Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [136]
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 “Bo” 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 I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion 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’ 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 meant the Hatter to be, since, so far as I can now remember, it
was exactly what Mr. Harcourt has 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;