picture, perhaps, in all poetry called up to his imagination

In

The night-birds all that hour were still. The nearer in temper any other line approaches this, the nearer does it approach the ideal of poetic wonder. It is, however, owing to the very rarity of Coleridge's genius that not he but Scott popularised the romantic movement. such purely poetical work as the first part of Christabel, which was entirely unlocalised, realistic mediæval pictures were not requisite as they were in the Lay of the Last Minstrel. After such work as Coleridge's all that the romantic revival needed was a poet who would supply it with feet in addition to wings. Scott supplied those feet. However, in the second part of Christabel, written later—in which the poem is localised after Scott's manner-Coleridge showed so much of Scott's influence that it may not be too fanciful to call these two immortal poets the binary star of romanticism revolving around one common poetic centre. Scott's poetry became so immensely popular that it soon set every poet and every versifier, from Byron downwards, writing romantic stories in octosyllabic couplets, with the old anapæstic lilt of romantic poetry.

As regards Wordsworth's share in this movement, though it was, no doubt, confined largely to poetic methods, the following superb lines from 'Yew Trees' can be set beside even Coleridge's masterpieces as regards the romantic side of the Renascence of Wonder :

Beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries-ghostly Shapes

May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton And Time the Shadow ;-there to celebrate As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship; or in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves. Whether the reaction would have died out (as did the revival of natural language by Theocritus after such comparatively feeble followers as Bion and Moschus) had not Wordsworth's indomitable will and masterful simplicity of character stood up and saved it, or whether, on the contrary, the movement was injured and delayed by this obstinacy and simplicity of character-which led him into exaggerated theories, exposing it to ridicule is perhaps a debatable question. However, it ended by the 'poetic diction' of the eighteenth century being swept away. But as to real knowledge of the mere physiognomy of mediævalism, Coleridge and Scott were perhaps on a par. Indeed, imperfect knowledge of this physiognomy was a weak point in the entire group of poets who set to work to revive it. Coleridge showed a certain knowledge of it, which, like Scott's, was

no doubt above that of Horace Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe. But since the great accumulation of learning upon this subject which came afterwards for the use of English poets it seems slight enough. Abbotsford alone is enough to show that Scott did not fully escape the bastard mediævalism of the eighteenth century. If he in Ivanhoe vanquished every difficulty and wrote an immortal mediæval romance with not many touches of true mediævalism, that is only another proof of his vitalising imagination and genius. Fortunately, however, Scott was something more than a man like his successor Meinhold, who had every mediæval detail at his command. Had the author of Ivanhoe been as truly mediæval as the author of Sidonia, he would have appealed to a leisured few by whom the past is more beloved than the present; but he would not have given the English-speaking race those superb works of his which are

A largess universal like the sun.

Though the Ettrick Shepherd, in The Queen's Wake, shows plenty of the true feeling for the supernatural side of the movement, he had not sufficient governance over his vivid imagination to express himself with that concentrated energy which is one of the first requisites.

As to Wordsworth as a nature-poet, there are, of course, three attitudes of the poet towards Nature. There is Wordsworth's attitude-that which recognises her as Natura Benigna; there is the attitude which recognises her as Natura Maligna, that of the poet who by temperament exclaims with the Syrian Gnostics, Matter is darkness-matter is evil, and of matter is this body, and to become incarnate is to inherit sorrow and grievous pain ;' and there is the attitude which recognises her as being neither benign nor malignant, but the cold, passionless, unloving mother to whom the sorrows, fears, and aspirations of man are indifferent because unknown-the attitude, in a word, of Matthew Arnold and other recent poets who have written after the general acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis.

Wordsworth's influence in regard to the painting of Nature was no doubt great upon all the poets of his time, and upon none was it greater than upon Byron, who scoffed at him. In order to see Wordsworth's influence upon Byron we have only to compare the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold with the first and second. But besides this, Byron was evidently in the later decade of his life a student of Wordsworth's theories as to the use of natural language instead of poetic diction. In Julia's letter in Don Juan, notwithstanding occasional echoes like that of Barton Booth's couplet given on page 290, Vol. II. of this work—

the heart.' The same may be said concerning the pathetic naturalness of the Haidée episode. Would this ever have been written as we now have it had it not been for Wordsworth's Preface? What makes Byron an important figure in the romantic revival is that, while his own draughts of romanticism were drawn from the well-springs of Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, it was from his own reservoir that the French romantiques drank. Indeed, it may almost be said that to his influence was largely due that revival which, according to Banville, 'made French poetry leap from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth.' As regards, however, the French romantiques of the thirties to whom Banville alludes - those whose revolt against French classicism culminated, perhaps, in that great battle of Hernani before mentioned their revolt was even more imperfectly equipped with knowledge of the physiognomy of mediævalism than that of Scott.

