Chapter XX

IMAGINATIVE AND DIDACTIC PROSE

BUT the interesting subjects touched upon in the last four chapters have led me far from the subject of 'The Renascence of Wonder.' In its biographical sketch of Mr. Watts-Dunton the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' says: "Imaginative glamour and mysticism are prominent characteristics both of 'The Coming of Love' and 'Aylwin,' and the novel in particular has had its share in restoring the charms of pure romance to the favour of the general public." This is high praise, but I hope to show that it is deserved. When it was announced that a work of prose fiction was about to be published by the critic of the 'Athenaeum,' what did Mr. Watts-Dunton's readers expect? I think they expected something as unlike what the story turned out to be as it is possible to imagine. They expected a story built up of a discursive sequence of new and profound generalizations upon life and literature expressed in brilliant picturesque prose such as had been the delight of my boyhood in Ireland; they expected to be fascinated more than ever by that 'easy authoritative greatness and comprehensiveness of style' with which they had been familiar for long; they expected also that subtle irony after the fashion of Fielding, which suggests so much between the lines, that humour which had been an especial joy to me in scores of articles signed by the writer's style as indubitably as if they had been signed by his name. I think everybody cherished this expectation: everybody took it for granted that heaps of those 'intellectual nuggets' about which Minto talked would smother the writer as a story-teller, that the book as literature would be admirable--but as a novel a failure. Great as was Mr. Watts-Dunton's esoteric reputation, I believe that many of the booksellers declined (as the author had prophesied that they would decline) to subscribe for the book. They expected it to fail as a marketable novel--to fail in that 'artistic convincement' of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself so often written. What neither I nor any one else save those who, like Mr. Swinburne, had read the story in manuscript, did expect, was a story so poetic, so unworldly, and so romantic that it might have been written by a young Celt--a love story of intense passion, which yet by some magic art was as convincingly realistic as any one of those 'flat-footed' sermon-stories which the late W. E. Henley was wont to deride.

In fact, from this point of view 'Aylwin' is a curiosity of literature. The truth seems to be, however, that, as one of Mr. Watts-Dunton's most intimate friends has said, its style represents one facet only of Watts-Dunton's character. Like most of us, he has a dual existence--one half of him is the romantic youth, Henry Aylwin, the other half is the world-wise philosopher of the 'Athenaeum.' This other half of him lives in the style of another story altogether, where the creator of Henry Aylwin takes up the very different role of a man of the world. Now I have views of my own upon this duality. I think that if the brilliant worldly writing of the mass of his work be examined, it will be found to be a 'shot' texture scintillating with various hues where sometimes repressed passion and sometimes mysticism and dreams are constantly shining through the glossy silk of the style. Sometimes from the smooth, even flow of the criticisms gleams of a passion far more intense than anything in 'Aylwin' will flash out. I will cite a passage in his critical writings wherein he discusses the inadequacy of language to express the deepest passion:--

"As compared with sculpture and painting the great infirmity of poetry, as an 'imitation' of nature, is of course that the medium is always and of necessity words--even when no words could, in the dramatic situation, have been spoken. It is not only Homer who is obliged sometimes to forget that passion when at white heat is never voluble, is scarcely even articulate; the dramatists also are obliged to forget that in love and in hate, at their tensest, words seem weak and foolish when compared with the silent and satisfying triumph and glory of deeds, such as the plastic arts can render. This becomes manifest enough when we compare the Niobe group or the Laocoon group, or the great dramatic paintings of the modern world, with even the finest efforts of dramatic poetry, such as the speech of Andromache to Hector, or the speech of Priam to Achilles; nay, such as even the cries of Cassandra in the 'Agamemnon,' or the wailings of Lear over the dead Cordelia. Even when writing the words uttered by OEdipus, as the terrible truth breaks in upon his soul, Sophocles must have felt that, in the holiest chambers of sorrow and in the highest agonies of suffering reigns that awful silence which not poetry, but painting sometimes, and sculpture always, can render. What human sounds could render the agony of Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as we see them in the sculptor's rendering? Not articulate speech at all; not words, but wails. It is the same with hate; it is the same with love. We are not speaking merely of the unpacking of the heart in which the angry warriors of the 'Ilaid' indulge. Even such subtle writing as that of AEschylus and Sophocles falls below the work of the painter. Hate, though voluble perhaps as Clytaemnestra's when hate is at that red-heat glow which the poet can render, changes in a moment whenever that redness has been fanned into hatred's own last complexion--whiteness as of iron at the melting-point--when the heart has grown far too big to be 'unpacked' at all, and even the bitter epigrams of hate's own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier's snap before he fleshes his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as she springs before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish for a soul to which language at its tensest has become idle play. But this is just what cannot be rendered by an art whose medium consists solely of words."

