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Some time ago I was dipping into the ‘official pictorial guides’ of those three great trunk railways, the Midland, the Great Northern, and the Great Eastern, being curious to see what they had to say about St. Ives—not the famous town in Cornwall, but the little town in Huntingdonshire where, according to Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell spent those five years of meditation upon which his after life was nourished. In the Great Northern Guide I stumbled upon these words: ‘At Slepe Hall dwelt the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but by many this little Huntingdonshire town will be even better known as the birthplace of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose exquisite examples of the English sonnet and judicious criticisms in the kindred realms of poetry and art are familiar to lovers of our national literature.’ ‘Well,’ I thought, when I found similar remarks in the other two guides, ‘here at least is one case in which a prophet has honour in his own country.’ This set me musing over a subject which had often tantalized me during my early Irish days, the whimsical workings of the Spirit of Place. To a poet, what are the advantages and what are the disadvantages of being born in a microcosm like St. Ives? If the fame of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a poet were as great as that of his living friend, Mr. Swinburne, or as that of his dead friend, Rossetti, I should not have been surprised to find the place of his birth thus associated with his name. But whether or not Rossetti was right in saying that Mr. Watts-Dunton ‘had sought obscurity as other poets seek fame,’ it is certain that until quite lately he neglected to claim his proper place among his peers. Doubtless, as the ‘Journal des Débats’ has pointed out, the very originality of his work, both in subject and in style, has retarded the popular recognition of its unique quality; but although the names of Rossetti and Swinburne echo through the world, there is one respect in which they were less lucky than their friend. They were born in the macrocosm of London, where the Spirit of Place has so much to attend to that his memory can find but a small corner even for the author of ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ or for the author of ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’

Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country—Buttercup Land, as the Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good luck. Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with Rhona Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess of the D’Urbervilles. For the poet born in a microcosm becomes identified with it in the public eye, whereas the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom associated with his birthplace.

To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater advantage in being born in a microcosm. He sees the drama of life from a point of view entirely different from that of the novelist born in the macrocosm. The human microbe, or, as Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human cheese-mite in the macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other cheese-mite on the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe or every other cheese-mite in the round.

Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work is saturated with memories of the Ouse. Cowper had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who first flung the rainbow of romance over the river and over the sweet meadows of Cowslip Land, through which it flows. In these lines he has described a sunset on the Ouse:—

More mellow falls the light and still more mellow

Around the boat, as we two glide along

’Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong,

The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow.

She knows the nightingales of ‘Portobello’;

Love makes her know each bird! In all that throng

No voice seems like another: soul is song,

And never nightingale was like its fellow;

For, whether born in breast of Love’s own bird,

Singing its passion in those islet bowers

Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers

The rosy river’s glowing arms engird,

Or born in human souls—twin souls like ours—

Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.

Now, will it be believed that this lovely river—so famous too among English anglers for its roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, and gudgeon—has been libelled? Yes, it has been libelled, and libelled by no less a person than Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath the reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:—

“There is, as far as I know, nothing like the Ouse elsewhere in England. I do not mean that our river surpasses or even equals in picturesqueness such rivers as the Wye, the Severn, the Thames, but that its beauty is unique. There is not to be seen anywhere else so wide and stately a stream moving so slowly and yet so clearly. Consequently there is no other river which reflects with such beauty the scenery of the clouds floating overhead. This, I think, is owing to the stream moving over a bottom which is both flat and gravelly. When Carlyle spoke of the Ouse dragging in a half-stagnant way under a coating of floating oils, he showed ‘how vivid were his perceptive faculties and also how untrustworthy.’ I have made a good deal of enquiry into the matter of Carlyle’s visit to St. Ives, and have learnt that, having spent some time exploring Ely Cathedral in search of mementoes of Cromwell, he rode on to St. Ives, and spent about an hour there before proceeding on his journey. Among the objects at which he gave a hasty glance was the river, covered from the bridge to the Holmes by one of those enormous fleets of barges which were frequently to be seen at that time, and it was from the newly tarred keels of this fleet of barges that came the oily exudation which Carlyle, in his ignorance of the physical sciences and his contempt for them, believed to arise from a greasy river-bottom. And to this mistake the world is indebted for this description of the Ouse, which has been slavishly followed by all subsequent writers on Cromwell. This is what makes strangers, walking along the tow-path of Hemingford meadow, express so much surprise when, instead of seeing the oily scum they expected, they see a broad mirror as clear as glass, whose iridescence is caused by the reflection of the clouds overhead and by the gold and white water lilies on the surface of the stream.”

If the beauty of the Ouse inspired Mr. Norris to praise it so eloquently in prose, we need not wonder at the pictorial fascination of what Rossetti styled in a letter to a friend ‘Watts’s magnificent star sonnet’:—

The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears,

And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;

The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles, Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres. We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears An angel’s, yet with woman’s dearer wiles; But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.

