And so, with regard to the question whether a Proposition is or is not to be understood as asserting the existence of its Subject, I maintain that every writer may adopt his own rule, provided of course that it is consistent with itself and with the accepted facts of Logic.
Let us consider certain views that may logically be held, and thus settle which of them may conveniently be held; after which I shall hold myself free to declare which of them I intend to hold.
The view adopted by Carroll (that both “all” and “some” imply existence but that “no” leaves the question open) did not finally win out. In modern logic only the “some” propositions are taken to imply that a class is not a null class. This does not, of course, invalidate the nominalistic attitude of Carroll and his egg. The current point of view was adopted solely because logicians believed it to be the most useful.
When logicians shifted their interest from the class logic of Aristotle to the propositional or truth-value calculus, another furious and funny debate (though mostly among nonlogicians) raged over the meaning of “material implication.” Most of the confusion sprang from a failure to realize that “implies” in the statement “A implies B” has a restricted meaning peculiar to the calculus and does not refer to any causal relation between A and B. A similar confusion still persists in regard to the multivalued logics in which terms such as and, not, and implies have no common-sense or intuitive meaning; in fact, they have no meaning whatever other than that which is exactly defined by the matrix tables, which generate these “connective” terms. Once this is fully understood, most of the mystery surrounding these queer logics evaporates.
In mathematics equal amounts of energy have been dissipated in useless argumentation over the “meaning” of such phrases as “imaginary number,” “transfinite number,” and so on; useless because such words mean precisely what they are defined to mean; no more, no less.
On the other hand, if we wish to communicate accurately we are under a kind of moral obligation to avoid Humpty’s practice of giving private meanings to commonly used words. “May we…make our words mean whatever we choose them to mean?” asks Roger W. Holmes in his article, “The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland,” (Antioch Review, Summer 1959). “One thinks of a Soviet delegate using ‘democracy’ in a UN debate. May we pay our words extra, or is this the stuff that propaganda is made of? Do we have an obligation to past usage? In one sense words are our masters, or communication would be impossible. In another we are the masters; otherwise there could be no poetry.”
12. Portmanteau word will be found in many modern dictionaries. It has become a common phrase for words that are packed, like a suitcase, with more than one meaning. In English literature, the great master of the portmanteau word is, of course, James Joyce. Finnegans Wake (like the Alice books, a dream) contains them by the tens of thousands. This includes those ten hundred-letter thunderclaps that symbolize, among other things, the mighty fall from his ladder of Tim Finnegan, the Irish hod carrier. Humpty Dumpty himself is packed up in the seventh thunderclap:
Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup!
References to Humpty abound in Finnegans Wake, from a mention on the first page to a mention on the last.
13. Readers may not be as quick as Alice to catch Humpty’s word play. “Wabe” is the beginning of “way before” and “way behind.” Alice appropriately adds “way beyond.”
14. “From home,” spoken with a dropped h, produces the “mome” sound.
15. Neil Phelps sent me a possible inspiration for Humpty’s song, a poem called “Summer Days” by a forgotten Victorian poet, Wathen Mark Wilks Call (1817–1870). The poem is anonymous in many Victorian anthologies. The following version is from Everyman’s Book of Victorian Verse (1982), edited by J. R. Watson:
In summer, when the days were long,
We walked, two friends, in field and wood,
Our heart was light, our step was strong,
And life lay round us, fair as good,
In summer, when the days were long.
We strayed from morn till evening came,
We gathered flowers, and wove us crowns,
We walked mid poppies red as flame,
Or sat upon the yellow downs,
And always wished our life the same.
In summer, when the days were long,
We leapt the hedgerow, crossed the brook;
And still her voice flowed forth in song,
Or else she read some graceful book,
In summer, when the days were long.
And then we sat beneath the trees,
With shadows lessening in the noon;
And in the sunlight and the breeze.
We revelled, many a glorious June,
While larks were singing o’er the leas.
In summer, when the days were long,
We plucked wild strawberries, ripe and red,
Or feasted, with no grace but song,
On golden nectar, snow-white bread,
In summer, when the days were long.
We loved, and yet we knew it not,
For loving seemed like breathing then,
We found a heaven in every spot,
Saw angels, too, in all good men,
And dreamt of gods in grove and grot.
In summer, when the days are long,
Alone I wander, muse alone;
I see her not, but that old song,
Under the fragrant wind is blown,
In summer, when the days are long.
Alone I wander in the wood,
But one fair spirit hears my sighs;
And half I see the crimson hood,
The radiant hair, the calm glad eyes,
That charmed me in life’s summer mood.