Could any one reading this passage doubt that the real work of the writer was to write poetry and not criticism?

But this makes it necessary for me to say a word upon the question of the style of 'Aylwin'--a question that has often been discussed. The fascination of the story is largely due to the magnetism of its style. And yet how undecorated, not to say how plain, the style in the more level passages often is! When the story was first written the style glittered with literary ornament. But the author deliberately struck out many of the poetic passages. Coleridge tells us that an imaginative work should be written in a simple style, and that the more imaginative the work the simpler the style should be. I often think of these words when I labour in the sweat of my brow to read the word-twisting of precious writers! It is then that I think of 'Aylwin,' for 'Aylwin' stands alone in its power of carrying the reader away to climes of new and rare beauty peopled by characters as new and as rare. It was clearly Mr. Watts-Dunton's idea that what such a story needed was mastery over 'artistic convincement.' He has more than once commented on the acuteness of Edgar Poe's remark that in the expression of true passion there is always something of the 'homely.' 'Aylwin' is one long unbroken cry of passion, mostly in a 'homely key,' but this 'homely key' is left for loftier keys whenever the proper time for the change comes. In beginning to write, the author seems to have felt that 'The Renascence of Wonder' and the quest of beauty, although adequately expressed in the poetry of the newest romantic school--that of Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne--had only found its way into imaginative prose through the highly elaborate technique of his friend, George Meredith. He seems to have felt that the great imaginative prose writers of the time, Thackeray, Dickens, and Charles Reade, were in a certain sense Philistines of genius who had done but little to bring beauty, romance and culture into prose fiction. And as to Meredith, though a true child of romanticism who never did and never could breathe the air of Philistia, he had adopted a style too self-conscious and rich in literary qualities to touch that great English pulse that beats outside the walls of the Palace of Art.

Mrs. Craigie has lately declared that at the present moment all the most worthy English novelists, with the exception of Mr. Thomas Hardy, are distinguished disciples of Mr. George Meredith. But to belong to 'the mock Meredithians' is not a matter of very great glory. No one adores the work of Mr. Meredith more than I do, though my admiration is not without a certain leaven of distress at his literary self-consciousness. I say this with all reverence. Great as Meredith is, he would be greater still if, when he is delivering his priceless gifts to us, he would bear in mind that immortal injunction in 'King Henry the Fourth'--'I prithee now, deliver them like a man of this world.' I can imagine how the great humourist must smile when the dolt, who once found 'obscurity' in his most lucid passages, praises him for the defects of his qualities, and calls upon all other writers to write Meredithese.

