There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks
blown from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine
biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white
hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is
"the heir of all the ages" is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less
popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes
to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal
antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and
to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.
The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding
childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and
inventive in any age; and if we 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 every one 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 who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and
another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the
moon blue, was, by his very divided nature, his one foot on both
worlds, a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His
Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel
the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade; we feel that if we
could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and
the March Hare were Professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a
mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in
Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the
world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic biography as we know
Lewis Carroll's. We accept him as a purely fabulous figure, on his own
description of himself:
"His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat."
While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear
introduces quite another element--the element of the poetical and even
emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong
a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded
reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his
amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic
prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.
"Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live,"
is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in
"Jabberwocky." Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes
his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear,
with more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps
of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational
statements, until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know
what they mean. There is a genial ring of common sense about such
lines as,
"For his aunt Jobiska said 'Every one knows
That a Pobble is better without his toes,'"
which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the
matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning,
that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old
travellers in the "Gromboolian Plain" as he is.
Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new
sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than
a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out
of mere 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 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 of things, has decided that "faith is nonsense," does
not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the
form that nonsense is faith.
_G. K. Chesterton._