to contrast the 'Relapse' with the
+    'Way of the World,' we should very likely come upon a distinction
+    between comedy and farce such as has never yet been drawn.  We should
+    find that farce is not comedy with a broadened grin--Thalia with her
+    girdle loose and run wild--as the critics seem to assume.  We should
+    find that the difference between the two is not one of degree at all,
+    but rather one of kind, and that mere breadth of fun has nothing to
+    do with the question.  No doubt the fun of comedy may be as broad as
+    that of farce, as is shown indeed by the celebrated Dogberry scenes
+    in 'Much Ado about Nothing' and by the scene in 'Love for Love'
+    between Sir Sampson Legend and his son, alluded to above; but here,
+    as in every other department of art, all depends upon the quality of
+    the imaginative belief that the artist seeks to arrest and secure.
+    Of comedy the breath of life is dramatic illusion.  Of farce the
+    breath of life is mock illusion.  Comedy, whether broad or genteel,
+    pretends that its mimicry is real.  Farce, whether broad or genteel,
+    makes no such pretence, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up
+    between itself and the audience, says, 'My acting is all sham, and
+    you know it.'  Now, while Vanbrugh was apt too often to forget this
+    the fundamental difference between comedy and farce, Congreve never
+    forgot it, Wycherly rarely.  Not that there should be in any literary
+    form any arbitrary laws.  There is no arbitrary law declaring that
+    comedy shall not be mingled with farce, and yet the fact is that in
+    vital drama they cannot be so mingled.  The very laws of their
+    existence are in conflict with each other, so much so that where one
+    lives the other must die, as we see in the drama of our own day.  The
+    fact seems to be that probability of incident, logical sequence of
+    cause and effect, are as necessary to comedy as they are to tragedy,
+    while farce would stifle in such an air.  Rather, it would be
+    poisoned by it, just as comedy is poisoned by what farce flourishes
+    on; that is to say, inconsequence of reasoning--topsy-turvy logic.
+    Born in the fairy country of topsy-turvy, the logic of farce would be
+    illogical if it were not upside-down.  So with coincidence, with
+    improbable accumulation of convenient events--farce can no more exist
+    without these than comedy can exist with them.  Hence we affirm that
+    Jeremy Collier's strictures on the farcical adulterations of the
+    'Relapse' pierce more deeply into Vanbrugh's art than do the
+    criticisms of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt.  In other words, perhaps the
+    same lack of fusion which mars Vanbrugh's architectural ideas mars
+    also his comedy."
+
+Without for a moment wishing to institute comparisons between the merit
+of Mr. Watts-Dunton's literary articles and the merit of other literary
+articles by other contemporary writers, I may at least say that between
+his articles and theirs the difference is not one of degree, it is one of
+kind.  Theirs are compact, business-like compressions of facts admirably
+fitted for an Encyclopaedia.  No attempt is made to formulate
+generalizations upon the principles of literary art, and this must be
+said in their praise--they are faultless as articles in a book of
+reference.  But no student of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work who turns over the
+pages of an article in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' can fail after
+reading a few sentences to recognize the author.  Generalizations, hints
+of daring theories, novel and startling speculations, graze each other's
+heels, until one is dazzled by the display of intellectual brilliance.
+That his essays are out of place in an Encyclopaedia may be true, but
+they seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating
+idiosyncrasy upon their coldly impersonal environment.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+'THE LIFE POETIC'
+
+
+      [Picture: 'The Pines.'  (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.)]
+
+I have been allowed to enrich this volume with photographs of 'The Pines'
+and of some of the exquisite works of art therein.  But it is unfortunate
+for me that I am not allowed to touch upon what are the most important
+relations of Mr. Watts-Dunton's life--important though so many of them
+are.  I mean his intimacy with the poet whose name is now beyond doubt
+far above any other name in the contemporary world of letters.  I do not
+sympathize with the hyper-sensitiveness of eminent men with regard to
+privacy.  The inner chamber of what Rossetti calls the 'House of Life'
+should be kept sacred.  But Rossetti's own case shows how impossible it
+is in these days to keep those recesses inviolable.  The fierce light
+that beats upon men of genius grows fiercer and fiercer every day, and it
+cannot be quenched.  This was one of my arguments when I first answered
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's own objection to the appearance of this monograph.
+The times have changed since he was a young man.  Then publicity was
+shunned like a plague by poets and by painters.  If such men wish the
+light to be true as well as fierce, they must allow their friends to
+illuminate their 'House of Life' by the lamp of truth.  If Rossetti
+during his lifetime had allowed one of his friends who knew the secrets
+of his 'House of Life' to write about him, we might have been spared
+those canards about him and the wife he loved which were rife shortly
+after his death.  Byron's reluctance to take payment for his poetry was
+not a more belated relic of an old quixotism than is this dying passion
+for privacy.  Publicity may be an evil, but it is an inevitable evil, and
+great men must not let the wasps and the gadflies monopolize its uses.
+It may be a reminiscence of an older and a nobler social temper, the
+temper under the influence of which Rossetti in 1870 said that he felt
+abashed because a paragraph had appeared in the 'Athenaeum' announcing
+the fact that a book from him was forthcoming.  But that temper has gone
+by for ever.  We live now in very different times.  Scores upon scores of
+unauthorized and absolutely false paragraphs about eminent men are
+published, especially about these two friends who have lived their poetic
+life together for more than a quarter of a century.  Only the other day I
+saw in a newspaper an offensive descriptive caricature of Mr. Swinburne,
+of his dress, etc.  It is interesting to recall the fact that mendacious
+journalism was the cause of Mr. Watts-Dunton's very first contribution to
+the 'Athenaeum,' before he wrote any reviews at all.  At that time the
+offenders seem to have been chiefly Americans.  The article was not a
+review, but a letter signed 'Z,' entitled 'The Art of Interviewing,' and
+it appeared in the 'Athenaeum,' of March 11, 1876.  As it shows the great
+Swinburne myth in the making, I will reproduce this merry little skit:--
+
+    "'Alas! there is none of us without his skeleton-closet,' said a
+    great writer to one who was congratulating him upon having reached
+    the goal for which he had, from the first, set out.  'My skeleton
+    bears the dreadful name of "American Interviewer."  Pity me!'  'Is he
+    an American with a diary in his pocket?' was the terrified question
+    always put by another man of genius, whenever you proposed
+    introducing a stranger to him.  But this was in those ingenuous
+    Parker-Willisian days when the 'Interviewer' merely invented the
+    dialogue--not the entire dramatic action--not the interview itself.
+    Primitive times! since when the 'Interviewer' has developed indeed!
+    His dramatic inspiration now is trammelled by none of those foolish
+    and arbitrary conditions which--whether his scene of action was at
+    the 'Blue Posts' with Thackeray, or in the North with Scottish
+    lords--vexed and bounded the noble soul of the great patriarch of the
+    tribe.  Uncribbed, uncabined, unconfined, the 'Interviewer' now
+    invents, not merely the dialogue, but the 'situation,' the place, the
+    time--the interview itself.  Every dramatist has his favourite
+    character--Sophocles had his; Shakspeare had his; Schiller had his;
+    the 'Interviewer' has his.  Mr. Swinburne has, for the last two or
+    three years, been--for some reason which it might not be difficult to
+    explain--the 'Interviewer's' special favourite.  Moreover, the
+    accounts of the interviews with him are always livelier than any
+    others, inasmuch as they are accompanied by brilliant fancy-sketches
+    of his personal appearance--sketches which, if they should not
+    gratify him exactly, would at least astonish him; and it is surely
+    something to be even astonished in these days.  Some time ago, for
+    instance, an American lady journalist, connected with a 'Western
+    newspaper,' made her appearance in London, and expressed many 'great
+    desires,' the greatest of all her 'desires' being to know the author
+    of 'Atalanta,' or, if she could not know him, at least to 'see him.'
+
+    The Fates, however, were not kind to the lady.  The author of
+    'Atalanta' had quitted London.  She did not see him, therefore--not
+    with her bodily eyes could she see him.  Yet this did not at all
+    prevent her from 'interviewing' him.  Why should it?  The 'soul hath
+    eyes and ears' as well as the body--especially if the soul is an
+    American soul, with a mission to 'interview.'  There soon appeared in
+    the lady's Western newspaper a graphic account of one of the most
+    interesting interviews with this poet that has ever yet been
+    recorded.  Mr. Swinburne--though at the time in Scotland--'called'
+    upon the lady at her rooms in London; but, notwithstanding this
+    unexampled feat of courtesy, he seems to have found no favour in the
+    lady's eyes.  She 'misliked him for his complexion.'  Evidently it
+    was nothing but good-breeding that prevented her from telling the
+    bard, on the spot, that he was physically an unlovely bard.  His
+    manners, too, were but so-so; and the Western lady was shocked and
+    disgusted, as well she might be.  In the midst of his conversation,
+    for example, he called out frantically for 'pen and ink.'  He had
+    become suddenly and painfully 'afflated.'  When furnished with pen
+    and ink he began furiously writing a poem, beating the table with his
+    left hand and stamping the floor with both feet as he did so.  Then,
+    without saying a word, he put on his hat and rushed from the room
+    like a madman!  This account was copied into other newspapers and
+    into the magazines.  It is, in fact, a piece of genuine history now,
+    and will form valuable material for some future biographer of the
+    poet.  The stubborn shapelessness of facts has always distressed the
+    artistically-minded historian.  But let the American 'Interviewer' go
+    on developing thus, and we may look for History's becoming far more
+    artistic and symmetrical in future.  The above is but one out of many
+    instances of the art of interviewing."
+
+It is all very well to say that irresponsible statements of this kind are
+not in the true sense of the word believed by readers; they create an
+atmosphere of false mist which destroys altogether the picture of the
+poet's life which one would like to preserve.  And I really think that it
+would have been better if I or some one else among the friends of the
+poets had been allowed to write more freely about the beautiful and
+intellectual life at 'The Pines.'  But I am forbidden to do this, as the
+following passage in a letter which I have received from Mr. Watts-Dunton
+will show:
+
+    "I cannot have anything about our life at 'The Pines' put into print,
+    but I will grant you permission to give a few reproductions of the
+    interesting works of art here, for many of them may have a legitimate
+    interest for the public on account of their historic value, as having
+    come to me from the magician of art, Rossetti.  And I assure you that
+    this is a concession which I have denied to very many applicants,
+    both among friends and others."
+
+     [Picture: A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Lacquer Cabinet]
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's allusion to the Rossetti mementoes requires a word of
+explanation.  Rossetti, it seems, was very fond of surprising his friends
+by unexpected tokens of generosity.  I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say
+that during the week when he was moving into 'The Pines,' he spent as
+usual Wednesday night at 16 Cheyne Walk, and he and Rossetti sat talking
+into the small hours.  Next morning after breakfast he strolled across to
+Whistler's house to have a talk with the ever-interesting painter, and
+this resulted in his getting home two hours later than usual.  On
+reaching the new house he saw a waggon standing in front of it.  He did
+not understand this, for the furniture from the previous residence had
+been all removed.  He went up to the waggon, and was surprised to find it
+full of furniture of a choice kind.  But there was no need for him to
+give much time to an examination of the furniture, for he found he was
+familiar with every piece of it.  It had come straight from Rossetti's
+house, having been secretly packed and sent off by Dunn on the previous
+day.  Some of the choicest things at 'The Pines' came in this way.  Not a
+word had Rossetti said about this generous little trick on the night
+before.  The superb Chinese cabinet, a photograph of which appears in
+this book, belonged to Rossetti.  It seems that on a certain occasion
+Frederick Sandys, or some one else, told Rossetti that the clever but
+ne'er-do-well artist, George Chapman, had bought of a sea-captain,
+trading in Chinese waters, a wonderful piece of lacquer work of the
+finest period--before the Manchu pig-tail time.  The captain had bought
+it of a Frenchman who had aided in looting the Imperial Palace.
+Rossetti, of course, could not rest until he had seen it, and when he had
+seen it, he could not rest until he had bought it of Chapman; and it was
+taken across to 16 Cheyne Walk, where it was greatly admired.  The
+captain had barbarously mutilated it at the top in order to make it fit
+in his cabin, and it remained in that condition for some years.
+Afterwards Rossetti gave it to Mr. Watts-Dunton, who got it restored and
+made up by the wonderful amateur carver, the late Mr. T. Keynes, who did
+the carving on the painted cabinet also photographed for this book.
+There is a long and interesting story in connection with this piece of
+Chinese lacquer, but I have no room to tell it here.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                   [Picture: Summer at 'The Pines'--I]
+
+All I am allowed to say about the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+Mr. Swinburne is that the friendship began in 1872, that it soon
+developed into the closest intimacy, not only with the poet himself, but
+with all his family.  In 1879 the two friends became house-mates at 'The
+Pines,' Putney Hill, and since then they have never been separated, for
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's visits to the Continent, notably those with the late
+Dr. Hake recorded in 'The New Day,' took place just before this time.
+The two poets thenceforth lived together, worked together; saw their
+common friends together, and travelled together.  In 1882, after the
+death of Rossetti they went to the Channel Islands, staying at St.
+Peter's Port, Guernsey, for some little time, and then at Petit Bot Bay.
+Their swims in this beautiful bay Mr. Watts-Dunton commemorated in two of
+the opening sonnets of 'The Coming of Love':--
+
+                          NATURE'S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
+
+                 (A MORNING SWIM OFF GUERNSEY WITH A FRIEND)
+
+       As if the Spring's fresh groves should change and shake
+    To dark green woods of Orient terebinth,
+    Then break to bloom of England's hyacinth,
+    So 'neath us change the waves, rising to take
+    Each kiss of colour from each cloud and flake
+    Round many a rocky hall and labyrinth,
+    Where sea-wrought column, arch, and granite plinth,
+    Show how the sea's fine rage dares make and break.
+    Young with the youth the sea's embrace can lend,
+    Our glowing limbs, with sun and brine empearled,
+    Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend,
+    Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled,
+    Of child-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend
+    Over the magic wonders of the world
+
+                      THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE'S FRAGRANCY
+
+                        (THE TIRING-ROOM IN THE ROCKS)
+
+    These are the 'Coloured Caves' the sea-maid built;
+    Her walls are stained beyond that lonely fern,
+    For she must fly at every tide's return,
+    And all her sea-tints round the walls are spilt.
+    Outside behold the bay, each headland gilt
+    With morning's gold; far off the foam-wreaths burn
+    Like fiery snakes, while here the sweet waves yearn
+    Up sand more soft than Avon's sacred silt.
+    And smell the sea! no breath of wood or field,
+    From lips of may or rose or eglantine,
+    Comes with the language of a breath benign,
+    Shuts the dark room where glimmers Fate revealed,
+    Calms the vext spirit, balms a sorrow unhealed,
+    Like scent of sea-weed rich of morn and brine.
+
+The two friends afterwards went to Sark.  A curious incident occurred
+during their stay in the island.  The two poet-swimmers received a
+bravado challenge from 'Orion' Horne, who was also a famous swimmer, to
+swim with him round the whole island of Sark!  I need hardly say that the
+absurd challenge was not accepted.
+
+During the cruise Mr. Swinburne conceived and afterwards wrote some
+glorious poetry.  In the same year the two friends went to Paris, as I
+have already mentioned, to assist at the Jubilee of 'Le Roi s'Amuse.'
+Since then their love of the English coasts and the waters which wash
+them, seems to have kept them in England.  For two consecutive years they
+went to Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast, for bathing.  It was there that
+Mr. Swinburne wrote some of his East Anglian poems, and it was there that
+Mr. Watts-Dunton conceived the East coast parts of 'Aylwin.'  It was
+during one of these visits that Mr. Swinburne first made the acquaintance
+of Grant Allen, who had long been an intimate friend of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's.  The two, indeed, were drawn together by the fact that
+they both enjoyed science as much as they enjoyed literature.  It was a
+very interesting meeting, as Grant Allen had long been one of Swinburne's
+most ardent admirers, and his social charm, his intellectual sweep and
+brilliance, made a great impression on the poet.  Since then their visits
+to the sea have been confined to parts of the English Channel, such as
+Eastbourne, where they were near neighbours of Rossetti's friends, Lord
+and Lady Mount Temple, between whom and Mr. Watts-Dunton there had been
+an affectionate intimacy for many years--but more notably Lancing,
+whither they went for three consecutive years.  For several years they
+stayed during their holiday with Lady Mary Gordon, an aunt of Mr.
+Swinburne's, at 'The Orchard,' Niton Bay, Isle of Wight.  During the hot
+summer of 1904 they were lucky enough to escape to Cromer, where the
+temperature was something like twenty degrees lower than that of London.
+A curious incident occurred during this visit to Cromer.  One day Mr.
+Watts-Dunton took a walk with another friend to 'Poppy-land,' where he
+and Mr. Swinburne had previously stayed, in order to see there again the
+landslips which he has so vividly described in 'Aylwin.'  While they were
+walking from 'Poppyland' to the old ruined churchyard called 'The Garden
+of Sleep,' they sat down for some time in the shade of an empty hut near
+the cliff.  Coming back Mr. Watts-Dunton said that the cliff there was
+very dangerous, and ought to be fenced off, as the fatal land-springs
+were beginning to show their work.  Two or three weeks after this a
+portion of the cliff at that point, weighing many thousands of tons, fell
+into the sea, and the hut with it.
+
+[Picture: A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Chinese Divan described in
+                                'Aylwin']
+
+A friendship so affectionate and so long as the friendship between these
+two poets is perhaps without a parallel in literature.  It has been
+frequently and beautifully commemorated.  When Mr. Swinburne's noble
+poem, 'By the North Sea,' was published, it was prefaced by this
+sonnet:--
+
+                           TO WALTER THEODORE WATTS
+
+    'WE ARE WHAT SUNS AND WINDS AND WATERS MAKE US.'
+
+                                                                   Landor.
+
+    Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath
+       The spirit of man fulfilling--these create
+       That joy wherewith man's life grown passionate
+    Gains heart to hear and sense to read and faith
+    To know the secret word our Mother saith
+       In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great,
+       Death as the shadow cast by life on fate,
+    Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.
+
+    Brother, to whom our Mother, as to me,
+       Is dearer than all dreams of days undone,
+    This song I give you of the sovereign three
+       That are, as life and sleep and death are, one:
+    A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea,
+       Where nought of man's endures before the sun.
+
+1882 was a memorable year in the life of Mr. Watts-Dunton.  The two most
+important volumes of poetry published in that year were dedicated to him.
+Rossetti's 'Ballads and Sonnets,' the book which contains the chief work
+of his life, bore the following inscription:--
+
+                                      TO
+                                THEODORE WATTS
+                     THE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR ME,
+                             THESE FEW MORE PAGES
+                        ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
+
+A few weeks later Mr. Swinburne's 'Tristram of Lyonesse,' the volume
+which contains what I regard as his ripest and richest poetry, was thus
+inscribed:--
+
+                              TO MY BEST FRIEND
+                                THEODORE WATTS
+                           I DEDICATE IN THIS BOOK
+                         THE BEST I HAVE TO GIVE HIM.
+
+    Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,
+       And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,
+       That twice have made keen April's clarion sound
+    Since here we first together saw and heard
+    Spring's light reverberate and reiterate word
+       Shine forth and speak in season.  Life stands crowned
+       Here with the best one thing it ever found,
+    As of my soul's best birthdays dawns the third.
+
+    There is a friend that as the wise man saith
+       Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me
+          Hath time not shown, through days like waves at strife
+    This truth more sure than all things else but death,
+       This pearl most perfect found in all the sea
+          That washes toward your feet these waifs of life.
+
+    THE PINES,
+             _April_, 1882.
+
+But the finest of all these words of affection are perhaps those opening
+the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the magnificent Collected Edition of
+Mr. Swinburne's poems issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1904:--
+
+    'To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition
+    of my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the
+    occasion.'
+
+Once also Mr. Watts-Dunton dedicated verses of his own to Mr. Swinburne,
+to wit, in 1897, when he published that impassioned lyric in praise of a
+nobler and larger Imperialism, the 'Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the
+Men of Greater Britain':--
+
+                     "TO OUR GREAT CONTEMPORARY WRITER OF
+                              PATRIOTIC POETRY,
+                         ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
+
+    You and I are old enough to remember the time when, in the world of
+    letters at least, patriotism was not so fashionable as it is
+    now--when, indeed, love of England suggested Philistinism rather than
+    'sweetness and light.'  Other people, such as Frenchmen, Italians,
+    Irishmen, Hungarians, Poles, might give voice to a passionate love of
+    the land of their birth, but not Englishmen.  It was very curious, as
+    I thought then, and as I think now.  And at that period love of the
+    Colonies was, if possible, even more out of fashion than was love of
+    England; and this temper was not confined to the 'cultured' class.
+    It pervaded society and had an immense influence upon politics.  On
+    one side the Manchester school, religiously hoping that if the
+    Colonies could be insulted so effectually that they must needs
+    (unless they abandoned all self-respect) 'set up for themselves,' the
+    same enormous spurt would be given to British trade which occurred
+    after the birth of the United States, bade the Colonies 'cut the
+    painter.'  On the other hand the old Tories and Whigs, with a few
+    noble exceptions, having never really abandoned the old traditions
+    respecting the unimportance of all matters outside the parochial
+    circle of European diplomacy, scarcely knew where the Colonies were
+    situated on the map.
+
+    There was, however, in these islands one person who saw as clearly
+    then as all see now the infinite importance of the expansion of
+    England to the true progress of mankind--the Great Lady whose praises
+    in this regard I have presumed to sing in the opening stanza of these
+    verses.
+
+    I may be wrong, but I, who am, as you know, no courtier, believe from
+    the bottom of my heart that without the influence of the Queen this
+    expansion would have been seriously delayed.  Directly and indirectly
+    her influence must needs be enormous, and, as regards this matter, it
+    has always been exercised--energetically and even eagerly
+    exercised--in one way.  This being my view, I have for years been
+    urging more than one friend clothed with an authority such as I do
+    not possess to bring the subject prominently before the people of
+    England at a time when England's expansion is a phrase in everybody's
+    mouth.  I have not succeeded.  Let this be my apology for undertaking
+    the task myself and for inscribing to you, as well as to the men of
+    Greater Britain, these lines."
+
+                   [Picture: Summer at 'The Pines'--II]
+
+I feel that it is a great privilege to be able to present to my readers
+beautiful photogravures and photographs of interiors and pictures and
+works of art at 'The Pines.'  Many of the pictures and other works of art
+at 'The Pines' are mementoes of a most interesting kind.
+
+Among these is the superb portrait of Madox Brown, at this moment hanging
+in the Bradford Exhibition.  Madox Brown painted it for the owner.  An
+interesting story is connected with it.  One day, not long after Mr.
+Watts-Dunton had become intimate with Madox Brown, the artist told him he
+specially wanted his boy Nolly to read to him a story that he had been
+writing, and asked him to meet the boy at dinner.
+
+'Nolly been writing a story!' exclaimed Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+
+'I understand your smile,' said Madox Brown; 'but you will find it better
+than you think.'
+
+At this time Oliver Madox Brown seemed a loose-limbed hobbledehoy, young
+enough to be at school.  After dinner Oliver began to read the opening
+chapters of the story in a not very impressive way, and Mr. Watts-Dunton
+suggested that he should take it home and read it at his leisure.  This
+was agreed to.  Pressure of affairs prevented him from taking it up for
+some time.  At last he did take it up, but he had scarcely read a dozen
+pages when he was called away, and he asked a member of his family to
+gather up the pages from the sofa and put them into an escritoire.  On
+his return home at a very late hour he found the lady intently reading
+the manuscript, and she declared that she could not go to bed till she
+had finished it.
+
+On the next day Mr. Watts-Dunton again took up the manuscript, and was
+held spellbound by it.  It was a story of passion, of intense love, and
+intense hate, told with a crude power that was irresistible.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton knew Smith Williams (the reader of Smith, Elder & Co.),
+whose name is associated with 'Jane Eyre.'  He showed it to Williams, who
+was greatly struck by it, but pointed out that it terminated in a violent
+scene which the novel-reading public of that time would not like, and
+asked for a concluding scene less daring.  The ending was modified, and
+the story, when it appeared, attracted very great attention.  Madox Brown
+was so grateful to Mr. Watts-Dunton for his services in the matter that
+he insisted on expressing his gratitude in some tangible form.  Miss Lucy
+Madox Brown (afterwards Mrs. W. M. Rossetti) was consulted, and at once
+suggested a portrait of the painter, painted by himself.  This was done,
+and the result was the masterpiece which has been so often exhibited.
+From that moment Oliver Madox Brown took his place in the literary world
+of his time.  The mention of Oliver Madox Brown will remind the older
+generation of his friendship with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet,
+one of the most pathetic chapters in literary annals.
+
+ [Picture: 'Picture for a Story.'  (Face and Instrument designed by D. G.
+                     Rossetti, background by Dunn.)]
+
+Although Rossetti never fulfilled his intention of illustrating what he
+called 'Watts's magnificent star sonnet,' he began what would have been a
+superb picture illustrating Mr. Watts-Dunton's sonnet, 'The Spirit of the
+Rainbow.'  He finished a large charcoal drawing of it, which is thus
+described by Mr. William Sharp in his book, 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a
+Record and a Study':--
+
+    "It represents a female figure standing in a gauzy circle composed of
+    a rainbow, and on the frame is written the following sonnet (the poem
+    in question by Mr. Watts-Dunton):
+
+                           THE WOOD-HAUNTER'S DREAM
+
+    The wild things loved me, but a wood-sprite said:
+          'Though meads are sweet when flowers at morn uncurl,
+          And woods are sweet with nightingale and merle,
+    Where are the dreams that flush'd thy childish bed?
+    The Spirit of the Rainbow thou would'st wed!'
+       I rose, I found her--found a rain-drenched girl
+       Whose eyes of azure and limbs like roseate pearl
+    Coloured the rain above her golden head.
+
+    But when I stood by that sweet vision's side
+       I saw no more the Rainbow's lovely stains;
+    To her by whom the glowing heavens were dyed
+       The sun showed naught but dripping woods and plains:
+        'God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains,'
+    The wood-sprite laugh'd, 'Our seeker finds a bride!'
+
+Rossetti meant to have completed the design with the 'woods and plains'
+seen in perspective through the arch; and the composition has an
+additional and special interest because it is the artist's only
+successful attempt at the wholly nude--the 'Spirit' being extremely
+graceful in poise and outline.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I am able to give a reproduction of another of Rossetti's beautiful
+studies which has never been published, but which has been very much
+talked about.  Many who have seen it at 'The Pines' agree with the late
+Lord de Tabley that Rossetti in this crayon created the loveliest of all
+his female faces.  It is thus described by Mr. William Sharp: "The
+drawing, which, for the sake of a name, I will call 'Forced Music,'
+represents a nude half-figure of a girl playing on a mediaeval stringed
+instrument elaborately ornamented.  The face is of a type unlike that of
+any other of the artist's subjects, and extraordinarily beautiful."
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I should explain that the background and the ragged garb of the girl in
+the version of the picture here reproduced, are by Dunn.  These two
+exquisite drawings were made from the same girl, who never sat for any
+other pictures.  Her face has been described as being unlike that of any
+other of Rossetti's models and yet combining the charm of them all.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any
+personal description of him.  For my part I do not sympathize with this
+extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one's personal
+characteristics described in print.  What is there so dreadful or so
+sacred in mere print?  The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I
+think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter
+there was 'a great gulf fixed.'  Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr.
+Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of
+friends or strangers, remarks--delicate enough, no doubt--are made about
+them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in
+ever so small a degree.  Not so very long ago I remained in a room after
+Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it.  Straightway there were the freest remarks
+about him, not in the least unkind, but free.  Some did not expect to see
+so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him
+to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences,
+described his dark-brown eyes as 'green'--through a printer's error, no
+doubt.  Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his
+absent friend, Mr. Swinburne--and so on, and so on.  Now, what is the
+difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation?
+Merely that the printed report reaches a wider--a little wider--audience.
+That is all.  I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition
+to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in
+the papers.  Some energetic gentleman--possibly some one living in the
+neighbourhood--took the following 'Kodak' of him.  It appeared in
+'M.A.P.' and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could
+be painted.  In years to come, when he and I and the 'Kodaker' are dead,
+it may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written
+about him:--
+
+    "Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn
+    lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin
+    has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he
+    loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes
+    and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance.
+    For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and
+    thick moustache are partially shot with grey.  But he looks not a day
+    over forty-five.  Generally he carries a book.  Often, however, he
+    turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits.  For--it will be
+    news to lie-abeds of the district--Wimbledon Common is lively with
+    rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere
+    the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until
+    the moon rises again.  To him, morning, although he has seen more
+    sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious
+    pageant.  This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore
+    Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet,
+    novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour."
+
+The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to
+the sea-side.  One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late
+Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his
+country places, such as Boar's Hill.
+
+I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the
+famous Master of Balliol.  I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great
+admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+intellectual powers and various accomplishments.  There was no one, I
+have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem.  That
+air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett's
+friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr.
+Watts-Dunton.
+
+Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton's life were these visits
+with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett's house, where he had the opportunity of
+meeting some of the most prominent men of the time.  He has described the
+Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to
+them.  I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which
+appeared in the 'Athenaeum' of December 22, 1894.
+
+    "It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the
+    poet of 'Atalanta' and the student of Plato and translator of
+    Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no
+    common strength.  They took expeditions into the country together,
+    and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at
+    Jowett's quiet autumnal retreat at Boar's Hill.  The Master of
+    Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself
+    the admiration of men of poetic genius.  To say which poet admired
+    and loved him most deeply--Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr.
+    Swinburne--would be difficult.  He seemed to join their hands all
+    round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of
+    the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett.  He was
+    always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his
+    verses as in telling him what he liked.  And although the poets of
+    our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times
+    past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after
+    all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are
+    poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to
+    straightforward men like Jowett.  That Jowett's judgment in artistic
+    matters, and especially in poetry, was borne no one knew better than
+    himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical
+    subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and
+    this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would
+    otherwise have been allowed to him.  For, notwithstanding the Oxford
+    epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be
+    more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary
+    knowledge.  He was fond of quoting Hallam's words that without an
+    exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction;
+    and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge,
+    he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion.  They are
+    not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to
+    secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the
+    Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a
+    great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble
+    and most truly lovable.  The kind of restraint in social intercourse
+    resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as
+    his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett's
+    taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the
+    peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for
+    talking's sake.  If a proper and right response to a friend's remark
+    chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to
+    deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to
+    be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of
+    keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or
+    uneducated man.  It is, however, extremely difficult to write
+    reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett.  In order to bring out
+    one of Jowett's pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it
+    has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and
+    then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism."
+
+Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits
+that the two friends used to pay to Jowett's rural retreat at Boar's
+Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the
+riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian.  The two poets used to spend
+the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master
+to Boar's Hill.  Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry will remember
+the following sonnets:--
+
+                      THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR'S HILL
+                               To A. C. S.
+
+                                    I
+
+    One after one they go; and glade and heath,
+       Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers
+       They made so dear, are haunted by the hours
+    Once musical of those who sleep beneath;
+    One after one does Sorrow's every wreath
+       Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,
+       And Love and Memory from each loss of ours
+    Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.
+
+    Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield
+    The friend with whom we walk through mead and field
+       To-day as on that day when last we parted,
+    Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?
+    Love shapes a presence out of Memory's dream,
+       A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.
+
+                                      II
+
+    Can he be dead?  We walk through flowery ways
+       From Boar's Hill down to Oxford, fain to know
+       What nugget-gold, in drift of Time's long flow,
+    The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;
+    He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,
+       Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,
+       Still talks of Plato while the scene below
+    Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.
+
+    Can he be dead?  He shares our homeward walk,
+    And by the river you arrest the talk
+       To see the sun transfigure ere he sets
+    The boatmen's children shining in the wherry
+       And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,
+    Making the clumsy craft an angel's ferry.
+
+                                     III
+
+    The river crossed, we walk 'neath glowing skies
+       Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
+       With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air--
+    Fading as colour after colour dies:
+    We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise--
+       Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
+       We win the scholar's nest--his simple fare
+    Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.
+
+    Can he be dead?  His heart was drawn to you.
+    Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew
+       The poet's heart of gold that gives the spell!
+    Can he be dead?  Your heart being drawn to him,
+    How shall ev'n Death make that dear presence dim
+       For you who loved him--us who loved him well?
+
+Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
+loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill.  Not the least interesting among
+the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious
+contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith.  Mr.
+William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the
+intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+Speaking of Swinburne's championship, in the 'Spectator,' of Meredith's
+first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the 'Pall Mall
+Magazine,' of December 1901, says:--
+
+    "Among those who read and considered" [Meredith's work] "was another
+    young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the
+    most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . .  If
+    the letter signed 'A. C. Swinburne' had not appeared, another signed
+    'Theodore Watts' would have been published, to the like effect.  It
+    was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith,
+    A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion."
+
+The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the
+article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the 'Athenaeum' on 'Poems and Lyrics of
+the Joy of Earth.'  After this appeared articles appreciative of
+Meredith's prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others.  But it was Mr.
+Watts-Dunton who led the way.  The most touching of all the testimonies
+of love and admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr
+Watts-Dunton, or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet
+addressed to him on his seventy-fourth birthday.  It appeared in the
+'Saturday Review' of February 15, 1902:--
+
+                              TO GEORGE MEREDITH
+                       (ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)
+
+    This time, dear friend--this time my birthday greeting
+       Comes heavy of funeral tears--I think of you,
+       And say, ''Tis evening with him--that is true--
+    But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;
+    Still he is spared--while Spring and Winter, meeting,
+       Clasp hands around the roots 'neath frozen dew--
+       To see the 'Joy of Earth' break forth anew,
+    And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.'
+
+    Love's remnant melts and melts; but, if our days
+       Are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, still,
+    Still Winter has a sun--a sun whose rays
+       Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,
+    And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,
+       Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.
+
+The allusion to 'funeral tears' was caused by one of the greatest
+bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years,
+namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the
+'Athenaeum.'  I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often
+heard Mr. Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration
+the fine charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and
+style of his conversation.
+
+But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of
+'The Pines' Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.
+
+I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of
+Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between
+the external facets of Tennyson's character and the 'abysmal deeps' of
+his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet's son, is the only man
+living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet.
+Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries
+nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and
+Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy.  So
+long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his
+seventy-first birthday.  It attracted much attention, and although it was
+not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well
+he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to
+another:--
+
+    TO ALFRED TENNYSON, ON HIS PUBLISHING, IN HIS SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR, THE
+    MOST RICHLY VARIOUS VOLUME OF ENGLISH VERSE THAT HAS APPEARED IN HIS
+    OWN CENTURY.
+
+    Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs
+       Whose magic waters to a flood expand,
+       Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,
+    The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.
+    From honeyed flowers,--from balm of zephyr-wings,--
+       From fiery blood of gems, {286} through all the land,
+       The river draws;--then, in one rainbow-band,
+    Ten leagues of nectar o'er the ocean flings.
+
+    Rich with the riches of a poet's years,
+       Stained in all colours of Man's destiny,
+    So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears
+       The misty main, and, taking now the sea,
+    Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears
+       The ashen billows of Eternity.
+
+Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a
+garden party, and they fraternized at once.  Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open
+invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this
+invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth.  One point in
+which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the 'Table Talk') or with Mr.
+Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson's ear was defective at the very
+first.  He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show
+a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the
+demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of
+poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best
+occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield.  As an
+illustration of Tennyson's sensibility to the most delicate nuances of
+metrical music, I remember at one of those charming 'symposia' at 'The
+Pines,' hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English
+poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of
+Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of
+this.  It referred to the two sonnets upon 'The Omnipotence of Love' in
+the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of 'Aylwin'
+and 'The Coming of Love.'  These sonnets appeared in an article called
+'The New Hero' in the 'English Illustrated Magazine' in 1883.  Mr.
+Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article
+reached him.  The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the
+son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high
+position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to
+his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets.  Tennyson,
+who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in
+criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of
+the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge.  The line was
+this:--
+
+    And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.
+
+Now it so chanced that this very line had been especially praised by two
+other fine critics, D. G. Rossetti and William Morris, to whom the sonnet
+had been read in manuscript.  Tennyson's criticism was that there were
+too many sibilants in the line, and that although, other things being
+equal, 'scents' might be more accurate than 'scent,' this was a case
+where the claims of music ought to be dominant over other claims.  The
+present Lord Tennyson took the same view, and I am sure they were right,
+and that Mr. Watts-Dunton was right, in finally adopting 'scent' in place
+of 'scents.'
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that Tennyson's sensibility to
+criticism was the result, not of imperious egotism, but of a kind of
+morbid modesty.  Tennyson used to say that "to whatsoever exalted
+position a poet might reach, he was not 'born to the purple,' and that if
+the poet's mind was especially plastic he could never shake off the
+reminiscence of the time when he was nobody."
+
+On a certain occasion Tennyson took Mr. Watts-Dunton into the
+summer-house at Aldworth to read to him 'Becket,' then in manuscript.
+Although another visitor, whom he esteemed very highly, both as a poet
+and an old friend, was staying there, Tennyson said that he should prefer
+to read the play to Mr. Watts-Dunton alone.  And this no doubt was
+because he desired an absolute freedom of criticism.  Freedom of
+criticism we may be sure he got, for of all men Mr. Watts-Dunton is the
+most outspoken on the subject of the poet's art.  The entire morning was
+absorbed in the reading; and, says Mr. Watts-Dunton, 'the remarks upon
+poetic and dramatic art that fell from Tennyson would have made the
+fortune of any critic.'
+
+On the subject of what has been called Tennyson's gaucherie and rudeness
+to women I have seen Mr. Watts-Dunton wax very indignant.  'There was to
+me,' he said, 'the greatest charm in what is called Tennyson's bluntness.
+I would there were a leaven of Tennyson's single-mindedness in the
+society of the present day.'
+
+One anecdote concerning what is stigmatized as Tennyson's rudeness to
+women shows how entirely the man was misunderstood.  Mrs. Oliphant has
+stated that Tennyson, in his own house, after listening in silence to an
+interchange of amiable compliments between herself and Mrs. Tennyson,
+said abruptly, 'What liars you women are!'  'I seem to hear,' said Mr.
+Watts-Dunton, 'Tennyson utter the exclamation--utter it in that tone of
+humourous playfulness, followed by that loud guffaw, which neutralized
+the rudeness as entirely as Douglas Jerrold's laugh neutralized the sting
+of his satire.  For such an incident to be cited as instance of
+Tennyson's rudeness to women is ludicrous.  When I knew him I was, if
+possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me
+with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious
+people.  I did not feel that I had any claim to such treatment, for he
+was, beyond doubt, the greatest literary figure in the world of that
+time.  There seems unfortunately to be an impulse of detraction, which
+springs up after a period of laudation.'
+
+The only thing I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton say in the way of stricture
+upon Tennyson's work was that, considering his enormous powers as a poet,
+he seemed deficient in the gift of inventing a story:--"The stanzas
+beginning, 'O, that 'twere possible'--the nucleus of 'Maud'--appeared
+originally in 'The Tribute.'  They were the finest lines that Tennyson
+ever wrote--right away the finest.  They suggested some superb story of
+passion and mystery; and every reader was compelled to make his own guess
+as to what the story could possibly be.  In an evil moment some friend
+suggested that Tennyson should amplify this glorious lyric into a story.
+A person with more of the endowment of the inventor than Tennyson might
+perhaps have invented an adequate story--might perhaps have invented a
+dozen adequate stories; but he could not have invented a worse story than
+the one used by Tennyson in the writing of his monodrama.  But think of
+the poetic riches poured into it!"
+
+I remember a peculiarly subtle criticism that Mr. Watts-Dunton once made
+in regard to 'The Princess.'  "Shakspeare," he said, "is the only poet
+who has been able to put sincere writing into a story the plot of which
+is fanciful.  The extremely insincere story of 'The Princess' is filled
+with such noble passages of sincere poetry as 'Tears, idle tears,' 'Home
+they brought her warrior dead,' etc., passages which unfortunately lose
+two-thirds of their power through the insincere setting."
+
+Not very long before Tennyson died, the editor of the 'Magazine of Art'
+invited Mr. Watts-Dunton to write an article upon the portraits of
+Tennyson.  Mr. Watts-Dunton consulted the poet upon this project, and he
+agreed, promising to aid in the selection of the portraits.  The result
+was two of the most interesting essays upon Tennyson that have ever been
+written--in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that without a knowledge
+of these articles no student of Tennyson can be properly equipped.  It is
+tantalizing that they have never been reprinted.  Tennyson died before
+their appearance, and this, of course, added to the general interest felt
+in them.
+
+After Tennyson's death Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote two penetrating essays upon
+Tennyson in the 'Nineteenth Century,' one of them being his reminiscences
+of Tennyson as the poet and the man, and the other a study of him as a
+nature-poet in reference to evolution.  It will be a great pity if these
+essays too are not reprinted.  Mr. Knowles, the editor, also included Mr.
+Watts-Dunton among the friends of Tennyson who were invited to write
+memorial verses on his death for the 'Nineteenth Century.'  To this
+series Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed the following sonnet, which is one of
+the several poems upon Tennyson not published in 'The Coming of Love'
+volume, which, I may note in passing, contains 'What the Silent Voices
+Said,' the fine 'sonnet sequence' commemorating the burial of Tennyson:--
+
+                             IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
+
+                   'THE CROWD IN THE ABBEY WAS VERY GREAT.'
+
+                                                        Morning Newspaper.
+
+    I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold
+       What others saw not--his lov'd face sublime
+       Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime
+    Of Tennyson's long day that grows not old;
+    And, as I gazed, my grief seemed over-bold;
+       And, 'Who art thou,' the music seemed to chime,
+        'To mourn that King of song whose throne is Time?'
+    Who loves a god should be of godlike mould.
+
+    Then spake my heart, rebuking Sorrow's shame:
+       'So great he was, striving in simple strife
+       With Art alone to lend all beauty life--
+    So true to Truth he was, whatever came--
+       So fierce against the false when lies were rife--
+    That love o'erleapt the golden fence of Fame.'
+
+By the invitation of the present Lord Tennyson, Mr. Watts-Dunton was one
+of the few friends of the poet, including Jowett, F. W. H. Myers, F. T.
+Palgrave, the late Duke of Argyll, and others, who contributed
+reminiscences of him to the 'Life.'  In a few sentences he paints this
+masterly little miniature of Tennyson, entitled, 'Impressions: 1883-1892'
+{291}:--
+
+    "All are agreed that D. G. Rossetti's was a peculiarly winning
+    personality, but no one has been in the least able to say why.
+    Nothing is easier, however, than to find the charm of Tennyson.  It
+    lay in a great veracity of soul: it lay in a simple
+    single-mindedness, so childlike that, unless you had known him to be
+    the undoubted author of poems as marvellous for exquisite art as for
+    inspiration, you could not have supposed but that all
+    subtleties--even those of poetic art--must be foreign to a nature so
+    simple.
+
+    Working in a language like ours--a language which has to be moulded
+    into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art--how can this great,
+    inspired, simple nature be the delicate-fingered artist of 'The
+    Princess,' 'The Palace of Art,' 'The Day-Dream,' and 'The Dream of
+    Fair Women'?
+
+    Tennyson knew of but one justification for the thing he said--viz.
+    that it was the thing he thought.  Behind his uncompromising
+    directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy of the grand
+    old type.  As he stood at the porch of Aldworth meeting a guest or
+    bidding him good-bye--as he stood there, tall far beyond the height
+    of average men, his skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and
+    wind--as he stood there, no one could mistake him for anything but a
+    great forthright English gentleman.  Always a man of an extraordinary
+    beauty of presence, he showed up to the last the beauty of old age to
+    a degree rarely seen.  He was the most hospitable of men.  It was
+    very rare indeed for him to part from a guest without urging him to
+    return, and generally with the words, 'Come whenever you like.'
+
+    Tennyson's knowledge of nature--nature in every aspect--was simply
+    astonishing.  His passion for 'stargazing' has often been commented
+    upon by readers of his poetry.  Since Dante, no poet in any land has
+    so loved the stars.  He had an equal delight in watching the
+    lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a
+    thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he
+    persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding
+    lightning.  For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong,
+    and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that
+    he passed away in the light he so much loved--in a room where there
+    was no artificial light--nothing to quicken the darkness but the
+    light of the full moon, which somehow seems to shine more brightly at
+    Aldworth than anywhere else in England.
+
+    In a country having a composite language such as ours it may be
+    affirmed with special emphasis that there are two kinds of poetry:
+    one appealing to the uncultivated masses, the other appealing to the
+    few who are sensitive to the felicitous expression of deep thought
+    and to the true beauties of poetic art.
+
+    Of all poets Shakespeare is the most popular, and yet in his use of
+    what Dante calls the 'sieve for noble words' his skill transcends
+    that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.  His felicities
+    of thought and of diction in the great passages seem little short of
+    miraculous, and there are so many that it is easy to understand why
+    he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore.
+    That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will
+    take the trouble to compare the first edition of 'Romeo and Juliet'
+    with the received text, the first sketch of 'The Merry Wives of
+    Windsor' with the play as we now have it, and the 'Hamlet' of 1603
+    with the 'Hamlet' of 1604, and with the still further varied version
+    of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623.  Next
+    to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two
+    great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace
+    public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps,
+    Chaucer; but since Shakespeare's time no one has met with anything
+    like Tennyson's success in effecting a reconciliation between popular
+    and artistic sympathy with poetry in England."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS
+
+
+I feel that my hasty notes about Mr. Watts-Dunton's literary friendships
+would be incomplete without a word or two upon his American friends.
+There is a great deal of interest in the story of the first meeting
+between him and James Russell Lowell.  Shortly after Lowell had accepted
+the post of American Minister in England, Mr. Watts-Dunton met him at
+dinner.  During the dinner Mr. Watts-Dunton was somewhat attracted by the
+conversation of a gentleman who sat next to him but one.  He observed
+that the gentleman seemed to talk as if he wished to entice him into the
+conversation.  The gentleman was passing severe strictures upon English
+writers--Dickens, Thackeray, and others.  As the dinner wore on, his
+conversation left literary names and took up political ones, and he was
+equally severe upon the prominent political figures of the time, and also
+upon the prominent political men of the previous generation--Palmerston,
+Lord John Russell, and the like.  Then the name of the Alabama came up;
+the gentleman (whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now discovered to be an American),
+dwelt with much emphasis upon the iniquity of England in letting the
+Alabama escape.  This diatribe he concluded thus: 'You know we owe
+England nothing.'  In saying this he again looked at Mr. Watts-Dunton,
+manifestly addressing his remarks to him.
+
+These attacks upon England and Englishmen and everything English had at
+last irritated Mr. Watts-Dunton, and addressing the gentleman for the
+first time, he said: "Pardon me, sir, but there you are wrong.  You owe
+England a very great deal, for I see you are an American."
+
+"What do we owe England?" said the gentleman, whom Mr. Watts-Dunton now
+began to realize was no other than the newly appointed American Minister.
+
+"You owe England," he said, "for an infinity of good feeling which you
+are trying to show is quite unreciprocated by Americans.  So kind is the
+feeling of English people towards Americans that socially, so far as the
+middle classes are concerned, they have an immense advantage over English
+people themselves.  They are petted and made much of, until at last it
+has come to this, that the very fact of a person's being American is a
+letter of introduction."
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton spoke with such emphasis, and his voice is so
+penetrating, that those on the opposite side of the table began to pause
+in their conversation to listen to it, and this stopped the little duel
+between the two.  After the ladies had retired, Mr. Lowell drew up his
+chair to Mr. Watts-Dunton and said:
+
+"You were very sharp upon me just now, sir."
+
+"Not in the least," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  "You were making an onslaught
+on my poor little island, and you really seemed as though you were
+addressing your conversation to me."
+
+"Well," replied Mr. Lowell, "I will confess that I did address my
+conversation partially to you; you are, I think, Mr. Theodore Watts."
+
+"That is my little name," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  "But I really don't see
+why that should induce you to address your conversation to me.  I suppose
+it is because absurd paragraphs have often appeared in the American
+newspapers stating that I am strongly anti-American in my sympathies.  An
+entire mistake!  I have several charming American friends, and I am a
+great admirer of many of your most eminent writers.  But I notice that
+whensoever an American book is severely handled in the 'Athenaeum,' the
+article is attributed to me."
+
+"I do not think," said Mr. Lowell, "that you are a lover of my country,
+but I am not one of those who attribute to you articles that you never
+wrote."
+
+And he then drew his chair nearer to his interlocutor, and became more
+confidential.
+
+"Well," he said, "I will tell you something that, I think, will not be
+altogether unpleasant to you.  When I came to take up my permanent
+residence in London a short time ago, I was talking to a friend of mine
+about London and Londoners, and I said to him: 'There is one man whom I
+very much want to meet.'  'You!' said he, 'why, you can meet anybody from
+the royal family downwards.  Who is the man you want to meet?'  'It is a
+man in the literary world,' said I, 'and I have no doubt you can
+introduce me to him.  It is the writer of the chief poetical criticism in
+the "Athenaeum."'  My friend laughed.  'Well, it is curious,' he replied:
+'that is one of the few men in the literary world I cannot introduce you
+to.  I scarcely know him, and, besides, not long ago he passed strictures
+on my writing which I don't much approve of.'  Does that interest you?"
+added Mr. Lowell.
+
+"Very much," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+
+"Would it interest you to know that ever since your first article in the
+'Athenaeum' I have read every article you have written?"
+
+"Very much," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
+
+"Would it interest you to know that on reading your first article I said
+to a friend of mine: 'At last there is a new voice in English
+criticism?'"
+
+"Very much," said Mr. Watts-Dunton.  "But you must first tell me what
+that article was, for I don't believe there is one of my countrymen who
+could do so."
+
+"That article," said Lowell, "was an essay upon the 'Comedy of the Noctes
+Ambrosianae,' and it opened with an Oriental anecdote."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "that does interest me very much."
+
+"And I will go further," said Lowell: "every line you have written in the
+'Athenaeum' has been read by me, and often re-read."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "I confess to being amazed, for I assure
+you that in my own country, except within a narrow circle of friends, my
+name is absolutely unknown.  And I must add that I feel honoured, for it
+is not a week since I told a friend that I have a great admiration for
+some of your critical essays.  But still, I don't quite forgive you for
+your onslaught upon my poor little island!  My sympathies are not
+strongly John Bullish, and they tell me that my verses are more Celtic
+than Anglo-Saxon in temper.  But I am somewhat of a patriot, in my way,
+and I don't quite forgive you."
+
+The meeting ended in the two men fraternizing with each other.
+
+"Won't you come to see me," said Lowell, "at the Embassy?"
+
+"I don't know where it is."
+
+"Then you ought to know!" said Lowell.  "Another proof of the stout
+sufficiency of the English temper--not to know where the American Embassy
+is!  It is in Lowndes Square."  Then he named the number.
+
+"Why," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "that is next door to Miss Swinburne, aunt
+of the poet, a perfectly marvellous lady, possessing the vitality of the
+Swinburne family--a lady who makes watercolour landscape drawings in the
+open air at I don't know what age of life--something like eighty.  She
+was a friend of Turner's, and is the possessor of some of Turner's finest
+works."
+
+"So you actually go next door, and don't know where the American Embassy
+is!  A crowning proof of the insolent self-sufficiency of the English
+temper!  However, as you come next door, won't you come and see me?"
+
+"I shall be delighted," said Mr. Watts-Dunton; "but I am perfectly sure
+you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man."
+
+"On the contrary," said Lowell, "I always reserve to myself an hour, from
+five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette."
+
+Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an
+hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution,
+this hour over a cigarette once a week.
+
+This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling
+the way in which Lowell's Anglophobia became milder and milder, 'fine by
+degrees and beautifully less,' until at last it entirely vanished.  Then
+it was followed by something like Anglo-mania.  Lowell began to talk with
+the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways
+which he would formerly have deprecated.  The climax of this revolution
+was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:
+
+"Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have
+ceased to be able to follow you.  The English ladies are--let us say,
+charming; English gentlemen are--let us say, charming, or at least some
+of them.  Everything is charming!  But there is one thing you cannot say
+a word for, and that is our detestable climate."
+
+"And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!" said
+Lowell.  "I positively cannot live out of it."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Watts-Dunton, "you and I will cease to talk about
+England and John Bull, if you please.  I cannot follow you."
+
+In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with
+all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his
+own country.  There never was a stauncher American than James Russell
+Lowell.  Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed
+man.  Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling
+between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to
+Lowell.  Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest
+sonnets.  It appeared in the 'Athenaeum' after Lowell's death, and it has
+been frequently reprinted in the United States.  It now appears in 'The
+Coming of Love.'  It was addressed 'To Britain and America: On the Death
+of James Russell Lowell,'
+
+    Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
+       And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
+       Your fathers drew, for Freedom's pioneers,
+    Your English speech, your dower of English blood--
+    Ye ask to-day, in sorrow's holiest mood,
+       When all save love seems film--ye ask in tears--
+        'How shall we honour him whose name endears
+    The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?'
+
+    Your hands he joined--those fratricidal hands,
+       Once trembling, each, to seize a brother's throat:
+    How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
+       Between you still?--Keep Love's bright sails afloat
+       For Lowell's sake, where once ye strove and smote
+    On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.
+
+This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton's feelings
+towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile.  Apart from his
+intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence
+Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most
+cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey,
+Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans.
+Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during
+several years they saw each other nearly every day.  That was before
+Whistler's genius had received full recognition.  I may recall that
+during a certain controversy concerning Whistler's animosity against the
+Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the
+'Times' of August 12, 1903:--
+
+    "In the 'Times' of to-day Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., says: 'I was on
+    friendly terms with Whistler for nearly forty years, and I never
+    heard him at any time testify animosity against the Academy or its
+    members.'
+
+    My own acquaintance with Whistler did not extend over forty years,
+    but for about ten years I was very intimate with him, so intimate
+    that during part of this period we met almost every day.  Indeed, at
+    one time we were jointly engaged on a weekly periodical called
+    'Piccadilly,' for which Du Maurier designed the cover, and for which
+    Whistler furnished his very first lithographs, by the valuable aid of
+    Mr. T. Way.  During that time there were not many days when he failed
+    to 'testify animosity' against the Academy and its members.  To say
+    the truth, the testifications on this subject by 'Jimmy,' as he was
+    then called, were a little afflictive to his friends.  Whether he was
+    right or wrong in the matter is a point on which I feel unqualified
+    to express an opinion.