With regard to Victor Hugo, however, it may be said that, modern as he was in temper, he was able by aid of his splendid imagination in La Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean, and indeed in many other poems, to feel and express the true renascence of wonder. But in poetry the mere physiognomy of life is only suggested: in prose it has to be secured. Hugo never secured it.

Shelley's place in the Renascence of Wonder is peculiar. His vigorous imagination was partially strangled by his humanitarianism and ethical impulse, inherited largely from Rousseau. Of all the poets of this group he was by far the most influenced by the social upheaval of the French Revolution; and, of course, apart from his splendid work in so many kinds of poetry, he is a very important figure in the revival of romanticism broadly considered. But those poems of his dealing with subjects akin to those represented by the purely romantic works of the old ballads and Christabel show that in the Renascence of Wonder his place is not among the first. Queen Mab is not the least in touch with the spiritual world. And there is more of the pure romantic glamour in Keats's two lines

Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

than in the whole of The Witch of Atlas.

Southey's voluminous and industrious work upon romantic lines is receiving at this moment less attention than it deserves. There is really a fine atmosphere of romance thrown over Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama. But the atmosphere is

cold.

With regard to Keats in relation to it, the present writer has elsewhere dwelt upon the fact that, brief as was his life, he who had already passed through so many halls of the poetic palace was at one time passing into yet another-the magic hall of Coleridge and the old ballads. As expressions of the highest romantic temper there are not many

things in our literature to be set above The Eve of St Mark and La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Our object being merely to trace to its sources that stream of Romanticism upon which the poetry of the nineteenth century has been nourished, this essay should properly close with Keats. And if a word or two is here said upon the poets who immediately followed the great group, it must not be supposed that any general criticism of these latter poets is attempted.

Tennyson, in virtue of the large mass of perfect work actually done, would perhaps be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century if Coleridge had not left us among his own large mass of inferior work half-a-dozen poems which will be the wonder and the despair of English poets in all time to come. In the blending of music and colour so that each seems born of each, it is hard to think that even the poet of The Eve of St Agnes and The Ode to a Nightingale was the superior of him who gave us The Lady of Shalott and The Lotos-Eaters. But when it comes to the true romantic glamour it cannot be said that he was instinctively in touch with the old spirit. The magnificent Idylls of the King, in temper as well as in style one of the most modern poems of its time, does occasionally, as in the picture of the finding of Arthur, give us the old glamour very finely. But the stately rhetorical movement of his blank verse is generally out of harmony with it. That romantic suggestion which Shakespeare's blank verse catches in such writing as we get in the fifth act of the Merchant of Venice, and in hundreds of other passages, shows, however, that blank verse, though not so 'right' in romantic poetry as rhyme, can yet be made sufficiently flexible. It is only in the poetic methods of his rhymed poems that Tennyson successfully worked on romantic lines, though of course the naïveté, the fairy-like, unconscious grace of Coleridge at his best, were never caught by any of his successors. And yet above all nineteenth-century poets Tennyson is steeped in the absolute humour of romanticism. In Shakespeare himself there is no finer example of absolute humour than he gives us in those lines where the Northern Farmer' expresses his views on the immorality of Bessy Marris:

Bessy Marris's barne! tha knaws she laäid it to meä. Mowt a beän, mayhap, for she wur a bad un, sheä. 'Siver, I kep 'um, I kep 'um, my lass, tha mun understond;

I done moy duty boy 'um as I 'a done boy the lond.

