“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 æternum 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 ‘Athenæum.’ 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 ‘Athenæum’ 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 cæsuric 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 ποιητής (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 ποίησις. Only, while Aristotle considered ποίησις 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.