Chapter XXVI: 'the Coming of Love'

IN my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature' I devoted most of my space to 'The Coming of Love.' I put the two great romantic poems 'The Coming of Love' and 'Christmas at the "Mermaid"' far above everything he has done. I think I see both in the conception and in the execution of these poems the promise of immortality--if immortality can be predicted of any poems of our time. In reading them one remembers in a flash Mr. Watts-Dunton's own noble words about the poetic impulse:--

"In order to produce poetry the soul must for the time being have
reached that state of exaltation, that state of freedom from
self-consciousness, depicted in the lines--

I started once, or seemed to start, in pain
Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,
As when a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek.

Whatsoever may be the poet's 'knowledge of his art,' into this mood
he must always pass before he can write a truly poetic line. For,
notwithstanding all that we have said and are going to say upon
poetry as a fine art, it is in the deepest sense of the word an
'inspiration' indeed. No man can write a line of genuine poetry
without having been 'born again' (or, as the true rendering of the
text says, 'born from above'); and then the mastery over those
highest reaches of form which are beyond the ken of the mere
versifier comes to him as a result of the change. Hence, with all
Mrs. Browning's metrical blemishes, the splendour of her metrical
triumphs at her best.

For what is the deep distinction between poet and proseman? A writer
may be many things besides a poet; he may be a warrior like
AEschylus, a man of business like Shakespeare, a courtier like
Chaucer, or a cosmopolitan philosopher like Goethe; but the moment
the poetic mood is upon him all the trappings of the world with which
for years he may perhaps have been clothing his soul--the world's
knowingness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition--fall away,
and the man becomes an inspired child again, with ears attuned to
nothing but the whispers of those spirits from the Golden Age, who,
according to Hesiod, haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such
a man produces may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not
so greatly as it delights and astonishes himself. His passages of
pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his
own eyes while he writes; his sublime passages overawe no soul so
imperiously as his own; his humour draws no laughter so rich or so
deep as that stirred within his own breast.

It might almost be said, indeed, that Sincerity and Conscience, the
two angels that bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic dream,
bring him also the deepest, truest delight of form. It might almost
be said that by aid of sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled
to see more clearly than other men the eternal limits of his own
art--to see with Sophocles that nothing, not even poetry itself, is
of any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil,
unless it is in the deepest and highest sense good, unless it comes
linking us all together by closer bonds of sympathy and pity,
strengthening us to fight the foes with whom fate and even nature,
the mother who bore us, sometimes seem in league--to see with Milton
that the high quality of man's soul which in English is expressed by
the word virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized,
greater than all the rhythms of all the tongues that have been spoken
since Babel--and to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the
high passion which in England is called love is lovelier than all
art, lovelier than all the marble Mercuries that 'await the chisel of
the sculptor' in all the marble hills."

The reason why the criticism of the hour does not always give Mr. Watts-Dunton the place accorded to him by his great contemporaries is not any lack of generosity: it arises from the unprecedented, not to say eccentric, way in which his poetry has reached the public. In this respect alone, apart from its great originality, 'The Coming of Love' is a curiosity of literature. I know nothing in the least like the history of this poem. It was written, circulated in manuscript among the very elite of English letters, and indeed partly published in the 'Athenaeum,' very nearly a quarter of a century ago. I have before alluded to Mrs. Chandler Moulton's introduction to Philip Bourke Marston's poems, where she says that it was Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry which won for him the friendship of Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Yet for lustre after lustre it was persistently withheld from the public; cenacle after poetic cenacle rose, prospered and faded away, and still this poet, who was talked of by all the poets and called 'the friend of all the poets,' kept his work back until he had passed middle age. Then, at last, owing I believe to the energetic efforts of Mr. John Lane, who had been urging the matter for something like five years, he launched a volume which seized upon the public taste and won a very great success so far as sales go. It is now in its sixth edition. There can be no doubt whatever that if the book had appeared, as it ought to have appeared, at the time it was written, critics would have classed the poet among his compeers and he would have come down to the present generation, as Swinburne has come down, as a classic. But, as I have said, it is not in the least surprising that, notwithstanding Rossetti's intense admiration of the poem, notwithstanding the fact that Morris intended to print it at the Kelmscott Press, and notwithstanding the fact that Swinburne, in dedicating the collected edition of his works to Mr. Watts-Dunton, addresses him as a poet of the greatest authority--it is only the true critics who see in the right perspective a poet who has so perversely neglected his chances. If his time of recognition has not yet fully come, this generation is not to blame. The poet can blame only himself, although to judge by Rossetti's words, and by the following lines from Dr. Hake's 'New Day,' he is indifferent to that:--

