The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake’s strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?
Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven out to the open sea. He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but in quite a different spirit. In Gwynn’s fevered imagination the skeleton which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to its destruction:—
Gwynn
With towering sterns, with golden stems
That totter in the smoke before their foe,
I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
With death above the billows, death below!
Who leads them down the tempest’s path,
From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
All helpless in the wild wind’s wrath,
Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
The Skeleton!At length with toil the cape is passed,
And faster and faster still the billows come
To coil and boil till every mast
Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
That Inca’s bony shape burn on the waves,
Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
While Mother Carey, Orkney’s witch,
Waves to the Spectre’s song her lantern-switch
O’er ocean-graves.The glimmering crown of Scotland’s head
They pass. No foe dares follow but the storm.
The Spectre, like a sunset red,
Illumines mighty Wrath’s defiant form,
And makes the dreadful granite peak
Burn o’er the ships with brows of prophecy;
Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
Above the tempest’s foam and reek,
More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
‘Tyrants, ye die!’The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
Writes ‘God’s Revenge’ on waves that climb and dash,
Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
Where ships are hurled. It sings amid the crash;
Yea, sings amid the tempest’s roar,
Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
And yells of captives chained to oar,
And cries of those who strike for shore,
‘Spain’s murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
The righteous sea!’
The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted in anthologies:—
Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?Raleigh
’Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright with golden roofs and walls—
El Dorado’s rare domain—
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?Drayton
’Tis where Avon’s wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O’er the river-flags embossed
Rich with flowery runes of frost—
O’er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed—
Strains of olden time.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?’Tis, methinks, on any ground
Where our Shakspeare’s feet are set.
There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
With his blithest coronet:
Friendship’s face he loveth well:
’Tis a countenance whose spell
Sheds a balm o’er every mead and dell
Where we used to fret.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?Heywood
More than all the pictures, Ben,
Winter weaves by wood or stream,
Christmas loves our London, when
Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam—
Clouds like these, that, curling, take
Forms of faces gone, and wake
Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
London like a dream.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?Ben Jonson
Love’s old songs shall never die,
Yet the new shall suffer proof;
Love’s old drink of Yule brew I,
Wassail for new love’s behoof:
Drink the drink I brew, and sing
Till the berried branches swing,
Till our song make all the Mermaid ring—
Yea, from rush to roof.Finale
Christmas loves this merry, merry place:—
Christmas saith with fondest face
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
Rare!’
This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of ‘The Coming of Love,’ fine as it is, was overshadowed by the wild and romantic poem which lends its name to the volume. But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his beautiful series, ‘Flowers of Parnassus,’ where it was charmingly illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue considerably. There is no doubt that for originality, for power, and for music, “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid’” is enough to form the base of any poet’s reputation. It has been enthusiastically praised by some of the foremost writers of our time. I have permission to print only one of the letters in its praise which the author received, but that is an important one, as it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:—
“I have been beginning Christmas, in a way, by reading over the fire your delightful little ‘Christmas at the “Mermaid”’ which it was most kind of you to send. I was carried back right into Armada times by David Gwynn’s vivid story: it seems remarkable that you should have had the conjuring power to raise up those old years so brightly in your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers in such high relief of three dimensions, as one may say.
The absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest touches of the poem: it throws one into a ‘humourous melancholy’—and we feel him, in some curious way, more than if he had been there.”
Chapter XXVIII
CONCLUSION
‘Assuredly,’ says Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on Thoreau, ‘there is no profession so courageous as that of the pen.’ Well, in coming to the end of my task—a task which has been a labour of love—I wish I could feel confident that I have not been too courageous—that I have satisfactorily done what I set out to do. But I have passed my four-hundred and fortieth page, and yet I seem to have let down only a child’s bucket into a sea of ideas that has no limit. Out of scores upon scores of articles buried in many periodicals I have been able to give three or four from the ‘Athenæum,’ none from the ‘Examiner,’ and none out of the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ ‘The Fortnightly Review,’ ‘Harper’s Magazine,’ etc. Still, I have been able to show that a large proportion of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s scattered writings preaches the same peculiar doctrine in a ratiocinative form which in ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love’ is artistically enunciated; that this doctrine is of the greatest importance at the present time, when science seems to be revealing a system of the universe so deeply opposed to the system which in the middle of the last century seemed to be revealed; and that this doctrine of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s is making a very deep impression upon the generation to which I belong. If it should be said that in speaking for the younger generation I am speaking for a pigmy race (and I sometimes fear that we are pigmies when I remember the stature of our fathers), I am content to appeal to one of the older generation, who has spoken words in praise of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet, which would demand even my courage to echo. I mean Dr. Gordon Hake, whose volume of sonnets, entitled, ‘The New Day,’ was published in 1890. It was these remarkable sonnets which moved Frank Groome to dub Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘homo ne quidem unius libri,’ a literary celebrity who had not published a single book. I have already referred to ‘The New Day,’ but I have not given an adequate account of this sonnet-sequence. In their nobility of spirit, their exalted passion of friendship, their single-souled purity of loyal-hearted love, I do not think they have ever been surpassed. It is a fine proof of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s genius for friendship that he should be able unconsciously to enlink himself to the souls of his seniors, his coevals and his juniors, and that there should be between him and the men of three generations, equal links of equal affection. But I must not lay stress on the whimsies of chronology and the humours of the calendar, for all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friends are young, and the youngest of them, Mr. George Meredith, is the oldest. The youthfulness of ‘The New Day’ makes it hard to believe that it was written by a septuagenarian. The dedication is full of the fine candour of a romantic boy:—
“To ‘W. T. W.,’ the friend who has gone with me through the study of Nature, accompanied me to her loveliest places at home and in other lands, and shared with me the reward she reserves for her ministers and interpreters, I dedicate this book.”