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AD the great change in the poetry of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth been a revolution of artistic methods merely, it would still have been

the most important change in the history of English literature. But it affected the very soul of poetry. It had two sides: one side concerned that of poetic methods, and one that of poetic energy. It was partly realistic as seen in Wordsworth's portion of the Lyrical Ballads, and partly imaginative as seen in Coleridge's portion of that incongruous but epochmaking book. As the movement substituted for the didactic materialism of the eighteenth century a new temper-or, rather, the revival of an old temper which to all appearance was dead-it has been called the Romantic Revival. The French Revolution is generally credited, by French writers at least, with having been the prime factor in this change. Now, beyond doubt, the French Revolution, the mightiest social convulsion recorded in the history of the world, was accompanied in France by such romantic poetry as that of André Chénier, and was followed, many years afterwards, by the work of writers like

Dumas, Victor Hugo, and others, until at last the bastard classicism of the age of Louis XIV. was entirely overthrown. In Germany, too, the French Revolution stimulated the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, and the prose of Novalis, Tieck, and F. Schlegel. And in England it stimulated, though it did not originate, the romanticism of Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. But in this as in so many matters, while other countries have had the credit of taking the lead in the great human march, the English race has really been in the van. Just as Cromwell and Washington preceded and were perhaps the main cause of Mirabeau and Danton, so Chatterton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron preceded and were the cause of the romantic furore in France which, later on, was decided by the great battle of Hernani. As the storm-wind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the effect of the French Revolution. It was nothing less than a great revived movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic acceptance in all things, including literature and art. To this revival the present writer, in the introduction to an imaginative work dealing with this movement, has already

for convenience' sake, and in default of a better one, given the name of the Renascence of Wonder. As was said on that occasion, '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 acceptancethe 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.' In order, however, to explain the phrase fully it is necessary to postpone the discussion of the Lyrical Ballads until we have made a rapid sweep over antecedent methods and antecedent thought. It would seem that something works as inevitably and as logically as a physical law in the yearning which societies in a certain stage of development show to get away-as far away as possible -from the condition of the natural man; to get away from that despised condition not only in material affairs, such as dress, domestic arrangements and economies, but also in the fine arts and in intellectual methods, till, having passed that inevitable stage, each society is liable to suffer (even if it does not in some cases actually suffer) a reaction, when nature and art are likely again to take the place of convention and artifice. Anthropologists have often asked, what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark womb of some remote semi-human brain which, by first stirring, lifting, and vitalising other potential and latent faculties, gave birth to man? Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder? But certainly it is not rash, as regards the races of man, to affirm that the more intelligent the race the less it is governed by the instinct of acceptance, and the more it is governed by the instinct of wonder-that instinct which leads to the movement of challenge. The alternate action of the two great warring instincts is specially seen just now in the Japanese. Here the instinct of challenge which results in progress became active up to a certain point and then suddenly became arrested, leaving the instinct of acceptance to have full play, and then everything became crystallised. Ages upon ages of an immense activity of the instinct of challenge were required before the Mongolian savage was developed into the Japanese of the period before the nature-worship of 'Shinto' had been assaulted by dogmatic Buddhism. But by that time the instinct of challenge had resulted in such a high state of civilisation that acceptance set in, and there was an end, for the time being, of progress. There is no room here to say even a few words upon other great revivals in past times, such, for instance, as the Jewish-Arabian renascence of the ninth and tenth centuries, when the interest in philosophical speculation, which had previously been arrested, was revived; when

the old sciences were revived; and when some modern sciences were born. There are, of course, different kinds of wonder. Primitive poetry is full

of wonder-the naïve and eager wonder of the healthy child. It is this kind of wonder which makes the Iliad and the Odyssey so delightful. The wonder of primitive poetry passes as the primitive conditions of civilisation pass. And then for the most part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of wonder-the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery of man's life and the mystery of nature's theatre on which the human drama is played-the wonder, in short, of Æschylus and Sophocles. And among the Romans, Virgil, though living under the same kind of Augustan acceptance in which Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, is full of this latter kind of wonder. Among the English poets who preceded the great Elizabethan epoch there is no room, and indeed there is no need, to allude to any poet besides Chaucer; and even he can only be slightly touched upon. He stands at the head of those who are organised to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the wonder of the world at hand.' Of the poets whose wonder is of the simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king. But it is not the wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in the following sentences. It is the spiritual wonder which in our literature came afterwards. It is that kind of wonder which filled the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Webster, of Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the old ballads: it is that poetical attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which man finds himself entangled, dominate it. That this high temper should have passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance is quite inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract from the Introduction to Aylwin. Perhaps the difference between the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective periods.

