Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James

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      A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’ – June 9, 1870.

      (The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called ‘The Rosy Scar,’ depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of Rosenkreutz, as a ‘rosy phantom.’ The Lover reads aloud the descriptive verses on the frame.)

      “Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon grew up an intimacy between us. It has been my experience to learn that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference of age between friends of either sex. At that time I do not think I had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men, each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father. Basevi was one of these: so was Lineham. I daresay it was owing to some idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young fellows with whom I was brought into contact was mainly confined to matters connected with field-sports. I found it far easier to be brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age than with men. But as Basevi told me that it was the same with himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all. When Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same with himself.

      One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common, evidently bound for the house.

      ‘Dereham!’ I said. ‘Is there a man in the world I should so like to see as Dereham?’

      And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.

      ‘Why do you want so much to see him?’ asked Gordon.

      ‘Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the Open Air.’

      Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant. But it is necessary here to explain what that meaning was.

      We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels, ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was – perhaps rarer. It was, we believed, quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it. In human souls – in one, perhaps, as much as in another – there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’ herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English СКАЧАТЬ