After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the reader with the ‘pure amber’ itself:—
I see thee pine like her in golden story
Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
The gates thrown open—saw the sunbeams play,
With only a web ’tween her and summer’s glory;
Who, when that web—so frail, so transitory,
It broke before her breath—had fallen away,
Saw other webs and others rise for aye
Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine—
That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh—
Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
Could thy rare spirit’s wings have pierced the mesh
Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
But lets the poet see how heav’n can shine.
Here again the verbal parsimony is notable. I defy any one to find anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony. There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet. Every word is cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning. The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall. Metrical students will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a part in the suspensive music.
I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as one of the wisest, done by the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ was that of printing Rhona’s letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona. It certainly showed immense confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great success. The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George Meredith: “I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that. When I read her love-letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ I had the regret that the dialect might cause its banishment from literature. Reading the whole poem through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate. We are the richer for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed.” And, discussing ‘The Coming of Love,’ Meredith wrote: ‘I will not speak of the tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the dexterity which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of the work.’ Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry is so consummate that it is concealed from the reader. There is no sense of difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice. Yet the metrical structure of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest. ‘Rhona’s Love Letter’ is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern, each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of a sonnet. But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naïve, unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether, and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour are produced by the most elaborate art.
I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry. There can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the deeper quality of imaginative energy. By ‘the most original poet’ I do not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what I mean. Poe’s ‘Raven’ is more ‘original’ than Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion,’ but it is not so great. In my article on Blake in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ I pointed out that there are greater poets than Blake (or Donne) but none more original. There are many poets who possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual matching of common ideas with common metaphors. But few poets have the rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift. He uses the symbol to suggest ideas which cannot be suggested otherwise. His theory of the universe is optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads. He sees the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as benignant. Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the two great sonnets, ‘Natura Maligna’ and ‘Natura Benigna,’ which I have already quoted.
All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell. Upon this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the introduction to the later editions of the poem:—
“But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio readers seem to be most sceptical. The humourous endowment of most races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the men than among the women. But among the Romanies the women seem to have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.
A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit and the humourous charm that you attribute to them? My answer to this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome’s delightful book, ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales.’ Speaking of the Romany chi’s incomparable piquancy, he says:—
‘I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with “a lot o’ real tip-top gentry”; and “Reia,” she said to me afterwards, “I’ll tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We’d pulled up to put the brake on, and there was a púro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye upon me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and ‘Missus,’ he’d say, ‘what d’ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal just now in a coach and four horses’; and ‘Dabla,’ she’d say, ‘sawkumni ’as varde kenaw’” [‘Bless us! every one now keeps a carriage’].’
Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell, I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome, that it might well have been she. Although there is as great a difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between the humour of all gypsy girls. No three girls could possibly be more unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr. Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the fanciful humour of them all. The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak for itself in these pages—where, however, the passionate and tragic side of her character and her story dominates everything.”
Chapter XXVII
“CHRISTMAS AT THE ‘MERMAID’”
Second in importance to ‘The Coming of Love’ among Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poems is the poem I have already mentioned—the poem which Mr. Swinburne has described as ‘a great lyrical epic’—“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’” The originality of this wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of ‘The Coming of Love.’ No other writer would have dreamed of depicting the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a golden skeleton in the form of one of the burnt Incas, called up by ‘the righteous sea,’ and squatting grimly at the prow of Medina’s flag-ship. Here we get ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ indeed. Some Aylwinians put it at the head of all his writings. The exploit of David Gwynn is accepted by Motley and others as historic, but it needed the co-operation of the Golden Skeleton to lift his narrative into the highest heaven of poetry. Extremely unlike ‘The Coming of Love’ as it is in construction, it is built on the same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with ‘The Coming of Love’ the remarks I have made upon a desideratum in poetic art—that is to say, it is cast in a form which gives as much scope to the dramatic instinct at work as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from the restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped. The poem was written, or mainly written, during one of those visits which, as I have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to pay to Stratford-on-Avon. The scene is laid, however, in London, at that famous ‘Mermaid’ tavern which haunts the dreams of all English poets:—
“With the exception of Shakespeare, who has quitted London for good, in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has lately rebuilt, all the members of the ‘Mermaid’ Club are assembled at the ‘Mermaid’ Tavern. At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson dealing out wassail from a large bowl. At the other end sits Raleigh, and at Raleigh’s right hand, the guest he had brought with him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man, whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or false, given him in the low countries a great reputation, the echo of which had reached England. Raleigh’s desire was to excite the public enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice spirits as those associated with the ‘Mermaid’ club.”