Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (275 page)

I’ll try and tell you what I mean:

In summer, when the days are long,

Perhaps you’ll understand the song:

In autumn, when the leaves are brown,

Take pen and ink, and write it down.

I sent a message to the fish:

I told them: “This is what I wish.”

The little fishes of the sea,

They sent an answer back to me.

The little fishes’ answer was:

“We cannot do it, Sir, because——”

I sent to them again to say:

“It will be better to obey.”

The fishes answered, with a grin:

“Why, what a temper you are in!”

I told them once, I told them twice:

They would not listen to advice.

I took a kettle large and new,

Fit for the deed I had to do.

My heart went hop, my heart went thump:

I filled the kettle at the pump.

Then someone came to me and said:

“The little fishes are in bed.”

I said to him, I said it plain:

“Then you must wake them up again.”

I said it very loud and clear:

I went and shouted in his ear.

But he was very stiff and proud:

He said: “You needn’t shout so loud!”

And he was very proud and stiff:

He said: “I’d go and wake them, if——”

I took a corkscrew from the shelf;

I went to wake them up myself.

And when I found the door was locked,

I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

And when I found the door was shut,

I tried to turn the handle, but——

With which highly satisfactory ending
Humpty
remarked:

“That’s all.
Good-bye.”

Alice got up and held out her hand.

“Good-bye till we meet again,” she said, as cheerfully as she could.

“I shouldn’t know you if we
did
meet,” Humpty-Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake.
“You’re so exactly like other people.”

The next square—the seventh—took
Alice
through the woods.
Here she met some old friends: the
Mad Hatter
and the
White Rabbit
of Wonderland fame, mixed in with a great many new beings, including the
Lion
and the
Unicorn
, who, as the old ballad tells us, “were fighting for the crown”; and then as the
Red Queen
had promised from the beginning, the
White Knight
—after a battle with the
Red Knight
who held
Alice
prisoner—took her in charge to guide her through the woods.
Whoever has read the humorous and yet pathetic story of “Don Quixote” will see at once where Lewis Carroll found his gentle, valiant old
White Knight
and his horse, so like yet so unlike the famous steed
Rosenante
.

He, too, had a song for
Alice
, which he called “The Aged, Aged Man,” and which he sang to her, set to very mechancholy music.
It is doubtful if
Alice
understood it for she wasn’t thinking of age, you see.
She was only seven years and six months old, and probably paid no attention.
She was thinking instead of the strange kindly smile of the knight, “the setting sun gleaming through his hair and shining on his armor in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her; the horse quietly moving about with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet, and the black shadows of the forest behind.”
Certainly Lewis Carroll could paint a picture to remain with us always.
The poem is rather too long to quote here, but the experiences of this “Aged, Aged Man” are well worth reading.

Alice
was now hastening toward the end of her journey and events were tumbling over each other.
She had reached the eighth square, where, oh, joy!
a golden crown awaited her, also the
Red Queen
and the
White Queen
in whose company she traveled through the very stirring episodes of that very famous dinner party, when the candles on the table all grew up to the ceiling, and the glass bottles each took a pair of plates for wings, and forks for legs, and went fluttering in all directions.
Everything was in the greatest confusion, and when the
White Queen
disappeared in the soup tureen, and the soup ladle began walking up the table toward
Alice’s
chair, she could stand it no longer.
She jumped up “and seized the tablecloth with both hands; one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.”
And then
Alice
began to shake the
Red Queen
as the cause of all the mischief.

“The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green; and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter, and fatter, and softer, and rounder, and—and it really
was
a kitten after all.”

And
Alice
, opening her eyes in the red glow of the fire, lay snug in the armchair, while the Looking-Glass on the mantel caught the reflection of a very puzzled little face.
The “dream-child” had come back to everyday, and was trying to retrace her journey as she lay there blinking at the firelight, and wondering if, back of the blaze, the Chessmen were still walking to and fro.

And Lewis Carroll, as he penned the last words of “Alice’s Adventures through the Looking-Glass,” remembered once more the little girl who had been his inspiration, and wrote a loving tribute to her at the very end of the book, an acrostic on her name—Alice Pleasance Liddell.

A boat, beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July.

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear.

Long has paled that sunny sky;

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies,

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream,

Lingering in the golden gleam,

Life, what is it but a dream?

CHAPTER X.

“HUNTING THE SNARK” AND OTHER POEMS.