There are, of course, in all literatures two kinds of humour-absolute humour and relative humour. The difference between these is as fundamental as that which—as the present writer has pointed out in his article on 'Poetry' in the Encyclopædia Britannica-exists in poetry between absolute vision and relative vision. That a recognition and an enjoyment of incongruity is the basis of both absolute and relative humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of relative humour that which amuses the humourist

is the incongruity of some departure from the laws of convention, in the case of absolute humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal as fixed by Nature herself. In other words, while relative humour laughs at the breach of the conventional laws of man and the symmetry of the social pyramid of the country and the time— which laws and which symmetry it accepts as final -absolute humour sees the incongruity of these conventional laws and this pyramid with the absolute sanction of Nature's own harmony. follows that in trying to estimate the value of any age's humour, the first thing to consider is how it stands in regard to absolute humour and how it stands in regard to relative humour. Was there more absolute humour in the age of wonder than in the age of acceptance?

It

On the whole, the answer must be, we think, in the affirmative. Chaucer's humour was more closely related to absolute humour than any kind of humour in English poetry which followed it until we get to the greatest absolute humourist in English poetry, Burns.

The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have ended with Milton. For Milton, although born only twenty-three years before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs properly to the period of romantic poetry. He has no relation whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by Ben Jonson. From the moment when Augustanism really began -in the latter decades of the seventeenth century -the periwig poetry of Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true poets. All the periwig poets became too 'polite' to be natural. As acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of Cathay. It was, notwithstanding certain parts of Virgil's work, the temper of Rome in the time of Horace as much as it was the temper of England in the time of Pope, Congreve, and Addison, and of France at that period when the blight of gentility did as much as it could to poison the splendid genius of Corneille and of Molière. In Greek literature the genteel finds no place, and it is quite proper that its birth should have been among a people so comparatively vulgar as the Romans of the Empire. A Greek Horace would have been as much an impossibility as a Greek Racine or a Greek Pope. When English writers in the eighteenth century tried to touch that old chord of wonder whose vibrations, as we have above suggested, were the first movement in the development of man, it was not in poetry but in prose.

Yet there was no more interesting period of English history than that in which Milton and

Dryden lived the period when the social pyramid of England was assaulted but not overturned, nor even seriously damaged, by the great Rebellion. This Augustan pyramid of ours had all the symmetry which Blackstone so much admired in the English constitution and its laws; and when, afterwards, the American colonies came to revolt and set up a pyramid of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model. At the basepatient as the tortoise beneath the elephant in the Indian cosmogony-was the people, born to be the base and born for nothing else. Resting on this foundation were the middle classes in their various strata, each stratum sharply marked off from the others. Then above these was the strictly genteel class, the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in dress if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs as a matter of right. Above the patriciate was the earthly source of gentility, the monarch, who would, no doubt, have been the very apex of the sacred structure save that a little -a very little-above him sat God, the suzerain to whom the prayers even of the monarch himself were addressed. The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done a daring thing, and an original thing, by striking off the apex of this pyramid, and it might reasonably have been expected that the building itself would collapse and crumble away. But it did nothing of the kind. It was simply a pyramid with the apex cut off-a structure to serve afterwards as a model of the American and French pyramids, both of which, though aspiring to be original structures, are really built on exactly the same scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour as that upon which the pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no doubt built. Then came the Restoration the apex was restored the structure was again complete; it was, indeed, more solid than ever-stronger than ever. Subject to the exception of certain great and glorious prose writers of that period, the incongruity which struck the humourist as laughable was incongruity not with the order of nature and the elemental laws of man's mind, but with the order of the Augustan pyramid. It required the genius of a Swift in England, as it required in France the genius of a Molière, to produce absolute humour. In Fielding, to be sure (notably in Joseph Andrews), and sometimes in Addison, as in the famous scene of Sir Roger at church, and in the less-known but equally fine description of the Tory squire in The Freeholder, we do sometimes get it; but in poetry very rarely.

