Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

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.”