“And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?
The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my father’s book, its strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days passed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two, and then returned home and went to bed—but not to sleep. For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be quelled—till the sound of Winnie’s song in the street could be stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and, taking out the amulet, proceeded to examine the facets as I did once before when I heard in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father—
‘Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that materialism is intolerable—is hell itself—to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word “never”! You will find that you dare not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope.’
And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a waking dream.
The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a start of horror, and cried, ‘Whose face?’ Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as if the pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh—where had I seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But upon the picture of ‘The Sibyl’ in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!
‘It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,’ I exclaimed.
Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.
And then Sinfi Lovell’s voice seemed murmuring in my ears, ‘Fenella Stanley’s dead and dust, and that’s why she can make you put that cross in your feyther’s tomb, and she will, she will.’
I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin. Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new. I was feeling the facets. But the tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache were tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, ‘For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.’ . . .
What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse—what agonies were mine as I sat there sobbing the one word ‘Winnie’—could be understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the passionate blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins. . . .
I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were done)—scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a hand-valise: ‘Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and close it again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our skill. And as burglars’ jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark.’”
But after all I am unable to express any opinion worth expressing upon the chief point which would decide the question as to whether the imagination at work in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is lyrical or dramatic, because I do not know whether, like Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin, the author has a dash of Romany blood in his veins. If he has not that dash, and I certainly never heard that he has, and neither Groome’s words in the ‘Bookman’ nor ‘Gypsy Smith’s’ words can be construed into an expression of opinion on the subject, then I will say with confidence that his delineation of two English gentleman with an ancestral Romany strain so like and yet so unlike as Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin could only have been achieved by a wonderful exercise of absolute vision. It was this that struck the late Grant Allen so forcibly. On the other hand, if he has that strain, then, as I have said before, it is not in the story but in the poem that we must look for the best dramatic character drawing. On this most interesting subject no one can speak but himself, and he has not spoken. But here is what he has said upon the similarity and the contrast between Percy and Henry Aylwin:—
“Certain parts of ‘The Coming of Love’ were written about the same time as ‘Aylwin.’ The two Aylwins, Henry and Percy, were then very distinct in my own mind; they are very distinct now. And I confess that the possibility of their being confounded with each other had never occurred to me. A certain similarity between the two there must needs be, seeing that the blood of the same Romany ancestress, Fenella Stanley, flows in the veins of both. I say there must needs be this similarity, because the ancestress was Romany. For, without starting the inquiry here as to whether or not the Romanies as a race are superior or inferior to all or any of the great European races among which they move, I will venture to affirm that in the Romanies the mysterious energy which the evolutionists call ‘the prepotency of transmission’ in races is specially strong—so strong, indeed, that evidences of Romany blood in a family may be traced down for several generations. It is inevitable, therefore, that in each of the descendants of Fenella Stanley the form taken by the love-passion should show itself in kindred ways. But the reader who will give a careful study to the characters of Henry and Percy Aylwin will come to the conclusion, I think, that the similarity between the two is observable in one aspect of their characters only. The intensity of the love-passion in each assumes a spiritualizing and mystical form.”
Chapter XXII
A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES
One thing seems clear to me: having fully intended to make Winifred the heroine of ‘Alwyn’ round whom the main current of interest should revolve, the author failed to do so. And the reason of his failure is that Winifred has to succumb to the superior vitality of Sinfi’s commanding figure. For the purpose of telling the story of Winifred and bringing out her character he conceived and introduced this splendid descendant of Fenella Stanley, and then found her, against his will, growing under his hand until, at last, she pushed his own beloved heroine off her pedestal, and stood herself for all time. Never did author love his heroine as Mr. Watts-Dunton loves Winifred, and there is nothing so curious in all fiction as the way in which he seems at times to resent Sinfi’s dominance over the Welsh heroine; and this explains what readers have sometimes said about his ‘unkindness to Sinfi.’
It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the reader’s heroine. When Madox Brown read the story in manuscript, he became greatly enamoured of Sinfi, and talked about her constantly. It was the same with Mr. Swinburne, who says that ‘Aylwin’ is the only novel he ever read in manuscript, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it in type. Mr. George Meredith in a letter said:—“I am in love with Sinfi. Nowhere can fiction give us one to match her, not even the ‘Kriegspiel’ heroine, who touched me to the deeps. Winifred’s infancy has infancy’s charm. The young woman is taking. But all my heart has gone to Sinfi. Of course it is part of her character that her destiny should point to the glooms. The sun comes to me again in her conquering presence. I could talk of her for hours. The book has this defect,—it leaves in the mind a cry for a successor.” And the author of ‘Kriegspiel’ himself, F. H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as the true heroine of the story. “In Sinfi Lovell,” says he, “Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have scored a magnificent success had he achieved nothing more than this most splendid figure—supremely clever but utterly illiterate, eloquent but ungrammatical, heroic but altogether womanly. Winifred is good, and so too is Henry Aylwin himself, and so are many of the minor characters (the mother, for instance, the aunt, and Mrs. Gudgeon), but it is as the tragedy of Sinfi’s sacrifice that ‘Aylwin’ should take its place in literature.” Yes, it seems cruel to tell the author this, but Sinfi, and not Winifred, with all her charm, is evidently the favourite of his English public. That admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in the ‘Daily News’ that ‘Sinfi Lovell is one of the most finished studies of its type and kind in all romantic literature.’
I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel Berners. In the first place, while Sinfi is the crowning type of the Romany chi, Isopel is, as the author has pointed out, the type of the ‘Anglo-Saxon road girl’ with a special antagonism to Romany girls. Grand as is the character of Borrow’s Isopel Berners, she is not in the least like Sinfi Lovell. And I may add that she is not really like any other of the heroic women who figure in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s gallery of noble women. It is, however, interesting here to note that Mr. Watts-Dunton has a special sympathy with women of this heroic type and a special strength of hand in delineating them. There is nothing in them of Isopel’s hysterical tears. Once only does Sinfi, in the nobility of her affection for Aylwin, yield to weakness. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathy with this kind of woman is apparent in his eulogy of ‘Shirley’:—
“Note that it is not enough for the ideal English girl to be beautiful and healthy, brilliant and cultivated, generous and loving: she must be brave, there must be in her a strain of Valkyrie; she must be of the high blood of Brynhild, who would have taken Odin himself by the throat for the man she loved. That is to say, that, having all the various charms of English women, the ideal English girl must top them all with that quality which is specially the English man’s, just as the English hero, the Nelson, the Sydney, having all the various glories of other heroes, must top them all with that quality which is specially the English woman’s—tenderness. What we mean is, that there is a symmetry and a harmony in these matters; that just as it was an English sailor who said, ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ when dying on board the ‘Victory’—just as it was an English gentleman who on the burning ‘Amazon,’ stood up one windy night, naked and blistered, to make of himself a living screen between the flames and his young wife; so it was an Englishwoman who threw her arms round that fire-screen, and plunged into the sea; and an Englishwoman who, when bitten by a dog, burnt out the bite from her beautiful arm with a red-hot poker, and gave special instructions how she was to be smothered when hydrophobia should set in.”
But Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, in his sonnet, ‘Brynhild on Sigurd’s Funeral Pyre,’ so powerfully illustrated by Mr. Byam Shaw, has given us in fourteen lines a picture of feminine courage and stoicism that puts even Charlotte Brontë’s picture of Shirley in the shade:—