The following sonnet on ‘Friendship’ expresses a very rare mood and a very high ideal:—
Friendship is love’s full beauty unalloyed
With passion that may waste in selfishness,
Fed only at the heart and never cloyed:
Such is our friendship ripened but to bless.
It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound
With cheery look that makes a winter bright;
It saves the hope from falling to the ground,
And turns the restless pillow towards the light.
To be another’s in his dearest want,
At struggle with a thousand racking throes,
When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant
Is that which friendship’s soothing hand bestows:
How joyful to be joined in such a love,—
We two,—may it portend the days above!
The volume consists of ninety-three sonnets of the same fine order. Many English and American critics have highly praised them, but not too highly. This venerable ‘parable poet’ did not belong to my generation. Nor did he belong to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s generation. His day was the day before yesterday, and yet he wrote these sonnets when he was past seventy, not to glorify himself, but to glorify his friend. They are one long impassioned appeal to that friend to come forward and take his place among his peers. The indifference to fame of Theodore Watts is one of the most bewildering enigmas of literature. I have already quoted what Gordon Hake says about the man who when the ‘New Day’ was written had not published a single book.
With regard to the unity binding together all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings, I can, at least, as I have shown in the Introduction, speak with the authority of a careful student of them. With the exception of the late Professor Strong, who when ‘The Coming of Love’ appeared, spoke out so boldly upon this subject in ‘Literature,’ I doubt if anyone has studied those writings more carefully than I have; and yet the difficulty of discovering the one or two quotable essays which more than the others expound and amplify their central doctrine has been so great that I am dubious as to whether, in the press of my other work, I have achieved my aim as satisfactorily as it would have been achieved by another—especially by Professor Strong, had he not died before he could write his promised essay upon the inner thought of ‘Aylwinism’ in the ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ But, even if I have failed adequately to expound the gospel of ‘Aylwinism,’ it is undeniable that, since the publication of ‘Aylwin’ (whether as a result of that publication or not), there has been an amazing growth of what may be called the transcendental cosmogony of ‘Aylwinism.’
Dr. Robertson Nicoll, discussing the latest edition of ‘Aylwin’—the ‘Arvon’ illustrated edition—says:—
“When ‘Aylwin’ was in type, the author, getting alarmed at its great length, somewhat mercilessly slashed into it to shorten it, and the more didactic parts of the book went first. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has restored one or two of these excised passages, notably one in which he summarizes his well-known views of the ‘great Renascence of Wonder, which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.’ In one of these passages he has anticipated and bettered Mr. Balfour’s speculations at the recent meeting of the British Association.”
Something like the same remark was made in the ‘Athenæum’ of September 3, 1904:—
“The writer has restored certain didactic passages of the story which were eliminated before the publication of the book, owing to its great length. Though the teaching of the book is complete without the restorations, it seems a pity that they were ever struck out, because they appear to have anticipated the striking remarks of Mr. Balfour at the British Association the other day, to say nothing of the utterances of certain scientific writers who have been discussing the transcendental side of Nature.”
The restorations to which Dr. Nicoll and ‘The Athenæum’ refer are excerpts from ‘The Veiled Queen,’ by Aylwin’s father. The first of these comes in at the conclusion of the chapter called ‘The Revolving Cage of Circumstance’ and runs thus:—
“‘The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
The warring of the two impulses governing man—the impulse of wonder and the impulse of acceptance—will occupy all the energies of the next century.
The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy has to come back—has to triumph—before the morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn.
But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism, which at this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution, will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the creature of organism—is a something outside the material world, a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal expression.
The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Groves turn round on him and tell him that “the principle of all certitude” is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the organism upon which they fall.’
These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about ‘the Omnipotence of Love,’ which showed, beyond doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very original poet.”