Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

“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.” 18 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 painResolved on noble things, and strove to speak,As when a great thought strikes along the brainAnd 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.