+
+    May I be allowed to conclude this note by expressing my admiration of
+    your New York Correspondent's amazingly vivid portrait of one of the
+    most vivid personalities of our time?  It is a masterpiece. . . . "
+
+When Bret Harte died, in May 1902, one of the best and most appreciative
+estimates of him was written by Mr. Watts-Dunton for the 'Athenaeum.'  I
+am tempted to quote it nearly in full, as it shows deep sympathy with
+American literature, and it will prove more conclusively than any words
+of mine how warm are Mr. Watts-Dunton's feelings towards Americans:--
+
+    "As a personality Bret Harte seems to have exercised a great charm
+    over his intimate friends, and I am not in the least surprised at his
+    being a favourite.  It is many years since I last saw him.  I think
+    it must have been at a club dinner given by William Black; but I have
+    a very vivid remembrance of my first meeting him, which must have
+    been more than twenty-six years ago, and on that occasion it occurred
+    to me that he had great latent histrionic gifts, and, like Charles
+    Dickens, might have been an admirable actor.  On that account the
+    following incident is worth recording.  A friend of mine, an American
+    poet, who at that time was living in London, brought him to my
+    chambers, and did me the honour of introducing me to him.  Bret Harte
+    had read something about the London music-halls, and proposed that we
+    should all three take a drive round the town and see something of
+    them.  At that time these places took a very different position in
+    public estimation from what they appear to be doing now.  People then
+    considered them to be very cockney, very vulgar, and very inane, as,
+    indeed, they were, and were shy about going to them.  I hope they
+    have improved now, for they seem to have become quite fashionable.
+    Our first visit was to the Holborn Music Hall, and there we heard one
+    or two songs that gave the audience immense delight--some comic, some
+    more comic from being sentimental-maudlin.  And we saw one or two
+    shapeless women in tights.  Then we went to the 'Oxford,' and saw
+    something on exactly the same lines.  In fact, the performers seemed
+    to be the same as those we had just been seeing.  Then we went to
+    other places of the same kind, and Bret Harte agreed with me as to
+    the distressing emptiness of what my fellow-countrymen and women
+    seemed to be finding so amusing.  At that time, indeed, the almost
+    only interesting entertainment outside the opera and the theatres was
+    that at Evans's supper-rooms, where, under the auspices of the famous
+    Paddy Green, one could enjoy a Welsh rarebit while listening to the
+    'Chough and Crow' and 'The Men of Harlech,' given admirably by
+    choir-boys.  Years passed before I saw Bret Harte again.  I met him
+    at a little breakfast party, and he amused those who sat near him by
+    giving an account of what he had seen at the music-halls--an account
+    so graphic that I think a fine actor was lost in him.  He not only
+    vivified every incident, but gave verbal descriptions of every
+    performer in a peculiarly quiet way that added immensely to the
+    humour of it.  His style of acting would have been that of Jefferson
+    of 'Rip Van Winkle' fame.  This proved to me what a genius he had for
+    accurate observation, and also what a remarkable memory for the
+    details of a scene.  His death has touched English people very
+    deeply.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    It is easy to be unjust to Bret Harte--easy to say that he was a
+    disciple of Dickens--easy to say that in richness, massiveness, and
+    variety he fell far short of his great and beloved master.  No one
+    was so ready to say all this and more about Bret Harte as Bret Harte
+    himself.  For of all the writers of his time he was perhaps the most
+    modest, the most unobtrusive, the most anxious to give honour where
+    he believed honour to be due.
+
+    But the comparison between the English and American story-tellers
+    must not be pushed too far to the disadvantage of the latter.  If
+    Dickens showed great superiority to Bret Harte on one side of the
+    imaginative writer's equipment, there were, I must think, other sides
+    of that equipment on which the superiority was Bret Harte's.
+
+    Therefore I am not one of those who think that in a court of
+    universal criticism Bret Harte's reputation will be found to be of
+    the usual ephemeral kind.  It is, of course, impossible to speak on
+    such matters with anything like confidence.  But it does seem to me
+    that Bret Harte's reputation is more likely than is generally
+    supposed to ripen into what we call fame.  For in his short
+    stories--in the best of them, at least--there is a certain note quite
+    indescribable by any adjective--a note which is, I believe, always to
+    be felt in the literature that survives.  The charge of not being
+    original is far too frequently brought against the imaginative
+    writers of America.  What do we mean by 'originality'?  Scott did not
+    invent the historic method.  Dickens simply carried the method of
+    Smollett further, and with wider range.  Thackeray is admittedly the
+    nineteenth century Fielding.  Perhaps, indeed, there is but one
+    absolutely original writer of prose fiction of the nineteenth
+    century--Nathaniel Hawthorne.  By original I mean simply original.  I
+    do not mean that he was the greatest imaginative writer of his epoch.
+    But he invented a new kind of fiction altogether, a fiction in which
+    the material world and the spiritual world were not merely brought
+    into touch, but were positively intermingled one with the other.
+
+    Bret Harte had the great good fortune to light upon material for
+    literary treatment of a peculiarly fresh and a peculiarly fascinating
+    kind, and he had the artistic instinct to treat it adequately.  This
+    is what I mean: in the wonderful history of the nineteenth century
+    there are no more picturesque figures than those goldseekers--those
+    'Argonauts' of the Pacific slope--who in 1848 and 1849 showed the
+    world what grit lies latent in the racial amalgam we agree to call
+    'the Anglo-Saxon race.'  The Australian gold-diggers of 1851 who
+    followed them, although they were picturesque and sturdy too, were
+    not exactly of the strain of the original Argonauts.  The romance of
+    the thing had been in some degree worn away.  The land of the Golden
+    Fleece had degenerated into a Tom Tiddler's Ground.  Moreover, the
+    Tom Tiddler's Grounds of Ballarat and Bendigo were at a comparatively
+    easy distance from the Antipodean centre of civilization.  'Canvas
+    Town' could easily be reached from Sydney.  But to reach the Golden
+    Fleece sought by the original Californian Argonauts the adventurer
+    had before him a journey of an almost unparalleled kind.  Every
+    Argonaut, indeed, was a kind of explorer as well as seeker of gold.
+    He must either trek overland--that is to say, over those vast
+    prairies and then over those vast mountain chains which to men of the
+    time of Fenimore Cooper and Dr. Bird made up the limitless 'far West'
+    regions which only a few pioneers had dared to cross--or else he must
+    take a journey, equally perilous, round Cape Horn in the first crazy
+    vessel in which he could get a passage.  It follows that for an
+    adventurer to succeed in reaching the land of the Golden Fleece at
+    all implied in itself that grit which adventurers of the Anglo-Saxon
+    type are generally supposed to show in a special degree.  What kind
+    of men these Argonauts were, and what kind of life they led, the
+    people of the Eastern states of America and the people of England had
+    for years been trying to gather from newspaper reports and other
+    sources; but had it not been for the genius of Bret Harte this most
+    picturesque chapter of nineteenth-century history would have been
+    obliterated and forgotten.  Thanks to the admirable American writer
+    whom England had the honour and privilege of entertaining for so many
+    years, those wonderful regions and those wonderful doings in the
+    Sierra Nevada are as familiar to us as is Dickens's London.  Surely
+    those who talk of Bret Harte as being 'Dickens among the Californian
+    pines' do not consider what their words imply.  It is true, no doubt,
+    that there was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens
+    and the temperament of Bret Harte.  They both held the same
+    principles of imaginative art, they both felt that the function of
+    the artist is to aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him
+    beautiful ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called
+    realism which lowers man in his aspirations--which calls before man's
+    imagination degrading pictures of his 'animal origin'--is to do him a
+    disservice.  For man has still a long journey before he reaches the
+    goal.  Yet though they were both by instinct idealists as regards
+    character-drawing, they both sought to give their ideals a local
+    habitation and a name by surrounding those ideals with vividly
+    painted real accessories, as real as those of the ugliest realist.
+
+    With regard to Bret Harte's Argonauts and the romantic scenery in
+    which they lived and worked, it would, no doubt, be a bold thing to
+    say whether Dickens could or could not have painted them, and
+    whether, if he had painted them, the pictures would or would not have
+    been as good as Bret Harte's pictures.  But Dickens never did paint
+    these Argonauts; he never had the chance of painting them.  Bret
+    Harte did paint them, and succeeded as wonderfully as Dickens
+    succeeded in painting certain classes of London life.  Now,
+    assuredly, I should have never dreamt of instituting a comparison of
+    this kind between two of the most delightful writers and the most
+    delightful men that have lived in my time had not critics been doing
+    so to the disparagement of one of them.  But if one of these writers
+    must be set up against another, I feel that something should be said
+    upon the other side of the question--I feel that something should be
+    said on those points where the American had the advantage.  Take the
+    question of atmosphere, for instance.  Let us not forget how
+    enormously important is atmosphere in any imaginative picture of
+    life.  Without going so far as to say that atmosphere is as
+    important, or nearly as important, as character, let me ask, What was
+    it that captured the readers of 'Robinson Crusoe'?  Was it the
+    character of Defoe's hero, or was it the scenery and the atmosphere
+    in which he placed him?  Again, see what an important part scenery
+    and atmosphere played in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' in 'The Lady
+    of the Lake,' in 'Marmion,' and in 'Waverley.'  And surely it was the
+    atmosphere of Byron's 'Giaour,' 'The Bride of Abydos,' and 'The
+    Corsair,' that mainly gave these poems their vogue.  And, in a
+    certain sense, it may be said that Dickens gave to his readers a new
+    atmosphere, for he was the first to explore what was something new to
+    the reading world--the great surging low-life of London and the life
+    of the lower stratum of its middle class.  It seems that the pure
+    novelist of manners only can dispense with a new and picturesque
+    atmosphere.  It was natural for England to look to American writers
+    to enrich English literature with a new imaginative atmosphere, and
+    she did not look in vain.  But, notwithstanding all that had been
+    done by writers like Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Bird, and
+    others to bring American atmosphere into literature, Bret Harte gave
+    us an atmosphere that was American and yet as new as though the
+    above-mentioned writers had never written.  He had the advantage of
+    depicting a scenery that was as unlike the backwoods of his
+    predecessors as it was unlike everything else in the world.  It is
+    doubtful whether there is any scenery in the world so fascinating as
+    the mountain ranges of the Pacific side of the United States and
+    Canada.
+
+    Every one is born with an instinct for loving some particular kind of
+    scenery, and this bias has not so much to do with the
+    birth-environment as is generally supposed.  It would have been of no
+    avail for Bret Harte to be familiar with the mighty canons, peaks,
+    and cataracts of the Nevada regions unless he had had a natural
+    genius for loving and depicting them; and this, undoubtedly, he had,
+    as we see by the effect upon us of his descriptions.  Once read, his
+    pictures are never forgotten.  But it was not merely that the scenery
+    and atmosphere of Bret Harte's stories are new--the point is that the
+    social mechanism in which his characters move is also new.  And if it
+    cannot be denied that in temperament his characters are allied to the
+    characters of Dickens, we must not make too much of this.
+    Notwithstanding all the freshness and newness of Dickens's characters
+    they were entirely the slaves of English sanctions.  Those
+    incongruities which gave them their humourous side arose from their
+    contradicting the English social sanctions around them.  But in Bret
+    Harte's Argonauts we get characters that move entirely outside those
+    sanctions of civilization with which the reader is familiar.  And
+    this is why the violent contrasts in his stories seem, somehow, to be
+    better authenticated than do the equally violent contrasts in
+    Dickens's stories.  Bret Harte's characters are amenable to no laws
+    except the improvised laws of the camp; and the final arbiter is
+    either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch.  And yet
+    underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep
+    'law-abidingness' which the late Grant Allen despised as being 'the
+    Anglo-Saxon characteristic.'  To my mind, indeed, there is nothing so
+    new, fresh, and piquant in the fiction of my time as Bret Harte's
+    pictures of the mixed race we call Anglo-Saxon finding itself right
+    outside all the old sanctions, exercising nevertheless its own
+    peculiar instinct for law-abidingness of a kind.
+
+    We get the Anglo-Saxon beginning life anew far removed from the old
+    sanctions of civilization, retaining of necessity a good deal of that
+    natural liberty which, according to Blackstone, was surrendered by
+    the first human compact in order to secure its substitute, civil
+    liberty.  We get vivid pictures of the racial qualities which enable
+    the Anglo-Saxon to plant his roots and flourish in almost every
+    square mile of the New World that lies in the temperate zone.  Let a
+    group of this great race of universal squatters be the dwellers in
+    Roaring Camp, or a party of whalers in New Zealand when it is a 'no
+    man's land,' or even a gang of mutineers from the Bounty, it is all
+    one as regards their methods as squatters.  The moment that the
+    mutineers set foot on Pitcairn Island they improvise a code of laws
+    something like the camp laws of Bret Harte's Argonauts, and the code
+    on the whole works well.
+
+    Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence
+    of the presentation, Bret Harte's pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in
+    these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature.  And
+    again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are
+    what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more
+    sought after.  This accounts in a large measure for the growing
+    interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if
+    there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of
+    Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
+
+    Bret Harte's stories give the reader a sense of the open air second
+    only to Borrow's own pictures.  And if I am right in thinking that
+    the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this
+    also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
+
+    And now what about his power of creating new characters--not
+    characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters?  Well, here
+    one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret
+    Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens.  Dickens,
+    of course, used a larger canvas--gave himself more room to depict his
+    subjects.
+
+    If Bret Harte's scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may
+    it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories
+    and not long novels?  For it is very difficult in a short story to
+    secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to
+    nature--the last perfection of imaginative art.
+
+    All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection.
+    In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having
+    the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as
+    in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from
+    the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature.  The
+    shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence
+    the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of
+    course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from
+    which a long novel may be free."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+WALES
+
+
+           [Picture: Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd]
+
+IT is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr.
+Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described
+by Dr. Hake in 'The New Day.'  I can best show the impression that Alpine
+scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of 'The Coming of
+Love.'  But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two
+should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted
+'Aylwin' as the representative Welsh novel.  And this is not surprising,
+because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born
+upon her soil.  The 'Arvon' edition is thus dedicated:--
+
+    "To Ernest Rhys, poet and romancist, and my very dear friend, this
+    edition of 'Aylwin' is affectionately inscribed.
+
+    It was as far back as those summer days when you used to read the
+    proofs of 'Aylwin'--used to read them in the beautiful land the story
+    endeavours to depict--that the wish came to me to inscribe it to you,
+    whose paraphrases of 'The Lament of Llywarch Hen,' 'The Lament of
+    Urien,' and 'The Song of the Graves' have so entirely caught the old
+    music of Kymric romance.
+
+    When I described my Welsh heroine as showing that 'love of the wind'
+    which is such a fascinating characteristic of the Snowdonian girls I
+    had only to recall that poetic triumph, your paraphrase of Taliesin's
+    'Song of the Wind'--
+
+    Oh, most beautiful One!
+    In the wood and in the mead,
+    How he fares in his speed!
+    And over the land,
+    Without foot, without hand,
+    Without fear of old age,
+    Or Destiny's rage.
+
+       * * *
+
+    His banner he flings
+    O'er the earth as he springs
+    On his way, but unseen
+    Are its folds; and his mien,
+    Rough or fair, is not shown,
+    And his face is unknown.
+
+    Had I anticipated that 'Aylwin' would achieve a great success among
+    the very people for whom I wrote it, I should without hesitation have
+    asked you to accept the dedication at that time.  But I felt that it
+    would seem like endeavouring to take a worldly advantage of your
+    friendship to ask your permission to do this--to ask you to stand
+    literary sponsor, as it were, to a story depicting Wales and the
+    great Kymric race with which the name of Rhys is so memorably and so
+    grandly associated.  For although my heart had the true 'Kymric
+    beat'--if love of Wales may be taken as an indication of that
+    'beat'--the privilege of having been born on the sacred soil of the
+    Druids could not be claimed by me, and I feared that in the vital
+    presentation of that organic detail, which is the first requisite in
+    all true imaginative art, I might in some degree be found wanting.
+    You yourself always prophesied, I remember, that 'Aylwin' would win
+    the hearts of your countrymen and countrywomen; but I knew your
+    generous nature; I knew also if I may say it, your affection for me.
+    How could I then help feeling that the kind wish was father to the
+    kind thought?
+
+    But now that your prophecies have come true, now that there is, if I
+    am to accept the words of another Welsh writer, 'scarcely any home in
+    Wales where a well-thumbed copy of "Aylwin" is not to be found,' and
+    now that thousands of Welsh women and Welsh girls have read, and, as
+    I know by letters from strangers, have smiled and wept over the story
+    of their countrywoman, Winifred Wynne, I feel that the time has come
+    when I may look for the pleasure of associating your name with the
+    book.
+
+                [Picture: Moel Siabod and the River Lledr]
+
+    Sometimes I have been asked whether Winifred Wynne is not an
+    idealised Welsh girl; but never by you, who know the characteristics
+    of the race to which you belong--know it far too well to dream of
+    asking that question.  There are not many people, I think, who know
+    the Kymric race so intimately as I do; and I have said on a previous
+    occasion what I fully meant and mean, that, although I have seen a
+    good deal of the races of Europe, I put the Kymric race in many ways
+    at the top of them all.  They combine, as I think, the poetry, the
+    music, the instinctive love of the fine arts, and the humour of the
+    other Celtic peoples with the practicalness and bright-eyed sagacity
+    of the very different race to which they are so closely linked by
+    circumstance--the race whom it is the fashion to call the
+    Anglo-Saxon.  And as to the charm of the Welsh girls, no one who
+    knows them as you and I do can fail to be struck by it continually.
+    Winifred Wynne I meant to be the typical Welsh girl as I have found
+    her--affectionate, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and brave.  And I
+    only wish that my power to do justice to her and to the country that
+    gave her birth had been more adequate.  There are, however, writers
+    now among you whose pictures of Welsh scenery and Welsh life can hold
+    their own with almost anything in contemporary fiction; and to them I
+    look for better work than mine in the same rich field.  Although I am
+    familiar with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe, in
+    their wildest and most beautiful recesses, no hill scenery has for me
+    the peculiar witchery of that around Eryri.  And what race in Europe
+    has a history so poetic, so romantic, and so pathetic as yours?  That
+    such a country, so beautiful in every aspect, and surrounded by such
+    an atmosphere of poetry, will soon give birth to its Walter Scott is
+    with me a matter of fervid faith."
+
+As to the descriptions of North Wales in 'Aylwin,' they are now almost
+classic; especially the descriptions of the Swallow Falls and the Fairy
+Glen.  Long before 'Aylwin' was published, Welsh readers had been
+delighted with the 'Athenaeum' article containing the description of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton and Sinfi Lovell walking up the Capel Curig side of Snowdon
+at break of day.
+
+Fine as is that description of a morning on Snowdon, it is not finer than
+the description of a Snowdon sunset, which forms the nobly symbolic
+conclusion of 'Aylwin':--
+
+    "We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard,
+    and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn
+    Ddu'r Arddu.  And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers' Llyn and
+    the echoes to be heard there.  She then took me to another famous
+    sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five
+    thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers' Anvil.  While we
+    lingered here Winnie gave me as many-anecdotes and legends of this
+    stone as would fill a little volume.  But suddenly she stopped.
+
+    'Look!' she said, pointing to the sunset.  'I have seen that sight
+    only once before.  I was with Sinfi.  She called it "The Dukkeripen
+    of the Trushul."'
+
+    The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on
+    the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films
+    floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a
+    ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire.  A
+    horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell
+    upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from
+    the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment
+    a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold.  But what
+    Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where
+    the sun had now sunk behind the horizon.  Shooting up from the cliffs
+    where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of
+    clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose."
+
+It is no wonder, therefore, that the path Henry Aylwin and Sinfi Lovell
+took on the morning when the search for Winifred began was a source of
+speculation, notably in 'Notes and Queries.'  Mr. Watts-Dunton deals with
+this point in the preface to the twenty-second edition:--
+
+    "Nothing," he says, "in regard to 'Aylwin' has given me so much
+    pleasure as the way in which it has been received both by my Welsh
+    friends and my Romany friends.  I little thought, when I wrote it,
+    that within three years of its publication the gypsy pictures in it
+    would be discoursed upon to audiences of 4,000 people by a man so
+    well equipped to express an opinion on such a subject as the eloquent
+    and famous 'Gypsy Smith,' and described by him as 'the most
+    trustworthy picture of Romany life in the English language,
+    containing in Sinfi Lovell the truest representative of the Gypsy
+    girl.'
+
+    Since the first appearance of the book there have been many
+    interesting discussions by Welsh readers, in various periodicals,
+    upon the path taken by Sinfi Lovell and Aylwin in their ascent of
+    Snowdon.
+
+    A very picturesque letter appeared in 'Notes and Queries' on May 3,
+    1902, signed C. C. B., in answer to a query by E. W., which I will
+    give myself the pleasure of quoting because it describes the writer's
+    ascent of Snowdon (accompanied by a son of my old friend, Harry Owen,
+    late of Pen-y-Gwryd) along a path which was almost the same as that
+    taken by Aylmin and Sinfi Lovell, when he saw the same magnificent
+    spectacle that was seen by them:--
+
+    'The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was
+    entirely gone.  So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense
+    a prospect, I have never beheld since.  For the first and only time
+    in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and
+    Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland
+    and Ireland.  The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth
+    walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for
+    even a briefer view than that.'
+
+    Referring to Llyn Coblynau, this interesting writer says:--
+
+    'Only from Glaslyn would the description in "Aylwin" of y Wyddfa
+    standing out against the sky "as narrow and as steep as the sides of
+    an acorn" be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of
+    Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance
+    of the mountain.  We must suppose the action of the story to have
+    taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on
+    Snowdon.'
+
+                      [Picture: Snowdon and Glaslyn]
+
+    With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself
+    all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli
+    in the same number of 'Notes and Queries':--
+
+    'None of us are very likely to succeed in "placing" this llyn,
+    because the author of "Aylwin," taking a privilege of romance often
+    taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks
+    in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story.  It may be,
+    indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a
+    rough translation of the gipsies' name for it, the "Knockers" being
+    gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence "Coblynau"--goblins.  If so, the
+    name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure
+    the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide.  In any case, the only
+    point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps
+    llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture),
+    is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the
+    actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes
+    something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake.
+    The "Knockers," it must be remembered, usually depend upon the
+    existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings
+    where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the
+    curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the
+    Snowdon chapters of "Aylwin."'"
+
+In 'Aylwin' Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of giving his readers little
+pictorial glimpses of Welsh life:--
+
+    "The peasants and farmers all knew me.  'Sut mae dy galon? (How is
+    thy heart?)' they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met
+    them.  'How is my heart, indeed!'  I would sigh as I went on my way.
+
+    Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in
+    the Principality.  Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who
+    knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country.
+    Never a trace of Winifred could I find.
+
+    At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to
+    Pen-y-Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach
+    the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that
+    morning."
+
+His intense affection for Welsh characteristics is seen in the following
+description of the little Welsh girl and her fascinating lisp:--
+
+    "'Would you like to come in our garden?  It's such a nice garden.'
+
+    I could resist her no longer.  That voice would have drawn me had she
+    spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin.  To
+    describe it would of course be impossible.  The novelty of her
+    accent, the way in which she gave the 'h' in 'which,' 'what,' and
+    'when,' the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me
+    as the timbre of her voice.  And let me say here, once for all, that
+    when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the
+    English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions
+    were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives;
+    but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair.  I found that to use
+    colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible
+    without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.
+
+    Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book
+    will go out to the world.  While a story-teller may reproduce, by
+    means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish
+    accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to
+    represent Welsh accent."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE
+
+
+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 'Encyclopaedia 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 'Athenaeum,' 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 'Athenaeum.'  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 OEdipus,
+    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 AEschylus and Sophocles falls below the work of
+    the painter.  Hate, though voluble perhaps as Clytaemnestra'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 naivete 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 naivete 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 'naivete.'
+It was by naivete, 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 naive 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 Badakhshan 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,
+    aerial 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-fetes 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 aerial 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 aeternum 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 'Athenaeum.'  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 'Athenaeum' 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 caesuric 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 (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.  Only,
+    while Aristotle considered 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.
+
+    [Picture: 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 'Athenaeum' 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.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION
+
+
+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 denouement 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
+Bronte 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 Litteraire.'  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 'Athenaeum.'  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--aesthetic, 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 'Cyclopaedia 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 'Cyclopaedia 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 Khayyam,' 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 'Encyclopaedia 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 naive, 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 'Athenaeum,' 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."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES
+
+
+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.'
+
+ [Picture: 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 Bronte'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
+'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' 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 Brontes, 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 12_s._ 6_d._ 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 'Athenaeum,' 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
+'Athenaeum' 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."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION
+
+
+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 idee mere.  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 'Athenaeum' 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 Debats';
+    so did M. Henri Jacottet in 'La Semaine Litteraire.'  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 'Encyclopaedia
+    Britannica,' in the introductory essay to the third volume of
+    'Chambers's Cyclopaedia 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 Trushul,' 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 Litteraire':--
+
+    "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?"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR
+
+
+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 anapaests.  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!'"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+GORGIOS AND ROMANIES
+
+
+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
+'Athenaeum' 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."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+'THE COMING OF LOVE'
+
+
+IN my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia 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
+    AEschylus, 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 'Athenaeum,'
+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 Debats,' 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
+
+    On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams
+    the day
+    When Herne the Scollard come and
+    said to me,
+    He s off, that rye o yourn, gone                  gentleman
+    clean away
+    Till swallow-time; hes left this
+    letter: see.
+    In dreams I heerd the bee and
+    grasshopper,
+    Like on that mornin, buz in Rington
+    Hollow,
+    Shell live till swallow-time and                     die
+    then shell mer,
+    For never will a rye come back to                 gentleman
+    her
+Wot leaves her till the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+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;
+
+All night I heerd in dreams my daddy                  laugh
+sal,
+Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo            girl-whole
+O Bozzles breed--tans, vardey, greis,        tents: waggons: horses
+and all--
+To see dat tarno rye o hern palall                    back
+Wots left her till the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+I woke and went a-walkin on the ice
+All white with snow-dust, just like                   salt
+sparklin loon,
+And soon beneath the stars I heerd a
+vice,
+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                   spirit
+mollo. {403a}
+Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love,
+He s thinkin on you; don t you go and                 weep
+rove;
+You ll see him at the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the
+grass
+When he wur gone, and freeze the                      songs
+brooklets gillies;
+There wornt no smell, dear, in the                     hay
+sweetest cas,
+And when the summer brought the
+water-lilies,
+And when the sweet winds waved the                    wheat
+golden giv,
+The skies above em seemed as bleak and                black
+kollo {403b}
+As now, when all the world seems frozen               snow
+yiv.
+The months are long, but mammy says you
+ll live
+By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.
+
+She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver
+throat
+Will meet the stonechat in the buddin
+whin,
+And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie                song
+ull float
+From light-green boughs through leaves
+a-peepin thin;
+The wheat-ear soon ull bring the
+willow-wren,
+And then the fust fond nightingale ull
+follow,
+A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen
+Still out at sea, the spring is in our
+glen;
+Come, darlin, wi the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+And she wur gone!  And then I read the
+words
+In mornin twilight wot you rote to me;
+They made the Christmas sing with summer
+birds,
+And spring-leaves shine on every frozen
+tree;
+And when the dawnin kindled Rington
+spire,
+And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and   red
+lollo
+Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o
+fire,
+Another night, I sez, has brought him
+nigher;
+He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
+
+And soon the bull-pups found me on the
+Pool--
+You know the way they barks to see me
+slide--
+But when the skatin bors o Rington scool
+Comed on, it turned my head to see em
+glide.
