Through the Looking Glass VI -- chapter 4: BLACK BIRD

The first half of Chapter 4 (to the completion of Dee's recitation) manages a balance of true nonsense for nonsense's sake ("The Walrus and the Carpenter," for example, though I think there's yet some revelatory nuggets here anyway) and what I believe to be truly symbolic, either as intended by Carroll or as subconscious manifestation.

What are your thoughts regarding:

• the music from the tree, which starts when Alice and the Tweedles begin their brief dance and ends abruptly upon their finishing;
• Alice's narration of her story to her sister;
• "The Walrus and the Carpenter":

– There is evidence that Carroll intended no symbolism whatsoeverby this poem, and despite uncounted readers' attempts, and that it’s indeed complete nonsense, for Carroll left the choice of the second character to Tenniel, based upon the latter's preference in drawing, betwixt a carpenter, a butterfly, and a baronet.

– (from Roger Green, via Martin Gardner) The operetta Alice, by Savile Clarke extends the ending of the poem with an additional stanza, thus:

        The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

                The Walrus ceased to weep;

        They’d finished all the oysters;

                And they laid them down to sleep—

        And of their craft and cruelty

                The punishment to reap.

        —at which point the ghosts of two oysters return and dance upon the chests of the gluttons.  According to Gardner “Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oysters sympathizers among the spectators.”

The second half of the chapter is significantly darker, even if you are an oyster sympathizer.

1. Which is Alice more justified to "like": the Walrus, who felt sorry for the oysters; or the Carpenter, who ate fewer of them?
2. The Red King is Carroll.  Defend.
3. Dee and Dum are mirror opposites (enantiomorphs; examine Tenniel's illustration of Alice preparing the brothers for combat.  Except for the accoutrement, they are indeed mirror images of each other).  If one stood before a mirror, he would not see himself (so to speak), but his brother.  As we're dealing with reflections, what do you think of someone battling with his/her own reflection?
4. This chapter opens with a famous nursery rhyme, which turns out in the end of the chapter to be prophetic--i.e. the crow actually comes.  Does Carroll, perhaps passively, hope that his writing might be similarly prophetic?  Does he have any such hope?
5. Interesting bit of double symbolism with the crow: first, consider the quotation from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, below; second, the fact that in 585 B.C. the war between King Alyattes of Lydia and King Cyaxares of Medes ended--or was interrupted--by a total eclipse of the sun.  Tangentially, is there a connection between Alice's taking refuge under a tree and the somehow-avoidance of dark and death?

From Tortilla Flat:

        Where is Danny?  Lonely as smoke on a clear cold night, he drifts through Monterey in the evening.  To the post-office he goes, to the station, to the pool rooms on Alvarado Street, to the wharf where the black water mourns among the piles.  What is it, Danny?  What makes you feel this way?  Danny didn’t know.  There was an ache in his heart like the farewell to a dear woman; there was a vague sorrow in him like the despair of autumn.  He walked past the restaurants he used to smell with interest, and no appetite was aroused in him.  He walked by Madam Zuca’s great establishment, and exchanged no obscene jests with the girls in the windows.  Back to the wharf he went.  He leaned over the rail and looked into the deep, deep water.  Do you know, Danny, how the wine of your life is pouring into the fruit jars of the gods?  Do you see the procession of your days in the oily water among the piles?  He remained motionless, staring down.

        They were worried about him at Danny’s house, when it began to get dark.  The friends left the party and trotted down the hill into Monterey.  They asked, “Have you seen Danny?”

        “Yes, Danny walked by here an hour ago.  He walked slow.”

        Pilon and Pablo hunted together.  They traced their friend over the route he had followed, and at last they saw him, on the end of the dark pier.  He was lighted by a dim electric wharf light.  They hurried out to him.

        Pablo did not mention it then, but ever afterwards it was his custom, when Danny was mentioned, to describe what he saw as he and Pilon walked out on the wharf toward Danny.  “There he stood,” Pablo always said.  “I could just see him, leaning on the rail.  I looked at him, and then I saw something else.  At first it looked like a black cloud in the air over Danny’s head.  And then I saw it was a big black bird, as big as a man.  It hung in the air like a hawk over a rabbit hole.  I crossed myself and said two Hail Marys.  The bird was gone when we came to Danny.”

