Kitabı oku: «Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic», sayfa 25
Chapter XXVIII
CONCLUSION
‘Assuredly,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, ‘there is no profession so courageous as that of the pen.’ Well, in coming to the end of my task – a task which has been a labour of love – I wish I could feel confident that I have not been too courageous – that I have satisfactorily done what I set out to do. But I have passed my four-hundred and fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a child’s bucket into a sea of ideas that has no limit. Out of scores upon scores of articles buried in many periodicals I have been able to give three or four from the ‘Athenæum,’ none from the ‘Examiner,’ and none out of the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ ‘The Fortnightly Review,’ ‘Harper’s Magazine,’ etc. Still, I have been able to show that a large proportion of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s scattered writings preaches the same peculiar doctrine in a ratiocinative form which in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is artistically enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest importance at the present time, when science seems to be revealing a system of the universe so deeply opposed to the system which in the middle of the last century seemed to be revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s is making a very deep impression upon the generation to which I belong. If it should be said that in speaking for the younger generation I am speaking for a pigmy race (and I sometimes fear that we are pigmies when I remember the stature of our fathers), I am content to appeal to one of the older generation, who has spoken words in praise of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet, which would demand even my courage to echo. I mean Dr. Gordon Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, ‘The New Day,’ was published in 1890. It was these remarkable sonnets which moved Frank Groome to dub Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘homo ne quidem unius libri,’ a literary celebrity who had not published a single book. I have already referred to ‘The New Day,’ but I have not given an adequate account of this sonnet-sequence. In their nobility of spirit, their exalted passion of friendship, their single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not think they have ever been surpassed. It is a fine proof of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s genius for friendship that he should be able unconsciously to enlink himself to the souls of his seniors, his coevals and his juniors, and that there should be between him and the men of three generations, equal links of equal affection. But I must not lay stress on the whimsies of chronology and the humours of the calendar, for all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friends are young, and the youngest of them, Mr. George Meredith, is the oldest. The youthfulness of ‘The New Day’ makes it hard to believe that it was written by a septuagenarian. The dedication is full of the fine candour of a romantic boy: —
“To ‘W. T. W.,’ the friend who has gone with me through the study of Nature, accompanied me to her loveliest places at home and in other lands, and shared with me the reward she reserves for her ministers and interpreters, I dedicate this book.”
The following sonnet on ‘Friendship’ expresses a very rare mood and a very high ideal: —
Friendship is love’s full beauty unalloyed
With passion that may waste in selfishness,
Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:
Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.
It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound
With cheery look that makes a winter bright;
It saves the hope from falling to the ground,
And turns the restless pillow towards the light.
To be another’s in his dearest want,
At struggle with a thousand racking throes,
When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant
Is that which friendship’s soothing hand bestows:
How joyful to be joined in such a love, —
We two, – may it portend the days above!
The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine order. Many English and American critics have highly praised them, but not too highly. This venerable ‘parable poet’ did not belong to my generation. Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s generation. His day was the day before yesterday, and yet he wrote these sonnets when he was past seventy, not to glorify himself, but to glorify his friend. They are one long impassioned appeal to that friend to come forward and take his place among his peers. The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of the most bewildering enigmas of literature. I have already quoted what Gordon Hake says about the man who when the ‘New Day’ was written had not published a single book.
With regard to the unity binding together all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings, I can, at least, as I have shown in the Introduction, speak with the authority of a careful student of them. With the exception of the late Professor Strong, who when ‘The Coming of Love’ appeared, spoke out so boldly upon this subject in ‘Literature,’ I doubt if anyone has studied those writings more carefully than I have; and yet the difficulty of discovering the one or two quotable essays which more than the others expound and amplify their central doctrine has been so great that I am dubious as to whether, in the press of my other work, I have achieved my aim as satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by another – especially by Professor Strong, had he not died before he could write his promised essay upon the inner thought of ‘Aylwinism’ in the ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ But, even if I have failed adequately to expound the gospel of ‘Aylwinism,’ it is undeniable that, since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ (whether as a result of that publication or not), there has been an amazing growth of what may be called the transcendental cosmogony of ‘Aylwinism.’
Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of ‘Aylwin’ – the ‘Arvon’ illustrated edition – says: —
“When ‘Aylwin’ was in type, the author, getting alarmed at its great length, somewhat mercilessly slashed into it to shorten it, and the more didactic parts of the book went first. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has restored one or two of these excised passages, notably one in which he summarizes his well-known views of the ‘great Renascence of Wonder, which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.’ In one of these passages he has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour’s speculations at the recent meeting of the British Association.”
Something like the same remark was made in the ‘Athenæum’ of September 3, 1904: —
“The writer has restored certain didactic passages of the story which were eliminated before the publication of the book, owing to its great length. Though the teaching of the book is complete without the restorations, it seems a pity that they were ever struck out, because they appear to have anticipated the striking remarks of Mr. Balfour at the British Association the other day, to say nothing of the utterances of certain scientific writers who have been discussing the transcendental side of Nature.”
The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and ‘The Athenæum’ refer are excerpts from ‘The Veiled Queen,’ by Aylwin’s father. The first of these comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called ‘The Revolving Cage of Circumstance’ and runs thus: —
“‘The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
The warring of the two impulses governing man – the impulse of wonder and the impulse of acceptance – will occupy all the energies of the next century.
The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy has to come back – has to triumph – before the morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn.
But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism, which at this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution, will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the creature of organism – is a something outside the material world, a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal expression.
The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell him that “the principle of all certitude” is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless – a phantasmagoric show – a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the organism upon which they fall.’
These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about ‘the Omnipotence of Love,’ which showed, beyond doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very original poet.”
The second restored excerpt from ‘The Veiled Queen’ comes in at the end of the chapter called ‘The Magic of Snowdon,’ and runs thus: —
“I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin: —
With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies —
that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life, ‘The Veiled Queen.’
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
‘The omnipotence of love – its power of knitting together the entire universe – is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called “The Bedouin Child,” dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
Ilyàs the prophet, lingering ’neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child’s heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
’Neath wings of Death – ’mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
“Poor child, plead on,” the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help – “Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father’s eyes.”
The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures’ claws;
’Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o’er the moonlit sand,
“Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death’s, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land.”
“Nay,” saith a Voice, “the wind of Azraeel’s wings
A child’s sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:”
A camel’s bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
Filling the Bedouin’s brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.
‘Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but “the superficial film” of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards Sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal love and beauty.’”
With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has said that the method of depicting the power of love in them is sublime. ‘The Slave girl’s Progress to Paradise,’ however, is equally powerful and equally original. The feeling in the ‘Bedouin Child’ and in ‘The Slave Girl’s Progress to Paradise’ is exactly like that which inspires ‘The Coming of Love.’ When Percy sees Rhona’s message in the sunrise he exclaims: —
But now – not all the starry Virtues seven
Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.
And morning says, ‘Love hath such godlike might
That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
Were quelled by doom, Love’s high-creative leaven
Could light new worlds.’ If, then, this Lord of Fate,
When death calls in the stars, can re-create,
Is it a madman’s dream that Love can show
Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
And build again my heaven?
The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately affirmed in the words of ‘The Spirit of the Sunrise,’ addressed to the bereaved poet: —
Though Love be mocked by Death’s obscene derision,
Love still is Nature’s truth and Death her lie;
Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
To taste the fell destroyer’s crowning spite
That blasts the soul with life’s most cruel sight,
Corruption’s hand at work in Life’s transition:
This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
Her body’s image pictured in thy brain;
The flowers above her weave the only shroud
Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
Rhona! Behold the vision!
Some may call this too mystical – some may dislike it on other accounts – but few will dream of questioning its absolute originality.
Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour’s to which the passages quoted from ‘The Veiled Queen’ have been compared. In his presidential address to the British Association, entitled, ‘Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter,’ he said: —
“We claim to found all our scientific opinions on experience: and the experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is our sense of perception of that universe. That is experience; and in this region of belief there is no other. Yet the conclusions which thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and nature compels us to employ.
Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply the premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the physical world. It is they which tell us there is a physical world; it is on their authority that we learn its character. But in order of causation they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our orders of sense. What we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen, but on our eyes. What we hear depends, not merely on what there is to hear, but on our ears.”