+I seemed to see you twirlin on your
+skates,
+And somethin made me clap my hans and
+hollo;
+It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s.                 cutting
+But when I woke-like--Im the gal wot
+waits
+Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.
+
+Comin seemed ringin in the
+Christmas-chime;
+Comin seemed rit on everything I seed,
+In beads o frost along the nets o rime,
+Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed;
+And when the pups began to bark and
+play,
+And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock
+and wallow
+Among the snow and fling it up like
+spray,
+I says to them, You know who rote to say
+He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.
+
+The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o
+December
+Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o
+spring
+Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups,
+remember;
+If not--for me no singin birds ull sing:
+No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale                cuckoo
+Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, {404} over hill and
+hollow:
+Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail,
+Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale,
+For her wot waits the comin o the
+swallow.
+
+Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your             mine own
+han
+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           miserable Gentile
+her.
+Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife.
+Come back--or, say the word, and I will
+follow
+Your footfalls round the world: Ill
+leave this life
+(Ive flung away a-ready that ere
+knife)--
+I m dyin for the comin o the swallow.
+
+Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very moment when
+'the Schollard,' maddened by the discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy
+that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the
+river-bank.  Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle
+on the other side without being able to go to Rhona's assistance.  But
+the girl hurls her antagonist into the water, and he is drowned.  There
+are other witnesses--the stars, whose reflected light, according to a
+gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man
+sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the deed.  For a Romany
+woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty is death.  Nevertheless, Rhona
+marries Percy.  I will quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in
+the tent at dawn:--
+
+    The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
+    The tent's mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
+    The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
+    Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.
+    I hear the earliest anvil's tingling clink
+    From Jasper's forge; the cattle on the leas
+    Begin to low.  She's waking by degrees:
+    Sleep's rosy fetters melt, but link by link.
+    What dream is hers?  Her eyelids shake with tears;
+    The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
+    She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
+    "You'll never leave me now?  There is but you;
+    I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
+    'The Dukkeripen o' stars comes ever true.'"
+
+    She rises, startled by a wandering bee
+    Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
+    She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
+    And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
+    Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree--
+    Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,
+    Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl--
+    The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
+    And says, 'This bride of yours, I know her well,
+    And so do all the birds in all the bowers
+    Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
+    When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
+    See, on the curtain of the morning haze
+    The Future's finger writes of happy days.'
+
+Rhona, half-hidden by 'the branches of the hawthorn tree,' stretches up
+to kiss the white and green May buds overhanging the bridal tent, while
+Percy Aylwin stands at the tent's mouth and looks at her:--
+
+    Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
+       When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings
+       Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
+    From Rhona's eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
+    Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,
+       Kissing the buds for 'luck o' love' it brings,
+       While from the dingle grass the skylark springs
+    And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?
+
+                           [He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches
+                                        apart, and clasps her in his arms.
+
+    Can she here, covering with her childish kisses
+       These pearly buds--can she so soft, so tender,
+    So shaped for clasping--dowered of all love-blisses--
+       Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
+    An angel storming hell, through death's abysses,
+       Where never a sight could fright or power could bend her?
+
+But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the lovers are on
+the river she reads the scripture of the stars.  I must give here the
+sonnet quoted on page 29:--
+
+    The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,
+    And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
+    The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
+    Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
+    We rowed--we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
+    An angel's, yet with woman's dearer wiles;
+    But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
+    And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.
+
+    What shaped those shadows like another boat
+    Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
+    There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
+    While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
+    We wept--we kissed--while starry fingers wrote,
+    And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
+
+The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in which Percy
+confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its menace.  The stars write in the
+river:--
+
+    Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is strong.
+
+Percy reads the rune and answers:--
+
+    I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
+    In Heav'n that wove this net of life for men?
+    Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
+    Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth--
+       King that can do no wrong!
+    Ah!  Night seems opening!  There, above the skies,
+    Who sits upon that central sun for throne
+    Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
+    Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
+    Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?
+    Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes
+    Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
+    Of infinite light, 'tis Love that stands immortal,
+    The King of Kings.
+
+The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering Rhona's secret,
+secretly slay her.  Percy, having returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to
+find her grave.  Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona
+should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into
+the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called 'Natura Maligna,'
+which has been much discussed by the critics:--
+
+    The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
+    Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
+    By glacier-brink she stood--by cataract-spray--
+    When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
+    At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
+    And if a footprint shone at break of day,
+    My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
+    ''Tis hers whose hand God's mightier hand doth hold.'
+    I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
+    Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
+    When lo, she stood! . . .  God made her let me pass,
+    Then felled the bridge! . . .  Oh, there in sallow light,
+    There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
+    And all my wondrous days as in a glass.
+
+This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry.
+Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the 'Athenaeum' of
+February 5, 1881: "Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a
+Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali ('the malignant') or
+Parvati ('the mountaineer').  It is to be delivered from her that Hindus
+shriek to God in the delirium of their fear."
+
+Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while
+New Year's morning is breaking:--
+
+    Through Fate's mysterious warp another weft
+       Of days is cast; and see!  Time's star-built throne,
+       From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
+    Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
+    Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
+       Of all that was its music--stand alone,
+       Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
+    Impatient of the leaden minutes left--
+
+    The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
+       The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
+    Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
+       Barren and foolish, and I cry, 'No grain,
+    No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!'
+    And yet I cannot join the dead--and live.
+
+    Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
+       In England, heedless of the knells they ring
+       To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
+    Each to the other ere you say adieu!--
+    I seem to hear their chimes--the chimes we knew
+       In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
+       Greeting a New Year's Day as bright of wing
+    As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.
+
+    If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
+       Could bring the past and make it live again,
+       Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
+    And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears--
+       And with the past bring her I weep in vain--
+    Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.
+
+                                        [The clouds move away and show the
+                                             stars in dazzling brightness.
+
+    Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
+       Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
+       My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove--
+    They bring the mighty Mother's new-year greeting:
+       'All save great Nature is a vision fleeting'--
+       So says the scripture of those orbs above.
+       'All, all,' I cry, 'except man's dower of love!--
+    Love is no child of Nature's mystic cheating!'
+
+    And yet it comes again, the old desire
+        To read what yonder constellations write
+        On river and ocean--secrets of the night--
+    To feel again the spirit's wondering fire
+        Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
+    To catch the master-note of Nature's lyre.
+
+    New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
+       And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
+       By Fate and Death, 'Nature is ever young,
+    Clad in new riches, as each morning's gold
+    Blooms o'er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
+       The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
+       The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
+    The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;
+
+    The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
+    But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
+       Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
+    In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
+       Of Youth's fresh runners in the lists of Time.
+    Arise, and drink the wine of Nature's light!'
+
+Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of
+'The Promise of the Sunrise' and the revelation of 'Natura Benigna':--
+
+    Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
+    Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
+    Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
+    Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
+    'Sorrow,' I said, 'has made me old, my dear;
+    'Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
+    Beneath my load a seraph's neck might bow,
+    Vigils like mine would blanch an angel's hair.'
+    Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
+    I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes--
+    I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
+    Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
+    But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
+    Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.
+
+And now 'Natura Benigna' reveals to him her mystic consolation:--
+
+    What power is this?  What witchery wins my feet
+    To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
+    All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
+    Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
+    What thrill of earth and heaven--most wild, most sweet--
+    What answering pulse that all the senses know,
+    Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
+    Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
+    Mother, 'tis I, reborn: I know thee well:
+    That throb I know and all it prophesies,
+    O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
+    Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
+    Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
+    The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
+
+This is not the pathetic fallacy.  It is the poetic interpretation of the
+latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that
+the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard
+only by the poet's finer ear.
+
+The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's poetry, both in subject and in form.  The originality of
+any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in
+new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the
+language.  In 'The Coming of Love' the poet has invented a new poetic
+form.  Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the
+disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel,
+and of the prose play.  In Tennyson's 'Maud' and in Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+other lyrical drama, "Christmas at the 'Mermaid,'" the special functions
+of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form.  The
+story is told by brief pictures.  In 'The Coming of Love' this method
+reaches its perfection.  Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets,
+are used according to an inner law of the poet's mind.  The exaltation of
+these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being
+summarized in bare prose.  The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is
+revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions.  In Dante's 'Vita Nuova' a
+method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind
+of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante's poems are all
+sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in 'The
+Coming of Love.'  Here the very 'rhyme-colour' and the subtle variety of
+vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical
+composition.  Wagner's music is the only modern art-form which is
+comparable with the metrical architecture of 'The Coming of Love,' and
+"Christmas at the 'Mermaid.'"  No one can fully understand the rhythmic
+triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated
+in his treatise on Poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica'--a theory
+which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of
+music, is still developing.  Both these lyrical dramas ought to be
+carefully studied by all students of English metres.
+
+The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an
+extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry.  It is
+remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in
+Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under
+such conditions.  Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her
+portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry.
+But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson's Maud,
+the difference is startling.  Maud does not tingle with personality.  She
+is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of 'creamy English
+girls.'  Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality.
+One makes pictures of her in one's brain--pictures that never become
+blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic
+heroines.  How much of this is due to the poetic form?  Could Rhona have
+lived so intensely in a novel or a play?  I do not think so.  At any
+rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel,
+and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is
+well worth the study of critics and craftsmen.  Mr. Kernahan has called
+attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative.  Perhaps this
+defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose
+like that of the opening of 'Aylwin,' which would lead the imagination
+insensibly from one situation or mood to another.
+
+In connection with the opening sonnets of 'The Coming of Love,' a very
+interesting point of criticism presents itself.  These sonnets, in which
+Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket
+lighthouse, appeared in the 'Athenaeum' a week after Mr. Swinburne and he
+returned from a visit to the Channel Islands.  They record a real
+incident.  Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the 'English
+Illustrated Magazine' his version of the story, a splendid specimen of
+his sonorous rhythms.
+
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's version of the story may interest the reader:--
+
+                    LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
+         (THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)
+
+    Amid the Channel's wiles and deep decoys,
+    Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
+    A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
+    Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
+    The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
+    Were hers.  At last she sailed to Alderney,
+    But there she pined.  'The bustling world,' said she,
+    'Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.'
+    The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
+    Had winds for sponsor--one proud rock for nurse,
+    Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
+    All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
+    The cold bright sea was hers for universe
+    Till o'er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.
+
+    But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:--
+    Her lover's boat was out; her ears were dinned
+    With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
+    That shook the troubled sun's red canopy.
+    Even while she prayed the storm's high revelry
+    Woke petrel, gull--all revellers winged and finned--
+    And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
+    And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
+    'My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,'
+    The Mother sang.  'Thy sea-boy waged no strife
+    With Hatred's poison, gangrened Envy's knife--
+    With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
+    Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
+    Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!'
+
+Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature
+than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends.  It seems
+impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other's work or
+ever have known each other well.  The point which I wish to emphasize is
+that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers,
+they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every
+day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the
+evening in each other's society; and yet when they sit down at their
+desks they may be as far asunder as the poles.  From this we may perhaps
+infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this
+one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.
+
+Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem.  I
+may mention that the other day I came across a little book called
+'Authors that have Influenced me,' and found that Mr. Rider Haggard
+instanced the opening section of 'The Coming of Love,' 'Mother Carey's
+Chicken,' as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than
+all others.  I think this is a compliment, for the originality of
+invention displayed in 'King Solomon's Mines' and 'She' sets Rider
+Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr.
+Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and
+also good is a rare achievement.
+
+I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's miscellaneous sonnets.  Some of them have had a great
+vogue: for instance, 'John the Pilgrim.'  Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.,
+as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the
+subject.  It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in
+this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister
+power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature's
+mockery by the mirage:--
+
+    Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
+       But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
+       Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
+    Claspt in a silvery river's winding maze:
+    'Water, water!  Blessed be God!' he says,
+       And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
+       Then all is fled!  Over the sandy piles
+    The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.
+
+    'God heard me not,' says he, 'blessed be God!'
+       And dies.  But as he nears the pearly strand,
+       Heav'n's outer coast where waiting angels stand,
+    He looks below: 'Farewell, thou hooded clod,
+       Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
+    God heard my prayer for life--blessed be God!'
+
+        [Picture: 'John the Pilgrim.'  (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)]
+
+This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic
+in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled,
+or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious
+faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet.  The rhymes in
+this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer's luck, good and
+ill.  To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have
+been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of
+'chamomiles' and 'isles,' 'chamomiles' giving the picture of the flowers,
+and 'isles' giving the false vision of the mirage.  The same thing is
+notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, 'The Bedouin Child'
+(see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified.  Without
+the fortunate rhyme-words 'pashas,' 'camel-maws,' and 'claws' in the
+octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.
+
+The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry and that of Coleridge has
+been frequently discussed.  It has the same romantic glamour and often
+the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the
+music of the ravishing octosyllabics of 'Christabel.'  This at least I
+know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,--he owns the true wizard of
+romance as master.  I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me
+quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and
+his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the
+author as follows: 'The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive
+analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through
+volumes of essays and not so paint him.  There is Coleridge!  But whence
+the source of your story--if anything of such aptness could have been
+other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu--I cannot tell.  It is new
+to me.'
+
+After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the
+reader with the 'pure amber' itself:--
+
+    I see thee pine like her in golden story
+       Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
+       The gates thrown open--saw the sunbeams play,
+    With only a web 'tween her and summer's glory;
+    Who, when that web--so frail, so transitory,
+       It broke before her breath--had fallen away,
+       Saw other webs and others rise for aye
+    Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.
+
+    Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine--
+       That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh--
+    Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
+       Could thy rare spirit's wings have pierced the mesh
+       Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
+    But lets the poet see how heav'n can shine.
+
+Here again the verbal parsimony is notable.  I defy any one to find
+anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony.
+There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet.  Every word is
+cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning.
+The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising
+imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a
+sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall.  Metrical students
+will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a
+part in the suspensive music.
+
+I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as
+one of the wisest, done by the editor of the 'Athenaeum,' was that of
+printing Rhona's letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at
+the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the
+poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona.  It certainly showed immense
+confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great
+success.  The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George
+Meredith: "I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that.  When I
+read her love-letter in the 'Athenaeum,' I had the regret that the
+dialect might cause its banishment from literature.  Reading the whole
+poem through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate.  We are the
+richer for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed."
+And, discussing 'The Coming of Love,' Meredith wrote: 'I will not speak
+of the tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the
+dexterity which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of
+the work.'  Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry is
+so consummate that it is concealed from the reader.  There is no sense of
+difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice.  Yet the metrical structure
+of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest.
+'Rhona's Love Letter' is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern,
+each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of
+a sonnet.  But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naive,
+unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether,
+and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour
+are produced by the most elaborate art.
+
+I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry.  There
+can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not
+merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the
+deeper quality of imaginative energy.  By 'the most original poet' I do
+not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what
+I mean.  Poe's 'Raven' is more 'original' than Shelley's 'Epipsychidion,'
+but it is not so great.  In my article on Blake in Chambers's
+'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' I pointed out that there are greater
+poets than Blake (or Donne) but none more original.  There are many poets
+who possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual
+matching of common ideas with common metaphors.  But few poets have the
+rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also
+the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty.  Now Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift.  He uses the symbol to suggest ideas
+which cannot be suggested otherwise.  His theory of the universe is
+optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads.  He sees
+the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as
+benignant.  Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the
+two great sonnets, 'Natura Maligna' and 'Natura Benigna,' which I have
+already quoted.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell.  Upon
+this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the
+introduction to the later editions of the poem:--
+
+    "But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio
+    readers seem to be most sceptical.  The humourous endowment of most
+    races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the
+    men than among the women.  But among the Romanies the women seem to
+    have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.
+
+    A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with
+    my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit
+    and the humourous charm that you attribute to them?  My answer to
+    this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome's delightful book,
+    'Gypsy Folk-Tales.'  Speaking of the Romany chi's incomparable
+    piquancy, he says:--
+
+    'I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale
+    impromptu.  She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with "a lot
+    o' real tip-top gentry"; and "Reia," she said to me afterwards, "I'll
+    tell you the comicalest thing as ever was.  We'd pulled up to put the
+    brake on, and there was a puro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and
+    looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard.  I could see he'd
+    his eye upon me.  And home he'd go, that old hedgehog, to his wife,
+    and 'Missus,' he'd say, 'what d'ye think?  I seen a little gypsy gal
+    just now in a coach and four horses'; and 'Dabla,' she'd say,
+    'sawkumni 'as varde kenaw'" ['Bless us! every one now keeps a
+    carriage'].'
+
+    Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell,
+    I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome,
+    that it might well have been she.  Although there is as great a
+    difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English
+    girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between
+    the humour of all gypsy girls.  No three girls could possibly be more
+    unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr.
+    Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the
+    fanciful humour of them all.  The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak
+    for itself in these pages--where, however, the passionate and tragic
+    side of her character and her story dominates everything."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+"CHRISTMAS AT THE 'MERMAID'"
+
+
+SECOND in importance to 'The Coming of Love' among Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+poems is the poem I have already mentioned--the poem which Mr. Swinburne
+has described as 'a great lyrical epic'--"Christmas at the 'Mermaid.'"
+The originality of this wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of
+'The Coming of Love.'  No other writer would have dreamed of depicting
+the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a golden skeleton in the
+form of one of the burnt Incas, called up by 'the righteous sea,' and
+squatting grimly at the prow of Medina's flag-ship.  Here we get 'The
+Renascence of Wonder' indeed.  Some Aylwinians put it at the head of all
+his writings.  The exploit of David Gwynn is accepted by Motley and
+others as historic, but it needed the co-operation of the Golden Skeleton
+to lift his narrative into the highest heaven of poetry.  Extremely
+unlike 'The Coming of Love' as it is in construction, it is built on the
+same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with 'The Coming of
+Love' the remarks I have made upon a desideratum in poetic art--that is
+to say, it is cast in a form which gives as much scope to the dramatic
+instinct at work as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from
+the restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped.  The poem
+was written, or mainly written, during one of those visits which, as I
+have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to pay to Stratford-on-Avon.
+The scene is laid, however, in London, at that famous 'Mermaid' tavern
+which haunts the dreams of all English poets:--
+
+    "With the exception of Shakespeare, who has quitted London for good,
+    in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has
+    lately rebuilt, all the members of the 'Mermaid' Club are assembled
+    at the 'Mermaid' Tavern.  At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson
+    dealing out wassail from a large bowl.  At the other end sits
+    Raleigh, and at Raleigh's right hand, the guest he had brought with
+    him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man,
+    whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada
+    before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or
+    false, given him in the low countries a great reputation, the echo of
+    which had reached England.  Raleigh's desire was to excite the public
+    enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and
+    generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already
+    become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice
+    spirits as those associated with the 'Mermaid' club."
+
+It opens with a chorus:--
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+    Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+             Where?
+
+Then Ben Jonson rises, fills the cup with wassail and drinks to
+Shakespeare, and thus comments upon his absence:--
+
+    That he, the star of revel, bright-eyed Will,
+       With life at golden summit, fled the town
+       And took from Thames that light to dwindle down
+    O'er Stratford farms, doth make me marvel still.
+
+Then he calls upon Shakespeare's most intimate friend--the mysterious Mr.
+W. H. of the sonnets--to give them reminiscences of Shakespeare with a
+special reference to the memorable evening when he arrived at Stratford
+on quitting London for good and all.
+
+To the sixth edition of the poem Mr. Watts-Dunton prefixed the following
+remarks, and I give them here because they throw light upon his view of
+Shakespeare's friend:--
+
+    "Since the appearance of this volume, there has been a great deal of
+    acute and learned discussion as to the identity of that mysterious
+    'friend' of Shakespeare, to whom so many of the sonnets are
+    addressed.  But everything that has been said upon the subject seems
+    to fortify me in the opinion that 'no critic has been able to
+    identify' that friend.  Southampton seems at first to fit into the
+    sacred place; so does Pembroke at first.  But, after a while, true
+    and unbiassed criticism rejects them both.  I therefore feel more
+    than ever justified in 'imagining the friend for myself.'  And this,
+    at least, I know, that to have been the friend of Shakespeare, a man
+    must needs have been a lover of nature;--he must have been a lover of
+    England, too.  And upon these two points, and upon another--the
+    movement of a soul dominated by friendship as a passion--I have tried
+    to show Shakespeare's probable influence upon his 'friend of
+    friends.'  It would have been a mistake, however, to cast the sonnets
+    in the same metrical mould as Shakespeare's."
+
+Shakspeare's friend thus records what Shakespeare had told him about his
+return to Stratford:--
+
+    As down the bank he strolled through evening dew,
+    Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves
+    Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,
+    And all his happy childhood came to view;
+    He saw a child watching the birds that flew
+    Above a willow, through whose musky leaves
+    A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves
+    That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.
+    These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling
+    From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,
+    With power beyond all power of things beholden
+    Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk
+    Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,
+    And closed him in from all but willow musk.
+
+    And then a child beneath a silver sallow--
+    A child who loved the swans, the moorhen's 'cheep'--
+    Angled for bream where river holes were deep--
+    For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,
+    Or ate the 'fairy cheeses' of the mallow,
+    And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep
+    Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep
+    In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;
+    And then a child to whom the water-fairies
+    Sent fish to 'bite' from Avon's holes and shelves,
+    A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,
+    The flower-sprites sent the bees and 'sunshine elves';
+    Then, in the shifting vision's sweet vagaries,
+    He saw two lovers walking by themselves--
+
+    Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain
+    Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy
+    Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,
+    Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain--
+    Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain
+    By sudden silence, 'lest his plaint should cloy'--
+    Knew when the skylark's changing note of joy
+    Saith, 'Now will I return to earth again'--
+    Knew every warning of the blackbird's shriek,
+    And every promise of his joyful song--
+    Knew what the magpie's chuckle fain would speak;
+    And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,
+    Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,
+    Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.
+    He heard her say, 'The birds attest our troth!'
+    Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may
+    Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray
+    Round summer's royal field of golden cloth
+    Shines o'er the buttercups like snowy froth,
+    And that sweet skylark on his azure way,
+    And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:
+    'We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.'
+    And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory,
+    River and church, grows rosier with our story!
+    This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,
+    Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!
+    They breathe--o'er mead and stream they breathe--the blessing.
+    'We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!'
+
+When Mr. 'W. H.' sits down, the friend and brother of another great poet,
+Christopher Marlowe, who had been sitting moody and silent, oppressed by
+thoughts of the dead man, many of whose unfriends were at the gathering,
+recites these lines 'On Seeing Kit Marlowe Slain at Deptford':--
+
+    'Tis Marlowe falls!  That last lunge rent asunder
+    Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe's life,
+    Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heaven at strife,
+    Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!
+    Heav'n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,
+    If Fate's hand guided yonder villain's knife
+    Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife
+    With dower of poets--song and love and wonder.
+    Or was it Chance?  Shakspeare, who art supreme
+    O'er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe's sight
+    To pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height
+    Where man and men and gods and all that seem
+    Are Nature's mutterings in her changeful dream--
+    Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!
+
+After they have all drunk in silence to the memory of Marlowe, Marlowe's
+friend speaks:--
+
+    Where'er thou art, 'dead Shepherd,' look on me;
+       The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,
+       He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;
+    Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!
+
+Then Raleigh rises, and the great business of the evening begins with the
+following splendid chorus:--
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+                           (Turning to David Gwynn)
+
+       Wherever billows foam
+       The Briton fights at home:
+    His hearth is built of water--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Water blue and green;
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       There's never a wave of ocean
+       The wind can set in motion
+    That shall not own our England--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Own our England queen. {427}
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       The guest I bring to-night
+       Had many a goodly fight
+    On seas the Don hath found--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Hath found for English sails;
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       And once he dealt a blow
+       Against the Don to show
+    What mighty hearts can move--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Can move in leafy Wales.
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,
+       Who hast a heart akin
+    To England's own brave hearts--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Brave hearts where'er they beat;
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,
+       And tell the Mermaid how
+    A galley-slave struck hard--
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Struck hard the Spanish fleet.
+
+       Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+          Where he goes with fondest face,
+             Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+Upon being thus called forth the old sea-dog rises, and tells a wonderful
+story indeed, the 'story of how he and the Golden Skeleton crippled the
+Great Armada sailing out':--
+
+    'A galley lie' they called my tale; but he
+       Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales:
+    The man, I say, who helped to keep you free
+       Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.
+    Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,
+       Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,
+    Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire
+    Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire--
+       Stands asking here Truth's one reward, belief!
+
+    And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,
+       This tale of mine--shall tell, in future days,
+    How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled
+       For England when she moved in perilous ways;
+    But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung
+       From loins of men whose ghosts have still the sea--
+    Doth England--she who loves the loudest tongue--
+    Remember mariners whose deeds are sung
+       By waves where flowed their blood to keep her free?
+
+    I see--I see ev'n now--those ships of Spain
+       Gathered in Tagus' mouth to make the spring;
+    I feel the cursed oar, I toil again,
+       And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys sing;
+    And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,
+       Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing out--
+    Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,
+    Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,
+       Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.
+
+    And one we call the 'Princess,' one the 'Royal,'
+        'Diana' one; but 'tis the fell 'Basana'
+    Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,
+       Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;
+    For by their help Hope whispers me that I--
+       Whom ten hours' daily travail at a stretch
+    Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die--
+    May strike once more where flags of England fly,
+       Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.
+
+    True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:
+       Again I feel the lash that tears my back;
+    Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,
+       Answered by boatswain's laugh and scourge's crack;
+    Again I feel the pang when trying to choke
+       Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread
+    Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,
+    They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;
+       Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.
+
+    By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,
+       And mighty waves assault our trembling galley
+    With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,
+       And soldiers cry, 'What saint shall bid her rally?'
+    Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore
+       The Dons to free them from the metal tether
+    By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;
+    Some shout, in answer to the billows' roar,
+        'The Dons and we will drink brine-wine together.'
+
+    'Bring up the slave,' I hear the captain cry,
+        'Who sank the golden galleon "El Dorado,"
+    The dog can steer.'
+                    'Here sits the dog,' quoth I,
+        'Who sank the ship of Commodore Medrado!'
+    With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,
+       Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:
+    'Hearken, thou pirate--bold Medrado's bane!--
+    Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain,
+       If thou canst take the galley through this sea.'
+
+    'Ay! ay!' quoth I.  The fools unlock me straight!
+       And then 'tis I give orders to the Don,
+    Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,
+       Whose winning game I know hath just begun.
+    I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak
+       Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night
+    Oh then I see beneath the galley's beak
+    A glow like Spanish _auto's_ ruddy reek--
+       Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!
+
+    A skeleton, but yet with living eyes--
+       A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold--
+    Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,
+       And round his brow, of high imperial mould,
+    A burning circle seems to shake and shine,
+       Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,
+    Throwing a radiance o'er the foam-lit brine:
+       ''Tis God's Revenge,' methinks.  'Heaven sends for sign
+    That bony shape--that Inca's diadem.'
+
+    At first the sign is only seen of me,
+       But well I know that God's Revenge hath come
+    To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,
+       And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous foam.
+    Quoth I, 'How fierce soever be the levin
+       Spain's hand can hurl--made mightier still for wrong
+    By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven--
+    Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven--
+       Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is strong.'
+
+    'The dog can steer,' I laugh; 'yea, Drake's men know
+       How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.'
