Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (269 page)

There is fun bubbling over in every situation.
Sir John Tenniel has given us a clever picture of the wet, woe-begone animals, all clustering around the
Mouse
, who had undertaken to make them dry.
“Ahem!”
said the Mouse, with an important air, “are you all ready?
This is the driest thing I know,” and off he rambled into some dull corner of English history, most probably taken out of
Alice’s
own lesson book, not unknown to Lewis Carroll.

The Caucas race was suggested by the
Dodo
as an excellent method for getting dry, and as it was a race in which everyone came in ahead, everyone of course was satisfied, and in the distribution of prizes no one was forgotten.
Alice
herself received her own thimble, which she fished out of her pocket, and which the
Dodo
solemnly handed back to her, “saying: ‘We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble,’ and when it had finished this short speech they all cheered.”

Dinah, the real Alice’s real cat, plays an important part in the drama of Wonderland, although she was left at home dozing in the sun;
Alice
mortally offended the
Mouse
, and frightened many of her bird friends almost to death, simply by bringing her into the conversation.

It is certainly delightful to follow in the footsteps of this dream-child of Lewis Carroll’s; we lose ourselves in the mazes of Wonderland, and even as we grow older we do not feel that we have to stoop in the least to pass through the portals.

There was a certain air of sociability in Wonderland that pleased
Alice
immensely, for her visiting-list was quite astonishing, and she was continually meeting new—well, not exactly people, but experiences.
Her talk with a caterpillar during one of those periods when she was barely tall enough to peep over the mushroom on which he was sitting is “highly amusing and instructive.”

“‘Who are you?’
said the Caterpillar.

“This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
Alice replied rather shyly: ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present: at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.’

“‘What do you mean by that?’
said the Caterpillar sternly.
‘Explain yourself!’

“‘I can’t explain
myself
, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

“‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.

“‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied, very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with, and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’

“‘It isn’t,’ said the Caterpillar.

“‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice, ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’

“‘Not a bit,’ said the Caterpillar.

“‘Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,’ said Alice; ‘all I know is, it would feel very queer to
me
.’

“‘You!’
said the Caterpillar, contemptuously, ‘Who are
you
?’
Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation.”

It was the
Caterpillar
who asked her to recite “You are old, Father William,” and
Alice
began in this fashion:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

“And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

Do you think at your age it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,

“I feared it might injure the brain;

But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,

Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,

And have grown most uncommonly fat;

Yet you turned a back somersault in at the door—

Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,

“I kept all my limbs very supple

By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—

Allow me to sell you a couple.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak

For anything tougher than suet;

Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—

Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,

And argued each case with my wife;

And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw

Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth; “one would hardly suppose

That your eye was as steady as ever;

Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—

What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”

Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!

Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?

Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

Now
Alice
knew well enough that she had given an awful twist to a pretty and old-fashioned piece of poetry, but for the life of her the old words refused to come.
It seemed that with her power to grow large or small on short notice, her memory performed queer antics; she was never sure of it for two minutes together.

One odd thing about her change of size was that she never grew up or dwindled away unless she ate something or drank something.
Now every little girl has had similar experience when it came to eating and drinking.
“Eat so and so,” says a “grown-up,” “and you will be tall and strong,” and “if you
don’t
eat this thing or that, you will be little all your life,” so
Alice
was only going through the same trials in Wonderland.

Her meeting with the
Duchess
and the peppery
Cook
, and the screaming
Baby
, and the grinning
Cheshire Cat
, occupied some thrilling moments.
She found the
Duchess
conversational but cross, and the
Cook
sprinkling pepper lavishly into
the
soup she was stirring, and
out
of it for the matter of that, so that everybody was sneezing.
The
Cat
was the sole exception; it sat on the hearth and grinned from ear to ear.
Alice
opened the conversation by asking the
Duchess
, who was holding the
Baby
and jumping it up and down so roughly that it howled dismally, why the
Cat
grinned in that absurd way.

