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.
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