Part 1 (1/2)

Aylwin.

by Theodore Watts-Dunton.

ENVOY

(_The day after the rescue: Gelert and his master walking along the sand._)

'Twas in no glittering tourney's mimic strife,-- 'Twas in that b.l.o.o.d.y fight in Raxton Grove, While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above, And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife-- 'Twas there, in days when Friends.h.i.+p still was rife.

Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-glove Conquered and found his foe a soul to love, Found friends.h.i.+p--Life's great second crown of life.

So I this morning love our North Sea more Because he fought me well, because these waves Now weaving sunbows for us by the sh.o.r.e Strove with me, tossed me in those emerald caves That yawned above my head like conscious graves-- I love him as I never loved before.

PREFACE

The heart-thought of this hook being the peculiar doctrine in Philip Aylwin's _Veiled Queen_, and the effect of it upon the fortunes of the hero and the other characters, the name 'The Renascence of Wonder' was the first that came to my mind when confronting the difficult question of finding a name for a book that is at once a love-story and an expression of a creed. But eventually I decided, and I think from the worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply the name of the hero.

The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed did not escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which she made in the Rivista d' Italia, gave great attention to its central idea: so did M. Maurice Muret, in the _Journal des Debats_; so did M. Henri Jacottet in _La Semaine Litteraire_.

Mr. Baker, again, in his recently published work on fiction, described _Aylwin_ as 'an imaginative romance of modern days, the moral idea of which is man's att.i.tude in face of the unknown,'

or, as the writer puts it, 'the renascence of wonder.' With regard to the phrase itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of Aylwin--the twenty-second edition--I made the following brief reply to certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England and on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The Renascence of Wonder,'

Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of expression reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of Rossetti. The phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only but the entire world of conscious life--the impulse of acceptance--the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.

The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of my life has been the reading of _The Veiled Queen_, your father's hook of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great picture symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin's vignette. Since the original writing of Aylwin, many years ago, I have enlarged upon its central idea in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and in the introductory essay to the third volume of Chambers's _Cyclopaedia of English Literature_, and in other places. Naturally, therefore, the phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text of a remarkable discourse upon the 'Renascence of Wonder in Religion.' I am tempted to quote some of his words:--

Amongst the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt Fund, there is one of which part was already known to have occurred in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It runs as follows:--'Let not him that seeketh cease from his search until he find, and when he finds he shall wonder: wondering he shall reach the kingdom, and when he reaches the kingdom he shall have rest.'...We believe that Butler was one of the first to share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the renascence of religion....Men saw once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man's destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the lifelong struggle of the soul, of the power of the unseen.

The words quoted by Dr. Nicoll might very appropriately be used as a motto for _Aylwin_ and also for its sequel _The Coming of Love: Rhona Boswells Story_.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SNOWDON EDITION OF 1901

Though written many years ago this story was, for certain personal reasons easy to guess, withheld from publication--withheld, as _The Times_ pointed out, because 'with the _Dichtung_ was mingled a good deal of _Wahrheit_,' But why did I still delay in publis.h.i.+ng it after these reasons for withholding it had pa.s.sed away?

This is a question that has often been put to me both in print and in conversation. And yet I should have imagined that the explanation was not far to seek. It was simply diffidence; in other words it was that infirmity which, though generally supposed to belong to youth, comes to a writer, if it comes at all, with years. Undoubtedly there was a time in my life when I should have leapt with considerable rashness into the brilliant ranks of our contemporary novelists. But this was before I had reached what I will call the diffident period in the life of a writer. And then, again, I had often been told by George Borrow, and also by my friend Francis Groome, the great living authority on Romany matters, that there was in England no interest in Gypsies. Altogether then, had it not been for the unexpected success of _The Coming of Love_, a story of Gypsy life, it is doubtful whether I should not have delayed the publication of _Aylwin_ until the great warder of the gates of day we call Death should close his portal behind me and shut me off from these dreams. However, I am very glad now that I did publish it; for it has brought around me a number of new friends--brought them at a time when new friends were what I yearned for--a time when, looking back through this vision of my life, I seem to be looking down an Appian way--a street of tombs--the tombs of those I loved. No wonder, then, that I was deeply touched by the kindness with which the Public and the Press received the story.

One critic did me the honour of remarking upon what he called the 'absolute newness of the plot and incidents of _Aylwin_.' He seems to have forgotten, however, that one incident--the most daring incident in the book--that of the rifling of a grave for treasure --is not new: it will at once remind folk-lorists of certain practices charged against our old Norse invaders. And students of Celtic and Gaelic literature are familiar with the same idea. Quite, lately, indeed, Mr. Alfred Nutt, in his a.n.a.lysis of the Gaelic _Agallamh na Senorach_, or 'Colloquy of the Elders,' has made some interesting remarks upon the subject.

As far as I remember, the only objection made by the critics to _Aylwin_ was that I had imported into a story written for popular acceptance too many speculations and breedings upon the gravest of all subjects--the subject of love at struggle with death.

My answer to this is that although it did win a great popular acceptance I never expected it to do so. I knew the book to be an expression of idiosyncrasy, and no man knows how much or how little his idiosyncrasy is in harmony with the temper of his time, until his book has been given to the world. It was the story of _Aylwin_ that was born of the speculations upon Love and Death; it was not the speculations that were pressed into the story; without these speculations there could have been no story to tell. Indeed the chief fault which myself should find with _Aylwin_, if my business were to criticise it, would be that it gives not too little but too much prominence to the strong incidents of the story--a story written as a comment on love's warfare with death--written to show that confronted as a man is every moment by signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the unknown country beyond Orion where the beloved dead are loving us still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything else--a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes intensified when a man has lost--or thinks he has lost--a woman whose love was the only light of his world--when his soul is torn from his body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the 'viewless winds' right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter darkness and loneliness.

It was to depict this phase of human emotion that both _Aylwin_ and its sequel, _The Coming of Love_, were written. They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer's soul, sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world--sent out to find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was, without knowing it, akin.

And now as to my two Gypsy heroines, the Sinfi Lovell of _Aylwin_ and the Rhona Boswell of _The Coming of Love_.

Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friends.h.i.+p in his later years--during the time when he lived in Hereford Square; and since his death I have written a good deal about him--both in prose and in verse--in the Athenaeum, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in other places. When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out an edition of _Lavengro_ (in Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co.'s Minerva Library), I prefaced that delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Sorrow's Gypsy characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most remarkable 'Romany Chi' that had ever been met with in the part of East Anglia known to Borrow and myself--Sinfi Lovell. I described her playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl Isopel Berners. Since the publication of _Aylwin_ and _The Coming of Love_ I have received very many letters from English and American readers inquiring whether 'the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to _Lavenyro_ is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of _Aylwin_,' and also whether 'the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the same as the Rhona of _The Coming of Love_?' The evidence of the reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the appearance of Rhona's first letter in the _Athenaeum_, where the poem was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very ill,--near her death indeed,--urging me to tell her whether Rhona's love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real Gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the Sinfi of _Aylwin_ and the Sinfi described in my introduction to _Lavengro_ are one and the same character--except that the story of the child Sinfi's weeping for the 'poor dead Gorgios' in the churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the Gypsies, not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded to in the now famous sonnet describing 'the walking lord of Gypsy lore,' Borrow, by his most intimate friend Dr.

Gordon Hake.

'And he, the walking lord of Gypsy lore!