Lewis Carroll Again
The Rectory Umbrella, and Mischmasch. By Lewis Carroll. With a Foreword by Florence Milner. (Cassell. 10s. 6d.) IN such writing as Lewis Carroll's a miss is as good as a mile. No " inner " or ." outer " is of any use. You either hit the very centre of the target or you fail utterly. Even in Alice one chapter was such a failure. Nothing could be done with it ; it had to be ruthlessly suppressed. _
These specimens of Carroll's early attempts are, excusably
enough, almost all failures. In themselves, they are prac- tically valueless. We have seen several family magazines, which never reached the printing-press, but which are vastly better than the Rectory Umbrella, and not inferior to Misch- masch. Some of these articles, indeed, we hope are not Carroll's at all, but the performances of other members of his family. Those that are obviously his have the interest of showing him struggling toward the light, and making expe- riments with a shaky prentice-hand. That Lewis Carroll would have agreed with us is indicated by the fact that nothing in the Umbrella was used by him in any of his later works.
There are signs that his love of playing on words began
early ; but his first essays in paronomasia were crude enough. Thus he bids his readers an ear-nest adieu, from your heart- wrung victim. This is a pun upon ears, and is well paralleled by a sketch of a " First car-ring," in which a boy is having his car pulled. A slight, but very slight, adumbration of Alice maybe detected in the lines :
" And so it fell upon a day, That is, it never rose again."
The love of mathematical paradox, which was so marked a feature in Carroll later in life, is clearly foreshadowed in a little jeu-d'esprit proving that a clock which does not go at all is better than one which loses a minute a day : for the one is right twice every twenty-four hours, while the other is right but once in two years. " Keep your eye fixed on your clock, and the very moment it is right it will be eight o'clock.
' But ' you say. There, that'll do, reader ; the more you argue, the further you get from the point."
When we come to Mischmasch, which was written when Carroll had been 'at Oxford some years, the general improve- ment is manifest. We have here the stanza which became the germ of Jabbencocky ; and the Three Voices, which, though of no great merit, Carroll thought worthy of publication in the Train. Some articles, however, are astonishingly feeble. A parody on Dobell's Tommy's Dead, and some variations on Moore's " I never nursed a dear gazelle " might have been written by Poet Close or Alfred Bunn.
The main interest of this book, then, as we hinted above, is like that we should feel if the admiring parents of Christopher' Wren had carefully preserved the cathedrals which the future architect built with his toy-bricks when a child.
E. E. Katturr.
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