Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

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Title: Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

Author: James Douglas

Release date: January 6, 2013 [eBook #41792]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41792

Credits: Transcribed from the 1904 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON: POET, NOVELIST, CRITIC ***

credit

Transcribed from the 1904 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

[Picture: Theodore Watts-Dunton, from a painting by Miss H. B. Norris]

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

POET NOVELIST CRITIC

BY
JAMES DOUGLAS

[Picture: Decorative graphic, Natura Benigna]

WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

* * * * *

LONDON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

27 PATERNOSTER ROW

1904

SYNOPSIS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER 11
CHAPTER II
COWSLIP COUNTRY 26
CHAPTER III
THE CRITIC IN THE BUD 40
CHAPTER IV
CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM 50
CHAPTER V
EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES 61
CHAPTER VI
SPORT AND WORK 65
CHAPTER VII
EAST ANGLIA 72
CHAPTER VIII
LONDON 87
CHAPTER IX
GEORGE BORROW 95
CHAPTER X
THE ACTED DRAMA 117
CHAPTER XI
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 138
CHAPTER XII
WILLIAM MORRIS 170
CHAPTER XIII
THE 'EXAMINER' 183
CHAPTER XIV
THE 'ATHENAEUM' 190
CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT BOOK OF WONDER 228
CHAPTER XVI
A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR 242
CHAPTER XVII
'THE LIFE POETIC' 262
CHAPTER XVIII
AMERICAN FRIENDS: LOWELL, BRET HARTE, AND OTHERS 295
CHAPTER XIX
WALES 312
CHAPTER XX
IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE 321
CHAPTER XXI
THE METHODS OF PROSE FICTION 345
CHAPTER XXII
A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES 363
CHAPTER XXIII
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION 372
CHAPTER XXIV
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR 382
CHAPTER XXV
GORGIOS AND ROMANIES 389
CHAPTER XXVI
'THE COMING OF LOVE' 393
CHAPTER XXVIII
"CHRISTMAS AT THE 'MERMAID'" 422
CHAPTER XXVIII
CONCLUSION 442

ILLUSTRATIONS

Theodore Watts-Dunton. From a painting by Miss H. Frontispiece
B. Norris
Reverie. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at 'The Pines' 1
The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts. (From a Water 28
Colour by Fraser at 'The Pines.')
'The Thicket,' St. Ives. (From a Water Colour by 32
Fraser at 'The Pines.')
Slepe Hall: Cromwell's Supposed Residence at St. 36
Ives. (From an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')
'Evening Dreams with the Poets.' (From an Oil 68
Painting at 'The Pines.')
A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Painted and 92
Carved Cabinet
A Letter Box on the Broads. (From an Oil Painting 114
at 'The Pines.')
Pandora. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at 'The Pines' 140
'The Green Dining Room,' 16 Cheyne Walk. (From a 161
Painting by Dunn, at 'The Pines.')
One of the Carved Mirrors at 'The Pines,' 162
decorated with Dunn's copy of the lost Rossetti
Frescoes at the Oxford Union
Kelmscott Manor. (From a Water Colour by Miss May 170
Morris.)
'The Pines.' (From a Drawing by Herbert Railton.) 262
A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Lacquer 266
Cabinet
Summer at 'The Pines'--I 268
A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Chinese Divan 270
described in 'Aylwin'
Summer at 'The Pines'--II 274
'Picture for a Story.' (Face and Instrument 276
designed by D. G. Rossetti, background by Dunn.)
Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd 312
Moel Siabod and the River Lledr 314
Snowdon and Glaslyn 318
Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff. (From 342
an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')
Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at 364
'The Pines.')
'John the Pilgrim.' (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.) 416

NATURA BENIGNA

_What power is this_? _what witchery wins my feet_
_To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow_,
_All silent as the emerald gulfs below_,
_Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat_?
_What thrill of earth and heaven_--_most wild_, _most sweet_--
_What answering pulse that all the senses know_,
_Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow_
_Where_, _far away_, _the skies and mountains meet_?
_Mother_, '_tis I reborn_: _I know thee well_:
_That throb I know and all it prophesies_,
_O Mother and Queen_, _beneath the olden spell_
_Of silence_, _gazing from thy hills and skies_!
_Dumb Mother_, _struggling with the years to tell_
_The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes_.

[Picture: Reverie. Crayon by D. G. Rossetti at The Pines]

Introduction

'It was necessary for Thomas Hood still to do one thing ere the wide
circle and profound depth of his genius were to the full
acknowledged: that one thing was--to die.'--DOUGLAS JERROLD.

ALTHOUGH in the inner circle of English letters this study of a living
writer will need no apology, it may be well to explain for the general
reader the reasons which moved me to undertake it.

Some time ago a distinguished scholar, the late S. Arthur Strong,
Librarian of the House of Lords, was asked what had been the chief source
of his education. He replied: "Cambridge, scholastically, and
Watts-Dunton's articles in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and the
'Athenaeum' from the purely literary point of view. I have been a reader
of them for many years, and it would be difficult for me to say what I
should have been without them." Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has said that
he bought the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' simply to possess one
article--Mr. Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry. There are many other men
of letters who would give similar testimony. With regard to his critical
work, Mr. Swinburne in one of his essays, speaking of the treatise on
Poetry, describes Mr. Watts-Dunton as 'the first critic of our time,
perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age,' {1} a judgment
which, according to the article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's
'Encyclopaedia,' Rossetti endorsed. In this same article it is further
said:--

"He came to exercise a most important influence on the art and
culture of the day; but although he has written enough to fill many
volumes--in the 'Examiner,' the 'Athenaeum' (since 1876), the
'Nineteenth Century,' the 'Fortnightly Review,' etc.--he has let year
after year go by without his collecting his essays, which, always
dealing with first principles, have ceased to be really anonymous,
and are quoted by the press both in England and in Germany as his.
But, having wrapped up his talents in a weekly review, he is only
ephemerally known to the general public, except for the sonnets and
other poems that, from the 'Athenaeum,' etc., have found their way
into anthologies, and for the articles on poetic subjects that he has
contributed to the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 'Chambers's
Encyclopaedia,' etc. The chief note of his poetry--much of it
written in youth--is its individuality, the source of its inspiration
Nature and himself. For he who of all men has most influenced his
brother poets has himself remained least influenced by them. So,
too, his prose writings--literary mainly, but ranging also over
folk-lore, ethnology, and science generally--are marked as much by
their independence and originality as by their suggestiveness,
harmony, incisive vigour, and depth and breadth of insight. They
have made him a force in literature to which only Sainte-Beuve, not
Jeffrey, is a parallel." {2}

These citations from students of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, written before
his theory of the 'Renascence of Wonder' was exemplified in 'Aylwin' and
'The Coming of Love,' show, I think, that this book would have had a
right to exist even if his critical writings had been collected into
volumes; but as this collection has never been made, and I believe never
will be made by the author, I feel that to do what I am now doing is to
render the reading public a real service. For many years he has been
urged by his friends to collect his critical articles, but although
several men of letters have offered to relieve him of that task, he has
remained obdurate.

Speaking for myself, I scarcely remember the time when I was not an eager
student of Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings. Like most boys born with the
itch for writing, I began to spill ink on paper in my third lustre. The
fermentation of the soul which drove me to write a dreadful elegy,
modelled upon 'Lycidas,' on the death of an indulgent aunt, also drove me
to welter in drowsy critical journals. By some humour of chance I
stumbled upon the 'Athenaeum,' and there I found week by week writing
that made me tingle with the rapture of discovery. The personal magic of
some unknown wizard led me into realms of gold and kingdoms of romance.
I used to count the days till the 'Athenaeum' appeared in my Irish home,
and I spent my scanty pocket money in binding the piled numbers into
ponderous tomes. Well I remember the advent of the old, white-bearded
Ulster book-binder, bearing my precious volumes: even now I can smell the
pungent odour of the damp paste and glue. In those days I was a solitary
bookworm, living far from London, and I vainly tried to discover the name
of the magician who was carrying me into so 'many goodly states and
kingdoms.' With boyish audacity I wrote to the editor of the
'Athenaeum,' begging him to disclose the secret; and I am sure my naive
appeal provoked a smile in Took's Court. But although the editor was
dumb, I exulted in the meagre apparition of my initials, 'J. D.,' under
the solemn rubric, 'To Correspondents.'

It was by collating certain signed sonnets and signed articles with the
unsigned critical essays that I at last discovered the name of my hero,
Theodore Watts. Of course, the sonnets set me sonneteering, and when my
execrable imitation of 'Australia's Mother' was printed in the 'Belfast
News-Letter' I felt like Byron when he woke up and found himself famous.
Afterwards, when I had plunged into the surf of literary London, I learnt
that the writer who had turned my boyhood into a romantic paradise was
well known in cultivated circles, but quite unknown outside them.

There was, indeed, no account of him in print. It was not till 1887 that
I found a brief but masterly memoir in 'Celebrities of the Century.' The
article concluded with the statement that in the 'Athenaeum' and in the
Ninth Edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' Mr. Watts-Dunton had
'founded a school of criticism which discarded conventional authority,
and sought to test all literary effects by the light of first principles
merely.' These words encouraged me, for they told me that as a boy I had
not been wrong in thinking that I had discovered a master and a guide in
literature. Then came the memoir of Philip Bourke Marston by the
American poetess, Louise Chandler Moulton, in which she described Mr.
Watts-Dunton as 'a poet whose noble work won for him the intimate
friendship of Rossetti and Browning and Lord Tennyson, and was the first
link in that chain of more than brotherly love which binds him to
Swinburne, his housemate at present and for many years past.' I also
came across Clarence Stedman's remarks upon the opening of 'The Coming of
Love,' 'Mother Carey's Chicken,' first printed in the 'Athenaeum.' He
was enthusiastic about the poet's perception of 'Nature's grander
aspects,' and spoke of his poetry as being 'quite independent of any bias
derived from the eminent poets with whom his life has been closely
associated.'

When afterwards I made his acquaintance, our intercourse led to the
formation of a friendship which has deepened my gratitude for the
spiritual and intellectual guidance I have found in his writings for
nearly twenty years. Owing to the popularity of 'The Coming of Love' and
of 'Aylwin'--which the late Lord Acton, in 'The Annals of Politics and
Culture,' placed at the head of the three most important books published
in 1898--Mr. Watts-Dunton's name is now familiar to every fairly educated
person. About few men living is there so much literary curiosity; and
this again is a reason for writing a book about him.

The idea of making an elaborate study of his work, however, did not come
to me until I received an invitation from Dr. Patrick, the editor of
Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' to write for that
publication an article on Mr. Watts-Dunton--an article which had been
allotted to Professor Strong, but which he had been obliged through
indisposition to abandon at the last moment. I undertook to do this.
But within the limited space at my command I was able only very briefly
to discuss his work as a poet. Soon afterwards I was invited by my
friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, to write a monograph upon Mr. Watts-Dunton
for Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, and, if I should see my way to do so, to
sound him on the subject. My only difficulty was in approaching Mr.
Watts-Dunton, for I knew how constantly he had been urged by the press to
collect his essays, and how persistently he had declined to do so.
Nevertheless, I wrote to him, telling him how gladly I should undertake
the task, and how sure I was that the book was called for. His answer
was so characteristic that I must give it here:--

"MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,--It must now be something like fifteen years
since Mr. John Lane, who was then compiling a bibliography of George
Meredith, asked me to consent to his compiling a bibliography of my
articles in the 'Athenaeum' and elsewhere, and although I
emphatically declined to sanction such a bibliography, he on several
occasions did me the honour to renew his request. I told him, as I
have told one or two other generous friends, that although I had put
into these articles the best criticism and the best thought at my
command, I considered them too formless to have other than an
ephemeral life. I must especially mention the name of Mr. Alfred
Nutt, who for years has been urging me to let him publish a selection
from my critical essays. I am really proud to record this, because
Mr. Nutt is not only an eminent publisher but an admirable scholar
and a man of astonishing accomplishments. I had for years, let me
confess, cherished the idea that some day I might be able to take my
various expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon
poetry, and mould them into a coherent and, perhaps, into a
harmonious whole. This alone would have satisfied me. But year by
year the body of critical writing from my pen has grown, and I felt
and feel more and more unequal to the task of grappling with such a
mass. To the last writer of eminence who gratified me by suggesting
a collection of these essays--Dr. Robertson Nicoll--I wrote, and
wrote it with entire candour, that in my opinion the view generally
taken of the value of them is too generous. Still, they are the
result of a good deal of reflection and not a little research,
especially those in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and I am not so
entirely without literary aspiration as not to regret that, years
ago, when the mass of material was more manageable, I neglected to
collect them and edit them myself. But the impulse to do this is now
gone. Owing to the quite unexpected popularity of 'The Coming of
Love' and of 'Aylwin,' my mind has been diverted from criticism, and
plunged into those much more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction
in which I used to revel long before. If you really think that a
selection of passages from the articles, and a critical examination
and estimate of the imaginative work would be of interest to any
considerable body of readers, I do not know why I should withhold my
consent. But I confess, judging from such work of your own as I have
seen, I find it difficult to believe that it is worth your while to
enter upon any such task.

I agree with you that it is difficult to see how you are to present
and expound the principles of criticism advanced in the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' the 'Athenaeum,' etc., without discussing
those two imaginative works the writing of which inspired the canons
and generalizations in the critical work--'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of
Love.' As regards 'Aylwin,' however, I cannot help wincing under the
thought that in these days when so much genius is at work in prose
fiction, your discussion will seem to give quite an undue prominence
to a writer who has published but one novel. This I confess does
disturb me somewhat, and I wish you to bear well in mind this aspect
of the matter before you seriously undertake the book. As to the
prose fiction of the present moment, I constantly stand amazed at its
wealth. If, however, you do touch upon 'Aylwin,' I hope you will
modify those generous--too generous--expressions of yours which, I
remember, you printed in a review of the book when it first
appeared."

After getting this sanction I set to work, and soon found that my chief
obstacle was the superabundance of material, which would fill several
folio volumes. But although it is undoubtedly 'a mighty maze,' it is
'not without a plan.' In a certain sense the vast number of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's generalizations upon literature, art, philosophy, and what
Emerson calls 'the conduct of life,' revolve round certain fixed
principles which have guided me in the selection I have made. I also
found that to understand these principles of romantic art, it was
necessary to make a thorough critical study of the romance, 'Aylwin,' and
of the book of poems, 'The Coming of Love.' I think I have made that
study, and that I have connected the critical system with the imaginative
work more thoroughly than has been done by any other writer, although the
work of Mr. Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been acutely
discussed, not only in England but also in France and in Italy.

The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as that of his
poetry and fiction. He poured into his criticism the intellectual and
imaginative force which other men pour into purely artistic channels, for
he made criticism a vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his
irony. His criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime. Their vitality
is not impaired by the impermanence of their texts. No critic has
surpassed his universality of range. Out of a full intellectual and
imaginative life he has evolved speculations which cut deep not only into
the fibre of modern thought but into the future of human development.
Great teachers have their day and their disciples. Mr. Watts-Dunton's
day and disciples belong to the young future whose dawn some of us
already descry. For, as Mr. Justin McCarthy wrote of 'Aylwin,' 'it is
inspired by the very spirit of youth,' and this is why so many of the
younger writers are beginning to accept him as their guide. Mr.
Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life which, I
think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the pessimists across
the history of the soul of man. That is the aspect of his work which
calls for the comprehension of the new generation. The old cosmogonies
are dead; here is the new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse
of wonder reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion
of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna which no
assaults of science can shake.

