Delphi complete works of.., p.416
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 416
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand!
“‘If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year;
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.”
We note here the queer half-suggestion of statistics and mathematics; the exact calculation of the seven maids with seven mops working for six months, followed by the feeble mathematical conclusion, “I doubt it.” There is, of course, no room for doubt in mathematics; either they do it or they don’t. But this queer, sudden collapse of what sounded like severe reasoning, sounds terribly like something — is it parliamentary finance? or what?
The collegiate note is struck even more strongly a little lower down. Anybody who has ever looked over the thing called the agenda of a scientific society, meaning the mixture of things they propose to talk about, will recognize at once the type.
“The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.’”
The concluding verses, however, break away from mathematics and rest on problems of what seem to be mutual service and social help — but end (again just like something or other) in the death of the oysters.
“‘It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf —
I’ve had to ask you twice!’
“‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
‘To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘The butter’s spread too thick!’
“‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
“‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none —
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.”
On the conclusion of the recitation, Tweedledum and Tweedledee apply college reasoning to the Carpenter and the Walrus — what is called in philosophy the problem of conduct.
“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see, he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.”
“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best — if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”
“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.
The characters come drifting past — the White Queen who turns into a Sheep, Humpty Dumpty who lives in a tangle of Arithmetic, Kings, Lions and Unicorns, and then round the corner we go, right into the Middle Ages with the Red Knight and the White Knight. After their terrific duel, the Red Knight gallops off and Alice is left alone with the White Knight. One can picture him! His queer accoutrement of tin pans and “inventions” hung all around him; his gentle, simple face; his easy acceptance of failure; his refusal to complain; his willingness, if need be, to talk upside-down ... Cervantes in his Don Quixote painted a picture of departing chivalry, laughing it off the stage of history, as it were, only to find it come back again at his call. Mark Twain transported his Connecticut Yankee to King Arthur’s Court, to show what invention could do for mediaeval stagnation. But Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, even before the Yankee was written, had joined him with Don Quixote into the beautiful character of the White Knight, the character of “God’s Fool” that appears and reappears in the world’s literature. We may read him straight ahead for he interprets himself as he goes.
“It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it?” said the White Knight, as he came up panting.
“I don’t know,” Alice said doubtfully. “I don’t want to be anybody’s prisoner. I want to be a Queen.”
“So you will, when you’ve crossed the next brook,” said the White Knight. “I’ll see you safe to the end of the wood — and then I must go back, you know. That’s the end of my move.”
“Thank you very much,” said Alice. “May I help you off with your helmet?” It was evidently more than he could manage by himself; however, she managed to shake him out of it at last.
“Now one can breathe more easily,” said the Knight, putting back his shaggy hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild eyes to Alice. She thought she had never seen such a strange-looking soldier in all her life.
He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and he had a queer little deal box fastened across his shoulders upside-down, and with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with great curiosity.
“I see you’re admiring my little box,” the Knight said in a friendly tone. “It’s my own invention — to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see, I carry it upside-down, so that the rain can’t get in.”
“But the things can get out,” Alice gently remarked. “Do you know the lid’s open?”
“I didn’t know it,” the Knight said, a shade of vexation passing over his face. “Then all the things must have fallen out! And the box is no use without them.” He unfastened it as he spoke, and was just going to throw it into the bushes, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he hung it carefully on a tree. “Can you guess why I did that?” he said to Alice.
Alice shook her head.
“In hopes some bees may make a nest in it — then I should get the honey.”
“But you’ve got a bee-hive — or something like one — fastened to the saddle,” said Alice.
“Yes, it’s a very good bee-hive,” the Knight said in a discontented tone, “one of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet. And the other thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees out — or the bees keep the mice out, I don’t know which.”
“I was wondering what the mouse-trap was for,” said Alice. “It isn’t very likely there would be any mice on the horse’s back.”
“Not very likely, perhaps,” said the Knight; “but if they do come, I don’t choose to have them running all about.”
“You see,” he went on after a pause, “it’s as well to be provided for everything. That’s the reason the horse has anklets round his feet.”
“But what are they for?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
“To guard against the bites of sharks,” the Knight replied. “It’s an invention of my own. And now help me on. I’ll go with you to the end of the wood. What’s that dish for?”
“It’s meant for plum-cake,” said Alice.
“We’d better take it with us,” the Knight said. “It’ll come in handy if we find any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.”
