“Anarcharsis, who found the humour of Nature alone laughable, was the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, who only finds food for laughter in the distortions of so-called humourous art. The quality which I have called absolute humour is popularly supposed to be the characteristic and special temper of the English. The bustling, money grubbing, rank-worshipping British slave of convention claims to be the absolute humourist! It is very amusing. The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of ‘contentment with things as they be,’ who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his ‘thick rotundity of belly,’ good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature’s largess, the exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet rains and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side. Between this and relative humour how wide is the gulf!
That an apprehension of incongruity is the basis of both relative and absolute humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of relative humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal, in the case of absolute humour it is the sweet incongruity of the normal itself. Relative humour laughs at the breach of the accustomed laws of nature and the conventional laws of man, which laws it accepts as final. Absolute humour (comparing them unconsciously with some ideal standard of its own, or with that ideal or noumenal or spiritual world behind the cosmic show) sees the incongruity of those very laws themselves—laws which are the relative humourist’s standard. Absolute humour, in a word, is based on metaphysics—relative humour on experience. A child can become a relative humourist by adding a line or two to the nose of Wellington, or by reversing the nose of the Venus de Medici. The absolute humourist has so long been saying to himself, ‘What a whimsical idea is the human nose!’ that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the child’s laughter on seeing it turned upside down. So with convention and its codes of etiquette—from the pompous harlequinade of royalty—the ineffable gingerbread of an aristocracy of names without office or culture, down to the Draconian laws of Philistia and bourgeois respectability; whatever is a breach of the local laws of the game of social life, whether the laws be those of a village pothouse or of Mayfair; whether it displays an ignorance of matters of familiar knowledge, these are the quarry of the relative humourist. The absolute humourist, on the other hand, as we see in the greatest masters of absolute humour, is so perpetually overwhelmed with the irony of the entire game, cosmic and human, from the droll little conventions of the village pothouse to those of London, of Paris, of New York, of Pekin—up to the apparently meaningless dance of the planets round the sun—up again to that greater and more meaningless waltz of suns round the centre—he is so delighted with the delicious foolishness of wisdom, the conceited ignorance of knowledge, the grotesqueness even of the standard of beauty itself; above all, with the whim of the absolute humourist Nature, amusing herself, not merely with her monkeys, her flamingoes, her penguins, her dromedaries, but with these more whimsical creatures still—these ‘bipeds’ which, though ‘featherless’ are proved to be not ‘plucked fowls’; these proud, high-thinking organisms—stomachs with heads, arms, and legs as useful appendages—these countless little ‘me’s,’ so all alike and yet so unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be the me, the only true original me, round whom all other me’s revolve—so overwhelmed is the absolute humourist with the whim of all this—with the incongruity, that is, of the normal itself—with the ‘almighty joke’ of the Cosmos as it is—that he sees nothing ‘funny’ in departures from laws which to him are in themselves the very quintessence of fun. And he laughs the laugh of Rabelais and of Sterne; for he feels that behind this rich incongruous show there must be a beneficent Showman. He knows that although at the top of the constellation sits Circumstance, Harlequin and King, bowelless and blind, shaking his starry cap and bells, there sits far above even Harlequin himself another Being greater than he—a Being who because he has given us the delight of laughter must be good, and who in the end will somewhere set all these incongruities right—who will, some day, show us the meaning of that which now seems so meaningless. With Charles Lamb he feels, in short, that humour ‘does not go out with life’; and in answer to Elia’s question, ‘Can a ghost laugh?’ he says, ‘Assuredly, if there be ghosts at all,’ for he is as unable as Soame Jenyns himself to imagine that even the seraphim can be perfectly happy without a perception of the ludicrous.
If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, his type is not Dickens or Cruikshank, but Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial source of amusement to the absolute humourist he gets to love. Mere representation, therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of art. Exaggeration offends him. Nothing to him is so rich as the real. He pronounces Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’ or the public-house scene in ‘Silas Marner’ to be more humourous than the trial scene in ‘Pickwick.’ Wilkie’s realism he finds more humourous than the funniest cartoon in the funniest comic journal. And this mood is as much opposed to satire as to relative humour. Of all moods the rarest and the finest—requiring, indeed, such a ‘blessed mixing of the juices’ as nature cannot every day achieve—it is the mood of each one of those fatal ‘Paradis Artificiels,’ the seeking of which has devastated the human race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of Villon; of Walter Mapes in the following verse:—
Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”Now it is because Mrs. Gudgeon is the very type of the absolute humourist as defined in this magnificent fugue of prose, and the only example of absolute humour which has appeared in prose fiction, that she is to me a fount of esoteric and fastidious joy. If I were asked what character in ‘Aylwin’ shows the most unmistakable genius, I should reply, ‘Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs. Gudgeon!’”
