The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll Part 11

Next came "The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford; a Monograph by D.C.L." On the t.i.tle-page was a neatly drawn square--the figure of Euclid I. 46--below which was written "East view of the New Belfry, Christ Church, as seen from the meadow." The new belfry is fortunately a thing of the past, and its insolent hideousness no longer defaces Christ Church, but while it lasted it was no doubt an excellent target for Lewis Carroll's sarcasm. His article on it is divided into thirteen chapters. Three of them are perhaps worth quoting:--

--1. _On the etymological significance of the new Belfry, Ch. Ch_.

The word "Belfry" is derived from the French _bel_, "beautiful, becoming, meet," and from the German _frei_, "free unfettered, secure, safe." Thus, the word is strictly equivalent to "meat-safe,"

to which the new Belfry bears a resemblance so perfect as almost to amount to coincidence.

--4. _On the chief architectural merit of the new Belfry, Ch. Ch_.

Its chief merit is its simplicity--a simplicity so pure, so profound, in a word, so _simple_, that no other word will fitly describe it. The meagre outline, and baldness of detail, of the present Chapter, are adopted in humble imitation of this great feature.

--5. _On the other architectural merits of the new Belfry, Ch. Ch_.

The Belfry has no other architectural merits.

"The Vision of the Three T's" followed. It also was an attack on architectural changes in Christ Church; the general style was a parody of the "Compleat Angler." Last of all came "The Blank Cheque, a Fable," in reference to the building of the New Schools, for the expenses of which it was actually proposed (in 1874), to sign a blank cheque before any estimate had been made, or any plan laid before the University, and even before a committee had been elected to appoint an architect for the work.

At the end of 1874 Mr. Dodgson was again at Hatfield, where he told the children the story of Prince Uggug, which was afterwards made a part of "Sylvie and Bruno," though at that time it seems to have been a separate tale. But "Sylvie and Bruno," in this respect entirely unlike "Alice in Wonderland," was the result of notes taken during many years; for while he was thinking out the book he never neglected any amusing sc.r.a.ps of childish conversation or funny anecdotes about children which came to his notice. It is this fact which gives such verisimilitude to the prattle of Bruno; childish talk is a thing which a grown-up person cannot possibly _invent_. He can only listen to the actual things the children say, and then combine what he has heard into a connected narrative.

During 1875 Mr. Dodgson wrote an article on "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," which was refused by the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the editor saying that he had never heard of most of them; on which Mr. Dodgson plaintively notes in his Diary that seven out of the thirteen fallacies dealt with in his essay had appeared in the columns of the _Pall Mall Gazette_. Ultimately it was accepted by the editor of _The Fortnightly Review_. Mr. Dodgson had a peculiar horror of vivisection. I was once walking in Oxford with him when a certain well-known professor pa.s.sed us. "I am afraid that man vivisects," he said, in his gravest tone. Every year he used to get a friend to recommend him a list of suitable charities to which he should subscribe. Once the name of some Lost Dogs' Home appeared in this list. Before Mr. Dodgson sent his guinea he wrote to the secretary to ask whether the manager of the Home was in the habit of sending dogs that had to be killed to physiological laboratories for vivisection. The answer was in the negative, so the inst.i.tution got the cheque. He did not, however, advocate the total abolition of vivisection--what reasonable man could?--but he would have liked to see it much more carefully restricted by law. An earlier letter of his to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ on the same subject is sufficiently characteristic to deserve a place here. Be it noted that he signed it "Lewis Carroll," in order that whatever influence or power his writings had gained him might tell in the controversy.

VIVISECTION AS A SIGN OF THE TIMES.

