Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home Part 22

CHAPTER XIII.

"ALICE" ON THE STAGE AND OFF.

When the question of dramatizing the "Alice" books was placed before the author, by Mr. Savile Clarke, who was to undertake the work, he consented gladly enough. It was to be an operetta of two acts; the libretto, or story part, by Mr. Clarke himself, the music by Mr. Walter Slaughter, and the only condition Lewis Carroll made was that nothing should be written or acted which should in any way be unsuitable for children.

Of course, everything was done under his eye, and he wrote an extra song for the ghosts of the _Oysters_, who had been eaten by the _Walrus_ and the _Carpenter_; he also finished that poetic gem, "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster."

"'Tis the voice of the Lobster," I heard him declare, "You baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."

As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose, Trims his belt and his b.u.t.tons, and turns out his toes.

When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark And talks with the utmost contempt of a shark; But when the tide rises and sharks are around, His words have a timid and tremulous sound.

I pa.s.sed by his garden, and marked with one eye How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie: The Panther took pie, crust and gravy and meat, While the Owl had the dish, for his share of the treat.

When the pie was all finished, the Owl--as a boon Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon; While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl, And concluded the banquet----

That is how the poem originally ended, but musically that would never do, so the last two lines were altered in this fashion:

"But the Panther obtained both the fork and the knife, So when _he_ lost his temper, the Owl lost his life,"

and a rousing little song it made.

The play was produced at the Prince of Wales' Theater, during Christmas week of 1886, where it was a great success. Lewis Carroll himself specially praises the Wonderland act, notably the Mad Tea Party. The _Hatter_ was finely done by Mr. Sidney Harcourt, the _Dormouse_ by little Dorothy d'Alcourt, aged six-and-a-half, and Phoebe Carlo, he tells us, was a "splendid _Alice_."

He went many times to see his "dream child" on the stage, and was always very kind to the little actresses, whose dainty work made _his_ work such a success. Phoebe Carlo became a very privileged young person and enjoyed many treats of his giving, to say nothing of a personal gift of a copy of "Alice" from the delighted author.

After the London season, the play was taken through the English provinces and was much appreciated wherever it went. On one occasion a company gave a week's performance at Brighton, and Lewis Carroll happening to be there one afternoon, came across three of the small actresses down on the beach and spent several hours with them. "Happy, healthy little girls" he called them, and no doubt that beautiful afternoon they had the time of their lives.

These children, he found--and he had made the subject quite a study--had been acting every day in the week, and twice on the day before he met them, and yet were energetic enough to get up each morning at seven for a sea bath, to run races on the pier, and to be quite ready for another performance that night.

On December 26, 1888, there was an elaborate revival of "Alice" at the Royal Globe Theater. In the _London Times_ the next morning appeared this notice:

"'Alice in Wonderland,' having failed to exhaust its popularity at the Prince of Wales' Theater, has been revived at the Globe for a series of matines during the holiday season. Many members of the old cast remain in the bill, but a new 'Alice' is presented in Miss Isa Bowman, who is not only a wonderful actress for her years, but also a nimble dancer.

"In its new surroundings the fantastic scenes of the story--so cleverly transferred from the book to the stage by Mr. Savile Clarke--lose nothing of their original brightness and humor. 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Gla.s.s' have the rare charm of freshness for children and for their elders, and the many strange personages concerned--the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the Dormouse, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the Red and White Kings and Queens, the Walrus, Humpty-Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and all the rest of them--being seen at home, so to speak, and not on parade as in an ordinary pantomime.

Even the dreaded Jabberwock pays an unconventional visit to the company from the 'flies,' and his appearance will not be readily forgotten. As before, Mr. Walter Slaughter's music is an agreeable element to the performance...."

