James Douglas

“ Rome was too sensual and gross. It had to wait for the steady Teutonic mind—the plodding brains of modern England and modern Germany. That Homer is the father of poetry—that Æschylus is a wonder of sublimity—that Sophocles and Euripides are profound masters of human passion and human pathos—that Aristophanes is an exhaustless fountain of sparkling wit and richest humour—no one in this room, or out of it, is more willing to admit than I am. But is that to blind us to the fact, gentlemen, that Humboldt and Murchison and Lyell are greater natural philosophers than Lucretius or Aristotle? ”

“ The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of ‘contentment with things as they be,’ who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his ‘thick rotundity of belly,’ good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature’s largess, the exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet rains and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side. ”

“ Hate, though voluble perhaps as Clytæmnestra’s when hate is at that red-heat glow which the poet can render, changes in a moment whenever that redness has been fanned into hatred’s own last complexion—whiteness as of iron at the melting-point—when the heart has grown far too big to be ‘unpacked’ at all, and even the bitter epigrams of hate’s own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier’s snap before he fleshes his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as she springs before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish for a soul to which language at its tensest has become idle play. ”

“ And here again the views of the ‘Athenæum’ have remained unchanged. The critic who works ‘without a conscience or an aim’ knows only too well that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses of human nature—the love that people have of seeing each other attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself. For although man has a strong instinct for admiration—else had he never reached his present position in the conscious world—he has, running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct—the instinct for contempt. ”

“ Criticism will have to recognize, and at once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of the ‘literature of power,’ and if criticism does not so recognize it, so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I have said in print) , poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing boy—it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be stretched to fit the muscles as they swell. ”

“ Among the English poets who preceded the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed there is no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he can only be slightly touched upon. He stands at the head of those who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the wonder of the ‘world at hand.’ Of the poets whose wonder is of the simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king. ”

“ In this regard, in its freedom from littleness, its breadth of life, its exaltation of mood, its sense of serene issues that do not pass with the changing fashions of a generation, the book is almost epic.
But ‘Aylwin’ has yet other sides. It is a vital and seizing story. The girl-heroine is a beautiful presentment, and the struggle with destiny, when, believing in the efficacy of a mystic’s curse she loses her reason, and flies from poignantly idyllic life to harrowing life, her stricken lover in her wake, is nearly Greek in its intensity and pathos. ”

“ Watts-Dunton, I cannot accept it as a right and fair definition. It is a fact no doubt that the struggle in the world of art—whether poetry, music, painting, sculpture, or the drama—is unlike that of the mere strivers after wealth and position, inasmuch as to praise one man’s artistic work is in a certain way to set it up against the work of another. Still, one can realize, without referring to Disraeli’s ‘Curiosities of Literature,’ that envy is much too vigorous in the artistic life. ”

“ Watts-Dunton, both creative and critical, has been acutely discussed, not only in England but also in France and in Italy.
The creative originality of his criticism is as absolute as that of his poetry and fiction. He poured into his criticism the intellectual and imaginative force which other men pour into purely artistic channels, for he made criticism a vehicle for his humour, his philosophy, and his irony. His criticisms are the reflections of a lifetime. Their vitality is not impaired by the impermanence of their texts. No critic has surpassed his universality of range. ”

“ In reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains. We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!’
Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. ”

“ But, at last, God has permitted man’s long, long experience to be followed by wisdom; and we have thrown off the yoke of this ancient enemy, and clasped the hands of Science—Science, that good genius who makes matter the obedient slave of mind; who imprisons the ethereal lightning and makes it the messenger of commerce; who reigns king of the raging sea and winds; who compresses the life of Methusaleh into seventy years; who unlocks the casket of the human frame, and ranges through its most secret chambers, until at last nothing, save the mysterious germ of life itself, shall be hidden ”

“ But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life. ”

“ To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.’
‘Ambition and the green gamp,’ said Gordon. ‘But look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries; and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light.’
But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind which the ‘Child of the Open Air’ must needs lack. ”

