Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, CriticDouglas, James
General
Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic
Douglas, James
Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 1832-1914
When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare,
and ‘the night-birds’ are jubilant anew. This is the very highest
reach of poetic wonder—finer, if that be possible, than the
night-storm during the murder of Duncan.”
And now let us turn again to the essay upon Rossetti from which I have
already quoted:—
“Although the idea at the heart of the highest romantic poetry
(allied perhaps to that apprehension of the warring of man’s soul
with the appetites of the flesh which is the basis of the Christian
idea), may not belong exclusively to what we call the romantic temper
(the Greeks, and also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less
familiar with it, as we see in the ‘Salámán’ and ‘Absál’ of Jámí),
yet it became a peculiarly romantic note, as is seen from the fact
that in the old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its
logical expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all
romantic art. But, in order to express this stupendous idea as fully
as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to adopt the
asceticism of the old masters? This is the question that Rossetti
asked himself, and answered by his own progress in art.”
In the same article, Mr. Watts-Dunton discusses the crowning specimen of
Rossetti’s romanticism before it had, as it were, gone to seed and passed
into pure mysticism, the grand design, ‘Pandora,’ of which he possesses
by far the noblest version:—
“In it is seen at its highest Rossetti’s unique faculty of treating
classical legend in the true romantic spirit. The grand and sombre
beauty of Pandora’s face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep
blue-grey eyes as she tries in vain to re-close the fatal box from
which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves
as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with
agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest
romantic mood.”
It is my privilege to be allowed to give here a reproduction of this
masterpiece, for which I and my publishers cannot be too grateful. The
influence of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s teachings is seen in the fact that the
idea of the Renascence of Wonder has become expanded by theological
writers and divines in order to include within its scope subjects
connected with religion. Among others Dr. Robertson Nicoll has widened
its ambit in a remarkable way in an essay upon Dr. Alexander White’s
‘Appreciation’ of Bishop Butler. He quotes one of the Logia discovered
by the explorers of the Egypt Fund:—‘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.’ He then points out that Bishop Butler was ‘one of the first to
share in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the Renascence of religion.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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