Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

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?

Shakspeare’s Friend

’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.”

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.’