I will now quote the words of a very accomplished scholar and critic upon the inner meaning of ‘Aylwin’ generally. They appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of October 1904, and they show that the interest in the book, so far from waning, is increasing:—
“Public taste has for once made a lucky shot, and we are only too pleased to be able to put an item to the credit of an account in taste, where the balance is so heavily on the wrong side. How ‘Aylwin’ ever came to be a popular success is hard indeed to understand. We cannot wonder at the doubts of a popular reception confessed to by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his dedication of the latest edition to Mr. Ernest Rhys. How did a book, notable for its poetry and subtlety of thought, come to appeal to an English public? That it should have a vogue in Wales was natural; Welsh patriotism would assure a certain success, though by itself it could not indeed have made the book the household word it has now become throughout all Wales. And undoubtedly its Welsh reception has been the more intelligent; it has been welcomed there for the qualities that most deserved a welcome; while in England we fear that in many quarters it has rather been welcomed in spite of them. The average English man and woman do not like mystery and distrust poetry. They have little sympathy with the ‘renascence of wonder,’ which some new passages unfold to us in the Arvon edition, passages originally omitted for fear of excessive length and now restored from the MS. We are glad to have them, for they illustrate further the intellectual motive of the book. We are of those who do not care to take ‘Aylwin’ merely as a novel.”
These words remind me of two reviews of ‘Aylwin,’ one by Mr. W. P. Ryan, a fellow-countryman of mine, which was published when ‘Aylwin’ first appeared, the other by an eminent French writer.
“The salient impression on the reader is that he is looking full into deep reaches of life and spirituality rather than temporary pursuits and mundane ambitions. In this regard, in its freedom from littleness, its breadth of life, its exaltation of mood, its sense of serene issues that do not pass with the changing fashions of a generation, the book is almost epic.
But ‘Aylwin’ has yet other sides. It is a vital and seizing story. The girl-heroine is a beautiful presentment, and the struggle with destiny, when, believing in the efficacy of a mystic’s curse she loses her reason, and flies from poignantly idyllic life to harrowing life, her stricken lover in her wake, is nearly Greek in its intensity and pathos. The long, long quest through the mountain magic of Wales, the wandering spheres of Romany-land, and the art-reaches of London, could only be made real and convincing by triumphant art. A less expert pioneer would enlarge his effects in details that would dissipate their magic; Mr. Watts-Dunton knows that one inspired touch is worth many uninspired chapters, as Shakespeare knew that ‘she should have died hereafter.’
Death came on her like an untimely frost,
Upon the fairest flower of all the field.or
Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
is worth an afternoon of emphasis, a night of mystical elaboration.
Incidentally, the Celtic and Romany types of character reveal their essence. Here, too, the author preserves the artistic unities. Delightful as one realizes these characters to be, full-blooded personalities though they are, it is still their spirit, and through it the larger spirit of their race, that shines clearest. Their story is all realistic, and yet it leaves the flavour of a fairy tale of Regeneration. At first sight one is inclined to speak of their beautiful kinship with Nature; but the truth is that Nature and they together are seen with spiritual eyes; that they and Nature are different but kindred embodiments of the underlying, all-extending, universal soul; that Henry’s love, and Winnie’s rapture, and Snowdon’s magic, and Sinfi’s crwth, and the little song of y Wydffa, and the glorious mountain dawn are but drops and notes in a melodic mystic ocean, of which the farthest stars and the deepest loves are kindred and inevitable parts—parts of a whole, of whose ministry we hardly know the elements, yet are cognisant that our highest joy is to feel in radiant moments that we, too, are part of the harmony. In idyll, despair or tragedy, the beauty of ‘Aylwin’ is that always the song of the divine in humanity is beneath it. Everything merges into one consistent, artistically suggested, spiritual conception of life; love tried, tortured, finally rewarded as the supreme force utilized to drive home the intolerable negation and atrophy of materialism; in Henry’s gnostic father, in the scientific Henry himself, the Romany Sinfi, Winnie whose nature is a song, Wilderspin who believes that his model is a heavenly visitant with an immaterial body, D’Arcy who stands for Rossetti, the end is the same; and the striking trait is the felicity with which so many dissimilar personalities, while playing the drama of divergent actuality to the full, yet realize and illustrate, without apparent manipulation by the author, the one abiding spiritual unity.
