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; 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 modernize 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 yeoman 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 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 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 be so imprisoned. It may be said of Chatterton that he was the Renascence of Wonder incarnate. To him St Mary Redcliffe Church was as much alive as were the men about whom Pope wrote with such astonishing prosaic brillance. This is one of the reasons why he bulks so largely among the poets of the Renascence of Wonder. For this renascence was shown not merely in the way in which Man's mysterious destiny was conceived, but also in the way in which the theatre of the human drama was confronted. This theatre became as fresh, as replete with wonder, as the actors themselves. A new seeing was lent to man's eyes. And of this young poet it may almost be said that he saw what science is now affirming the kinship between man and the lower animal; nay, even the sentience of the vegetable world further still, he felt that what is called dead matter is as the very latest science is telling us in a certain sense alive, shedding its influence around it. Then came Cowper, whose later poetry, when it is contrasted with the jargon of Hayley, seems to belong to another world. But it is possible, perhaps, to credit Cowper with too much in this matter. He was followed by a poet who did more for the romantic movement than even the 'marvellous boy' himself could do. Although Burns, like so many other fine poets, has left behind him some poor stuff, it would be as difficult to exaggerate his intellectual strength as to overestimate his genius. For not one of his predecessors-not even Chatterton-had been able to get away from the growth of poetic diction which had at last become so rank that originality of production was in the old forms no longer possible. The dialect of the Scottish peasantry had already been admirably worked in by certain of his predecessors; but it was left to Burns to bring it into high poetry.. In mere style he is, when writing in Scots, to be ranked with the great masters. No one realised more fully than he the power of verbal parsimony in poetry. As a quarter of an ounce of bullet in its power of striking home is to an ounce of duckshot, so is a line of Burns to a line of any other poet save two, both of whom are extremely unlike him in other respects and extremely unlike each other. To conciseness he made everything yield as completely as did Villon in the 'Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis' and in 'Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière,' and as completely as did Dante in the most concise of his lines. As surely as Dante's condensation is born of an intensity of imaginative vision, so surely is Burns's condensation born of an intensity of passion. Since Drayton wrote his sonnet beginning— Since ther's no helpe, come let us kiss and part! there had been nothing in the shape of passionate poetry in rhyme that could come near Burns's lines Had we never loved sae kindly, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. But, splendid as is his passionate poetry, it is specially as an absolute humourist that he towers above all the poets of the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly, to get away on all occasions from the shadow of the great social pyramid was not to be expected of a poet at the time and in the conditions in which Burns was born. Yet it is astonishing how this Scottish yeoman did get away from it at times, as in 'A Man's a Man for a' that.' It is astonishing to realise how he was able to show a feeling for absolute humour such as in the eighteenth century had only been shown by prose writers-prose writers of the first rank-like Swift and Sterne. Indeed, if we did not remember that he followed the creator of Uncle Toby, he would take, if that were possible, a still higher place than he now does as an absolute humourist. Not even Uncle Toby's apostrophe to the fly is finer than Burns's lines to a mouse on turning her up with a plough. But his lines to a mountain daisy which he had turned down with the plough are full of a deeper humour still-a humorous sympathy with the vegetable no less than with the animal kingdom. There is nothing in all poetry which touches it. Much admiration has been given, and rightly given, to Dorothy Wordsworth's beautiful prose words in her diary about the daffodil, as showing how a nature-lover without the 'accomplishment of verse' can make us conscious of the consciousness of a wild-flower. But they were written after Burns, and though they have some of Burns's playfulness, they cannot be said to show his humour. It is in poems of another class, however-in such poems as the 'Address to the De'il'-that we get his greatest triumph as an absolute humourist, for there we get what the present writer has called 'cosmic humour'-the very crown and flower of absolute humour. And take 'Holy Willie's Prayer,' where, biting as is the satire, the poet's humorous enjoyment of it carries it into the rarest poetry. In Tam o' Shanter' we get the finest mixture of humour and wisdom, the finest instance of Teutonic grotesque, to be found in all English poetry. In 'The Jolly Beggars' Burns now and again shows that he could pass into the mood of true Pantagruelism-a mood which is of all moods the rarest and the finest-a mood which requires in the humourist such a