*

The Tweedles always frightened me more than anything else in the two books when I was a kid.

"NOSTALGIA FOR THE NIGHT"

Go here and watch the trailer:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/nostalgiaforthelight/

This is real.  Of it I'd love to learn more, and hope to see the movie; but this isn't the point:

O, how reality is so infinitely more 
creative than our imaginations!

The Atacama, by virtue of its simple geography, juxtaposes--generating a reciprocal, implicit allegory between them--the efforts of scientists gazing upward to space to find the origins of life to those searching the sand, digging downward toward their lost family, which task and object become their locus of self-identity.

I challenge you to find a fictional metaphor as poignant and original.

A PERFECT SIMILE

From The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (again -- I can't help myself -- Is there no end to Keeler's brilliance?):

Context:
A character, blackmailed for murder, seeks refuge without possibility of extradition in a fictional South American country by the name of San Do Mar, with possible plans to stop briefly in New Orleans along the way to await news from his friend.  He's worried about cold feet and comments that, "Yes, I--I am in a nervous state.  I know it.  And once I'm 900 miles or so from my home town, I'll--I'll be in a worse state than ever.  I'm even likely to head back to--to Canada--instead of giving the police a chance to pull me off of some United Fruit Company liner," to which the protagonist and the man's friend, not to mention employee, Clay Calthorpe brilliant remarks:

"No.  You're done for--if you do that.  

Canada is as much a refuge for you as--as a 

Wisconsin lumber camp is for a lost virgin."


*

Through the Looking Glass V -- chapter 3: NAMES and NO NAMES

1. Curiously, there are no bishops in the book, except here, however, this very subtle mention: bishops were once calls elephants, and in Russian still are.
2. "'Oh, I liked it well enough--' (here came the favourite little toss of the head)...."
3. The chorus on the train--like a musical or a Greek play--interests me (not the "pounds a ____," but its very presence).  What do you make of it in the Alice context?
4. (The passengers in the train coach are full of puns and suggestions of once-famous puns and rhymes.)
5. An interesting combination: the gnat sighs, much like the lamenting wasp in the retracted "Wasp in a Wig" episode; there is a "shadow of a sigh" mentioned in the prefatory poem; trains are classic symbols of choice, change, and the relentless passage of time, and this train is also "traveling the wrong way" (a reversal, of course, but also a metaphor for Alice's growth away from Carroll); finally, remember that Alice, according to the conductor, has forgotten her name, which may correlate to the Red Queen's advice at the end of chapter 2.  The gnat: "I know you are a friend, a dear friend, and an old friend.  And you wo'n't hurt me, though I am an insect."
6. If Carroll is the Gnat (which, considering the conversation, is, I think, inevitable), and we extend the characteristic adult-ishness of Wonderland to Looking-Glass House, then perhaps the fact the insects' silence where Alice comes from works on a level beyond the simple fact that, duh, bugs don't talk, at least not to children; and this then emphasizes Carroll's grief, where Carroll is so fundamentally different than the rest of his caste.
7. The fantastic thing, at least for Carroll, of a secret place without names or labels is its utter anonymity.  Here, nothing would prevent him from approaching Alice, especially in such form as an innocent fawn.  Only on leaving would the fawn and the girl remember who they were and, as it happens and by necessary skittishness of the former, have to part (or is it not Carroll, but merely an analogue of the otherwise inevitable distance between human/wild animal and the impossibility of their continued relationship?).  Note also that in its very beginning Eden must not have had names either.  (This is another scene, so much like that of Alice's moment thinking favorably of the snow forever beyond the window, that touches my soul.)  From Martin Gardner:  The wood in which things have no name is in fact the universe itself, as it is apart from symbol-manipulating creatures who label portions of it because--as Alice earlier remarked with pragmatic wisdom-- "it's useful to the people that name them."  The realization that the world by itself contains no signs--that there is no connection whatever between things and their names except by way of the mind that finds the tags useful--is by no means a trivial philosophic insight.
8. All the issues with names, and Carroll's own split between writer Carroll and professor Dodgson!