+    Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,
+       Some 'neath the hatches, some beside the slaves,
+    And bid them stack their muskets all in piles
+       Beside the foremast, covered by a sail,
+    The captives guess my plan--I see their smiles
+    As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,
+       Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and pale.
+
+    I say, they guess my plan--to send beneath
+       The soldiers to the benches where the slaves
+    Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth--
+       Hate's nails and teeth more keen than Spanish glaives,
+    Then wait until the tempest's waxing might
+       Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,
+    Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite
+    The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,
+       Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.
+
+    Past Ferrol Bay each galley 'gins to stoop,
+       Shuddering before the Biscay demon's breath.
+    Down goes a prow--down goes a gaudy poop:
+        'The Don's "Diana" bears the Don to death,'
+    Quoth I, 'and see the "Princess" plunge and wallow
+       Down purple trough, o'er snowy crest of foam:
+    See! see! the "Royal," how she tries to follow
+    By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,
+       Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to roam.'
+
+    Now, three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;
+       The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,
+    Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,
+       Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,
+    Each rower murmuring o'er my whispered plan,
+       Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,
+    'Rise, every man, to tear to death his man--
+    Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,
+       When God's Revenge sings loud to ocean's lyre.'
+
+    Taller the spectre grows 'mid ocean's din;
+       The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:
+    I give the sign: the slaves cry, 'Ho for Gwynn!'
+        'Teach them,' quoth I, 'the way we grip in Wales.'
+    And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,
+       I win the key--let loose a storm of slaves:
+    'When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,'
+    They cry; 'sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,
+       Or drink to England's Queen in foaming waves.'
+
+    We leap adown the hatches; in the dark
+       We stab the Dons at random, till I see
+    A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,
+       Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be
+    A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:
+       Then, lo: a bony shape with lifted hands--
+    A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,
+    O'ertopping groans, o'ertopping Ocean's quire--
+       A skeleton with Inca's diadem stands!
+
+    It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,
+       Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,
+    When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,
+       Sniffing man's flesh at roast for Christ His sake.
+    The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;
+       They cross their foreheads, but they dare not speak.
+    Anon the spectre, when the strife is o'er,
+    Melts from the dark, then glimmers as before,
+       Burning upon the conquered galley's beak.
+
+    And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows
+       The 'Royal' bearing down upon our craft--
+    Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows
+       Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.
+    I take the helm; I put the galley near:
+       We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.
+    Amid the 'Royal's' din I laugh to hear
+    The curse of many a British mutineer,
+       The crack, crack, crack of boatswain's biting scourge.
+
+    'Ye scourge in vain,' quoth I, 'scourging for life
+       Slaves who shall row no more to save the Don';
+    For from the 'Royal's' poop, above the strife,
+       Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!
+    'What! is it thou, Pirate of "El Dorado"?
+       He shouts in English tongue.  And there, behold!
+    Stands he, the devil's commodore, Medrado.
+    'Ay! ay!' quoth I, 'Spain owes me one strappado
+       For scuttling Philip's ship of stolen gold.'
+
+    'I come for that strappado now,' quoth I.
+        'What means yon thing of burning bones?' he saith.
+    ''Tis God's Revenge cries, "Bloody Spain shall die!"
+       The king of El Dorado's name is Death.
+    Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,'
+       I cry; 'strong hands are stretched to save you now;
+    Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.'
+    But when the 'Royal,' captured, rides adrift,
+       I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.
+
+    When all are slain, the tempest's wings have fled,
+       But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:
+    Far down the offing glows a spot of red,
+       My soul knows well it hath that Inca's form.
+    'It lights,' quoth I, 'the red cross banner of Spain
+       There on the flagship where Medina sleeps--
+    Hell's banner, wet with sweat of Indian's pain,
+    And tears of women yoked to treasure train,
+       Scarlet of blood for which the New World weeps.'
+
+    There on the dark the flagship of the Don
+       To me seems luminous of the spectre's glow;
+    But soon an arc of gold, and then the sun,
+       Rise o'er the reddening billows, proud and slow;
+    Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,
+       That take all shifting colours as they shake,
+    I see the great Armada coil and twist
+    Miles, miles along the ocean's amethyst,
+       Like hell's old snake of hate--the winged snake.
+
+    And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,
+       That snake accursed, with wings which swell and puff
+    Before the slackening horses of the wind,
+       Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.
+    'Behold,' quoth I, 'their floating citadels,
+       The same the priests have vouched for musket-proof,
+    Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,
+    That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells--
+       Yea, sailed from Tagus' mouth, for Christ's behoof.
+
+    For Christ's behoof they sailed: see how they go
+       With that red skeleton to show the way
+    There sitting on Medina's stem aglow--
+       A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;
+    Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse--
+       Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,
+    Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,
+    Their trucks, their flags--behold them, how they pass--
+       With God's Revenge for figurehead--to Doom!'
+
+Then Ben Jonson, the symposiarch, rises and calls upon Raleigh to tell
+the story of the defeat of the Great Armada.  I can give only a stanza or
+two and the chorus:--
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       The choirboys sing the matin song,
+    When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard's right.
+       He drives the wing--a huddled throng--
+    Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.
+       While galleon hurtles galeasse,
+    And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,
+       As scythes cut down the summer grass,
+       Drake closes on the writhing mass,
+    Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,
+                Skimming the waves.
+
+       Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,
+    Running from ship to ship like living things.
+       With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,
+    Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.
+       Through smoke we see their chiefs encased
+    In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;
+       And once I see within a waist
+       Wild English captives ashen-faced,
+    Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced
+                In purple weals.
+
+                         [DAVID GWYNN here leaps up, pale and panting, and
+                           bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from RALEIGH
+                                                          sits down again.
+
+       The Don fights well, but fights not now
+    The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,
+       To pluck the gold from off the brow,
+    Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.
+       He hunts not now the Indian maid
+    With bloodhound's bay--Peru's confiding daughter,
+       Who saw in flowery bower or glade
+       The stranger's god-like cavalcade,
+    And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro's trade
+                Of rape and slaughter.
+
+       His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,
+    Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,
+       Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,
+    Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:
+       Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,
+    Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:
+       Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage
+       Like any wolf that tears his cage!
+    'Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge
+                Till set of sun!
+
+       Their troops, superfluous as their gold,
+    Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,
+       Are packed away in every hold--
+    Targets of flesh for every English gun--
+       Till, like Pizarro's halls of blood,
+    Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,
+       Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,
+       Reddening the waves for many a rood,
+    As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud
+                Before the wind.
+
+The chief leit-motiv of the poem is the metrical idea that whenever a
+stanza ends with the word 'sea,' Ben Jonson and the rest of the jolly
+companions break into this superb chorus:--
+
+                   The sea!
+       Thus did England fight;
+       And shall not England smite
+    With Drake's strong stroke in battles yet to be?
+       And while the winds have power
+       Shall England lose the dower
+       She won in that great hour--
+                   The sea?
+
+Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven
+out to the open sea.  He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of
+excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but
+in quite a different spirit.  In Gwynn's fevered imagination the skeleton
+which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to
+its destruction:--
+
+                                    GWYNN
+
+       With towering sterns, with golden stems
+    That totter in the smoke before their foe,
+       I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
+    With death above the billows, death below!
+       Who leads them down the tempest's path,
+    From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
+       Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
+       All helpless in the wild wind's wrath,
+    Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
+                The Skeleton!
+
+       At length with toil the cape is passed,
+    And faster and faster still the billows come
+       To coil and boil till every mast
+    Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
+       I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
+    That Inca's bony shape burn on the waves,
+       Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
+       While Mother Carey, Orkney's witch,
+    Waves to the Spectre's song her lantern-switch
+                O'er ocean-graves.
+
+       The glimmering crown of Scotland's head
+    They pass.  No foe dares follow but the storm.
+       The Spectre, like a sunset red,
+    Illumines mighty Wrath's defiant form,
+       And makes the dreadful granite peak
+    Burn o'er the ships with brows of prophecy;
+       Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
+       Above the tempest's foam and reek,
+    More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
+                 'Tyrants, ye die!'
+
+       The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
+    Writes 'God's Revenge' on waves that climb and dash,
+       Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
+    Where ships are hurled.  It sings amid the crash;
+       Yea, sings amid the tempest's roar,
+    Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
+       And yells of captives chained to oar,
+       And cries of those who strike for shore,
+    'Spain's murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
+                The righteous sea!'
+
+The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted
+in anthologies:--
+
+                                WASSAIL CHORUS
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+    Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+                                   RALEIGH
+
+       'Tis by Devon's glorious halls,
+          Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
+       Bright with golden roofs and walls--
+          El Dorado's rare domain--
+       Seem those halls when sunlight launches
+       Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
+    Where the winter's feathery mantle blanches
+                Field and farm and lane.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+       Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+          Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+                                   DRAYTON
+
+       'Tis where Avon's wood-sprites weave
+          Through the boughs a lace of rime,
+       While the bells of Christmas Eve
+          Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
+       O'er the river-flags embossed
+       Rich with flowery runes of frost--
+    O'er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed--
+                Strains of olden time.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+       Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+          Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
+                Where?
+
+                             SHAKSPEARE'S FRIEND
+
+       'Tis, methinks, on any ground
+          Where our Shakspeare's feet are set.
+       There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
+          With his blithest coronet:
+       Friendship's face he loveth well:
+          'Tis a countenance whose spell
+       Sheds a balm o'er every mead and dell
+                Where we used to fret.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
+                Where?
+
+                                   HEYWOOD
+
+       More than all the pictures, Ben,
+          Winter weaves by wood or stream,
+       Christmas loves our London, when
+          Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam--
+       Clouds like these, that, curling, take
+       Forms of faces gone, and wake
+    Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
+                London like a dream.
+
+                                    CHORUS
+
+    Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
+       Where he goes with fondest face,
+       Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
+                Where?
+
+                                  BEN JONSON
+
+       Love's old songs shall never die,
+          Yet the new shall suffer proof;
+       Love's old drink of Yule brew I,
+          Wassail for new love's behoof:
+       Drink the drink I brew, and sing
+       Till the berried branches swing,
+    Till our song make all the Mermaid ring--
+                Yea, from rush to roof.
+
+                                    FINALE
+
+       Christmas loves this merry, merry place:--
+          Christmas saith with fondest face
+          Brightest eye, brightest hair:
+    Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
+                Rare!'
+
+This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of 'The Coming of Love,'
+fine as it is, was overshadowed by the wild and romantic poem which lends
+its name to the volume.  But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his
+beautiful series, 'Flowers of Parnassus,' where it was charmingly
+illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue considerably.
+There is no doubt that for originality, for power, and for music,
+"Christmas at the 'Mermaid'" is enough to form the base of any poet's
+reputation.  It has been enthusiastically praised by some of the foremost
+writers of our time.  I have permission to print only one of the letters
+in its praise which the author received, but that is an important one, as
+it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:--
+
+    "I have been beginning Christmas, in a way, by reading over the fire
+    your delightful little 'Christmas at the "Mermaid"' which it was most
+    kind of you to send.  I was carried back right into Armada times by
+    David Gwynn's vivid story: it seems remarkable that you should have
+    had the conjuring power to raise up those old years so brightly in
+    your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers in such
+    high relief of three dimensions, as one may say.
+
+    The absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest
+    touches of the poem: it throws one into a 'humourous melancholy'--and
+    we feel him, in some curious way, more than if he had been there."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVIII
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+'ASSUREDLY,' says Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, 'there is no
+profession so courageous as that of the pen.'  Well, in coming to the end
+of my task--a task which has been a labour of love--I wish I could feel
+confident that I have not been too courageous--that I have satisfactorily
+done what I set out to do.  But I have passed my four-hundred and
+fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a child's bucket into
+a sea of ideas that has no limit.  Out of scores upon scores of articles
+buried in many periodicals I have been able to give three or four from
+the 'Athenaeum,' none from the 'Examiner,' and none out of the
+'Nineteenth Century,' 'The Fortnightly Review,' 'Harper's Magazine,' etc.
+Still, I have been able to show that a large proportion of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's scattered writings preaches the same peculiar doctrine in
+a ratiocinative form which in 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' is
+artistically enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest importance
+at the present time, when science seems to be revealing a system of the
+universe so deeply opposed to the system which in the middle of the last
+century seemed to be revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's is making a very deep impression upon the generation to
+which I belong.  If it should be said that in speaking for the younger
+generation I am speaking for a pigmy race (and I sometimes fear that we
+are pigmies when I remember the stature of our fathers), I am content to
+appeal to one of the older generation, who has spoken words in praise of
+Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet, which would demand even my courage to echo.
+I mean Dr. Gordon Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, 'The New Day,'
+was published in 1890.  It was these remarkable sonnets which moved Frank
+Groome to dub Mr. Watts-Dunton 'homo ne quidem unius libri,' a literary
+celebrity who had not published a single book.  I have already referred
+to 'The New Day,' but I have not given an adequate account of this
+sonnet-sequence.  In their nobility of spirit, their exalted passion of
+friendship, their single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not
+think they have ever been surpassed.  It is a fine proof of Mr.
+Watts-Dunton's genius for friendship that he should be able unconsciously
+to enlink himself to the souls of his seniors, his coevals and his
+juniors, and that there should be between him and the men of three
+generations, equal links of equal affection.  But I must not lay stress
+on the whimsies of chronology and the humours of the calendar, for all
+Mr. Watts-Dunton's friends are young, and the youngest of them, Mr.
+George Meredith, is the oldest.  The youthfulness of 'The New Day' makes
+it hard to believe that it was written by a septuagenarian.  The
+dedication is full of the fine candour of a romantic boy:--
+
+    "To 'W. T. W.,' the friend who has gone with me through the study of
+    Nature, accompanied me to her loveliest places at home and in other
+    lands, and shared with me the reward she reserves for her ministers
+    and interpreters, I dedicate this book."
+
+The following sonnet on 'Friendship' expresses a very rare mood and a
+very high ideal:--
+
+    Friendship is love's full beauty unalloyed
+       With passion that may waste in selfishness,
+    Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:
+       Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.
+    It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound
+       With cheery look that makes a winter bright;
+    It saves the hope from falling to the ground,
+       And turns the restless pillow towards the light.
+    To be another's in his dearest want,
+       At struggle with a thousand racking throes,
+    When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant
+       Is that which friendship's soothing hand bestows:
+    How joyful to be joined in such a love,--
+    We two,--may it portend the days above!
+
+The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine order.  Many
+English and American critics have highly praised them, but not too
+highly.  This venerable 'parable poet' did not belong to my generation.
+Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton's generation.  His day was the day
+before yesterday, and yet he wrote these sonnets when he was past
+seventy, not to glorify himself, but to glorify his friend.  They are one
+long impassioned appeal to that friend to come forward and take his place
+among his peers.  The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of
+the most bewildering enigmas of literature.  I have already quoted what
+Gordon Hake says about the man who when the 'New Day' was written had not
+published a single book.
+
+With regard to the unity binding together all Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+writings, I can, at least, as I have shown in the Introduction, speak
+with the authority of a careful student of them.  With the exception of
+the late Professor Strong, who when 'The Coming of Love' appeared, spoke
+out so boldly upon this subject in 'Literature,' I doubt if anyone has
+studied those writings more carefully than I have; and yet the difficulty
+of discovering the one or two quotable essays which more than the others
+expound and amplify their central doctrine has been so great that I am
+dubious as to whether, in the press of my other work, I have achieved my
+aim as satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by
+another--especially by Professor Strong, had he not died before he could
+write his promised essay upon the inner thought of 'Aylwinism' in the
+'Cyclopaedia of English Literature.'  But, even if I have failed
+adequately to expound the gospel of 'Aylwinism,' it is undeniable that,
+since the publication of 'Aylwin' (whether as a result of that
+publication or not), there has been an amazing growth of what may be
+called the transcendental cosmogony of 'Aylwinism.'
+
+Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of 'Aylwin'--the
+'Arvon' illustrated edition--says:--
+
+    "When 'Aylwin' was in type, the author, getting alarmed at its great
+    length, somewhat mercilessly slashed into it to shorten it, and the
+    more didactic parts of the book went first.  Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has
+    restored one or two of these excised passages, notably one in which
+    he summarizes his well-known views of the 'great Renascence of
+    Wonder, which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century
+    and the beginning of the nineteenth.'  In one of these passages he
+    has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour's speculations at the recent
+    meeting of the British Association."
+
+Something like the same remark was made in the 'Athenaeum' of September
+3, 1904:--
+
+    "The writer has restored certain didactic passages of the story which
+    were eliminated before the publication of the book, owing to its
+    great length.  Though the teaching of the book is complete without
+    the restorations, it seems a pity that they were ever struck out,
+    because they appear to have anticipated the striking remarks of Mr.
+    Balfour at the British Association the other day, to say nothing of
+    the utterances of certain scientific writers who have been discussing
+    the transcendental side of Nature."
+
+The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and 'The Athenaeum' refer are
+excerpts from 'The Veiled Queen,' by Aylwin's father.  The first of these
+comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called 'The Revolving Cage of
+Circumstance' and runs thus:--
+
+    "'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth
+    and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in
+    Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of
+    the nineteenth.
+
+    The warring of the two impulses governing man--the impulse of wonder
+    and the impulse of acceptance--will occupy all the energies of the
+    next century.
+
+    The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy
+    has to come back--has to triumph--before the morning of the final
+    emancipation of man can dawn.
+
+    But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those
+    in which it was exercised in the past.  The materialism, which at
+    this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of
+    evolution, will go.  Against their own intentions certain scientists
+    are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not
+    the creature of organism--is a something outside the material world,
+    a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal
+    expression.
+
+    The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the
+    testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold,
+    when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell him that
+    "the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony
+    of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests
+    of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can
+    neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the
+    excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the
+    materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical,
+    lightless, colourless, soundless--a phantasmagoric show--a deceptive
+    series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not,
+    according to the organism upon which they fall.'
+
+    These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about
+    'the Omnipotence of Love,' which showed, beyond doubt, that if my
+    father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very
+    original poet."
+
+The second restored excerpt from 'The Veiled Queen' comes in at the end
+of the chapter called 'The Magic of Snowdon,' and runs thus:--
+
+    "I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy
+    expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer,
+    Ferridoddin:--
+
+    With love I burn: the centre is within me;
+    While in a circle everywhere around me
+    Its Wonder lies--
+
+    that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the
+    Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of
+    the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of
+    my life, 'The Veiled Queen.'
+
+    The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
+
+    'The omnipotence of love--its power of knitting together the entire
+    universe--is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind.  Just
+    after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The
+    Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins
+    about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic.  Among these
+    Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
+    daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
+
+    Ilyas the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,
+       Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,
+       Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
+    And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
+    A little maiden dreaming there alone.
+       She babbled of her father sitting pale
+       'Neath wings of Death--'mid sights of sorrow and bale,
+    And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
+
+    "Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith,
+       While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
+       To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
+    To Heaven for help--"Plead on; such pure love-breath,
+    Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death
+       That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."
+
+    The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
+       Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;
+       'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
+    The father sits, the last of all the band.
+    He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
+        "Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all pashas;
+       Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
+    A childless father from an empty land."
+
+    "Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings
+       A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:"
+       A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
+    Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
+       And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
+    Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.
+
+    'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial
+    film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of
+    love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no
+    real difference.  Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly
+    be confined to Asia.  The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic
+    element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards
+    Sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such
+    as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
+    Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune
+    of universal love and beauty.'"
+
+With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has said that
+the method of depicting the power of love in them is sublime.  'The Slave
+girl's Progress to Paradise,' however, is equally powerful and equally
+original.  The feeling in the 'Bedouin Child' and in 'The Slave Girl's
+Progress to Paradise' is exactly like that which inspires 'The Coming of
+Love.'  When Percy sees Rhona's message in the sunrise he exclaims:--
+
+    But now--not all the starry Virtues seven
+       Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.
+       And morning says, 'Love hath such godlike might
+    That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
+    Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
+    Were quelled by doom, Love's high-creative leaven
+       Could light new worlds.'  If, then, this Lord of Fate,
+       When death calls in the stars, can re-create,
+    Is it a madman's dream that Love can show
+    Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
+       And build again my heaven?
+
+The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately affirmed in
+the words of 'The Spirit of the Sunrise,' addressed to the bereaved
+poet:--
+
+    Though Love be mocked by Death's obscene derision,
+       Love still is Nature's truth and Death her lie;
+       Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
+    To taste the fell destroyer's crowning spite
+    That blasts the soul with life's most cruel sight,
+    Corruption's hand at work in Life's transition:
+       This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
+       Her body's image pictured in thy brain;
+    The flowers above her weave the only shroud
+    Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
+          Rhona!  Behold the vision!
+
+Some may call this too mystical--some may dislike it on other
+accounts--but few will dream of questioning its absolute originality.
+
+Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour's to which the passages
+quoted from 'The Veiled Queen' have been compared.  In his presidential
+address to the British Association, entitled, 'Reflections suggested by
+the New Theory of Matter,' he said:--
+
+    "We claim to found all our scientific opinions on experience: and the
+    experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is
+    our sense of perception of that universe.  That is experience; and in
+    this region of belief there is no other.  Yet the conclusions which
+    thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all
+    appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is
+    based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it
+    to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from
+    anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and
+    nature compels us to employ.
+
+    Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply the
+    premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the physical world.
+    It is they which tell us there is a physical world; it is on their
+    authority that we learn its character.  But in order of causation
+    they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our orders of
+    sense.  What we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen,
+    but on our eyes.  What we hear depends, not merely on what there is
+    to hear, but on our ears."
+
+I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any idea that
+is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is afterwards accepted as
+a simple truth.  One of the reviewers of 'Aylwin' was much amused by the
+description of the hero's emotions when he stood in the lower room of
+Mrs. Gudgeon's cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by Winifred's
+corpse, stretched upon a squalid mattress:--
+
+    "At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and
+    died I passed into a new world of horror.  Dead matter had become
+    conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before
+    me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of
+    brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the
+    walls,--it was these which seemed to have life--a terrible life--and
+    to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the
+    triumph of evil over good.  I knew that the woman was still speaking,
+    but for a time I heard no sound--my senses could receive no
+    impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet
+    living matter around me.  Not an object there that did not seem
+    charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates."
+
+'Fancy,' said the reviewer, 'any man out of Bedlam feeling as if dead
+matter were alive!'
+
+Well, apart from the psychological subtlety of this passage, our critic
+must have been startled by the declaration lately made by a sane man of
+science, that there is no such thing as dead matter--and that every
+particle of what is called dead matter is alive and shedding an aura
+around it!
+
+Had the mass of Mr. Watts-Dunton's scattered writings been collected into
+volumes, or had a representative selection from them been made, their
+unity as to central idea with his imaginative work, and also the
+importance of that central idea, would have been brought prominently
+forward, and then there would have been no danger of his contribution to
+the latest movement--the anti-materialistic movement--of English thought
+and English feeling being left unrecognized.  Lost such teachings as his
+never could have been, for, as Minto said years ago, their colour tinges
+a great deal of the literature of our time.  The influence of the
+'Athenaeum,' not only in England, but also in America and on the
+Continent, was always very great--and very great of course must have been
+the influence of the writer who for a quarter of a century spoke in it
+with such emphasis.  Therefore, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had himself collected
+or selected his essays, or if he had allowed any of his friends to
+collect or select them, this book of mine would not have been written,
+for more competent hands would have undertaken the task.  But a study of
+work which, originally issued in fragments, now lies buried 'full fathom
+five' in the columns of various journals, could, I felt, be undertaken
+only by a cadet of letters like myself.  There are many of us younger men
+who express views about Mr. Watts-Dunton's work which startle at times
+those who are unfamiliar with it.  And I, coming forward for the moment
+as their spokesman, have long had the desire to justify the faith that is
+in us, and in the wide and still widening audience his imaginative work
+has won.  But I doubt if I should have undertaken it had I realized the
+magnitude of the task.  For it must be remembered that the articles,
+called 'reviews,' are for the most part as unlike reviews as they can
+well be.  No matter what may have been the book placed at the head of the
+article, it was used merely as an opportunity for the writer to pour
+forth generalizations upon literature and life, or upon the latest
+scientific speculations, or upon the latest reverie of philosophy, in a
+stream, often a torrent, coruscating with brilliancies, and alive with
+interwoven colours like that of the river in the mountains of Kaf
+described in his birthday sonnet to Tennyson.  Take, for instance, that
+great essay on the Psalms which I have used as the key-note of this
+study.  The book at the head of the review was not, as might have been
+supposed, a discourse learned, or philosophical, or emotional, upon the
+Psalms--but a little unpretentious metrical version of the Psalms by Lord
+Lorne.  Only a clear-sighted and daring editor would have printed such an
+article as a review.  But I doubt if there ever was a more prescient
+journalist than he who sat in the editorial chair at that time.  A man of
+scholarly accomplishments and literary taste, he knew that an article
+such as this would be a huge success; would resound through the world of
+letters.  The article, I believe, was more talked about in literary
+circles than any book that had come out during that month.
+
+Again, take that definition of humour which I seized upon (page 384) to
+illustrate my exposition of that wonderful character in 'Aylwin'--Mrs.
+Gudgeon, a definition that seems, as one writer has said, to make all
+other talk about humour cheap and jejune.  It is in a review of an
+extremely futile history of humour.  Now let the reader consider the
+difficult task before a writer in my position--the task of searching for
+a few among the innumerable half-remembered points of interest that turn
+up in the most unexpected places.  Of course, if the space allotted to me
+by my publishers had been unlimited, and if my time had been unlimited, I
+should have been able to give so large a number of excerpts from the
+articles as to make my selection really representative of what has been
+called the "modern Sufism of 'Aylwin.'"  But in this regard my publishers
+have already been as liberal and as patient as possible.  After all, the
+best, as well as the easiest way, to show that 'Aylwin,' and 'The Coming
+of Love,' are but the imaginative expression of a poetic religion
+familiar to the readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton's criticism for twenty-five
+years, is to quote an illuminating passage upon the subject from one of
+the articles in the 'Athenaeum.'  Moreover, I shall thus escape what I
+confess I dread--the sight of my own prose at the end of my book in
+juxtaposition to the prose of a past master of English style:--
+
+    "The time has not yet arrived for poetry to utilize even the results
+    of science; such results as are offered to her are dust and ashes.
+    Happily, however, nothing in science is permanent save mathematics.
+    As a great man of science has said, 'everything is provisional.'  Dr.
