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Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic
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 smiteWith Drake’s strong stroke in battles yet to be?And while the winds have powerShall England lose the dowerShe 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: —
GwynnWith towering sterns, with golden stemsThat 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 comeTo coil and boil till every mastIs 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-switchO’er ocean-graves.The glimmering crown of Scotland’s headThey 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 peakBurn o’er the ships with brows of prophecy;Yea, makes that silent countenance speakAbove 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 moreThe righteous sea!’The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted in anthologies: —
WASSAIL CHORUSChorusChristmas 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 launchesShafts of gold through leafless branches,Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanchesField and farm and lane.ChorusChristmas 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 weaveThrough the boughs a lace of rime,While the bells of Christmas EveFling for Will the Stratford-chimeO’er the river-flags embossedRich with flowery runes of frost —O’er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed —Strains of olden time.ChorusChristmas 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 groundWhere our Shakspeare’s feet are set.There smiles Christmas, holly-crownedWith his blithest coronet:Friendship’s face he loveth well:’Tis a countenance whose spellSheds a balm o’er every mead and dellWhere we used to fret.ChorusChristmas knows a merry, merry place,Where he goes with fondest face,Brightest eye, brightest hair:Tell the Mermaid where is that one placeWhere?HeywoodMore than all the pictures, Ben,Winter weaves by wood or stream,Christmas loves our London, whenRise thy clouds of wassail-steam —Clouds like these, that, curling, takeForms of faces gone, and wakeMany a lay from lips we loved, and makeLondon like a dream.ChorusChristmas knows a merry, merry place,Where he goes with fondest face,Brightest eye, brightest hair:Tell the Mermaid where is that one placeWhere?Ben JonsonLove’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 singTill the berried branches swing,Till our song make all the Mermaid ring —Yea, from rush to roof.FinaleChristmas loves this merry, merry place: —Christmas saith with fondest faceBrightest 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 woundWith 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 grantIs 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 meIts 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 triesTo kiss a dream, stretches her arms and criesTo Heaven for help – “Plead on; such pure love-breath,Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of DeathThat, 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 mawsThe 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 drawsA childless father from an empty land.”“Nay,” saith a Voice, “the wind of Azraeel’s wingsA 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 springsAnd 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 sevenSeem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.And morning says, ‘Love hath such godlike mightThat 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 leavenCould 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 showRhona, 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 spiteThat 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 retainHer body’s image pictured in thy brain;The flowers above her weave the only shroudThine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloudRhona! 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!