"My First Sermon," by John Everett Millais

A CALL FOR IGNORANCE -- and the Gap Between Observation and Reality

From chapter 3 of Summerland, by Michael Chabon:

Jennifer T. Rideout had spent more time at the ruins of the Summerland Hotel than any other child of her generation.  It was a thirty-seven-minute hike, through woods, fields and the parking lot of the county dump, from the Rideout place to the beach.  There was no road you could take to get you there; there had never been a road to the hotel.  That was something she had always liked about the place.  In the old days, her uncle Mo had told her, everything came to the hotel by steamship: food, linens, fine ladies and gentlemen, mail, musicians, fireworks on the Fourth of July.  Though nowadays it was a popular spot for teenagers in the summer, on gray winter afternoons Hotel Beach could be pretty forlorn.  As if in payment for the miracle of its summer sunshine, in the winter it was tormented by rain and fog, hailstorms, icy rain.  Green stuff grew all over everything, this weird cross between algae and fungus and slime that settled like snow over the piles of drift and anything else that was made out of wood.  On a damp, chilly winter afternoon she often found herself to be the only human being on the whole Tooth.

Another thing she liked, besides the solitude, were the stories.  A boy from up by Kiwanis Beach wandered into one of the abandoned beach cabins at dusk and came out stark raving mad, having seen something he could never afterward describe.  Ghosts of the hotel dead, ghostly orchestras playing, phantoms doing the Lindy Hop in the light of the full moon.  Sometimes people felt someone touching their cheek, pinching their arm, even giving them a kick in the seat of the pants.  Girls had their skirts lifted, or found their hair tied in intractable knots.  Jennifer T. didn’t necessarily believe these legends.  But they gave Hotel Beach an atmosphere that she enjoyed.  Jennifer T. Rideout believed in magic, maybe even more than Ethan did—otherwise she could not have been a part of this story.  But she also believed that she had been born a hundred years too late to get even the faintest taste of it.  Long ago there had been animals that talked, and strange little Indians who haunted the birch wood, while other Indians lived in villages on the bottom of the Sound.  Now that world had all but vanished.  Except on the ball field of Summerland, that is, and here at Hotel Beach.

My typical cycle of audiobooks has brought me back to Summerland.  I don't have very many audiobooks, and we haven't been back to the library anytime recently to get one I haven't already listened to a dozen times.  I don't mind.  This is a fantastic--and a fantastical--book, which, like so many of the best books, yields something new with each pass.

I listened to this passage (quoted above) about my favorite character from the book, Jennifer T., while driving home from work yesterday, and it got me thinking (fear not: I didn't hurt myself!) --not that my thoughts generally, much less these particularly, brought anything revolutionary.  Really this is all pretty old stuff, but borne upon something more poignant, less abstract.

We all know, of course, that superstition comes from ignorance.  The more educated you are, generally, the less superstitious you are.  Generally.  Along these same lines, and with far less connoted negativity, so the ability to live, to exist, and from within the very substance of one's imagination--to miss the fuzzy borders that divide personal fantasy from reality (and as only the recklessly preoccupied and gleefully distracted kid can do) --is reliant on ignorance.  Education and wisdom (conventional wisdom) de-fuzz that border.  This is not to say the educated can't imagine, but their (dare I say "our"?) imaginations must be lived out and delivered packaged neatly within the strictures of contrivance--the story, the picture, the movie, etcetera.

I watch my children, whose imaginations are just as real as reality, and I weakly relive, vicariously, the days when I was so ignorant (back before I'd burdened myself with the inconvenience of all this cumbersome knowledge, which, far from anything to boast of, so often translates merely to feeble pragmatism), and likely to trip, literally, into real fantasy, as they.

