With blue eyes fixed on joy and sorrow past,
Tall Brynhild stands on Sigurd’s funeral pyre;
She stoops to kiss his mouth, though forks of fire
Rise fighting with the reek and wintry blast;
She smiles, though earth and sky are overcast
With shadow of wings that shudder of Asgard’s ire;
She weeps, but not because the gods conspire
To quell her soul and break her heart at last.“Odin,” she cries, “it is for gods to droop!—
Heroes! we still have man’s all-sheltering tomb,
Where cometh peace at last, whate’er may come:
Fate falters, yea, the very Norns shall stoop
Before man’s courage, naked, bare of hope,
Standing against all Hell and Death and Doom.
Rhona Boswell, too, under all her playful humour, is of this strain, as we see in that sonnet on ‘Kissing the Maybuds’ in ‘The Coming of Love’ (given on page [406] of this book).
As Groome’s remarks upon ‘Aylwin’ are in many ways of special interest, I will for a moment digress from the main current of my argument, and say a few words about it. Of course as the gypsies figure so largely in this story, there were very few writers competent to review it from the Romany point of view. Leland was living when it appeared, but he was residing on the Continent; moreover, at his age, and engrossed as he was, it was not likely that he would undertake to review it. There was another Romany scholar, spoken of with enthusiasm by Groome—I allude to Mr. Sampson, of Liverpool, who has since edited Borrow’s ‘Romany Rye’ for Messrs. Methuen, and who is said to know more of Welsh Romany than any Englishman ever knew before. At that time, however, he was almost unknown. Finally, there was Groome himself, whose articles in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ had proclaimed him to be the greatest living gypsologist. The editor of the ‘Bookman,’ being anxious to get a review of the book from the most competent writer he could find, secured Groome himself. I can give only a few sentences from the review. Groome, it will be seen, does not miss the opportunity of flicking in his usual satirical manner the omniscience of some popular novelists:—
“Novelty and truth,” he says, “are ‘Aylwin’s’ chief characteristics, a rare combination nowadays. Our older novelists—those at least still held in remembrance—wrote only of what they knew, or of what they had painfully mastered. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot belong to the foremost rank of these; for types of the second or the third may stand Marryat, Lever, Charles Reade, James Grant, Surtees, Whyte Melville, and Wilkie Collins. But now we have changed all that; the maximum of achievement seldom rises above school board nescience. With a few exceptions (one could count them on the ten fingers) our present-day novelists seem to write only about things of which they clearly know nothing. One of the most popular lays the scene of a story in Paris: the Seine there is tidal, it rolls a murdered corpse upwards. In another work by her a gambler shoots himself in a cab. ‘I trust,’ cries a friend who has heard the shot, ‘he has missed.’ ‘No,’ says a second friend, ‘he was a dead shot.’ Mr. X. writes a realistic novel about betting. It is crammed with weights, acceptances, and all the rest of it; but, alas! on an early page a servant girl wins 12s. 6d. at 7 to 1. Mrs. Y. takes her heroine to a Scottish deer-forest: it is full of primeval oaks. Mrs. Z. sends her hero out deerstalking. Following a hill-range, he sights a stag upon the opposite height, fires at it, and kills his benefactor, who is strolling below in the glen. And Mr. Ampersand in his masterpiece shows up the littleness of the Establishment: his ritualistic church presents the inconceivable conjunction of the Ten Commandments and a gorgeous rood-screen. I have drawn upon memory for these six examples, but subscribers to Mudie’s should readily recognize the books I mean; they have sold by thousands on thousands. ‘Aylwin’ is not such as these. There is much in it of the country, of open-air life, of mountain scenery, of artistic fellowship, of Gypsydom; it might be called the novel of the two Bohemias.”
Many readers have expressed the desire to know something about the prototypes of Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. The following words from the Introduction to the 20th edition (called the ‘Snowdon Edition’) may therefore be read with interest:—
“Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years—during the time when he lived in Hereford Square. When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out an edition of ‘Lavengro,’ I prefaced that delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Borrow’s gypsy characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most remarkable ‘Romany Chi’ that had ever been met with in the part of East Anglia known to Borrow and myself—Sinfi Lovell. I described her playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl Isopel Berners.
Since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ I have received very many letters from English and American readers inquiring whether ‘the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to “Lavengro” is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of “Aylwin,” and also whether ‘the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the same as the Rhona of “The Coming of Love?”’ The evidence of the reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the appearance of Rhona’s first letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ where the poem was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very ill,—near her death indeed,—urging me to tell her whether Rhona’s love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the Sinfi of ‘Aylwin’ and the Sinfi described in my introduction to ‘Lavengro’ are one and the same character—except that the story of the child Sinfi’s weeping for the ‘poor dead Gorgios’ in the churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the gypsies, not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded to in the now famous sonnet describing ‘the walking lord of gypsy lore,’ Borrow; by his most intimate friend, Dr. Gordon Hake.
Now that so many of the gryengroes (horse-dealers), who form the aristocracy of the Romany race, have left England for America, it is natural enough that to some readers of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love,’ my pictures of Romany life seem a little idealized. The ‘Times,’ in a kindly notice of ‘The Coming of Love,’ said that the kind of gypsies there depicted are a very interesting people, ‘unless the author has flattered them unduly.’ Those who best knew the gypsy women of that period will be the first to aver that I have not flattered them unduly.”
It is Winifred who shares, not only with Henry Aylwin, but also with the author himself, that love of the wind which he revealed in the ‘Athenæum’ many years before ‘Aylwin’ was published. I may quote this passage in praise of the wind as an example of the way in which his imaginative work and his critical work are often interwoven:—
“There is no surer test of genuine nature instinct than this. Anybody can love sunshine. No people had less of the nature instinct than the Romans, but they could enjoy the sun; they even took their solaria or sun-baths, and gave them to their children. And, if it may be said that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be said of the French! None but a born child of the tent could ever have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written in ‘Les Travailleurs de la Mer,’ as though they were the ministers of Ahriman. ‘From Ormuzd, not from Ahriman, ye come.’ And here, indeed, is the difference between the two nationalities. Love of the wind has made England what she is; dread of the wind has greatly contributed to make France what she is. The winds are the breathings of the Great Mother. Under the ‘olden spell’ of dumbness, nature can yet speak to us by her winds. It is they that express her every mood, and, if her mood is rough at times, her heart is kind. This is why the true child of the open-air—never mind how much he may suffer from the wind—loves it, loves it as much when it comes and ‘takes the ruffian billows by the top’ to the peril of his life, as when it comes from the sweet South. In the wind’s most boisterous moods, such as those so splendidly depicted by Dana in the doubling of Cape Horn, there is an exhilaration, a fierce delight, in struggling with it. It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes about the wind, and that which the wind so loves—the snow.”
Chapter XXIII
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN RELIGION
And now as to the real inner meaning of ‘Alwyin,’ about which so much has been written. “‘Aylwin,’” says Groome, “is a passionate love-story, with a mystical idée mère. For the entire dramatic action revolves around a thought that is coming more and more to the front—the difference, namely, between a materialistic and a spiritualistic cosmogony.” And Dr. Nicoll, in his essay on “The Significance of ‘Aylwin,’” in the ‘Contemporary Review,’ says:—