ere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen
out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any
great aesthetic growth. The principle of _art for art's sake_ is a very
good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the
earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad
principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its
roots in the air. Every great literature has always been
allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad'
is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all
life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There
is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the
word 'ghosts'; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it
is summed up in the words 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Even the
vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses
something of the delight in sinister possibilities--the healthy lust for
darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a
dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the
future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world
must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be
nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very
unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things.
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the
'wonders' of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be
completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we
regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for
a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we
consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the
skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the
astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to
it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other
side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a
quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a
man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple
with only two.

This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder.
It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book
of Job, the a