Theodore Watts-Dunton Part 28

Chapter XXIV THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR

THE character of Mrs. Gudgeon in 'Aylwin' stands as entirely alone among humourous characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs.

Partridge. In my own review of 'Aylwin' I thus noted the entirely new kind of humour which characterizes it:-"To one aspect of this book we have not yet alluded, namely, its humour. Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is inimitable, with her quaint saying: 'I shall die a-larfin', they say in Primrose Court, and so I shall-unless I die a-crying.'" Few critics have done justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the 'Times' said: 'In Mrs. Gudgeon, one of his characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what seems to be a new comic figure,' and the 'Sat.u.r.day Review' singled her out as being the triumph of the book". Could she really have been a real character? Could there ever have existed in the London of the mid-Victorian period a real flesh and blood costermonger so rich in humour that her very name sheds a glow of laughter over every page in which it appears? According to Mr. Hake, she was suggested by a real woman, and this makes me almost lament my arrival in London too late to make her acquaintance. "With regard to the most original character of the story," says Mr. Hake, "those who knew Clement's Inn, where I myself once resided, and Lincoln's Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify Mrs. Gudgeon, who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market.

Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper. At one time, I believe-but I am not certain about this-she kept a stall on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge, and it might have been there that, as I have been told, her portrait was drawn for a specified number of early breakfasts by an unfortunate artist who sank very low, but had real ability. Her constant phrase was 'I shall die o'-laughin'-I know I shall!' On account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an Irishwoman. But she was not; she was c.o.c.kney to the marrow. Recluse as Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different, and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her impudence, and I may say insolence, Mrs. Gudgeon was a great favourite with the police, who were the constant b.u.t.ts of her chaff." {383} But, of course, this interesting costermonger could have only suggested our unique Mrs. Gudgeon.

She shows that it is possible to paint a low-cla.s.s humourist as rich in the new cosmic humour as any one of d.i.c.kens's is rich in the old terrene humour, and yet without one d.i.c.kensian touch. The difficulty of achieving this feat is manifested every day, both in novels and on the stage. Until Mrs. Gudgeon appeared I thought that d.i.c.kens had made it as impossible for another writer to paint humourous pictures of low-cla.s.s London women as Swinburne has made it impossible for another poet to write in anapaests. But there is in all that Mrs. Gudgeon says or does a profundity of humour so much deeper than the humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it wins her a separate niche in our gallery of humourous women. The chief cause of the delight which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she ill.u.s.trates Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of absolute humour as distinguished from relative humour-a theory which delighted me in those boyish days in Ireland, to which I have already alluded. I have read his words on this theme so often that I think I could repeat them as fluently as a nursery rhyme. In their original form I remember that the word 'caricature' took the place of the phrase 'relative humour.' I do not think there is anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings so suggestive and so profound, and to find in reading 'Aylwin' that they were suggested to him by a real living character was exhilarating indeed.

Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of humour is one of his most original generalizations, and it is vitally related both to his theory of poetry and to his generalization of generalizations, 'The Renascence of Wonder.'

I think Mrs. Gudgeon is a c.o.c.kney Anacharsis in petticoats. The Scythian philosopher, it will be remembered, when jesters were taken to him, could not be made to smile, but afterwards, when a monkey was brought to him, broke out into a fit of laughter and said, 'Now this is laughable by nature, the other by art.' I will now quote the essay on absolute and relative humour:-

"Anarcharsis, who found the humour of Nature alone laughable, was the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, who only finds food for laughter in the distortions of so-called humourous art. The quality which I have called absolute humour is popularly supposed to be the characteristic and special temper of the English. The bustling, money grubbing, rank-wors.h.i.+pping British slave of convention claims to be the absolute humourist! It is very amusing. The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the temper of Hotei, the fat j.a.panese G.o.d of 'contentment with things as they be,' who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the suns.h.i.+ne, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his 'thick rotundity of belly,' good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature's largess, the exceeding cheapness of good things, such as suns.h.i.+ne and sweet rains and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side.

Between this and relative humour how wide is the gulf!

