By James Oliphant. By Ruth Putnam. By Charles R. Hall. By J. White Chadwick. By Ruth Putnam. By Walter Raleigh. y A. C. Swinburne. T. White Chadwick. Villiam Paton Ker. H The Renascence of Wonder in Poetry.* 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 105 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. 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 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 timewhich 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. It 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? 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; |