But, although the main object of this book is to focus, as it were, the
many scattered utterances of Mr. Watts-Dunton in prose and poetry upon
the great subject of the Renascence of Wonder, I have interspersed here
and there essays which do not touch upon this theme, and also excerpts
from those obituary notices of his friends which formed so fascinating a
part of his contributions to the 'Athenaeum.' For, of course, it was
necessary to give the charm of variety to the book. Rossetti used to
say, I believe, that there is one quality necessary in a poem which very
many poets are apt to ignore--the quality of being amusing. I have
always thought that there is great truth in this, and I have also thought
that the remark is applicable to prose no less than to poetry. This is
why I have occasionally enlivened these pages with extracts from his
picturesque monographs; indeed, I have done more than this. Not having
known Mr. Watts-Dunton's great contemporaries myself, I have looked about
me for the aid of certain others who did know them. I have not hesitated
to collect from various sources such facts and details connected with Mr.
Watts-Dunton and his friends as are necessarily beyond the scope of my
own experience and knowledge. Among these I must prominently mention one
to whom I have been specially indebted for reminiscences of Mr.
Watts-Dunton and his circle. This is Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, eldest son
of the 'parable poet,' a gentleman of much too modest and retiring a
disposition, who, from Mr. Watts-Dunton's first appearance in London
right onwards, was brought into intimate relations with himself, his
relatives, Rossetti, William Morris, Westland Marston, Philip Bourke
Marston, Madox Brown, George Borrow, Stevenson, Minto, and many others.
I have not only made free use of his articles, but I have had the
greatest aid from him in many other respects, and it is my bare duty to
express my gratitude to him for his services. I have also to thank the
editor of the 'Athenaeum' for cordially granting me permission to quote
so freely from its columns; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging
my debt to the many other publications from which I have drawn materials
for this book.

Chapter I
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER

"'The renascence of wonder,' to employ Mr. Watts-Dunton's appellation
for what he justly considers the most striking and significant
feature in the great romantic revival which has transformed
literature, is proclaimed by this very appellation not to be the
achievement of any one innovator, but a general reawakening of
mankind to a perception that there were more things in heaven and
earth than were dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy."--DR. R. GARNETT:
Monograph on Coleridge.

UNDOUBTEDLY the greatest philosophical generalization of our time is
expressed in the four words, 'The Renascence of Wonder.' They suggest
that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to Mr.
Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that set in
after the publication of Darwin's great book. This phrase, which I first
became familiar with in his 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' article on
Rossetti, seems really to have been used first in 'Aylwin.' The story
seems originally to have been called 'The Renascence of Wonder,' but the
title was abandoned because the writer believed that an un-suggestive
name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the practical
point of view. For the knowledge of this I am indebted to Mr. Hake, who
says:--

"During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in Great James Street,
several of his friends had chambers in the same street, and among
them were my late father, Dr. Gordon Hake--Rossetti's friend and
physician--Mr. Watts-Dunton and myself. Mr. Watts-Dunton, as is well
known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as a
writer. I have heard him tell scores of stories full of plot and
character that have never appeared in print. On a certain occasion
he was suffering from one of his periodical eye troubles that had
used occasionally to embarrass him. He had just been telling Mr.
Swinburne the plot of a suggested story, the motive of which was the
'renascence of wonder in art and poetry' depicting certain well-known
characters.

I offered to act as his amanuensis in writing the story, and did so,
with the occasional aid of my father and brothers. The story was
sent to the late F. W. Robinson, the novelist, then at the zenith of
his vogue, who declared that he 'saw a fortune in it,' and it was he
who advised the author to send it to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. As
far as I remember, the time occupied by the work was between five and
six months. When a large portion of it was in type it was read by
many friends,--among others by the late Madox Brown, who thought some
of the portraits too close, as the characters were then all living,
except one, the character who figures as Cyril. Although
unpublished, it was so well known that an article upon it appeared in
the 'Liverpool Mercury.' This was more than twenty years ago."

The important matter before us, however, is not when he first used this
phrase, which has now become a sort of literary shorthand to express a
wide and sweeping idea, but what it actually imports. Fortunately Mr.
Watts-Dunton has quite lately given us a luminous exposition of what the
words do precisely mean. Last year he wrote for that invaluable work,
Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' the Introduction to
volume iii., and no one can any longer say that there is any ambiguity in
this now famous phrase:--

"As the storm-wind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty
billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the
effect of the French Revolution. It was nothing less than a great
revived movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic
acceptance in all things, including literature and art. To this
revival the present writer, in the introduction to an imaginative
work dealing with this movement, has already, for convenience' sake,
and in default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of
Wonder. As was said on that occasion, 'The phrase, the Renascence of
Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing
man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious
life: the impulse of acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and
for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are--and the
impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.'
It would seem that something works as inevitably and as logically as
a physical law in the yearning which societies in a certain stage of
development show to get away, as far away as possible, from the
condition of the natural man; to get away from that despised
condition not only in material affairs, such as dress, domestic
arrangements and economies, but also in the fine arts and in
intellectual methods, till, having passed that inevitable stage, each
society is liable to suffer (even if it does not in some cases
actually suffer) a reaction, when nature and art are likely again to
take the place of convention and artifice. Anthropologists have
often asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark
womb of some remote semi-human brain, which, by first stirring,
lifting, and vitalizing other potential and latent faculties, gave
birth to man? Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a
vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder? But certainly it is not
rash, as regards the races of man, to affirm that the more
intelligent the race the less it is governed by the instinct of
acceptance, and the more it is governed by the instinct of wonder,
that instinct which leads to the movement of challenge. The
alternate action of the two great warring instincts is specially seen
just now in the Japanese. Here the instinct of challenge which
results in progress became active up to a certain point, and then
suddenly became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have
full play, and then everything became crystallized. Ages upon ages
of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were required
before the Mongolian savage was developed into the Japanese of the
period before the nature-worship of 'Shinto' had been assaulted by
dogmatic Buddhism. But by that time the instinct of challenge had
resulted in such a high state of civilization that acceptance set in
and there was an end, for the time being, of progress. There is no
room here to say even a few words upon other great revivals in past
times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian renascence of the
ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in philosophical
speculation, which had previously been arrested, was revived; when
the old sciences were revived; and when some modern sciences were
born. There are, of course, different kinds of wonder."

This passage has a peculiar interest for me, because I instinctively
compare it with the author's speech delivered at the St. Ives old Union
Book Club dinner when he was a boy. It shows the same wide vision, the
same sweep, and the same rush of eloquence. It is in view of this great
generalization that I have determined to quote that speech later.

The essay then goes on in a swift way to point out the different kinds of
wonder:--

"Primitive poetry is full of wonder--the naive and eager wonder of
the healthy child. It is this kind of wonder which makes the 'Iliad'
and the 'Odyssey' so delightful. The wonder of primitive poetry
passes as the primitive conditions of civilization pass; and then for
the most part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of
wonder--the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery of man's
life and the mystery of nature's theatre on which the human drama is
played--the wonder, in short, of AEschylus and Sophocles. And among
the Romans, Virgil, though living under the same kind of Augustan
acceptance in which Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, is
full of this latter kind of wonder. Among the English poets who
preceded the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed
there is no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he
can only be slightly touched upon. He stands at the head of those
who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the
wonder of the 'world at hand.' Of the poets whose wonder is of the
simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of
the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king. But
it is not the wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in
the following sentences. It is the spiritual wonder which in our
literature came afterwards. It is that kind of wonder which filled
the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Webster, of
Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the old ballads: it is that poetical
attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen
powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which
man finds himself entangled, dominate it. That this high temper
should have passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance
is quite inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction
of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract
from the Introduction to 'Aylwin.' Perhaps the difference between
the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian
on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better
understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective
periods."

Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and relative
humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type of absolute
humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in 'Aylwin.'

I will now quote a passage from an article in the 'Quarterly Review' on
William Morris by one of Morris's intimate friends:--

"The decorative renascence in England is but an expression of the
spirit of the pre-Raphaelite movement--a movement which has been
defined by the most eminent of living critics as the renascence of
the 'spirit of wonder' in poetry and art. So defined, it falls into
proper relationship with the continuous development of English
literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last century and
a half, and is no longer to be considered an isolated phenomenon
called into being by an erratic genius. The English Romantic school,
from its first inception with Chatterton, Macpherson, and the
publication of the Percy ballads, does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has
finely pointed out, aim merely at the revival of natural language; it
seeks rather to reach through art and the forgotten world of old
romance, that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of
which poets gain glimpses through

magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:--

"It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that
mysterious side of nature and man's life which to other painters of
his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the
wings of sport. It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity
as Dante's Dream, La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they
Met Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that
Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern
art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical
imitation of the facts of nature.

For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in
modern Europe, if it is not a mere passing mood, if it is really the
inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of
civilization (when the sanctions which have made and moulded society
are found to be not absolute and eternal, but relative, mundane,
ephemeral, and subject to the higher sanctions of unseen powers that
work behind 'the shows of things'), then perhaps one of the first
questions to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the
nineteenth century is, In what relation does he stand to the
newly-awakened spirit of romance? Had he a genuine and independent
sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over Europe
had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation, prosaic
acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic materialism? Or was his
apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence and awe the
result of artistic environment dictated to him by other and more
powerful and original souls around him? I do not say that the mere
fact of a painter's or poet's showing but an imperfect sympathy with
the Renascence of Wonder is sufficient to place him below a poet in
whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, because we should then be
driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti above our great
realistic painters, and we should be driven to place a poet like the
author of 'The Excursion' and 'The Prelude' beneath a poet like the
author of 'The Queen's Wake'; but we do say that, other things being
equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be
judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement which we
call the Renascence of Wonder--call it so because the word
romanticism never did express it even before it had been vulgarized
by French poets, dramatists, doctrinaires, and literary harlequins.

To struggle against the prim traditions of the eighteenth century,
the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types instead of
character, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Balzac, and Hugo
struggled, was well. But in studying Rossetti's works we reach the
very key of those 'high palaces of romance' which the English mind
had never, even in the eighteenth century, wholly forgotten, but
whose mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked. Not all the
romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with
their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood
of romance) could equal the romantic spirit expressed in a single
picture or drawing of Rossetti's, such, for instance, as Beata
Beatrix or Pandora.

For while the French romanticists--inspired by the theories (drawn
from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck, and Herder--cleverly
simulated the old romantic feeling, the 'beautifully devotional
feeling' which Holman Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it: he
was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded
the great renascence of materialism that he might have lived and
worked amidst the old masters. Hence, in point of design, so
original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in Lilith,
Hesterna Rosa, Michael Scott's Wooing, the Sea Spell, etc., we have
to turn to the sister art of poetry, where only we can find an
equally powerful artistic representation of the idea at the core of
the old romanticism--the idea of the evil forces of nature assailing
man through his sense of beauty. We must turn, we say, not to
art--not even to the old masters themselves--but to the most perfect
efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery--to such ballads as
'The Demon Lover,' to Coleridge's 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan,' to
Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' for parallels to Rossetti's most
characteristic designs."

These words about Coleridge recall to the students of Mr. Watts-Dunton's
work a splendid illustration of the true wonder of the great poetic
temper which he gives in the before-mentioned essay on The Renascence of
Wonder in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature':--

"Coleridge's 'Christabel,' 'The Ancient Mariner,' and 'Kubla Khan'
are, as regards the romantic spirit, above--and far above--any work
of any other English poet. Instances innumerable might be adduced
showing how his very nature was steeped in the fountain from which
the old balladists themselves drew, but in this brief and rapid
survey there is room to give only one. In the 'Conclusion' of the
first part of 'Christabel' he recapitulates and summarizes, in lines
that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in succinctness of
statement, the entire story of the bewitched maiden and her terrible
foe which had gone before:--

A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine--
Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill,
The night-birds all that hour were still.
But now they are jubilant anew,
From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!
Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!

Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the human
drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul of poetic
wonder. So great is the maleficent power of the beautiful witch that
a spell is thrown over all Nature. For an hour the very woods and
fells remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic consciousness of
her--

The night-birds all that hour were still.

When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare,
and 'the night-birds' are jubilant anew. This is the very highest
reach of poetic wonder--finer, if that be possible, than the
night-storm during the murder of Duncan."

And now let us turn again to the essay upon Rossetti from which I have
already quoted:--

"Although the idea at the heart of the highest romantic poetry
(allied perhaps to that apprehension of the warring of man's soul
with the appetites of the flesh which is the basis of the Christian
idea), may not belong exclusively to what we call the romantic temper
(the Greeks, and also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less
familiar with it, as we see in the 'Salaman' and 'Absal' of Jami),
yet it became a peculiarly romantic note, as is seen from the fact
that in the old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its
logical expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all
romantic art. But, in order to express this stupendous idea as fully
as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to adopt the
asceticism of the old masters? This is the question that Rossetti
asked himself, and answered by his own progress in art."

In the same article, Mr. Watts-Dunton discusses the crowning specimen of
Rossetti's romanticism before it had, as it were, gone to seed and passed
into pure mysticism, the grand design, 'Pandora,' of which he possesses
by far the noblest version:--

"In it is seen at its highest Rossetti's unique faculty of treating
classical legend in the true romantic spirit. The grand and sombre
beauty of Pandora's face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep
blue-grey eyes as she tries in vain to re-close the fatal box from
which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves
as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with
agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest
romantic mood."

It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction of this
masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too grateful. The
influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton's teachings is seen in the fact that the
idea of the Renascence of Wonder has become expanded by theological
writers and divines in order to include within its scope subjects
connected with religion. Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened
its ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander White's
'Appreciation' of Bishop Butler. He quotes one of the Logia discovered
by the explorers of the Egypt Fund:--'Let not him that seeketh cease from
his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he
shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have
rest.' He then points out that Bishop Butler was 'one of the first to
share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of religion.'

And now I must quote a passage alluding to the generalization upon
absolute and relative humour which I shall give later when discussing the
humour of Mrs. Gudgeon. I shall not be able in these remarks to dwell
upon Mr. Watts-Dunton as a humourist, but the extracts will speak for
themselves. Writing of the great social Pyramid of the Augustan age, Mr.
Watts-Dunton says:--

"This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the symmetry which Blackstone
so much admired in the English constitution and its laws; and when,
afterwards, the American colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid
of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model. At the base--patient
as the tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony--was the
people, born to be the base and born for nothing else. Resting on
this foundation were the middle classes in their various strata, each
stratum sharply marked off from the others. Then above these was the
strictly genteel class, the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in
dress if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of
right. Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the
monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the sacred
structure save that a little--a very little--above him sat God, the
suzerain to whom the prayers even of the monarch himself were
addressed. The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done a daring
thing, and an original thing, by striking off the apex of this
pyramid, and it might reasonably have been expected that the building
itself would collapse and crumble away. But it did nothing of the
kind. It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off--a structure to
serve afterwards as a model of the American and French pyramids, both
of which, though aspiring to be original structures, are really built
on exactly the same scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour as that
upon which the pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built.
Then came the Restoration: the apex was restored: the structure was
again complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever, stronger than
ever.

With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic
movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural
side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be
described realistically. Yet we must not suppose that in the
eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations,
without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty
of gazing honestly in her face. She does not work in that way. In
the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a
great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. In the
period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will
give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the
greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen. In the time of
Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a
diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable
insight and intellectual breadth that his generalizations cover not
only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual
limbs of so complex an epoch as the twentieth century."

Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour is in prose
fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got into romantic poetry,
as he himself understood romantic poetry; for he did not class ballads
like Kinmont Willie, where there are such superb touches of humour, among
the romantic ballads. And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked,
his poems, like Morris's, are entirely devoid of humour, although both
the poets were humourists. But the readers of Rhona's Letters in 'The
Coming of Love' will admit that a delicious humour can be imported into
the highest romantic poetry.

With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of
English Literature,' I must conclude my remarks upon the keynote of all
Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, whether imaginative or critical:--

"The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have
ended with Milton. For Milton, although born only twenty-three years
before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs
properly to the period of romantic poetry. He has no relation
whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and
which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain
contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by
Ben Jonson. From the moment when Augustanism really began--in the
latter decades of the seventeenth century--the periwig poetry of
Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true
poets. All the periwig poets became too 'polite' to be natural. As
acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the
most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom
everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of
Cathay."

One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the most
powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in Rossetti's
poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in 'Aylwin,' but in 'The Coming
of Love.' But in order fully to understand Mr. Watts-Dunton's work it is
necessary to know something of his life-history, and thanks to the aid I
have received from certain of his friends, and also to a little
topographical work, the 'History of St. Ives,' by Mr. Herbert E. Norris,
F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long before he
was known in London.

Chapter II
COWSLIP COUNTRY

SOME time ago I was dipping into the 'official pictorial guides' of those
three great trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the
Great Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St.
Ives--not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town in
Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell spent those
five years of meditation upon which his after life was nourished. In the
Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon these words: 'At Slepe Hall dwelt
the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little
Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace of Mr.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the English sonnet and
judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of poetry and art are familiar
to lovers of our national literature.' 'Well,' I thought, when I found
similar remarks in the other two guides, 'here at least is one case in
which a prophet has honour in his own country.' This set me musing over
a subject which had often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the
whimsical workings of the Spirit of Place. To a poet, what are the
advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a microcosm
like St. Ives? If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet were as great
as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne, or as that of his dead
friend, Rossetti, I should not have been surprised to find the place of
his birth thus associated with his name. But whether or not Rossetti was
right in saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton 'had sought obscurity as other
poets seek fame,' it is certain that until quite lately he neglected to
claim his proper place among his peers. Doubtless, as the 'Journal des
Debats' has pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in
subject and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique
quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo through
the world, there is one respect in which they were less lucky than their
friend. They were born in the macrocosm of London, where the Spirit of
Place has so much to attend to that his memory can find but a small
corner even for the author of 'The Blessed Damozel,' or for the author of
'Atalanta in Calydon.'

Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law
repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country--Buttercup Land, as
the Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good
luck. Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with
Rhona Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess of
the D'Urbervilles. For the poet born in a microcosm becomes identified
with it in the public eye, whereas the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom
associated with his birthplace.

To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater advantage
in being born in a microcosm. He sees the drama of life from a point of
view entirely different from that of the novelist born in the macrocosm.
The human microbe, or, as Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human
cheese-mite in the macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other
cheese-mite on the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe
or every other cheese-mite in the round.

Mr. Watts-Dunton's work is saturated with memories of the Ouse. Cowper
had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who first
flung the rainbow of romance over the river and over the sweet meadows of
Cowslip Land, through which it flows. In these lines he has described a
sunset on the Ouse:--

More mellow falls the light and still more mellow
Around the boat, as we two glide along
'Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,
The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.
She knows the nightingales of 'Portobello';
Love makes her know each bird! In all that throng
No voice seems like another: soul is song,
And never nightingale was like its fellow;
For, whether born in breast of Love's own bird,
Singing its passion in those islet bowers
Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers
The rosy river's glowing arms engird,
Or born in human souls--twin souls like ours--
Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.

[Picture: The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts. (From a Water Colour by
Fraser at 'The Pines.')]

Now, will it be believed that this lovely river--so famous too among
English anglers for its roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, and gudgeon--has
been libelled? Yes, it has been libelled, and libelled by no less a
person than Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath
the reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:--

"There is, as far as I know, nothing like the Ouse elsewhere in
England. I do not mean that our river surpasses or even equals in
picturesqueness such rivers as the Wye, the Severn, the Thames, but
that its beauty is unique. There is not to be seen anywhere else so
wide and stately a stream moving so slowly and yet so clearly.
Consequently there is no other river which reflects with such beauty
the scenery of the clouds floating overhead. This, I think, is owing
to the stream moving over a bottom which is both flat and gravelly.
When Carlyle spoke of the Ouse dragging in a half-stagnant way under
a coating of floating oils, he showed 'how vivid were his perceptive
faculties and also how untrustworthy.' I have made a good deal of
enquiry into the matter of Carlyle's visit to St. Ives, and have
learnt that, having spent some time exploring Ely Cathedral in search
of mementoes of Cromwell, he rode on to St. Ives, and spent about an
hour there before proceeding on his journey. Among the objects at
which he gave a hasty glance was the river, covered from the bridge
to the Holmes by one of those enormous fleets of barges which were
frequently to be seen at that time, and it was from the newly tarred
keels of this fleet of barges that came the oily exudation which
Carlyle, in his ignorance of the physical sciences and his contempt
for them, believed to arise from a greasy river-bottom. And to this
mistake the world is indebted for this description of the Ouse, which
has been slavishly followed by all subsequent writers on Cromwell.
This is what makes strangers, walking along the tow-path of
Hemingford meadow, express so much surprise when, instead of seeing
the oily scum they expected, they see a broad mirror as clear as
glass, whose iridescence is caused by the reflection of the clouds
overhead and by the gold and white water lilies on the surface of the
stream."

If the beauty of the Ouse inspired Mr. Norris to praise it so eloquently
in prose, we need not wonder at the pictorial fascination of what
Rossetti styled in a letter to a friend 'Watts's magnificent star
sonnet':--

The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears,
And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
We rowed--we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
An angel's, yet with woman's dearer wiles;
But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.

What shaped those shadows like another boat
Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
We wept--we kissed--while starry fingers wrote,
And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.

According to Mr. Sharp, Rossetti pronounced this sonnet to be the finest
of all the versions of the Doppelganger idea, and for many years he
seriously purposed to render it in art. It is easy to understand why
Rossetti never carried out his intention, for the pictorial magic of the
sonnet is so powerful that even the greatest of all romantic painters
could hardly have rendered it on canvas. Poetry can suggest to the
imagination deeper mysteries than the subtlest romantic painting.

No sonnet has been more frequently localized--erroneously localized than
this. It is often supposed to depict the Thames above Kew, but Mr.
Norris says that 'every one familiar with Hemingford Meadow will see that
it describes the Ouse backwater near Porto Bello, where the author as a
young man was constantly seen on summer evenings listening from a canoe
to the blackcaps and nightingales of the Thicket.'

That excellent critic, Mr. Earl Hodgson, the editor of Dr. Gordon Hake's
'New Day,' seems to think that the 'lily-isles' are on the Thames at
Kelmscott, while other writers have frequently localized these
'lily-isles' on the Avon at Stratford. But, no doubt, Mr. Norris is
right in placing them on the Ouse.

This, however, gives me a good opportunity of saying a few words about
Mr. Watts-Dunton's love of the Avon. The sacred old town of
Stratford-on-Avon has always been a favourite haunt of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's. No poet of our time has shown a greater love of our
English rivers, but he seems to love the Avon even more passionately than
the Ouse. He cannot describe the soft sands of Petit Bot Bay in Guernsey
without bringing in an allusion to 'Avon's sacred silt.' It was at
Stratford-on-Avon that he wrote several of his poems, notably the two
sonnets which appeared first in the 'Athenaeum,' and afterwards in the
little volume, 'Jubilee Greetings at Spithead to the Men of Greater
Britain.' They are entitled 'The Breath of Avon: To English-speaking
Pilgrims on Shakspeare's Birthday':--

Whate'er of woe the Dark may hide in womb
For England, mother of kings of battle and song--
Rapine, or racial hate's mysterious wrong,
Blizzard of Chance, or fiery dart of Doom--
Let breath of Avon, rich of meadow-bloom,
Bind her to that great daughter sever'd long--
To near and far-off children young and strong--
With fetters woven of Avon's flower perfume.
Welcome, ye English-speaking pilgrims, ye
Whose hands around the world are join'd by him,
Who make his speech the language of the sea,
Till winds of Ocean waft from rim to rim
The Breath of Avon: let this great day be
A Feast of Race no power shall ever dim.

From where the steeds of Earth's twin oceans toss
Their manes along Columbia's chariot-way;
From where Australia's long blue billows play;
From where the morn, quenching the Southern Cross,
Startling the frigate-bird and albatross
Asleep in air, breaks over Table Bay--
Come hither, pilgrims, where these rushes sway
'Tween grassy banks of Avon soft as moss!
For, if ye found the breath of Ocean sweet,
Sweeter is Avon's earthy, flowery smell,
Distill'd from roots that feel the coming spell
Of May, who bids all flowers that lov'd him meet
In meadows that, remembering Shakspeare's feet,
Hold still a dream of music where they fell.

It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr. Watts-Dunton
wrote the cantata, 'Christmas at the Mermaid,' a poem in which breathes
the very atmosphere of Shakespeare's town. There are no poetical
descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the
descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.

[Picture: 'The Thicket,' St. Ives. (From a Water Colour by Fraser at
'The Pines.')]

* * * * *

A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes called, 'The
Green Country,' is Hemingford Meadow, adjoining St. Ives. It is a level
tract of land on the banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of
alluvium from the overflowings of the river. In summer it is clothed
with gay flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as
a skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is a
famous skating centre. On the opposite side of the meadow is The
Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely picture. This, no doubt, is
the scene described in one of Mr. Watts-Dunton's birthday addresses to
Tennyson:--

Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.
There through the branches of the glittering trees
The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze
Sends forth methinks a thrill--a conscious thrill
That tells yon meadows by the steaming rill--
Where, o'er the clover waiting for the bees,
The mist shines round the cattle to their knees--
'Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!'

The meadow leads to what the 'oldest rustic inhabitant' calls the 'First
Hemingford,' or 'Hemingford Grey.' The imagination of this same 'oldest
inhabitant' used to go even beyond the First Hemingford to the Second
Hemingford, and then of course came Ultima Thule! The meadow has quite a
wide fame among those students of nature who love English grasses in
their endless varieties. Owing to the richness of the soil, the
luxuriant growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in
England. For years the two Hemingfords have been the favourite haunt of
a group of landscape painters the chief of whom are the brothers Fraser,
two of whose water-colours are reproduced in this book.

* * * * *

Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more advantage
than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through Huntingdonshire into
East Anglia. It was not, however, near St. Ives, but in another somewhat
distant part of Cowslip Country that the gypsies depicted in 'The Coming
of Love' took an active part in haymaking. But alas! in these times of
mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer hope to see
such a picture as that painted in the now famous gypsy haymaking song
which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth of Rhona Boswell. Moreover,
the prosperous gryengroes depicted by Borrow and by the author of 'The
Coming of Love' have now entirely vanished from the scene. The present
generation knows them not. But it is impossible for the student of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's poetry to ramble along any part of Cowslip Country, with
the fragrance of newly-made hay in his nostrils, without recalling this
chant, which I have the kind permission of the editor of the 'Saturday
Review' (April 19, 1902) to quote:--

Make the kas while the kem says, 'Make it!' {34}
Shinin' there on meadow an' grove,
Sayin, 'You Romany chies, you take it,
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
Singin' the ghyllie the while you shake it
To lennor and love!'

Hark, the sharpenin' scythes that tingle!
See they come, the farmin' ryes!
'Leave the dell,' they say, 'an' pingle!
Never a gorgie, married or single,
Can toss the kas in dell or dingle
Like Romany chies.'
Make the kas while the kem says 'Make it!'

Bees are a-buzzin' in chaw an' clover
Stealin' the honey from sperrits o' morn,
Shoshus leap in puv an' cover,
Doves are a-cooin' like lover to lover,
Larks are awake an' a-warblin' over
Their kairs in the corn.
Make the kas while the kem says 'Make it!'

Smell the kas on the baval blowin'!
What is that the gorgies say?
Never a garden rose a-glowin',
Never a meadow flower a-growin',
Can match the smell from a Rington mowin'
Of new made hay.

All along the river reaches
'Cheep, cheep, chee!'--from osier an' sedge;
'Cuckoo, cuckoo!' rings from the beeches;
Every chirikel's song beseeches
Ryes to larn what lennor teaches
From copse an' hedge.
Make the kas while the kem says 'Make it!'

Lennor sets 'em singin' an' pairin',
Chirikels all in tree an' grass,
Farmers say, 'Them gals are darin',
Sometimes dukkerin', sometimes snarin';
But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin','
Toss the kas!

Make the kas while the kem says, 'Make it!'
Shinin' there on meadow an' grove,
Sayin', 'You Romany chies, you take it,
Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,
Singin' the ghyllie the while you shake it
To lennor and love!'

Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was Slepe, and
that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a farmer for five years
in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the late forties. When Mr.
Watts-Dunton's friend, Madox Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the
scenery for his famous picture, 'Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,' he could
present only an imaginary farm.

Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being born in a
microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing stories full of local
colour and character which, according to friends of D. G. Rossetti, would
keep the poet-painter up half the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr.
Hake in his account of the origin of 'Aylwin' which I have already given.
I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe Hall which I have heard
Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would certainly make a good nucleus for
a short story. It is connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement
Shorter, in some reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes:
"My mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns by
inheritance some freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe
Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed. At Slepe Hall, a
picturesque building, she went to school in girlhood. She remembers Mr.
Watts-Dunton, the author of 'Aylwin,' who was also born at St. Ives, as a
pretty little boy then unknown to fame."

[Picture: Slepe Hall: Cromwell's Supposed Residence at St. Ives. (From
an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')]

When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they
sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in
building lots. It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell
was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older
house whose cellars remained intact. This was, of course, a tremendous
event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the
schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to
watch the workmen in their task of demolition. In the early stages of
this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was
centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found,
whence Oliver Cromwell's ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his
terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks
about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds. But no such
secret chamber could be found. When at length the work had proceeded so
far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure
was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact,
Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it
was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives,
that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the
world--

Imposteur a la Mecque et prophete a Medine.

Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at
the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that,
before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to
St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel
friends, in Slepe Hall cellars. No treasure turned up, but what was
found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once
christened 'Cromwell's wine' by the local humourist of the town, who was
also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much
interest as the boys in the exploration. The workmen, of course, at once
began knocking off the bottles' necks and drinking the wine, and were
soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a
teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to
take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days
that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell's wine and perhaps imbibed some of
the Cromwellian spirit and pluck. Consequently the young urchins carried
off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called 'Oliver's
Tree,' and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink. The
wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to
have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous--elder
wine. Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was,
he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell's
elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, 'I was never even
excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being
drunk on Oliver Cromwell's elder-wine.' The wine was probably about a
century old.

I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve
was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time
than is usual. He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat
elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly
biology, and also art and music. As has been said in the notice of him
in 'Poets and Poetry of the Century,' he is one of the few contemporary
poets with a scientific knowledge of music. Owing to his father's
passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this
accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his
writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the
lower animals.

Upon the subject of "the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase,
'the dumb animals,'" Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often
been eloquent about 'those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St.
Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful
animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe
the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry
like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could
direct it to trace out any given name in the company.'

"Of course," he says, "the 'lower animals' are no more dumb than we
are. With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape
from isolation--to get as close as may be to some other conscious
thing--which is a great factor of progress. With them, as with us,
each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others
around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless
accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what
these signs and sounds shall be. Those among us who have gone at all
underneath conventional thought and conventional expression--those
who have penetrated underneath conventional feeling--know that
neither thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all. The
voice cannot do it, as we see by comparing one language with another.
Wordsworth calls language the incarnation of thought. But the mere
fact of there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this.
If there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream
of, the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd. Soul
cannot communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when
you can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a 'lower
animal,' interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with
them as it is with men. Nay, with some temperaments and in some
moods, the communication is far, far closer. 'When I am assailed
with heavy tribulation,' said Luther, 'I rush out among my pigs
rather than remain alone by myself.' And there is no creature that
does not at some points sympathize with man. People have laughed at
Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed
upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used
to lavish his endearments. Neither I nor my companion had a pet
passion for leeches. Erskine probably knew leeches better than we,
for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of
which they know nothing. Like most dog lovers, we had no special
love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge. 'I wish
women would purr when they are pleased,' said Horne Tooke to Rogers
once."

Chapter III
THE CRITIC IN THE BUD

ONE of my special weaknesses is my delight in forgotten records of the
nooks of old England and 'ould Ireland'; I have a propensity for
'dawdling and dandering' among them whenever the occasion arises, and I
am yielding to it here.

Besides the interesting history of St. Ives from which I have been
compelled to quote so liberally, Mr. Norris has written a series of
brochures upon the surrounding villages. One of these, called 'St. Ives
and the Printing Press,' has greatly interested me, for it reveals the
wealth of the material for topographical literature which in the rural
districts lies ready for the picking up. I am tempted to quote from
this, for it shows how strong since Cromwell's time the temper which
produced Cromwell has remained. During the time when at Cambridge George
Dyer and his associates, William Frend, Fellow of Jesus, and John Hammond
of Fenstanton, Fellow of Queen's, revolted against the discipline and the
doctrine of the Church of England, St. Ives was the very place where the
Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed. The house whence
issued these fulminations was the 'Old House' in Crown Street, now pulled
down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton's father, having
remained during all this time a printing office. Mr. Norris gives a very
picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the
house, with its pointed roof, 'king posts' and panelling, reminding one
of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices. Mr. Norris also
tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the 'Crown Inn,' that
William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear
the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens. According to
Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John
Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton's father
when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor. A
curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer
addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the
eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to
Lamb, and inspired some of Elia's most delightful touches of humour.
This poem of Dyer's opens thus:--

Though much I love th' AEolian lyre,
Whose varying sounds beguil'd my youthful day,
And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray
In fabled groves, among th' Aonian choir:
Yet more on native fields, thro' milder skies,
Nature's mysterious harmonies delight:
There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,
What is the moon's pale orb that cheer'd the lonesome night?
I cannot leave thee, classic ground,
Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;
Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:
And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.
No purple Venus round my Hammond's bow'r,
No blue-ey'd graces, wanton mirth diffuse,
The king of gods here rains no golden show'r,
Nor have these lips e'er sipt Castilian dews.

At the 'Old House' in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer's time,
if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at
this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his
boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general. Filled
with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that
boyish utterance. It interests me much, because I seem to see in it
adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I
hope to enrich these pages. I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking
advantage of a lucky accident--the accident that a member of Mr.
Watts-Dunton's family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown
newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported. In 1854, 'W. Theodore
Watts,' as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be
himself a member--if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just
left it--on account of his father's great local reputation as a man of
learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the
toast, 'Science.' In the 'Cambridge Chronicle' of that date the
proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given
to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by
the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely
improvized. The subject which he discussed was 'The Influence of Science
upon Modern Civilization':--

"It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical
lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs
straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches. Now, of
all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most
hopeful one for humanity is physical science--that branch of the tree
which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to
bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present
wondrous state of development. I am aware that the assertion that
Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by
many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person
young and inexperienced as myself. It is heterodox; it clashes, for
instance, with the venerable superstition of 'the wisdom of the
ancients'--a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my
friend Mr. Wright's old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been
talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the
point:--

For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,
And out of olde bookes; in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men lere.

But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom
in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply
abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients
more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy. It is
the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong
only to individuals. There can be no doubt that, of contemporary
individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and
is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with
generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact. As
Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, 'Those who came
first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least
experience. Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in
arms--chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under
Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the
white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are
prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can
supply.

And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own
English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity. What, for instance,
was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans--what but the
wildest Astrology? What schoolboy has not chuckled over the
ingenious old Herodotus's description of the sun being blown out of
the heavens? Or again, at old Plutarch's veracious story of the
hedgehogs and the grapes? Nay, there are absurdities enough in such
great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us
that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters
appertaining to the Physical Sciences.

Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the
ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence. But
theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our
day--though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has
been proving to us lately--is, as essentially, the day of Science. I
might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here--the constitution
of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking
as the soul of antiquity). Was that scientific? Surely not.

The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was
beauty, sensuous beauty. This prevailing passion for the beautiful
exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said:
it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in
their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture. The
productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful,
and, as such, will never fade and decay, for

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that
Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity.
Athens was too imaginative and poetical. Sparta was too warlike and
barbarous. Rome was too sensual and gross. It had to wait for the
steady Teutonic mind--the plodding brains of modern England and
modern Germany. That Homer is the father of poetry--that AEschylus
is a wonder of sublimity--that Sophocles and Euripides are profound
masters of human passion and human pathos--that Aristophanes is an
exhaustless fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour--no one in
this room, or out of it, is more willing to admit than I am. But is
that to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison
and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or
Aristotle?

The Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied
through life by a spiritual good genius and evil genius. Every right
action he did, and every right thought that entered his mind, he
attributed to the influence of his good Genius; while every bad
thought and action he attributed to his evil Genius. And this was
not the mere poetic figment of a poetic brain: it was a living and
breathing faith with him. He believed it in his childhood, in his
youth, in his manhood, and he believed it on his death-bed, when the
deadly hemlock was winding its fold, like the fatal serpent of
Laocoon, around his giant brain. Well, gentlemen, don't let us laugh
at this idea of the grand old Athenian; for it is, after all, a
beautiful one, and typical of many great truths. And I have often
thought that the idea might be applied to a greater man than
Socrates. I mean the great man--mankind. He, too, has his good
genius and his evil genius. The former we will designate science,
the latter we will call superstition. For ages upon ages,
superstition has had the sway over him--that evil genius, who blotted
out the lamp of truth that God had implanted within his breast, and
substituted all manner of blinding errors--errors which have made him
play

Such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

This evil genius it was who made him look upon the fair face of
creation, not as a book in which God may be read, as St. Paul tells
us, but as a book full of frightful and horrid mysteries. In a word,
the great Man who ought to have been only a little lower than the
angels, has been made, by superstition, only a little above the
fiends.

But, at last, God has permitted man's long, long experience to be
followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient
enemy, and clasped the hands of Science--Science, that good genius
who makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the
ethereal lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns
king of the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of
Methusaleh into seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human
frame, and ranges through its most secret chambers, until at last
nothing, save the mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden;
who maps out all the nations of the earth; showing how the sable
Ethiopian, the dusky Polynesian, the besotted Mongolian, the
intellectual European, are but differently developed exemplars of the
same type of manhood, and warning man that he is still his 'brother's
keeper' now as in the primeval days of Cain and Abel.

The good genius, Science, it is who bears us on his daedal wings up
into the starry night, there where 'God's name is writ in worlds,'
and discourses to us of the laws which bind the planets revolving
around their planetary suns, and those suns again circling for ever
around the great central sun--'The Great White Throne of God!'

The good genius, Science, it is who takes us back through the long
vista of years, and shows us this world of ours, this beautiful world
which the wisest and the best of us are so unwilling to leave, first,
as a vast drop of liquid lava-fire, starting on that mysterious
course which is to end only with time itself; then, as a dark humid
mass, 'without form and void,' where earth, sea, and sky, are mingled
in unutterable confusion; then, after countless, countless ages,
having grown to something like the thing of beauty the Creator had
intended, bringing forth the first embryonic germs of vegetable life,
to be succeeded, in due time, by gigantic trees and towering ferns,
compared with which the forest monarchs of our day are veritable
dwarfs; then, slowly, gradually, developing the still greater wonder
of animal life, from the primitive, half-vegetable, half-conscious
forms, till such mighty creatures as the Megatherium, the Saurian,
the Mammoth, the Iguanodon, roam about the luxuriant forests, and
bellow in chaotic caves, and wallow in the teeming seas, and circle
in the humid atmosphere, making the earth rock and tremble beneath
their monstrous movements; then, last of all, the wonder of wonders,
the climax towards which the whole had been tending, the noblest and
the basest work of God--the creation of the thinking, reasoning,
sinning animal, Man.

And thus, gentlemen, will this good genius still go on, instructing
and improving, and purifying the human mind, and aiding in the grand
work of developing the divinity within it. I know, indeed, that it
is a favourite argument of some people that modern civilization will
decline and vanish, 'like the civilizations of old.' But I venture
to deny it in toto. From a human point of view, it is utterly
impossible. And without going into the question (for I see the time
is running on) as to whether ancient civilization really has passed
away, or whether the old germ did not rather spring into new life
after the dark ages, and is now bearing fruit, ten thousand times
more glorious than it ever did of old; without arguing this point, I
contend that all comparisons between ancient civilization and modern
must of necessity be futile and fallacious. And for this reason,
that independently of the civilizing effects of Christianity, Science
has knit the modern nations into one: whereas each nation of
antiquity had to work out its own problems of social and political
life, and come to its own conclusions. So isolated, indeed, was one
nation from another, that nations were in some instances ignorant of
each other's existence. A new idea, or invention, born at Nineveh,
was for Assyria alone; at Athens, for Greece alone; at Rome, for
Italy alone. There was no science then to 'put a girdle round about
the earth' (as Puck says) 'in forty minutes.' But now, a new idea
brought to light in modern London, or Paris, or New York, is for the
whole world; it is wafted on the wings of science around the whole
habitable globe--from Ireland to New Zealand, from India to Peru. I
am not going to say, gentlemen, that Britannia must always be the
ruler of the waves. The day may come that will see her sink to a
second-rate, a third-rate, or a fourth-rate power in Europe. In
spite of all we have been saying this evening, the day may come that
will see Russia the dominant power in Europe. The day may come that
will see Sydney and Melbourne the fountain heads of refinement and
learning. It may have been ordained in Heaven at the first that each
race upon the globe shall be in its turn the dominant race--that the
negro race shall one day lord it over the Caucasian, as the Caucasian
race is now lording it over the negro. Why not? It would be only
equity. But I am not talking of races; I am not talking of
nationalities. I speak again of the great man, Mankind--the one
indivisible man that Science is making him. He will never
retrograde, because 'matter and mind comprise the universe,' and
matter must entirely sink beneath the weight of mind--because good
must one day conquer ill, or why was the world made? Henceforth his
road is onward--onward. Science has helped to give him such a start
that nothing shall hold him back--nothing can hold him back--save a
fiat, a direct fiat from the throne of Almighty God."

But I am wandering from the subject of the 'Old House' in Crown Street
and its connection with printing. The last important book that was ever
printed there was a very remarkable one. It was the famous essay on
Pantheism by Mr. Watts-Dunton's friend, the Rev. John Hunt, D.D., at that
time a curate of the St. Ives Church--a book that was the result of an
enormous amount of learning, research, and original thought, a book,
moreover, which has had a great effect upon modern thought. It has
passed through several editions since it was printed at St. Ives in 1866.

Chapter IV
CHARACTERS IN THE MICROCOSM

MRS. CRAIGIE has recently protested against the metropolitan fable that
London enjoys a monopoly of culture, and has reminded us that in the
provinces may be found a great part of the intellectual energy of the
nation. It would be hard to find a more intellectual environment than
that in which Theodore Watts grew up. Indeed, his early life may be
compared to that of John Stuart Mill, although he escaped the hardening
and narrowing influences which marred the austere educational system of
the Mill family. Mr. Watts-Dunton's father was in many respects a very
remarkable man. 'He was,' says the famous gypsologist, F. H. Groome, in
Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 'a naturalist intimately connected with
Murchison, Lyell, and other geologists, a pre-Darwinian evolutionist of
considerable mark in the scientific world of London, and the Gilbert
White of the Ouse valley.' There is, as the 'Times' said in its review
of 'Aylwin,' so much of manifest Wahrheit mingled with the Dichtung of
the story, that it is not surprising that attempts have often been made
to identify all the characters. Many of these guesses have been wrong;
and indeed, the only writer who has spoken with authority seems to be Mr.
Hake, who, in two papers in 'Notes and Queries' identified many of the
characters. Until he wrote on the subject, it was generally assumed that
the spiritual protagonist from whom springs the entire action of the
story, Philip Aylwin, was Mr. Watts-Dunton's father. Mr. Hake, however,
tells us that this is not so. Philip Aylwin is a portrait of the
author's uncle, an extraordinary man of whom I shall have something to
say later. I feel myself fortunate in having discovered an admirable
account of Mr. Watts-Dunton's father in Mr. Norris's 'History of St.
Ives':--

"For many years one of the most interesting of St. Ivian figures was
the late Mr. J. K. Watts, who was born at St. Ives in 1808, though
his family on both sides came from Hemingford Grey and Hemingford
Abbots. According to the following extracts from 'The Cambridge
Chronicle and University Journal' of August 15, 1884, Mr. Watts died
quite suddenly on August 7 of that year: 'We record with much regret
the sudden death at Over of our townsman, Mr. J. K. Watts, who died
after an hour's illness of heart disease at Berry House, whither he
had been taken after the seizure. Dr. J. Ellis, of Swavesey, was
called in, but without avail. At the inquest the post-mortem
examination disclosed that the cause of death was a long-standing
fatty degeneration of the heart, which had, on several occasions,
resulted in syncope. Deceased had been driven to Willingham and back
to Over upon a matter of business with Mr. Hawkes, and the extreme
heat of the weather seems to have acted as the proximate cause of
death.

Mr. Watts had practised in St. Ives from 1840, and was one of the
oldest solicitors in the county. He had also devoted much time and
study to scientific subjects, and was, in his earlier life, a
well-known figure in the scientific circles of London. He was for
years connected with Section E of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, and elected on the Committee. He read papers
on geology and cognate subjects before that Association and other
Societies during the time that Murchison and Lyell were the apostles
of geology. Afterwards he made a special study of luminous meteors,
and in the Association's reports upon this subject some of the most
interesting observations of luminous meteors are those recorded by
Mr. Watts. He was one of the earliest Fellows of the Geographical
Society, and one of the Founders of the Anthropological Society.'

Mr. Watts never collected his papers and essays, but up to the last
moment of his life he gave attention to those subjects to which he
had devoted himself, as may be seen by referring to the 'Antiquary'
for 1883 and 1884, where will be found two articles on Cambridgeshire
Antiquities, one of which did not get into type till several months
after his death. It was, however, not by Archaeology, but by his
geological and geographical writings that he made his reputation.
And it was these which brought him into contact with Murchison,
Livingstone, Lyell, Whewell, and Darwin, and also with the
geographers, some of whom, such as Du Chaillu, Findlay, Dr. Norton
Shaw, visited him at the Red House on the Market Hill, now occupied
by Mr. Matton. In the sketches of the life of Dr. Latham it is
mentioned that the famous ethnologist was a frequent visitor to Mr.
Watts at St. Ives. Since his death there have been frequent
references to him as a man of 'encyclopaedic general knowledge.'