There is no doubt that the second “Alice” book was quite as successful as the first, but regarding its merit there is much difference of opinion.
As a rule the “grown-ups” prefer it.
They like the clever situations and the quaint logic, no less than the very evident good writing; but this of course did not influence the children in the least.
They liked “Alice” and the pretty idea of her trip through the Looking-Glass, but for real delight “Wonderland” was big enough for them, and to whisk down into a rabbit-hole on a summer’s day was a much easier process than squeezing through a looking-glass at the close of a short winter’s afternoon, not being
quite
sure that one would not fall into the fire on the other side.

The very care that Lewis Carroll took in the writing of this book deprived it of a certain charm of originality which always clings to the pages of “Wonderland.”
Each chapter is so methodically planned and so well carried out that, while we never lose sight of the author and his cleverness, fairyland does not seem quite so real as in the book which was written with no plan at all, but the earnest desire to please three children.
Then again there was a certain staidness in the prim little girl who pushed her way through the Looking-Glass.
And there were no wonderful cakes marked “eat me,” and bottles marked “drink me,” which kept the Wonderland
Alice
in a perpetual state of growing or shrinking; so the fact that nothing happened to
Alice
at all during this second journey lessened its interest somewhat for the young ones to whom constant change is the spice of life.
A very little girl, while she might enjoy the flower chapter, and might be tempted to build her own fanciful tales about the rest of the garden, would not be so attracted toward the insect chapter, which may possibly have been written with the praiseworthy idea of teaching children not to be afraid of these harmless buzzing things that are too busy with their own concerns to bother them.

There are, in truth, little “cut and dried” speeches in the Looking-Glass “Alice,” which we do not find in “Wonderland.”
A real hand is moving the Chessman over the giant board, and the
Red
and the
White Queen
often speak like automatic toys.
We miss the savage “off with his head” of the
Queen of Hearts
, who, for all her cardboard stiffness, seemed a thing of flesh and blood.
But the poetry in the two “Alices” is of very much the same quality.

In his prose “nonsense” anyone might notice the difference of years between the two books, but Lewis Carroll’s poetry never loses its youthful tone.
It was as easy for him to write verses as to teach mathematics, and that was saying a good deal.
It was as easy for him to write verses at sixty as at thirty, and that is saying even more.
From the time he could hold a pencil he could make a rhyme, and his earlier editorial ventures, as we know, were full of his own work which in after years made its way to the public, either through the magazines or in collection of poems, such as “Rhyme and Reason,” “Phantasmagoria,” and “The Three Sunsets.”

In
The Train
, that early English magazine before mentioned, are several poems written by him and signed by his newly borrowed name of Lewis Carroll, but they are very sentimental and high-flown, utterly unlike anything he wrote either before or after.

Between the publication of “Through the Looking-Glass” and “The Hunting of the Snark” was a period of five years, during which, according to his usual custom, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in the seclusion of Christ Church, calmly pursued his scholarly way, smiling sedately over the literary antics of Lewis Carroll, for the Rev.
Charles was a sober, over-serious bachelor, whose one aim and object at that time was the proper treatment of Euclid, for during those five years he wrote the following pamphlets: “Symbols, etc., to be used in Euclid—Books I and II,” “Number of Propositions in Euclid,” “Enunciations—Euclid I-VI,” “Euclid—Book V.
Proved Algebraically,” “Preliminary Algebra and Euclid—Book V,” “Examples in Arithmetic,” “Euclid—Books I and II.”

He also wrote many other valuable pamphlets concerning the government of Oxford and of Christ Church in particular, for the retiring “don” took a keen interest in the University life, and his influence was felt in many spicy articles and apt rhymes, usually brought forth as timely skits.
Notes by an Oxford Chiel
, published at Oxford in 1874, included much of this material, where his clever verses, mostly satirical, generally hit the mark.

And all this while, Lewis Carroll was gathering in the harvest yielded by the two “Alices,” and planning more books for his child-friends, who, we may be sure, were growing in numbers.

We find him at the Christmas celebration of 1874, at Hatfield, the home of Lord Salisbury, as usual, the central figure of a crowd of happy children.
On this occasion he told them the story of
Prince Uggug
, which was afterwards a part of “Sylvie and Bruno.”
Many of the chapters of this book had been published as separate stories in
Aunt Judy’s Magazine
and other periodicals, and, as such, they were very sweet and dainty as well as amusing.
It was Lewis Carroll’s own special charm in telling these stories which really lent them colour and drew the children; they lost much in print, for they lacked the sturdy foundations of nonsense on which the “Alices” were built.

On March 29, 1876, “The Hunting of the Snark” was published, a new effort in “nonsense” verse-making, which stands side by side with “Jabberwocky” in point of cleverness and interest.