_To the Editor of the "Pall Mall Gazette."_

Sir,--The letter which appeared in last week's _Spectator_, and which must have saddened the heart of every one who read it, seems to suggest a question which has not yet been asked or answered with sufficient clearness, and that is, How far may vivisection be regarded as a sign of the times, and a fair specimen of that higher civilisation which a purely secular State education is to give us? In that much-vaunted panacea for all human ills we are promised not only increase of knowledge, but also a higher moral character; any momentary doubt on this point which we may feel is set at rest at once by quoting the great crucial instance of Germany. The syllogism, if it deserves the name, is usually stated thus: Germany has a higher scientific education than England; Germany has a lower average of crime than England; _ergo_, a scientific education tends to improve moral conduct. Some old-fashioned logician might perhaps whisper to himself, "Praemissis particularibus nihil probatur," but such a remark, now that Aldrich is out of date, would only excite a pitying smile. May we, then, regard the practice of vivisection as a legitimate fruit, or as an abnormal development, of this higher moral character? Is the anatomist, who can contemplate unmoved the agonies he is inflicting for no higher purpose than to gratify a scientific curiosity, or to ill.u.s.trate some well-established truth, a being higher or lower, in the scale of humanity, than the ignorant boor whose very soul would sicken at the horrid sight? For if ever there was an argument in favour of purely scientific education more cogent than another, it is surely this (a few years back it might have been put into the mouth of any advocate of science; now it reads like the merest mockery): "What can teach the n.o.ble quality of mercy, of sensitiveness to all forms of suffering, so powerfully as the knowledge of what suffering really is? Can the man who has once realised by minute study what the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being?" A little while ago we should have confidently replied, "He cannot do it"; in the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess "He can." And let it never be said that this is done with serious forethought of the balance of pain and gain; that the operator has pleaded with himself, "Pain is indeed an evil, but so much suffering may fitly be endured to purchase so much knowledge." When I hear of one of these ardent searchers after truth giving, not a helpless dumb animal, to whom he says in effect, "_You_ shall suffer that _I_ may know," but his own person to the probe and to the scalpel, I will believe in him as recognising a principle of justice, and I will honour him as acting up to his principles. "But the thing cannot be!" cries some amiable reader, fresh from an interview with that most charming of men, a London physician. "What! Is it possible that one so gentle in manner, so full of n.o.ble sentiments, can be hardhearted? The very idea is an outrage to common sense!" And thus we are duped every day of our lives. Is it possible that that bank director, with his broad honest face, can be meditating a fraud? That the chairman of that meeting of shareholders, whose every tone has the ring of truth in it, can hold in his hand a "cooked" schedule of accounts? That my wine merchant, so outspoken, so confiding, can be supplying me with an adulterated article? That the schoolmaster, to whom I have entrusted my little boy, can starve or neglect him? How well I remember his words to the dear child when last we parted. "You are leaving your friends," he said, "but you will have a father in me, my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers!" For all such rose-coloured dreams of the necessary immunity from human vices of educated men the facts in last week's _Spectator_ have a terrible significance. "Trust no man further than you can see him," they seem to say. "Qui vult decipi, decipiatur."

Allow me to quote from a modern writer a few sentences bearing on this subject:--

"We are at present, legislature and nation together, eagerly pushing forward schemes which proceed on the postulate that conduct is determined, not by feelings, but by cognitions. For what else is the a.s.sumption underlying this anxious urging-on of organisations for teaching? What is the root-notion common to Secularists and Denominationalists but the notion that spread of knowledge is the one thing needful for bettering behaviour? Having both swallowed certain statistical fallacies, there has grown up in them the belief that State education will check ill-doing.... This belief in the moralising effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd _a priori_.... This faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the superst.i.tions of the age.... Not by precept, though heard daily; not by example, unless it is followed; but only by action, often caused by the related feeling, can a moral habit be formed. And yet this truth, which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored in current educational fanaticisms."

There need no praises of mine to commend to the consideration of all thoughtful readers these words of Herbert Spencer. They are to be found in "The Study of Sociology" (pp. 36l-367).

Let us, however, do justice to science. It is not so wholly wanting as Mr. Herbert Spencer would have us believe in principles of action--principles by which we may regulate our conduct in life. I myself once heard an accomplished man of science declare that his labours had taught him one special personal lesson which, above all others, he had laid to heart. A minute study of the nervous system, and of the various forms of pain produced by wounds had inspired in him one profound resolution; and that was--what think you?--never, under any circ.u.mstances, to adventure his own person into the field of battle! I have somewhere read in a book--a rather antiquated book, I fear, and one much discredited by modern lights--the words, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Truly we read these words with a new meaning in the present day!

"Groan and travail" it undoubtedly does still (more than ever, so far as the brute creation is concerned); but to what end? Some higher and more glorious state? So one might have said a few years back. Not so in these days. The _telos teleion_ of secular education, when divorced from religious or moral training, is--I say it deliberately--the purest and most unmitigated selfishness.

The world has seen and tired of the worship of Nature, of Reason, of Humanity; for this nineteenth century has been reserved the development of the most refined religion of all--the worship of Self. For that, indeed, is the upshot of it all. The enslavement of his weaker brethren--"the labour of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do not labour"--the degradation of woman--the torture of the animal world--these are the steps of the ladder by which man is ascending to his higher civilisation. Selfishness is the key-note of all purely secular education; and I take vivisection to be a glaring, a wholly unmistakable case in point. And let it not be thought that this is an evil that we can hope to see produce the good for which we are asked to tolerate it, and then pa.s.s away. It is one that tends continually to spread. And if it be tolerated or even ignored now, the age of universal education, when the sciences, and anatomy among them, shall be the heritage of all, will be heralded by a cry of anguish from the brute creation that will ring through the length and breadth of the land! This, then, is the glorious future to which the advocate of secular education may look forward: the dawn that gilds the horizon of his hopes! An age when all forms of religious thought shall be things of the past; when chemistry and biology shall be the ABC of a State education enforced on all; when vivisection shall be practised in every college and school; and when the man of science, looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a h.e.l.l for animals.