Maybe I'm irresponsible:  is the desperate speed with which we educate our children, and in effort to keep up with all the international and unimaginative Joneses, really so necessary?  More favorably and locally:  I wish I could be less responsible; and, even less likely and more selfishly, I wish I could be both.  I wish, often, that I could backtrack, wash away, as does Ethan in Summerland's finale (vague spoiler in the next phrase), where, by the mighty force of his childish faith and desperation, he returns the magic, eradicates Coyote's mischief, and the galls between the several worlds are remade.  But I can't.  No one can.  Once the magic is lost, it's gone, only to be had second-hand or through the machine--organic or calculated--of art and entertainment.  The less we know, the greater the gap between our observations and reality, and the more space there is for our imaginations to fill.  That gap shrinks as our life, within the real world, jades us.

Not that education is so bad.  Learning about this world and the reality of distant others--which learning is so often just as mysterious and mystifying as that childish magic in the gap--for me, an adult (more or less), carries, as far as I can tell, a very similar, and often as powerful, a bliss as those bygone fantasies and space-aliens and lands where I could speak the languages of all the prolix beasts, all so tangibly "real."

Dreams are insufficient proxies for the waking reality of childhood magic that lives and breathes around them, wheezes and coughs under their beds, in the vacant spaces away from knowledgeable adults, within the stuffed heads of teddy bears and rayon tigers--in the Lego box, the coloring book, or building blocks.  That empty air that crackles with life between the ecstatic faces of my 6- and 3-year-olds.

I love my books.  I love my "academic" discussions.  I love watching Jeopardy or playing Trivial Pursuit and knowing stuff.  I love being an English teacher and yet find that I can fairly fluently teach 7th and 8th grade science (not that this is so impressive, I know, but you get the idea).  And when it comes right down to it, the loss of magic--the narrowing of that gap--is inevitable.  'Tis the world we live in.  Responsibility erases the freedom of childhood.  Stuffed animals and Legos are no longer any more than stuffing and plastic.  That electric air loses its charge, as stress of bills, work, and family mount.  For this, then, to preserve what does yet remains of the gap, or even just fabricate a little more of it every once in while, I am eternally grateful for books, for movies, for stories, and  the ever-childish interest I have in creating/writing, and maybe, flimsily, even inhabiting my own.

Wednesday's for Kids XIV -- LATE NIGHT, SNEAKY READING

I have a tendency (unintentional, of course) to exaggerate how young I was when I started to read "chapter books," as they're called.  Regardless of how old I was or wasn't, non-fiction tended to dominate my grade school canon.  Yeah, I was dorky.  I actually read an abridged dictionary for Book It! in 3rd grade--well, A-E or F or so, anyway.  My favorites were a series of fantastically illustrated books by David Macaulay with such terse titles as Cathedral, Castle, Pyramid, and City.  I would read these over and over again, way too late into the night, hiding under the blankets with the flashlight--feet on my pillow, face at the foot, buried deep--and a ready ear tuned to the stairs in case Dad came to check on me.  I don't remember the grades precisely--somewhere between 2nd and 5th, more or less, I'd say--but somewhere around the discovery of Macauley (thanks, Dad), there were also three novels--whoa! fiction!! --that equally captured my imagination, also which I only ever read late at night (unlike the Alice books, which were uniquely day-reading), and all of which remain to this day three of my all-time favorites.  (And two of them are actually pretty darn good!)

1: Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry  --  I lost my copy and am eager to buy a new one.  This is the first novel I ever fell in love with. 

2: Invasion of the Brain Sharpeners, by Philip Curtis  --  Admittedly, this isn't a fantastic book by typical, snobby literary standards.  It falls under roughly the same category as The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, which I've been raving about so much lately.  This is pulp fiction (not the movie, for better or worse) for kids.  (This book also maintains a particular hold on me as a teacher.  The book's premise: a teacher bemoans his idiot students and wishes they were sharper; eavesdropping aliens not so far away come to sharpen their brains!)

my personal copy -- a treasure!

3: James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.  --  Enough said.  (Well, not quite, apparently:)  It's better than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Seriously.  And if you've only ever seen the movie, then shame on you!

I can't say this is my personal copy.  Somehow it
accompanied me to college from home and never
made its way back.