The programme of this performance certainly spreads a feast before the children's eyes. First of all, think of a forest in autumn! (They had to change the season a little to get the bright colors of red and yellow.) Here it is that _Alice_ falls asleep and the Elves sing to her. Then there is the awakening in Wonderland--such a Wonderland as few children dreamed of. And then all our favorites appear and do just the things we always thought they would do if they had the chance. The _Cheshire Cat_ grins and vanishes, and then the grin appears without the cat, and then the cat grows behind the grin, and everything is so impossible and wonderful that one shivers with delight. There is a good old fairy tale that every child knows; it is called "Oh! if I could but shiver!" and everyone who really enjoys a fairy tale understands the feeling--the delight of shivering--to see the Jabberwock pa.s.s before you in all his terrifying, delicious ugliness, flapping his huge wings, rolling his bulging eyes, and opening and shutting those dreadful jaws of his; and yet to know he isn't "_really, real_" any more than Sir John Tenniel's picture of him in the dear old "Alice" book at home, that you can actually go with _Alice_ straight into Wonderland and back again, safe and sound, and really see what happened just as she did, and actually squeeze through into Looking-Gla.s.s Land, all made so delightfully possible by clever scenery and acting.

A more charming, dainty little "Alice" never danced herself into the heart of anyone as Isa Bowman did into the heart of Lewis Carroll. She came into his life when all of his best-beloved children had pa.s.sed forever beyond the portals of childhood, never to return; loved more in these later days for the memory of what they had been. But here was a child who aroused all the a.s.sociations of earlier years, who had made "Alice" real again, whose clever acting gave just that dreamlike, elfin touch which the real Alice of Long Ago had suggested; a sweet-natured, lovable, most attractive child, the child perhaps who won his deepest affections because she came to him when the others had vanished, and clung to him in the twilight.

There must have been several little Bowmans. We know of four little sisters--Isa, Emsie, Nellie, and Maggie, and Master Charles Bowman was the _Cheshire Cat_ in the revival of "Alice in Wonderland," and to all of these--we are considering the girls of course, the boy never counted--Lewis Carroll showed his sweetest, most lovable side. They called him "Uncle," and a more devoted uncle they could not possibly have found.

As for Isa herself, there was a special niche all her own; she was, as he often told her, "_his_ little girl," and in a loving memoir of him she has given to the world of children a beautiful picture of what he really was.

There was something in the grip of his firm white hands, in his glance so deeply sympathetic, so tender and kind, that always stirred the little girl just as her sharp eyes noted a certain peculiarity in his walk. His stammer also impressed her, for it generally came when he least expected it, and though he tried all his life to cure it, he never succeeded.

His shyness, too, was very noticeable, not so much with children, except just at first until he knew them well, but with grown people he was, as she put it, "almost old-maidishly prim in his manner." This shyness was shown in many ways, particularly in a morbid horror of having his picture taken. As fond as he was of taking other people, he dreaded seeing his own photograph among strangers, and once when Isa herself made a caricature of him, he suddenly got up from his seat, took the drawing out of her hands, tore it in small pieces and threw it into the fire without a word; then he caught the frightened little girl in his strong arms and kissed her pa.s.sionately, his face, at first so flushed and angry, softening with a tender light.

Many and many a happy time she spent with him at Oxford. He found rooms for her just outside the college gates, and a nice comfortable dame to take charge of her. The long happy days were spent in his rooms, and every night at nine she was taken over to the little house in St. Aldates ("St.

Olds") and put to bed by the landlady.

In the morning the deep notes of "Great Tom" woke her and then began another lovely day with her "Uncle." She speaks of two tiny turret rooms, one on each side of his staircase in Christ Church. "He used to tell me,"

she writes, "that when I grew up and became married, he would give me the two little rooms, so that if I ever disagreed with my husband, we could each of us retire to a turret until we had made up our quarrel."

