BOOKS OF THE DAY

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Transport in the Great War (Brigadier-General Sir Valentine Murray) Michael Bakunin (I. Berlin) .. Children's Dreams (L. A. G. Strong) New Poetry (William Plomer) 1185 The Movies (Basil Wright) 1186 Dr. John Bull (A. L. Rowse) 1186 New Novels (Kate O'Brien)

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF EDWARD LEAR

By JOSEPHINE FRY

" And in twenty years they all came back,

In twenty years or more, And everyone said, How tall they've grown ! For they've been to the Lakes and the Terrible Zone, And the hills of Chankly Bore.' "

IT is just fifty years since Edward Lear died, and perhaps it is not an unfitting moment to bring back to mind those alluring,

elusive beings of his creation from the strange world which he made for them to live in. Lord Tweedsmuir once com- mented on the notable part that topography can play in poetry, and it is certain that Lear's literature is inspired by it. In the Limericks it is the very method of his madness. It is of a disjointed kind. Each state or city is an independent unit whose history is the history of its peculiar people. There is not the least reason to suppose that the Old Person of Ealing ever drove in his gig with three owls and a pig to observe his eccentric neighbour of Slough defying local opinion at the end of his bough ; or that the Lady of Prague who gave an oracular opinion on caps was at all disturbed by the news that a fellow citizen was smitten with the plague. The German gentleman prancing delicately from Turkey to France has an air of being spiritually as well as physically aloof from these countries. He belongs to Coblenz. They all belong for ever to the spot in which Lear has put them. He has given them a local habitation, and so endowed they have no need of a name.

The world of the Nonsense Songs is different. Its inhabitants travel, trade, quarrel, make love, marry, play games and emigrate, leading the life of a civilised, if at the same time nonsensical, people. A map, based on Lear's own descriptions, would reveal the poems as an epic of Emigration. There is the Old World and the New. The Old World is effete, over- civilised, and probably over-populated. London is its capital, home of the King and Queen and their court, where ceremony (" such rugs, and jugs and candlelights ! ") is of such importance that no short-legged subject can hope to be received. There is a railway ; there are old estates such as Aunt Jobiska's Park, and the ancestral dwelling of Uncle Arly. The poems concerned with this land give an impression of age and dis- illusionment. Mr. and Mrs. Discobolos who reared a family of twelve on the top of a wall seem to have fallen victims to the degenerate habit of record-breaking. Uncle Arly, who had seen better days, became a futile vagrant among the Tiniscoop Hills afar, and returned to Borley Melling only to die. The Pobble, too, in attempting to swim the Bristol Channel, seems to have done so in a spirit of self-advertisement, for as he swam

" He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled a bell So that all the world might hear him."

He returned, minus his toes and his wrapper of scarlet flannel, to his Aunt Jobiska, surrendering himself, one suspects not unwillingly, to her cossetting and culinary consolations. Mr. and Mrs. Spikky-Sparrow were happy certainly, with their house and family and domestic chatter, and an occasional visit to London to buy clothes, but they point the moral. One fears for a country where sparrows flourish and where men decay.

Hopes of a newer and better life lay in the New World. No wonder the braver spirits of the old kingdom could not resist its lure. Beyond the Western Sea, the Bristol Channel and the uncharted depths of the Syllabub Sea lay the great Grom- boolian Plain, rearing up northward through the forest lands abounding in bong rives and twangurn trees to the mighty range of the Chankly Bore and the region of the Terrible Zone. There is something of the Elizabethan seamen about the Jumblies who sailed away in a sieve regardless of their friends' remonstrances. Oh, Timballo ! How happy they were.

They were merchant adventurers rather than colonists, but when they came back laden with Gromboolian products everyone began to say :

" If we only live,

We, too, will go to sea in a sieve, To the hills of the Chankly Bore."

And no doubt they did in ever increasing numbers.

Mr. Daddy Longlegs and Mr. Floppy Fly fled with a sponge- taneous cry from the land where the length of one's legs and the quality of one's voice were the way to preferment, and spent the rest of their lives playing battlecock and shutdedore on the free sands of Gromboolia. The Owl and the Pussycat, escaping no doubt from the vexatious marriage laws of the Old World, found their way across the Ocean to the land of the Bong Trees, where they were happily and expeditiously wed. The Duck and the Kangaroo circumnavigated the world,•not once, but three times. Those were spacious days.

There was, of course, a tragic side to the movement. One can only speculate as to the fate of the two old bachelors and the Nutcrackers and the Sugar-tongs. " Calico Pie " is best explained as a cryptic dirge in memory of all such :

" They sang ' Tilly-loo ' Till away they flew,—

And they never came back to me !

The claims of new and old met and clashed in the persons of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, a lonely pioneer on the coast of Coro- mandel, and the Lady Jingly Jones, who, unable to forget her husband (Handel Jones, Esq., and Co.), and the Dorking foirls of her old home, rejected the broken crockery and solitary chair of primitive life and left her distracted lover. The Dong—a native of the New World—deserted by his Jumbly.

girl, lost what little sense he once possessed and wandered off in search of her. He seems to have ended his life on the Quangle Wangle's hat. This curious creature was evidently a benefactor to the native races, whose numbers probably declined rapidly as the emigrants mired in. Having pledged himself to vegetarianism (" Jam and jelly and bread are the best of foods for me "), he made his hat into a sort of Yellowstone Park where such rare specimens as the Fimble Fowl, the Artery Squash and the Bisky Bat were preserved.

Through the epic there runs the line of topographical detail. Like Tennyson, Lear makes the sound of his words fit the nonsense ; like Milton, he makes his proper names enhance the glamour of his tale. Whether we are watching the sunset from the Isles of Boshen or studying oblong oysters on the Zemmery Fidd, we accept Lear as their admiring relations received the Four Little. Children—" with joy tempered with contempt," a contempt, be it understood, no deeper than is implied in the use of that elastic word " Nonsense."

The Gromboolian Plain should by now be teeming with a most remarkable population. Let us hope, since its men are afflicted neither with sense nor with superiority over the animal world, that those who followed in the wake of the Jumblies left their guns behind them. Otherwise, if you want to see the Nupiter Piffkin or the Fimble Fowl, you must go to the Museum of the City of Tosh, and look for them in bottles, along with the Seven Families " on the Ninety-eighth table in the Four hundred and twenty-seventh room of the

right-hand corridor of the left wing of the Central Quadrangle of that magnificent building ; for if you do not, you certainly will not see them." . .