" THE HUNTING OF THE SNARL"

WE regret that "The Hunting of the Snark " is a failure, for it is a failure, partly because a very little more pains might have made it a success, and partly because we have a certain delight in its author's special faculty. Mr Lewis Carroll, as it pleases the author of "Alice in Wonderland" to call him- self, is one of the few humourista among us who is also an artist in nonsense, who can pour out words without meaning which make us laugh, and write songs without sense, or indeed intelligible words, which nevertheless give us pleasure from the associations they awaken. He is the only man who can make readers feel that they are asleep and irresponsible for their thoughts, and yet pleas- antly conscious all the while. Nothing in literature ever was so like a pleasant dream as " Alice in Wonderland," or " Alice in the Looking-Glass," with their endless absurdities, each of which woke up some comic association ; their preposterous card digni- taries and chess powers, all vivified by a child's imagination ; their proverbs turned into personages, till we dine with the March hare, and listen to the mad Hatter ; and their incidents and speeches and songs, which, as you wake—that is, close the book—you cannot recollect, because the dialogues have all faded away into a vague reminiscence of absurdity, and the songs live in the memory only as sounds with associations, but without meaning ; and the figures die away till, like the Cheshire Cat, nothing remains of them but a diabolical and slowly-vanishing grin. Nothing could be more perfectly like a dream after seeing a pantomime than the scenes between Alice and the Queen of Hearts, who is always ordering somebody's head off, or between Alice and the Duchess, who tells her that, if you take care of the sense, the sounds will take care of themselves, unless it be this song, which Mr. Carroll obviously wrote while asleep after a supper following an evening of opera bouffe :— " 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe ; All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome ratha outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son The jaws that bite, the claws that catch !

Beware the Jubjab bird, and shun The frumious Banderenatch ! '

And as in uffleh thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the talgey wood, And burbled as it came !

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock ? Come to my arms, my beamish boy ! 0 frabjous day Callooh I Catty!' He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe ; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome rathe outgrabe."

We believe, and are sad to believe, that there are Scotehmen in the world to whom that song is " just silly," as we believe, and are sad to believe, that there are children who get quite angry when told to learn the lovely bit of incoherence by which Foote tested a boaster's memory, and which has lived 120 years, and will live a thousand:—

" So she went into the garden to cut acabbage-leaf, to make an apples. pie ; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. What no soap.' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber, and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand Panjandrum him- self, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."

The majority of men, however, are not Scotchmen, and it is creditable to the world, so stupid as it sometimes is, that nonsense like that we have quoted, artistic nonsense intended to produce without words the impression that humour produces with them, should have touched its fancy till Alice's two series of adventures were translated into half the tongues of Europe; till the Jabberwock passed into the English language, as a person who might be sketched; and till thoughtful essays were written—at least, we have read one—to explain the principle on which Mr. Carroll invented his wonderful words. Children worshipped the books, luxuriating for the first time in a form of grotesquerie which they could understand, and their elders were often amazed to find how heartily they had laughed over stuff the charm of which, all the while, they could not analyse. They said they laughed too, which was another triumph for Mr. Carroll, for there are comic things—some of Cruikahank's fairy drawings, for example— which men will laugh over with internal laughter, without ever fairly acknowledging their child-like enjoyment. The art of those two books—the sustained power with which reason is set aside, and as in dreams everything happens because it happens, and not because there was any reason why it should happen, the thoughtful breaking of connecting-links, the stu- dious defiance of expectations, is amazing, and the more so because there is in the book so little rollick. Nonsense is gener- ally amusing, because, besides waking up that sense of incon- gruity which is the cause of laughter, it suggests high spirits and devil-may-careishness and abandon—a state of mind, in fact, which is for a moment a relief from a too serious world ; but Mr. Carroll's writing does not suggest this mood at all, but another and much quieter one. Tickling, not horse-play, is his forte, and he writes often as Lamb might have talked aloud in a dream, saying things that somehow make the reflective side of men chuckle as Lamb's wit does. Not that there is a " purpose "in Alice's adventures, for there is none, any more than in an ordi- nary dream ; Mr. Carroll's art is too good for that. He relies sometimes on mere oddities, a mere reversal of the expected sentence, but generally he produces the effect of reflection by touching an association, as, for example, in introducing the Hatter, which makes the reader remember the element of absurdity in something quite familiar to his mind, like the proverb vivified in that personage. He writes, in fact, artistic nonsense, and is master in that high art.

