r maker of these conditions for
class-room guidance in this effort. I suppose Mr. Lewis Carroll has done
more to develop this distinguishing characteristic than any other
contributor to our Letters. So we shall go on an excursion with his
_Alice_ into the _Wonderland_ he made for her. If her frank enjoyment
and free acceptance of the incongruous and the unexpected does not prove
infectious, we must be forever written down among those who could not
understand _Peter Pan_. We shall read and enjoy a chapter or two of
_Alice_ together in class, but for suggestive analysis along
interpretative lines Heaven forbid that I should lay violent hands on
her text. No one can teach you to interpret your _Alice_ save Alice
herself. You may walk with her, talk with her, dwindle and grow with
her, join her adventures in any way she will permit, but you may not
analyze nor dissect her. You may learn to interpret her only by living
with her and loving her.

Now _Aesop_ is another matter. However long you may live with him,
however much you may love his fables, there is a trick of interpretation
to be learned in voicing his philosophy which will develop the whimsical
side of your sense of humor and counteract the insistent moral tone
attached to every fable.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

The danger in handling a fable does not lie, as the interpreter seems so
often to think, in adopting too serious a tone. All the literature of
pure fancy, from the humorous essays of Bacon through the _Arabian
Nights_ to the nonsensical rhymes of Lear, must be treated with great
gravity of tone and temper by the interpreter. It is not levity, but
only whimsicality of temperament, I demand from one who would read from
this particular lore to me. I want my whimsical friend to interpret my
Chaucer and Crothers, _Peter Pan_ and the _Pied Piper_, Hans Christian
Andersen, Carroll, and Lear, and all the rest of the genial host who
minister to my most precious sense of nonsense. And, perhaps, most of
all, it is he (the whimsical friend) who must read fables to me, for a
fable, the dictionary tells us, is "a story in which, by the imagined
dealings of men with animals or mere things, or by the supposed doings
of these alone, useful lessons are taught." Now a moral "rubbed in" is
like an overdose of certain kinds of medicine, where a little cures, too
much kills. It is the presence of the _lesson_ which the whimsical tone
alone can offset. The whimsical tone never fal