This took a long time to manage, though Alice held the bag open very carefully, because the Knight was so very awkward in putting in the dish: the first two or three times that he tried he fell in himself instead. “It’s rather a tight fit, you see,” he said, as they got it in at last; “there are so many candlesticks in the bag.” And he hung it to the saddle, which was already loaded with bunches of carrots, and fire-irons, and many other things.
“I hope you’ve got your hair well fastened on?” he continued, as they set off.
“Only in the usual way,” Alice said, smiling.
“That’s hardly enough,” he said anxiously. “You see, the wind is so very strong here. It’s as strong as soup.”
“Have you invented a plan for keeping one’s hair from being blown off?” Alice inquired.
“Not yet,” said the Knight. “But I’ve got a plan for keeping it from falling off.”
“I should like to hear it very much.”
“First you take an upright stick,” said the Knight. “Then you make your hair creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is because it hangs down — things never fall upwards, you know. It’s my own invention. You may try it if you like.”
It didn’t sound a comfortable plan, Alice thought, and for a few minutes she walked on in silence, puzzling over the idea, and every now and then stopping to help the poor Knight, who certainly was not a good rider.
Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in front; and whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather suddenly), he fell off behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except that he had a habit of now and then falling off sideways; and as he generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon found that it was the best plan not to walk quite close to the horse.
“I’m afraid you’ve not had much practice in riding,” she ventured to say, as she was helping him up from his fifth tumble.
The Knight looked very much surprised, and a little offended at the remark. “What makes you say that?” he asked, as he scrambled back into the saddle, keeping hold of Alice’s hair with one hand, to save himself from falling over on the other side.
“Because people don’t fall off quite so often, when they’ve had much practice.”
“I’ve had plenty of practice,” the Knight said very gravely; “plenty of practice!”
Alice could think of nothing better to say than “Indeed?” but she said it as heartily as she could. They went on a little way in silence after this, the Knight with his eyes shut, muttering to himself, and Alice watched anxiously for the next tumble.
“The great art of riding,” the Knight suddenly began in a loud voice, waving his right arm as he spoke, “is to keep—” Here the sentence ended as suddenly as it had begun, as the Knight fell heavily on the top of his head exactly in the path where Alice was walking. She was quite frightened this time, and said in an anxious tone, as she picked him up, “I hope no bones are broken?”
“None to speak of,” the Knight said, as if he didn’t mind breaking two or three of them. “The great art of riding, as I was saying, is — to keep your balance. Like this, you know—”
He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice what he meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the horse’s feet.
“Plenty of practice!” he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was getting him on his feet again. “Plenty of practice!”
“It’s too ridiculous!” cried Alice, getting quite out of patience. “You ought to have a wooden horse on wheels, that you ought!”
“Does that kind go smoothly?” the Knight asked in a tone of great interest, clasping his arms round the horse’s neck as he spoke, just in time to save himself from tumbling off again.
“Much more smoothly than a live horse,” Alice said, with a little scream of laughter, in spite of all she could do to prevent it.
“I’ll get one,” the Knight said thoughtfully to himself. “One or two — several.”
There was a short silence after this; then the Knight went on again. “I’m a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, the last time you picked me up, that I was looking thoughtful?”
“You were a little grave,” said Alice.
“Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate — would you like to hear it?”
“Very much indeed,” Alice said politely
“I’ll tell you how I came to think of it,” said the Knight. “You see, I said to myself, The only difficulty is with the feet; the head is high enough already.’ Now, first I put my head on the top of the gate — then the head’s high enough — then I stand on my head — then the feet are high enough, you see — then I’m over, you see.”
“Yes, I suppose you’d be over when that was done,” Alice said thoughtfully; “but don’t you think it would be rather hard?”
“I haven’t tried it yet,” the Knight said gravely: “so I can’t tell for certain — but I’m afraid it would be a little hard.”
He looked so vexed at the idea that Alice changed the subject hastily. “What a curious helmet you’ve got!” she said cheerfully. “Is that your invention too?”
The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. “Yes,” he said, “but I’ve invented a better one than that — like a sugar-loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a very little way to fall, you see. But there was the danger of falling into it, to be sure. That happened to me once — and the worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.”
The Knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to laugh. “I’m afraid you must have hurt him,” she said in a trembling voice, “being on the top of his head.”
“I had to kick him, of course,” the Knight said, very seriously. “And then he took the helmet off again — but it took hours and hours to get me out. I was as fast as — as lightning, you know.”
“But that’s a different kind of fastness,” Alice objected.