He does not show himself master in " The Hunting of the Snark," and we have puzzled ourselves for some time to comprehend pre- cisely the cause of failure, and are not sure even now that we have caught it. We thought at one moment that we had it, fancying, doubtless in a crass mood, that Mr. Carroll had been weak enough to work out an idea, to try to extract his special fun, the fun outside reason, the fun of no sense, from the drama of human life. That hunting of the invisible object which when gained may be a boojum, and not only disappear, but make the hunter vanish too, in the moment of seizure, is a little like human life ; the Bellman who steers the ship, only ringing his Bell, which wakes attention, but gives the helmsman no course, standing for Conscience ; and the Chart without land in it, and therefore blank, representing the Future ; but we speedily gave that up, as a fancy fit only for that com- mentator of the future, who will one day, we suppose, evolve from the depths of his moral consciousness the meaning of the allegory under which Mr. Carroll veiled his secret wisdom. Such a purpose would, of course, involve failure, for though the human journey, the Quest of the Sangreal, on which every man consciously or unconsciously engages, admits of humorous treatment, it must be the humorous-pathetic or the humorous-sardonic, and not the humorous-nonsensical. The man who enjoys Mr. Carroll is sure to have too much of Omar Khayyam's motif about his mind, too deep a sense of the apparent failure in human destiny to endure seeing it all turned into pure nonsense. But as we have said, there is no reason for accusing Mr. Carroll of consequence in his thought, even in " The Snark," and we must seek another reason for the failure. Humour is not absent, except from the pictures— and one even of them, the beaver who is "shy,", because the butcher, who only kills beavers, is looking at her, is very comic- -while the line, " For the Snark was a Boojum, you see 1" is better than anything in " Alice," and may pass into a proverb. The description of the landless chart is delicious :— "The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies— Such a carriage, such ease, and such grace ! Such solemnity, too ! One could see he was wise, The moment one looked in his face 1

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.

'What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?'

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, ' They are merely conventional signs !

Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank' (So the crew would protest) 'that he's bought as the best— A perfect and absolute blank !' "

And we do not know anywhere a more original kind of fool than this :—

" This was charming, no doubt : but they shortly found out

That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tinkle his boll.

He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave

Were enough to bewilder a crew.

When he cried Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!' What on earth was the helmsman to do?

Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes: A thing, as the Bellman remarked, That frequently happens in tropical climes, When the vessel is, so to speak, snarked."

Nothing, moreover, can be more perfect in inconsequence than

some of the scenes—for instance, the effort to teach the Beaver

to add two and one together—and nothing more comically ridicu-

lous than some of the single thoughts :—

" Bat the valley grew narrower and narrower still,

And the evening got darker and colder, Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill) They marched along shoulder to shoulder.

Then a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky, And they knew that some danger was near : The Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail, And even the Butcher felt queer.

He thought of his childhood, left far, far behind— That blissful and innocent state-

The The sound so exactly recalled to his mind A pencil that squeaks on a slate."

The whole, however, falls flat, and we suppose the reason is that the nonsense is not artistic, that it does not wake as the nonsense in Alice's two adventures did the chain of association. We can be amused by the Cheshire Cat, but not by the Beaver ; by the Queen of Hearts, but not by the Bellman ; by the mad Hatter, but not by the Baker who could only bake bride-cake, and whose uncle gave him the wisest of rules, as the Bellman admits, for the hunting of the Snark

:- "You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;

You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway-share ; You may charm it with smiles and soap."

We do not expect anything, and have therefore no sense of oddity in the unexpectedness of what we get ; there is no Alice to stand as central figure, serenely puzzled and fearless, and there is no dialogue full of quirks, and oddities, and little turns that force out laughter against our will. The total effect is not one of humorous nonsense, but of tiresome nonsense, exciting only regret that Mr. Carroll should have wasted his powers on a book in which only a single line comes up to his usual level :— " For the Snark was a Boojnm, you see."