Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 414
So that brings me, Mr. Roosevelt, to that question I asked way up above, whether you have a loose dime? You may have forgotten it, but I’ve been thinking of it all through. If you haven’t got it, why, that’s all right. But if you have, what about lending it to us? I needn’t talk to you about our credit and how fine it is, because it’s wonderful, except of course in Alberta where they’ve got it a little too much socialized. But you know what they’re like in the West — big-hearted — a sort of effect of the big open spaces — well, never mind them: we’ll pay their share.
Now if you were to ask me how much, I would say that depends altogether on what you have. We’ll take all you’ve got, but beyond that we don’t want to go. And when I say send us over money, I don’t mean, of necessity, send it over to buy the kind of bonds in the table I spoke of. We have a line of common stocks that we are showing this winter that I think we can absolutely “guarantee,” as they say of the fresh eggs in our Bon Secours Market here. I hate to come down from the high level of this discussion to the low ground of political economy, but I know that I don’t need to tell Americans how beautiful is a dividend that is independent of the currency it’s paid in, because if the currency goes down the dividend goes up. Our money has fallen, as compared with yours, by ten per cent: as a matter of fact, all currencies are falling, like snowflakes coming down together, but some a little faster than the rest. Our snowflakes are wet and heavy just now with the gathering tears of war and fall a little bit faster for it; but we like them nonetheless for that: and soon the gathered warmth of national effort, peace and victory shall float them up in the sunshine....
But no, never mind all that. It’s all right, Mr. Roosevelt. If your people want to help and lend a hand or lend a dime, why, that’s fine! But if they can’t, it’s all right; we’ll manage. We’ve known hard years from our pioneer days down, hard times and mortgages, and the stress of war, and never yet broken faith for a day. We’ll go down deep and deeper into our pockets till we turn them inside out into emptiness. Who could fail to do it, with the tramp of the marching feet in our streets to remind us that there are higher things than money, and worse things than poverty? It’s all right, Mr. Roosevelt.
So let me get back again from my discussion of money and commerce to where I started from, the thesis that nothing that is to happen in Europe must disturb the peace and good will that prevails in North America. It has been fashioned in a mould that, once broken, can never be reset.
Those of us who study the past often think of the British people as the fortunate children of history; free from invasion for close upon a thousand years; their institutions struck deep into soil, ancient as the elms and oaks of their countryside: antiquity preserved in a hundred quaint and venerable forms, time’s chain upon the present; freedom so long established that it has bred a kindly tolerance that knows no cruelty: that merely touches crime upon the shoulder and says, “Come along with me”: lends a soap box to a communist to speak from: and fights and dies without hatred, calling its enemy “Fritz.” “That was a fine shot,” so said the other day a British Navy Captain before going down with his torpedoed ship, and, saying it, added another line to the golden page.
This same happy destiny, on a still larger scale, of an uninvaded land and an undisturbed peace, is offered to us in North America, as seen in the broad view of history, where a generation is but a day. Shaded and vexed as it is by fierce industrial conflict, it still has moved forward toward enduring peace. The light fights against the darkness. Already the twilight of the dawn is touched with the rising sun.
Over Great Britain, for the moment, a dark shadow has fallen. No one who knows the worth of the British people can doubt that it will pass. Such a people cannot die.
But when the shadow passes, they must not look across a clearer ocean to see that it has fallen over us. They must see that the broad daylight of peace and good will, which came to us in America from the sunrise out of their islands, has been unshadowed and unvexed, and shall so pass to the noonday of a larger future.
VI
THESE TWO ARTICLES WERE INTENDED FOR AN ANTHOLOGY OF HUMOUR, NEVER FINISHED, “NOT TO BE REGARDED AS AN ATTEMPT TO SELECT THE WORLD’S BEST HUMOUR BUT AS A PURELY PERSONAL DISCUSSION OF THE THINGS THAT I HAVE READ AND ADMIRED AND INVITE PEOPLE TO READ AGAIN WITH ME.”
