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 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 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;