You tell me life is all too rich and brief,
Too various, too delectable a game,
To give to art, entirely or in chief;
And love of Nature quells the thirst for fame.

The 'parable poet' then goes on to give voice to the opinion, not only of himself, but of most of the great poets of the mid-Victorian epoch:--

You who in youth the cone-paved forest sought,
Musing until the pines to musing fell;
You who by river-path the witchery caught
Of waters moving under stress of spell;
You who the seas of metaphysics crossed,
And yet returned to art's consoling haven--
Returned from whence so many souls are lost,
With wisdom's seal upon your forehead graven--
Well may you now abandon learning's seat,
And work the ore all seek, not many find;
No sign-post need you to direct your feet,
You draw no riches from another's mind.
Hail Nature's coming; bygone be the past;
Hail her New Day; it breaks for man at last.

Fulfil the new-born dream of Poesy!
Give her your life in full, she turns from less--
Your life in full--like those who did not die,
Though death holds all they sang in dark duress.
You, knowing Nature to the throbbing core,
You can her wordless prophecies rehearse.
The murmers others heard her heart outpour
Swell to an anthem in your richer verse.
If wider vision brings a wider scope
For art, and depths profounder for emotion,
Yours be the song whose master-tones shall ope
A new poetic heaven o'er earth and ocean.
The New Day comes apace; its virgin fame
Be yours, to fan the fiery soul to flame.

Indeed, he has often said to me: 'There is a tide in the affairs of men, and I did not throw myself upon my little tide until it was too late, and I am not going to repine now.' For my part, I have been a student of English poetry all my life--it is my chief subject of study--and I predict that when poetic imagination is again perceived to be the supreme poetic gift, Mr. Watts-Dunton's genius will be acclaimed. In respect of imaginative power, apart from the other poetic qualities--'the power of seeing a dramatic situation and flashing it upon the physical senses of the listener,' none of his contemporaries have surpassed him.

I have said in print more than once that I, a Celt myself, can see more Celtic glamour in his poetry than in many of the Celtic poets of our time. And, if we are to judge by the vogue of 'The Coming of Love' and 'Aylwin' in Wales, the Welsh people seem to see it very clearly. Take, for instance, the sonnet called 'The Mirrored Stars' again, given on page 29. It is impossible for Celtic glamour to go further than this; and yet it is rarely noted by critics in discussing the Celtic note in poetry.

In order fully to understand 'The Coming of Love' it is necessary to bear in mind a distinction between the two kinds of poetry upon which Mr. Watts-Dunton has often dwelt. "There are," he tells us, "but two kinds of poetry, but two kinds of art--that which interprets, and that which represents. 'Poetry is apparent pictures of unapparent realities,' says the Eastern mind through Zoroaster; 'the highest, the only operation of art is representation (Gestaltung),' says the Western mind through Goethe. Both are right." Madame Galimberti has called Mr. Watts-Dunton 'the poet of the sunrise': There are richer descriptions of sunrise in 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' than in any other writer I know. "Few poets," Mr. Watts-Dunton says, "have been successful in painting a sunrise, for the simple reason that, save through the bed-curtains, they do not often see one. They think that all they have to do is to paint a sunset, which they sometimes do see, and call it a sunrise. They are entirely mistaken, however; the two phenomena are both like and unlike. Between the cloud-pageantry of sunrise and of sunset the difference to the student of Nature is as apparent as is the difference to the poet between the various forms of his art."

