It was the White Rabbit talking to himself that first attracted her, but a short stay in “Wonderland” got her quite used to all sorts of animals and their funny talk, and the way she had of growing larger or smaller on the shortest notice was very puzzling and amusing. How like real people was this dream-child; how many everyday folks find themselves too small for great places, and too great for the small ones, and how many experiments they try to make themselves larger or smaller! You see Lewis Carroll thought of all this, though he did not spoil his story by stopping to explain. It is, indeed, poor nonsense that has to be explained every step of the way.
The dream “Alice” just at first was apt to cry if anything unusual or unpleasant happened; a bad habit with some children, the real Alice was given to understand. At any rate, when she drank out of the bottle that tasted of “cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast,” and found herself growing smaller and smaller, she cried, because she was only ten inches high and could not possibly reach the Golden Key on the glass table. Then she took herself to task very sharply, saying: “Come, there’s no use in crying like that! I advise you to leave off this minute!”
“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes, and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people, when there’s hardly enough left of me to make one respectable person.’”
Then when she found the little glass box with a cake in it marked “Eat Me” in currants, she decided that if she ate it something different might happen, for otherwise she would go out like a candle if she grew any smaller. Of course, as soon as she swallowed the whole cake, she took a start and soon stood nine feet high in her slippers.
“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so surprised that for the moment she quite forgot to speak good English), ‘now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was. Good-bye, feet!’ (for when she looked down at her feet they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off.) ‘Oh, my poor little feet! I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you; you must manage the best way you can; but I must be kind to them,’ thought Alice, ‘or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.’”
“And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. ‘They must go by the carrier,’ she thought; ‘and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s own feet, and how odd the directions will look!
Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.,
Hearthrug,
near the Fender,
(with Alice’s love).
Oh, dear, what nonsense I’m talking.’”
Perhaps it was just here that the children’s merriment broke forth; the idea of Alice being nine feet high was too ridiculous, but the poor dream “Alice” didn’t think so, for she sat down and began to cry again.
“‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘a great girl like you’ (she might well say this) ‘to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment I tell you!’ But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears until there was a large pool all around her about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.”
This change she found more puzzling still: everything seemed mixed up, the Multiplication Table, Geography, even the verses which had been familiar to her from babyhood. She tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but the words would not come right; instead she began repeating, in a hoarse, strange voice, the following noble lines:
“How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
“How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!”
Naturally this produced a sensation, for where is the child who speaks English who does not know that the busy bee “improves the shining hours!”
When the book was translated into French, however, this odd little rhyme not being known to the French children, the translator, M. Henri Bué, had to substitute something else which they could understand—one of their own French rhymes made into a parody of La Fontaine’s “Maître Corbeau” (Master Raven).
When Alice began to shrink again, she went suddenly splash into that immense pool of tears she had shed when she was nine feet high. Now she was only two feet high and the water was up to her chin. It was so salty, being tear-water, that she thought she had fallen into the sea, and in this sly fashion Lewis Carroll managed to smuggle in a timely word about the sad way some little girls have of shedding “oceans of tears” on the most trifling occasion.
It was on this briny trip that she fell in with the numbers of queer animals who had also taken refuge in the “Pool of Tears,” from the Mouse to the Lory, who had all fallen into the water and were eagerly swimming toward the shore. They gained it at last and sat there, “the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable,” including Alice herself, whose long hair hung wet and straggling on her shoulders.
The Lory, of all the odd animals, was probably the oddest. Alice found herself talking familiarly with them all, and entering into quite a lengthy argument with the Lory in particular about how to get dry. But the Lory “turned sulky and would only say: ‘I am older than you and must know better,’ and this ‘Alice’ would not allow without knowing how old it was, and as the ‘Lory’ positively refused to tell its age, there was nothing more to be said.”
Lewis Carroll himself made some interesting notes on the life history of this remarkable animal, which were first produced in The Rectory Umbrella long before he thought of popping it into “Wonderland.” “This creature,” he writes, “is, we believe, a species of parrot. Southey informs us that it is a bird of gorgeous plumery [plumage], and it is our private opinion that there never existed more than one, whose history, as far as practicable, we will now lay before our readers.”
“The time and place of the Lory’s birth is uncertain; the egg from which it was hatched was most probably, to judge from the colour of the bird, one of those magnificent Easter eggs which our readers have doubtless seen. The experiment of hatching an Easter egg is at any rate worth trying.”
After a lengthy and confusing description he winds up as follows:
“Having thus stated all we know and a great deal we don’t know on this interesting subject, we must conclude.”
Alice looked upon this domineering old bird of uncertain age quite as a matter of course, as, indeed, she looked upon everything that happened in Wonderland.
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 otherw
ise 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:
Complete Works of Lewis Carroll Page 159