Chapter XXV
GORGIOS AND ROMANIES
The publication of ‘The Coming of Love’ in book form preceded that of ‘Aylwin’ by about a year, but it had been appearing piecemeal in the ‘Athenæum’ since 1882.
“So far as regards Rhona Boswell’s story,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “‘The Coming of Love’ is a sequel to ‘Aylwin.’ If the allusions to Rhona’s lover, Percy Aylwin, in the prose story have been, in some degree, misunderstood by some readers—if there is any danger of Henry Aylwin, the hero of the novel, being confounded with Percy Aylwin, the hero of this poem—it only shows how difficult it is for the poet or the novelist (who must needs see his characters from the concave side only) to realize that it is the convex side only which he can present to his reader.
The fact is that the motive of ‘Aylwin’—dealing only as it does with that which is elemental and unchangeable in man—is of so entirely poetic a nature that I began to write it in verse. After a while, however, I found that a story of so many incidents and complications as the one that was growing under my hand could only be told in prose. This was before I had written any prose at all—yes, it is so long ago as that. And when, afterwards, I began to write criticism, I had (for certain reasons—important then, but of no importance now) abandoned the idea of offering the novel to the outside public at all. Among my friends it had been widely read, both in manuscript and in type.
But with regard to Romany women, Henry Aylwin’s feeling towards them was the very opposite of Percy’s. When, in speaking of George Borrow some years ago, I made the remark that between Englishmen of a certain type and gypsy women there is an extraordinary physical attraction—an attraction which did not exist between Borrow and the gypsy women with whom he was brought into contact—I was thinking specially of the character depicted here under the name of Percy Aylwin. And I asked then the question—Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn with much power towards any woman, could she possibly have been Romany? Would she not rather have been of the Scandinavian type?—would she not have been what he used to call a ‘Brynhild’? From many conversations with him on this subject, I think she must necessarily have been a tall blonde of the type of Isopel Berners—who, by-the-by, was much more a portrait of a splendid East-Anglian road-girl than is generally imagined. And I think, besides, that Borrow’s sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon type may account for the fact that, notwithstanding his love of the free and easy economies of life among the better class of Gryengroes, his gypsy women are all what have been called ‘scenic characters.’
When he comes to delineate a heroine, she is the superb Isopel Berners—that is to say, she is physically (and indeed mentally, too), the very opposite of the Romany chi. It was here, as I happen to know, that Borrow’s sympathies were with Henry Aylwin far more than with Percy Aylwin.
The type of the Romany chi, though very delightful to Henry Aylwin as regards companionship, had no physical attractions for him, otherwise the witchery of the girl here called Rhona Boswell, whom he knew as a child long before Percy Aylwin knew her, must surely have eclipsed such charms as Winifred Wynne or any other winsome ‘Gorgie’ could possess. On the other hand, it would, I believe, have been impossible for Percy Aylwin to be brought closely and long in contact with a Romany girl like Sinfi Lovell and remain untouched by those unique physical attractions of hers—attractions that made her universally admired by the best judges of female beauty as being the most splendid ‘face-model’ of her time, and as being in form the grandest woman ever seen in the studios—attractions that upon Henry Aylwin seem to have made almost no impression.
There is no accounting for this, as there is no accounting for anything connected with the mysterious witchery of sex. And again, the strong inscrutable way in which some gypsy girls are drawn towards a ‘Tarno Rye’ (as a young English gentleman is called), is quite inexplicable. Some have thought—and Borrow was one of them—that it may arise from that infirmity of the Romany Chal which causes the girls to ‘take their own part’ without appealing to their men-companions for aid—that lack of masculine chivalry among the men of their own race.
And now for a word or two upon a matter in connection with ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ which interests me more deeply. Some of those who have been specially attracted towards Sinfi Lovell have had misgivings, I find, as to whether she is not an idealization, an impossible Romany chi, and some of those who have been specially attracted towards Rhona Boswell have had the same misgivings as to her.
One of the great racial specialities of the Romany is the superiority of the women to the men. For it is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over language, in comparative breadth of view regarding the Gorgio world that the Romany women (in Great Britain, at least) leave the men far behind. In everything that goes to make nobility of character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imagine a gypsy hero is, I will confess, rather difficult. Not that the average male gypsy is without a certain amount of courage, but it soon gives way, and, in a conflict between a gypsy and an Englishman, it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped the virility of Romany stamina.
Although some of our most notable prize-fighters have been gypsies, it used to be well known, in times when the ring was fashionable, that a gypsy could not always be relied upon to ‘take punishment’ with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly-strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain.
The courage of a gypsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt it. This superiority of the women to the men extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift of music for which the gypsies as a race are noticeable. With regard to music, however, even in Eastern Europe (Russia alone excepted), where gypsy music is so universal that, according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men, and not, in general, the women, who excel. Those, however, who knew Sinfi Lovell may think with me that this state of things may simply be the result of opportunity and training.”