What shaped those shadows like another boat

Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?

There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,

While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;

We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,

And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.

According to Mr. Sharp, Rossetti pronounced this sonnet to be the finest of all the versions of the Doppelganger idea, and for many years he seriously purposed to render it in art. It is easy to understand why Rossetti never carried out his intention, for the pictorial magic of the sonnet is so powerful that even the greatest of all romantic painters could hardly have rendered it on canvas. Poetry can suggest to the imagination deeper mysteries than the subtlest romantic painting.

No sonnet has been more frequently localized—erroneously localized than this. It is often supposed to depict the Thames above Kew, but Mr. Norris says that ‘every one familiar with Hemingford Meadow will see that it describes the Ouse backwater near Porto Bello, where the author as a young man was constantly seen on summer evenings listening from a canoe to the blackcaps and nightingales of the Thicket.’

That excellent critic, Mr. Earl Hodgson, the editor of Dr. Gordon Hake’s ‘New Day,’ seems to think that the ‘lily-isles’ are on the Thames at Kelmscott, while other writers have frequently localized these ‘lily-isles’ on the Avon at Stratford. But, no doubt, Mr. Norris is right in placing them on the Ouse.

This, however, gives me a good opportunity of saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s love of the Avon. The sacred old town of Stratford-on-Avon has always been a favourite haunt of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s. No poet of our time has shown a greater love of our English rivers, but he seems to love the Avon even more passionately than the Ouse. He cannot describe the soft sands of Petit Bot Bay in Guernsey without bringing in an allusion to ‘Avon’s sacred silt.’ It was at Stratford-on-Avon that he wrote several of his poems, notably the two sonnets which appeared first in the ‘Athenæum,’ and afterwards in the little volume, ‘Jubilee Greetings at Spithead to the Men of Greater Britain.’ They are entitled ‘The Breath of Avon: To English-speaking Pilgrims on Shakspeare’s Birthday’:—

Whate’er of woe the Dark may hide in womb

For England, mother of kings of battle and song—

Rapine, or racial hate’s mysterious wrong,

Blizzard of Chance, or fiery dart of Doom—

Let breath of Avon, rich of meadow-bloom,

Bind her to that great daughter sever’d long—

To near and far-off children young and strong—

With fetters woven of Avon’s flower perfume.

Welcome, ye English-speaking pilgrims, ye

Whose hands around the world are join’d by him,

Who make his speech the language of the sea,

Till winds of Ocean waft from rim to rim

The Breath of Avon: let this great day be

A Feast of Race no power shall ever dim.

From where the steeds of Earth’s twin oceans toss

Their manes along Columbia’s chariot-way;

From where Australia’s long blue billows play;

From where the morn, quenching the Southern Cross, Startling the frigate-bird and albatross Asleep in air, breaks over Table Bay— Come hither, pilgrims, where these rushes sway ’Tween grassy banks of Avon soft as moss! For, if ye found the breath of Ocean sweet, Sweeter is Avon’s earthy, flowery smell, Distill’d from roots that feel the coming spell Of May, who bids all flowers that lov’d him meet In meadows that, remembering Shakspeare’s feet, Hold still a dream of music where they fell.

It was during a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1880 that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote the cantata, ‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ a poem in which breathes the very atmosphere of Shakespeare’s town. There are no poetical descriptions of the Avon that can stand for a moment beside the descriptions in this poem, which I shall discuss later.

A typical meadow of Cowslip Country, or, as it is sometimes called, ‘The Green Country,’ is Hemingford Meadow, adjoining St. Ives. It is a level tract of land on the banks of the Ouse, consisting of deposits of alluvium from the overflowings of the river. In summer it is clothed with gay flowers, and in winter, during floods and frosts, it is used as a skating-ground, for St. Ives, being on the border of the Fens, is a famous skating centre. On the opposite side of the meadow is The Thicket, of which I am able to give a lovely picture. This, no doubt, is the scene described in one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s birthday addresses to Tennyson:—

Another birthday breaks: he is with us still.

There through the branches of the glittering trees

The birthday sun gilds grass and flower: the breeze

Sends forth methinks a thrill—a conscious thrill

That tells yon meadows by the steaming rill— Where, o’er the clover waiting for the bees, The mist shines round the cattle to their knees— ‘Another birthday breaks: he is with us still!’