The Knight shook his head. “It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you!” he said. He raised his hands in some excitement as he said this, and instantly rolled out of the saddle, and fell headlong into a deep ditch.
Alice ran to the side of the ditch to look for him. She was rather startled by the fall, as for some time he had kept on very well, and she was afraid that he really was hurt this time. However, though she could see nothing but the soles of his feet, she was much relieved to hear that he was talking on in his usual tone. “All kinds of fastness,” he repeated; “but it was careless of him to put another man’s helmet on — with the man in it, too.”
“How can you go on talking so quietly, head downwards?” Alice asked, as she dragged him out by the feet, and laid him in a heap on the bank.
The Knight looked surprised at the question. “What does it matter where my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.”
“Now the cleverest thing that I ever did,” he went on after a pause, “was inventing a new pudding during the meat-course.”
“In time to have it cooked for the next course?” said Alice. “Well, that was quick work, certainly.”
“Well, not the next course,” the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone; “no, certainly not the next course.”
“Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn’t have two pudding-courses in one dinner?”
“Well, not the next day,” the Knight repeated as before: “not the next day. In fact,” he went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and lower, “I don’t believe that pudding ever was cooked! In fact, I don’t believe that pudding ever will be cooked! And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent.”
“What did you mean it to be made of?” Alice asked, hoping to cheer him up, for he seemed quite low-spirited about it.
“It began with blotting-paper,” the Knight answered with a groan.
“That wouldn’t be very nice, I’m afraid—”
“Not very nice alone,” he interrupted, quite eagerly; “but you’ve no idea what a difference it makes, mixing it with other things — such as gunpowder and sealing-wax. And here I must leave you.”
Alice in Wonderland, as we have seen, came together by a sort of mystical gathering of bits and scraps, of ideas that came of themselves. As a result, by a sort of mathematical paradox, the whole turned out to be greater than its parts. Lewis Carroll himself, somewhat perplexed at this, wrote, “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,” nor was he trying to be funny when he said it. The proof of this is found in the fact that when he tried to repeat the process deliberately he failed utterly. The result of this attempt was embodied in the unhappy trash called Sylvie and Bruno, published in 1889. It met a hollow and false acclaim and rapidly subsided into oblivion. The book has long since been forgiven and forgotten. Here again are little children in a garden, one of them a boy — or meant to be. Lewis Carroll was not strong on boys. Indeed, his admiring biographer, Mr. Stuart Collingwood of Christ Church, calmly tells us that “he professed an aversion to boy nature, almost amounting to terror.” So little Bruno may have been born wrong by reason of Lewis Carroll’s fright. The book Sylvie and Bruno is meant to be another Wonderland, with the same queer shifting scenes and odd characters. But it doesn’t work. This time Lewis Carroll had gone at it deliberately. For years, we are told, he jotted down little actual scraps of child conversation. This was especially for Bruno who is at the baby stage and says “OO” for you.... “Does oo always confuses two animals together?” asks Bruno. “Oo never believes me,” he complains. Another time he says, “I never talks to nobody when he isn’t here. Oo should always wait till he comes before oo talks to him.” Pretty cute, eh? Don’t oo think so? In fact, about as tiresome as are all the quoted sayings of little children — except one’s own. Indeed, one would feel inclined to hand Bruno over to the Duchess and let him turn into a pig.
Ever so many people have tried to imitate Lewis Carroll and failed. But the first one who tried and failed was Lewis Carroll himself.
Gilbert’s “Bab” Ballads
IT IS A great change from the secluded woodland of Wonderland to the open scenes, the noise and the combat of the “Bab” Ballads. Here are the breezes of the sea, the thunder of guns, the clash of swords and the thud of the executioner’s axe. In Alice’s Wonderland, the characters just fade away and disappear. In the “Bab” Ballads, they are thrown into the sea, knocked on the head, or cut clean in two with scimitars of exquisite sharpness and their remains fed to sharks or boiled up by enthusiastic cannibals. In the most “popular” of the ballads, meaning the one that the plain people have liked best, The Yarn of the “Nancy Bell,” one character eats all the others, one by one. “Mr. Gilbert,” says a penetrating critic of today, “shows a sort of cruelty.... In fact, he cared little about the feelings of others.” Very little, one would think, if he boiled them alive and chopped them up, as one famous ballad puts it, “particularly small.” The same critic, however, adds that Gilbert was a “full-blooded, impatient Englishman,” which explains the whole thing.