Chapter XXVI
‘THE COMING OF LOVE’
In my article on Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’ I devoted most of my space to ‘The Coming of Love.’ I put the two great romantic poems ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Christmas at the “Mermaid”’ far above everything he has done. I think I see both in the conception and in the execution of these poems the promise of immortality—if immortality can be predicted of any poems of our time. In reading them one remembers in a flash Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own noble words about the poetic impulse:—
“In order to produce poetry the soul must for the time being have reached that state of exaltation, that state of freedom from self-consciousness, depicted in the lines—
I started once, or seemed to start, in pain
Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,
As when a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek.Whatsoever may be the poet’s ‘knowledge of his art,’ into this mood he must always pass before he can write a truly poetic line. For, notwithstanding all that we have said and are going to say upon poetry as a fine art, it is in the deepest sense of the word an ‘inspiration’ indeed. No man can write a line of genuine poetry without having been ‘born again’ (or, as the true rendering of the text says, ‘born from above’); and then the mastery over those highest reaches of form which are beyond the ken of the mere versifier comes to him as a result of the change. Hence, with all Mrs. Browning’s metrical blemishes, the splendour of her metrical triumphs at her best.
For what is the deep distinction between poet and proseman? A writer may be many things besides a poet; he may be a warrior like Æschylus, a man of business like Shakespeare, a courtier like Chaucer, or a cosmopolitan philosopher like Goethe; but the moment the poetic mood is upon him all the trappings of the world with which for years he may perhaps have been clothing his soul—the world’s knowingness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition—fall away, and the man becomes an inspired child again, with ears attuned to nothing but the whispers of those spirits from the Golden Age, who, according to Hesiod, haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such a man produces may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not so greatly as it delights and astonishes himself. His passages of pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his own eyes while he writes; his sublime passages overawe no soul so imperiously as his own; his humour draws no laughter so rich or so deep as that stirred within his own breast.
It might almost be said, indeed, that Sincerity and Conscience, the two angels that bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic dream, bring him also the deepest, truest delight of form. It might almost be said that by aid of sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled to see more clearly than other men the eternal limits of his own art—to see with Sophocles that nothing, not even poetry itself, is of any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil, unless it is in the deepest and highest sense good, unless it comes linking us all together by closer bonds of sympathy and pity, strengthening us to fight the foes with whom fate and even nature, the mother who bore us, sometimes seem in league—to see with Milton that the high quality of man’s soul which in English is expressed by the word virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized, greater than all the rhythms of all the tongues that have been spoken since Babel—and to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the high passion which in England is called love is lovelier than all art, lovelier than all the marble Mercuries that ‘await the chisel of the sculptor’ in all the marble hills.”
The reason why the criticism of the hour does not always give Mr. Watts-Dunton the place accorded to him by his great contemporaries is not any lack of generosity: it arises from the unprecedented, not to say eccentric, way in which his poetry has reached the public. In this respect alone, apart from its great originality, ‘The Coming of Love’ is a curiosity of literature. I know nothing in the least like the history of this poem. It was written, circulated in manuscript among the very elite of English letters, and indeed partly published in the ‘Athenæum,’ very nearly a quarter of a century ago. I have before alluded to Mrs. Chandler Moulton’s introduction to Philip Bourke Marston’s poems, where she says that it was Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry which won for him the friendship of Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Yet for lustre after lustre it was persistently withheld from the public; cenacle after poetic cenacle rose, prospered and faded away, and still this poet, who was talked of by all the poets and called ‘the friend of all the poets,’ kept his work back until he had passed middle age. Then, at last, owing I believe to the energetic efforts of Mr. John Lane, who had been urging the matter for something like five years, he launched a volume which seized upon the public taste and won a very great success so far as sales go. It is now in its sixth edition. There can be no doubt whatever that if the book had appeared, as it ought to have appeared, at the time it was written, critics would have classed the poet among his compeers and he would have come down to the present generation, as Swinburne has come down, as a classic. But, as I have said, it is not in the least surprising that, notwithstanding Rossetti’s intense admiration of the poem, notwithstanding the fact that Morris intended to print it at the Kelmscott Press, and notwithstanding the fact that Swinburne, in dedicating the collected edition of his works to Mr. Watts-Dunton, addresses him as a poet of the greatest authority—it is only the true critics who see in the right perspective a poet who has so perversely neglected his chances. If his time of recognition has not yet fully come, this generation is not to blame. The poet can blame only himself, although to judge by Rossetti’s words, and by the following lines from Dr. Hake’s ‘New Day,’ he is indifferent to that:—
You tell me life is all too rich and brief,
Too various, too delectable a game,
To give to art, entirely or in chief;
And love of Nature quells the thirst for fame.
The ‘parable poet’ then goes on to give voice to the opinion, not only of himself, but of most of the great poets of the mid-Victorian epoch:—