I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any idea that is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is afterwards accepted as a simple truth. One of the reviewers of ‘Aylwin’ was much amused by the description of the hero’s emotions when he stood in the lower room of Mrs. Gudgeon’s cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by Winifred’s corpse, stretched upon a squalid mattress: —
“At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the walls, – it was these which seemed to have life – a terrible life – and to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still speaking, but for a time I heard no sound – my senses could receive no impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet living matter around me. Not an object there that did not seem charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates.”
‘Fancy,’ said the reviewer, ‘any man out of Bedlam feeling as if dead matter were alive!’
Well, apart from the psychological subtlety of this passage, our critic must have been startled by the declaration lately made by a sane man of science, that there is no such thing as dead matter – and that every particle of what is called dead matter is alive and shedding an aura around it!
Had the mass of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s scattered writings been collected into volumes, or had a representative selection from them been made, their unity as to central idea with his imaginative work, and also the importance of that central idea, would have been brought prominently forward, and then there would have been no danger of his contribution to the latest movement – the anti-materialistic movement – of English thought and English feeling being left unrecognized. Lost such teachings as his never could have been, for, as Minto said years ago, their colour tinges a great deal of the literature of our time. The influence of the ‘Athenæum,’ not only in England, but also in America and on the Continent, was always very great – and very great of course must have been the influence of the writer who for a quarter of a century spoke in it with such emphasis. Therefore, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had himself collected or selected his essays, or if he had allowed any of his friends to collect or select them, this book of mine would not have been written, for more competent hands would have undertaken the task. But a study of work which, originally issued in fragments, now lies buried ‘full fathom five’ in the columns of various journals, could, I felt, be undertaken only by a cadet of letters like myself. There are many of us younger men who express views about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work which startle at times those who are unfamiliar with it. And I, coming forward for the moment as their spokesman, have long had the desire to justify the faith that is in us, and in the wide and still widening audience his imaginative work has won. But I doubt if I should have undertaken it had I realized the magnitude of the task. For it must be remembered that the articles, called ‘reviews,’ are for the most part as unlike reviews as they can well be. No matter what may have been the book placed at the head of the article, it was used merely as an opportunity for the writer to pour forth generalizations upon literature and life, or upon the latest scientific speculations, or upon the latest reverie of philosophy, in a stream, often a torrent, coruscating with brilliancies, and alive with interwoven colours like that of the river in the mountains of Kaf described in his birthday sonnet to Tennyson. Take, for instance, that great essay on the Psalms which I have used as the key-note of this study. The book at the head of the review was not, as might have been supposed, a discourse learned, or philosophical, or emotional, upon the Psalms – but a little unpretentious metrical version of the Psalms by Lord Lorne. Only a clear-sighted and daring editor would have printed such an article as a review. But I doubt if there ever was a more prescient journalist than he who sat in the editorial chair at that time. A man of scholarly accomplishments and literary taste, he knew that an article such as this would be a huge success; would resound through the world of letters. The article, I believe, was more talked about in literary circles than any book that had come out during that month.
Again, take that definition of humour which I seized upon (page 384) to illustrate my exposition of that wonderful character in ‘Aylwin’ – Mrs. Gudgeon, a definition that seems, as one writer has said, to make all other talk about humour cheap and jejune. It is in a review of an extremely futile history of humour. Now let the reader consider the difficult task before a writer in my position – the task of searching for a few among the innumerable half-remembered points of interest that turn up in the most unexpected places. Of course, if the space allotted to me by my publishers had been unlimited, and if my time had been unlimited, I should have been able to give so large a number of excerpts from the articles as to make my selection really representative of what has been called the “modern Sufism of ‘Aylwin.’” But in this regard my publishers have already been as liberal and as patient as possible. After all, the best, as well as the easiest way, to show that ‘Aylwin,’ and ‘The Coming of Love,’ are but the imaginative expression of a poetic religion familiar to the readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism for twenty-five years, is to quote an illuminating passage upon the subject from one of the articles in the ‘Athenæum.’ Moreover, I shall thus escape what I confess I dread – the sight of my own prose at the end of my book in juxtaposition to the prose of a past master of English style: —
