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

Автор: Douglas James

Издательство: Public Domain

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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СКАЧАТЬ St. Ives was the very place where the Cambridge revolutionists had their books printed. The house whence issued these fulminations was the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street, now pulled down, which for a time belonged to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father, having remained during all this time a printing office. Mr. Norris gives a very picturesque description of this old printing office at the top of the house, with its pointed roof, ‘king posts’ and panelling, reminding one of the pictures of the ancient German printing offices. Mr. Norris also tells us that it was at the house adjoining this, the ‘Crown Inn,’ that William Penn died in 1718, having ridden thither from Huntingdon to hear the lawsuit between himself and the St. Ives churchwardens. According to Mr. Norris, the fountain-head of the Cambridge revolt was the John Hammond above alluded to, who was a friend of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s father when the latter was quite a young man under articles for a solicitor. A curious character must have been this long-forgotten rebel, to whom Dyer addressed an ode, with an enormous tail of learned notes showing the eccentric pedantry which was such an infinite source of amusement to Lamb, and inspired some of Elia’s most delightful touches of humour. This poem of Dyer’s opens thus: —

      Though much I love th’ Æolian lyre,

      Whose varying sounds beguil’d my youthful day,

      And still, as fancy guides, I love to stray

      In fabled groves, among th’ Aonian choir:

      Yet more on native fields, thro’ milder skies,

      Nature’s mysterious harmonies delight:

      There rests my heart; for let the sun but rise,

      What is the moon’s pale orb that cheer’d the lonesome night?

      I cannot leave thee, classic ground,

      Nor bid your labyrinths of song adieu;

      Yet scenes to me more dear arise to view:

      And my ear drinks in notes of clearer sound.

      No purple Venus round my Hammond’s bow’r,

      No blue-ey’d graces, wanton mirth diffuse,

      The king of gods here rains no golden show’r,

      Nor have these lips e’er sipt Castilian dews.

      At the ‘Old House’ in Crown Street there used to be held in Dyer’s time, if not earlier, the meetings of the St. Ives old Union Book Club, and at this very Book Club, Walter Theodore Watts first delivered himself of his boyish ideas about science, literature, and things in general. Filled with juvenile emphasis as it is, I mean to give here nearly in full that boyish utterance. It interests me much, because I seem to see in it adumbrations of many interesting extracts from his works with which I hope to enrich these pages. I cannot let slip the opportunity of taking advantage of a lucky accident – the accident that a member of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s family was able to furnish me with an old yellow-brown newspaper cutting in which the speech is reported. In 1854, ‘W. Theodore Watts,’ as he is described in the cutting, although too young to be himself a member – if he was not still at school at Cambridge, he had just left it – on account of his father’s great local reputation as a man of learning, was invited to the dinner, and called upon to respond to the toast, ‘Science.’ In the ‘Cambridge Chronicle’ of that date the proceedings of the dinner were reported, and great prominence was given to the speech of the precocious boy, a speech delivered, as is evident by the allusions to persons present, without a single note, and largely improvized. The subject which he discussed was ‘The Influence of Science upon Modern Civilization’: —

      “It is one of the many beautiful remarks of the great philosophical lawyer, Lord Bacon, that knowledge resembles a tree, which runs straight for some time, and then parts itself into branches. Now, of all the branches of the tree of knowledge, in my opinion, the most hopeful one for humanity is physical science – that branch of the tree which, before the time of the great lawyer, had scarcely begun to bud, and which he, above all men, helped to bring to its present wondrous state of development. I am aware that the assertion that Lord Bacon is the Father of Physical Science will be considered by many of you as rather heterodox, and fitting to come from a person young and inexperienced as myself. It is heterodox; it clashes, for instance, with the venerable superstition of ‘the wisdom of the ancients’ – a superstition, by the bye, as old in our literature as my friend Mr. Wright’s old friend Chaucer, whom we have this moment been talking about, and who, I remember, has this sarcastic verse to the point: —

      For out of the olde fieldes, as men saith,

      Cometh all this new corn from yeare to yeare,

      And out of olde bookes; in good faith,

      Cometh all this new science that men lere.

      But, gentlemen, if by the wisdom of the ancients we mean their wisdom in matters of Physical Science (as some do), I contend that we simply abuse terms; and that the phrase, whether applied to the ancients more properly, or to our own English ancestors, is a fallacy. It is the error of applying qualities to communities of men which belong only to individuals. There can be no doubt that, of contemporary individuals, the oldest of them has had the greatest experience, and is therefore, or ought therefore, to be the wisest; but with generations of men, surely the reverse of this must be the fact. As Sydney Smith says in his own inimitably droll way, ‘Those who came first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least experience. Our ancestors up to the Conquest were children in arms – chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can supply.

      And, gentlemen, I think the wit was right, both as regards our own English ancestors, and the nations of antiquity. What, for instance, was the much-vaunted Astronomy of the ancient Chaldeans – what but the wildest Astrology? What schoolboy has not chuckled over the ingenious old Herodotus’s description of the sun being blown out of the heavens? Or again, at old Plutarch’s veracious story of the hedgehogs and the grapes? Nay, there are absurdities enough in such great philosophers as Pliny, Plato, and Aristotle, to convince us that the ancients were profoundly ignorant in most matters appertaining to the Physical Sciences.

      Gentlemen, I would be the last one in the room to disparage the ancients: my admiration of them amounts simply to reverence. But theirs was essentially the day of poetry and imagination; our day – though there are still poets among us, as Alexander Smith has been proving to us lately – is, as essentially, the day of Science. I might, if I had time, dwell upon another point here – the constitution of the Greek mind (for it is upon Greece I am now especially looking as the soul of antiquity). Was that scientific? Surely not.

      The predominant intuition of the Greek mind, as you well know, was beauty, sensuous beauty. This prevailing passion for the beautiful exhibits itself in everything they did, and in everything they said: it breathes in their poetry, in their oratory, in their drama, in their architecture, and above all in their marvellous sculpture. The productions of the Greek intellect are pure temples of the beautiful, and, as such, will never fade and decay, for

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

      Nevertheless, I may as well confess at once that I believe that Science could never have found a home in the Europe of antiquity. Athens was too imaginative and poetical. Sparta was too warlike and barbarous. 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 Athenian philosopher, Socrates, believed that he was accompanied through life by a spiritual good genius and evil СКАЧАТЬ