Theodore Watts-Dunton Part 30

The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey; By glacier-brink she stood-by cataract-spray- When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.

At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold, And if a footprint shone at break of day, My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say: "Tis hers whose hand G.o.d's mightier hand doth hold.'

I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright, Her icicle-arch across the sheer creva.s.se, When lo, she stood! ... G.o.d made her let me pa.s.s, Then felled the bridge! ... Oh, there in sallow light, There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white, And all my wondrous days as in a gla.s.s.

This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry.

Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the 'Athenaeum' of February 5, 1881: "Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali ('the malignant') or Parvati ('the mountaineer'). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek to G.o.d in the delirium of their fear."

Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while New Year's morning is breaking:-

Through Fate's mysterious warp another weft Of days is cast; and see! Time's star-built throne, From which he greets a new-born year, is shown Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!

Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft Of all that was its music-stand alone, Remembering happy hours for ever flown, Impatient of the leaden minutes left-

The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure, The chidings of mankind that once gave pain, Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure Barren and foolish, and I cry, 'No grain, No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!'

And yet I cannot join the dead-and live.

Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New In England, heedless of the knells they ring To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling Each to the other ere you say adieu!- I seem to hear their chimes-the chimes we knew In those dear days when Rhona used to sing, Greeting a New Year's Day as bright of wing As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.

If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears Could bring the past and make it live again, Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain, And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears- And with the past bring her I weep in vain- Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.

[The clouds move away and show the stars in dazzling brightness.

Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove- They bring the mighty Mother's new-year greeting: 'All save great Nature is a vision fleeting'- So says the scripture of those orbs above.

'All, all,' I cry, 'except man's dower of love!- Love is no child of Nature's mystic cheating!'

And yet it comes again, the old desire To read what yonder constellations write On river and ocean-secrets of the night- To feel again the spirit's wondering fire Which, ere this pa.s.sion came, absorbed me quite, To catch the master-note of Nature's lyre.

New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!

And yet they say to me, most sorely stung By Fate and Death, 'Nature is ever young, Clad in new riches, as each morning's gold Blooms o'er a blasted land: be thou consoled: The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung; The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung; The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;

The Past has given to man a wondrous world, But curtains of old Night were being upcurled Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight Of Youth's fresh runners in the lists of Time.

Arise, and drink the wine of Nature's light!'

Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of 'The Promise of the Sunrise' and the revelation of 'Natura Benigna':-

Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear: Last night came she whose eyes are memories now; Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.

'Sorrow,' I said, 'has made me old, my dear; 'Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow: Beneath my load a seraph's neck might bow, Vigils like mine would blanch an angel's hair.'

Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!

I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes- I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise; But when upon my neck she fell, my love, Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.

And now 'Natura Benigna' reveals to him her mystic consolation:-

What power is this? What witchery wins my feet To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow, All silent as the emerald gulfs below, Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?

What thrill of earth and heaven-most wild, most sweet- What answering pulse that all the senses know, Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?

Mother, 'tis I, reborn: I know thee well: That throb I know and all it prophesies, O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!

Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.

This is not the pathetic fallacy. It is the poetic interpretation of the latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard only by the poet's finer ear.

The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr.

Watts-Dunton's poetry, both in subject and in form. The originality of any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the language. In 'The Coming of Love' the poet has invented a new poetic form. Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel, and of the prose play. In Tennyson's 'Maud' and in Mr. Watts-Dunton's other lyrical drama, "Christmas at the 'Mermaid,'" the special functions of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form. The story is told by brief pictures. In 'The Coming of Love' this method reaches its perfection. Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets, are used according to an inner law of the poet's mind. The exaltation of these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being summarized in bare prose. The interplay of thought, mood, and pa.s.sion is revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions. In Dante's 'Vita Nuova' a method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante's poems are all sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in 'The Coming of Love.' Here the very 'rhyme-colour' and the subtle variety of vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical composition. Wagner's music is the only modern art-form which is comparable with the metrical architecture of 'The Coming of Love,' and "Christmas at the 'Mermaid.'" No one can fully understand the rhythmic triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr.

Watts-Dunton's theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated in his treatise on Poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica'-a theory which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of music, is still developing. Both these lyrical dramas ought to be carefully studied by all students of English metres.