That an apprehension of incongruity is the basis of both relative and absolute humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of relative humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal, in the case of absolute humour it is the sweet incongruity of the normal itself. Relative humour laughs at the breach of the accustomed laws of nature and the conventional laws of man, which laws it accepts as final. Absolute humour (comparing them unconsciously with some ideal standard of its own, or with that ideal or noumenal or spiritual world behind the cosmic show) sees the incongruity of those very laws themselves-laws which are the relative humourist's standard. Absolute humour, in a word, is based on metaphysics-relative humour on experience. A child can become a relative humourist by adding a line or two to the nose of Wellington, or by reversing the nose of the Venus de Medici. The absolute humourist has so long been saying to himself, 'What a whimsical idea is the human nose!' that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the child's laughter on seeing it turned upside down. So with convention and its codes of etiquette-from the pompous harlequinade of royalty-the ineffable gingerbread of an aristocracy of names without office or culture, down to the Draconian laws of Philistia and bourgeois respectability; whatever is a breach of the local laws of the game of social life, whether the laws be those of a village pothouse or of Mayfair; whether it displays an ignorance of matters of familiar knowledge, these are the quarry of the relative humourist. The absolute humourist, on the other hand, as we see in the greatest masters of absolute humour, is so perpetually overwhelmed with the irony of the entire game, cosmic and human, from the droll little conventions of the village pothouse to those of London, of Paris, of New York, of Pekin-up to the apparently meaningless dance of the planets round the sun-up again to that greater and more meaningless waltz of suns round the centre-he is so delighted with the delicious foolishness of wisdom, the conceited ignorance of knowledge, the grotesqueness even of the standard of beauty itself; above all, with the whim of the absolute humourist Nature, amusing herself, not merely with her monkeys, her flamingoes, her penguins, her dromedaries, but with these more whimsical creatures still-these 'bipeds' which, though 'featherless' are proved to be not 'plucked fowls'; these proud, high-thinking organisms-stomachs with heads, arms, and legs as useful appendages-these countless little 'me's,' so all alike and yet so unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be _the_ me, the only true original me, round whom all other _me's_ revolve-so overwhelmed is the absolute humourist with the whim of all this-with the incongruity, that is, of the normal itself-with the 'almighty joke'

of the Cosmos as it is-that he sees nothing 'funny' in departures from laws which to him are in themselves the very quintessence of fun. And he laughs the laugh of Rabelais and of Sterne; for he feels that behind this rich incongruous show there must be a beneficent Showman. He knows that although at the top of the constellation sits Circ.u.mstance, Harlequin and King, bowelless and blind, shaking his starry cap and bells, there sits far above even Harlequin himself another Being greater than he-a Being who because he has given us the delight of laughter must be good, and who in the end will somewhere set all these incongruities right-who will, some day, show us the meaning of that which now seems so meaningless. With Charles Lamb he feels, in short, that humour 'does not go out with life'; and in answer to Elia's question, 'Can a ghost laugh?' he says, 'a.s.suredly, if there be ghosts at all,' for he is as unable as Soame Jenyns himself to imagine that even the seraphim can be perfectly happy without a perception of the ludicrous.

If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, his type is not d.i.c.kens or Cruikshank, but Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial source of amus.e.m.e.nt to the absolute humourist he gets to love. Mere representation, therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of art. Exaggeration offends him. Nothing to him is so rich as the real. He p.r.o.nounces Tennyson's 'Northern Farmer' or the public-house scene in 'Silas Marner' to be more humourous than the trial scene in 'Pickwick.' Wilkie's realism he finds more humourous than the funniest cartoon in the funniest comic journal. And this mood is as much opposed to satire as to relative humour. Of all moods the rarest and the finest-requiring, indeed, such a 'blessed mixing of the juices' as nature cannot every day achieve-it is the mood of each one of those fatal 'Paradis Artificiels,' the seeking of which has devastated the human race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of Villon; of Walter Mapes in the following verse:-

Meum est propositum in taberna mori, Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, Ut dicant c.u.m venerint angelorum chori, Deus sit propitius huic potatori."

Now it is because Mrs. Gudgeon is the very type of the absolute humourist as defined in this magnificent fugue of prose, and the only example of absolute humour which has appeared in prose fiction, that she is to me a fount of esoteric and fastidious joy. If I were asked what character in 'Aylwin' shows the most unmistakable genius, I should reply, 'Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs. Gudgeon!'"

Chapter XXV GORGIOS AND ROMANIES

THE publication of 'The Coming of Love' in book form preceded that of 'Aylwin' by about a year, but it had been appearing piecemeal in the 'Athenaeum' since 1882.

"So far as regards Rhona Boswell's story," says Mr. Watts-Dunton, "'The Coming of Love' is a sequel to 'Aylwin.' If the allusions to Rhona's lover, Percy Aylwin, in the prose story have been, in some degree, misunderstood by some readers-if there is any danger of Henry Aylwin, the hero of the novel, being confounded with Percy Aylwin, the hero of this poem-it only shows how difficult it is for the poet or the novelist (who must needs see his characters from the concave side only) to realize that it is the convex side only which he can present to his reader.

