er 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 argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has
been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth
century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on
the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it.
"Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?" This simple
sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant
independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial
definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of
nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are
the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the
soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out
Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying
the logical side