“‘It’s a Cheshire Cat,’ said the Duchess, and that’s why.
‘Pig!’
She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the Baby and not to her, so she took courage and went on again:

“‘I didn’t know that Cheshire Cats always grinned—in fact I didn’t know that Cats
could
grin.’

“‘They all can,’ said the Duchess, ‘and most of ’em do.’

“‘I don’t know of any that do,’ said Alice, very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.

“‘You don’t know much,’ said the Duchess; ‘and that’s a fact.’

“Alice did not like the tone of this remark and thought it would be well to introduce some other subject of conversation.”

Then the
Cook
began throwing things about, and the
Duchess
, to quiet the howling
Baby
, sang the following beautiful lullaby, which she emphasized by a violent shake at the end of every line.
Considering Lewis Carroll’s rather strong feeling on the boy question, they were most appropriate lines, indeed.

Speak roughly to your little boy,

And beat him when he sneezes;

He only does it to annoy,

Because he know it teases.

Chorus.

(In which the Cook and the Baby joined.)

Wow!
wow!
wow!

I speak severely to my boy,

I beat him when he sneezes,

For he can thoroughly enjoy

The pepper when he pleases!

Chorus.

Wow!
wow!
wow!

Imagine the quiet “don” beating time to this beautiful measure, his blue eyes gleaming with fun, his expressive voice shaded to just the right tones to give colour to the chorus, while the little girls chimed in at the proper moment.
It was no trouble for him to make rhymes, being endowed with this wonderful gift of nonsense, and in conversation he was equally clever.
He gave the
Duchess
quite the air of a learned lady, even though she did not know that mustard was a vegetable.
When
Alice
suggested that it was a mineral, she was quite ready to agree.
“‘There’s a large mustard mine near here,’ she observed, ‘and the moral of that is’ [the Duchess had a moral for everything], ‘The more there is of mine—the less there is of yours.’
‘Oh, I know!’
exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, ‘it’s a vegetable.
It doesn’t look like one but it is.’

“‘I quite agree with you,’ said the Duchess, ‘and the moral of that is, “Be what you would seem to be,” or if you’d like to put it more simply, “Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”’

“‘I think I should understand that better,’ said Alice, very politely, ‘if I had it written down, but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.’

“‘That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,’” the Duchess replied in a pleasant tone.

Alice’s
talk with the
Cheshire Cat
, which had the remarkable power of appearing and vanishing in portions, the table gossip at the Mad Tea Party, to which she was an uninvited guest, are too well-known to quote.
Many a time the Mad Tea Party has been the theme of some nursery play or school entertainment.
The
Mad Hatter
and the
March Hare
were certainly the maddest things that ever were.
When the
Hatter
complained of his watch being two days wrong, he turned angrily to the
March Hare
, saying:

“‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works.’

“‘It was the
best
butter,’ the March Hare meekly replied.

“‘Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,’ the Hatter grumbled; ‘you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread knife.’

“The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily; then he dipped it into his cup of tea and looked at it again; but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, ‘It was the
best
butter you know.’”

Surely nothing could be more amusing that this party of mad ones, and the sleepy
Dormouse
, who sat between the
March Hare
and the
Hatter
, contributed his share to the fun, while the
Hatter’s
songs, which he sang at the concert given by the
Queen of Hearts
, was certainly very familiar to
Alice
.
It began:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat—

How I wonder what you’re at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle.

Who but Lewis Carroll could invent such a scene?
Who could better plan the little sparkling sentences which gave the nonsense just the glitter which children found so fascinating and so laughable.
Yet what did they laugh at after all?
What do we laugh at even to-day in glancing over the familiar pages?
What is it in the mysterious depths of childhood which Lewis Carroll has caught in his golden web?
Perhaps, it is not all mere childhood; we are ourselves but “children of a larger growth,” and deep down within us at some time or other fancy runs riot and imagination does the rest.
So it was with Lewis Carroll, only
his
fancy soared into genius, carrying with it, as someone has said, “a suggestion of clear and yet soft laughing sunshine.
He never made us laugh
at
anything, but always
with
him and his knights and queens and heroes of the nursery rhymes.”