He was of an exceedingly retiring disposition, and few men in St.
Ives have been more liked or more generally respected. His great
delight seemed to be roaming about in meadows and lanes observing the
changes of the vegetation and the bird and insect life in which our
neighbourhood is as rich as Selborne itself. On such occasions the
present writer has often met him and had many interesting
conversations with him upon subjects connected with natural science."

With regard to the family of Mr. Watts-Dunton's mother, the Duntons,
although in the seventeenth century a branch of the family lived in
Huntingdonshire, some of them being clergymen there for several
generations, they are entirely East Anglian; and some very romantic
chapters in the history of the family have been touched upon by Dr.
Jessopp in his charming essay, 'Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery.' This
essay was based upon a paper, communicated by Miss Mary Bateson to the
Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, and treating of the Register
of Crab House Nunnery. In 1896 Walter Theodore Watts added his mother's
to his father's name, by a deed in Chancery.

I could not give a more pregnant instance of the difference in
temperament between a father and a son than by repeating a story about
Mr. Watts-Dunton which Rossetti (who was rich in anecdotes of his friend)
used to tell. When the future poet and critic was a boy in jackets
pursuing his studies at the Cambridge school, he found in the school
library a copy of Wells's 'Stories after Nature,' and read them with
great avidity. Shortly afterwards, when he had left school and was
reading all sorts of things, and also cultivating on the sly a small
family of Gryengroes encamped in the neighbourhood, he was amazed to
find, in a number of the 'Illuminated Magazine,' a periodical which his
father, on account of Douglas Jerrold, had taken in from the first, one
of the 'Stories after Nature' reprinted with an illustration by the
designer and engraver Linton. He said to his father, 'Why, I have read
this story before!' 'That is quite impossible,' said his father, 'quite
impossible that you should have before read a new story in a new number
of a magazine.' 'I have read it before; I know all about it,' said the
boy. 'As I do not think you untruthful,' said the father, 'I think I can
explain your hallucination about this matter.' 'Do, father,' said the
son. 'Well,' said the father, 'I do not know whether or not you are a
poet. But I do know that you are a dreamer of dreams. You have told me
before extraordinary stories to the effect that when you see a landscape
that is new to you, it seems to you that you have seen it before.' 'Yes,
father, that often occurs.' 'Well, the reason for that is this, as you
will understand when you come to know a little more about physiology.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres, exactly answering to each
other, and they act so simultaneously that they work like one brain; but
it often happens that when dreamers like you see things or read things,
one of the hemispheres has lapsed into a kind of drowsiness, and the
other one sees the object for itself; but in a second or two the lazy
hemisphere wakes up and thinks it has seen the picture before.' The
explanation seemed convincing, and yet it could not convince the boy.

The very next month the magazine gave another of the stories, and the
father said, 'Well, Walter, have you read this before?' 'Yes,' said the
boy falteringly, 'unless, of course, it is all done by the double brain,
father.' And so it went on from month to month. When the boy had grown
into a man and came to meet Rossetti, one of the very first of the
literary subjects discussed between them was that of Charles Wells's
'Joseph and His Brethren' and 'Stories after Nature.' Rossetti was
agreeably surprised that although his new friend knew nothing of 'Joseph
and His Brethren,' he was very familiar with the 'Stories after Nature.'
'Well,' said Mr. Watts-Dunton, 'they appeared in the "Illuminated
Magazine."' 'Who should have thought,' said Rossetti, 'that the
"Illuminated Magazine" in its moribund days, when Linton took it up,
should have got down to St. Ives. Its circulation, I think, was only a
few hundreds. Among Linton's manoeuvres for keeping the magazine alive
was to reprint and illustrate Charles Wells's "Stories after Nature"
without telling the public that they had previously appeared in book
form.' 'They did then appear in book form first?' said Mr. Watts-Dunton.
'Yes, but there can't have been over a hundred or two sold,' said
Rossetti. 'I discovered it at the British Museum.' 'I read it at
Cambridge in my school library,' said Mr. Watts-Dunton. It was the
startled look on Rossetti's face which caused Mr. Watts-Dunton to tell
him the story about his father and the 'Illuminated Magazine.'

It was a necessity that a boy so reared should feel the impulse to
express himself in literature rather early. But it will be new to many,
and especially to the editor of the 'Athenaeum,' that as a mere child he
contributed to its pages. When he was a boy he read the 'Athenaeum,'
which his father took in regularly. One day he caught a correspondent of
the 'Athenaeum'--no less a person than John P. Collier--tripping on a
point of Shakespearean scholarship, being able to do so by chance. He
had stumbled on the matter in question while reading one of his father's
books. He wrote to the editor in his childish round hand, stigmatizing
the blunder with youthful scorn. In due time the correction was noted in
the Literary Gossip of the journal. Soon after, his father had occasion
to consult the book, and finding a pencil mark opposite the passage, he
said, 'Walter, have you been marking this book?' 'Yes, father.' 'But
you know I object?' 'Yes, father, but I was interested in the point.'
'Why,' said his father, 'somebody has been writing about this very
passage to the "Athenaeum."' 'Yes, father,' replied the boy, red and
ungrammatical with proud confusion, 'it was me.' 'You!' cried his
astonished father, 'you!' And thus the matter was explained. Mr.
Watts-Dunton confesses that he was never tired of thumbing that, his
first contribution to the 'Athenaeum.'

* * * * *

Whatever may have been the influence of his father upon Mr. Watts-Dunton,
it was not, I think, nearly so great as that of his uncle, James Orlando
Watts. His father may have made him scientific: his uncle seems to have
made him philosophical with a dash of mysticism. As I have already
pointed out, Mr. Hake has identified this uncle as the prototype of
Philip Aylwin, the father of the hero. The importance of this character
in 'Aylwin' is shown by the fact that, if we analyze the story, we find
that the character of Philip is its motive power. After his death,
everything that occurs is brought about by his doctrines and his dreams,
his fantasies and his whims. This effect of making a man dominate from
his grave the entire course of the life of his descendants seems to be
unique in imaginative literature; and yet, although the fingers of some
critics (notably Mr. Coulson Kernahan) burn close to the subject, there
they leave it. What Mr. Watts-Dunton calls 'the tragic mischief' of the
drama is not brought about by any villain, but by the vagaries and
mystical speculations of a dead man, the author of 'The Veiled Queen.'
There were few things in which James Orlando Watts did not take an
interest. He was a deep student of the drama, Greek, English, Spanish,
and German. And it is a singular fact that this dreamy man was a lover
of the acted drama. One of his stories in connection with acting is
this. A party of strolling players who went to St. Ives got permission
to act for a period in a vast stone-built barn, called Priory Barn, and
sometimes Cromwell's Barn. Mr. J. O. Watts went to see them, and on
returning home after the performance said, 'I have seen a little actor
who is a real genius. He reminds me of what I have read about Edmund
Kean's acting. I shall go and see him every night. And he went. The
actor's name was Robson. When, afterwards, Mr. Watts went to reside in
London, he learnt that an actor named Robson was acting in one of the
second-rate theatres called the Grecian Saloon. He went to the theatre
and found, as he expected, that it was the same actor who had so
impressed him down at St. Ives. From that time he followed Robson to
whatsoever theatre in London he went, and afterward became a well-known
figure among the playgoers of the Olympic. He always contended that
Robson was the only histrionic genius of his time. Mr. Hake seems to
have known James Orlando Watts only after he had left St. Ives to live in
London:--

"He was," says Mr. Hake, "a man of extraordinary learning in the
academic sense of the word, and he possessed still more extraordinary
general knowledge. He lived for many years the strangest kind of
hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts. His two
great passions were philology and occultism, but he also took great
interest in rubbings from brass monuments. He knew more, I think, of
those strange writers discussed in Vaughan's 'Hours with the Mystics'
than any other person--including perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he
managed to combine with his love of mysticism a deep passion for the
physical sciences, especially astronomy. He seemed to be learning
languages up to almost the last year of his life. His method of
learning languages was the opposite of that of George Borrow--that is
to say, he made great use of grammars; and when he died, it is said
that from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among
his books. He used to express great contempt for Borrow's method of
learning languages from dictionaries only. I do not think that any
one connected with literature--with the sole exception of Mr.
Swinburne, my father, and Dr. R. G. Latham--knew so much of him as I
did. His personal appearance was exactly like that of Philip Aylwin,
as described in the novel. Although he never wrote poetry, he
translated, I believe, a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese
poets. I remember that he was an extraordinary admirer of Shelley.
His knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists was a
link between him and Mr. Swinburne.

At a time when I was a busy reader at the British Museum reading
room, I used frequently to see him, and he never seemed to know
anyone among the readers except myself, and whenever he spoke to me
it was always in a hushed whisper, lest he should disturb the other
readers, which in his eyes would have been a heinous offence. For
very many years he had been extremely well known to the second-hand
booksellers, for he was a constant purchaser of their wares. He was
a great pedestrian, and, being very much attached to the north of
London, would take long, slow tramps ten miles out in the direction
of Highgate, Wood Green, etc. I have a very distinct recollection of
calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living
close to him in Percy Circus. Books were piled up from floor to
ceiling, apparently in great confusion; but he seemed to remember
where to find every book and what there was in it. It is a singular
fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to
have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas
Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him 'the
scholar.' How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that
surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must
have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the
north of London where 'the scholar' was taking his chop and bottle of
Beaune. He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after
another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I
think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of 'Aylwin,'
and myself. But at Christmas he always spent a week at The Pines,
when and where my father and I used to meet him. His memory was so
powerful that he seemed to be able to recall, not only all that he
had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part.
He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to
the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life. He
always reminded me of Charles Lamb's description of George Dyer.

Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only
of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent
to touch upon his inner life. He was a still greater recluse than
the 'Philip Aylwin' of the novel. I think I am right in saying that
he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of
age. Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these
studies that he sympathized with the author of 'Aylwin's' friend, the
late Lord de Tabley. I remember one story of his peculiarities which
will give an idea of the kind of man he was. He had a brother, Mr.
William K. Watts, who was the exact opposite of him in every
way--strikingly good-looking, with great charm of manner and savoir
faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial
knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of
British military and naval exploits--where he was really learned.
Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a
parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great
volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in
the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until
at last he got to be called the 'walking encyclopaedia.' The result
was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an
original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was
frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned
brother. This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply
amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories
as to what people had said to him on this subject." {60}

Balzac might have made this singular anecdote the nucleus of one of his
stories. I may add that the editor of 'Notes and Queries,' Mr. Joseph
Knight, knew James Orlando Watts, and he has stated that he 'can testify
to the truth' of Mr. Hake's 'portraiture.'

Chapter V
EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE GYPSIES

ALTHOUGH an East Midlander by birth it seems to have been to East Anglia
that Mr. Watts-Dunton's sympathies were most strongly drawn. It was
there that he first made acquaintance with the sea, and it was to East
Anglia that his gypsy friends belonged.

On the East Anglian side of St. Ives, opposite to the Hemingford side
already described, the country, though not so lovely as the western side,
is at first fairly attractive; but it becomes less and less so as it
nears the Fens. The Fens, however, would seem to have a charm of their
own, and Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has described them with a vividness
that could hardly be surpassed. It was here as a boy that he made
friends with the Gryengroes--that superior variety of the Romanies which
Borrow had known years before. These gypsies used to bring their Welsh
ponies to England and sell them at the fairs. I must now go back for
some years in order to enrich my pages with Mr. Watts-Dunton's graphic
description of his first meeting with the gypsies in the Fen country,
which appeared in 'Great Thoughts' in 1903.

"I shall never forget my earliest recollections of them. My father
used sometimes to drive in a dogcart to see friends of his through
about twelve miles of Fen country, and he used to take me with him.
Let me say that the Fen country is much more striking than is
generally supposed. Instead of leafy quick hedgerows, as in the
midlands, or walls, as in the north country, the fields are divided
by dykes; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles.
This gives an importance to the skies such as is observed nowhere
else except on the open sea. The flashing opalescent radiance of the
sea is apt to challenge the riches of the sky, and in a certain
degree tends to neutralize it; but in the Fen country the level,
monotonous greenery of the crops in summer, and, in autumn and
winter, the vast expanse of black earth, make the dome of the sky, by
contrast, so bright and glorious that in cloudless weather it gleams
and suggests a roof of rainbows; and in cloudy weather it seems
almost the only living sight in the universe, and becomes thus more
magical still. And as to sunsets, I do not know of any, either by
land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen
country. The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal
to do with it. The sun frequently sets in a pageantry of gauzy
vapour of every colour, quite indescribable.

The first evening that I took one of these drives, while I was
watching the wreaths of blue curling smoke from countless heaps of
twitch-grass, set burning by the farm-labourers, which stretched
right up to the sky-line, my father pulled up the dogcart and pointed
to a ruddy fire glowing, flickering, and smoking in an angle where a
green grassy drove-way met the dark-looking high-road some yards
ahead. And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky
figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about. 'The
gypsies!' I said, in the greatest state of exultation, which soon
fled, however, when I heard a shrill whistle and saw a lot of these
dusky people running and leaping like wild things towards the
dog-cart. 'Will they kill us, father?' I said. 'Kill us? No,' he
said, laughing; 'they are friends of mine. They've only come to lead
the mare past the fire and keep her from shying at it.' They came
flocking up. So far from the mare starting, as she would have done
at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome
the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose
with their tawny but well-shaped fingers, and caressing her neck.
Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw.
When the gypsies conducted us past their camp I was fascinated by the
charm of the picture. Outside the tents in front of the fire, over
which a kettle was suspended from an upright iron bar, which I
afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was spread a large dazzling white
table-cloth, covered with white crockery, among which glittered a
goodly number of silver spoons. I afterwards learnt that to possess
good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons, was as 'passionate
a desire in the Romany chi as in the most ambitious farmer's wife in
the Fen country.' It was from this little incident that my intimacy
with the gypsies dated. I associated much with them in after life,
and I have had more experiences among them than I have yet had an
opportunity of recording in print."

This pretty gypsy girl was the prototype, I believe, of the famous Rhona
Boswell herself.

It must of course have been after the meeting with Rhona in the East
Midlands--supposing always that we are allowed to identify the novelist
with the hero, a bold supposition--that Mr. Watts-Dunton again came
across her--this time in East Anglia. Whether this is so or not, I must
give this picture of her from 'Aylwin':--

"It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie's friend,
Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl. Graylingham Wood and
Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of
a superior kind of Gypsies called Gryengroes, that is to say,
horse-dealers. Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell
them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that
Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales. Compared
with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie
seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona's limbs were always on the
move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions. Her laugh
seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it
was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most Gypsy
girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona's laughter was a
sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards, when she
grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her. It seemed
to emanate, not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame.
If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the
ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some
idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona
would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor, some
miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of
flowers that she had been weaving for herself. This induced Winnie
to weave for herself a coronet of seaweeds, and an entire morning was
passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other."