Alice Walks in Wonderland
ALICE IN WONDERLAND is one of the world’s books. The name is so familiar that the world forgets that it is really two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The first was published in 1865 and the second not till 1871, but they generally pass amalgamated as Alice in Wonderland. Few people could remember offhand whether or not the Walrus and the Carpenter were in the same book with the Mad Hatter. But no one doubts the unity of the whole. Book One or Two, it is all Wonderland with the same kind of people in it, found nowhere else.
All of it is the work of Lewis Carroll who was in reality the last person to have written it. His real name was the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), and he lived a secluded life in Christ Church College, Oxford, as a clerical don and a fellow and tutor in mathematics. Here life passed easily by, term succeeding term, as sheltered as the quadrangles of the colleges, as timeless as the flow of the River Isis. Here lived a bygone world of cloistered, clerical, classical quiet, a world of learning undisturbed, majestic in its prestige, profound in its very ignorance. Here Greek grammar outranked the maker of the Suez Canal. Yet these cloistered, clerical scholars, walking like rooks in their college quad, maintained in religion essentially the beliefs of the Tennessee fundamentalists, and outside of it a complete ignorance of, and often a complete contempt for, at least one-half of the things that constitute the world’s knowledge of today. For them chemistry was a stinking business, geology halfway to hell and electricity better left alone.
In this environment Lewis Carroll fitted like a white mouse in a silk box. He lived in sort of half-seclusion with just enough to do not to have nothing to do, wrote a few mathematical disquisitions, and quite a long theological monograph, but chiefly he revelled in the puzzles and acrostics and conceits of language that come down from scholastic days. Biographers exalt his mathematics for sensation’s sake. But, in reality, Lewis Carroll’s mathematical writings amounted to nothing more than textbook stuff, juggling Euclid Book V into algebra and so on. His chief theological writing is a little treatise on the problem of eternal punishment in Hell by a loving God, which he shows in a rather misty way to be just the kind of thing that a loving God would institute, if it didn’t last too long. It might be so — in Wonderland.
The chief and most obvious personal characteristic of the Reverend Charles Dodgson was his extraordinary fondness for little girls; he loved to loll with them in punts, to nestle with them in the grass beneath a tree, and to tell them neverending stories. This is of course so admirable, especially in a young cleric, that those of us made of rougher metal are not allowed to call it “sissy.” But I’d like to — the endless pussy-wussy letters to little girls, the endless willingness to have them in to tea, and to take their photographs in the spacious set of rooms which he enjoyed at Christ Church. A little of that sort of thing may be excellent but, as they say in Yiddish-English, too much is enough.
More than that. The Reverend Mr. Dodgson was not only a sissy in college but a sissy outside of it. He thought swearing terrible, and the faintest touch of scoffing at sacred things, even in fun, distressed his sensitive nature. For example, he thought some of the so-called fun of England’s new writer, Mr. W. S. Gilbert, most deplorable stuff. Gilbert, celebrated already for his “Bab” Ballads, had now opened out into the glorious fun of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. But it was too glorious for Lewis Carroll to see; it dazzled his eyes, unused to full daylight. He thought it dreadful of Mr. Gilbert to make fun of curates and the church. There is in one of the earlier operas, forgotten now, the Sorcerer, a delightful song, executed by a Bishop who embodies all the plump and decorous prosperity of his happy office, a song detailing his life as a “pale young curate”:
Time was when love and I were well acquainted,
Time was when we walked ever hand in hand;
A saintly youth with worldly thought untainted,
None better loved than I in all the land.
Time was when maidens of the noblest station,
Forsaking even military men,
Would gaze upon me; rapt in adoration —
Ah, me, I was a fair young curate then.
Had I a headache? Sighed the maids assembled;
Had I a cold? Welled forth the silent tear;
Did I look pale? Then half the parish trembled;
And when I coughed all thought the end was near.
I had no care — no jealous doubts hung o’er me —
For I was loved beyond all other men.