The beauty of Lewis Carroll’s “nonsense” was that he never tried to be funny or “smart.”
The queer words and the still queerer ideas popped into his head in the simplest way.
His command of language, including that important knowledge of how to make “portmanteau” words, was his greatest aid, and the poem which he called “An Agony in Eight Fits” depends entirely upon the person who reads it for the cleverness of its meaning.
To children it is one big fairy tale where the more ridiculous the situations, the more true to the rules of fairyland.
The Snark, being a “portmanteau” word, is a cross between a
snake
and a
shark
, hence
Snark
, and the fact that he dedicated this wonderful bit of word-making to a little girl, goes far to prove that the poem was intended as much for children as for “grown-ups.”

The little girl in this instance was Gertrude Chataway, and the verses are an acrostic on her name:

Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,

Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well

Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask

The tale he loves to tell.

Rude spirit of the seething outer strife,

Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,

Deem, if you list, such hours a waste of life,

Empty of all delight!

Chat on, sweet maid, and rescue from annoy,

Hearts that by wiser talk are unbeguiled;

Ah, happy he who owns that tenderest joy,

The heart-love of a child!

Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more!

Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days,

Albeit bright memories of that sunlit shore

Yet haunt my dreaming gaze!

There was scarcely a little girl who claimed friendship with Lewis Carroll who was not the proud possessor of an acrostic poem written by him—either on the title-page of some book that he had given her, or as the dedication of some published book of his own.

“The Hunting of the Snark” owed its existence to a country walk, when the last verse came suddenly into the mind of our poet:

“In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

For the Snark
was
a Boojum, you see.”

In a very humorous preface to the book, Lewis Carroll attempted some sort of an explanation, which leaves us as much in the dark as ever.
He writes:

“If—and the thing is wildly possible—the charge of writing nonsense was ever brought against the author of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line:

“‘Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.’

“In view of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal indignantly to my other writings as a proof that I am incapable of such a deed; I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral purpose of the poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so cautiously inculcated in it, or to its noble teachings in Natural History.
I will take the more prosaic course of simply explaining how it happened.

“The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances, used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished; and more than once it happened, when the time came for replacing it, that no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to.
They knew it was not of the slightest use to appeal to the Bellman about it—he would only refer to his Naval Code and read out in pathetic tones Admiralty Instructions which none of them had ever been able to understand, so it generally ended in its being fastened on anyhow across the rudder.
The Helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes;
he
knew it was all wrong, but, alas!
Rule 4, of the Code, ‘
No one shall speak to the man at the helm
,’ had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words, ‘
and the man at the helm shall speak to no one
,’ so remonstrance was impossible and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day.
During these bewildering intervals the ship usually sailed backward.”

Is it any wonder that a poem, based upon such an explanation, should be a perfect bundle of nonsense?
But we know from experience that Lewis Carroll’s nonsense was not stupidity, and that not one verse in all that delightful bundle missed its own special meaning and purpose.

We do not propose to find the key to this remarkable work—for two reasons: first, because there are different keys for different minds; and second, because the unexplainable things in many cases come nearer the “mind’s eye,” as Shakespeare calls it, without words.
We cannot tell
why
we understand such and such a thing, but we
do
understand it, and that is enough—quite according to Lewis Carroll’s ideas, for he always appeals to our imagination and that is never guided by rules.
The higher it soars, the more fantastic the region over which it hovers, the nearer it gets to the land of “make believe,” “let’s pretend” and “supposing,” the better pleased is Lewis Carroll.
In a delightful letter to some American children, published in
The Critic
shortly after his death, he gives his own ideas as to the meaning of the
Snark
.

“I’m very much afraid I didn’t mean anything but nonsense,” he wrote; “still you know words mean more than we mean to express when we use them, so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means.
So whatever good meanings are in the book, I shall be glad to accept as the meaning of the book.
The best that I’ve seen is by a lady (she published it in a letter to a newspaper) that the whole book is an allegory on the search after happiness.
I think this fits beautifully in many ways, particularly about the bathing machines; when people get weary of life, and can’t find happiness in towns or in books, then they rush off to the seaside to see what bathing machines will do for them.”

Taking this idea for the foundation of the poem, it is easy to explain
Fit the First
, better named
The Landing
, though where they landed it is almost impossible to say.

“Just the place for a Snark,” the Bellman cried, and, as he stated this fact three distinct times, it was undoubtedly true.
That was the
Bellman’s
rule—once was uncertain, twice was possible, three times was “dead sure.”
And the
Bellman
being a person of some authority, ought to have known.
The crew consisted of a
Boots
, a
Maker of Bonnets and Hoods
, a
Barrister
, a
Broker
, a
Billiard-marker
, a
Banker
, a
Beaver
, a
Butcher
, and a nameless being who passed for the
Baker
, and who, in the end, turned out to be the luckless victim of the Snark.
He is thus beautifully described: