Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1910-09-25

and they also heap up constant additions
to the common stock of unconscious non
sense
There used to be two bardS, one of whom for
five or six years, and the other for no less
than thirty years, poured forth protuse
strains of premeditated artlessness in verse.
The praise of morality was the general theme
of one of them. Unfortunately, however, the
symbolism with which he adorned his moral
essays was generally that of gold and silver,
of diamonds and rubies. His ode to Vir-
tue" is Justly famous, and its climax can
never be forgotten:
0 Virtue, thou TT a precious thing
More valuable than life itself,
More costly than a diamond ring!
The other bard celebrated all things
Nothing was too high, nothing too low, to
escape the tribute of his lvre In a happy
hour, by means of a rhythmic assertion of
close relationship between nourishment and
morals he surpassed all his previous efforts.
He had written an ode on the occasion of the
opening of a fair and the holding of wo-
mems food show. He praised everything
in more or less measured accents, and, reach
ing his highest flight in describing the cakes
and pies, gave voice to this concluding
strain:
Our lady's food is so delicious.
Keeps many ones from being VICIOUS.
The nonsense put forth by prophets of the
many mystic Creeds that just now are so
prominent is of exceptional quality. How
much of it is ignorant and how much mania
cal, how much deliberate and how much I'M
conscious, cannot be determined. But
choice instance may be quoted in passing
the recent advertisement of woman healer
who proposed by absent thought treatment,
by the practice OF constrainng and withhold
ing the aura, by the employment of natural
song and the wearing of an improved corset,
to develop genius insure material success,
and immortaze the soul.
Manufactured Nonsense
WE have widely different field when we
come to deliberate nonsense. 1t eludes
and defies adequate definition. How far it is
from wit or humor in their ordinary forms
may be judged from the fact that person
with an average working sense of either may
be wholly impervious to it's charm Its gene
sis and its end are play, play upon the values
OF words, upon the logical relations of things
and upon the r faml ar and accepted aspects
1t assemblies and joins incongruous images
it pictures impossible situations, and the
words in which it is clothed are made as by
magician wand, to yield forth undreamed
meanings and haunting melodies. 1t is Gre
atlve, IN tar truer sense, than is much OF
our serious work. and it is the product, in its
best examples, of notable genius.
How many there are, these last years, who
have given us new creations in this pleasing
art! The Gilbert of the Dab Ballads" an
Oliver Herford, Carolyn Wells, a Guy Wet
more Carryl, Charles E. Carry. are some
of them. But it is ever to the two masters,
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, that we
turn for the best expressions of the art.
Lear, by his wide range his fertile magina-
ton, and particularly by his poetic skill,
reaches a plane of sustained creativeness
wherein only one other can compete with
him. He creates real fairy lands. and he
peoples them with altogether lovable and
unforgetable beings. To one who has Wis
tied in imagination his scenes,-the coast of
Coromandel, the sunset isles of Boshen the
Terrible Zone, and the hills of the Chankly
Bore,-to such one the Kingdoms and happy
valleys of medieval romance seem but poor
stretches of bleak waste; and who that has
heard of them would not rather have met
and made acquaintance with the Jumblies,
or the Yonghy Bonghy Bo, or the Pebble
that has no toes, than with Aladdin or the
fairy Paribanou?
But though Lear excels in poetic art, he
is in turn exceled in other qualities by
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