'The Coming of Love' shows that independence of contemporary vogues and influences which characterizes all Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, whether in verse or prose, whether in romance or criticism, or in that analysis and exposition of the natural history of minds about which Sainte Beuve speaks. It was as a poet that his energies were first exercised, but this for a long time was known only to his poetical friends. His criticism came many years afterwards, and, as Rossetti used to say, 'his critical work consists of generalizations of his own experience in the poet's workshop.' For many years he was known only in his capacity as a critic. James Russell Lowell is reported to have said: 'Our ablest critics hitherto have been 18-carat; Theodore Watts goes nearer the pure article.' Mr. William Sharp, in his study of Rossetti, says: 'In every sense of the word the friendship thus begun resulted in the greatest benefit to the elder writer, the latter having greater faith in Mr. Watts-Dunton's literary judgment than seems characteristic with so dominant and individual an intellect as that of Rossetti. Although the latter knew well the sonnet-literature of Italy and England, and was a much-practised master of the heart's key himself, I have heard him on many occasions refer to Theodore Watts as having still more thorough knowledge on the subject, and as being the most original sonnet-writer living.'

'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' are vitally connected with the poet's peculiar critical message. Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin may be regarded as the embodiment of his philosophy of life. The very popularity of 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' is apt to make readers forget the profundity of the philosophical thought upon which they are based, although this profundity has been indicated by such competent critics as Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the 'Contemporary Review,' M. Maurice Muret in the 'Journal des Debats,' and other thoughtful writers. Upon the inner meaning of the romance and the poem I have, however, ideas of my own to express, which are not in full accordance with any previous criticisms. To me it seems that the two cousins, Henry Aylwin of the romance, and Percy Aylwin of the poem, are phases of a modern Hamlet, a Hamlet who has travelled past the pathetic superstitions of the old cosmogonies to the last milestone of doubting hope and questioning fear, a Hamlet who stands at the portals of the outer darkness, gazing with eyes made wistful by the loss of a beloved woman. In both the romance and the poem the theme is love at war with death. Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to the illustrated edition of 'Aylwin' says:--

"It is a story written as a comment on Love's warfare with
death--written to show that, confronted as man is every moment by
signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel
connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the
unknown country beyond Orion, where the beloved dead are loving us
still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything
else: a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes
intensified when a man has lost--or thinks he has lost--a woman whose
love was the only light of his world--when his soul is torn from his
body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the 'viewless
winds' right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs
beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last
even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter
darkness and loneliness. It was to depict this phase of human
emotion that both 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' were written.
They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer's soul,
sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world--sent out to
find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was,
without knowing it, akin. In 'Aylwin' the problem is symbolized by
the victory of love over sinister circumstance, whereas in the poem
it is symbolized by a mystical dream of 'Natura Benigna.'

In 'The Coming of Love' Percy Aylwin is a poet and a sailor, with such an absorbing love for the sea that he has no room for any other passion; to him an imprisoned seabird is a sufferer almost more pitiable than any imprisoned man, as will be seen by the opening section of the poem, 'Mother Carey's Chicken.' On seeing a storm-petrel in a cage on a cottage wall near Gypsy Dell, he takes down the cage in order to release the bird; then, carrying the bird in the cage, he turns to cross a rustic wooden bridge leading past Gypsy Dell, when he suddenly comes upon a landsman friend of his, a Romany Rye, who is just parting from a young gypsy-girl. Gazing at her beauty, Percy stands dazzled and forgets the petrel. It is symbolical of the inner meaning of the story that the bird now flies away through the half-open door. From that moment, through the magic of love, the land to Percy is richer than the sea: this ends the first phase of the story. The first kiss between the two lovers is thus described:--

If only in dreams may Man be fully blest,
Is heaven a dream? Is she I claspt a dream?
Or stood she here even now where dew-drops gleam
And miles of furze shine yellow down the West?
I seem to clasp her still--still on my breast
Her bosom beats: I see the bright eyes beam.
I think she kissed these lips, for now they seem
Scarce mine: so hallowed of the lips they pressed.
Yon thicket's breath--can that be eglantine?
Those birds--can they be Morning's choristers?
Can this be Earth? Can these be banks of furze?
Like burning bushes fired of God they shine!
I seem to know them, though this body of mine
Passed into spirit at the touch of hers!

Percy stays with the gypsies, and the gypsy-girl, Rhona, teaches him Romany. This arouses the jealousy of a gypsy rival--Herne the 'Scollard.' Percy Aylwin's family afterwards succeeds in separating him from her, and he is again sent to sea. While cruising among the coral islands he receives the letter from Rhona which paints her character with unequalled vividness:--

RHONA'S LETTER

On Christmas Eve I seed in dreams
the day
When Herne the Scollard come and
said to me,
He s off, that rye o yourn, gone gentleman
clean away
Till swallow-time; hes left this
letter: see.
In dreams I heerd the bee and
grasshopper,
Like on that mornin, buz in Rington
Hollow,
Shell live till swallow-time and die
then shell mer,
For never will a rye come back to gentleman
her
Wot leaves her till the comin o the
swallow.

All night I heerd them bees and grasshoppers;

All night I smelt the breath o grass and may,

Mixed sweet wi' smells o honey from the furze

Like on that mornin when you went away;

All night I heerd in dreams my daddy laugh sal, Sayin, De blessed chi ud give de chollo girl-whole O Bozzles breed--tans, vardey, greis, tents: waggons: horses and all-- To see dat tarno rye o hern palall back Wots left her till the comin o the swallow.

I woke and went a-walkin on the ice All white with snow-dust, just like salt sparklin loon, And soon beneath the stars I heerd a vice, A vice I knowed and often, often shoon; hear An then I seed a shape as thin as tuv; smoke I knowed it wur my blessed mammy s spirit mollo. {403a} Rhona, she sez, that tarno rye you love, He s thinkin on you; don t you go and weep rove; You ll see him at the comin o the swallow.

Sez she, For you it seemed to kill the grass When he wur gone, and freeze the songs brooklets gillies; There wornt no smell, dear, in the hay sweetest cas, And when the summer brought the water-lilies, And when the sweet winds waved the wheat golden giv, The skies above em seemed as bleak and black kollo {403b} As now, when all the world seems frozen snow yiv. The months are long, but mammy says you ll live By thinkin o the comin o the swallow.

She sez, The whinchat soon wi silver throat Will meet the stonechat in the buddin whin, And soon the blackcaps airliest gillie song ull float From light-green boughs through leaves a-peepin thin; The wheat-ear soon ull bring the willow-wren, And then the fust fond nightingale ull follow, A-callin Come, dear, to his laggin hen Still out at sea, the spring is in our glen; Come, darlin, wi the comin o the swallow.

And she wur gone! And then I read the words In mornin twilight wot you rote to me; They made the Christmas sing with summer birds, And spring-leaves shine on every frozen tree; And when the dawnin kindled Rington spire, And curdlin winter-clouds burnt gold and red lollo Round the dear sun, wot seemed a yolk o fire, Another night, I sez, has brought him nigher; He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.

And soon the bull-pups found me on the Pool-- You know the way they barks to see me slide-- But when the skatin bors o Rington scool Comed on, it turned my head to see em glide. I seemed to see you twirlin on your skates, And somethin made me clap my hans and hollo; It s him, I sez, achinnin o them 8s. cutting But when I woke-like--Im the gal wot waits Alone, I sez, the comin o the swallow.

Comin seemed ringin in the Christmas-chime; Comin seemed rit on everything I seed, In beads o frost along the nets o rime, Sparklin on every frozen rush and reed; And when the pups began to bark and play, And frisk and scrabble and bite my frock and wallow Among the snow and fling it up like spray, I says to them, You know who rote to say He s comin wi the comin o the swallow.

The thought on t makes the snow-drifts o December Shine gold, I sez, like daffodils o spring Wot wait beneath: hes comin, pups, remember; If not--for me no singin birds ull sing: No choring chiriklo ull hold the gale cuckoo Wi Cuckoo, cuckoo, {404} over hill and hollow: Therell be no crakin o the meadow-rail, Therell be no Jug-jug o the nightingale, For her wot waits the comin o the swallow.

