After getting this sanction I set to work, and soon found that my chief obstacle was the superabundance of material, which would fill several folio volumes. But although it is undoubtedly ‘a mighty maze,’ it is ‘not without a plan.’ In a certain sense the vast number of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s generalizations upon literature, art, philosophy, and what Emerson calls ‘the conduct of life,’ revolve round certain fixed principles which have guided me in the selection I have made. I also found that to understand these principles of romantic art, it was necessary to make a thorough critical study of the romance, ‘Aylwin,’ and of the book of poems, ‘The Coming of Love.’ I think I have made that study, and that I have connected the critical system with the imaginative work more thoroughly than has been done by any other writer, although the work of Mr. Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been acutely discussed, not only in England but also in France and in Italy.
The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as that of his poetry and fiction. He poured into his criticism the intellectual and imaginative force which other men pour into purely artistic channels, for he made criticism a vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his irony. His criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime. Their vitality is not impaired by the impermanence of their texts. No critic has surpassed his universality of range. Out of a full intellectual and imaginative life he has evolved speculations which cut deep not only into the fibre of modern thought but into the future of human development. Great teachers have their day and their disciples. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s day and disciples belong to the young future whose dawn some of us already descry. For, as Mr. Justin McCarthy wrote of ‘Aylwin,’ ‘it is inspired by the very spirit of youth,’ and this is why so many of the younger writers are beginning to accept him as their guide. Mr. Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life which, I think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the pessimists across the history of the soul of man. That is the aspect of his work which calls for the comprehension of the new generation. The old cosmogonies are dead; here is the new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse of wonder reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna which no assaults of science can shake.
But, although the main object of this book is to focus, as it were, the many scattered utterances of Mr. Watts-Dunton in prose and poetry upon the great subject of the Renascence of Wonder, I have interspersed here and there essays which do not touch upon this theme, and also excerpts from those obituary notices of his friends which formed so fascinating a part of his contributions to the ‘Athenæum.’ For, of course, it was necessary to give the charm of variety to the book. Rossetti used to say, I believe, that there is one quality necessary in a poem which very many poets are apt to ignore—the quality of being amusing. I have always thought that there is great truth in this, and I have also thought that the remark is applicable to prose no less than to poetry. This is why I have occasionally enlivened these pages with extracts from his picturesque monographs; indeed, I have done more than this. Not having known Mr. Watts-Dunton’s great contemporaries myself, I have looked about me for the aid of certain others who did know them. I have not hesitated to collect from various sources such facts and details connected with Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friends as are necessarily beyond the scope of my own experience and knowledge. Among these I must prominently mention one to whom I have been specially indebted for reminiscences of Mr. Watts-Dunton and his circle. This is Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, eldest son of the ‘parable poet,’ a gentleman of much too modest and retiring a disposition, who, from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s first appearance in London right onwards, was brought into intimate relations with himself, his relatives, Rossetti, William Morris, Westland Marston, Philip Bourke Marston, Madox Brown, George Borrow, Stevenson, Minto, and many others. I have not only made free use of his articles, but I have had the greatest aid from him in many other respects, and it is my bare duty to express my gratitude to him for his services. I have also to thank the editor of the ‘Athenæum’ for cordially granting me permission to quote so freely from its columns; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging my debt to the many other publications from which I have drawn materials for this book.
Chapter I
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER
“‘The renascence of wonder,’ to employ Mr. Watts-Dunton’s appellation for what he justly considers the most striking and significant feature in the great romantic revival which has transformed literature, is proclaimed by this very appellation not to be the achievement of any one innovator, but a general reawakening of mankind to a perception that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.”—Dr. R. Garnett: Monograph on Coleridge.