Chapter VI
SPORT AND WORK

IT was at this period that, like so many young Englishmen who were his
contemporaries, he gave attention to field sports, and took interest in
that athleticism which, to judge from Wilkie Collins's scathing pictures,
was quite as rampant and absurd then as it is in our own time. It was
then too that he acquired that familiarity with the figures prominent in
the ring which startles one in his reminiscences of George Borrow. But
it will scarcely interest the readers of this book to dwell long upon
this subject. Nor have I time to repeat the humorous stories I have
heard him tell about the queer characters who could then be met at St.
Ives Fair (said to have been the largest cattle fair in England), and at
another favourite resort of his, Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge.
Stourbridge Fair still exists, but its glory was departing when Mr.
Watts-Dunton was familiar with it; and now, possibly, it has departed for
ever. Of Cambridge and the entire county he tells many anecdotes. Here
is a specimen:--

Once in the early sixties he and his brother and some friends were
greatly exercised by the news that Deerfoot, the famous American Indian
runner in whom Borrow took such an interest, was to run at Cambridge
against the English champion. When the day came, they drove to Cambridge
in a dog-cart from St. Ives, about a dozen miles. The race took place in
a field called Fenner's Ground, much used by cricketers. This is how, as
far as I can recall the words, he tells the anecdote:--

"The place was crammed with all sorts of young men--'varsity men and
others. There were not many young farmers or squires or yeomen
within a radius of a good many miles that did not put in an
appearance on that occasion. The Indian won easily, and at the
conclusion of the race there was a frantic rush to get near him and
shake his hand. The rush was so wild and so insensate that it
irritated me more than I should at the present moment consider it
possible to be irritated. But I ought to say that at that time of my
life I had developed into a strangely imperious little chap. I had
been over-indulged--not at home, but at the Cambridge school to which
I had been sent--and spoilt. This seems odd, but it's true. It was
the boys who spoilt me in a curious way--a way which will not be
understood by those who went to public schools like Eton, where the
fagging principle would have stood in the way of the development of
the curious relation between me and my fellow-pupils which I am
alluding to. There is an inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct
in the genus homo which causes boys, without in the least knowing
why, to select one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and
spoil him, almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which
is so valuable in the social struggle for life that follows
school-days. This kind of emperor I had been at that school. It
indicated no sort of real superiority on my part; for I learnt that
immediately after I had left the vacant post it was filled by another
boy--filled for an equally inscrutable reason. The result of it was
that I became (as I often think when I recall those days) the most
masterful young urchin that ever lived. If I had not been so, I
could not have got into a fury at being jostled by a good-humoured
crowd. My brother, who had not been so spoilt at school, was very
different, and kept urging me to keep my temper. 'It's capital fun,'
he said; 'look at this blue-eyed young chap jostling and being
jostled close to us. He's fond of a hustle, and no mistake. That's
the kind of chap I should like to know'; and he indicated a young
'varsity man of whose elbow at that moment I was unpleasantly
conscious, and who seemed to be in a state of delight at other elbows
being pushed into his ribs. I soon perceived that certain men whom
he was with seemed angry, not on their own account, but on account of
this youth of the laughing lips and blue eyes. As they were trying
to make a ring round him, 'Hanged if it isn't the Prince!' said my
brother. 'And look how he takes it! Surely you can stand what he
stands!' It was, in fact, the Prince of Wales, who had come to see
the American runner. I needed only two or three years of buffeting
with the great life outside the schoolroom to lose all my
imperiousness and learn the essential lesson of give-and-take."

For a time Mr. Watts-Dunton wavered about being articled to his father as
a solicitor. His love of the woods and fields was too great at that time
for him to find life in a solicitor's office at all tolerable. Moreover,
it would seem that he who had been so precocious a student, and who had
lived in books, felt a temporary revulsion from them, and an irresistible
impulse to study Nature apart from books, to study her face to face. And
it was at this time that, as the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' remarks, he
'moved much among the East Anglian gypsies, of whose superstitions and
folklore he made a careful study.' But of this period of his life I have
but little knowledge. Judging from Groome's remarks upon 'Aylwin' in the
'Bookman,' he alone had Mr. Watts-Dunton's full confidence in the matter.
So great was his desire to pore over the book of nature, there appears to
have been some likelihood, perhaps I ought to say some danger, of his
feeling the impulse which had taken George Borrow away from civilization.
He seems, besides, to have shared with the Greeks and with Montaigne a
belief in the value of leisure. It was at this period, to judge from his
writings, that he exclaimed with Montaigne, 'Have you known how to
regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
than he who has taken empires and cities.' I suppose, however, that this
was the time when he composed that unpublished 'Dictionary for
Nature-worshippers,' from which he often used to quote in the
'Athenaeum.' There is nothing in his writings so characteristic as those
definitions. Work and Sport are thus defined: 'Work: that activity of
mind or body which exhausts the vital forces without yielding pleasure or
health to the individual. Sport: that activity of mind or body which, in
exhausting the vital forces, yields pleasure and health to the
individual. The activity, however severe, of a born artist at his easel,
of a born poet at his rhymings, of a born carpenter at his plane, is
sport. The activity, however slight, of the born artist or poet at the
merchant's desk, is work. Hence, to work is not to pray. We have called
the heresy of Work modern because it is the characteristic one of our
time; but, alas! like all heresies, it is old. It was preached by
Zoroaster in almost Mr. Carlyle's words when Concord itself was in the
woods and ere Chelsea was.'

[Picture: 'Evening Dreams with the Poets.' (From an Oil Painting at 'The
Pines.')]

In one of his books Mr. Watts-Dunton writes with great eloquence upon
this subject:--

"How hateful is the word 'experience' in the mouth of the
litterateur. They all seem to think that this universe exists to
educate them, and that they should write books about it. They never
look on a sunrise without thinking what an experience it is; how it
is educating them for bookmaking. It is this that so often turns the
true Nature-worshipper away from books altogether, that makes him
bless with what at times seems such malicious fervour those two great
benefactors of the human race, Caliph Omar and Warburton's cook.

In Thoreau there was an almost perpetual warring of the Nature
instinct with the Humanity instinct. And, to say the truth, the
number is smaller than even Nature-worshippers themselves are
aware--those in whom there is not that warring of these two great
primal instincts. For six or eight months at a time there are many,
perhaps, who could revel in 'utter solitude,' as companionship with
Nature is called; with no minster clock to tell them the time of day,
but, instead, the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle in the
morning, the shifting of the shadows at noon, and the cawing of rooks
going home at sunset. But then to these, there comes suddenly, and
without the smallest warning, a half-recognized but secretly sweet
pleasure in looking at the smooth high-road, and thinking that it
leads to the city--a beating of the heart at the sound of the distant
railway-whistle, as the train winds its way, like a vast gliding
snake, to the whirlpool they have left.

In order to realize the folly of the modern Carlylean heresy of work,
it is necessary to realize fully how infinitely rich is Nature, and
how generous, and consequently what a sacred duty as well as wise
resolve it is that, before he 'returns unto the ground,' man should
drink deeply while he may at the fountain of Life. Let it be enough
for the Nature-worshipper to know that he, at least, has been
blessed. Suppose he were to preach in London or Paris or New York
against this bastard civilization, and expatiate on Nature's largess,
of which it robs us? Suppose he were to say to people to whom
opinion is the breath of life, 'What is it that this civilization of
yours can give you by way of compensation for that of which it robs
you? Is it your art? Is it your literature? Is it your music? Is
it your science?' Suppose, for instance, he were to say to the
collector of Claudes, or Turners, or David Coxes: 'Your possessions
are precious undoubtedly, but what are even they when set against the
tamest and quietest sunrise, in the tamest and quietest district of
Cambridge or Lincoln, in this tame and quiet month, when, over the
treeless flat you may see, and for nothing, purple bar after purple
bar trembling along the grey, as the cows lift up their heads from
the sheet of silver mist in which they are lying? How can you really
enjoy your Turners, you who have never seen a sunrise in your lives?'
Or suppose he were to say to the opera-goer: 'Those notes of your
favourite soprano were superb indeed; and superb they ought to be to
keep you in the opera-house on a June night, when all over the south
of England a thousand thickets, warm with the perfumed breath of the
summer night, are musical with the gurgle of the nightingales.'
Thoreau preached after this fashion, and was deservedly laughed at
for his pains.

Yet it is not a little singular that this heresy of the sacredness of
work should be most flourishing at the very time when the sophism on
which it was originally built is exploded; the sophism, we mean, that
Nature herself is the result of Work, whereas she is the result of
growth. One would have thought that this was the very time for
recognizing what the sophism had blinded us to, that Nature's
permanent temper--whatever may be said of this or that mood of
hers--is the temper of Sport, that her pet abhorrence, which is said
to be a vacuum, is really Work. We see this clearly enough in what
are called the lower animals--whether it be a tiger or a gazelle, a
ferret or a coney, a bat or a butterfly--the final cause of the
existence of every conscious thing is that it should sport. It has
no other use than that. For this end it was that 'the great Vishnu
yearned to create a world.' Yet over the toiling and moiling world
sits Moloch Work; while those whose hearts are withering up with
hatred of him are told by certain writers to fall down before him and
pretend to love.

The worker of the mischief is, of course, civilization in excess, or
rather, civilization in wrong directions. For this word, too, has to
be newly defined in the Dictionary before mentioned, where you will
find it thus given:--Civilization: a widening and enriching of human
life. Bastard or Modern Western Civilization: the art of inventing
fictitious wants and working to supply them. In bastard civilization
life becomes poorer and poorer, paltrier and paltrier, till at last
life goes out of fashion altogether, and is supplanted by work. True
freedom is more remote from us than ever. For modern Freedom is thus
defined: the exchange of the slavery of feudality for the slavery of
opinion. Thoreau realized this, and tried to preach men back to
common-sense and Nature. Here was his mistake--in trying to preach.
No man ever yet had the Nature-instinct preached into him."

Chapter VII
EAST ANGLIA

WHATEVER may have been those experiences with the gryengroes which made
Groome, when speaking of the gypsies of 'Aylwin,' say 'the author writes
only of what he knows,' it seems to have been after his intercourse with
the gypsies that he and a younger brother, Alfred Eugene Watts (elsewhere
described), were articled as solicitors to their father. His bent,
however, was always towards literature, especially poetry, of which he
had now written a great deal--indeed, the major part of the volume which
was destined to lie unpublished for so many years. But before I deal
with the most important period of Mr. Watts-Dunton's life--his life in
London--it seems necessary to say a word or two about his visits to East
Anglia, and especially to the Norfolk coast. There are some admirable
remarks upon the East Coast in Mr. William Sharp's chapter on
'Aylwinland' in 'Literary Geography,' and he notes the way in which Rhona
Boswell links it with Cowslip Land; but he does not give examples of the
poems which thus link it, such as the double roundel called 'The Golden
Hand.'

THE GOLDEN HAND {73a}

PERCY

Do you forget that day on Rington strand
When, near the crumbling ruin's parapet,
I saw you stand beside the long-shore net
The gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?

RHONA

Do I forget?

PERCY

You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy band
Around your hair which shone as black as jet:
No fairy's crown of bloom was ever set
Round brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.

I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:
Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:
Love-lips (with one tattoo 'for dukkerin' {73b}) tanned
By sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.

RHONA

Do I forget?
The Golden Hand shone there: it's you forget,
Or p'raps us Romanies ondly understand
The way the Lover's Dukkeripen is planned
Which shone that second time when us two met.

PERCY

Blest 'Golden Hand'!

RHONA

The wind, that mixed the smell o' violet
Wi' chirp o' bird, a-blowin' from the land
Where my dear Mammy lies, said as it fanned
My heart-like, 'Them 'ere tears makes Mammy fret.'
She loves to see her chavi {74} lookin' grand,
So I made what you call'd a coronet,
And in the front I put her amulet:
She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.

PERCY

Blest 'Golden Hand'!

In the same way that the velvety green of Hunts is seen in the verses I
have already quoted, so the softer side of the inland scenery of East
Anglia is described in the following lines, where also we find an
exquisite use of the East Anglian fancy about the fairies and the
foxglove bells.

At a waltz during certain Venetian revels after the liberation from the
Austrian yoke, a forsaken lover stands and watches a lady whose
child-love he had won in England:--

Has she forgotten for such halls as these
The domes the angels built in holy times,
When wings were ours in childhood's flowery climes
To dance with butterflies and golden bees?--
Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breeze
Shook out those English harebells' magic chimes
On that child-wedding morn, 'neath English limes,
'Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?

The love that childhood cradled--girlhood nursed--
Has she forgotten it for this dull play,
Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and sway
Like dancers in a telescope reversed?
Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,
'Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed'?

But was it this that bought her--this poor splendour
That won her from her troth and wild-flower wreath
Who 'cracked the foxglove bells' on Grayland Heath,
Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,
Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,
Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,
Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,
When Love grew grave--to hide her soul's surrender?

Mr. Sharp has dwelt upon the striking way in which the scenery and
atmosphere are rendered in 'Aylwin,' but this, as I think, is even more
clearly seen in the poems. And in none of these is it seen so vividly as
in that exhilarating poem, 'Gypsy Heather,' published in the 'Athenaeum,'
and not yet garnered in a volume. This poem also shows his lyrical
power, which never seems to be at its very best unless he is depicting
Romany life and Romany passion. The metre of this poem is as original as
that of 'The Gypsy Haymaking Song,' quoted in an earlier chapter. It has
a swing like that of no other poem:--

GYPSY HEATHER

'If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it'll show
him the selfsame heather where it wur born.'--SINFI LOVELL.

[Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the 'Petrel,' takes from his
pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south
seas, the Melbourne post had brought him--a letter from Rhona,
staying then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by
the Boswells, called 'Gypsy Heather.' He takes from the envelope a
withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on
which Rhona has written the words, 'Remember Gypsy Heather.']

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Remember Jasper's camping-place
Where heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,
And scents of meadow, wood and chase,
Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?
Remember where, in Rington Furze,
I kissed her and she asked me whether
I 'thought my lips of teazel-burrs,
That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,
Felt nice on a rinkenny moey {76} like hers?'--
Gypsy Heather!

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Remember her whom nought could tame
But love of me, the poacher-maiden
Who showed me once my father's game
With which her plump round arms were laden
Who, when my glances spoke reproach,
Said, "Things o' fur an' fin an' feather
Like coneys, pheasants, perch an' loach,
An' even the famous 'Rington roach,'
Wur born for Romany chies to poach!"--
Gypsy Heather!

III

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Atolls and reefs, you change, you change
To dells of England dewy and tender;
You palm-trees in yon coral range
Seem 'Rington Birches' sweet and slender
Shading the ocean's fiery glare:
We two are in the Dell together--
My body is here, my soul is there
With lords of trap and net and snare,
The Children of the Open Air,--
Gypsy Heather!

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Its pungent breath is on the wind,
Killing the scent of tropic water;
I see her suitors swarthy skinned,
Who pine in vain for Jasper's daughter.
The 'Scollard,' with his features tanned
By sun and wind as brown as leather--
His forehead scarred with Passion's brand--
Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,
Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,--
Gypsy Heather!

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Now Rhona sits beneath the tree
That shades our tent, alone and weeping;
And him, the 'Scollard,' him I see:
From bush to bush I see him creeping--
I see her mock him, see her run
And free his pony from the tether,
Who lays his ears in love and fun,
And gallops with her in the sun
Through lace the gossamers have spun,--
Gypsy Heather!

Remember Gypsy Heather?
She reaches 'Rington Birches'; now,
Dismounting from the 'Scollard's' pony,
She sits alone with heavy brow,
Thinking, but not of hare or coney.
The hot sea holds each sight, each sound
Of England's golden autumn weather:
The Romanies now are sitting round
The tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;
Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,--
Gypsy Heather!

VII

Remember Gypsy Heather?
She's thinking of this withered spray
Through all the dance; her eyes are gleaming
Darker than night, yet bright as day,
While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;
I see the lips--the upper curled,
A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,
Whence--while the floating shawl is twirled,
As if a ruddy cloud were swirled--
Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,--
Gypsy Heather!