“ This is why the true child of the open-air—never mind how much he may suffer from the wind—loves it, loves it as much when it comes and ‘takes the ruffian billows by the top’ to the peril of his life, as when it comes from the sweet South. In the wind’s most boisterous moods, such as those so splendidly depicted by Dana in the doubling of Cape Horn, there is an exhilaration, a fierce delight, in struggling with it. It is delightful to read Thoreau when he writes about the wind, and that which the wind so loves—the snow. ”

“ Just as science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his wit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Having read your treatise on poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ which, it is said, has been an influence in every European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand. ”

“ Between relative and absolute vision the difference is this, that the former only enables the imaginative writer even in its very highest exercise, to make his own individuality, or else humanity as represented by his own individuality, live in the imagined situation; the latter enables him in its highest exercise to make special individual characters other than the poet’s own live in the imagined situation. In the very highest reaches of imaginative writing art seems to become art no longer—it seems to become the very voice of Nature herself. ”

“ As Job’s faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been tried by the power which you call ‘circumstance’ and which Wilderspin calls ‘the spiritual world.’ All that death has to teach the mind and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms. I, alas! have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a beloved mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows what the word ‘love’ really means. ”

“ Watts-Dunton has built up a new optimistic philosophy of life which, I think, is sure to arrest the devastating march of the pessimists across the history of the soul of man. That is the aspect of his work which calls for the comprehension of the new generation. The old cosmogonies are dead; here is the new cosmogony, the cosmogony in which the impulse of wonder reasserts its sovereignty, proclaiming anew the nobler religion of the spiritual imagination, with a faith in Natura Benigna which no assaults of science can shake. ”

“ There is a fatality of detraction about his name which in its unreasonableness would be grotesque were it not heartrending. It would turn my natural optimism about mankind into pessimism were it not that another dear friend of mine—a man of equal nobility of character, and almost of equal genius, has escaped calumny altogether—William Morris. This matter is a painful puzzle to me. The only great man of my time who seems to have shared something of Rossetti’s fate, is Lord Tennyson. ”

“ The river crossed, we walk ’neath glowing skies
Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air—
Fading as colour after colour dies:
We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise—
Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
We win the scholar’s nest—his simple fare
Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.
Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.
Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew
The poet’s heart of gold that gives the spell!
Can he be dead? ”

“ It is true, no doubt, that there was a kind of kinship between the temperament of Dickens and the temperament of Bret Harte. They both held the same principles of imaginative art, they both felt that the function of the artist is to aid in the emancipation of man by holding before him beautiful ideals; both felt that to give him any kind of so-called realism which lowers man in his aspirations—which calls before man’s imagination degrading pictures of his ‘animal origin’—is to do him a disservice. For man has still a long journey before he reaches the goal. ”

“ The public, as I say, knows that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a review. ”

“ Anybody can love sunshine. No people had less of the nature instinct than the Romans, but they could enjoy the sun; they even took their solaria or sun-baths, and gave them to their children. And, if it may be said that no Roman loved the wind, how much more may this be said of the French! None but a born child of the tent could ever have written about the winds of heaven as Victor Hugo has written in ‘Les Travailleurs de la Mer,’ as though they were the ministers of Ahriman. ”

“ Man, the ‘fool of nature,’ prouder than Lucifer himself, yet ‘bounded in a nutshell,’ brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little ‘beastie’ whose house is ruined by the ploughshare—here is, indeed, a creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter! ”

“ On the appearance of ‘Aylwin’ it was amusing to see how puzzled many of the critics were when they came to talk about the various classes in which the various figures moved. How could a man give pictures of gypsies in their tents, East Enders in their slums, Bohemian painters in their studios, aristocrats in their country houses, and all of them with equal vividness? But vividness is not always truth. Some wondered whether the gypsies were true, when ‘up and spake’ the famous Tarno Rye himself, Groome, the greatest authority on gypsies in the world, and said they were true to the life. ”

“ Yet we must not suppose that in the eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations, without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty of gazing honestly in her face. She does not work in that way. In the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. In the period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen. ”

“ If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, his type is not Dickens or Cruikshank, but Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial source of amusement to the absolute humourist he gets to love. ”

“ But there was the cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist’s proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional literature very hard. ”

“ In Sterne’s writings every kind of humour is to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as Addison’s, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare’s. In loving sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by Sterne in his ‘fat, foolish scullion.’ Lower than the Dogberry type there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph. ”