Come back, minaw, and you may kiss your mine own han To that fine rawni rowin on the river; lady I ll never call that lady a chovihan witch Nor yit a mumply gorgie--I'll forgive miserable Gentile her. Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife. Come back--or, say the word, and I will follow Your footfalls round the world: Ill leave this life (Ive flung away a-ready that ere knife)-- I m dyin for the comin o the swallow.

Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very moment when 'the Schollard,' maddened by the discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the river-bank. Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle on the other side without being able to go to Rhona's assistance. But the girl hurls her antagonist into the water, and he is drowned. There are other witnesses--the stars, whose reflected light, according to a gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the deed. For a Romany woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty is death. Nevertheless, Rhona marries Percy. I will quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in the tent at dawn:--

The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
The tent's mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.
I hear the earliest anvil's tingling clink
From Jasper's forge; the cattle on the leas
Begin to low. She's waking by degrees:
Sleep's rosy fetters melt, but link by link.
What dream is hers? Her eyelids shake with tears;
The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
"You'll never leave me now? There is but you;
I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
'The Dukkeripen o' stars comes ever true.'"

She rises, startled by a wandering bee
Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree--
Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,
Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl--
The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
And says, 'This bride of yours, I know her well,
And so do all the birds in all the bowers
Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
See, on the curtain of the morning haze
The Future's finger writes of happy days.'

Rhona, half-hidden by 'the branches of the hawthorn tree,' stretches up to kiss the white and green May buds overhanging the bridal tent, while Percy Aylwin stands at the tent's mouth and looks at her:--

Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings
Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
From Rhona's eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,
Kissing the buds for 'luck o' love' it brings,
While from the dingle grass the skylark springs
And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?

[He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches
apart, and clasps her in his arms.

Can she here, covering with her childish kisses
These pearly buds--can she so soft, so tender,
So shaped for clasping--dowered of all love-blisses--
Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
An angel storming hell, through death's abysses,
Where never a sight could fright or power could bend her?

But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the lovers are on the river she reads the scripture of the stars. I must give here the sonnet quoted on page 29:--

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.

The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in which Percy confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its menace. The stars write in the river:--

Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is strong.

Percy reads the rune and answers:--

I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
In Heav'n that wove this net of life for men?
Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth--
King that can do no wrong!
Ah! Night seems opening! There, above the skies,
Who sits upon that central sun for throne
Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?
Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes
Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
Of infinite light, 'tis Love that stands immortal,
The King of Kings.

The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering Rhona's secret, secretly slay her. Percy, having returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to find her grave. Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called 'Natura Maligna,' which has been much discussed by the critics:--

The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
By glacier-brink she stood--by cataract-spray--
When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
And if a footprint shone at break of day,
My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
''Tis hers whose hand God's mightier hand doth hold.'
I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
When lo, she stood! . . . God made her let me pass,
Then felled the bridge! . . . Oh, there in sallow light,
There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
And all my wondrous days as in a glass.

This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry. Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the 'Athenaeum' of February 5, 1881: "Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali ('the malignant') or Parvati ('the mountaineer'). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek to God in the delirium of their fear."

Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while New Year's morning is breaking:--

Through Fate's mysterious warp another weft
Of days is cast; and see! Time's star-built throne,
From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
Of all that was its music--stand alone,
Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
Impatient of the leaden minutes left--

The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
Barren and foolish, and I cry, 'No grain,
No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!'
And yet I cannot join the dead--and live.

Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
In England, heedless of the knells they ring
To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
Each to the other ere you say adieu!--
I seem to hear their chimes--the chimes we knew
In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
Greeting a New Year's Day as bright of wing
As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.

If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
Could bring the past and make it live again,
Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears--
And with the past bring her I weep in vain--
Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.

[The clouds move away and show the
stars in dazzling brightness.

Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove--
They bring the mighty Mother's new-year greeting:
'All save great Nature is a vision fleeting'--
So says the scripture of those orbs above.
'All, all,' I cry, 'except man's dower of love!--
Love is no child of Nature's mystic cheating!'

And yet it comes again, the old desire
To read what yonder constellations write
On river and ocean--secrets of the night--
To feel again the spirit's wondering fire
Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
To catch the master-note of Nature's lyre.

