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.