“The time has not yet arrived for poetry to utilize even the results of science; such results as are offered to her are dust and ashes. Happily, however, nothing in science is permanent save mathematics. As a great man of science has said, ‘everything is provisional.’ Dr. Erasmus Darwin, following the science of his day, wrote a long poem on the ‘Loves of the Plants,’ by no means a foolish poem, though it gave rise to the ‘Loves of the Triangles,’ and though his grandson afterwards discovered that the plants do not love each other at all, but, on the contrary, hate each other furiously – ‘struggle for life’ with each other, ‘survive’ against each other – just as though they were good men and ‘Christians.’ But if a poet were to set about writing a poem on the ‘Hates of the Plants,’ nothing is more likely than that, before he could finish it, Mr. Darwin will have discovered that the plants do love after all; just as – after it was a settled thing that the red tooth and claw did all the business of progression – he delighted us by discovering that there was another factor which had done half the work – the enormous and very proper admiration which the females have had for the males from the very earliest forms upwards. In such a case, the ‘Hates of the Plants’ would have become ‘inadequate.’ Already, indeed, there are faint signs of the physicists beginning to find out that neither we nor the plants hate each other quite so much as they thought, and that Nature is not quite so bad as she seems. ‘She is an Æolian harp,’ says Novalis, ‘a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.’ And after all there are higher strings within us just as real as those which have caused us to ‘survive,’ and poetry is right in ignoring ‘interpretations,’ and giving us ‘Earthly Paradises’ instead. She must wait, it seems; or rather, if this aspiring ‘century’ will keep thrusting these unlovely results of science before her eyes, she must treat them as the beautiful girl Kisāgotamī treated the ugly pile of charcoal. A certain rich man woke up one morning and found that all his enormous wealth was turned to a huge heap of charcoal. A friend who called upon him in his misery, suspecting how the case really stood, gave him certain advice, which he thus acted upon. ‘The Thuthe, following his friend’s instructions, spread some mats in the bazaar, and, piling them upon a large heap of his property which was turned into charcoal, pretended to be selling it. Some people, seeing it, said, “Why does he sell charcoal?” Just at this time a young girl, named Kisāgotamī, who was worthy to be owner of the property, and who, having lost both her parents, was in a wretched condition, happened to come to the bazaar on some business. When she saw the heap, she said, “My lord Thuthe, all the people sell clothes, tobacco, oil, honey, and treacle; how is it that you pile up gold and silver for sale?” The Thuthe said, “Madam, give me that gold and silver.” Kisāgotamī, taking up a handful of it, brought it to him. What the young girl had in her hand no sooner touched the Thuthe’s hand than it became gold and silver.’”
I cannot find a clearer note for the close of this book than that which sounds in one of the latest and one of the finest of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sonnets. It was composed on the last night of the Nineteenth Century, a century which will be associated with many of the dear friends Mr. Watts-Dunton has lost, and, as I must think, associated also with himself. The lines have a very special charm for me, because they show the turn which the poet’s noble optimism has taken; they show that faith in my own generation which for so many years has illumined his work, and which has endeared him to us all. I wish I could be as hopeful as this nineteenth century poet with regard to the poets who will carry the torch of imagination and romance through the twentieth century; but whether or not there are any poets among us who are destined to bring in the Golden Fleece, it is good to see ‘the Poet of the Sunrise’ setting the trumpet of optimism to his lips, and heralding so cheerily the coming of the new argonauts: —
THE ARGONAUTS OF THE NEW AGE
the poet
[In starlight, listening to the chimes in thedistance, which sound clear through theleafless trees.
Say, will new heroes win the ‘Fleece,’ ye spheres
Who – whether around some King of Suns ye roll
Or move right onward to some destined goal
In Night’s vast heart – know what Great Morning nears?
the stars
Since Love’s Star rose have nineteen hundred years
Written such runes on Time’s remorseless scroll,
Impeaching Earth’s proud birth, the human soul,
That we, the bright-browed stars, grow dim with tears.
Did those dear poets you loved win Light’s release?
What ‘ship of Hope’ shall sail to such a world?
[The night passes, and morning breaksgorgeously over the tree top.
the poet
Ye fade, ye stars, ye fade with night’s decease!
Above yon ruby rim of clouds empearled —
There, through the rosy flags of morn unfurled —
I see young heroes bring Light’s ‘Golden Fleece.’