The fact is that the motive of 'Aylwin'-dealing only as it does with that which is elemental and unchangeable in man-is of so entirely poetic a nature that I began to write it in verse. After a while, however, I found that a story of so many incidents and complications as the one that was growing under my hand could only be told in prose. This was before I had written any prose at all-yes, it is so long ago as that. And when, afterwards, I began to write criticism, I had (for certain reasons-important then, but of no importance now) abandoned the idea of offering the novel to the outside public at all. Among my friends it had been widely read, both in ma.n.u.script and in type.

But with regard to Romany women, Henry Aylwin's feeling towards them was the very opposite of Percy's. When, in speaking of George Borrow some years ago, I made the remark that between Englishmen of a certain type and gypsy women there is an extraordinary physical attraction-an attraction which did not exist between Borrow and the gypsy women with whom he was brought into contact-I was thinking specially of the character depicted here under the name of Percy Aylwin. And I asked then the question-Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn with much power towards any woman, could she possibly have been Romany? Would she not rather have been of the Scandinavian type?-would she not have been what he used to call a 'Brynhild'? From many conversations with him on this subject, I think she must necessarily have been a tall blonde of the type of Isopel Berners-who, by-the-by, was much more a portrait of a splendid East-Anglian road-girl than is generally imagined. And I think, besides, that Borrow's sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon type may account for the fact that, notwithstanding his love of the free and easy economies of life among the better cla.s.s of Gryengroes, his gypsy women are all what have been called 'scenic characters.'

When he comes to delineate a heroine, she is the superb Isopel Berners-that is to say, she is physically (and indeed mentally, too), the very opposite of the Romany chi. It was here, as I happen to know, that Borrow's sympathies were with Henry Aylwin far more than with Percy Aylwin.

The type of the Romany chi, though very delightful to Henry Aylwin as regards companions.h.i.+p, had no physical attractions for him, otherwise the witchery of the girl here called Rhona Boswell, whom he knew as a child long before Percy Aylwin knew her, must surely have eclipsed such charms as Winifred Wynne or any other winsome 'Gorgie' could possess. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have been impossible for Percy Aylwin to be brought closely and long in contact with a Romany girl like Sinfi Lovell and remain untouched by those unique physical attractions of hers-attractions that made her universally admired by the best judges of female beauty as being the most splendid 'face-model' of her time, and as being in form the grandest woman ever seen in the studios-attractions that upon Henry Aylwin seem to have made almost no impression.

There is no accounting for this, as there is no accounting for anything connected with the mysterious witchery of s.e.x. And again, the strong inscrutable way in which some gypsy girls are drawn towards a 'Tarno Rye' (as a young English gentleman is called), is quite inexplicable. Some have thought-and Borrow was one of them-that it may arise from that infirmity of the Romany Chal which causes the girls to 'take their own part' without appealing to their men-companions for aid-that lack of masculine chivalry among the men of their own race.

And now for a word or two upon a matter in connection with 'Aylwin'

and 'The Coming of Love' which interests me more deeply. Some of those who have been specially attracted towards Sinfi Lovell have had misgivings, I find, as to whether she is not an idealization, an impossible Romany chi, and some of those who have been specially attracted towards Rhona Boswell have had the same misgivings as to her.

One of the great racial specialities of the Romany is the superiority of the women to the men. For it is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over language, in comparative breadth of view regarding the Gorgio world that the Romany women (in Great Britain, at least) leave the men far behind. In everything that goes to make n.o.bility of character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imagine a gypsy hero is, I will confess, rather difficult. Not that the average male gypsy is without a certain amount of courage, but it soon gives way, and, in a conflict between a gypsy and an Englishman, it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped the virility of Romany stamina.

Although some of our most notable prize-fighters have been gypsies, it used to be well known, in times when the ring was fas.h.i.+onable, that a gypsy could not always be relied upon to 'take punishment'

with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly-strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain.

The courage of a gypsy woman, on the other hand, has pa.s.sed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt it. This superiority of the women to the men extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift of music for which the gypsies as a race are noticeable. With regard to music, however, even in Eastern Europe (Russia alone excepted), where gypsy music is so universal that, according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men, and not, in general, the women, who excel. Those, however, who knew Sinfi Lovell may think with me that this state of things may simply be the result of opportunity and training."

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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sages of pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his own eyes while he writes; his sublime pa.s.sages 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 Sh.e.l.ley that the high pa.s.sion 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 ma.n.u.script 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 friends.h.i.+p of Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Yet for l.u.s.tre after l.u.s.tre 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sed the poet among his compeers and he would have come down to the present generation, as Swinburne has come down, as a cla.s.sic. 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 rehea.r.s.e.

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 flas.h.i.+ng it upon the physical senses of the listener,' none of his contemporaries have surpa.s.sed 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."