The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry. It is remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under such conditions. Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry.

But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson's Maud, the difference is startling. Maud does not tingle with personality. She is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of 'creamy English girls.' Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality.

One makes pictures of her in one's brain-pictures that never become blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic heroines. How much of this is due to the poetic form? Could Rhona have lived so intensely in a novel or a play? I do not think so. At any rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel, and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is well worth the study of critics and craftsmen. Mr. Kernahan has called attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative. Perhaps this defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose like that of the opening of 'Aylwin,' which would lead the imagination insensibly from one situation or mood to another.

In connection with the opening sonnets of 'The Coming of Love,' a very interesting point of criticism presents itself. These sonnets, in which Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket lighthouse, appeared in the 'Athenaeum' a week after Mr. Swinburne and he returned from a visit to the Channel Islands. They record a real incident. Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the 'English Ill.u.s.trated Magazine' his version of the story, a splendid specimen of his sonorous rhythms.

Mr. Watts-Dunton's version of the story may interest the reader:-

LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA (THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)

Amid the Channel's wiles and deep decoys, Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea, A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree Nor breath of gra.s.s at dawn, yet had high joys: The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney, But there she pined. 'The bustling world,' said she, 'Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.'

The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm, Had winds for sponsor-one proud rock for nurse, Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form: The cold bright sea was hers for universe Till o'er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.

But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:- Her lover's boat was out; her ears were dinned With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind That shook the troubled sun's red canopy.

Even while she prayed the storm's high revelry Woke petrel, gull-all revellers winged and finned- And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned, And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.

'My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,'

The Mother sang. 'Thy sea-boy waged no strife With Hatred's poison, gangrened Envy's knife- With me he strove, in deadly sport divine, Who lend to men, to G.o.ds, an hour of life, Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!'

Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends. It seems impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other's work or ever have known each other well. The point which I wish to emphasize is that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers, they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the evening in each other's society; and yet when they sit down at their desks they may be as far asunder as the poles. From this we may perhaps infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.

Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem. I may mention that the other day I came across a little book called 'Authors that have Influenced me,' and found that Mr. Rider Haggard instanced the opening section of 'The Coming of Love,' 'Mother Carey's Chicken,' as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than all others. I think this is a compliment, for the originality of invention displayed in 'King Solomon's Mines' and 'She' sets Rider Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr.

Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and also good is a rare achievement.

I can find no s.p.a.ce to give as much attention as I should like to give to Mr. Watts-Dunton's miscellaneous sonnets. Some of them have had a great vogue: for instance, 'John the Pilgrim.' Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton's sonnets, it lends itself to ill.u.s.tration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A., as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the subject. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature's mockery by the mirage:-

Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays; But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles, Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles, Claspt in a silvery river's winding maze: 'Water, water! Blessed be G.o.d!' he says, And totters gasping toward those happy isles.

Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.

'G.o.d heard me not,' says he, 'blessed be G.o.d!'

And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand, Heav'n's outer coast where waiting angels stand, He looks below: 'Farewell, thou hooded clod, Brown corpse the vultures tear on b.l.o.o.d.y sand: G.o.d heard my prayer for life-blessed be G.o.d!'

[Picture: 'John the Pilgrim.' (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)]

This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled, or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet. The rhymes in this sonnet ill.u.s.trate my own theory as to the rhymer's luck, good and ill. To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of 'chamomiles' and 'isles,' 'chamomiles' giving the picture of the flowers, and 'isles' giving the false vision of the mirage. The same thing is notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, 'The Bedouin Child'

(see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified. Without the fortunate rhyme-words 'pashas,' 'camel-maws,' and 'claws' in the octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.

The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton's poetry and that of Coleridge has been frequently discussed. It has the same romantic glamour and often the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the music of the ravishing octosyllabics of 'Christabel.' This at least I know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,-he owns the true wizard of romance as master. I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the author as follows: 'The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive a.n.a.logy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through volumes of essays and not so paint him. There is Coleridge! But whence the source of your story-if anything of such aptness could have been other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu-I cannot tell. It is new to me.'

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 h.o.a.ry.

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.