Aylwin | Page 4

different kind--raised by
several correspondents of _Notes and Queries_, upon which I should
like to say a word--a question as to The Veiled Queen and the use
therein of the phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder'--a phrase which has
been said to 'express the artistic motif of the book.' The motif of the
book, however, is one of emotion primarily, or it would not have been
written.
There is yet another subject upon which I feel tempted to say a few
words. D'Arcy in referring to Aylwin's conduct in regard to the cross
says:--
You were simply doing what Hamlet would have done in such
circumstances--what Macbeth would have done, and what he would
have done who spoke to the human heart through their voices. All men,
I believe, have Macbeth's instinct for making 'assurance doubly sure,'
and I cannot imagine the man who, entangled as you were in a net of
conflicting evidence--the evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of
the natural world--would not, if the question were that of averting a
curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as you did. That
paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two
worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can possibly understand
better than I.
Several critics have asked me to explain these words. Of course,
however, the question is much too big and much too important to
discuss here. I will merely say that Shakespeare having decided in the

case of 'Macbeth' to adopt the machinery he found in Holinslied, and in
the case of 'Hamlet' the machinery he found in the old 'Hamlet,' seems
to have set himself the task of realising the situation of a man
oscillating between the evidence of two worlds, the physical and the
spiritual--a man in each case unusually sagacious, and in each case
endowed with the instinct for 'making assurance doubly sure'--the
instinct which seems, from many passages in his dramas, to have been
a special characteristic of the poet's own, such for instance as the words
in _Pericles_:
For truth can never be confirm'd enough, Though doubts did ever sleep.
Why is it that, in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon
charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly
companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and
the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted
character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so
profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare,
that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most
intimate friends. It is because the sea which washes between
personality and personality is here, for once, rolled away, and we and
this Hamlet touch, soul to soul. That is why we ask whether such a
character can be the mere evolvement of the artistic mind at work. That
is why we exclaim: 'The man who painted Hamlet must have been
painting himself.' The perfection of the dramatist's work betrays him.
For, really and truly, no man can paint another, but only himself, and
what we call 'character painting' is, at the best, but a poor mixing of
painter and painted, a 'third something' between these two; just as what
we call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon
organism.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SNOWDON EDITION OF 1901
Though written many years ago this story was, for certain personal
reasons easy to guess, withheld from publication--withheld, as The
Times pointed out, because 'with the Dichtung was mingled a good deal
of _Wahrheit_,' But why did I still delay in publishing it after these
reasons for withholding it had passed away? This is a question that has
often been put to me both in print and in conversation. And yet I should
have imagined that the explanation was not far to seek. It was simply

diffidence; in other words it was that infirmity which, though generally
supposed to belong to youth, comes to a writer, if it comes at all, with
years. Undoubtedly there was a time in my life when I should have
leapt with considerable rashness into the brilliant ranks of our
contemporary novelists. But this was before I had reached what I will
call the diffident period in the life of a writer. And then, again, I had
often been told by George Borrow, and also by my friend Francis
Groome, the great living authority on Romany matters, that there was
in England no interest in Gypsies. Altogether then, had it not been for
the unexpected success of _The Coming of Love_, a story of Gypsy life,
it is doubtful whether I should not have delayed the publication of
Aylwin until the great warder of the gates of day we call