She, too, was fascinated by his collection of music-boxes, the finest, she thought, to be found anywhere in the world. "There were big black ebony boxes with gla.s.s tops, through which you could see all the works. There was a big box with a handle, which it was quite hard exercise for a little girl to turn, and there must have been twenty or thirty little ones which could only play one tune. Sometimes one of the musical boxes would not play properly and then I always got tremendously excited. Uncle used to go to a drawer in the table and produce a box of little screw-drivers and punches, and while I sat on his knee, he would unscrew the lid and take out the wheels to see what was the matter. He must have been a clever mechanist, for the result was always the same--after a longer or shorter period, the music began again. Sometimes, when the musical boxes had played all their tunes, he used to put them in the box backwards, and was as pleased as I was at the comic effect of the music 'standing on its head,' as he phrased it.

"There was another and very wonderful toy which he sometimes produced for me, and this was known as 'The Bat.' The ceilings of the rooms in which he lived were very high, indeed, and admirably suited for the purposes of 'The Bat.' It was an ingeniously constructed toy of gauze and wire, which actually flew about the room like a bat. It was worked by a piece of twisted elastic, and it could fly for about half a minute. I was always a little afraid of this toy because it was too lifelike, but there was a fearful joy in it. When the music boxes began to pall, he would get up from his chair and look at me with a knowing smile. I always knew what was coming, even before he began to speak, and I used to dance up and down in tremendous antic.i.p.ation.

"'Isa, my darling,' he would say, 'once upon a time there was someone called Bob, the Bat! and he lived in the top left-hand drawer of the writing table. What could he do when Uncle wound him up?'"

"And then I would squeak out breathlessly: 'He could really _fly_!'"

And Bob the Bat had many wonderful adventures. She tells us how, on a hot summer morning when the window was wide open, Bob flew out into the garden and landed in a bowl of salad that one of the servants was carrying to someone's room. The poor fellow was so frightened by this sudden apparition that he promptly dropped the bowl, breaking it into countless pieces.

Lewis Carroll never liked "his little girl" to exaggerate. "I remember,"

she tells us, "how annoyed he once was when, after a morning's sea bathing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed: 'Oh, this salt water, it always makes my hair as stiff as a poker!'

"He impressed upon me quite irritably that no little girl's hair could ever possibly get as _stiff as a poker_. 'If you had said "as stiff as wires" it would have been more like it, but even that would have been an exaggeration.' And then seeing I was a little frightened, he drew for me a picture of 'The little girl called Isa, whose hair turned into pokers because she was always exaggerating things.'

"'I nearly died of laughing' was another expression that he particularly disliked; in fact, any form of exaggeration generally called from him a reproof, though he was sometimes content to make fun. For instance, my sisters and I had sent him 'millions of kisses' in a letter.' Here is his answer:

"'Ch. Ch. Oxford. Ap. 14, 1890.

"'MY OWN DARLING:

"'It's all very well for you and Nellie and Emsie to write in millions of hugs and kisses, but please consider the _time_ it would occupy your poor old very busy uncle! Try hugging and kissing Emsie for a minute by the watch and I don't think you'll manage it more than 20 times a minute. "Millions" must mean two millions at least.'"

Then follows a characteristic example in arithmetic:

20)2,000,000 hugs and kisses.

------------ 60)100,000 minutes.

---------- 12)1,666 hours.

-------- 6)138 days (at twelve hours a day).

----- 23 weeks.

"I couldn't go on hugging and kissing more than 12 hours a day; and I wouldn't like to spend _Sundays_ that way. So you see it would take _23_ weeks of hard work. Really, my dear child, I cannot spare the time.

"Why haven't I written since my last letter? Why, how could I have written _since the last time I did_ write? Now you just try it with kissing. Go and kiss Nellie, from me, several times, and take care to manage it so as to have kissed her _since the last time you did_ kiss her. Now go back to your place and I'll question you.

"'Have you kissed her several times?'

"'Yes, darling Uncle.'

"'What o'clock was it when you gave her the _last_ kiss?'

"'Five minutes past 10, Uncle.'

"'Very well, now, have you kissed her _since_?'