e with the sincerity of the imagination.
If it is merely the informing of life with the spirit of light
laughter--as in Calverley--it affords its proper pleasure--it is the
spectacle of life drawn up into that kind of imagination to which
laughter belongs. Lewis Carroll's _Alice_ is in the same sense a work
of art. Is there not throughout those two most charming of children's
books an entirely consistent spirit of bonhomie and exquisite
rationality--rationality of an order high enough to produce those
delightful expositions of the irrational and the absurd? That the
author of _Alice in Wonderland_ was a mathematician is exactly what we
might have expected--though he was, what mathematicians rarely are,
the artist-mathematician, who understood the world intuitively as well
as logically, and thus manifested his spirit of laughter and logic
through an inverted world of contradiction.

And so again, if we take a modern author of a very different type,
such a one as Henry James, whose concern it is to state life, with a
view to throwing into relief the finer shades, we shall observe that
most of his work is characterised by a kind of intensive culture, as
opposed to that extensive method which through lack of form was abused
in Dickens, and through obedience to form was satisfactorily applied
by the poet Swinburne at his best. We may safely say that when
Swinburne was at his best, when he was "himself," his world was a
world of rhythmical energy, of impetuous freedom and sensuous
activity, which, translated into poetry, was expressed through the
symbols of love and sea-foam and battle; to be true to the genius
which was central to himself, he required no pregnancy or subtle
suggestiveness of phrase; he needed no more than rhyme, rhythm and
onomatopoeic words, and with these he gave all he had to give--the
sense of energy remembered, the sensuous delight of physical activity,
a world of divinely glorified sensation. Mature readers do not seek
him often, for there are only a few moods which he can satisfy. A
writer such as Mr. Henry James stands at the exactly opposite pole. It
was the proper business of such a man as Swinburne merely to affirm
sensation, and he could do it perfectly. It is the proper business of
Mr. James, not to assert sensation or any experience--he could not do
it with sincerity--but to question sensation, to question emotion and
sentiment; it is his proper business to examine experience with the
amused,