The meadow leads to what the ‘oldest rustic inhabitant’ calls the ‘First Hemingford,’ or ‘Hemingford Grey.’ The imagination of this same ‘oldest inhabitant’ used to go even beyond the First Hemingford to the Second Hemingford, and then of course came Ultima Thule! The meadow has quite a wide fame among those students of nature who love English grasses in their endless varieties. Owing to the richness of the soil, the luxuriant growth of these beautiful grasses is said to be unparalleled in England. For years the two Hemingfords have been the favourite haunt of a group of landscape painters the chief of whom are the brothers Fraser, two of whose water-colours are reproduced in this book.

Nowhere can the bustling activity of haymaking be seen to more advantage than in Cowslip Country, which extends right through Huntingdonshire into East Anglia. It was not, however, near St. Ives, but in another somewhat distant part of Cowslip Country that the gypsies depicted in ‘The Coming of Love’ took an active part in haymaking. But alas! in these times of mechanical haymaking the lover of local customs can no longer hope to see such a picture as that painted in the now famous gypsy haymaking song which Mr. Watts-Dunton puts into the mouth of Rhona Boswell. Moreover, the prosperous gryengroes depicted by Borrow and by the author of ‘The Coming of Love’ have now entirely vanished from the scene. The present generation knows them not. But it is impossible for the student of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry to ramble along any part of Cowslip Country, with the fragrance of newly-made hay in his nostrils, without recalling this chant, which I have the kind permission of the editor of the ‘Saturday Review’ (April 19, 1902) to quote:—

Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’ [34] Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove, Sayin, ‘You Romany chies, you take it, Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it, Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it To lennor and love!’

Hark, the sharpenin’ scythes that tingle!

See they come, the farmin’ ryes!

‘Leave the dell,’ they say, ‘an’ pingle!

Never a gorgie, married or single,

Can toss the kas in dell or dingle

Like Romany chies.’

Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’

Bees are a-buzzin’ in chaw an’ clover

Stealin’ the honey from sperrits o’ morn,

Shoshus leap in puv an’ cover,

Doves are a-cooin’ like lover to lover,

Larks are awake an’ a-warblin’ over

Their kairs in the corn.

Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’

Smell the kas on the baval blowin’!

What is that the gorgies say?

Never a garden rose a-glowin’,

Never a meadow flower a-growin’,

Can match the smell from a Rington mowin’

Of new made hay.

All along the river reaches

‘Cheep, cheep, chee!’—from osier an’ sedge;

‘Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ rings from the beeches;

Every chirikel’s song beseeches

Ryes to larn what lennor teaches

From copse an’ hedge.

Make the kas while the kem says ‘Make it!’

Lennor sets ’em singin’ an’ pairin’, Chirikels all in tree an’ grass, Farmers say, ‘Them gals are darin’, Sometimes dukkerin’, sometimes snarin’; But see their forks at a quick kas-kairin’,’ Toss the kas!

Make the kas while the kem says, ‘Make it!’

Shinin’ there on meadow an’ grove,

Sayin’, ‘You Romany chies, you take it,

Toss it, tumble it, cock it, rake it,

Singin’ the ghyllie the while you shake it

To lennor and love!’

Mr. Norris tells us that the old Saxon name of St. Ives was Slepe, and that Oliver Cromwell is said to have resided as a farmer for five years in Slepe Hall, which was pulled down in the late forties. When Mr. Watts-Dunton’s friend, Madox Brown, went down to St. Ives to paint the scenery for his famous picture, ‘Oliver Cromwell at St. Ives,’ he could present only an imaginary farm.

Perhaps my theory about the advantage of a story-teller being born in a microcosm accounts for that faculty of improvizing stories full of local colour and character which, according to friends of D. G. Rossetti, would keep the poet-painter up half the night, and which was dwelt upon by Mr. Hake in his account of the origin of ‘Aylwin’ which I have already given. I may give here an anecdote connected with Slepe Hall which I have heard Mr. Watts-Dunton tell, and which would certainly make a good nucleus for a short story. It is connected with Slepe Hall, of which Mr. Clement Shorter, in some reminiscences of his published some time ago, writes: “My mother was born at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, and still owns by inheritance some freehold cottages built on land once occupied by Slepe Hall, where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have farmed. At Slepe Hall, a picturesque building, she went to school in girlhood. She remembers Mr. Watts-Dunton, the author of ‘Aylwin,’ who was also born at St. Ives, as a pretty little boy then unknown to fame.”

