There are few writers whose works I care to read more than once, and one of them is certainly Edward Lear. Nonsense, like poetry, to which it is closely allied, like philosophic speculation, like every product of the imagination, is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppression of circumstance. As long as it remains possible for the human mind to invent the Quangle Wangle and the Fimble Fowl, to wander at will over the Great Gromboolian Plain and the hills of the Cnankly Bore, the victory is ours. The existence of nonsense is the nearest approach to a proof of that improvable article of faith, whose truth we must all assume or perish miserably: that life is worth living. It is when circumstances combine to prove, with syllogistic cogency, that life is not worth living that I turn to Lear and find comfort and refreshment. I read him and I perceive that it is a good thing to be alive; for I am free, with Lear, to be as inconsequent as I like. Lear is a genuine poet. For what is his nonsense except the poetical imagination a 162little twisted out of its course? Lear had the true poet’s feeling for words—words in themselves, precious and melodious, like phrases of music; personal as human beings. Marlowe talks of entertaining divine Zenocrate; Milton of the leaves that fall in Vallombrosa; Lear of the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg, of runcible spoons, of things meloobious and genteel. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense by exaggerating sense—a too logical logic. His coinages of words are intellectual. Lear, more characteristically a poet, wrote nonsense that is an excess of imagination, coined words for the sake of their colour and sound alone. His is the purer nonsense, because more poetical. Change the key ever so little and the “Dong with a Luminous Nose” would be one of the most memorable romantic poems of the nineteenth century. Think, too, of that exquisite “Yonghy Bonghy Bo”! In one of Tennyson’s later volumes there is a charming little lyric about Catullus, which begins:
Row us out from Desenzano,
To your Sirmione row!
So they row’d, and there we landed—
O venusta Sirmio!
Can one doubt for a moment that he was thinking, when he wrote these words, of that 163superb stanza with which the “Yonghy Bonghy” opens:
On the coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods,
Dwelt the Yonghy Bonghy Bo.
Personally, I prefer Lear’s poem; it is the richer and the fuller of the two.
Lear’s genius is at its best in the Nonsense Rhymes, or Limericks, as a later generation has learned to call them. In these I like to think of him not merely as a poet and a draughtsman—and how unique an artist the recent efforts of Mr. Nash to rival him have only affirmed—but also as a profound social philosopher. No study of Lear would be complete without at least a few remarks on “They” of the Nonsense Rhymes. “They” are the world, the man in the street; “They” are what the leader-writers in the twopenny press would call all Right-Thinking Men and Women; “They” are Public Opinion. The Nonsense Rhymes are, for the most part, nothing more nor less than episodes selected from the history of that eternal struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow-being............