As to the old romantic temper which had inspired Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Faustus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, that was dead and goneseemed dead and gone for ever. In order to realise how the instinct of wonder had been wiped out of English poetry we have only to turn to Dryden's modernisation of Chaucer; his translations from Virgil, Boccaccio, and others;

and to Pope's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Let us take first the later and smaller of these two Augustan poets. Instead of the unconscious and unliterary method of rendering the high temper of man in the heroic youth of the world-man confronting and daring the 'arrows of Fate and Chance'-what do we get? The artificial, high-sounding lines of a writer of worldly verse whom nature, no doubt, intended to be a poet, but whom Augustanism impelled to cultivate himself like a Dutch garden in order to become 'polite' all round. That Dryden should fail as Pope failed in catching the note of primitive wonder which characterises Homer was to be expected. But it might at least have been supposed that he would succeed better with Virgil; for Virgil was born only five years before the typical Augustan poet of Rome, Horace. But then it chanced that Virgil was something much more than an Augustan poet. Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable in connection with the chameleon-like character of Virgil's genius than the fact that in the laureate of Cæsarism and the flatterer of Augustus we should get not only the dawn of modern love-love as a pure sentiment -but also that other romantic note of wonderget, in a word, those beginnings of mysticism and that speculative temper which made him the dominant figure of the Middle Ages. Of all these qualities of all that made Bacon call him the 'chastest poet and royalist that to the memory of man is known'-the coarse, vigorous, materialistic mind of Dryden was as insensitive as was the society in which he moved. And does he prosper any better with his own countryman, Chaucer, whose splendid poem, The Knight's Tale, he essayed to modernise with others? Upon the Knight's Tale, based upon Boccaccio's Teseide, Shakespeare and another built one of the great dramas of the modern world, and so far from depriving it of the charm of wonder, added to it a deeper wonder still-the wonder of their own epoch. This superb poem Dryden undertook to make Augustan. Again, see how his coarse fingers degraded Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida when he took upon himself to make that strange work 'polite.' No doubt the littleness of greatness is the humorous motif of the play. No doubt Shakespeare felt that there is no reason why the heroic should not be treated for once from the valet point of view. But how has Dryden handled the theme? By adding to the coarseness of Thersites and Pandarus in the play-coarse enough already and by simply excising all the poetry. But if his treatment of Troilus and Cressida is grotesque, what shall be said of his treatment of the most romantic of all plays, The Tempest, where, in order to improve the romantic interest of the play, he and D'Avenant give us a male Miranda who had never seen a woman, and a female Caliban to match the male monster of Shakespeare? The same fate befell him when

he undertook to modernise Boccaccio. The one quality which saves the cruel story of Theodore and Honoria from disgusting the truly imaginative reader is the air of wild romance in which it is enveloped. Remove that and it becomes a story of mutilation, blood, and shambles. Dryden does take away that atmosphere from the story and ruins it. Again, take Boccaccio's beautiful story of Sigismonda and Guiscardo. It seems impossible to coarsen and brutalise this until we read Dryden's modernisation.

Nothing shows more forcibly the distinctive effect of the new temper of acceptance than the ill-fortune that befell those priceless romantic ballads which in their oral form had been so full of the poetry of wonder in the days of the poetical past. From various European countries -from Germany, from Italy, from France, from Spain, from Roumania-a stream of legendary lore in ballad form had flowed into Great Britain and spread all over the island, not in Scotland and the Border country merely, but in mid and southern England also, where it had only an oral life. But when there came from the Continent the prosaic wave of materialism which killed poetry properly so called, inasmuch as it stifled for a time the great instinct of wonder, it killed, as far as mid and south England are concerned, the romantic ballad also. For during this arid period the ballad in the southern counties passed into type. The 'stall copy,' as has been pointed out by Mr Lang, destroyed the South English ballad. For the transcriber of ballads for the stall was under the influence of the anti-poetic literature of his time, and the very beauties of the ballads as they came from the reciter's mouth seemed to him barbarisms, and he substituted for them his notions of 'polite' poetic diction.

With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be described realistically. Yet we must not suppose that in the eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations, without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty of gazing honestly in her face. She does not work in that way. In the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. In the period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen. In the time of Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable insight and intellectual breadth that his generalisations cover not only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual limbs

of so complex an epoch as those of the twentieth century.

