Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James
that shape themselves as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest romantic mood.”
It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction of this masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too grateful. The influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s teachings is seen in the fact that the idea of the Renascence of Wonder has become expanded by theological writers and divines in order to include within its scope subjects connected with religion. Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened its ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander White’s ‘Appreciation’ of Bishop Butler. He quotes one of the Logia discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund: – ‘Let not him that seeketh cease from his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have rest.’ He then points out that Bishop Butler was ‘one of the first to share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of religion.’
And now I must quote a passage alluding to the generalization upon absolute and relative humour which I shall give later when discussing the humour of Mrs. Gudgeon. I shall not be able in these remarks to dwell upon Mr. Watts-Dunton as a humourist, but the extracts will speak for themselves. Writing of the great social Pyramid of the Augustan age, Mr. Watts-Dunton says: —
“This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the symmetry which Blackstone so much admired in the English constitution and its laws; and when, afterwards, the American colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model. At the base – patient as the tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony – was the people, born to be the base and born for nothing else. Resting on this foundation were the middle classes in their various strata, each stratum sharply marked off from the others. Then above these was the strictly genteel class, the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in dress if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of right. Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the sacred structure save that a little – a very little – above him sat God, the suzerain to whom the prayers even of the monarch himself were addressed. The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done a daring thing, and an original thing, by striking off the apex of this pyramid, and it might reasonably have been expected that the building itself would collapse and crumble away. But it did nothing of the kind. It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off – a structure to serve afterwards as a model of the American and French pyramids, both of which, though aspiring to be original structures, are really built on exactly the same scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour as that upon which the pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built. Then came the Restoration: the apex was restored: the structure was again complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever, stronger than ever.
With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be described realistically. Yet we must not suppose that in the eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations, without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty of gazing honestly in her face. She does not work in that way. In the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. In the period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen. In the time of Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable insight and intellectual breadth that his generalizations cover not only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual limbs of so complex an epoch as the twentieth century.”
Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour is in prose fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got into romantic poetry, as he himself understood romantic poetry; for he did not class ballads like Kinmont Willie, where there are such superb touches of humour, among the romantic ballads. And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked, his poems, like Morris’s, are entirely devoid of humour, although both the poets were humourists. But the readers of Rhona’s Letters in ‘The Coming of Love’ will admit that a delicious humour can be imported into the highest romantic poetry.
With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ I must conclude my remarks upon the keynote of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, whether imaginative or critical: —
“The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have ended with Milton. For Milton, although born only twenty-three years before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs properly to the period of romantic poetry. He has no relation whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by Ben Jonson. From the moment when Augustanism really began – in the latter decades of the seventeenth century – the periwig poetry of Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true poets. All the periwig poets became too ‘polite’ to be natural. As acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of Cathay.”
One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the most powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in Rossetti’s poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in ‘Aylwin,’ but in ‘The Coming of Love.’ But in order fully to understand Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work it is necessary to know something of his life-history, and thanks to the aid I have received from certain of his friends, and also to a little topographical work, the ‘History of St. Ives,’ by Mr. Herbert E. Norris, F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long before he was known in London.
Chapter II
COWSLIP COUNTRY
Some time ago I was dipping into the ‘official pictorial guides’ of those three great trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the Great Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St. Ives – not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town in Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell spent those five years of meditation upon which his after life was nourished. In the Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon these words: ‘At Slepe Hall dwelt the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the English sonnet and judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of poetry and art are familiar to lovers of our national literature.’ ‘Well,’ I thought, when I found similar remarks in the other two guides, ‘here at least is one case in which a prophet has honour in his own country.’ This set me musing over a subject which had often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the whimsical workings of the Spirit of Place. To a poet, what are the advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a microcosm like St. Ives? If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet were as great as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne, or as that of his dead friend, Rossetti, I should not have been surprised to find the place of his birth thus associated with his name. But whether or not Rossetti was right in saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘had sought obscurity as other poets seek fame,’ it is certain that until quite lately he neglected to claim his proper place among his peers. Doubtless, as the ‘Journal des Débats’ has pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in subject and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo through the world, there is one respect in which they were less lucky than their friend. They were born in the macrocosm of London, where the Spirit of Place has so much to attend to that his memory can find but a small corner even for the author of ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ or for the author of ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’
Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country – Buttercup Land, as the Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good luck. Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with Rhona Boswell as Wessex