Aylwin | Page 2

gave you--then a Titan whelp!-- I think you
know my danger and would help!-- See how I point to yonder smack
that lies At anchor--Go! His countenance replies. Hope's music rings in
Gelert's eager yelp! [_The dog swims swiftly away down the tide._]
Now, life and love and death swim out with him! If he should reach the
smack, the men will guess The dog has left his master in distress. She
taught him in these very waves to swim-- 'The prince of pups,' she said,
'for wind and limb'-- And now those lessons come to save--to bless.
ENVOY
(_The day after the rescue: Gelert and his master walking along the
sand._)
'Twas in no glittering tourney's mimic strife,-- 'Twas in that bloody
fight in Raxton Grove, While hungry ravens croaked from boughs
above, And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife-- 'Twas there,
in days when Friendship still was rife. Mine ancestor who threw the
challenge-glove Conquered and found his foe a soul to love, Found
friendship--Life's great second crown of life.
So I this morning love our North Sea more Because he fought me well,
because these waves Now weaving sunbows for us by the shore Strove

with me, tossed me in those emerald caves That yawned above my head
like conscious graves-- I love him as I never loved before.

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION
The heart-thought of this hook being the peculiar doctrine in Philip
Aylwin's _Veiled Queen_, and the effect of it upon the fortunes of the
hero and the other characters, the name 'The Renascence of Wonder'
was the first that came to my mind when confronting the difficult
question of finding a name for a book that is at once a love-story and an
expression of a creed. But eventually I decided, and I think from the
worldly point of view wisely, to give it simply the name of the hero.
The important place in the story, however, taken by this creed did not
escape the most acute and painstaking of the critics. Madame
Galimberti, for instance, in the elaborate study of the book which she
made in the Rivista d' Italia, gave great attention to its central idea: so
did M. Maurice Muret, in the _Journal des Débats_; so did M. Henri
Jacottet in _La Semaine Littéraire_. Mr. Baker, again, in his recently
published work on fiction, described Aylwin as 'an imaginative romance
of modern days, the moral idea of which is man's attitude in face of the
unknown,' or, as the writer puts it, 'the renascence of wonder.' With
regard to the phrase itself, in the introduction to the latest edition of
Aylwin--the twenty-second edition--I made the following brief reply to
certain questions that have been raised by critics both in England and
on the Continent concerning it. The phrase, I said, 'The Renascence of
Wonder,'
Is used to express that great revived movement of the soul of man
which is generally said to have begun with the poetry of Wordsworth,
Scott, Coleridge, and others, and after many varieties of expression
reached its culmination in the poems and pictures of Rossetti. The
phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder' merely indicates that there are two
great impulses governing man, and probably not man only but the
entire world of conscious life--the impulse of acceptance--the impulse
to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer
world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with
eyes of inquiry and wonder.
The painter Wilderspin says to Henry Aylwin, 'The one great event of
my life has been the reading of _The Veiled Queen_, your father's hook

of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the
mind of man.' And further on he says that his own great picture
symbolical of this renascence was suggested by Philip Aylwin's
vignette. Since the original writing of Aylwin, many years ago, I have
enlarged upon its central idea in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in
the introductory essay to the third volume of Chambers's _Cyclopædia
of English Literature_, and in other places. Naturally, therefore, the
phrase has been a good deal discussed. Quite lately Dr. Robertson
Nicoll has directed attention to the phrase, and he has taken it as a text
of a remarkable discourse upon the 'Renascence of Wonder in
Religion.' I am tempted to quote some of his words:--
Amongst the Logia recently discovered by the explorers of the Egypt
Fund, there is one of which part was already known to have occurred in
the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It runs as follows:--'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.'...We believe that Butler was
one of