In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Æaean isle forgets the main....
or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man” rushed through by Alph the sacred river to where we
see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
IV
No: I am not talking fantastically at all. Let us be sober-serious, corrugating our brows upon history: and at once see that these Cambridge men of Thackeray’s generation—FitzGerald (to whom he was “old Thack”), Tennyson, Brookfield, Monckton Milnes, Kinglake—all with the exception of Arthur Hallam (whom I sadly suspect to have been something of a prig) cultivated high fooling and carried it to the nth power as a fine art. Life, in that Victorian era of peace between wars, was no lull of lotus-eating for them—the England of Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin admitted no lull of the young mind—but a high-spirited hilarious game. As one of them, Milnes, wrote of “The Men of Old”:
They went about their gravest deeds
As noble boys at play.
A plenty of English writers—some of them accounted highly serious writers—had indulged in what I may call similar “larks” before them. Swift, for example, has a glorious sense of the high-nonsensical; Cowper has it, of course. I regret to say that I even suspect Crabbe. Canning had it—take, for example, a single stage-direction in The Rovers: