I am convinced that this extravagant dressing up tendency, like the allied tendency to unkemptness, is only another of the many forms in which the capricious child spirit which rules our most emotional dreams is trying also to dominate the critical, diligent, constructive man-spirit of waking life, without which the poet is lost beyond recovery. Shelley was a great poet not because he enjoyed sailing paper boats on the Serpentine but because, in spite of this infantile preference he had schooled his mind to hard thinking on the philosophical and political questions of the day and had made friends among men of intellect and sophistication. It is from considerations rather similar to these that I have given this book a plain heading and restrained my fancy from elaborating a gay seventeenth-century title or sub-title:--“A Broad-side from Parnassus,” “The Mustard Tart,” “Pebbles to Crack Your Teeth,” or “Have at you, Professor Gargoyle!” But I am afraid that extravagance has broken down my determination to write soberly, on almost every page. And ... no, the question of the psychology of poetesses is too big for these covers and too thorny in argument. When psycho-analysis has provided more evidence on the difference between the symbolism of women’s dreams and men’s, there will be something to say worth saying. Meanwhile it can only be offered as a strong impression that the dreams of normally-sexed women are, by comparison with those of normally-sexed men, almost always of the same simple and self-centred nature as their poetry and their humour. XII CONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR It was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats a very sly sense of humour, because humour is surely only another product of the same process that makes poetry and poets--the reconciliation of incongruities. When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his Canterbury characters could trip and dance “after the schole of Oxenforde” he is saying two things:-- I. That Absalom thought he could dance well. II. That the professors of the University of Oxford are hardly the people from whom one would expect the most likely instruction in that art, and to point the joke he adds to “trip and dance” the absurd “and with his legges casten to and fro.” A sympathetic grin, as poets and other conjurors know, is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion. Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see the connection between poetry and humour, but his argument which uses the Irish Bull “I was a fine child but they changed me” to prove the analogy, trails off disappointingly. XIII DICTION