Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (276 page)

 “There was one who was famed for a number of things

He forgot when he entered the ship:

His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,

And the clothes he had brought for the trip.

“He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,

With his name painted clearly on each:

But, since he omitted to mention the fact,

They were all left behind on the beach.

“The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because

He had seven coats on when he came,

With three pair of boots—but the worst of it was,

He had wholly forgotten his name.

“He would answer to ‘Hi!’
or to any loud cry,

Such as ‘Fry me!’
or ‘Fritter my wig!’

To ‘What-you-may-call-um!’
or ‘What-was-his-name!’

But especially ‘Thing-um-a-jig!’

“While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,

He had different names from these:

His intimate friends called him ‘Candle-ends,’

And his enemies ‘Toasted-cheese.’

“‘His form is ungainly, his intellect small’

(So the Bellman would often remark);

‘But his courage is perfect!
and that, after all,

Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.’

“He would joke with hyenas, returning their stare

With an impudent wag of the head:

And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw with a bear,

‘Just to keep up its spirits,’ he said.

“He came as a Baker: but owned when too late—

And it drove the poor Bellman half-mad—

He could only bake Bride-cake, for which I may state,

No materials were to be had.”

Notice how ingeniously the actors in this drama are introduced; all the “B’s,” as it were, buzzing after the phantom of happiness, which eludes them, no matter how hard they struggle to find it.
Notice, too, that all these beings are unmarried, a fact shown by the
Baker
not being able to make a bride-cake as there are no materials on hand.
All these creatures, while hunting for happiness, came to prey upon each other.
The
Butcher
only killed
Beavers
, the
Barrister
was hunting among his fellow sailors for a good legal case.
The
Banker
took charge of all their cash, for it certainly takes money to hunt properly for a
Snark
, and it is a well-known fact that bankers need all the money they can get.

Fit the Second
describes the
Bellman
and why he had such influence with his crew:

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!

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
us
the best—

A perfect and absolute blank!”

And true enough, the
Bellman’s
idea of the ocean was a big square basin, with the latitude and longitude carefully written out on the margin.
They found, however, that their “brave Captain” knew very little about navigation, he—

“Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,

And that was to tingle his bell.”

He thought nothing of telling his crew to steer starboard and larboard at the same time, and then we know how—

The bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.

“A thing,” as the Bellman remarked,

“That frequently happens in tropical climes,

When a vessel is, so to speak, ‘snarked.’”

The
Bellman
had hoped, when the wind blew toward the east, that the ship would not travel toward the west, but it seems that with all his nautical knowledge he could not prevent it; ships are perverse animals!

“But the danger was past—they had landed at last,

With their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags:

Yet at first sight the crew were not pleased with the view,

Which consisted of chasms and crags.”

Now that they had reached the land of the Snark, the
Bellman
proceeded to air his knowledge on that subject.

“A snark,” he said, “had five unmistakable traits—its taste, ‘meager and mellow and crisp,’ its habit of getting up late, its slowness in taking a jest, its fondness for bathing machines, and, fifth and lastly, its ambition.”
He further informed the crew that “the snarks that had feathers could bite, and those that had whiskers could scratch,” adding as an afterthought:

“‘For although common Snarks do no manner of harm,

Yet I feel it my duty to say,

Some are Boojums—’ The Bellman broke off in alarm,

For the Baker had fainted away.”

Fit the Third
was the
Baker’s
tale.

“They roused him with muffins, they roused him with ice,

They roused him with mustard and cress,

They roused him with jam and judicious advice,

They set him conundrums to guess.”

Then he explained why it was that the name “Boojum” made him faint.
It seems that a dear uncle, after whom he was named, gave him some wholesome advice about the way to hunt a snark, and this uncle seemed to be a man of much influence:

“‘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——’”

“‘That’s exactly the method,’ the Bellman bold

In a hasty parenthesis cried,

‘That’s exactly the way I have always been told

That the capture of Snarks should be tried!’”

“‘But, oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,

If your Snark be a Boojum!
For then

You will softly and suddenly vanish away,

And never be met with again!’”

This of course was a very sad thing to think of, for the man with no name, who was named after his uncle, and called in courtesy the
Baker
, had grown to be a great favorite with the crew; but they had no time to waste in sentiment—they were in the Snark’s own land, they had the
Bellman’s
orders in
Fit the Fourth
—the Hunting:

“To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care;

To pursue it with forks and hope;

To threaten its life with a railway share;

To charm it with smiles and soap!

“For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t

Be caught in a commonplace way.

Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t:

Not a chance must be wasted to-day!”

Then they all went to work according to their own special way, just as we would do now in our hunt for happiness through the chasms and crags of every day.

Fit the Fifth
is the
Beaver’s
Lesson, when the
Butcher
discourses wisely on arithmetic and natural history, two subjects a butcher should know pretty thoroughly, and this is proved:

“While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks

More eloquent even than tears,

It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books

Would have taught it in seventy years.”

The
Barrister’s
Dream occupied
Fit the Sixth
, and here our poet’s keen wit gave many a slap at the law and the lawyers.

The
Banker’s
Fate in
Fit the Seventh
was sad enough; he was grabbed by the Bandersnatch (that “frumious” “portmanteau” creature that we met before in the
Lay of the Jabberwocky
) and worried and tossed about until he completely lost his senses.
Some bankers are that way in the pursuit of fortune, which means happiness to them; but fortune may turn, like the Bandersnatch, and shake their minds out of their bodies, and so they left this
Banker
to his fate.
That is the way of people when bankers are in trouble, because they were reckless and not always careful to

“Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch.”

Fit the Eighth
treats of the vanishing of the Baker according to the prediction of his prophetic uncle.
All day long the eager searchers had hunted in vain, but just at the close of the day they heard a shout in the distance and beheld their
Baker
“erect and sublime” on top of a crag, waving his arms and shouting wildly; then before their startled and horrified gaze, he plunged into a chasm and disappeared forever.

“‘It’s a Snark!’
was the sound that first came to their ears.

And seemed almost too good to be true.

Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers,

Then the ominous words, ‘It’s a Boo——’

“Then, silence.
Some fancied they heard in the air

A weary and wandering sigh

That sounded like ‘jum!’
but the others declare

It was only a breeze that went by.

“They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

Not a button, or feather, or mark

By which they could tell that they stood on the ground

Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

“In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

For the Snark
was
a Boojum, you see.”

What became of the
Bellman
and his crew is left to our imagination.
Perhaps the
Baker’s
fate was a warning, or perhaps they are still hunting—not
too
close to the chasm.
Lewis Carroll, always so particular about proper endings, refuses any explanation.
The fact that this special Snark was a “Boojum” altered all the rules of the hunt.
Nobody knows what it is, but all the same nobody wishes to meet a “Boojum.”
That’s all there is about it.

“Now how absurd to talk such nonsense!”
some learned school girl may exclaim; undoubtedly one who has high ideals about life and literature.
But is it nonsense we are talking, and does the quaint poem really teach us nothing?
Anything which brings a picture to the mind must surely have some merit, and there is much homely common sense wrapped up in the queer verses if we have but the wit to find it, and no one is too young nor too old to join in this hunt for happiness.

Read the poem over and over, put expression and feeling into it, treat the
Bellman
and his strange crew as if they were real human beings—there’s a lot of the human in them after all—and see if new ideas and new meanings do not pop into your head with each reading, while the verses, all unconsciously, will stick in your memory, where Tennyson or Wordsworth or even Shakespeare fails to hold a place there.