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 naïve 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 Badakhshân 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, aërial 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-fêtes 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 aërial 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:—