To be a classic--to be immortal--it is necessary for an imaginative writer to deliver his message like 'a man of this world.' Shakespeare himself, occasionally, will seem to forget this, but only occasionally, and we never think of it when falling down in worship before the shrine of the greatest imaginative writer that has ever lived. Dr. Johnson said that all work which lives is without eccentricity. Now, entranced as I have been, ever since I was a boy, by Meredith's incomparable romances, I long to set my imagination free of Meredith and fly away with his characters, as I can fly away with the characters of the classic imaginative writers from Homer down to Sir Walter Scott. But I seldom succeed. Now and then I escape from the obsession of the picture of the great writer seated in his chalet with the summer sunshine gleaming round his picturesque head, but illuminating also all too vividly his inkstand, and his paper and his pens; but only now and then, and not for long. If it had pleased Nature to give him less intellectual activity, less humour and wit and literary brilliance, I feel sure that he would have lived more securely as an English classic. I adore him, I say, and although I do not know him personally, I love him. We all love him: and when I am in a very charitable mood, I can even forgive him for having begotten the 'mock Meredithians.' As to those who, without a spark of his humourous imagination and supple intellect can manage to mimic his style, if they only knew what a torture their word-twisting is to the galled reviewer who wants to get on, and to know what on earth they have got to tell him, I think they would display a little more mercy, and even for pity's sake deliver their gifts like 'men of this world.'

In 'Aylwin' Mr. Watts-Dunton seems to have determined to be as romantic and as beautiful as the romanticists in poetry had ever dared to be, and yet by aid of a simplicity and a naivete of diction of which his critical writings had shown no sign, to carry his beautiful dreams into Philistia itself. Never was there a bolder enterprise, and never was there a greater success. That 'Aylwin' would appeal strongly to imaginative minds was certain, for it was written by 'the most widely cultivated writer in the English belles lettres of our time.' But the strange thing is that a story so full of romance, poetry, and beauty, should also appeal to other minds.

I am no believer in mere popularity, and I confess that when books come before me for review I cannot help casting a suspicious eye upon any story by any of the very popular novelists of the day. But it is necessary to explain why the most poetical romance written within the last century is also one of the most popular. It was in part owing to its simplicity of diction, its naivete of utterance, and its freedom from superfluous literary ornamentation. I do not as a rule like using a foreign word when an English word will do the same work, but neither 'artlessness,' 'candour' nor 'simplicity' seem to express the unique charm of the style of 'Aylwin,' so completely as does the word 'naivete.' It was by naivete, I believe, that he carried the Renascence of Wonder into quarters which his great brothers in the Romantic movement could never reach.

For such a writer as he, the critic steeped in all the latest subtleties of the style of to-day, and indeed the originator of many of these subtleties, the intimate friend of such superb and elaborate literary artists as Tennyson, Browning, George Meredith, Rossetti and Swinburne, it must have been inconceivably difficult to write the 'working portions' of his narrative in a style as unbookish at times as if he had written in the pre-Meredithian epoch. Having set out to convince his readers of the truth of what he was telling them, he determined to sacrifice all literary 'self-indulgence' to that end. I do not recollect that any critic, when the book came out, noted this. But if 'Aylwin' had been a French book published in France, the naive style adopted by the autobiographer would have been recognized by the critics as the crowning proof of the author's dramatic genius. Whenever the style seems most to suggest the pre-Meredithian writers, it is because the story is an autobiography and because the hero lived in pre-Meredithian times. Difficult as was Thackeray's tour de force in 'Esmond,' it was nothing to the tour de force of 'Aylwin.' The tale is told 'as though inspired by the very spirit of youth' because the hero was a youth when he told it. It is hard to imagine a writer past the meridian of life being able to write a story 'more flushed with the glory and the passion and the wonder of youth than any other in English fiction.'

It should be noted that whenever the incidents become especially tragic or romantic or weird or poetic, the 'homeliness' of the style goes--the style at once rises to the occasion, it becomes not only rich, but too rich for prose. I have now and then heard certain word-twisters of second-hand Meredithese speak of the 'baldness' of the style of 'Aylwin.' Roll fifty of these word-twisters into one, and let that one write a sentence or two of such prose as this, published at the time that 'Aylwin' was written. It occurs in a passage on the greatest of all rich writers, Shakespeare:--

"In the quality of richness Shakespeare stood quite alone till the publication of 'Endymion.' Till then it was 'Eclipse first--the rest nowhere.' When we think of Shakespeare, it is his richness more than even his higher qualities that we think of first. In reading him, we feel at every turn that we have come upon a mind as rich as Marlowe's Moor, who

Without control can pick his riches up, And in his house heap pearls, like pebble-stones.

Nay, he is richer still; he can, by merely looking at the 'pebble-stones,' turn them into pearls for himself, like the changeling child recovered from the gnomes in the Rosicrucian story. His riches burden him. And no wonder: it is stiff flying with the ruby hills of Badakhshan on your back. Nevertheless, so strong are the wings of his imagination, so lordly is his intellect, that he can carry them all; he could carry, it would seem, every gem in Golconda--every gem in every planet from here to Neptune--and yet win his goal. Now, in the matter of richness this is the great difference between him and Keats, the wings of whose imagination, aerial at starting, and only iridescent like the sails of a dragon-fly, seem to change as he goes--become overcharged with beauty, in fact--abloom 'with splendid dyes, as are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings.' Or, rather, it may be said that he seems to start sometimes with Shakespeare's own eagle-pinions, which, as he mounts, catch and retain colour after colour from the earth below, till, heavy with beauty as the drooping wings of a golden pheasant, they fly low and level at last over the earth they cannot leave for its loveliness, not even for the holiness of the skies."

I will give a few instances of passages in 'Aylwin' quite as rich as this. One shall be from that scene in which Winifred unconsciously reveals to her lover that her father has stolen the jewelled cross and brought his own father's curse upon her beloved head:--

"Winifred picked up the sea weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.

'Isn't it a lovely colour?' she said, as it glistened in the moonlight. 'Isn't it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?'

'It is as red as the reddest ruby,' I replied, putting out my hand and grasping the slippery substance.

'Would you believe,' said Winnie, 'that I never saw a ruby in my life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.'

'Why do you want particularly to know?'

'Because,' said Winifred, 'my father, when he wished me to come out for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.'

'Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred--how very odd!'

'Yes,' said Winifred, 'and he talked about diamonds too.'

'THE CURSE!' I murmured, and clasped her to my breast. 'Kiss me, Winifred!'

There had come a bite of sudden fire at my heart, and I shuddered with a dreadful knowledge, like the captain of an unarmed ship, who, while the unconscious landsmen on board are gaily scrutinizing a sail that like a speck has appeared on the horizon, shudders with the knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells, and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit. As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from Winifred's bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my hair began to stir."

Another instance occurs in Wilderspin's ornate description of his great picture, 'Faith and Love':--

"'Imagine yourself standing in an Egyptian city, where innumerable lamps of every hue are shining. It is one of the great lamp-fetes of Sais, which all Egypt has come to see. There, in honour of the feast, sits a tall woman, covered by a veil. But the painting is so wonderful, Mr. Aylwin, that, though you see a woman's face expressed behind the veil--though you see the warm flesh-tints and the light of the eyes through the aerial film--you cannot judge of the character of the face--you cannot see whether it is that of woman in her noblest, or woman in her basest, type. The eyes sparkle, but you cannot say whether they sparkle with malignity or benevolence--whether they are fired with what Philip Aylwin calls "the love-light of the seventh heaven," or are threatening with "the hungry flames of the seventh hell!" There she sits in front of a portico, while, asleep, with folded wings, is crouched on one side of her the figure of Love, with rosy feathers, and on the other the figure of Faith, with plumage of a deep azure. Over her head, on the portico, are written the words:--"I am all that hath been, is, and shall be, and no mortal hath uncovered my veil." The tinted lights falling on the group are shed, you see, from the rainbow-coloured lamps of Sais, which are countless. But in spite of all these lamps, Mr. Aylwin, no mortal can see the face behind that veil. And why? Those who alone could uplift it, the figures folded with wings--Faith and Love--are fast asleep, at the great Queen's feet. When Faith and Love are sleeping there, what are the many-coloured lamps of science!--of what use are they to the famished soul of man?'

'A striking idea!' I exclaimed.

'Your father's,' replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, as though it were upon an easel before me. 'You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the sea. In the light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax tapers, a procession is moving through the streets. You see Isis, as Pelagia, advancing between two ranks, one of joyous maidens in snow white garments, adorned with wreaths, and scattering from their bosoms all kinds of dewy flowers; the other of youths, playing upon pipes and flutes mixed with men with shaven shining crowns, playing upon sistra of brass, silver, and gold. Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her breast by a tasselled knot,--an azure-coloured tunic bordered with silver stars,--and an upper garment of the colour of the moon at moon-rise. Her head is crowned with a chaplet of sea-flowers, and round her throat is a necklace of seaweeds, wet still with sea-water, and shimmering with all the shifting hues of the sea. On either side of her stand the awakened angels, uplifting from her face a veil whose folds flow soft as water over her shoulders and over the wings of Faith and Love. A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip Aylwin gave to the world!'"

Another instance I take from that scene in the crypt whither Aylwin had been drawn against his will by the ancestral impulses in his blood to replace the jewelled cross upon the breast of his father:--

"Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt. The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated, until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences. Scarcely had this mood passed before a sensation came upon me of being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words, harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the features of my father; at another, those of Tom Wynne; at another the leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio.

"'It is an illusion,' I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; 'it is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain and an exhausted stomach.' Yet it disturbed me as much as if my reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be fighting towards my father's coffin as a dreamer fights against a nightmare, and at last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and I was in darkness. As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the 'Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,' scattering seeds over the earth below. At the pyramid's base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading with the Queen of Death:

What answer, O Nin-ki-gal? Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached the coffin resting on a stone table. I found, on examining it, that although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free. Then I paused; for to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the blood's inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a giant. Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff's story, which at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between Winnie's father and mine seemed to hang in the air--a fascinating mirage of ghastly horror . . .

At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed the lid violently on one side . . .

The 'sweet odours and divers kinds of spices' of the Jewish embalmer rose like a gust of incense--rose and spread through the crypt like the sweet breath of a newborn blessing, till the air of the charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable sweetness. Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any sensuous influence so soothed my soul.

While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.

I opened my eyes. I looked into the coffin. The face (which had been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine. 'Fenella Stanley!' I cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon my father's brow that self-same message which the passions of a thousand Romany ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait hung in the picture-gallery. And the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the opened lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an indescribable reflex hue of quivering rose.

Beneath his head I placed the silver casket: I hung the hair-chain round his neck: I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his love and the parchment scroll.

Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed. I knew not what or why. But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine. Then I rose, and laying my hand upon my father's cold brow, I said: 'You have forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long agony. They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling against itself. You, who suffered so much--who know so well those flames burning at the heart's core--those flames before which all the forces of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and wind--you have forgiven me. You who knew the meaning of the wild word Love--you have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like yourself. You have forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the despoiler of your tomb: you have removed the curse, and his child--his innocent child--is free.' . . .

I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked myself: 'Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse? Do I really believe that my restoring the amulet has removed it? Have I really come to this?'

Throughout all these proceedings--yes, even amidst that prayer to Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father--had my reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before described."

My last instance shall be from D'Arcy's letter, in which he records the marvellous events that led to his meeting with Winifred:--

"And now, my dear Aylwin, having acted as a somewhat prosaic reporter of these wonderful events, I should like to conclude my letter with a word or two about what took place when I parted from you in the streets of London. I saw then that your sufferings had been very great, and since that time they must have been tenfold greater. And now I rejoice to think that, of all the men in this world who have ever loved, you, through this very suffering, have been the most fortunate. As Job's faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been tried by the power which you call 'circumstance' and which Wilderspin calls 'the spiritual world.' All that death has to teach the mind and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms. I, alas! have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a beloved mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows what the word 'love' really means. I have never been a reader of philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to Death--about the final beneficence of Death--that 'reasonable moderator and equipoise of justice,' as Sir Thomas Browne calls him. Equipoise of justice indeed! He who can read with tolerance such words as these must have known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman as you and I understand it. The Elizabethans are full of this nonsense; but where does Shakespeare, with all his immense philosophical power, ever show this temper of acquiescence? All his impeachments of Death have the deep ring of personal feeling--dramatist though he was. But, what I am going to ask you is, How shall the modern materialist, who you think is to dominate the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow--how shall he confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down? When Moschus lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long, unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile. Your bitter experience made you ask materialism, What comfort is there in being told that death is the very nursery of new life, and that our heirs are our very selves, if when you take leave of her who was and is your world it is 'Vale, vale, in aeternum vale'?"

These quotations may be taken as specimens of the passages of decorated writing which the author, in order to get closer to the imagination of the reader, mercilessly struck out in proof. Whether he did wisely or unwisely in striking them out is an interesting question for criticism.

But certainly the reader has only to go through the book with this criticism in his mind, and he will see that when the story passes into such lofty speculation as that of the opening sentences of the book, or into some equally lofty mood of the love passion, the style becomes not only full of literary qualities, but almost over-full; it becomes a style which can best be described in his own words about richness of style which I have quoted from the 'Athenaeum.' I do not doubt that Mr. Watts-Dunton was quite right in acting upon Coleridge's theory; for, notwithstanding the 'fairy-like beauty' of the story it is as convincing as a story told upon a prosaic subject by Defoe. In fact, it would be hard to name any novel wherein those laws of means and ends in art which Mr. Watts-Dunton has formulated in the 'Athenaeum' are more fully observed than in 'Aylwin.'

Madame Galimberti says in the 'Rivista d'Italia':--"'Aylwin' was begun in verse, and was written in prose only when the plot, taking, so to say, the poet by the hand, showed the necessity of a form more in keeping with the nature of the work; and in 'The Coming of Love,' in which the facts are condensed so as to give full relief to the philosophical motive, the result is, in my opinion, more perfect." {339} My remarks upon 'The Coming of Love' will show that I agree with the accomplished wife of the Italian Minister in placing it above 'Aylwin' as a satisfactory work of art, but that is because I consider 'The Coming of Love' the most important as well as the most original poem that has been published for many years.

Madame Galimberti touches here upon a very important subject for the literary student. I may say for myself that I have invariably spoken of 'Aylwin' as a poem, and I have done so deliberately. Indeed, I think the fact that it is a poem is at once its strength and its weakness. It does not come under the critical canons that are applied to a prose novel or romance. As a prose novel its one defect is that the quest for mere beauty is pushed too far; lovely picture follows lovely picture until the novel reader is inclined at last to cry, 'Hold, enough!'

In one of his essays on Morris, Mr. Watts-Dunton asks, 'What is poetic prose?' And then follows a passage which must always be borne in mind when criticizing 'Aylwin.'

"On no subject in literary criticism," says he, "has there been a more persistent misconception than upon this. What is called poetic prose is generally rhetorical prose, and between rhetoric and poetry there is a great difference. Poetical prose, we take it, is that kind of prose which above all other kinds holds in suspense the essential qualities of poetry. If 'eloquence is heard and poetry overheard,' where shall be placed the tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin? Grand and beautiful are such periods as these, no doubt, but prose to be truly poetical must move far away from them. It must, in a word, have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet's object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of caesuric effects, the great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned diction that are the poet's vehicle, but at the same time to avoid the expectancy of metrical bars. The moment that the regular bars assert themselves and lead the reader's ears to expect other bars of the like kind, sincerity ends."

Mr. Watts-Dunton himself has given us the best of all canons for answering the question, 'What is a poem as distinguished from other forms of imaginative literature?' In his essay on Poetry he says:--

"Owing to the fact that the word (first used to designate the poetic artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle seems to have assumed that the indispensable basis of poetry is invention. He appears to have thought that a poet is a poet more on account of the composition of the action than on account of the composition of his verses. Indeed, he said as much as this. Of epic poetry he declared emphatically that it produces its imitations either by mere articulate words or by metre superadded. This is to widen the definition of poetry so as to include all imaginative literature, and Plato seems to have given an equally wide meaning to the word. Only, while Aristotle considered to be an imitation of the facts of nature, Plato considered it to be an imitation of the dreams of man. Aristotle ignored, and Plato slighted, the importance of versification (though Plato on one occasion admitted that he who did not know rhythm could be called neither musician nor poet). It is impossible to discuss here the question whether an imaginative work in which the method is entirely concrete and the expression entirely emotional, while the form is unmetrical, is or is not entitled to be called a poem. That there may be a kind of unmetrical narrative so poetic in motive, so concrete in diction, so emotional in treatment, as to escape altogether from those critical canons usually applied to prose, we shall see when, in discussing the epic, we come to touch upon the Northern sagas.

"Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted against the dictum that substance, and not form, is the indispensable basis of poetry was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the arrangement of words is really a very fine piece of literary criticism. In his acute remarks upon the arrangement of the words in the sixteenth book of the Odyssey, as compared with that in the story of Gyges by Herodotus, was perhaps first enunciated clearly the doctrine that poetry is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristotelian theory as to invention, however, dominated all criticism after as well as before Dionysius. When Bacon came to discuss the subject (and afterwards), the only division between the poetical critics was perhaps between the followers of Aristotle and those of Plato as to what poetry should, and what it should not, imitate. It is curious to speculate as to what would have been the result had the poets followed the critics in this matter. Perhaps there are critics of a very high rank who would class as poems romances so concrete in method and diction, and so full of poetic energy, as 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Jane Eyre,' where we get absolutely all that Aristotle requires for a poem."

Now, if this be so in regard to those great romances, it must be still more so with regard to 'Aylwin,' where beauty and nothing but beauty seems to be the be-all and the end-all of the work.

[Picture: Henry Aylwin and Winifred under the Cliff. (From an Oil Painting at 'The Pines.')]

As 'Aylwin' was begun in metre, it would be very interesting to know on what lines the metre was constructed. Readers of 'Aylwin' have been struck with the music of the opening sentences, which are given as an extract from Philip Aylwin's book, 'The Veiled Queen':--

"Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea know the sea's prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea, and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it; when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire, then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels, as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near at hand, or, at least, not far off."

Many a reader will echo the words of a writer in 'Notes and Queries,' who says that this passage has haunted him since first he read it: I know it haunted me after I read it. But I wonder how many critics have read this passage in connection with Mr. Watts-Dunton's metrical studies which have been carried on in the 'Athenaeum' during more than a quarter of a century. They are closely connected with what he has said upon Bible rhythm in his article upon the Psalms, which I have already quoted, and in many other essays. Mr. Watts-Dunton, acknowledged to be a great authority on metrical subjects, has for years been declaring that we are on the verge of a new kind of metrical art altogether--a metrical art in which the emotions govern the metrical undulations. And I take the above passage and the following to be examples of what the movement in 'Aylwin' would have been if he had not abandoned the project of writing the story in metre:--

"Then quoth the Ka'dee, laughing until his grinders appeared: 'Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest, thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this story of thine--this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.'

Quoth Ja'afar, bowing low his head: 'Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka'dee! and bold the Ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve--not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah--not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer.'"

Break these passages up into irregular lines, and you get a new metre of a very emotional kind, governed as to length by the sense pause. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been arguing for many years that English verse is, as Coleridge long ago pointed out, properly governed by the number of accents and not by the number of syllables in a line, and that this accentual system is governed, or should be governed, by emotion. It is a singular thing, by the bye, that writer after writer of late has been arguing over and over again Mr. Watts-Dunton's arguments, and seems to be saying a new thing by using the word 'stress' for 'accent.' 'Stress' may or may not be a better word than 'accent,' the word used by Coleridge, and after him by Mr. Watts-Dunton, but the idea conveyed is one and the same. I, for my part, believe that rare as new ideas may be in creative work, they are still rarer in criticism.