VIII

Remember Gypsy Heather?
In storm or calm, in sun or rain,
There's magic, Rhona, in the writing
Wound round these flowers whose purple stain
Dims the dear scrawl of Love's inditing:
Dear girl, this spray between the leaves
(Now fading like a draggled feather
With which the nesting song-bird weaves)
Makes every wave the vessel cleaves
Seem purple of heather as it heaves,--
Gypsy Heather!

Remember Gypsy Heather?
Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of home
Are everywhere; the skylark winging
Through amber cloud-films till the dome
Seems filled with love, our love, a-singing.
The sea-wind seems an English breeze
Bearing the bleat of ewe and wether
Over the heath from Rington Leas,
Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,
You taught me Romany 'neath the trees,--
Gypsy Heather!

Another reason that makes it necessary for me to touch upon the inland
part of East Anglia is that I have certain remarks to make upon what are
called 'the Omarian poems of Mr. Watts-Dunton.' Although, as I have
before hinted, St. Ives, being in Hunts, belongs topographically to the
East Midlands, its sympathies are East Anglian. This perhaps is partly
because it is the extreme east of Hunts, and partly because the mouth of
the Ouse is at Lynn: to those whom Mr. Norris affectionately calls St.
Ivians and Hemingfordians, the seaside means Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Cromer,
Hunstanton, and the towns on the Suffolk coast. The splendour of Norfolk
ale may also partly account for it. This perhaps also explains why the
famous East Anglian translator of Omar Khayyam would seem to have been
known to a few Omarians on the banks of the Ouse and Cam as soon as the
great discoverer of good things, Rossetti, pounced upon it in the penny
box of a second-hand bookseller. Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton's obituary
notice of F. H. Groome in the 'Athenaeum' will recall these words:--

"It was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of
sympathy at 'The Pines' during that first luncheon; there was that
other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam.
We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps
all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be
esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual
personal contact with the wonderful old 'Fitz.' As a child of eight
he had seen him, talked with him, been patted on the head by him.
Groome's father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald's
most intimate friends. This was at once a delightful and a powerful
link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when
he heard, as he soon did, the toast to 'Omar Khayyam,' none drank
that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, as the Romanies
say, true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first
sight."

This is the poem alluded to: it is entitled, 'Toast to Omar Khayyam: An
East Anglian echo-chorus inscribed to old Omarian Friends in memory of
happy days by Ouse and Cam':--

CHORUS

In this red wine, where memory's eyes seem glowing,
And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
And Norfolk's foaming nectar glittered, showing
What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
We drink to thee, right heir of Nature's knowing,
Omar Khayyam!

Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowing
Her scriptured orbs on Time's wide oriflamme,
Nature's proud blazon: 'Who shall bless or damn?
Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!'
CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!

Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowing
Through Persian gardens, widened till it swam--
A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam--
Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,--
CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!

III

Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,
And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,
And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,
And swish of scythe in Bredfield's dewy mowing?
CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!

'Twas Fitz, 'Old Fitz,' whose knowledge, farther going
Than lore of Omar, 'Wisdom's starry Cham,'
Made richer still thine opulent epigram:
Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.--
CHORUS: Omar Khayyam!

In this red wine, where Memory's eyes seem glowing,
And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,
And Norfolk's foaming nectar glittered, showing
What beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,
We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!
Omar Khayyam!

It was many years after this--it was as a member of another Omar Khayyam
Club of much greater celebrity than the little brotherhood of Ouse and
Cam--not large enough to be called a club--that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote
the following well-known sonnet:--

PRAYER TO THE WINDS

On planting at the head of FitzGerald's grave two rose-trees whose
ancestors had scattered their petals over the tomb of Omar Khayyam.

"My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon
it."

OMAR KHAYYAM TO KWAJAH NIZAMI.

Hear us, ye winds! From where the north-wind strows
Blossoms that crown 'the King of Wisdom's' tomb,
The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,
Dreaming in seed of Love's ancestral rose,
To meadows where a braver north-wind blows
O'er greener grass, o'er hedge-rose, may, and broom,
And all that make East England's field-perfume
Dearer than any fragrance Persia knows.

Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!
This granite covers him whose golden mouth
Made wiser ev'n the Word of Wisdom's King:
Blow softly over Omar's Western herald
Till roses rich of Omar's dust shall spring
From richer dust of Suffolk's rare FitzGerald.

I must now quote another of Mr. Watts-Dunton's East Anglian poems, partly
because it depicts the weird charm of the Norfolk coast, and partly
because it illustrates that sympathy between the poet and the lower
animals which I have already noted. I have another reason: not long ago,
that good East Anglian, Mr. Rider Haggard interested us all by telling
how telepathy seemed to have the power of operating between a dog and its
beloved master in certain rare and extraordinary cases. When the poem
appeared in the 'Saturday Review' (December 20, 1902), it was described
as 'part of a forthcoming romance.' It records a case of telepathy
between man and dog quite as wonderful as that narrated by Mr. Rider
Haggard:--

CAUGHT IN THE EBBING TIDE

The mightiest Titan's stroke could not withstand
An ebbing tide like this. These swirls denote
How wind and tide conspire. I can but float
To the open sea and strike no more for land.
Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sand
Her feet have pressed--farewell, dear little boat
Where Gelert, {82} calmly sitting on my coat,
Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!

All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:
Yet these air-pictures of the past that glide--
These death-mirages o'er the heaving tide--
Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,
Will break my heart. I see them and I hear
As there they sit at morning, side by side.

THE FIRST VISION

_With Raxton elms behind--in front the sea_,
_Sitting in rosy light in that alcove_,
_They hear the first lark rise o'er Raxton Grove_;
'_What should I do with fame_, _dear heart_?' _says he_.
'_You talk of fame_, _poetic fame_, _to me_
_Whose crown is not of laurel but of love_--
_To me who would not give this little glove_
_On this dear hand for Shakspeare's dower in fee_.

_While_, _rising red and kindling every billow_,
_The sun's shield shines_ '_neath many a golden spear_,
_To lean with you against this leafy pillow_,
_To murmur words of love in this loved ear_--
_To feel you bending like a bending willow_,
_This is to be a poet_--_this_, _my dear_!'

O God, to die and leave her--die and leave
The heaven so lately won!--And then, to know
What misery will be hers--what lonely woe!--
To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieve
Will make me a coward as I sink, and cleave
To life though Destiny has bid me go.
How shall I bear the pictures that will glow
Above the glowing billows as they heave?

One picture fades, and now above the spray
Another shines: ah, do I know the bowers
Where that sweet woman stands--the woodland flowers,
In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay--
That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hours
Wore angel-wings,--till portents brought dismay?

THE SECOND VISION

_Proud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel_,
_She smiles on him_--_on him_, _the prouder giver_,
_As there they stand beside the sunlit river_
_Where petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel_:
_The chirping reed-birds_, _in their play or quarrel_,
_Make musical the stream where lilies quiver_--
_Ah_! _suddenly he feels her slim waist shiver_:
_She speaks_: _her lips grow grey_--_her lips of coral_!

'_From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are swaying_,
_The seeds of which that gypsy girl has spoken_--
'_Tis fairy grass_, _alas_! _the lover's token_.'
_She lifts her fingers to her forehead_, _saying_,
'_Touch the twin hearts_.' _Says he_, ''_Tis idle playing_':
_He touches them_; _they fall_--_fall bruised and broken_.

* * * * *

Shall I turn coward here who sailed with Death
Through many a tempest on mine own North Sea,
And quail like him of old who bowed the knee--
Faithless--to billows of Genesereth?
Did I turn coward when my very breath
Froze on my lips that Alpine night when he
Stood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,
While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?

Each billow bears me nearer to the verge
Of realms where she is not--where love must wait.--
If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urge
That friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,
To come and help me, or to share my fate.
Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.

[The dog, plunging into the tide and striking
towards him with immense strength, reaches
him and swims round him.]

Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of paw
Here gazing like your namesake, 'Snowdon's Hound,'
When great Llewelyn's child could not be found,
And all the warriors stood in speechless awe--
Mute as your namesake when his master saw
The cradle tossed--the rushes red around--
With never a word, but only a whimpering sound
To tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.

In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,
Should I, brave friend, have needed other speech
Than this dear whimper? Is there not a bond
Stronger than words that binds us each to each?--
But Death has caught us both. 'Tis far beyond
The strength of man or dog to win the beach.

Through tangle-weed--through coils of slippery kelp
Decking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyes
Shine true--shine deep of love's divine surmise
As hers who gave you--then a Titan whelp!
I think you know my danger and would help!
See how I point to yonder smack that lies
At anchor--Go! His countenance replies.
Hope's music rings in Gelert's eager yelp!

[The dog swims swiftly away down the tide.

Now, life and love and death swim out with him!
If he should reach the smack, the men will guess
The dog has left his master in distress.
You taught him in these very waves to swim--
'The prince of pups,' you said, 'for wind and limb'--
And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.

ENVOY

(The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the sand.)

'Twas in no glittering tourney's mimic strife,--
'Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,
While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,
And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife--
'Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,
Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove
Conquered and found his foe a soul to love,
Found friendship--Life's great second crown of life.

So I this morning love our North Sea more
Because he fought me well, because these waves
Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore
Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves
That yawned above my head like conscious graves--
I love him as I never loved before.

In these days when so much is written about the intelligence of the lower
animals, when 'Hans,' the 'thinking horse,' is 'interviewed' by eminent
scientists, the exploit of the Second Gelert is not without interest. I
may, perhaps, mention a strange experience of my own. The late Betts
Bey, a well-known figure in St. Peter's Port, Guernsey, had a fine black
retriever, named Caro. During a long summer holiday which we spent in
Guernsey, Caro became greatly attached to a friend, and Betts Bey
presented him to her. He was a magnificent fellow, valiant as a lion,
and a splendid diver and swimmer. He often plunged off the parapet of
the bridge which spans the Serpentine. Indeed, he would have dived from
any height. His intelligence was surprising. If we wished to make him
understand that he was not to accompany us, we had only to say, 'Caro, we
are going to church!' As soon as he heard the word 'church' his barks
would cease, his tail would drop, and he would look mournfully resigned.
One evening, as I was writing in my room, Caro began to scratch outside
the door, uttering those strange 'woof-woofs' which were his canine
language. I let him in, but he would not rest. He stood gazing at me
with an intense expression, and, turning towards the door, waited
impatiently. For some time I took no notice of his dumb appeal, but his
excitement increased, and suddenly a vague sense of ill seemed to pass
from him into my mind. Drawn half-consciously I rose, and at once with a
strange half-human whine Caro dashed upstairs. I followed him. He ran
into a bedroom, and there in the dark I found my friend lying
unconscious. It is well-nigh certain that Caro thus saved my friend's
life.

Chapter VIII
LONDON

BETWEEN Mr. Watts-Dunton and the brother who came next to him, before
mentioned, there was a very great affection, although the difference
between them, mentally and physically, was quite noticeable. They were
articled to their father on the same day and admitted solicitors on the
same day, a very unusual thing with solicitors and their sons. Mr.
Watts-Dunton afterwards passed a short term in one of the great
conveyancing offices in London in order to become proficient in
conveyancing. His brother did the same in another office in Bedford Row;
but he afterwards practised for himself. Mr. A. E. Watts soon had a
considerable practice as family solicitor and conveyancer. Mr. Hake
identifies him with Cyril Aylwin, but before I quote Mr. Hake's
interesting account of him, I will give the vivid description of Cyril in
'Aylwin':--

"Juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wideawake. He
had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he
gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the
little crow's feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately
as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim
and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have
considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and
sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an
impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often
produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek
which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of
sedateness . . . but in the one glance I had got from those watchful,
sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to
them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable."

Cyril Aylwin was at first thought to be a portrait of Whistler, which is
not quite so outrageously absurd as the wild conjecture that William
Morris was the original of Wilderspin. Mr. Hake says:--

"I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been
inquired about more than any other in the book. I knew him, I think,
even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group. He was
a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton's--Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts. He lived
at Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly
after I had met him at a wedding party. Among the set in which I
moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist.
His style of humour always struck me as being more American than
English. While bringing out humorous things that would set a dinner
table in a roar, he would himself maintain a perfectly unmoved
countenance. And it was said of him, as 'Wilderspin' says of 'Cyril
Aylwin,' that he was never known to laugh." {88}

After a time Mr. Watts-Dunton joined his brother, and the two practised
together in London. They also lived together at Sydenham. Some time
after this, however, Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to abandon the law for
literature. The brothers migrated to Sydenham, because at that time Mr.
Watts-Dunton pursued music with an avidity and interest which threatened
for a time to interfere with those literary energies which it was now his
intention to exercise. At that time the orchestral concerts at the
Crystal Palace under Manns, given every morning and every afternoon, were
a great attraction to music lovers, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, who lived close
by, rarely missed either the morning or the afternoon concert. It was in
this way that he became steeped in German music; and afterwards, when he
became intimate with Dr. F. Hueffer, the musical critic of the 'Times,'
and the exponent of Wagner in Great Britain, he became a thorough
Wagnerian.

It was during this time, and through the extraordinary social attractions
of his brother, that Mr. Watts-Dunton began to move very much in London
life, and saw a great deal of what is called London society. After his
brother's death he took chambers in Great James Street, close to Mr.
Swinburne, with whom he had already become intimate. And according to
Mr. Hake, in his paper in 'T. P.'s Weekly' above quoted from, it was here
that he wrote 'Aylwin.' I have already alluded to his record of this
most interesting event:--

"I have just read," he says, "with the greatest interest the article
in your number of Sept. 18, 1903, called 'How Authors Work Best.'
But the following sentence in it set me reflecting: 'Flaubert took
ten years to write and repolish "Madame Bovary," Watts-Dunton twenty
years to write, recast, and conclude "Aylwin."' The statement about
'Aylwin' has often been made, and in these days of hasty production
it may well be taken by the author as a compliment; but it is as
entirely apocryphal as that about Scott's brother having written the
Waverley Novels, and as that about Bramwell Bronte having written
'Wuthering Heights.' As to 'Aylwin,' I happen to be in a peculiarly
authoritative position to speak upon the genesis of this very popular
book. If any one were to peruse the original manuscript of the story
he would find it in four different handwritings--my late father's,
and two of my brothers', but principally in mine.

Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that its
composition did not take twenty years to achieve. It was dictated to
us."

Dr. Gordon Hake is mainly known as the 'parable poet,' but as a fact he
was a physician of extraordinary talent, who had practised first at Bury
St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, until he partly retired to
be private physician to the late Lady Ripon. After her death he left
practice altogether in order to devote himself to literature, for which
he had very great equipments. As 'Aylwin' touched upon certain subtle
nervous phases it must have been a great advantage to the author to
dictate these portions of the story to so skilled and experienced a
friend. The rare kind of cerebral exaltation into which Henry Aylwin
passed after his appalling experience in the Cove, in which the entire
nervous system was disturbed, was not what is known as brain fever. The
record of it in 'Aylwin' is, I understand, a literal account of a rare
and wonderful case brought under the professional notice of Dr. Hake.

As physician to Rossetti, a few years after the death of his beloved
wife, Dr. Hake's services must have been priceless to the poet-painter;
for, as is only too well known, Rossetti's grief for the death of his
wife had for some time a devastating effect upon his mind. It was one of
the causes of that terrible insomnia to relieve himself from which he
resorted to chloral, though later on the attacks upon him by certain foes
intensified the distressing ailment. The insomnia produced fits of
melancholia, an ailment, according to the skilled opinion of Dr. Hake,
more difficult than all others to deal with; for when the nervous system
has sunk to a certain state of depression, the mind roams over the
universe, as it were, in quest of imaginary causes for the depression.
This accounts for the 'cock and bull' stories that were somewhat rife
immediately after Rossetti's death about his having expressed remorse on
account of his ill-treatment of his wife. No one of his intimates took
the least notice of these wild and whirling words. For he would express
remorse on account of the most fantastic things when the fits of
melancholia were upon him; and when these fits were past he would smile
at the foolish things he had said. I get this knowledge from a very high
authority, Dr. Hake's son--Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, before mentioned--who
knew Rossetti intimately from 1871 until his death, having lived under
the same roof with him at Cheyne Walk, Bognor and Kelmscott. After
Rossetti's most serious attack of melancholia, his relations and friends
persuaded him to stay with Dr. Hake at Roehampton, and it was there that
the terrible crisis of his illness was passed.

