xiv The following Articles in this Volume are Copyright, 1903, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY in the United States of America: The Renascence of Wonder in Poetry. By Theodore Watts-Dunton. By James Oliphant. By Hector Macpherson. By C. Litton Falkiner. By Robert Steele. By Ruth Putnam. By J. White Chadwick. By Walter Raleigh. By Walter Raleigh. By J. W. Mackail. By William Paton Ker. By A. C. Swinburne. By Hector Macpherson. By J. W. Mackail. By J. White Chadwick. By James Douglas. By Mary J. J. Brotherton. By John Arthur Blaikie. By J. White Chadwick. By J. Arthur Thomson. By James Douglas. By J. White Chadwick. By J. White Chadwick. Wordsworth By William Paton Ker. H The Renascence of Wonder in Poetry.* AD the great change in the 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 *Copyright 1903 by J. B. Lippincott Company. 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 105 I 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 ourselves 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 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 Alywin. 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 |