blessed mixture of the juices as nature cannot often in a climate like ours achieve. A true child of the Renascence of Wonder who followed Burns, William Blake, though he was entirely without humour, and showed not much power of giving realistic pictures of nature, had a finer sense of the supernatural than any of his predecessors. And now, after this wide circuit, we are able to turn, better equipped for understanding them, to those writers of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth who are the accredited fathers of the Renascence of Wonder. It is not the purpose of the present essay to discuss the poetry of any one of the poets of this great epoch except in regard to this Renascence. Their work will be found fully presented and analysed by eminent specialists in this volume. In 1765 Percy had published his famous collection of old ballads, and this directed general attention to our ballad literature. The first poet among the great group who fell under the influence of the old ballads was probably Scott, who in 1802 brought out the first two volumes of his priceless Border Minstrelsy. The old ballads were, of course, very unequal in quality; but among them were 'Clerk Saunders,' 'The Wife of Usher's Well,' 'The Young Tamlane,' the ballad which Scott afterwards named 'The Demon Lover,' and certain others which compel us to set the 'Border Ballads,' as they are called, at the very top of the pure poetry of the modern world. Coleridge, as we are going to see, could give us the weird and the beautiful combined, but he could not blend with these qualities such dramatic humanity and intense pathos as are expressed in such a stanza as this from 'Clerk Saunders,' where Saunders's mistress, after he has been assassinated by her brothers, throws herself upon his grave and exclaims : Is there ony roome at your head, Saunders? Scott, we say, is entitled to be placed at the head of those who are generally accredited with originating the Renascence of Wonder in the nineteenth century. But great as was the influence of Scott in this matter, it is hard to see how the effect of his romantic work would have been so potent as it now is without the influence of Coleridge. For, as has been pointed out in the notice of Byron in this volume, Scott's friend Stoddart, having heard Coleridge recite the first part of Christabel while still in manuscript, and having a memory that retained everything, repeated the poem to Scott, and Scott at once sat down and produced The Lay of the Last Minstrel. There is no need to say with Leigh Hunt that Scott's vigorous poem is a coarse travesty of Christabel in order to admit that, full as it is of splendid poetical qualities, it is defective in technic and often cheap in diction. Some of Scott's romantic lyrics, however, scattered through his novels show that it was a languid artistic conscience alone that prevented him from taking a much higher place as a poet than he now takes. If he never learnt, as Coleridge did, the truth so admirably expressed in Joubert's saying that 'it is better to be exquisite then to be ample,' it really seems to have been because he did not care to learn it. For the distinctive quality of Scott is that he seems to be greater than his work-as much greater, indeed, as a towering oak seems greater than the leaves it sheds. Coleridge's Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan are, as regards the romantic spirit, above-and far above-any work of any other English poet. Instances innumerable might be adduced showing how his very nature was steeped in the fountain from which the old balladists themselves drew, but in this brief and rapid survey there is room to give only one. In the 'Conclusion' of the first part of Christabel he recapitulates and summarises, in lines that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in succinctness of statement, the entire story of the bewitched maiden and her terrible foe which had gone before : A star hath set, a star hath risen, From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo! Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the human drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul of poetic wonder. So great is the maleficent power of the beautiful witch that a spell is thrown over all Nature. For an hour the very woods and fells remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic consciousness of her The night-birds all that hour were still. When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare, and 'the night-birds' are jubilant anew. This is the very highest reach of poetic wonder-finer, if that be possible, than the night-storm during the murder of Duncan. And note the artistic method by which Coleridge gives us this amazing and overwhelming picture of the oneness of all Nature. However the rhymes may follow each other, it is always easy for the critic, by studying the intellectual and emotional movement of the sequence, to see which rhyme-word first came to the poet's mind and suggested the rhymewords to follow or precede it. It is the witch's maleficent will-power which here dominates the poet's mind as he writes. Therefore we know that he first wrote Thou 'st had thy will. In finding a rhyme-word for 'will' and 'rill,' the word still' would of course present itself, among others, to any poet's mind; but it required a poet steeped in the true poetic wonder of preAugustanism-it required Coleridge, whose genius was that very Lady of the Lake, Sole-sitting by the shores of Old Romance— to feel the most tremendous and awe-inspiring |