Undoubtedly the greatest philosophical generalization of our time is expressed in the four words, ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ They suggest that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that set in after the publication of Darwin’s great book. This phrase, which I first became familiar with in his ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ article on Rossetti, seems really to have been used first in ‘Aylwin.’ The story seems originally to have been called ‘The Renascence of Wonder,’ but the title was abandoned because the writer believed that an un-suggestive name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the practical point of view. For the knowledge of this I am indebted to Mr. Hake, who says:—
“During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in Great James Street, several of his friends had chambers in the same street, and among them were my late father, Dr. Gordon Hake—Rossetti’s friend and physician—Mr. Watts-Dunton and myself. Mr. Watts-Dunton, as is well known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as a writer. I have heard him tell scores of stories full of plot and character that have never appeared in print. On a certain occasion he was suffering from one of his periodical eye troubles that had used occasionally to embarrass him. He had just been telling Mr. Swinburne the plot of a suggested story, the motive of which was the ‘renascence of wonder in art and poetry’ depicting certain well-known characters.
I offered to act as his amanuensis in writing the story, and did so, with the occasional aid of my father and brothers. The story was sent to the late F. W. Robinson, the novelist, then at the zenith of his vogue, who declared that he ‘saw a fortune in it,’ and it was he who advised the author to send it to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. As far as I remember, the time occupied by the work was between five and six months. When a large portion of it was in type it was read by many friends,—among others by the late Madox Brown, who thought some of the portraits too close, as the characters were then all living, except one, the character who figures as Cyril. Although unpublished, it was so well known that an article upon it appeared in the ‘Liverpool Mercury.’ This was more than twenty years ago.”
The important matter before us, however, is not when he first used this phrase, which has now become a sort of literary shorthand to express a wide and sweeping idea, but what it actually imports. Fortunately Mr. Watts-Dunton has quite lately given us a luminous exposition of what the words do precisely mean. Last year he wrote for that invaluable work, Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ the Introduction to volume iii., and no one can any longer say that there is any ambiguity in this now famous phrase:—
“As the storm-wind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the effect of the French Revolution. It was nothing less than a great revived movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic acceptance in all things, including literature and art. To this revival the present writer, in the introduction to an imaginative work dealing with this movement, has already, for convenience’ sake, and in default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of Wonder. As was said on that occasion, ‘The phrase, the Renascence of Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious life: the impulse of acceptance—the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are—and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.’ It would seem that something works as inevitably and as logically as a physical law in the yearning which societies in a certain stage of development show to get away, as far away as possible, from the condition of the natural man; to get away from that despised condition not only in material affairs, such as dress, domestic arrangements and economies, but also in the fine arts and in intellectual methods, till, having passed that inevitable stage, each society is liable to suffer (even if it does not in some cases actually suffer) a reaction, when nature and art are likely again to take the place of convention and artifice. Anthropologists have often asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark womb of some remote semi-human brain, which, by first stirring, lifting, and vitalizing other potential and latent faculties, gave birth to man? Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder? But certainly it is not rash, as regards the races of man, to affirm that the more intelligent the race the less it is governed by the instinct of acceptance, and the more it is governed by the instinct of wonder, that instinct which leads to the movement of challenge. The alternate action of the two great warring instincts is specially seen just now in the Japanese. Here the instinct of challenge which results in progress became active up to a certain point, and then suddenly became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have full play, and then everything became crystallized. Ages upon ages of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were required before the Mongolian savage was developed into the Japanese of the period before the nature-worship of ‘Shinto’ had been assaulted by dogmatic Buddhism. But by that time the instinct of challenge had resulted in such a high state of civilization that acceptance set in and there was an end, for the time being, of progress. There is no room here to say even a few words upon other great revivals in past times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian renascence of the ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in philosophical speculation, which had previously been arrested, was revived; when the old sciences were revived; and when some modern sciences were born. There are, of course, different kinds of wonder.”
This passage has a peculiar interest for me, because I instinctively compare it with the author’s speech delivered at the St. Ives old Union Book Club dinner when he was a boy. It shows the same wide vision, the same sweep, and the same rush of eloquence. It is in view of this great generalization that I have determined to quote that speech later.