As to Browning, in order to discuss adequately his place as regards the Renascence of Wonder a long treatise would be required. On the realistic side of the Romantic movement he is, of course, very strong. His sympathies, however, are as modern as Matthew Arnold's own, except, of course, on the theological side, where he is a century behind his great poetic contemporaries. His

desire is to express not wonder but knowingness, the opposite of wonder. In a study of his works made by the present writer many years ago, the humour of Browning was named Teutonic grotesque. The name is convenient, and nearly, though not quite, satisfactory. But subsequent writers on Browning seem to have caught it up. Perhaps Teutonic grotesque, which, in architecture at least, lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms, is the only absolute grotesque. In Italian and French grotesque the incongruity throughout all art lies in a simple departure from the recognised line of beauty, spiritual or physical; but in the Teutonic mind the instinctive quest is really not-save in music-beauty at all, but the wonderful, the profound, the mysterious; and the incongruity of Teutonic grotesque lies in expressing the emotions aroused by these qualities in forms that are unexpected and bizarre. It is easy, however, to give too much heed to Browning's grotesquery in considering his relation to Romanticism. Ruskin has affirmed that such poems as The Bishop Orders his Tomb is the best rendering to be found in literature of the old temper, and on this point Ruskin speaks with authority.

With regard to Matthew Arnold, in The Scholar Gypsy he undoubtedly shows, reflected from Wordsworth, a good deal of the realistic side of Romanticism. But there is no surer sign that his temper was really Augustan than the fact that in his selections from Gray in Ward's English Poets, he actually omits the one stanza in Gray's Elegy which shows him to have been a true poet-the stanza about the robin, above quoted in the remarks upon Gray. The Forsaken Merman, whose very name suggests the Renascence of Wonder, beautiful as it is, is quite without the glamour and magic of such second-rate poets as the author of the Queen's Wake, and has no kinship with Coleridge or the old ballads. As to his attitude towards Nature, it is in such poems as Morality and In Harmony with Nature that Arnold shows that he comes under the third category of nature-poets above mentioned. With regard to his humour, Arnold was essentially a man of the world-of the very modern world-and his humour, though peculiarly delicate and delightful, must perhaps be called relative and not absolute.

As regards the Romantic temper, two English imaginative writers only have combined a true sympathy with a true knowledge of it, and these were of more recent date-Rossetti and William Morris. They had, of course, immense advantages owing to such predecessors in literature as Meinhold, and also to the attention that had been | given to the subject in Pugin's Gothic Architecture and in the works of other architects, English and foreign.

The poet of Christabel himself was scarcely more steeped in the true magic of the romantic

temper than was the writer of The Blessed Damozel and Sister Helen, while in knowledge of romance he was far behind the later poet. With regard to humour, he and Morris hold in their poetry no place either with the absolute or relative humourists, but those who knew them intimately can affirm that personally they were both humourists of a very fine order. The truth is that Rossetti consciously, and Morris unconsciously, worked upon the entirely mistaken theory that in romantic poetry humour has properly no place.

It is want of space alone that prevents our bringing prose fiction into this essay; otherwise Mr Meredith would receive more attention in these remarks than almost any other writer; but to discuss so vast a subject as that of the Renascence of Wonder as seen in prose fiction would require the space of a large book, or rather of a library.

critics that few, if any,

It is hard to think that even the singer of the Ode to the West Wind is in lyric power greater than he who wrote the choruses of Atalanta and the still more superb measures of Songs before Sunrise and Erechtheus. Indeed, we have only to recall the fact that before Shelley wrote it was an axiom among poets and more metres could ever be invented in order to give his proper place to a poet who has invented more metres than all the poets combined from the author of Piers Plowman down to the present day. Mr Swinburne too seems, consciously or uncon sciously, to act upon the theory that humour is out of place in romantic poetry. For in his prose writings he shows a great deal of wit and humour. With regard to form and artistic qualities generally, a new kind of poetic diction now grew up—a diction composed mainly of that of Shelley and of Keats, of Tennyson, of Rossetti, of Mr Swinburne, yet mixed with Elizabethan and more archaic formsa diction, to be sure, far more poetic in its elements than that which Coleridge, Scott, and Wordsworth did so much to demolish, but none the less artificial when manipulated by a purely artistic impulse for the production of purely artistic verse. It is, we say, true enough that the gorgeous and beautiful word-spinning of writers like Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Philip Bourke Marston, and those called the Pre-Raphaelite poets is far more like genuine poetry than was the worn-out, tawdry texture of eighteenth-century platitudes in which Hayley and Samuel Jackson Pratt bedecked their puny limbs. Rossetti, the great master of this kind of poetic diction, saw this, and during the last few years of his life endeavored to get away from it when writing his superb poems, A King's Tragedy and The White Ship. His relative, Mr Ford Madox Hueffer, in his monograph on Rossetti tells us that it should be pointed out that the White Ship was one of Rossetti's last works, and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narrative under the advice of the present writer. THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON.