"ALICE ON THE STAGE": In His Own Words

Photograph of Alice and Dormouse;
courtesy, www.christies.com

Regarding, "Alice on the Stage," from www.christies.com (here), oft mentioned by this blog and so many other commentaries of Alice:  "A paper of six pages so entitled, in the Theatre for Apr. 1887... and criticizes Savile Clarke's dramatization of Alice. Incidentally Dodgson recounts the origin of Alice and of the Snark... The most interesting part of the article is his conception of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, and the White Queen, in character sketches, apart from what they said or did on the stage" (Williams-Madan-Green-Crutch 203). 

Alice on the Stage

Lewis Carroll; in The Theatre; April, 1887

'LOOK here; here's all this Judy's clothes falling to pieces again.' Such were the pensive words of Mr Thomas Codlin; and they may fitly serve as a motto for a writer who has set himself the unusual task of passing in review a set of puppets that are virtually his own--the stage embodiments of his own dream-children. 

Not that the play itself is in any sense mine. The arrangements, in dramatic form, of a story written without the slightest idea that it would be so adapted, was a task that demanded powers denied to me, but possessed in an eminent degree, so far as I can judge, by Mr Saville Clarke. I do not feel myself qualified to criticise his play, as a play; nor shall I venture on any criticism of the players as players. 

What is it, then, I have set myself to do? And what possible claim have I to be heard? My answer must be that, as the writer of the two stories thus adapted, and the originator (as I believe, for at least I have not consciously borrowed them) of the 'airy nothings' for which Mr Saville Clarke has so skilfully provided, if not a name, at least, a 'local habitation', I may without boastfulness claim to have a special knowledge of what it was I meant them to be, and so a special understanding of how far that intention has been realised. And I fancied there might be some readers of The Theatre who would be interested in sharing that knowledge and that understanding. 

Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream--the three little maidens and I--and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit--whether it were at times when the narrator was 'i' the vein', and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say--yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards. And so, to please a child I loved (I don't remember any other motive), I printed in manuscript, and illustrated with my own crude designs--designs that rebelled against every law of Anatomy or Art (for I had never had a lesson in drawing)--the book which I have just had published in facsimile. In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication: but (this may interest some readers of 'Alice' to know) every such idea and nearly every word of the dialogue, came of itself. Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down--sometimes when out on a lonely winter walk, when I have had to stop, and with half-frozen fingers jot down a few words which should keep the new-born idea from perishing--but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself. I cannot set invention going like a clock, by any voluntary winding up: nor do I believe that any original writing (and what other writing is worth preserving?) was ever so produced. If you sit down, unimpassioned and uninspired, and tell yourself to write for so many hours, you will merely produce (at least I am sure I should merely produce) some of that article which fills, so far as I can judge, two-thirds of most magazines--most easy to write most weary to read--men call it 'padding', and it is to my mind one of the most detestable things in modern literature. 'Alice' and the 'Looking-Glass' are made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves. Poor they may have been; but at least they were the best I had to offer: and I can desire no higher praise to be written of me than the words of a Poet, written of a Poet,-- 

'He gave the people of his best:
The worst he kept, the best he gave.' 

I have wandered from my subject, I know: yet grant me another minute to relate a little incident of my own experience. I was walking on a hill-side, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse--one solitary line--'For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.' I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means now; but I wrote it down: and, some time afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza. And since then, periodically, I have received courteous letters from strangers, begging to know whether 'The Hunting of the Snark' is an allegory, or contains some hidden moral, or is a political satire: and for all such questions I have but one answer, 'I don't know!' And now I return to my text, and will wander no more. 

Stand forth, then, from the shadowy past, 'Alice' the child of my dreams. Full many a year has slipped away, since that 'golden afternoon' that gave thee birth but I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday--the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and (the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said 'nay' to: from whose lips 'Tell us a story, please', had all the stern immutability of Fate! 

What wert thou, dream-Alice, in thy foster-father's eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving, first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect), and gentle as a fawn: then courteous--courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as though she were herself a King's daughter, and her clothing of wrought gold: then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious--wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names--empty words signifying nothing! 