Fled gilded dukes and belted earls before me —
Ah, me, I was a pale young curate then.
Any one who cannot exult in the fun and thrill to the final cadence of that song has neither music nor humour. But it was too much for Lewis Carroll.
“Mr. Gilbert,” he wrote in the London magazine The Theatre, “seems to have a craze for making bishops and clergymen contemptible.... The Pale Young Curate is to me simply painful. I seem to see him as he goes home at night, pale and worn with his day’s work, perhaps sick with the pestilent atmosphere of a noisome garret, where, at the risk of his life, he has been comforting a dying man — and is your sense of humour, my reader, so keen that you can laugh at that man? Then be consistent ... laugh also at the pale young soldier as he sinks on the trampled battlefield” ...
Quite so. But not all pale young curates lived in the slums. A good many of them played croquet and drank tea on the lawn. That’s where they met the gilded earls and belted knights who ran away from them. These boys were not to be met in the slums. Lewis Carroll really shows his limitations. He didn’t understand that Gilbert was in fun. We may compare the man mentioned in Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes, who had a high-spirited, mischievous son Augustus who used to push people under buses: “I will say this about my son, he does enjoy a bit of fun.” Gilbert wasn’t thinking of slums and dying paupers who infested curates. He was like Augustus — just enjoying “a bit of fun.” One might as well denounce Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock poem as a scene of hideous bloodshed, or feel horrified when the Duchess’ baby turned into a pig and she threw it away. How painful for motherhood.
Still worse is Lewis Carroll’s denunciation of the terrible swearing in Gilbert’s Pinafore, where some one actually says, “Damme.”
He writes:
I have never seen Mr. Gilbert’s clever play Pinafore performed by grown-up actors; as played by children one passage in it was to me sad beyond words. It occurs when the Captain utters the oath, “damme,” and forthwith a bevy of sweet, innocent-looking little girls sing, with bright, happy looks, the chorus, “He said, ‘Damme me.’ He said, ‘Damme me.’” I cannot find words to convey to the reader the pain I felt in seeing those dear children taught to utter such words to amuse ears grown callous to their ghastly meaning.
A little while ago (September, 1941) one of the few survivors of the Oxford of that day, Mrs. Margaret Woods, distinguished as the daughter of George Granville Bradley, Dean of Westminster (1821-1903), and on her own account as a novelist, wrote an interesting reminiscence of Lewis Carroll in the Oxford of the Seventies.
The most enduringly famous of the Oxford writers of that date was Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. His real name was Dodgson and he was a Senior Student, that is, a Fellow of Christ Church, where he lived a secluded life in his college rooms. He had formerly been intimate with the family of Dean Liddell, the Dean of the College, and the story of Alice had been first told to the Liddell children. When the Alice of his tale had grown into a lovely girl, he asked, in old-world fashion, her father’s permission to pay his addresses to her. The Dean might reasonably have refused his permission on the ground of the girl’s youth and inexperience, and the discrepancy in age between her and their friend. But Dean Liddell, whose manner was always haughty, rebuffed Mr. Dodgson’s appeal in so offensive a way that all intercourse between them ceased. It is an awkward situation for a Fellow of a college not to be on speaking terms with his Head. Mr. Dodgson now took up photography but here also he found a snag. He invited a very little girl to be photographed and took her almost unclothed. Her mother shrieked at the impropriety of this. No wonder the sensitive man of genius became propriety-stricken. Hence the unsatisfactoriness of my own contacts with him. When I was fifteen, he expressed a wish to photograph me and invited my mother to bring me to lunch in his rooms. Their lunch time conversation was not amusing and, as manners for schoolgirls then enjoined, I remained silent. The resulting photograph represented a self-conscious young lady sitting bolt upright in her chair, with a forced smile on her face. My only tête-à-tête with him about a year later was still more unfortunate. I met him at Reading Station where I was changing for Oxford. He was seated in a first class carriage and found that I was alone and travelling third class. This horrified him, not quite so unreasonably as we thought, for there were traps set for young girls on journeys, of which my innocent mother was as ignorant as myself. I got into an empty compartment and to my embarrassment Mr. Dodgson left his first class carriage and joined me there. Seating himself at the furthest end to (sic) myself, he put arithmetical puzzles to me during the rest of the journey. My education had been neglected and not being interested in arithmetic I never learned more than was necessary for keeping accounts. Consequently I could not solve one of his conundrums, and he doubtless concluded me to be a stupid girl, for he took no further notice of me.