It is interesting to know that in the original form of 'Aylwin' the
important part taken in the development of the story by D'Arcy was taken
by Dr. Hake, under the name of Gordon, and that afterwards, when all
sorts of ungenerous things were written about Rossetti, D'Arcy was
substituted for Gordon in order to give the author an opportunity of
bringing out and showing the world the absolute nobility and charm of
Rossetti's character.

[Picture: A Corner in 'The Pines,' showing the Painted and Carved
Cabinet]

Among the many varieties of life which Mr. Watts-Dunton saw at this time
was life in the slums; and this was long before the once fashionable
pastime of 'slumming' was invented. The following lines in Dr. Hake's
'New Day' allude to the deep interest that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always
shown in the poor--shown years before the writers who now deal with the
slums had written a line. Artistically, they are not fair specimens of
Dr. Gordon Hake's verses, but nevertheless it is interesting to quote
them here:--

Know you a widow's home? an orphanage?
A place of shelter for the crippled poor?
Did ever limbless men your care engage
Whom you assisted of your larger store?
Know you the young who are to early die--
At their frail form sinks not your heart within?
Know you the old who paralytic lie
While you the freshness of your life begin?
Know you the great pain-bearers who long carry
The bullet in the breast that does not kill?
And those who in the house of madness tarry,
Beyond the blest relief of human skill?
These have you visited, all these assisted,
In the high ranks of charity enlisted.

That Mr. Watts-Dunton has retained his interest in the poor is shown by
the sonnet, 'Father Christmas in Famine Street,' which was originally
printed as 'an appeal' on Christmas Eve in the 'Athenaeum':--

When Father Christmas went down Famine Street
He saw two little sisters: one was trying
To lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,
Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.

From out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweet
Leapt, as in answer to the other's sighing,
While came a murmur, 'Don't 'ee keep on crying--
I wants to die: you'll get my share to eat.'
Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the city
Hymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,
Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.
Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,
'They do His bidding--if in thrifty fashion:
They let the little children go to Him.'

With this sonnet should be placed that entitled, 'Dickens Returns on
Christmas Day':--

A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: 'Dickens dead?
Then will Father Christmas die too?'--June 9, 1870.

'Dickens is dead!' Beneath that grievous cry
London seemed shivering in the summer heat;
Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:
'Dickens is dead!' said they, and hurried by;
Street children stopped their games--they knew not why,
But some new night seemed darkening down the street.
A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,
Cried, 'Dickens dead? Will Father Christmas die?'

City he loved, take courage on thy way!
He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.
Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey--
Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,
Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears--
Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!

Let me say here, parenthetically, that 'The Pines' is so far out of date
that for twenty-five years it has been famous for its sympathy with the
Christmas sentiment which now seems to be fading, as this sonnet shows:--

THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT 'THE PINES.'

Life still hath one romance that naught can bury--
Not Time himself, who coffins Life's romances--
For still will Christmas gild the year's mischances,
If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry--
To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry--
To smile with eyes outshining by their glances
The Christmas tree--to dance with fairy dances
And crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.

And as to us, dear friend, the carols sung
Are fresh as ever. Bright is yonder bough
Of mistletoe as that which shone and swung
When you and I and Friendship made a vow
That Childhood's Christmas still should seal each brow--
Friendship's, and yours, and mine--and keep us young.

I may also quote from 'Prophetic Pictures at Venice' this romantic
description of the Rosicrucian Christmas:--

(The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called 'The
Rosy Scar,' depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine
galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of
Rosenkreutz, as a 'rosy phantom.' The Lover reads aloud the
descriptive verses on the frame.)

While Night's dark horses waited for the wind,
He stood--he shone--where Sunset's fiery glaives
Flickered behind the clouds; then, o'er the waves,
He came to them, Faith's remnant sorrow-thinned.
The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,
Cried, 'Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?
Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,
The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.'

All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;
Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,
Flushed the grey sky--flushed sea and sail and spar,
Flushed, blessing every slave's woe-wasted cheek.
Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:
'Sufferers, take heart! Christ lends the Rosy Scar.'

Chapter IX
GEORGE BORROW

IT was not until 1872 that Mr. Watts-Dunton was introduced to Borrow by
Dr. Gordon Hake, Borrow's most intimate friend.

The way in which this meeting came about has been familiar to the readers
of an autobiographical romance (not even yet published!) wherein Borrow
appears under the name of Dereham, and Hake under the name of Gordon.
But as some of these passages in a modified form have appeared in print
in an introduction by Mr. Watts-Dunton to the edition of Borrow's
'Lavengro,' published by Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., in 1893, there will be
nothing incongruous in my quoting them here:--

"Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon
grew up an intimacy between us. It has been my experience to learn
that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference
of age between friends of either sex. At that time I do not think I
had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on
terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men,
each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father. Basevi
was one of these: so was Lineham. I daresay it was owing to some
idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young
fellows with whom I was brought into contact was mainly confined to
matters connected with field-sports. I found it far easier to be
brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age
than with men. But as Basevi told me that it was the same with
himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all. When
Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any
difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same
with himself.

One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near
Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and
in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons
came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common,
evidently bound for the house.

'Dereham!' I said. 'Is there a man in the world I should so like to
see as Dereham?'

And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in
the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.

'Why do you want so much to see him?' asked Gordon.

'Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the
Open Air.'

Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant. But it is
necessary here to explain what that meaning was.

We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the
picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels,
'Cook's excursions,' etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as
ever it was--perhaps rarer. It was, we believed, quite an affair of
individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost.
That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is
known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with
science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the
man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it. In human
souls--in one, perhaps, as much as in another--there is always that
instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is
always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as
close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals
this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some
few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the
blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to
some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to 'Natura Benigna'
herself, closer to her whom we now call 'Inanimate Nature,' than to
brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and
Emily Bronte among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English
gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the 'Children
of the Open Air.' But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of
his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing
pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Bronte, the sensitivity to
human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love
passion--disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct
with which they were undoubtedly endowed. I was perfectly conscious
that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers--that is, I
was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a
free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion
to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child
of the Open Air.

Between the true 'Children of the Open Air' and their fellows there
are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other
barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to
overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the
attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what this kind of
Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not
the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to
touch her close, soul to soul--but another ego enisled like his
own--sensitive, shrinking, like his own--a soul which, love him as it
may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the
universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other
Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations.
But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon
Nature they lavish their love, 'a most equal love' that varies no
more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a
beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a
Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a
mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A
balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter's
sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious
life.

To the 'Child of the Open Air' life has but few ills; poverty cannot
touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will
go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a
dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky,
the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love
of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature
seems 'to know him and love him' in her turn.

Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no
retreating, and we were introduced.

He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much
annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that
drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still.
My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling
of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible
barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully. I knew from his books
that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way
directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he
considered that in these his own special directions lay all the
knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to
Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was
its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk
of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be
'prying,' though there I should have been quite at home. I knew,
however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet
literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of
eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned,
and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I
touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Dereham
evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar
with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I
touched upon beer, the British bruiser, 'gentility nonsense,' and
other 'nonsense'; then upon etymology--traced hoity-toityism to
'toit,' a roof--but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with
a withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but
with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of
Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet
narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having
been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had
shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night,
escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and
afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been
hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett's supposed victim,
having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding
at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes' walk in
the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to
sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the
subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold's play upon it, and
at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.

We all went out of the house and looked over the common. It chanced
that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the
sunken road opposite to Gordon's house. These same gypsies, by the
by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared
in the 'Graphic.' Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they
were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but
basket-makers. After passing this group we went on the common. We
did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty
figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them,
striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now
stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose
lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now
stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.

After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham's suggestion,
for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the
'Bald-Faced Stag' in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should
introduce me to Jerry Abershaw's sword, which was one of the special
glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I
remember--a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been
tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from
an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at
the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.

These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a
rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the
meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of
those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was
Dereham's special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on
the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a
summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood
Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical
and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us
there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a
rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on
the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away.
Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in
connection with the rainbow--how, by making a 'trus'hul' (cross) of
two sticks, the Romany chi who 'pens the dukkerin can wipe the
rainbow out of the sky,' etc. Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a
man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into
a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record,
upon the subject of the 'Spirit of the Rainbow' which I, as a child,
went out to find.

Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I
found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar
with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers,
seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him
closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the
silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under
his arm, a true 'Child of the Open Air.'

'Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green
umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?' I murmured to
Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the
Park, said in a dreamy way, 'Old England! Old England!'

It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham's
arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the
trees, 'Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?' And then, calling to
mind the books he had written, I said: 'He went into the Dingle, and
lived alone--went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as
Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone,
for the 'horrors' to which he was occasionally subject did not spring
from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the
Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi
Lovell, and as Emily Bronte would certainly have been had she been
placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Bronte placed Shirley.'

'But the most damning thing of all,' said Gordon, 'is that umbrella,
gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.'

'Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,' said I.
'So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is
quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never.
No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story
finds himself able to realize from Dereham's description the misery
of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East
Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with
starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion,' I said to
Gordon, 'that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the
Nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could
never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition.
To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was
as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander
Smith's poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.'

'Ambition and the green gamp,' said Gordon. 'But look, the rainbow
is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries;
and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the
light.'

But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open
Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human
kind which the 'Child of the Open Air' must needs lack.

Knowing Dereham's extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of
meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close
to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the
terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that
walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why
Dereham should at once take to me--reasons that had nothing whatever
to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.

By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon
Dereham's character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.

Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably
had their nests. By the expression on Dereham's face as he stood and
gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.

'Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was
drained?' I said.

'I should think so,' said he dreamily, 'and every kind of water
bird.'

Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, 'But how
do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?'

'You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of
Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.'

'I don't mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,' he said.

'No,' said I, 'but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at
Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.'

'Then you know Whittlesea Mere?' said Dereham, much interested.

'I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,' I
said, 'and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know
the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized. He
was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much
across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of
the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.'

I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave
him Marcianus's story about the Moors being invulnerable to the
viper's bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected
child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper--as he, Dereham,
when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.

'The gypsies,' said Dereham, 'always believed me to be a Romany. But
surely you are not a Romany Rye?'

'No,' I said, 'but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it
has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and
low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?'

'I should think not,' said Dereham indignantly.

'But I hope you don't know the literary class among the rest.'

'Gordon is my only link to that dark world,' I said, 'and even you
don't object to Gordon. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the
taint of printers' ink.'

He laughed. 'Who are you?'

'The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child
in short frocks,' I said, 'and have never yet found an answer. But
Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself
with any such troublesome query.'

This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as
these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man's
personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in
many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself
into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly
vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
gypsies and East Anglia.

'You are an Englishman?' said Dereham.

'Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,' I said, using a
phrase of his own in one of his books--'if not a thorough East
Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.'

'Nearly,' said Dereham.

And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
'Shales mare,' a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who
could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk
farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and
when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare
with myself behind her in a dogcart--an East Anglian dogcart; when I
praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth,
Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most
buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told
him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the
rainbow he loved was 'the glassy Ouse' of East Anglia, and the only
place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was
the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing
that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East
Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment
we became friends.

Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He
turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity
between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon
a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the
distance.

'It is on sand alone,' said Dereham, 'that the sea strikes its true
music--Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.'

'The best of the sea's lutes,' I said, 'is made by the sands of
Cromer.'"

These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above
quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus
described by the 'Gordon' of the story in one of the sonnets in 'The New
Day':--

And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!
How often 'mid the deer that grazed the park,
Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,
Made musical with many a soaring lark,
Have we not held brisk commune with him there,
While Lavengro, there towering by your side,
With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,
Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride
To tell the legends of the fading race--
As at the summons of his piercing glance,
Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,
While you called up that pendant of romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi's noble story!

In the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and in Chambers' 'Cyclopaedia of
English Literature,' and scattered through scores of articles in the
'Athenaeum,' I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without
number. They afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man
that exists or is ever likely to exist. But, of course, it is quite
impossible for me to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many
more important figures waiting to be introduced. Still, I must find room
for the most brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush
these pages with a colour which I feel they need. Mr. Watts-Dunton has
been described as the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in
verse or in prose, and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but
never, I think, is he so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.

I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of gypsy life is
to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England
where East Anglia and the Midlands join. It adds interest to the
incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona
Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow. This also is a chapter from
the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to
be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow's books:--

"It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with
what Dereham called 'gypsy gold,' and the bright green of the foliage
showed scarcely a touch of bronze--at that very moment, indeed, when
the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and
the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their
half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy,
and pimpernel. Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man
could give. He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of
gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days. In
conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I
chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume
of Matthew Arnold in which appears 'The Scholar-Gypsy.' Dereham said
he well remembered my directing his attention to 'The Scholar-Gypsy.'
After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was
scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever
the merits of Matthew Arnold's poem might be, from any supposed
artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of
the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or
even understand its motive in the least degree. I challenged this,
contending that howsoever Arnold's classic language might soar above
a gypsy's intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the
most illiterate person could grasp it.

'I wish,' said Dereham, 'you would come with me to the camp and try
the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp.
As to gypsy men,' said he, 'they are too prosaic to furnish a fair
test.'

We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became
very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense,
and many other pet subjects of his. I already knew that he was no
lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the
'trumpery great,' although in other regards he was such a John Bull.
By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition.
As we were walking along, Dereham's eyes, which were as longsighted
as a gypsy's, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush
some distance off. He stopped and said: 'At first I thought that
white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it's a
magpie,'--next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies' most famous bird.
On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the
leaves. As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: 'It is
wounded--or else dying--or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?'
'Hawk!' said Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed
into the sky. 'The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his
quarry and made his meal. I fancied he has himself been 'chivvied'
by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.'

And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that
speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk--one of the kind which takes its
prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands--was wheeling up
and up, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to
swoop at and devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had
been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident,
for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest
birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk.
Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.

As we were gazing at the bird a woman's voice at our elbows said,--

'It's lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie. I shall stop
here till the hawk's flew away.'

We turned round, and there stood a fine young gypsy woman, carrying,
gypsy fashion, a weakly child that in spite of its sallow and wasted
cheek proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a young gypsy
girl. She was beautiful--quite remarkably so--but her beauty was not
of the typical Romany kind. It was, as I afterwards learned, more
like the beauty of a Capri girl.

She was bareheaded--there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her
head--her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a
gypsy girl's hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the
back of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses
glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.
They were small dead dragonflies, of the crimson kind called
'sylphs.'

To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known. The woman with
the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what was her
connection, if any, with 'Boswell the Great'--I mean Sylvester
Boswell, the grammarian and 'well-known and popalated gypsy of
Codling Gap,' who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about
the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, 'on the
accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of
Nature's life.'

Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was Perpinia, and that the
other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, was the famous beauty of
the neighbourhood--Rhona Boswell, of whom many stories had reached
him with regard to Percy Aylwin, a relative of Rosamond's father.

After greeting the two,

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