Mr. Watts-Dunton was born in the microcosm which was in those corn law repeal days a little metropolis in Cowslip Country—Buttercup Land, as the Ouse lanes are sometimes called, and therefore he was born to good luck. Cowslip Country will be as closely associated with him and with Rhona Boswell as Wessex is associated with Thomas Hardy and with Tess of the D’Urbervilles. For the poet born in a microcosm becomes identified with it in the public eye, whereas the poet born in a macrocosm is seldom associated with his birthplace.
To the novelist, if not to the poet, there is a still greater advantage in being born in a microcosm. He sees the drama of life from a point of view entirely different from that of the novelist born in the macrocosm. The human microbe, or, as Mr. John Morley might prefer to say, the human cheese-mite in the macrocosm sees every other microbe or every other cheese-mite on the flat, but in the microcosm he sees every other microbe or every other cheese-mite in the round.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work is saturated with memories of the Ouse. Cowper had already described the Ouse, but it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who first flung the rainbow of romance over the river and over the sweet meadows of Cowslip Land, through which it flows. In these lines he has described a sunset on the Ouse:—
More mellow falls the light and still more mellow Around the boat, as we two glide along ’Tween grassy banks she loves where, tall and strong, The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow. She knows the nightingales of ‘Portobello’; Love makes her know each bird! In all that throng No voice seems like another: soul is song, And never nightingale was like its fellow; For, whether born in breast of Love’s own bird, Singing its passion in those islet bowers Whose sunset-coloured maze of leaves and flowers The rosy river’s glowing arms engird, Or born in human souls—twin souls like ours— Song leaps from deeps unplumbed by spoken word.
[Picture: The Ouse at Houghton Mill, Hunts. (From a Water Colour by Fraser at ‘The Pines.’)]
Now, will it be believed that this lovely river—so famous too among English anglers for its roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, and gudgeon—has been libelled? Yes, it has been libelled, and libelled by no less a person than Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Norris, vindicating with righteous wrath the reputation of his beloved Ouse, says:—