thing to suggest what unexplored caprices might be latent in the power that had restored the golden age: 'arms flashing, and a military glare,' intruding into the quiet of the Grande Chartreuse. The contrast between the hopes and the disappointments of the Revolution was expressed in 1802 in a sonnet to his travelling companion :

Composed near Calais, on the Road leading to Ardres, August 7, 1802.

Jones! when from Calais southward you and I Went pacing side by side, this public Way Streamed with the pomp of a too-credulous day, When faith was pledged to new-born Liberty: A homeless sound of joy was in the sky : From hour to hour the antiquated Earth Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, mirth, Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh! And now, sole register that these things were, Two solitary greetings have I heard, 'Good-morrow, Citizen!' a hollow word, As if a dead man spake it! Yet despair Touches me not, though pensive as a bird Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare. In 1790 Wordsworth confesses that he was as yet hardly able to appreciate the issues:

A stripling, scarcely of the household then Of social life, I looked upon these things As from a distance, heard and saw and felt, Was touched, but with no intimate concern. The year after he was to grow out of the stripling, and to give to a political cause all that energy of mind which had been bestowed before by him on the study of Nature. He took his degree in 1791, and spent some time in London, where he saw and heard a good deal, including the other great imaginative reasoner-Burke :

With high disdain

Exploding upstart theory.

In November he went to France, meaning to spend the winter and learn the language. He stayed first at Orleans, then at Blois.

Of all the Englishmen who were affected by the French Revolution, none entered like Wordsworth into its vicissitudes of hope and fear. He had been welcomed by the people of France in their first revolutionary holiday. He listened, not long after, to the chaos of the Palais Orleans:

I stared and listened with a stranger's ears To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild, And hissing Factionists with ardent eyes In knots or pairs or single. Not a look Hope takes, or Doubt or Fear is forced to wear, But seemed there present, and I scanned them all. At Orleans in the society of royalist officers he recognised their magnamity, but was not affected by their political views; there, too, he met and conversed intimately with Beaupuy, one of the most honourable and high-minded of the reformers. There can hardly have been anywhere in Europe a nobler devotion to high causes than in these two chance acquaintances; they have the inextinguish

able grace of lofty ideas, which were not refuted, though frustrated, by the events that followed. Wordsworth's political enthusiasm had the same root as his poetry-in his early life. He was not carried away by rhetoric merely; the new revolutionary world appeared to him as something familiar, and he interpreted equality and fraternity as what he had always known among his own people in the dales. There was a pith of commonsense in his revolutionary beliefs; they were not all vapourings, though both Wordsworth and Beaupuy failed. Beaupuy became a general, and was killed in 1796. Wordsworth thought at one time of throwing in his lot with the Girondists, in October 1792, when he had returned to Paris, a month after the September massacres; but his supplies came to an end, and that prosaic cause brought him back to England.

Wordsworth has uttered the hopes of his youth in a passage of verse which is to the political revival what Tintern Abbey is with regard to the poetical worship of Nature. It is one of the fragments of the Prelude published in Coleridge's Friend:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! O times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

The return from France was more than a change of climate to Wordsworth. The outbreak of the great war caused the most serious, perhaps the only dangerous, intellectual crisis in the whole of his life. When Shelley afterwards reproached him as a lost leader, whose early love of liberty had grown ossified, he did not know the full story, the tragic conflict through which Wordsworth had passed. Wordsworth was not frightened, and there was no inconsistency. He found himself divided between his patriotism, which was always strong, and his love for the ideas and the country of Beaupuy. He saw the worst parties in France gaining by the war :

Tyrants strong before

In wicked pleas were strong as demons now,
And thus on every side beset with foes
The goaded land waxed mad.

Wordsworth, in division against himself, fell into He tried to find despondency and scepticism.

some new principles; but his critical inquiry was fruitless, or worse. Analysis could not provide him even with a theory; and it was not a theory