Poetic art had come to consist in clever manipulations of the stock conventional language common to all writers alike—the language of poetry had become so utterly artificial, so entirely removed from the language in which the soul of man would naturally express its emotions, that poetry must die out altogether unless some kind of reaction should set in. Roughly speaking, from the appearance of the last of Milton's poetry to the publication of Parnell's Night-piece, the business of the poet was not to represent Nature, but to decorate her and then work himself up into as much rapture as gentility would allow over the decorations. Not that Parnell got free from the Augustan vices, but partially free he did get at last. Among much that is tawdry and false in his earlier poems, the lines describing the osier-banded graves, given in the notice of Parnell in Volume II. of this work, might have been written at the same time as Wordsworth's Excursion so far as truthful representation of Nature is concerned. Then came Thomson's Seasons and showed that the worst was over. If we consider that his Winter appeared as early as 1726, and Summer and Spring in 1727 and 1728, and if we consider the intimate and first-hand knowledge Thomson shows of Nature in so many of her moods in the British Islands, it is not difficult to find his place in English poetry. No doubt his love of Nature was restricted to Nature in her gentle and even her homely moods. He could describe as 'horrid' that same Penmaenmawr which to the lover of Wales is so fascinating. Still, from this time a new life was breathed into English poetry. But the new growth was slow. Take the case of Gray, for instance. Not even the Chinese mandarin above described was more genteel than Gray. In him we get the very quintessence of the Augustan temper. Yet no one who reads his letters can doubt that Nature had endowed him with a true eye for local colour. And although Gray was not strong enough to throw off the conventional diction of his time, he was yet strong enough to speak to us sometimes through the muffler of that diction with a voice that thrills the ears of those who have listened to the song of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. As the present writer has said on the occasion above mentioned, his chief poem, the famous elegy, furnishes a striking proof of the poet's slavery to Augustanism. While reading about the solemn yew-tree's shade,' 'the ivymantled tower,' and the rest of the conventional accessories of such a situation, the reader yearns for such concrete pictures as we get in plenty not only in Wordsworth and those who succeeded him, but even in Parnell and Thomson. Noble as this poem is, it has a fundamental fault-a fault which is great-it lacks individual humanity. Who is the 'me' of the poem-this 'me' to whom, in company with 'Darkness,' the home

ward-plodding ploughman 'leaves the world'? The thoughts are fine; but is the thinker a moralising ghost among the tombstones, or is he a flesh-trammelled philosopher sitting upon the churchyard wall? The poem rolls on sonorously, and the reader's imagination yearns for a stanza full of picture and pathetic suggestion of individual life-full of those bewitching qualities, in short, which are the characteristics of all English poetry save that of the era of acceptance, the era of gentility-the Augustan era. At last, however, the poet does strike out a stanza of this kind, and immediately it sheds a warmth and a glow upon all that has gone before-vitalises the whole, in short. Describing the tomb of the hitherto shadowy moraliser, Gray says:

There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,

By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; The redbreast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground. Now at last we see that the moraliser is not a spectre whose bones are marrowless and whose blood is cold, but a man, the homely creature that Homer and Shakespeare loved to paint; a man with friends to scatter violets over his grave and little children to come and mourn by it; a man so tender, genial, and good that the very redbreasts loved him. And having written this beautiful stanza, full of the true romantic temper, having printed it in two editions, Gray cancelled it, and no doubt the age of acceptance and gentility approved the omission. For what are children and violets and robins warbling round a grave compared with 'the muse's flame' and 'the ecstasy' of the 'living lyre,' and such elegant things?

And again, who had a finer imagination than Collins? Who possessed more fully than he the imaginative power of seeing a man asleep on a loose hanging rock, and of actualising in a dramatic way the peril of the situation? But there is something very ungenteel about a mere man, as Augustanism had discovered. A man is a very homely and common creature, and the worker in 'polite letters' must avoid the homely and the common; whereas a personification of Danger is literary, Augustan, and 'polite.' Hence Collins, having first imagined with excessive vividness a man hanging on a loose rock asleep, set to work immediately to turn the man into an abstraction :

Danger, whose limbs of giant mould
What mortal eye can fixed behold?
Who stalks his round, a hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight storm,
Or throws him on the ridgy steep
Of some loose hanging rock to sleep.

But if Gray and Collins were giants imprisoned in the jar of eighteenth-century convention, they were followed by a 'marvellous boy' who refused to