In connection with the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love,’ a very interesting point of criticism presents itself. These sonnets, in which Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket lighthouse, appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ a week after Mr. Swinburne and he returned from a visit to the Channel Islands. They record a real incident. Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ his version of the story, a splendid specimen of his sonorous rhythms.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s version of the story may interest the reader:—
LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
(THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)Amid the Channel’s wiles and deep decoys,
Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney,
But there she pined. ‘The bustling world,’ said she,
‘Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.’
The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
Had winds for sponsor—one proud rock for nurse,
Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
The cold bright sea was hers for universe
Till o’er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:—
Her lover’s boat was out; her ears were dinned
With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
That shook the troubled sun’s red canopy.
Even while she prayed the storm’s high revelry
Woke petrel, gull—all revellers winged and finned—
And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
‘My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,’
The Mother sang. ‘Thy sea-boy waged no strife
With Hatred’s poison, gangrened Envy’s knife—
With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!’
Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends. It seems impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other’s work or ever have known each other well. The point which I wish to emphasize is that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers, they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the evening in each other’s society; and yet when they sit down at their desks they may be as far asunder as the poles. From this we may perhaps infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.
Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem. I may mention that the other day I came across a little book called ‘Authors that have Influenced me,’ and found that Mr. Rider Haggard instanced the opening section of ‘The Coming of Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than all others. I think this is a compliment, for the originality of invention displayed in ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and ‘She’ sets Rider Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and also good is a rare achievement.
I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s miscellaneous sonnets. Some of them have had a great vogue: for instance, ‘John the Pilgrim.’ Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A., as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the subject. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature’s mockery by the mirage:—
Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
Claspt in a silvery river’s winding maze:
‘Water, water! Blessed be God!’ he says,
And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles
The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.‘God heard me not,’ says he, ‘blessed be God!’
And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand,
Heav’n’s outer coast where waiting angels stand,
He looks below: ‘Farewell, thou hooded clod,
Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
God heard my prayer for life—blessed be God!’
This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled, or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet. The rhymes in this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer’s luck, good and ill. To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of ‘chamomiles’ and ‘isles,’ ‘chamomiles’ giving the picture of the flowers, and ‘isles’ giving the false vision of the mirage. The same thing is notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, ‘The Bedouin Child’ (see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified. Without the fortunate rhyme-words ‘pashas,’ ‘camel-maws,’ and ‘claws’ in the octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.
The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry and that of Coleridge has been frequently discussed. It has the same romantic glamour and often the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the music of the ravishing octosyllabics of ‘Christabel.’ This at least I know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,—he owns the true wizard of romance as master. I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the author as follows: ‘The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through volumes of essays and not so paint him. There is Coleridge! But whence the source of your story—if anything of such aptness could have been other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu—I cannot tell. It is new to me.’