New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
By Fate and Death, 'Nature is ever young,
Clad in new riches, as each morning's gold
Blooms o'er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;

The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
Of Youth's fresh runners in the lists of Time.
Arise, and drink the wine of Nature's light!'

Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of 'The Promise of the Sunrise' and the revelation of 'Natura Benigna':--

Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
'Sorrow,' I said, 'has made me old, my dear;
'Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
Beneath my load a seraph's neck might bow,
Vigils like mine would blanch an angel's hair.'
Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes--
I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.

And now 'Natura Benigna' reveals to him her mystic consolation:--

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.

This is not the pathetic fallacy. It is the poetic interpretation of the latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard only by the poet's finer ear.

The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry, both in subject and in form. The originality of any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the language. In 'The Coming of Love' the poet has invented a new poetic form. Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel, and of the prose play. In Tennyson's 'Maud' and in Mr. Watts-Dunton's other lyrical drama, "Christmas at the 'Mermaid,'" the special functions of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form. The story is told by brief pictures. In 'The Coming of Love' this method reaches its perfection. Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets, are used according to an inner law of the poet's mind. The exaltation of these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being summarized in bare prose. The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions. In Dante's 'Vita Nuova' a method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante's poems are all sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in 'The Coming of Love.' Here the very 'rhyme-colour' and the subtle variety of vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical composition. Wagner's music is the only modern art-form which is comparable with the metrical architecture of 'The Coming of Love,' and "Christmas at the 'Mermaid.'" No one can fully understand the rhythmic triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated in his treatise on Poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica'--a theory which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of music, is still developing. Both these lyrical dramas ought to be carefully studied by all students of English metres.

The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry. It is remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under such conditions. Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry. But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson's Maud, the difference is startling. Maud does not tingle with personality. She is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of 'creamy English girls.' Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality. One makes pictures of her in one's brain--pictures that never become blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic heroines. How much of this is due to the poetic form? Could Rhona have lived so intensely in a novel or a play? I do not think so. At any rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel, and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is well worth the study of critics and craftsmen. Mr. Kernahan has called attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative. Perhaps this defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose like that of the opening of 'Aylwin,' which would lead the imagination insensibly from one situation or mood to another.

In connection with the opening sonnets of 'The Coming of Love,' a very interesting point of criticism presents itself. These sonnets, in which Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket lighthouse, appeared in the 'Athenaeum' a week after Mr. Swinburne and he returned from a visit to the Channel Islands. They record a real incident. Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the 'English Illustrated Magazine' his version of the story, a splendid specimen of his sonorous rhythms.

Mr. Watts-Dunton's version of the story may interest the reader:--

LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
(THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)

Amid the Channel's wiles and deep decoys,
Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney,
But there she pined. 'The bustling world,' said she,
'Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.'
The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
Had winds for sponsor--one proud rock for nurse,
Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
The cold bright sea was hers for universe
Till o'er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.

But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:--
Her lover's boat was out; her ears were dinned
With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
That shook the troubled sun's red canopy.
Even while she prayed the storm's high revelry
Woke petrel, gull--all revellers winged and finned--
And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
'My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,'
The Mother sang. 'Thy sea-boy waged no strife
With Hatred's poison, gangrened Envy's knife--
With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!'

Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends. It seems impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other's work or ever have known each other well. The point which I wish to emphasize is that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers, they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the evening in each other's society; and yet when they sit down at their desks they may be as far asunder as the poles. From this we may perhaps infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.

Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem. I may mention that the other day I came across a little book called 'Authors that have Influenced me,' and found that Mr. Rider Haggard instanced the opening section of 'The Coming of Love,' 'Mother Carey's Chicken,' as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than all others. I think this is a compliment, for the originality of invention displayed in 'King Solomon's Mines' and 'She' sets Rider Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and also good is a rare achievement.

I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to Mr. Watts-Dunton's miscellaneous sonnets. Some of them have had a great vogue: for instance, 'John the Pilgrim.' Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton's sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A., as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the subject. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature's mockery by the mirage:--

Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
Claspt in a silvery river's winding maze:
'Water, water! Blessed be God!' he says,
And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles
The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.