And the White Rabbit, what of him? Was he framed on the 'Alice' lines, or meant as a contrast? As a contrast, distinctly. For her 'youth', 'audacity', 'vigour', and 'swift directness of purpose', read 'elderly', 'timid', 'feeble', and 'nervously shilly-shallying', and you will get something of what I meant him to be. I think the White Rabbit should wear spectacles. I am sure his voice should quaver, and his knees quiver, and his whole air suggest a total inability to say 'Boo' to a goose! 

But I cannot hope to be allowed, even by the courteous Editor of The Theatre, half the space I should need (even if my reader's patience would hold out) to discuss each of my puppets one by one. Let me cull from the two books a Royal Trio--the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, and the White Queen. It was certainly hard on my Muse, to expect her to sing of three Queens, within such brief compass, and yet to give to each her own individuality. Each, of course, had to preserve, through all her eccentricities, a certain queenly dignity. That was essential. And for distinguishing traits, I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion--a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen must be cold and calm; she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the tenth degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses! Lastly, the White Queen seemed, to my dreaming fancy, gentle, stupid, fat and pale; helpless as an infant; and with a slow, maundering, bewildered air about her just suggesting imbecility, but never quite passing into it; that would be, I think, fatal to any comic effect she might otherwise produce. There is a character strangely like her in Wilkie Collins's novel 'No Name': by two different converging paths we have somehow reached the same ideal, and Mrs Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin-sisters. 

As it is no part of my present purpose to find fault with any of those who have striven so zealously to make this 'dream-play' a waking success, I shall but name two or three who seemed to me specially successful in realising the characters of the story. 

None, I think, was better realised than the two undertaken by Mr Sydney Harcourt, 'the Hatter' and 'Tweedledum'. To see him enact the Hatter was a weird and uncanny thing, as though some grotesque monster, seen last night in a dream, should walk into the room in broad daylight, and quietly say 'Good morning!' I need not try to describe what I mean the Hatter to be, since, so far as I can now remember, it was exactly what Mr Harcourt had made him: and I may say nearly the same of Tweedledum: but the Hatter surprised me most--perhaps only because it came first in the play. 

There were others who realised my ideas nearly as well; but I am not attempting a complete review: I will conclude with a few words about the two children who played 'Alice' and 'the Dormouse'. 

Of Miss Phoebe Carlo's performance it would be difficult to speak too highly. As a mere effort of memory, it was surely a marvellous feat for so young a child, to learn no less than two hundred and fifteen speeches--nearly three times as many as Beatrice in 'Much Ado About Nothing'. But what I admired most, as realising most nearly my ideal heroine, was her perfect assumption of the high spirits, and readiness to enjoy everything, of a child out for a holiday. I doubt if any grown actress, however experienced, could have worn this air so perfectly; we look before and after, and sigh for what is not; a child never does this ; and it is only a child that can utter from her heart the words poor Margaret Fuller Ossoli so longed to make her own, 'I am all happy now!' 

And last (I may for once omit the time-honoured addition 'not least', for surely no tinier maiden ever yet achieved so genuine a theatrical success?) comes our dainty Dormouse. 'Dainty' is the only epithet that seems to me exactly to suit her: with her beaming baby-face, the delicious crispness of her speech, and the perfect realism with which she makes herself the embodied essence of Sleep, she is surely the daintiest Dormouse that ever yet told us 'I sleep when I breathe!' With the first words of that her opening speech, a sudden silence falls upon the house (at least it has been so every time I have been there), and the baby tones sound strangely clear in the stillness. And yet I doubt if the charm is due only to the incisive clearness of her articulation; to me there was an even greater charm in the utter self-abandonment and conscientious thoroughness of her acting. If Dorothy ever adopts a motto, it ought to be 'thorough'. I hope the time may soon come when she will have a better part than 'Dormouse' to play--when some enterprising manager will revive the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' and do his obvious duty to the public by securing Miss Dorothy d'Alcourt as 'Puck'! 

It would be well indeed for our churches if some of the clergy could take a lesson in enunciation from this little child; and better still, for 'our noble selves', if we would lay to heart some things that she could teach us, and would learn by her example to realise, rather more than we do, the spirit of a maxim I once came across in an old book, 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.'