+    Erasmus Darwin, following the science of his day, wrote a long poem
+    on the 'Loves of the Plants,' by no means a foolish poem, though it
+    gave rise to the 'Loves of the Triangles,' and though his grandson
+    afterwards discovered that the plants do not love each other at all,
+    but, on the contrary, hate each other furiously--'struggle for life'
+    with each other, 'survive' against each other--just as though they
+    were good men and 'Christians.'  But if a poet were to set about
+    writing a poem on the 'Hates of the Plants,' nothing is more likely
+    than that, before he could finish it, Mr. Darwin will have discovered
+    that the plants do love after all; just as--after it was a settled
+    thing that the red tooth and claw did all the business of
+    progression--he delighted us by discovering that there was another
+    factor which had done half the work--the enormous and very proper
+    admiration which the females have had for the males from the very
+    earliest forms upwards.  In such a case, the 'Hates of the Plants'
+    would have become 'inadequate.'  Already, indeed, there are faint
+    signs of the physicists beginning to find out that neither we nor the
+    plants hate each other quite so much as they thought, and that Nature
+    is not quite so bad as she seems.  'She is an AEolian harp,' says
+    Novalis, 'a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher
+    strings within us.'  And after all there are higher strings within us
+    just as real as those which have caused us to 'survive,' and poetry
+    is right in ignoring 'interpretations,' and giving us 'Earthly
+    Paradises' instead.  She must wait, it seems; or rather, if this
+    aspiring 'century' will keep thrusting these unlovely results of
+    science before her eyes, she must treat them as the beautiful girl
+    Kisagotami treated the ugly pile of charcoal.  A certain rich man
+    woke up one morning and found that all his enormous wealth was turned
+    to a huge heap of charcoal.  A friend who called upon him in his
+    misery, suspecting how the case really stood, gave him certain
+    advice, which he thus acted upon.  'The Thuthe, following his
+    friend's instructions, spread some mats in the bazaar, and, piling
+    them upon a large heap of his property which was turned into
+    charcoal, pretended to be selling it.  Some people, seeing it, said,
+    "Why does he sell charcoal?"  Just at this time a young girl, named
+    Kisagotami, who was worthy to be owner of the property, and who,
+    having lost both her parents, was in a wretched condition, happened
+    to come to the bazaar on some business.  When she saw the heap, she
+    said, "My lord Thuthe, all the people sell clothes, tobacco, oil,
+    honey, and treacle; how is it that you pile up gold and silver for
+    sale?"  The Thuthe said, "Madam, give me that gold and silver."
+    Kisagotami, taking up a handful of it, brought it to him.  What the
+    young girl had in her hand no sooner touched the Thuthe's hand than
+    it became gold and silver.'"
+
+I cannot find a clearer note for the close of this book than that which
+sounds in one of the latest and one of the finest of Mr. Watts-Dunton's
+sonnets.  It was composed on the last night of the Nineteenth Century, a
+century which will be associated with many of the dear friends Mr.
+Watts-Dunton has lost, and, as I must think, associated also with
+himself.  The lines have a very special charm for me, because they show
+the turn which the poet's noble optimism has taken; they show that faith
+in my own generation which for so many years has illumined his work, and
+which has endeared him to us all.  I wish I could be as hopeful as this
+nineteenth century poet with regard to the poets who will carry the torch
+of imagination and romance through the twentieth century; but whether or
+not there are any poets among us who are destined to bring in the Golden
+Fleece, it is good to see 'the Poet of the Sunrise' setting the trumpet
+of optimism to his lips, and heralding so cheerily the coming of the new
+argonauts:--
+
+                         THE ARGONAUTS OF THE NEW AGE
+
+                                   THE POET
+
+                             [In starlight, listening to the chimes in the
+                                   distance, which sound clear through the
+                                                           leafless trees.
+
+    Say, will new heroes win the 'Fleece,' ye spheres
+       Who--whether around some King of Suns ye roll
+       Or move right onward to some destined goal
+    In Night's vast heart--know what Great Morning nears?
+
+                                  THE STARS
+
+    Since Love's Star rose have nineteen hundred years
+       Written such runes on Time's remorseless scroll,
+       Impeaching Earth's proud birth, the human soul,
+    That we, the bright-browed stars, grow dim with tears.
+
+    Did those dear poets you loved win Light's release?
+       What 'ship of Hope' shall sail to such a world?
+
+                                     [The night passes, and morning breaks
+                                             gorgeously over the tree top.
+
+                                   THE POET
+
+    Ye fade, ye stars, ye fade with night's decease!
+       Above yon ruby rim of clouds empearled--
+       There, through the rosy flags of morn unfurled--
+    I see young heroes bring Light's 'Golden Fleece.'
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 THE END
+
+
+
+
+Index
+
+
+Abbey, Edwin, 122, 301
+
+Abershaw, Jerry, 100
+
+Abiogenesis, 373
+
+Absolute humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
+
+Accent, English verse governed by, 344
+
+Acceptance, instinct of, 14; Horace as poet of, 15
+
+Acton, Lord, place given 'Aylwin' by, 5
+
+Actors, two types of, 127
+
+Actresses, English prejudice against, 131
+
+Adams, Davenport, 132
+
+Addison, 'softness of touch' in portraiture, 350
+
+'Adonais,' 157
+
+'AEneid,' 208
+
+AEschylus, reference to, 15, 45, 324
+
+'Agamemnon,' 323
+
+Alabama, Lowell and, 295
+
+Aldworth, 286, 293
+
+Allen, Grant, 207, 269, 309, 361
+
+Allingham, William, 213
+
+Ambition v. Nature-Worship, 103
+
+America, Watts-Dunton's friends in, 295; his feelings towards, 297, 301
+
+Anacharsis, 384
+
+Anapaests, Swinburne and, 383
+
+Anglomania and Anglophobia, Lowell's, 299
+
+Anglo-Saxon, law-abidingness of, 309; conception of life, 381
+
+Animals, man's sympathy with 38-9, 82-86
+
+'Anne Boleyn,' Watts-Dunton's criticism of Lilian Adelaide Neilson's
+acting in, 117
+
+Anonymity in criticism, 209
+
+Anthropology, 14
+
+Apemantus, 250
+
+Appleton, Prof., Watts-Dunton's reminiscences of:--met at Bell Scott's
+and Rossetti's; Hegel on the brain; asks Watts to write for 'Academy,'
+187; wants him to pith the German transcendentalists in two columns, 188;
+in a rage; Watts explains why he has gone into enemy's camp, 201; a
+Philistine, 202
+
+'Arda Viraf,' 219
+
+'Argonauts of the New Age,' 457
+
+Argyll, Duchess of: see Louise, Princess
+
+Argyll, Duke of, 291: see Lorne, Marquis of
+
+Aristocrats, in 'Aylwin,' 351
+
+Aristotle, unities of, 18; 177; 340, 341
+
+Armada, 423
+
+'Armadale,' 348
+
+Arnold, Sir Edwin, 219, 228
+
+Arnold, Matthew, 'The Scholar Gypsy,' Borrow's criticism of, 108; Rhona
+Boswell and, 114; 157
+
+Artifice, 239
+
+Athenaeum, 1-4; editor of, 10; seventieth birthday of, 210-213; influence
+of, 452; Watts-Dunton's connection with, 6, 173, 188, 212-27, 315, 418,
+454
+
+Augustanism, 15, 16; pyramid of, 23
+
+Austen, Jane, 367
+
+'Australia's Mother,' 4
+
+'Ave Atque Vale,' 157
+
+Avon, River, Watts-Dunton's love for, 31
+
+'AYLWIN,' Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, 2; popularity of, 7;
+principles of romantic art expressed in, 8; Justin McCarthy's opinion of,
+9; 'Renascence of Wonder,' original title of, 11; attempted
+identification of characters in, 50, 88; 'Veiled Queen,' dominating
+influence of author, 56; Cyril Aylwin, identification with A. E. Watts,
+87; genesis of, 89; nervous phases in, 90; D'Arcy, identification with
+Rossetti, 139, 140-45; description of Rossetti in, 165-169; landslip in,
+270; Welsh acceptation of, 312-318; Snowdon ascent, 317; 'Encyc. Brit.'
+on, 321; naivete in style of, 328; youthfulness of, 328; richness in
+style, 330-38; Galimberti, Mme., criticism of, 338; 'Athenaeum' canons
+observed in, 338, 343; begun in metre, 342; critical analysis of,
+345-362; 'softness of touch' in portraiture, 351; love-passion, 362;
+Swinburne on, 363; Meredith on, 364; Groome on, 367; novel of the two
+Bohemias, 368; editions of, 368, 377; enigmatic nature of, 373; Dr.
+Nicoll on, 375; Celtic element in, 378; Jacottet on, 380; two heroines
+of, 363; spirituality of, 372, 375, 378, 380; inner meaning of, 372-81;
+heart-thought of contained in the 'Veiled Queen,' 374; 'Saturday Review'
+on, 377; motive of, 389, 'Arvon' edition, restoration of excised
+passages, 445-50; modern Sufism of, 454; quotations from, 330, 331, 333,
+336
+
+Aylwin, Cyril, 168
+
+Aylwin, Henry, at 16 Cheyne Walk, 165; autobiographical element in, 322,
+356; see 'Aylwin'; his mother, 352
+
+Aylwin, Philip: see Watts, J. O.
+
+Aylwin, Percy, contrasted with Henry Aylwin, 361; the part he plays in
+the 'Coming of Love,' 401-11; autobiographical element in--see
+description of Swinburne swimming, 268
+
+Aylwinism, Mr. Balfour and, 373, 446, 450; growth of, 445
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Bacon, 43
+
+Badakhshan, ruby hills of, 329
+
+Balfour, A. J., Aylwinism and, 373, 446, 450
+
+Ballads, old, wonder in, 16
+
+'Ballads and Sonnets,' Rossetti's, 271
+
+Balliol, Jowett's dinner parties at, 280
+
+Balzac, 18
+
+Banville, his 'Le Baiser,' 133
+
+Basevi, 95
+
+Bateson, Mary, her paper on Crab House Nunnery, 53
+
+Baudelaire, 135
+
+Baynes, invites Watts to write for 'Encyc. Brit.,' 256-7
+
+Beddoes, 126
+
+'Bedouin Child, The,' 448
+
+'Belfast News-Letter,' 4
+
+'Belle Dame Sans Merci, La,' wonder and mystery of, 19
+
+Bell, Mackenzie: on Watts-Dunton's study of music: see 'Poets and Poetry
+of the Century,' 38: also 'Shadow on the Window Blind'
+
+'Bells, The,' Watts on, 119
+
+Benson, A. C, his monograph on Rossetti, 138-40
+
+Berners, Isopel, 364, 369
+
+Beryl-Songs, in 'Rose Mary,' 139-40
+
+Betts Bey, 85
+
+Bible, The, Watts-Dunton's essay on, 228-41
+
+Bible Rhythm, 238
+
+Biogenesis, 373
+
+Bird, Dr., 306
+
+Birdwood, Sir George, 409
+
+Bisset, animal trainer, 38
+
+Black, William, 119; Watts-Dunton's friendship with, 185; their
+resemblance to each other, 185; an amusing mistake, 186
+
+Blackstone, 23, 309
+
+Blank verse, 239
+
+Boar's Hill, 282
+
+Bodleian, 282
+
+Body, its functions--humour of, 387
+
+Bognor, 91
+
+Bohemians, in 'Aylwin,' 351
+
+Bohemias, Novel of the Two, 'Aylwin' as, 368
+
+Borrow, George, 10; method of learning languages, 58; Watts-Dunton's
+description of, 95-106, 108-16; characteristics of, 99-106, 368; his
+gypsy women scenic characters, 390; Watts-Dunton's reminiscences of:--his
+first meeting with, 95; his shyness, 99; Watts attacks it; tries Bamfylde
+Moore Carew; then tries beer, the British bruiser, philology, Ambrose
+Gwinett, etc., 100; a stroll in Richmond Park; visit to 'Bald-Faced
+Stag'; Jerry Abershaw's sword; his gigantic green umbrella, 101-2; tries
+Whittlesea Mere; Borrow's surprise; vipers of Norman Cross; Romanies and
+vipers, 104; disclaims taint of printers' ink; 'Who are you?' 105; an
+East Midlander; the Shales Mare, 106; Cromer sea best for swimming;
+rainbow reflected in Ouse and Norfolk sand, 106; goes to a gypsy camp;
+talks about Matthew Arnold's 'Scholar-Gypsy,' 108; resolves to try it on
+gypsy woman; watches hawk and magpie, 109; meets Perpinia Boswell; 'the
+popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,' 110; Rhona Boswell, girl of the dragon
+flies; the sick chavo; forbids Pep to smoke, 112; description of Rhona,
+113; the Devil's Needles; reads Glanville's story; Rhona bored by Arnold,
+114; hatred of tobacco, 115; last sight of Borrow on Waterloo Bridge,
+115; sonnet on, 116
+
+Boswell, Perpinia, 110-12
+
+BOSWELL, RHONA, her 'Haymaking Song,' 33-5; her prototype, first meeting
+with, 63; description from 'Aylwin,' 64; East Anglia and 'Cowslip Land'
+linked by, 72, 108; description of in unpublished romance, 110-15; her
+beauty, 113; courageous nature of, 366, 406; presented dramatically, 356;
+type of English heroine, 366; Tennyson's 'Maud' compared with, 413;
+George Meredith on, 418; humour of, 421; 'Rhona's Letter,' 402-5;
+rhyme-pattern of same, 419
+
+Boswell, Sylvester, 110
+
+Bounty, mutineers of, 310
+
+Boxhill, Meredith's house at, 283
+
+Bracegirdle, Mrs., 131
+
+'Breath of Avon: To English-speaking Pilgrims on Shakespeare's Birthday,'
+31
+
+British Association, 373, 445, 450
+
+Bronte, Charlotte and Emily, Nature instinct of, 97; novels of, 346, 367
+
+Brown, Charles Brockden, 308
+
+Brown, Lucy Madox: see Rossetti, Mrs. W. M.
+
+Brown, Madox, 10, 12, 35, 170; his Eisteddfod, 136; portrait of, story
+connected with, 274
+
+Brown, Oliver Madox, 274-6
+
+Browne, Sir Thomas, 337
+
+Browning, Robert, 4; compared with Victor Hugo, 126; 144; Watts-Dunton's
+reminiscences of:--chaffs him in 'Athenaeum'; chided by Swinburne, 222,
+sees him at Royal Academy private view; Lowell advises him to slip away;
+bets he will be more cordial than ever; Lowell astonished at his
+magnanimity, 222-23; the review in question, 'Ferishtah's Fancies,'
+223-26
+
+Brynhild, 365
+
+'Brynhild on Sigurd's Funeral Pyre,' 366
+
+Buchanan, Robert, his attacks on Rossetti, 145-6; Watts-Dunton's
+impeachment of, 148
+
+'Buddhaghosha,' Parables of, 218
+
+Buddhism, 14
+
+Bull, John, 224, 299, 300
+
+Burbage, 124
+
+Burgin, G. B., his interview with Watts-Dunton, 205
+
+Burns, Robert, 38
+
+Butler, Bishop, share in Renascence of Wonder, 22
+
+'B.V.,' 161
+
+'Byles the Butcher,' 215-16
+
+Byron, 307
+
+'By the North Sea,' 271
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Caine, Hall, Rossetti 'Recollections' by, 150, 151-4
+
+Calderon, 219
+
+Cam, Ouse and, 79
+
+'Cambridge Chronicle,' 51
+
+Cambridge University, 1; George Dyer, Frend, Hammond and, 40; Prince of
+Wales at, 67
+
+Campbell, Lady Archibald, open-air plays organized by, 132
+
+Capri girl, Rhona Boswell like, 110
+
+Carew, Bamfylde Moore, 99
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, River Ouse, libellous description of, 27, 28; his heresy
+of 'work,' 68-71; 'Frederick the Great,' Watts-Dunton on, 192
+
+Carr, Comyns, contributor to 'Examiner,' 184
+
+Casket Lighthouse, girl in--poems by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 413
+
+Cathay, pyramid of, 25
+
+'Catriona,' 217
+
+'Caught in the Ebbing Tide,' 82
+
+Cavendish, Ada, 118
+
+'Celebrities of the Century,' memoir of Watts-Dunton in, 4
+
+Celtic temper, 'Aylwin,' 313-15; 378; 398
+
+Cervantes, Watts-Dunton on, 197, 246-52; 382
+
+Chalk Farm, Westland Marston's theatrical reunions at, 117; Parnassians
+at, 135
+
+'Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' Watts-Dunton's
+'Renascence of Wonder' article, 13, 20, 25; 173; Douglas, James, article
+on Watts-Dunton by, 393
+
+'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' article on Watts-Dunton in, 1; Watts-Dunton's
+contributions to, 2; Sonnet, Watts-Dunton's essay on, 205
+
+Chamisso, 119
+
+Channel Islands, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 268-9
+
+Chapman, George, 267
+
+Chaucer, his place in English poetry, 15, 43, 294, 394
+
+Chelsea, Rossetti's residence at, 137, 155, 161, 162, 165
+
+Cheyne Walk, 16: see Chelsea
+
+'Children of the Open Air,' 96, 97, 98, 116
+
+Children, Rossetti on, 168
+
+Chinese Cabinet, Rossetti's, 267
+
+'Christabel,' wonder and mystery of, 19; quotation from, 20
+
+Christmas, 'The Pines' and, 93, 94; Rosicrucian, 94
+
+"Christmas Tree at 'The Pines,' The," 94
+
+"Christmas at the 'Mermaid,'" 32; metrical construction of, 422;
+Watts-Dunton's preface to sixth edition, 424; written at
+Stratford-on-Avon, 423; opening chorus, 423; description of Shakespeare's
+return to Stratford-on-Avon, 425-26; quotations from, 423-40; chief
+leit-motiv of, 436; Wassail Chorus, 438; 'The Golden Skeleton,' 428-34,
+436-37; Raleigh and the Armada, 434-36; letter from Thomas Hardy about,
+440-41
+
+Circumstance, as villain, 125, 349; as humourist, 248; as harlequin, 387
+
+Civilization, definition of, 71
+
+Climate, English, Lowell on, 300
+
+Clive, Kitty, 131
+
+Cockerell, Sydney C., 179
+
+Coincidence, long arm of, 348
+
+Cole, Herbert, 440
+
+Coleridge, S. T., 19, 20, 38; Watts-Dunton's poetry, kinship to, 417,
+419; 324, 338; on accent in verse, 344
+
+Coleridge, Watts-Dunton's Sonnet to, 417; Meredith's opinion of same, 417
+
+Collaboration, 415
+
+Collier, Jeremy, 259
+
+Collier, John P., 55
+
+Collins, Wilkie, fiction of, 348, 367
+
+Colonies, Watts-Dunton on, 273
+
+Colvin, Sidney, 216
+
+Comedie Francaise: see Theatre Francaise
+
+Comedy: and Farce, distinction between, 258; of repartee, 259
+
+'COMING OF LOVE, THE': Renascence of Wonder exemplified in, 2; popularity
+of, 7; principles of Romantic Art explained in, 8; humour in, 24;
+locality of Gypsy Song, 33; publication of, 178, 389; history of, 395;
+inner meaning of, 400; form of, 411; opening sonnets, incident connected
+with, 413; quotations from, 402-11, 450; references to, 5, 361, 376
+
+Common Prayer, Book of, 231
+
+Congreve, his wit and humour, 258-60
+
+Convincement, artistic, 325
+
+Coombe, open-air plays at, 132
+
+Cooper, Fenimore, 306
+
+Corkran, Miss, 118, 278
+
+Corneille, 132
+
+Cosmic humour, 204
+
+Cosmogony, New, 9; see Renascence of Wonder, 373
+
+Cosmos, joke of, 386
+
+Cowper, W., 38
+
+Cowslip Country, Watts-Dunton's association with, 27, 32
+
+Craigie, Mrs., intellectual energy of the provinces asserted by, 50; 325
+
+Criticism, anonymity in, 209, 210; new ideas in, 344
+
+Cromer, 106; Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, 270
+
+Cromwell, Oliver, Slepe Hall, supposed residence at, 35; his elder wine,
+36-7
+
+Cruikshank, 387
+
+'Cyclopaedia of English Literature': see 'Chambers's Cyclopaedia'
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Daddy this and Daddy that, It's,' 181
+
+Dana, 371
+
+Dante, 208, 293, 412, 418
+
+D'Arcy (see Rossetti, D. G.), character in 'Aylwin' originally 'Gordon'
+(Gordon Hake), 91; Rossetti as prototype of, 91-2, 139, 140-45, 165, 336
+
+Darwin, Charles, 52, 97, 373, 455
+
+Darwin, Erasmus, 455
+
+Death, Pain and, 173
+
+'Debats, Journal des,' 27, 374, 400
+
+De Castro, 141-43, 166: see Howell, C. A.
+
+Decorative renascence, 16
+
+Deerfoot, the Indian, race won at Cambridge by, 65
+
+'Defence of Guinevere,' 177
+
+Defoe, 307, 367
+
+De Lisle, Leconte, 124
+
+'Demon Lover, The,' wonder and mystery expressed by, 19
+
+Denouement in fiction, dialogue and, 346
+
+De Quincey, 175, 197, 220, 340
+
+Dereham, Borrow as, 95
+
+Destiny, in drama, 125
+
+Devil's Needles, 113
+
+Dialect in poetry--Meredith on Rhona Boswell's letters, 418
+
+Dialogue in fiction, 346
+
+Dichtung, Wahrheit and, in 'Aylwin,' 50
+
+Dickens, Lowell's strictures on, 295; 325; hardness of touch in
+portraiture, 350; 367, 384, 387
+
+'Dickens returns on Christmas Day,' 93
+
+Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on the sibilant in poetry, 287; substance and
+form in poetry, 341
+
+Disraeli, 'softness of touch' in St. Aldegonde, 351; 353
+
+'Divina Commedia,' 208
+
+'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' Watts-Dunton's criticism of, 218
+
+Dogs, telepathy and, 82-6
+
+Doppelganger idea, 30
+
+Drama, surprise in, 120; famous actors and actresses, 117; table talk
+about 'The Bells' and 'Rip Van Winkle,' 119: see Actors, Actresses,
+AEschylus, Banville, Burbage, Comedy and Farce, Congreve, Etheredge,
+Ford, Garrick, Got, Hamlet, Hugo, Kean, Marlowe, Robson, Shakspeare,
+Sophocles, Cyril Tourneur, Vanbrugh, Webster, Wells, Wycherley
+
+Dramatic method in fiction, 346
+
+Drayton, 438
+
+Drury Lane, ragged girl in, 93
+
+Dryden, the first great poet of 'acceptance,' 25
+
+Du Chaillu, 52
+
+Duffield, contributor to 'Examiner,' 184
+
+Dukkeripen, The Lovers', 73
+
+Dumas, 346
+
+Du Maurier, 301
+
+Dunn, Treffry, De Castro's conduct to, 143; Watts-Dunton's portrait
+painted by, 171; drawings by, 161, 277
+
+Dunton, family of, 53
+
+Dyer, George, St. Ives and, 40, 41
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Earthly Paradise, The,' 177
+
+East Anglia, gypsies of, 63; Omar Khayyam and, 79; 72-85; Watts-Dunton's
+poem on, 82-5; road-girls in, 390
+
+Eastbourne, Swinburne and Watts visit, 270
+
+East Enders, in 'Aylwin,' 351
+
+Eliot, George, 372
+
+Ellis, F. S., 179
+
+Emerson, 8
+
+'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' Watts-Dunton's connection with, 1, 2, 4, 6,
+205, 256; his Essay on Poetry, 340, 393; on Vanbrugh, 258
+
+'Encyclopaedia, Chambers's': see 'Chambers's Encyc.'
+
+England, its beloved dingles, 69-70; Borrow and, 102; love of the wind
+and, 370
+
+'English Illustrated Magazine,' 287
+
+Epic method in fiction, 346
+
+Erckmann-Chatrian, 'Juif Polonais' by, 119
+
+Erskine, his pet leeches, 39
+
+'Esmond,' 328
+
+Etheredge, 259
+
+'Examiner,' contributors to, 184; Watts-Dunton's articles in, 184
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Fairy Glen,' 315
+
+'Faith and Love,' Wilderspin's picture, 331
+
+Falstaff, 382
+
+Farce, comedy and, distinction between, 258
+
+Farringford, 286
+
+'Father Christmas in Famine Street,' 92
+
+Febvre, as Saltabadil, 129
+
+Fens, the, description of, 62
+
+Feridun, 225
+
+'Ferishtah's Fancies,' Watts's review of, 223
+
+Ferridoddin, 447
+
+Fiction, genius at work in, 7; importance of, 208; beauty in, 221;
+atmosphere in, 308; 'artistic convincement' in, 325; methods of, 345 et
+seq.; epic and dramatic methods in, 346; 'softness of touch' in, 349 et
+seq.
+
+Fielding, 305, 321, 347; 'softness of touch' in, 350, 367
+
+Findlay, 52
+
+FitzGerald, Edward, 79; Watts-Dunton's Omarian poems, 80-1
+
+Fitzroy Square, Madox Brown's symposia at, 136-7
+
+Flaubert, 89
+
+'Fleshly School of Poetry,' 145-46
+
+'Florilegium Latinum,' 147
+
+Fonblanque, Albany, 185
+
+Ford, spirit of wonder in, 16
+
+'Fortnightly Review,' 442
+
+Foxglove bells, fairies and, 74
+
+France, Anatole, irony of, 204
+
+France, dread of the wind, 370
+
+Fraser, the brothers, water-colour drawings by, 33
+
+Freedom, modern, 71
+
+French Revolution, its relation to the Renascence of Wonder, 13
+
+Frend, William, revolt against English Church, 40
+
+Friendship, passion of, 146-48; sonnet (Dr. Gordon Hake), 444
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Gainsborough, 'softness of touch' in portraits by, 350
+
+Galimberti, Alice, her appreciation of Watts-Dunton's work, 204, 338,
+339, 347
+
+Gamp, Mrs., 384
+
+'Garden of Sleep,' 270
+
+Garnett, Dr., his views on 'Renascence of Wonder,' 11; contributions to
+'Examiner,' 184
+
+Garrick, David, 127
+
+Gaskell, Mrs., softness of touch, 350
+
+Gautier, Theophile, 135, 136
+
+Gawtry, in 'Night and Morning,' 349
+
+Gelert, 82-5
+
+Genius, wear and tear of, 175
+
+Gentility, 25, 109
+
+'Gentle Art of Making Enemies,' 353
+
+German music, fascination of, 89
+
+German romanticists, the terrible-grotesque in, 126
+
+Gestaltung, Goethe on, 398
+
+Ghost, laughter of, 387
+
+Gladstone, 175
+
+Glamour, Celtic, 313-15; 378
+
+'Glittering Plain,' 173
+
+Glyn, Miss, 118, 136
+
+God as beneficent Showman, 387
+
+Goethe, his critical system, Watts-Dunton's treatise on Poetry compared
+to, 257; his theory as to enigmatic nature of great works of art, 373,
+394; Gestaltung in art, 398
+
+'Golden Hand, The,' 73
+
+'Gordon,' Dr. G. Hake as, 91, 95
+
+Gordon, Lady Mary, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton's visits to, 270
+
+Gorgios and Romanies, 389
+
+Gosse, Edmund, contributes to 'Examiner,' 184; his study of Etheredge,
+259
+
+Got, M., Watts on his acting in 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' 127
+
+Grande dame, Aylwin's mother as type of, 352
+
+Grant, James, 367
+
+'Graphic,' 100
+
+'Grave by the Sea, A,' 157
+
+'Great Thoughts,' 61
+
+Grecian Saloon, Robson at, 57
+
+Greek mind, the, 44
+
+Green Dining Room at 16 Cheyne Walk, 161
+
+Groome, F. H., account of J. K. Watts by, 50; intimacy with Watts-Dunton,
+68; Watts-Dunton and the gypsies, 72; Watts-Dunton's obituary notice of,
+79; on gypsies in 'Aylwin,' 351; 'Kriegspiel,' 364; his review of
+'Aylwin,' 367, 372; gypsy humour--anecdote, 420
+
+Grotesque, the terrible-, in art, 126
+
+Gryengroes: see Gypsies
+
+'GUDGEON, MRS.,' humour of, 382-84, 388; prototype of, 383
+
+'Guide to Fiction,' Baker's, 374
+
+Gwinett, Ambrose, 99
+
+Gwynn, David, 423
+
+'Gypsy Folk-tales,' 420
+
+'Gypsy Heather,' 75
+
+Gypsies, Watts-Dunton's acquaintance with, 61, 67; superstitions of, 101;
+'prepotency of transmission' in, 362; in 'Aylwin,' Groome on, 367;
+'Aylwin,' gypsy characters of, 368; 'Times' on, 370; superiority of gypsy
+women to men, 392; characteristics of same, 390; music, 392; humour of,
+420
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Hacker, Arthur, A.R.A., illustration of 'John the Pilgrim' by, 415
+
+Haggard, Rider, telepathy and dumb animals, 82; Watts-Dunton's influence
+on writings of, 415
+
+Haggis, the stabbing of, 193
+
+Hake, Gordon, 12; 'Aylwin,' connection with, 90; physician to Rossetti,
+90-91; his view of Rossetti's melancholia and remorse--cock and bull
+stories about ill-treatment of his wife, 91; physician to Lady Ripon, 90;
+Borrow and Watts-Dunton introduced by, 95; poems connected with
+Watts-Dunton, 92; 'The New Day' (see that title)
+
+Hake, Thomas St. E., author's gratitude for assistance from, 10; 11, 12;
+'Notes and Queries,' papers on 'Aylwin' by, 50; J. O. Watts identified
+with Philip Aylwin by, 51, 56; account of J. O. Watts by, 57; A. E.
+Watts, description by, 88; 'Aylwin,' genesis of, account by, 89; account
+of his father's relations with Rossetti, 90-91; Hurstcote and Cheyne
+Walk, 'green dining room,' identified by, 161; William Morris, facts
+concerning, given by, 171
+
+Hallam, Henry, 281
+
+'Hamlet,' 293
+
+Hammond, John, 40-1
+
+'Hand and Soul,' 172
+
+Hardy, Thomas, 27, 186, 325; letter from, 440-41
+
+'Harper's Magazine,' 122, 442
+
+Harte, Bret, 301; Watts-Dunton's estimate of, 302-11; histrionic gifts,
+302; meeting with; drive round London music-halls, 303; 'Holborn,'
+'Oxford'; Evans's supper-rooms; Paddy Green; meets him again at
+breakfast; a fine actor lost, 303
+
+Hartley, on sexual shame, 255
+
+Hawk and magpie, Borrow and, 109
+
+Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 305
+
+'Haymaking Song,' 34
+
+Hazlitt, W., 261
+
+Hegel, 187
+
+Heine, 232
+
+Heminge and Condell, 293
+
+Hemingford Grey, 33
+
+Hemingford Meadow, description, 32, 33
+
+Henley, W. E., 284, 322
+
+Herder, 19
+
+Herkomer, Prof. H., 100
+
+Herne, the 'Scollard,' 402, 405
+
+Herodotus, 340
+
+Hero, English type of, 365
+
+'Hero, New,' The, 287
+
+Heroines, 'Aylwin,' a story with two, 363
+
+Hesiod, 221, 394
+
+Heywood, 439
+
+Higginson, Col., 301
+
+Hodgson, Earl, 30
+
+Homer, 177, 208, 323, 355
+
+Hood, Thomas, 1
+
+Hopkins, John, 233
+
+Horne, R. H., 137; challenge to Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 269
+
+Hotei, Japanese god of contentment, 385
+
+'House of the Wolfings,' 173
+
+Houssaye, Arsene, 218
+
+Houghton, Lord, 183
+
+Howell, Charles Augustus, prototype of De Castro, q.v.
+
+Hueffer, Dr. F., Wagner exponent, 89; Watts-Dunton's intimacy with, 89
+
+Hueffer, Ford Madox, testimony to the friendship of Watts-Dunton and
+Rossetti, 154
+
+Hugo, Victor, 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' 123-30; Watts-Dunton's sonnet to, 129;
+dread of the wind, 370
+
+Humboldt, 45
+
+Humour, Watts-Dunton's definition of, 196; absolute and relative, 16, 23,
+384; cosmic, 204; renascence of wonder in, 242; metaphysical meaning of,
+246-55
+
+Hunt, Holman, 19
+
+Hunt, Leigh, 261
+
+Hunt, Rev. J., 49
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Idler,' interview with Watts-Dunton in, 205
+
+'Illuminated Magazine,' 55
+
+Imagination, lyrical and dramatic, in 'Aylwin,' 356-61
+
+Imaginative power in 'Aylwin,' 345
+
+Imaginative representation, 208, 398
+
+Imperialism, 273
+
+Incongruity, basis of humour, 385
+
+Indecency, definition of, 255
+
+Ingelow, Jean, 369
+
+Interviewing, skit on, 263
+
+Ireland, hero-worship in, 3
+
+Irony, Anatole France's, 204; in human intercourse, 251
+
+Irving, Sir Henry, 118, 137
+
+Isis, 332
+
+Isle of Wight, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton visit, 270
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Jacottet, Henri, 347, 374, 380
+
+Jami, 21
+
+'Jane Eyre,' 342, 345
+
+Japanese, race development of, 14
+
+Jaques, 250
+
+'Jason,' 177
+
+Jefferson, Joseph, 121
+
+Jeffrey, Francis, 2
+
+Jenyns, Soame, 387
+
+Jerrold, Douglas, 1, 53, 289
+
+Jessopp, Dr., 'Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,' reference to Dunton
+family in, 53
+
+Jewish-Arabian Renascence: see Renascence
+
+'John the Pilgrim,' 416
+
+Johnson, Dr., 326
+
+Jolly-doggism, 199
+
+Jones, Sir Edward Burne, 180
+
+Jonson, Ben, 423
+
+'Joseph and His Brethren,' 55
+
+Joubert, 221
+
+'Journal des Debats,' 27, 374
+
+Journalism, mendacious, 263
+
+Jowett, Benjamin, Watts-Dunton's friendship with, 279; pen portrait of,
+280; see 'Last Walk from Boar's Hill,' 282
+
+'Jubilee Greeting at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain,' 31
+
+'Juif-Polonais,' 119
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Kaf, mountains of, 286, 453
+
+Kean, Edmund, 121, 127
+
+Keats, John, spirit of wonder in poetry of, 19, 293; richness of style,
+329
+
+Kelmscott Manor, Rossetti's residence at, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165;
+identification of Hurstcote with, 170; causeries at, 173
+
+Kelmscott Press, 178, 181
+
+Kernahan, Coulson, 56, 413
+
+Kew, Lord, Thackeray's, 351
+
+Keynes, T., 267
+
+Khayyam, Omar, 'Toast to,' 79, 81; Sonnet on, 81; 'The Pines,' Groome
+and, 79
+
+'Kidnapped,' Watts-Dunton's review of, 215; letter from Stevenson
+concerning same, 216
+
+'King Lear,' 126, 323, 355
+
+Kisagotami, 456
+
+'Kissing the May Buds,' 406
+
+Knight, Joseph, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 60; as dramatic critic,
+122, 123
+
+Knowles, James, 290: see also 'Nineteenth Century'
+
+'Kriegspiel,' 364
+
+'Kubla Khan,' wonder and mystery of, 19, 20
+
+Kymric note, in 'Aylwin,' 313-15
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Lamb, Charles, 41, 59, 250, 387
+
+Lancing, Swinburne and Watts visit, 270
+
+Landor, 271, 352
+
+Landslips at Cromer, 270
+
+Lane, John, wishes to compile bibliography of Watts-Dunton's articles, 6;
+publication of 'Coming of Love,' 396; 440
+
+Lang, Andrew, critical work of, 207; 415
+
+Language, inadequacy of, 323
+
+'Language of Nature's Fragrancy,' 269
+
+Laocoon, 323
+
+'Last Walk from Boar's Hill, The,' 282
+
+Latham, Dr. R. G., acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 58
+
+'Lavengro,' 368
+
+'Lear, King,' 126, 323, 355
+
+Le Gallienne, R., 1
+
+Leighton, Lord, 172
+
+Leslie, G. D., 301
+
+Leutzner, Dr. Karl, 205
+
+Lever, 367
+
+Lewis, Leopold, 119
+
+Ligier, as Triboulet in 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' 124
+
+Lineham, 95
+
+Litany, 231
+
+'Literature,' 132, 244, 245
+
+'Literature of power,' 208
+
+'Liverpool Mercury,' article on 'Aylwin,' 12
+
+Livingstone, J. K. Watts's friendship with, 52
+
+Llyn Coblynau, 317
+
+London, Watts-Dunton's life in, 87 et seq.; its low-class women,
+humourous pictures of, 383
+
+Lorne, Marquis of, 453: see Argyll, Duke of
+
+'Lothair,' 353
+
+Louise, Princess (Duchess of Argyll), Rossetti's alleged rudeness to, 156
+
+'Love brings Warning of Natura Maligna,' 414
+
+'Love for Love,' 258, 260
+
+'Love is Enough,' 177
+
+Love-passion in 'Aylwin,' 362
+
+'Lovers of Gudrun,' written in twelve hours, 176
+
+'Loves of the Plants,' 455
+
+'Loves of the Triangles,' 455
+
+Lovell, Sinfi, Nature instinct of, 97; 'Amazonian Sinfi,' 107; true
+representation of gypsy girl, 317; Meredith's praise of, 363; Groome on,
+364; Richard Whiteing on, 364; dominating character of, 363, 365;
+prototype of, 368-9; beauty of, 391
+
+Low, Sidney, 244
+
+Lowell, James Russell, 222; Watts-Dunton's critical work, appreciation
+of, 399; sonnet on the death of, 300; Watts-Dunton's reminiscences
+of:--meets him at dinner, 295; he attacks England; directs diatribe at
+Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel, 296; recognition; cites Watts's first
+article, 298; his anglophobia turns into anglomania, 299; likes English
+climate, 300
+
+Lowestoft, 106
+
+Luther, his pigs, 39
+
+'Lycidas,' 3, 157
+
+Lyell (geologist), 45; J. K. Watts's acquaintance with, 50, 52
+
+Lytton, Bulwer, novels of, 349
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+McCarthy, Justin, 'Aylwin,' criticism of, 9; hospitality of, 186
+
+MacColl, Norman, invites Watts-Dunton to write for 'Athenaeum,' 188; 243,
+418
+
+Macready, 136
+
+Macrocosm, microcosm and, 26, 27, 35
+
+'Madame Bovary,' 89
+
+Madonna, by Parmigiano, 172
+
+'Magazine of Art,' 290
+
+Magpie, hawk and, 109
+
+Maguelonne, Jeanne Samary as, 129
+
+Man, final emancipation of, 47: see also Renascence of Wonder,
+'Aylwinism.'
+
+'Man and Wife,' 348
+
+Manchester School, 273
+
+'Mankind, the Great Man,' 46
+
+Manns, August, Crystal Palace Concerts conducted by, 89
+
+Manu, 219
+
+'M.A.P.,' 278
+
+Mapes, Walter, 388
+
+Marcianus, 104
+
+Marlowe, Christopher, spirit of wonder in poetry of, 16; 329; friend of,
+426
+
+Marot, Clement, 229
+
+Marryat, 367
+
+Marshall, John, medical adviser to Rossetti, 152
+
+Marston, Dr. Westland:--symposia at Chalk Farm; famous actors and
+actresses, 117; table talk about 'The Bells' and 'Rip Van Winkle,' 119;
+on staff of 'Examiner,' 184; the sub-Swinburnians at the Marston
+Mornings; the divine Theophile; the Gallic Parnassus, 136
+
+Marston, Philip Bourke, Louise Chandler Moulton's memoir of, 4, 10, 157;
+Oliver Madox Brown's friendship with, 276
+
+Martin, Sir Theodore, 156
+
+Matter, dead, 411, 452; new theory of, 451
+
+Meredith, George, 6; Watts-Dunton's friendship with, 283, 284; literary
+style of, 325, 328; Watts-Dunton's Sonnet on Coleridge, opinion of, 417;
+'Coming of Love,' opinion of, 418
+
+'Meredith, 'To George, Sonnet, 284
+
+Meredithians, mock, 325
+
+'Merry Wives of Windsor,' 293
+
+Methuen, A. M. S., 216
+
+Metrical art, new, 343, 344, 412
+
+Microcosm, of St. Ives, 26-7; 35; characters in the, 50-60
+
+Middleton, Dr. J. H., his friendship with Morris, 172; 'Encyclopaedia
+Britannica,' collaboration in, 173
+
+Mill, John Stuart, education of, Watts-Dunton's early education compared
+with, 50
+
+Miller, Joaquin, 301
+
+Milton, John, 3; period of wonder in poetry ended with, 25; 157; 293
+
+Minto, Prof., 10; Watts-Dunton's connection with 'Examiner' and, 184-88,
+256; Watts-Dunton's reminiscences of:--neighbours in Danes Inn; editing
+'Examiner'; secures Watts; first article appears; Bell Scott's party;
+Scott wants to know name of new writer, 184; Watts slates himself, 185;
+Minto's Monday evening symposia, 185
+
+Moliere, 126, 132
+
+Montaigne--value of leisure--quotation, 68
+
+Morley, John, 27
+
+Morris, Mrs., Rossetti's picture painted from, 172; reference to, 179,
+180
+
+Morris, William, 'Quarterly Review' article on, 16; 'Chambers's
+Cyclopaedia,' article on, 173; 'Odyssey,' his translation of, 176;
+Watts-Dunton's criticism of poems by, 176; intimacy with Watts-Dunton,
+170; Watts-Dunton's monograph on, 170, 173-77; indifference to criticism,
+173; anecdotes of, 179-82; generosity of, 179; death of, 178-79;
+Watts-Dunton's reminiscences of:--Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; 'nosey
+Latin,' 136; Wednesday evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston,
+Madox Brown and Morris, 170; at Kelmscott, 170; passion for angling, 171;
+snoring of young owls, 171; causeries at Kelmscott, 173; the only reviews
+he read, 173; the little carpetless room, 175; writes 750 lines in twelve
+hours, 176; the crib on his desk, 177; offers to bring out an
+edition-de-luxe of Watts's poems; gets subscribers; a magnificent
+royalty, 179; presentation copies; extravagant generosity; 'All right,
+old chap'; 'Ned Jones and I,' 180; 'Algernon pay 10 for a book of mine!',
+181; disgusted with Stead, the music hall singer and dancer; 'damned
+tomfoolery,' 181
+
+Moulton, Louise Chandler, 4, 301
+
+Mounet-Sully, as Francois I in Le Roi s'Amuse, 125
+
+'Much Ado about Nothing,' 260
+
+Murchison, 45, 50, 52
+
+'Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,' 220
+
+Muret, Maurice, 374, 400
+
+Music, Watts-Dunton's knowledge of, 38, 89
+
+Myers, F. W. H., 291
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Natura Benigna,' 97; the keynote of 'Aylwinism,' 411
+
+'Natura Maligna,' 408; Sir George Birdwood on, 409
+
+Natura Mystica, 73
+
+'Nature's Fountain of Youth,' 268
+
+Nature, 'Poetic Interpretation of,' 204; as humourist, 386
+
+Nature-worship, Shintoism, 14, 97; ambition and, 103
+
+'Nature-worshippers,' Dictionary for, 68
+
+Neilson, Julia, 117
+
+Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton's criticism of her acting, 117-18
+
+Nelson, 365
+
+'New Day, The,' 92, 107, 162-64, 312, 396, 443
+
+New Year, sonnets on morning of, 409
+
+'News from Nowhere,' 173
+
+'Nibelungenlied,' 176
+
+Nicol, John, 202
+
+Nicoll, Dr. Robertson, 5; collection of Watts-Dunton's essays suggested
+by, 6, 22; "Significance of 'Aylwin,'" essay by, 372; Renascence of
+Wonder in Religion, articles on, 22, 375, 445
+
+Neilson, Lilian Adelaide, Watts-Dunton's appreciation of, 117
+
+'Night and Morning,' 349
+
+'Nineteenth Century,' 290, 291, 442
+
+'Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death,' 235
+
+Niobe, 323
+
+Niton Bay, 270
+
+'Noctes Ambrosianae, Comedy of,' Watts-Dunton's review of, 190-201;
+Lowell's opinion of same, 298
+
+Norman Cross, vipers of, 104
+
+Norris, H. E., 'History of St. Ives' (reference to), 25, 40, 51; River
+Ouse, praise of, 28, 29, 30
+
+North, Christopher: see Wilson, Professor
+
+'Northern Farmer,' 387
+
+Norwich horse fair, 106
+
+'Notes and Queries,' 50, 51, 56, 57, 88, 161, 171, 316, 317, 318
+
+'Notre Dame de Paris,' 125
+
+Novalis, 247, 455
+
+Novel, importance of, 208; of manners, 308; see Fiction.
+
+Novelists, absurdities of popular, 367
+
+Nutt, Alfred, 6
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Octopus of the Golden Isles,' 148
+
+'Odyssey,' Morris's translation of, 176; 208; 341
+
+'OEdipus Egyptiacus,' 226
+
+Olympic, Robson at, 57
+
+Omar, Caliph, 69
+
+Omar Khayyam Club, 81
+
+Omarian Poems, Watts-Dunton's, 78, 79, 80, 81
+
+'Omnipotence of Love.'  The, 287
+
+'Orchard, The,' Niton Bay, 270
+
+O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 'Marston Nights,' presence at, 136; 161
+
+Ouse, River, poems on, 28, 29, 30; Carlyle's libel of, 28-9
+
+Owen, Harry, 317
+
+Oxford Union, Rossetti's lost frescoes at, 162
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Pain and Death, 173
+
+Palgrave, F. T., 291
+
+'Pall Mall Gazette,' 245
+
+Palmerston, 295
+
+Pamphlet literature, 99
+
+'Pandora,' Rossetti's, 21
+
+'Pantheism': Dr. Hunt's book, 49
+
+Parable poetry, 224
+
+Paradis artificiel, 248, 388
+
+Paragraph-mongers, Rossetti and, 155
+
+Parmigiano, Madonna by, 172
+
+Parsimony, verbal, 418
+
+Partridge, Mrs., 382
+
+Patrick, Dr. David, 5
+
+Penn, William, St. Ives, his death there, 41
+
+'Perfect Cure,' The, 181
+
+'Peter Schlemihl,' 119
+
+Petit Bot Bay, 31, 268
+
+Phelps, 136
+
+Philistia, romance carried into, 327; 386
+
+Philistinism, actresses and, 132
+
+'Piccadilly,' Watts-Dunton writes for, 301, 353
+
+'Pickwick,' trial scene in, 387
+
+'Pines, The,' residence of Watts-Dunton and Swinburne: Christmas at,
+93-4; 262 et seq.; works of art at, 266
+
+Plato, 341
+
+Plot-ridden, 'Aylwin' not, 348
+
+Poe, Edgar Allan, on 'homely' note in fiction, 325; 'The Raven,'
+originality of, 419
+
+'Poems by the Way,' 173, 177
+
+Poetic prose: see Prose
+
+Poetry, wonder element in, 15, 25; English Romantic School, 17; humour
+in, question of, 24; parables in, 224; blank verse, 239; popular and
+artistic, 293; Watts-Dunton's Essay on, 340, 354, 393; Herodotus, Plato,
+Aristotle, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Bacon on, 340, 341; difference
+between prose and, 339; rhetoric and, 340; poetic impulse, 393; sincerity
+and, conscience in, 394; imagination in, 397; Zoroaster's definition of,
+398; originality in, 419
+
+'Poets and Poetry of the Century,' Mackenzie Bell's study of Watts-Dunton
+in, 38
+
+Pollock, Walter, contributor to 'Examiner,' 184
+
+Pope, Alexander, periwig poetry of, 25
+
+'Poppyland,' Watts-Dunton visits, 270
+
+Portraiture, ethics of, 141, 143
+
+'Prayer to the Winds,' 81
+
+Pre-Raphaelite movement, definition of, 16; poets, 160-61
+
+Priam, 355
+
+Primitive poetry, 15
+
+Prinsep, Val, his vindication of Rossetti, 145
+
+Printers' ink, taint of, 105
+
+Priory Barn, Robson at 57
+
+Prize-fighters, gypsy, 392
+
+'Prophetic Pictures at Venice,' 94
+
+Prose, poetic, 339: difference between poetry and, 339; see also
+'Aylwin,' Bible Rhythm, Common Prayer, Book of Litany; Manu; Ruskin
+
+Psalms, Watts-Dunton on, 228-41
+
+Publicity, evils of, 262
+
+Purnell, Thomas, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 59
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Quarterly Review,' on Renascence of Wonder, 16-17; on friendship between
+Morris and Watts-Dunton, 173
+
+Queen Katherine, Watts's sonnet on Ellen Terry as, 122
+
+Quickly, Mrs., 382
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Rabelais, 196-200, 387
+
+Racine, 132
+
+Rainbow, The Spirit of the, 101
+
+Raleigh, Sir Walter, 423; on 'command of the sea,' 427
+
+Rappel, Le, 123
+
+Reade Charles, 325, 348; hardness of touch, 351
+
+Rehan, Ada, 131
+
+Reid, Sir Wemyss, 185
+
+'Relapse, The,' 259
+
+Relative humour: see Humour, absolute and relative
+
+Religion, Renascence of Wonder in, 375; poetic, 455
+
+'Reminiscence of Open-Air Plays,' Epilogue, 133
+
+Renascence, decorative, connection with pre-Raphaelite movement, 16
+
+Renascence, Jewish-Arabian, connection with instinct of wonder, 14
+
+Renascence of religion, 22
+
+Renascence of Wonder, exemplified in 'Aylwin,' 2; origin of phrase, 11;
+meaning of phrase, 13, 17, 374; Garnett on, 11, French Revolution, cause
+of, 13; pre-Raphaelite movement, connection with, 16; Watts-Dunton's
+article on, 20, 25; in Philistia, 327, 328; in religion, 22, 375; 'Coming
+of Love, The,' the most powerful expression of, 25; Watts-Dunton's
+Treatise on Poetry, 257; 'Aylwin,' passages on, 446; foreign critics on,
+374; 9, 325
+
+Repartee, comedy of, 259
+
+Representation, imaginative, 398
+
+Rhetoric, Poetry and, 340
+
+RHONA BOSWELL, see Boswell.
+
+'Rhona's Letter,' 402
+
+Rhyme colour, 412
+
+Rhys, Ernest, 'Aylwin' dedicated to, 312; 'Song of the Wind,' paraphrase
+by; 313; 377
+
+Rhythm, 239, 412: see Bible Rhythm
+
+Richardson, 367
+
+Richmond Park, Borrow in, 100
+
+Ripon, Lady, 91
+
+'Rip Van Winkle,' 121
+
+'Rivista d'Italia': see Galimberti, Madame
+
+'Robinson Crusoe,' 307
+
+Robinson, F. W., 12
+
+Robson, actor, J. O. Watts's admiration for, 57; 127, 129
+
+Rogers, S., 39
+
+'Roi s'Amuse, Le,' 123
+
+Romanies, Gorgios and, 389; see Gypsies
+
+Romantic movement, 16-25
+
+'Romany Rye,' 367
+
+'Romeo and Juliet,' 293
+
+'Roots of the Mountains,' 173
+
+'Rose Mary,' Watts-Dunton's advice to Rossetti concerning, 139
+
+Rosicrucian Christmas, 94
+
+Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1, 2; Watts-Dunton on, 17, 18, 19, 21; 'Spirit
+of Wonder' expressed by, 18, 19; 'Pandora,' 21; Poems of, lack of humour
+in, 24; 'Watts's magnificent Star Sonnet,' his appreciation of, 29; Omar
+Khayyam, translation discovered by, 79; his insomnia; Dr. Hake as his
+physician; grief for his wife's death; his melancholia; cock-and-bull
+stories as to his treatment of his wife; their origin; wild and whirling
+words; 90-91; stay at Roehampton, 91; Cheyne Walk reunions, 137;
+Watts-Dunton, affection for, 138-69; Watts-Dunton's influence on, 139,
+140, 149, 150, 154; type of female beauty invented by, 140; dies in
+Watts-Dunton's arms, 150; illness of, anecdote concerning, 153; Watts
+Dunton's elegy on, 157; Cheyne Walk green dining-room, description, 161;
+Watts-Dunton's description of his house, 165-69; his wit and humour, 169;
+'Spirit of the Rainbow,' illustration to, 276; references to, 9, 10, 27,
+35, 262, 263; Watts-Dunton's reminiscences of:--at Marston symposia; the
+Gallic Parnassians; he advises the bardlings to write in French, 136;
+interest in work of others; reciting a bardling's sonnet, 137; wishes
+Watts to write his life, 140; letter to author about Rossetti, 140;
+Charles Augustus Howell (De Castro), Rossetti's opinion of, 142; portrait
+as D'Arcy in 'Aylwin'; not idealized; ethics of portraiture of friend;
+amazing detraction of, 144; too much written about him, 145; relations
+with his wife; Val Prinsep's testimony, 145; 'lovable--most lovable,'
+145; a pious fraud, 153; alleged rudeness to Princess Louise, 155;
+attitude to a disgraced friend, 210; the dishonest critic; 'By God, if I
+met such a man,' 211; a generous gift, 267; dislike of publicity; abashed
+by an 'Athenaeum' paragraph, 263
+
+Rossetti, W. M., 149, 154
+
+Rossetti, Mrs. W. M., 275
+
+Rous, 232
+
+Ruskin, 340
+
+Russell, Lord John, 295
+
+Ryan, W. P., 378
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+'Salaman' and 'Absal' of Jami, 21
+
+Saltabadil, Febvre as, 129
+
+St. Aldegonde, Disraeli's 'softness of touch' in, 351
+
+St. Francis of Assisi, 38
+
+St. Ives, birthplace of Watts-Dunton, 26; old Saxon name for, 35; George
+Dyer and, 40-41; printing press at, 40; Union Book Club, Watts-Dunton's
+speech at, 42; History of, 51; East Anglian sympathies of, 78
+
+St. Peter's Port, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 268
+
+Sainte-Beuve, Watts-Dunton compared to, 2; 399
+
+Sais, 331
+
+Samary, Jeanne, as Maguelonne, 129
+
+Sampson, Mr., Romany scholar, 367
+
+Sancho Panza, 382
+
+Sandys, Frederick, 267
+
+Sark, Swinburne and Watts-Dunton's visit to, 269
+
+'Saturday Review,' 34, 245, 257, 382
+
+Savile Club, 202
+
+Schiller, 221
+
+'Scholar Gypsy, The,' 108
+
+Schopenhauer, 247
+
+Science, man's good genius, 47-9
+
+Science, Watts-Dunton's speech on, 42-9
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, his humour, 195; tribute to, 220, 221, 307; 346;
+'softness of touch' in portraiture, 350; 367
+
+Scott, William Bell, anecdote of, 184
+
+'Scullion, Sterne's fat, foolish,' 249
+
+'Semaine Litteraire, La,' 347, 374, 380
+
+Sex, witchery of, 391
+
+'Shadow on the Window Blind,' 164: first printed in Mackenzie Bell's
+Study of Watts-Dunton in 'Poets and Poetry of the Century,' q.v.