In summer, when the days are long,
I love her as I loved of old;
My heart is light, my step is strong,
For love brings back those hours of gold,
In summer, when the days are long.
16. In his book on Tenniel, Michael Hancher calls attention to how closely Tenniel’s illustration for these lines resembles a gigantic gooseberry in his Punch cartoon of July 15, 1871.
THE GIGANTIC GOOSEBERRY
G. G. “HERE’S A PRECIOUS GO, FROGGY! I THOUGHT BIG GOOSEBERRIES AND SHOWERS O’ FROGS UD HAVE A HOLIDAY THIS ‘SILLY SEASON,’ ANYHOW. BUT THE PRECIOUS TICHBORNE CASE HAVE BEEN ADJOURNED, AND WE’LL HAVE TO BE ON DUTY AGAIN.”
TENNIEL. “THE GIGANTIC GOOSEBERRY.”
FROM PUNCH. 15 JULY 1871
17. “This has to be the worst poem in the Alice books,” writes Richard Kelly, in Lewis Carroll (Twayne, 1977). “The language is flat and prosaic, the frustrated story line is without interest, the couplets are uninspired and fail to surprise or delight, and there are almost no true elements of nonsense present, other than in the unstated wish of the narrator and the lack of a conclusion to the work.”
Beverly Lyon Clark, in her contribution to Soaring with the Dodo (Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1982), edited by Edward Guiliano and James Kincaid, calls attention to how the abrupt endings of the poem’s lines are echoed in Humpty’s abrupt “Good-bye” to Alice, and Alice’s unfinished comment in the chapter’s last paragraph: “Of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met—”
The Spectator, on September 9, 1995, published the results of Competition No. 1897. Readers were asked to add eight couplets to Humpty’s poem. The Bandersnatch (October 1995) published two of the winners:
The handle bit me on the hand!
I said, ‘Now, handle, understand
I mean to get inside this door,
So open up! Don’t be a bore!’
The handle (also proud and stiff)
Produced a most disdainful sniff
And said, ‘If you will wait till two,
I might then see what I can do.’
> ‘Till two?’ I cried. ‘That’s hours away!’
The handle said, ‘Most wait a day.
I once made someone wait a year:
He died just where you stand, I fear.
So patience, please, till two o’clock,
And then don’t kick or push, just knock.
Of course, I cannot guarantee…
Perhaps, meantime, you’d sing to me?’
—Andrew Gibbons
When nearly half an hour had gone
I saw that it was painted on.
Just then I heard a snicking sound
Behind me, so I turned around
And saw a cousin of the Queen
With twenty trays of nougatine.
‘I s’pose there’s room for these inside?’
He asked me gravely. I replied,
‘That may be so, I cannot say.
The fish are not themselves today.’
He wrote this carefully in a book.
‘I s’pose I ought to take a look,
Though as a cousin of the Queen
I must forget what I have seen.
Now do you like them boiled or fried?’
He asked, and smiled, and went inside.
—Richard Lucie
18. John Q. Rutherford, Mill Lane, Essex, calls my attention to the unpleasant habit, of some members of the Victorian aristocracy, of proferring two fingers when shaking hands with their social inferiors. In his pride, Humpty carries this practice to its ultimate.
At the end of Chapter 19, in Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale, a character gives the narrator “two flabby fingers to shake.”
19. Students of Finnegans Wake do not have to be reminded that Humpty Dumpty is one of that book’s basic symbols: the great cosmic egg whose fall, like the drunken fall of Finnegan, suggests the fall of Lucifer and the fall of man.
A fourteen-stanza poem titled “The Headstrong Man,” written by Carroll when he was thirteen, anticipates Humpty’s mighty fall. The poem appeared in Carroll’s first book, Useful and Instructive Poetry, written for his younger siblings, and published posthumously in 1954. The poem begins:
There was a man who stood on high,
Upon a lofty wall;
And every one who passed him by,
Called out “I fear you’ll fall.”
A strong wind blows the man off the wall. Next day he climbs a tree, the branch breaks, and he falls again.
In the Pennyroyal edition of Through the Looking-Glass, Barry Moser drew Humpty with the face of Richard Nixon. Will some future illustrator give the egg the face of William Jefferson Clinton?
Chapter VII
The Lion and
the Unicorn
The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by.
She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men.
