e were asked what was the best proof of
this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all
respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be
found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of
nonsense. 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose,' at least, is original, as
the first ship and the first plough were original.

It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the
world has seen--Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne--have written
nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense.
The nonsense of these men was satiric--that is to say, symbolic; it was
a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the
difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in
the Kaiser's moustaches something typical of him, draws them continually
larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason
whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look like on the present
Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We
incline to think that no age except our own could have understood that
the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the
Jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the
knave's trial in 'Alice in Wonderland' had been published in the
seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan's 'Trial of
Faithful' as a parody on the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy
that if 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose' had appeared in the same
period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.

It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's
'Nonsense Rhymes.' To our mind he is both chronologically and
essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis
Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We
know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious
and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant
and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and
in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense--the
idea of _escape_, of escape into a world where things are not fixed
horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees,
and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one
life in which he would have thundered morally against any one wh