When the owners of Slepe Hall, the White family, pulled it down, they sold the materials of the building and also the site and grounds in building lots. It was then discovered that the house in which Cromwell was said to have lived was built upon the foundations of a much older house whose cellars remained intact. This was, of course, a tremendous event in the microcosm, and the place became a rendezvous of the schoolboys of the neighbourhood, whose delight from morning to eve was to watch the workmen in their task of demolition. In the early stages of this work, when the upper stories were being demolished, curiosity was centred on the great question as to what secret chamber would be found, whence Oliver Cromwell’s ghost, before he was driven into hiding by his terror of the school girls, used to issue, to take his moonlit walks about the grounds, and fish for roach in the old fish ponds. But no such secret chamber could be found. When at length the work had proceeded so far as the foundations, the centre of curiosity was shifted: a treasure was supposed to be hidden there; for, although, as a matter of fact, Cromwell was born at Huntingdon and lived at St. Ives only five years, it was not at Huntingdon, but at the little Nonconformist town of St. Ives, that he was the idol: it was indeed the old story of every hero of the world—

Imposteur à la Mecque et prophète à Mèdine.

Although in all probability Cromwell never lived at Slepe Hall, but at the Green End Farm at the other end of the town, there was a legend that, before the Ironsides started on a famous expedition, Noll went back to St. Ives and concealed his own plate, and the plate of all his rebel friends, in Slepe Hall cellars. No treasure turned up, but what was found was a collection of old bottles of wine which was at once christened ‘Cromwell’s wine’ by the local humourist of the town, who was also one of its most prosperous inhabitants, and who felt as much interest as the boys in the exploration. The workmen, of course, at once began knocking off the bottles’ necks and drinking the wine, and were soon in what may be called a mellow condition; the humourist, being a teetotaler, would not drink, but he insisted on the boys being allowed to take away their share of it in order that they might say in after days that they had drunk Oliver Cromwell’s wine and perhaps imbibed some of the Cromwellian spirit and pluck. Consequently the young urchins carried off a few bottles and sat down in a ring under a tree called ‘Oliver’s Tree,’ and knocked off the tops of the bottles and began to drink. The wine turned out to be extremely sweet, thick and sticky, and appears to have been a wine for which Cowslip Land has always been famous—elder wine. Abstemious by temperament and by rearing as Mr. Watts-Dunton was, he could not resist the temptation to drink freely of Cromwell’s elder-wine; so freely, in fact, that he has said, ‘I was never even excited by drink except once, and that was when I came near to being drunk on Oliver Cromwell’s elder-wine.’ The wine was probably about a century old.

I should have stated that Mr. Watts-Dunton at the age of eleven or twelve was sent to a school at Cambridge, where he remained for a longer time than is usual. He received there and afterwards at home a somewhat elaborate education, comprising the physical sciences, particularly biology, and also art and music. As has been said in the notice of him in ‘Poets and Poetry of the Century,’ he is one of the few contemporary poets with a scientific knowledge of music. Owing to his father’s passion for science, he was specially educated as a naturalist, and this accounts for the innumerable allusions to natural science in his writings, and for his many expressions of a passionate interest in the lower animals.

Upon the subject of “the great human fallacy expressed in the phrase, ‘the dumb animals,’” Mr. Watts-Dunton has written much, and he has often been eloquent about ‘those who have seen through the fallacy, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, and Bisset, the wonderful animal-trainer of Perth of the last century, who, if we are to believe the accounts of him, taught a turtle in six months to fetch and carry like a dog; and having chalked the floor and blackened its claws, could direct it to trace out any given name in the company.’

“Of course,” he says, “the ‘lower animals’ are no more dumb than we are. With them, as with us, there is the same yearning to escape from isolation—to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing—which is a great factor of progress. With them, as with us, each individual tries to warm itself by communication with the others around it by arbitrary signs; with them, as with us, countless accidents through countless years have contributed to determine what these signs and sounds shall be. Those among us who have gone at all underneath conventional thought and conventional expression—those who have penetrated underneath conventional feeling—know that neither thought nor emotion can really be expressed at all. The voice cannot do it, as we see by comparing one language with another. Wordsworth calls language the incarnation of thought. But the mere fact of there being such a Babel of different tongues disproves this. If there were but one universal language, such as speculators dream of, the idea might, at least, be not superficially absurd. Soul cannot communicate with soul save by signs made by the body; and when you can once establish a Lingua Franca between yourself and a ‘lower animal,’ interchange of feeling and even of thought is as easy with them as it is with men. Nay, with some temperaments and in some moods, the communication is far, far closer. ‘When I am assailed with heavy tribulation,’ said Luther, ‘I rush out among my pigs rather than remain alone by myself.’ And there is no creature that does not at some points sympathize with man. People have laughed at Erskine because every evening after dinner he used to have placed upon the table a vessel full of his pet leeches, upon which he used to lavish his endearments. Neither I nor my companion had a pet passion for leeches. Erskine probably knew leeches better than we, for, as the Arabian proverb says, mankind hate only the thing of which they know nothing. Like most dog lovers, we had no special love for cats, but that was clearly from lack of knowledge. ‘I wish women would purr when they are pleased,’ said Horne Tooke to Rogers once.”