Then came the horses. Having four feet, these managed rather better than the foot-soldiers; but even they stumbled now and then; and it seemed to be a regular rule that, whenever a horse stumbled, the rider fell off instantly. The confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was very glad to get out of the wood into an open place, where she found the White King seated on the ground, busily writing in his memorandum-book.
“I’ve sent them all!” the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. “Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?”
“Yes, I did,” said Alice: “several thousand, I should think.”
“Four thousand two hundred and seven, that’s the exact number,” the King said, referring to his book. “I couldn’t send all the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game.1 And I haven’t sent the two Messengers, either. They’re both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody!2 And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. “I see somebody now!” she exclaimed at last. “But he’s coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!” (For the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)
“Not at all,” said the King. “He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.3 He only does them when he’s happy. His name is Haigha.” (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with “mayor.”)4
“I love my love with an H,”5 Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with—with—with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives—”
“He lives on the Hill,” the King remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating for the name of a town beginning with H. “The other Messenger’s called Hatta. I must have two, you know—to come and go. One to come, and one to go.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Alice.
“It isn’t respectable to beg,” said the King.
“I only meant that I didn’t understand,” said Alice. “Why one to come and one to go?”
“Don’t I tell you?” the King repeated impatiently. “I must have two—to fetch and carry. One to fetch, and one to carry.”
At this moment the Messenger arrived: he was far too much out of breath to say a word, and could only wave his hands about, and make the most fearful faces at the poor King.
“This young lady loves you with an H,” the King said, introducing Alice in the hope of turning off the Messenger’s attention from himself—but it was of no use—the Anglo-Saxon attitudes only got more extraordinary every moment, while the great eyes rolled wildly from side to side.
“You alarm me!” said the King. “I feel faint—Give me a ham sandwich!”
On which the Messenger, to Alice’s great amusement, opened a bag that hung round his neck, and handed a sandwich to the King, who devoured it greedily.
“Another sandwich!” said the King.
“There’s nothing but hay left now,” the Messenger said, peeping into the bag.
“Hay, then,” the King murmured in a faint whisper.
Alice was glad to see that it revived him a good deal. “There’s nothing like eating hay when you’re faint,” he remarked to her, as he munched away.
“I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,” Alice suggested: “—or some sal-volatile.”6
“I didn’t say there was nothing better,” the King replied. “I said there was nothing like it.” Which Alice did not venture to deny.7
“Who did you pass on the road?” the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay.
“Nobody,” said the Messenger.
“Quite right,” said the King: “this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.”
“I do my best,” the Messenger said in a sullen tone. “I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do!”
“He ca’n’t do that,” said the King, “or else he’d have been here first. However, now you’ve got your breath, you may tell us what’s happened in the town.”
“I’ll whisper it,” said the Messenger, putting his hands to his mouth in the shape of a trumpet and stooping so as to get close to the King’s ear. Alice was sorry for this, as she wanted to hear the news too. However, instead of whispering, he simply shouted, at the top of his vo
ice, “They’re at it again!”
“Do you call that a whisper?” cried the poor King, jumping up and shaking himself. “If you do such a thing again, I’ll have you buttered! It went through and through my head like an earthquake!”
“It would have to be a very tiny earthquake!” thought Alice. “Who are at it again?” she ventured to ask.
“Why, the Lion and the Unicorn, of course,” said the King.
“Fighting for the crown?”
“Yes, to be sure,” said the King: “and the best of the joke is, that it’s my crown all the while! Let’s run and see them.” And they trotted off, Alice repeating to herself, as she ran, the words of the old song:—8
“The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town.
Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown:
Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.”
“Does—the one—that wins—get the crown?” she asked, as well as she could, for the run was putting her quite out of breath.9
“Dear me, no!” said the King. “What an idea!”10
“Would you—be good enough—” Alice panted out, after running a little further, “to stop a minute—just to get—one’s breath again?”
“I’m good enough,” the King said, “only I’m not strong enough. You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!”
Alice had no more breath for talking; so they trotted on in silence, till they came into sight of a great crowd, in the middle of which the Lion and Unicorn were fighting. They were in such a cloud of dust, that at first Alice could not make out which was which; but she soon managed to distinguish the Unicorn by his horn.
They placed themselves close to where Hatta, the other Messenger, was standing watching the fight, with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other.
“He’s only just out of prison, and he hadn’t finished his tea when he was sent in,” Haigha whispered to Alice: “and they only give them oyster-shells in there—so you see he’s very hungry and thirsty. How are you, dear child?” he went on, putting his arm affectionately round Hatta’s neck.
The Annotated Alice Page 30