Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

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.’

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 fireRise fighting with the reek and wintry blast;She smiles, though earth and sky are overcastWith shadow of wings that shudder of Asgard’s ire;She weeps, but not because the gods conspireTo 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 stoopBefore man’s courage, naked, bare of hope,

Standing against all Hell and Death and Doom.

Rhona Boswell, too, under all her playful humour, is of this strain, as we see in that sonnet on ‘Kissing the Maybuds’ in ‘The Coming of Love’ (given on page 406 of this book).

As Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ are in many ways of special interest, I will for a moment digress from the main current of my argument, and say a few words about it. Of course as the gypsies figure so largely in this story, there were very few writers competent to review it from the Romany point of view. Leland was living when it appeared, but he was residing on the Continent; moreover, at his age, and engrossed as he was, it was not likely that he would undertake to review it. There was another Romany scholar, spoken of with enthusiasm by Groome – I allude to Mr. Sampson, of Liverpool, who has since edited Borrow’s ‘Romany Rye’ for Messrs. Methuen, and who is said to know more of Welsh Romany than any Englishman ever knew before. At that time, however, he was almost unknown. Finally, there was Groome himself, whose articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ had proclaimed him to be the greatest living gypsologist. The editor of the ‘Bookman,’ being anxious to get a review of the book from the most competent writer he could find, secured Groome himself. I can give only a few sentences from the review. Groome, it will be seen, does not miss the opportunity of flicking in his usual satirical manner the omniscience of some popular novelists: —

“Novelty and truth,” he says, “are ‘Aylwin’s’ chief characteristics, a rare combination nowadays. Our older novelists – those at least still held in remembrance – wrote only of what they knew, or of what they had painfully mastered. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot belong to the foremost rank of these; for types of the second or the third may stand Marryat, Lever, Charles Reade, James Grant, Surtees, Whyte Melville, and Wilkie Collins. But now we have changed all that; the maximum of achievement seldom rises above school board nescience. With a few exceptions (one could count them on the ten fingers) our present-day novelists seem to write only about things of which they clearly know nothing. One of the most popular lays the scene of a story in Paris: the Seine there is tidal, it rolls a murdered corpse upwards. In another work by her a gambler shoots himself in a cab. ‘I trust,’ cries a friend who has heard the shot, ‘he has missed.’ ‘No,’ says a second friend, ‘he was a dead shot.’ Mr. X. writes a realistic novel about betting. It is crammed with weights, acceptances, and all the rest of it; but, alas! on an early page a servant girl wins 12s. 6d. at 7 to 1. Mrs. Y. takes her heroine to a Scottish deer-forest: it is full of primeval oaks. Mrs. Z. sends her hero out deerstalking. Following a hill-range, he sights a stag upon the opposite height, fires at it, and kills his benefactor, who is strolling below in the glen. And Mr. Ampersand in his masterpiece shows up the littleness of the Establishment: his ritualistic church presents the inconceivable conjunction of the Ten Commandments and a gorgeous rood-screen. I have drawn upon memory for these six examples, but subscribers to Mudie’s should readily recognize the books I mean; they have sold by thousands on thousands. ‘Aylwin’ is not such as these. There is much in it of the country, of open-air life, of mountain scenery, of artistic fellowship, of Gypsydom; it might be called the novel of the two Bohemias.”

Many readers have expressed the desire to know something about the prototypes of Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. The following words from the Introduction to the 20th edition (called the ‘Snowdon Edition’) may therefore be read with interest: —

“Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years – during the time when he lived in Hereford Square. When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out an edition of ‘Lavengro,’ I prefaced that delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Borrow’s gypsy characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most remarkable ‘Romany Chi’ that had ever been met with in the part of East Anglia known to Borrow and myself – Sinfi Lovell. I described her playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl Isopel Berners.

Since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ I have received very many letters from English and American readers inquiring whether ‘the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to “Lavengro” is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of “Aylwin,” and also whether ‘the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the same as the Rhona of “The Coming of Love?”’ The evidence of the reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the appearance of Rhona’s first letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ where the poem was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very ill, – near her death indeed, – urging me to tell her whether Rhona’s love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the Sinfi of ‘Aylwin’ and the Sinfi described in my introduction to ‘Lavengro’ are one and the same character – except that the story of the child Sinfi’s weeping for the ‘poor dead Gorgios’ in the churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the gypsies, not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded to in the now famous sonnet describing ‘the walking lord of gypsy lore,’ Borrow; by his most intimate friend, Dr. Gordon Hake.

Now that so many of the gryengroes (horse-dealers), who form the aristocracy of the Romany race, have left England for America, it is natural enough that to some readers of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love,’ my pictures of Romany life seem a little idealized. The ‘Times,’ in a kindly notice of ‘The Coming of Love,’ said that the kind of gypsies there depicted are a very interesting people, ‘unless the author has flattered them unduly.’ Those who best knew the gypsy women of that period will be the first to aver that I have not flattered them unduly.”

It is Winifred who shares, not only with Henry Aylwin, but also with the author himself, that love of the wind which he revealed in the ‘Athenæum’ many years before ‘Aylwin’ was published. I may quote this passage in praise of the wind as an example of the way in which his imaginative work and his critical work are often interwoven: —

“There is no surer test of genuine nature instinct than this. Anybody can love sunshine. No people had less of the nature instinct than the Romans, but they could enjoy the sun; they even took their solaria or sun-baths, and gave them to their children. And, if it may be said that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be said of the French! None but a born child of the tent could ever have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written in ‘Les Travailleurs de la Mer,’ as though they were the ministers of Ahriman. ‘From Ormuzd, not from Ahriman, ye come.’ And here, indeed, is the difference between the two nationalities. Love of the wind has made England what she is; dread of the wind has greatly contributed to make France what she is. The winds are the breathings of the Great Mother. Under the ‘olden spell’ of dumbness, nature can yet speak to us by her winds. It is they that express her every mood, and, if her mood is rough at times, her heart is kind. This is why the true child of the open-air – never mind how much he may suffer from the wind – loves it, loves it as much when it comes and ‘takes the ruffian billows by the top’ to the peril of his life, as when it comes from the sweet South. In the wind’s most boisterous moods, such as those so splendidly depicted by Dana in the doubling of Cape Horn, there is an exhilaration, a fierce delight, in struggling with it. It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes about the wind, and that which the wind so loves – the snow.”

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.