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 commonsense 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