+
+Shakespeare, spirit of wonder in, 16; 126; 186; 293; richness in style,
+328; 355; 382; 394
+
+'Shales mare,' 106
+
+Shandys, the two, 350
+
+Sharp, William, 29; scenery and atmosphere of 'Aylwin,' 72, 75; 276, 284;
+influence of Watts-Dunton on Rossetti, 399
+
+Shaw, Byam, 'Brynhild on Sigurd's Funeral Pyre,' illustration of, 366
+
+Shaw, Dr. Norton, intimacy with J. K. Watts, 52
+
+Shelley, 157; 293; 'Epipsychidion,' 419
+
+Shintoism, 14
+
+Shirley: see Skelton, Sir John
+
+Shirley Essays, 202
+
+'Shirley,' Watts-Dunton's criticism of, 365
+
+Shorter, Clement, his connection with Slepe Hall, 35
+
+Sibilant, in poetry, 286-88
+
+Siddons, Mrs., 131
+
+Sidestrand, visit of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton to, 269
+
+Sidney, Sir Philip, 365
+
+'Sigurd,' 173, 176; 366
+
+'Silas Marner,' public-house scene in, 387
+
+Sinfi Lovell, see Lovell
+
+Skeleton, the Golden, 422 et seq.
+
+Skelton, Sir John, his 'Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae,' Watts-Dunton's
+review of, 190-201; Rossetti 'Reminiscences,' 202; Watts-Dunton's
+friendship with, 202
+
+Sleaford, Lord, 353
+
+Slepe Hall, Clement Shorter's connection with, 35; story told in
+connection with, 36
+
+Sly, Christopher, 388
+
+Smalley, G. W., his article on Whistler, 302
+
+Smart set, 353
+
+'Smart slating,' Watts-Dunton on, 207
+
+Smetham, James: see Wilderspin
+
+Smith, Alexander, 44; Herbert Spencer and, 213
+
+Smith, Gypsy, 351
+
+Smith, Sydney, 43, 196
+
+Smollett, 304, 367
+
+Snowdon, 315
+
+Socrates, 45
+
+'Softness of touch' in fiction, 350
+
+Sonnet, The, Essay on, reference to, 205
+
+Sophocles, 323, 394
+
+Sothern, 118
+
+Spencer, Herbert, Alexander Smith and, 'Athenaeum' anecdote, 212-14
+
+Spenser, Edmund, Spirit of Wonder in poetry of, 16
+
+Spirit of Place, 26
+
+'Spirit of the Sunrise,' 450
+
+Sport, 65-67; definition of, 68
+
+Sports, field, 65
+
+Squeezing of books, 191
+
+Stael, Madame de, her struggle against tradition of 18th century, 18
+
+Stanley, Fenella, 362, 363
+
+Stead, William Morris and, 181
+
+Stedman, Clarence, his remarks on 'The Coming of Love,' 4, 10, 301
+
+Sterne, his humour, 246-55; his indecencies, 253; his 'softness of
+touch,' 350; 367, 387
+
+Sternhold, 229
+
+Stevenson, R. L., 10; Watts-Dunton's criticism of 'Kidnapped' and 'Dr.
+Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' 215-21; letter from, 216
+
+Stillman, Mrs., Rossetti's picture painted from, 172
+
+Stone, E. D., "Christmas at the 'Mermaid,'" Latin translation by, 147
+
+'Stories after Nature,' Wells's, 53-55
+
+Stourbridge Fair, 65
+
+Strand, the symposium in the, 185
+
+Stratford-on-Avon, Watts-Dunton's poems on, 31, 32; see also "Christmas
+at the 'Mermaid,'" 423
+
+Stress in poetry, 344
+
+Strong, Prof. A. S., references to, 1, 5, 132; article on 'The Coming of
+Love,' 444; 445
+
+Style, le, c'est la race, 233
+
+Style, the Great, 234
+
+Sufism, 449; in 'Aylwin,' 454
+
+'Suicide Club, The,' 220
+
+Sully, Professor, contributor to 'Examiner,' 184
+
+Sunrise, Poet of the, 398
+
+Sunsets, in the Fens, 62
+
+Surtees, 367
+
+Swallow Falls, 315
+
+Swift, his humour the opposite of Sterne's, 250
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, acquaintance with J. O. Watts, 58;
+intercourse and friendship with Watts-Dunton, 89, 268-74; 'Jubilee
+Greeting' dedicated to, 273; partly identified with Percy Aylwin, see
+description of his swimming, 268; 279-84; at Theatre Francaise, 124;
+dedications to Watts-Dunton, 271, 272; offensive newspaper caricatures
+of, 263; championship of Meredith, 284; on 'Tom Jones,' 'Waverley,'
+'Aylwin,' 346; on 'Aylwin,' 363; references to, 1, 12, 27, 117, 123, 139,
+147, 157, 170, 180, 181, 184, 328, 413; ANECDOTES OF:--chambers in Great
+James St., 89; never a playgoer, 117; life at 'The Pines,' 262 et seq.;
+the great Swinburne myth, 263; the American lady journalist, 264; an
+imaginary interview, 265; an unlovely bard; painfully 'afflated'; method
+of composition; 'stamping with both feet,' 265; friendship with Watts
+began in 1872, 268; inseparable since; housemates at 'The Pines'; visit
+to Channel Islands; swimming in Petit Bot Bay, 268; Sark; 'Orion' Horne's
+bravado challenge, 269; visits Paris for Jubilee of 'Le Roi s'Amuse,'
+269; swimming at Sidestrand; meets Grant Allen, 269; visits Eastbourne,
+Lancing, Isle of Wight, Cromer, 270; visits to Jowett; Jowett's
+admiration of Watts, 279; Balliol dinner parties, 280; at the Bodleian,
+282; great novels which are popular, 273
+
+Swinburne, Miss, 299
+
+Symons, Arthur, 'Coming of Love,' article on, 257
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Table-Talk, Watts-Dunton's, Rossetti on, 183
+
+Tabley, Lord de, 277
+
+Taine, 232
+
+'Tale of Beowulf,' 173
+
+Taliesin, 'Song of the Wind,' 313
+
+Talk on Waterloo Bridge,' 'A, 116
+
+Tarno Rye, 351, 391
+
+Tate and Brady, 232
+
+Telepathy, dogs and, 82-6
+
+Temple, Lord and Lady Mount, 270
+
+Tenderness, in English hero, 365
+
+'Tennyson, Alfred, Birthday Address,' 32
+
+'Tennyson, Alfred,' sonnet to, 286
+
+Tennyson, Lord, 4, 32, 144; dishonest criticism, opinion of, 211;
+Watts-Dunton's friendship with, 285; Watts-Dunton's criticism of and
+essays on, 289, 290; 'Memoir,' Watts-Dunton's contribution, 291;
+anecdotes concerning, 287-89; 'The Princess,' defects of, 290; portraits
+of, Watts-Dunton's articles on, 290; 'Maud,' compared with Rhona Boswell,
+413; WATTS-DUNTON AND:--sympathy between him and, 285; sonnet on
+birthday, 286; meeting at garden party; open invitation to Aldworth and
+Farringford; his ear not defective, 286; sensibility to delicate metrical
+nuances, 287; challenges a sibilant in a sonnet, 287; 'scent' better than
+'scents,' 287; his morbid modesty, 288; a poet is not born to the purple,
+288; reading 'Becket' in summer-house; desired free criticism, 288;
+alleged rudeness to women, 289; detraction of, 289; could not invent a
+story, 289; the nucleus of 'Maud,' 289
+
+Terry, Ellen, Watts-Dunton's friendship with, 117, 121; sonnet on, 122
+
+Thackeray, 295, 305, 325, 328; 'softness of touch,' 350-53
+
+Theatre Francaise, Swinburne and Watts at, 123-29
+
+Thicket, The, St. Ives, 30, 32
+
+Thoreau, teaching of, 69; love of wind, 371; 442
+
+Thuthe, the, Kisagotami and, 455-6
+
+'Thyrsis,' 157
+
+Tieck, 19
+
+'Times,' 89, 245, 301, 370
+
+'Toast to Omar Khayyam,' 79
+
+Tooke, Horne, 39
+
+'T. P.'s Weekly,' 89
+
+'Torquemada,' motif of, 125
+
+Tourneur, Cyril, 'spirit of wonder' in, 16
+
+Traill, H. D., his criticism, 207; Watts-Dunton's meeting with, 243;
+review of his 'Sterne,' 246-55; his letter to MacColl, 243; meets him at
+dinner, 243; picturesque appearance; boyish lisp; calls at 'The Pines';
+interesting figures at his gatherings; 'a man of genius'; asks Watts to
+write for 'Literature'; his geniality as an editor, 244; why 'Literature'
+failed, 245
+
+'Travailleurs de la Mer, Les,' 370
+
+'Treasure Island,' 220
+
+Triboulet, Got as, 124-29
+
+'Tribute, The,' 289
+
+'Tristram of Lyonesse,' dedicated to Watts-Dunton, 272
+
+Troubadours and Trouveres, The, 204
+
+Trus'hul, the Romany Cross, 101
+
+Turner, 299
+
+Twentieth Century, Cosmogony of, 373
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Ukko, the Sky God, 73
+
+'Under the Greenwood Tree,' rustic humour of, 186
+
+'Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery,' 53
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Vacquerie, Auguste, 'Le Roi s'Amuse' produced by, 123
+
+Vanbrugh, Irene, 131
+
+Vanbrugh, Watts-Dunton's article on, 258
+
+Vance, the Great, 182
+
+Vaughan, his 'Hours with the Mystics,' 58
+
+'Veiled Queen, The,' 57, 229, 374, 375
+
+Vernunft of Man, the Bible and the, 230
+
+Verse, English, accent in, 344
+
+Vezin, Hermann, 118; Mrs., 131
+
+Victoria, Queen, Watts-Dunton's tribute to, 274
+
+Villain in Hugo's novels, 125; 'Aylwin,' a novel without a, 349
+
+Villon, 388
+
+Virgil, wonder in, 15; 208
+
+Vision, absolute and relative, 354; in 'Aylwin,' 357 et seq.
+
+'Vita Nuova,' 412
+
+'Volsunga Saga,' 176
+
+Voltaire, 259
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Wagner, 89, 412
+
+Wahrheit and Dichtung, in 'Aylwin,' 50
+
+Wales, Watts-Dunton's sympathy with, 312; popularity of 'Aylwin' in, 314;
+descriptions of, 315, 317, 318; Welsh accent, 319-20
+
+Wales, Prince of, anecdote of, 67
+
+Warburton, 69
+
+'Wassail Chorus,' 438
+
+Waterloo Bridge, Borrow on, 115
+
+'Water of the Wondrous Isles,' 181
+
+Watson, William, Grant Allen on, 207
+
+Watts, A. E., Watts-Dunton's brother, articled as solicitor, 72; Cyril
+Aylwin, identification with, 87; his humour, 88; death, 89
+
+Watts, G. F., Rossetti's portrait by, 161
+
+Watts, James Orlando, Watts-Dunton's uncle, identity of character with
+Philip Aylwin, 51, 56-60
+
+Watts, J. K., Watts-Dunton's father, account of, 50, 53; scientific
+celebrities, intimacy with, 50-53; scientific reputation of, 52
+
+Watts, William K., description of, 160
+
+WATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE, memoirs of, 4; monograph on, reply to author's
+suggestion to write, 6, 7; plan of same, 9; description of, 278-9;
+Boyhood:--birthplace, 26; Cromwell's elder wine, 37; Cambridge
+school-days, 37, 66; St. Ives Union Book Club, speech delivered at, 15,
+42-49; family of Dunton, 53; father and son--the double brain, 53-5; as
+child critic, 55; interest in sport and athletics, 65; Deerfoot and the
+Prince of Wales, 67; period of Nature study, 67; articled to solicitor,
+72; Life in London:--solicitor's practice, 88; life at Sydenham, 89;
+London Society, 89, 353; interest in slum-life, 92; connection with
+theatrical world, 117-35; Characteristics:--Love of animals, 38, 39,
+82-85; interest in poor, 92-4; conversational powers, 183; genius for
+friendship, 443; indifference to fame, 3, 183, 204; habit of early
+rising, 279; influence, 1, 2, 22, 452; dual personality, 322, 356; music,
+love of, 38, 89; natural science, proficiency in, 38; optimism, 9, 457;
+identification with Henry Aylwin, 356; Romany blood in, 361;
+Writings:--'Academy,' invitation to write for, 187; 'Athenaeum,'
+invitation to write for, 188, 202; contributions to, 1, 55, 170, 173,
+189-201, 204; his treatise on Sonnet--Dr. Karl Leutzner on, 205; critical
+principles, 205; 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' articles, 1, 2, 4, 6, 205,
+256, 257-8; difference between prose and poetry, 339; 340, 393; poetic
+style, 323; 'Examiner' articles, 184; see also Minto; Critical
+Work:--Swinburne's opinion of, 1; character of, 8, 205-208; critical and
+creative work, relation between, 203; critical and imaginative work
+interwoven, 370; School of Criticism founded, 4; Essays on Tennyson, 290;
+Lowell on, 399; Dramatic Criticism:--119, 120, 121, 123-30; Poetry:--2,
+4, 15, 393-441; Rossetti on, 399; Prose Writings:--character of, 2,
+321-25, 327-92, 350, 453; richness of style, 329, 330, 331, 333, 336;
+unity of his writings, 445; American friends of, 295-311; Gypsies,
+description of first meeting with, 61; Friends, Reminiscences
+of:--APPLETON, PROF: at Bell Scott's and Rossetti's; Hegel on the brain;
+asks Watts to write for 'Academy,' 187; wants him to pith the German
+transcendentalists in two columns, 188; in a rage; Watts explains why he
+has gone into enemy's camp, 201; a Philistine, 202; BLACK, WILLIAM:
+resemblance to Watts, 185; meeting at Justin McCarthy's, 186; Watts
+mistaken for Black, 186; BORROW, GEORGE: his first meeting with, 95; his
+shyness, 99; Watts attacks it; tries Bamfylde Moore Carew; then tries
+beer, the British bruiser, philology, Ambrose Gwinett, etc., 100; a
+stroll in Richmond Park; visit to 'Bald-faced Stag'; Jerry Abershaw's
+sword; his gigantic green umbrella, 101-102; tries Whittlesea Mere;
+Borrow's surprise; vipers of Norman Cross; Romanies and vipers, 104;
+disclaims taint of printers' ink; 'Who are you?' 105; an East Midlander;
+the Shales Mare, 106; Cromer sea best for swimming; rainbow reflected in
+Ouse and Norfolk sand, 106; goes to a gypsy camp; talks about Matthew
+Arnold's 'Scholar-Gypsy,' 108; resolves to try it on gypsy woman; watches
+hawk and magpie, 109; meets Perpinia Boswell; 'the popalated gypsy of
+Codling Gap,' 110; Rhona Boswell, girl of the dragon flies; the sick
+chavo; forbids Pep to smoke, 112; description of Rhona, 113; the Devil's
+Needles; reads Glanville's story; Rhona bored by Arnold, 114; hatred of
+tobacco, 115; last sight of Borrow on Waterloo Bridge, 115; sonnet on,
+116; BROWN, MADOX: 10, 12, 35, 136, 170; anecdote about portrait of, 274;
+BROWN, OLIVER MADOX: his novel, 274-6; BROWNING: Watts chaffs him in
+'Athenaeum'; chided by Swinburne, 222; 223-27; sees him at Royal Academy
+private view; Lowell advises him to slip away; bets he will be more
+cordial than ever; Lowell astonished at his magnanimity, 222-23; the
+review in question, 'Ferishtah's Fancies,' 223-26; GROOME, FRANK: a
+luncheon at 'The Pines,' 79; 'Old Fitz'; patted on the head by, 79; see
+also 50, 68, 72, 285, 351, 364, 367, 372, 420; HAKE, GORDON: Introduces
+Borrow, 95; see 'New Day'; physician to Rossetti and to Lady Ripon,
+90-91; HARTE, BRET: Watts's estimate of, 302-11; histrionic gifts, 302;
+meeting with; drive round London music halls, 303; 'Holborn,' 'Oxford';
+Evans's supper-rooms; Paddy Green; meets him again at breakfast; a fine
+actor lost, 303; LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL: meets him at dinner, 295; he
+attacks England; directs diatribe at Watts; he retorts; a verbal duel,
+296; recognition; cites Watts's first article, 298; his anglophobia turns
+into anglomania, 299; likes English climate, 300; MARSTON, WESTLAND:
+symposia at Chalk Farm; famous actors and actresses, 117; table talk
+about 'The Bells' and 'Rip Van Winkle,' 119; on staff of 'Examiner,' 184;
+the sub-Swinburnians at the Marston mornings; the divine Theophile; the
+Gallic Parnassus, 136; MEREDITH, GEORGE: 6, 283, 284, 325, 328, 417, 418;
+MINTO, PROF.: neighbours in Danes Inn; editing 'Examiner'; secures Watts;
+first article appears; Bell Scott's party; Scott wants to know name of
+new writer, 184; Watts slates himself, 185; Minto's Monday evening
+symposia, 185; MORRIS, WILLIAM: Marston mornings at Chalk Farm; 'nosey
+Latin,' 136; Wednesday evenings at Danes Inn; Swinburne, Watts, Marston,
+Madox Brown and Morris, 170; at Kelmscott, 170; passion for angling, 171;
+snoring of young owls, 171; causeries at Kelmscott, 173; the only reviews
+he read, 173; the little carpetless room, 175; writes 750 lines in twelve
+hours, 176; the crib on his desk, 177; offers to bring out an
+edition-de-luxe of Watts's poems; gets subscribers; a magnificent
+royalty, 179; presentation copies; extravagant generosity; 'All right,
+old chap'; 'Ned Jones and I,' 180; 'Algernon pay 10 for a book of mine!'
+181; disgusted with Stead, the music-hall singer and dancer; 'damned
+tomfoolery,' 181; ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL: at Marston symposia; the
+Gallic Parnassians; he advises the bardlings to write in French, 136;
+interest in work of others; reciting a bardling's sonnet, 137; wishes
+Watts to write his life, 140; Swinburne on Watts's influence over, 139;
+letter to author about Rossetti, 140; Charles Augustus Howell (De
+Castro), Rossetti's opinion of, 142; portrait as D'Arcy in 'Aylwin'; not
+idealized; ethics of portraiture of friend; amazing detraction of, 144;
+too much written about him, 145; relations with his wife; Val Prinsep's
+testimony, 145; 'lovable, most lovable,' 145; dies in Watts's arms, 150;
+a pious fraud, 153; alleged rudeness to Princess Louise, 155; described
+in 'Aylwin,' 165-9; his wit and humour, 169; attitude to a disgraced
+friend, 210; the dishonest critic; 'By God, if I met such a man,' 211; a
+generous gift, 267; dislike of publicity; abashed by an 'Athenaeum'
+paragraph, 263; SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES: James Orlando Watts and, 58;
+chambers in Great James Street, 89; life at 'The Pines,' 262 et seq.;
+offensive newspaper caricature of, 263; the great Swinburne myth, 263;
+the American lady journalist, 264; an imaginary interview, 265; an
+unlovely bard; painfully 'afflated'; method of composition; 'stamping
+with both feet,' 265; friendship with Watts began in 1872, 268;
+inseparable since; housemates at 'The Pines'; visit to Channel Islands;
+swimming in Petit Bot Bay, 268; Sark; 'Orion' Horne's bravado challenge,
+269; visits Paris for Jubilee of 'Le Roi s'Amuse,' 269; swimming at
+Sidestrand; meets Grant Allen, 269; visits Eastbourne, Lancing, Isle of
+Wight, Cromer, 270; sonnet to Watts, 271; dedicates 'Tristram of
+Lyonesse' to Watts, 272; also Collected Edition of Poems, 272; visits to
+Jowett; Jowett's admiration of Watts, 279; Balliol dinner parties, 280;
+at the Bodleian, 282; great novels which are popular, 273; champions
+Meredith, 284; TENNYSON, ALFRED: friendship with, 285; sympathy between
+him and, 285; sonnet on birthday, 286; meeting at garden party; open
+invitation to Aldworth and Farringford; his ear not defective, 286;
+sensibility to delicate metrical nuances, 287; challenges a sibilant in a
+sonnet, 287; 'scent' better than 'scents,' 287; his morbid modesty, 288;
+a poet is not born to the purple, 288; reading 'Becket' in summer-house;
+desired free criticism, 288; alleged rudeness to women, 289; detraction
+of, 289; could not invent a story, 289; the nucleus of 'Maud,' 289; his
+articles on portraits of, 290; TRAILL, H. D.: reviews his 'Sterne'; his
+letter to MacColl, 243; meets him at dinner, 243; picturesque appearance;
+boyish lisp; calls at 'The Pines'; interesting figures at his gatherings;
+'a man of genius'; asks Watts to write for 'Literature'; his geniality as
+an editor, 244; why 'Literature' failed, 245; WHISTLER, J. MCNEILL: Cyril
+Aylwin not a portrait of, 88; anecdotes of De Castro, 142; neighbour of
+Rossetti, 156; close friendship with Watts, 301; hostility to Royal
+Academy, 301-2; his first lithographs, 301-2; engaged with Watts on
+'Piccadilly,' 301, 353; 'To Theodore Watts, the Worldling,' 353
+
+Watts-Dunton, Theodore, Swinburne's sonnets to, 271, 272
+
+'Waverley,' Swinburne on; its new dramatic method; cause of its success;
+imitated by Dumas, 346
+
+Way, T., Whistler's first lithographs, 301, 302
+
+Webster, 'Spirit of Wonder' in, 16
+
+'Well at the World's End,' 173
+
+Wells, Charles, 53-55
+
+'Westminster Abbey, In' (Burial of Tennyson), 291
+
+'W. H. Mr.,' 424-26
+
+'What the Silent Voices said,' 291
+
+Whewell, intimacy with J. K. Watts, 52
+
+Whistler, J. McNeill:--Cyril Aylwin not a portrait of, 88; anecdotes of
+De Castro, 142; neighbour of Rossetti, 156; close friendship with Watts,
+301; his first lithographs, 301-2; hostility to Royal Academy, 301-2;
+engaged with Watts on 'Piccadilly,' 301, 353; 'To Theodore Watts, the
+Worldling,' 353
+
+White, Gilbert, 50
+
+Whiteing, Richard, 364
+
+'White Ship, The,' 153, 154
+
+Whittlesea Mere, 104
+
+Whyte-Melville, 352, 367
+
+Wilderspin, 331: see Smetham, James
+
+Wilkie, his realism, humour of, 387
+
+Williams,' Scholar,' contributor to 'Examiner,' 184
+
+Williams, Smith, 275
+
+'William Wilson,' 219
+
+Willis, Parker, 264
+
+Wilson, Professor, Watts-Dunton's essay on his 'Noctes Ambrosianae,'
+190-201
+
+Wimbledon Common, Borrow and, 101; Watts-Dunton and, 279
+
+Wind, love of the, Thoreau's, 370, 371
+
+Women, as actresses, 131; heroic type of, 365
+
+Wonder: see Renascence of Wonder; old and new, 15; Bible as great book
+of, 228; place in race development, 14
+
+'Wood-Haunter's Dream, The,' 276
+
+Wordsworth, William, definition of language, 39; his ideal John Bull, 224
+
+Word-twisting, 325, 327
+
+Work, heresy of, 68
+
+'World,' The, Rossetti's letter to, 155
+
+'World's Classics,' edition of 'Aylwin' in, 374
+
+'Wuthering Heights,' 342, 345
+
+Wynne, Winifred, character of, 314, 315, 363; love of the wind, 371
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Yarmouth, 106
+
+Yorickism, 250
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Zoroaster, heresy of work, 68; definition of poetry, 398
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+     Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  'Studies in Prose.'
+
+{2}  'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' vol. x., p. 581.
+
+{34}  The meanings of the gypsy words are:
+
+baval                              wind
+chaw                              grass
+chirikels                         birds
+dukkerin'               fortune-telling
+farmin' ryes                    farmers
+gals                              girls
+ghyllie                            song
+ghyllie                            song
+gorgie                    Gentile woman
+gorgies                        Gentiles
+kairs                             homes
+kas                                 hay
+kas-kairin'                   haymaking
+kem                                 sun
+lennor                           summer
+puv                               field
+Romany chies                gypsy girls
+Shoshus                           hares
+
+{60}  'Notes and Queries,' August 2, 1902.
+
+{73a}  Among the gypsies of all countries the happiest possible
+'Dukkeripen' (i.e. prophetic symbol of Natura Mystica) is a hand-shaped
+golden cloud floating in the sky.  It is singular that the same idea is
+found among races entirely disconnected with them--the Finns, for
+instance, with whom Ukko, the 'sky god,' or 'angel of the sunrise,' was
+called the 'golden king' and 'leader of the clouds,' and his Golden Hand
+was more powerful than all the army of Death.  The 'Golden Hand' is
+sometimes called the Lover's Dukkeripen.
+
+{73b}  Good-luck.
+
+{74}  Child.
+
+{76}  Pretty mouth.
+
+{82}  A famous swimming dog belonging to the writer.
+
+{88}  'Notes and Queries,' June 7, 1902.
+
+{112}  Bosom.
+
+{139}  I think I am not far wrong in saying that he whom Mr. Benson heard
+make this remark was a more illustrious poet than even D. G. Rossetti,
+the greatest poet indeed of the latter half of the nineteenth century,
+the author of 'Erechtheus' and 'Atalanta in Calydon.'
+
+{147}  As Mr. Swinburne has pronounced Mr. Stone's translation to be in
+itself so fine as to be almost a work of genius, I will quote it here:--
+
+                                  Greek
+
+    Felix, qui potuit gentem illustrare canendo,
+    quique decus patriae claris virtutibus addit
+    succurritque laboranti, tutamque periclis
+    eruit, hostilesque minas avertit acerbo
+    dente lacessitae; bene, quicquid fecerit audax,
+    explevisse iuvat: metam tenet ille quadrigis,
+    praemia victor habet, quamvis tuba vivida famae
+    ignoret titulos, vel si flammante sagitta
+    oppugnet Livor quam mens sibi muniit arcem.
+    quod si fata mihi virtutis gaudia tantae
+    invideant, nec fas Anglorum extendere fines
+    latius, et nitidae primordia libertatis,
+    Anglia cui praecepit iter, cantare poetae;
+    si numeris laudare meam vel marte Parentem
+    non mihi contingat, nec Divom adsumere vires
+    atque inconcessos sibi vindicet alter honores,
+    dignior ille mihi frater, quem iure saluto--
+    illum divino praestantem numine amabo.
+
+{157}  Philip Bourke Marston.
+
+{286}  According to a Mohammedan tradition, the mountains of Kaf are
+entirely composed of gems, whose reflected splendours colour the sky.
+
+{291}  'Tennyson: A Memoir,' by his son (1897), vol. ii. p. 479.
+
+{339}  "Tanto e vero, che 'Aylwin' fu cominciato a scrivere in versi, e
+mutato di forma soltanto quando l'intreccio, in certo modo prendendo la
+mano al poeta, rese necessario un genere di sua natura meno astretto alla
+rappresentazione di scorcio; e che l'Avvento d'amore, ove le circostanze
+di fatto sono condensate in modo da dar pieno risalto al motivo
+filosofico, riesce una cosa, a mio credere, piu perfetta."
+
+{383}  'Notes and Queries,' June 7, 1902.
+
+{403a}  Mostly pronounced 'mullo,' but sometimes in the East Midlands
+'mollo.'
+
+{403b}  Mostly pronounced 'kaulo,' but sometimes in the East Midlands
+'kollo.'
+
+{404}  The gypsies are great observers of the cuckoo, and call certain
+spring winds 'cuckoo storms,' because they bring over the cuckoo earlier
+than usual.
+
+{427}  'England is a country that can never be conquered while the
+Sovereign thereof has the command of the sea.'--RALEIGH.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON***
+
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