In execution, ‘Aylwin’ is far above the accomplished English novel-work of latter years; as a conception of life it surely transcends all. The ‘schools’ we have known: the realistic, the romantic, the quasi-historical, the local, seem but parts of the whole when their motives are measured with the idea that permeates this novel. They take drear or gallant roads through limited lands; it rises like a stately hill from which a world is clearer, above and beyond whose limits there are visions, Voices, and the verities.”
With equal eloquence M. Jacottet on the same day wrote about “Aylwin” in ‘La Semaine Littéraire’:—
“The central idea of this poetic book is that of love stronger than death, love elevating the soul to a mystical conception of the universe. It is a singular fact that at the moment when England, intoxicated with her successes, seems to have no room for thought except with regard to her fleet and her commerce, and allows herself to be dazzled by dreams of universal empire, the book in vogue should be Mr. Watts-Dunton’s romance—the most idealistic, the farthest removed from the modern Anglo-Saxon conception of life that he could possibly conceive. But this fact has often been observable in literary history. Is not the true charm of letters that of giving to the soul respite from the brutalities of contemporary events?”
Chapter XXIV
THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN HUMOUR
The character of Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin’ stands as entirely alone among humourous characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs. Partridge. In my own review of ‘Aylwin’ I thus noted the entirely new kind of humour which characterizes it:—“To one aspect of this book we have not yet alluded, namely, its humour. Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is inimitable, with her quaint saying: ‘I shall die a-larfin’, they say in Primrose Court, and so I shall—unless I die a-crying.’” Few critics have done justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the ‘Times’ said: ‘In Mrs. Gudgeon, one of his characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what seems to be a new comic figure,’ and the ‘Saturday Review’ singled her out as being the triumph of the book”. Could she really have been a real character? Could there ever have existed in the London of the mid-Victorian period a real flesh and blood costermonger so rich in humour that her very name sheds a glow of laughter over every page in which it appears? According to Mr. Hake, she was suggested by a real woman, and this makes me almost lament my arrival in London too late to make her acquaintance. “With regard to the most original character of the story,” says Mr. Hake, “those who knew Clement’s Inn, where I myself once resided, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify Mrs. Gudgeon, who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market. Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper. At one time, I believe—but I am not certain about this—she kept a stall on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge, and it might have been there that, as I have been told, her portrait was drawn for a specified number of early breakfasts by an unfortunate artist who sank very low, but had real ability. Her constant phrase was ‘I shall die o’-laughin’—I know I shall!’ On account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an Irishwoman. But she was not; she was cockney to the marrow. Recluse as Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different, and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her impudence, and I may say insolence, Mrs. Gudgeon was a great favourite with the police, who were the constant butts of her chaff.” [383] But, of course, this interesting costermonger could have only suggested our unique Mrs. Gudgeon.
She shows that it is possible to paint a low-class humourist as rich in the new cosmic humour as any one of Dickens’s is rich in the old terrene humour, and yet without one Dickensian touch. The difficulty of achieving this feat is manifested every day, both in novels and on the stage. Until Mrs. Gudgeon appeared I thought that Dickens had made it as impossible for another writer to paint humourous pictures of low-class London women as Swinburne has made it impossible for another poet to write in anapæsts. But there is in all that Mrs. Gudgeon says or does a profundity of humour so much deeper than the humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it wins her a separate niche in our gallery of humourous women. The chief cause of the delight which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she illustrates Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of absolute humour as distinguished from relative humour—a theory which delighted me in those boyish days in Ireland, to which I have already alluded. I have read his words on this theme so often that I think I could repeat them as fluently as a nursery rhyme. In their original form I remember that the word ‘caricature’ took the place of the phrase ‘relative humour.’ I do not think there is anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings so suggestive and so profound, and to find in reading ‘Aylwin’ that they were suggested to him by a real living character was exhilarating indeed.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of humour is one of his most original generalizations, and it is vitally related both to his theory of poetry and to his generalization of generalizations, ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ I think Mrs. Gudgeon is a cockney Anacharsis in petticoats. The Scythian philosopher, it will be remembered, when jesters were taken to him, could not be made to smile, but afterwards, when a monkey was brought to him, broke out into a fit of laughter and said, ‘Now this is laughable by nature, the other by art.’ I will now quote the essay on absolute and relative humour:—