'God heard me not,' says he, 'blessed be God!'
And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand,
Heav'n's outer coast where waiting angels stand,
He looks below: 'Farewell, thou hooded clod,
Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
God heard my prayer for life--blessed be God!'

[Picture: 'John the Pilgrim.' (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)]

This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled, or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet. The rhymes in this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer's luck, good and ill. To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of 'chamomiles' and 'isles,' 'chamomiles' giving the picture of the flowers, and 'isles' giving the false vision of the mirage. The same thing is notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, 'The Bedouin Child' (see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified. Without the fortunate rhyme-words 'pashas,' 'camel-maws,' and 'claws' in the octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.

The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry and that of Coleridge has been frequently discussed. It has the same romantic glamour and often the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the music of the ravishing octosyllabics of 'Christabel.' This at least I know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,--he owns the true wizard of romance as master. I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the author as follows: 'The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through volumes of essays and not so paint him. There is Coleridge! But whence the source of your story--if anything of such aptness could have been other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu--I cannot tell. It is new to me.'

After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the reader with the 'pure amber' itself:--

I see thee pine like her in golden story
Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
The gates thrown open--saw the sunbeams play,
With only a web 'tween her and summer's glory;
Who, when that web--so frail, so transitory,
It broke before her breath--had fallen away,
Saw other webs and others rise for aye
Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.

Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine--
That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh--
Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
Could thy rare spirit's wings have pierced the mesh
Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
But lets the poet see how heav'n can shine.

Here again the verbal parsimony is notable. I defy any one to find anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony. There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet. Every word is cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning. The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall. Metrical students will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a part in the suspensive music.

I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as one of the wisest, done by the editor of the 'Athenaeum,' was that of printing Rhona's letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona. It certainly showed immense confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great success. The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George Meredith: "I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that. When I read her love-letter in the 'Athenaeum,' I had the regret that the dialect might cause its banishment from literature. Reading the whole poem through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate. We are the richer for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed." And, discussing 'The Coming of Love,' Meredith wrote: 'I will not speak of the tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the dexterity which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of the work.' Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry is so consummate that it is concealed from the reader. There is no sense of difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice. Yet the metrical structure of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest. 'Rhona's Love Letter' is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern, each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of a sonnet. But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naive, unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether, and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour are produced by the most elaborate art.

I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry. There can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the deeper quality of imaginative energy. By 'the most original poet' I do not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what I mean. Poe's 'Raven' is more 'original' than Shelley's 'Epipsychidion,' but it is not so great. In my article on Blake in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' I pointed out that there are greater poets than Blake (or Donne) but none more original. There are many poets who possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual matching of common ideas with common metaphors. But few poets have the rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift. He uses the symbol to suggest ideas which cannot be suggested otherwise. His theory of the universe is optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads. He sees the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as benignant. Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the two great sonnets, 'Natura Maligna' and 'Natura Benigna,' which I have already quoted.

* * * * *

All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell. Upon this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the introduction to the later editions of the poem:--

"But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio
readers seem to be most sceptical. The humourous endowment of most
races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the
men than among the women. But among the Romanies the women seem to
have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.

A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with
my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit
and the humourous charm that you attribute to them? My answer to
this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome's delightful book,
'Gypsy Folk-Tales.' Speaking of the Romany chi's incomparable
piquancy, he says:--

'I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale
impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with "a lot
o' real tip-top gentry"; and "Reia," she said to me afterwards, "I'll
tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We'd pulled up to put the
brake on, and there was a puro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and
looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard. I could see he'd
his eye upon me. And home he'd go, that old hedgehog, to his wife,
and 'Missus,' he'd say, 'what d'ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal
just now in a coach and four horses'; and 'Dabla,' she'd say,
'sawkumni 'as varde kenaw'" ['Bless us! every one now keeps a
carriage'].'

Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell,
I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome,
that it might well have been she. Although there is as great a
difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English
girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between
the humour of all gypsy girls. No three girls could possibly be more
unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr.
Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the
fanciful humour of them all. The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak
for itself in these pages--where, however, the passionate and tragic
side of her character and her story dominates everything."