So one would think that such a secluded, academic, not to say sissified, young man would be the last person to amuse his more robust compatriots and his rough transatlantic cousins for three generations. And so, indeed, he was in his ordinary walk in life. “I knew and greatly valued Charles Dodgson,” wrote one of his intimate friends, “in the friendly intercourse of life; but the friend of the fireside and the family dinner table was totally unlike the Lewis Carroll that popular imagination would picture. I may truthfully say that throughout much friendly intercourse with Charles Dodgson, the remembrance of which I value greatly, I never met that exquisite humourist Lewis Carroll.”
For here stepped in a peculiar mystery or magic such as occurs in the creation of literature of exception. It was like Charles Dickens groping his way, leading the Pickwick Club by the bridles of their horses and then turning around a corner into the magic world of Dingley Dell and the White Hart Inn; such a world as never was, quite untrue to life, but much better, as all our lives ought to be, and hence more true than life itself. It was like Mark Twain, fumbling around with an attempt at a new Tom Sawyer story, the same old pranks grown stale, and then drifting away down the Mississippi on a raft with Huckleberry Finn. So it was with Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll, telling random stories to his little girls, made up as he went along, fell down a rabbit hole into a most extraordinary world of odd characters. He didn’t make them up. They just seemed to come; and the odd thing is that these impossible characters always seem to be suggesting something else. It all seems as if we had heard it before; as if it meant something that we don’t quite apprehend, and yet recognize; something half-caught and yet slipping away, leaving its unsolved suggestion. We keep asking, as the shifting inconsequential scenes and people pass by, What is that? Who is that like? Where have I heard that?
For example, at the Mad Hatter’s Tea-Party which we quote below, when the Hatter and the March Hare shake the Dormouse to wake him up and he says, “I heard every word you fellows were saying.” ... Surely we have heard that before. It sounds so familiar — yes! — men together in the evening and one who dozes off from too much open-air exercise — that’s exactly what it is!
But Lewis Carroll himself could only guess what the characters meant and where the talk came from. “Bits and scraps,” he said, “every idea and nearly every word of the dialogue came of itself.... I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion ... the Red Queen a fury, but cold and calm.... The White Queen gentle, stupid, fat and pale, and helpless as an infant ... suggesting imbecility but never quite passing into it.” It was a queer process that went on in his brain; something half-suggested, a peculiar power to write half an idea, which the reader half-gets. When he was asked what The Hunting of the Snark meant, Lewis Carroll answered truthfully that he didn’t know. He said that he was walking one day on a hillside when it suddenly occurred to him that “the Snark was a Boojum.” This was like one of the revelations of the Old Testament. More was revealed later— “pieced itself together” — he said. So the Snark remains an unfathomed mystery.
These fancies were first precipitated into written form as the result of a summer afternoon picnic in the long vacation. He had with him the three children of Dr. Liddell, the pundit mentioned above, the Head of Mr. Dodgson’s college, the joint compiler of Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon. Lewis Carroll has told the story himself.
“I made an expedition up the river,” wrote Mr. Dodgson in his diary of July 4, 1862, “to Godstow with the three Liddells; we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach Christ Church till half-past eight.” Later he inserted, “On which occasion I told them the fairy tale of Alice’s adventures underground.” As a matter of fact, another clerical gentleman, the late Canon Duckworth, says he was also in the boat when Dodgson told the story as they rowed. He may have been. If so, Lewis Carroll forgot he was there. He disappeared like the Cheshire Cat.