I am, sir,

Your obedient servant,

Lewis Carroll.

_February 10th_.

On March 29, 1876, "The Hunting of the Snark" was published. Mr.

Dodgson gives some interesting particulars of its evolution. The first idea for the poem was the line "For the Snark _was_ a Boojum, you see," which came into his mind, apparently without any cause, while he was taking a country walk. The first complete verse which he composed was the one which stands last in the poem:--

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.

The ill.u.s.trations were the work of Mr. Henry Holiday, and they are thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of the poem. Many people have tried to show that "The Hunting of the Snark" was an allegory; some regarding it as being a burlesque upon the Tichborne case, and others taking the Snark as a personification of popularity. Lewis Carroll always protested that the poem had no meaning at all.

As to the meaning of the Snark [he wrote to a friend in America], I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book. The best that I've seen is by a lady (she published it in a letter to a newspaper), that the whole book is an allegory on the search after happiness. I think this fits in beautifully in many ways--particularly about the bathing-machines: when the people get weary of life, and can't find happiness in towns or in books, then they rush off to the seaside, to see what bathing-machines will do for them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry Holiday in his Studio. _From a photograph_.]

Mr. H. Holiday, in a very interesting article on "The Snark's Significance" (_Academy,_ January 29, 1898), quoted the inscription which Mr. Dodgson had written in a vellum-bound, presentation-copy of the book. It is so characteristic that I take the liberty of reproducing it here:--

Presented to Henry Holiday, most patient of artists, by Charles L. Dodgson, most exacting, but not most ungrateful of authors, March 29, 1876.

A little girl, to whom Mr. Dodgson had given a copy of the "Snark,"

managed to get the whole poem off by heart, and insisted on reciting, it from beginning to end during a long carriage-drive. Her friends, who, from the nature of the case, were unable to escape, no doubt wished that she, too, was a Boojum.

During the year, the first public dramatic representation of "Alice in Wonderland" was given at the Polytechnic, the entertainment taking the form of a series of _tableaux_, interspersed with appropriate readings and songs. Mr. Dodgson exercised a rigid censorship over all the extraneous matter introduced into the performance, and put his veto upon a verse in one of the songs, in which the drowning of kittens was treated from the humorous point of view, lest the children in the audience might learn to think lightly of death in the case of the lower animals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lewis Carroll. _From a photograph_.]

CHAPTER V

(1877-1883)

Dramatic tastes--Miss Ellen Terry--"Natural Science at Oxford"--Mr. Dodgson as an artist--Miss E. G. Thomson--The drawing of children--A curious dream--"The Deserted Parks"--"Syzygies"--Circus children--Row-loving undergraduates--A letter to _The Observer_--Resignation of the Lectureship--He is elected Curator of the Common Room--Dream-music.

Mr. Dodgson's love of the drama was not, as I have shown, a taste which he acquired in later years. From early college days he never missed anything which he considered worth seeing at the London theatres. I believe he used to reproach himself--unfairly, I think--with spending too much time on such recreations. For a man who worked so hard and so incessantly as he did; for a man to whom vacations meant rather a variation of mental employment than absolute rest of mind, the drama afforded just the sort of relief that was wanted. His vivid imagination, the very earnestness and intensity of his character enabled him to throw himself utterly into the spirit of what he saw upon the stage, and to forget in it all the petty worries and disappointments of life. The old adage says that a man cannot burn the candle at both ends; like most proverbs, it is only partially true, for often the hardest worker is the man who enters with most zest into his recreations, and this was emphatically the case with Mr.

Dodgson.

Walter Pater, in his book on the Renaissance, says (I quote from rough notes only), "A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pa.s.s most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Here we have the truer philosophy, here we have the secret of Lewis Carroll's life. He never wasted time on social formalities; he refused to fulfil any of those (so called) duties which involve ineffable boredom, and so his mind was always fresh and ready. He said in one of his letters that he hoped that in the next world all knowledge would not be given to us suddenly, but that we should gradually grow wiser, for the _acquiring_ knowledge was to him the real pleasure. What is this but a paraphrase of another of Pater's thoughts, "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end."

And so, times without number, he allowed himself to be carried away by emotion as he saw life in the mirror of the stage; but, best of all, he loved to see the acting of children, and he generally gave copies of his books to any of the little performers who specially pleased him. On January 13, 1877, he wrote in his Diary:--

Went up to town for the day, and took E-- with me to the afternoon pantomime at the Adelphi, "Goody Two-Shoes," acted entirely by children. It was a really charming performance.

Little Bertie Coote, aged ten, was clown--a wonderfully clever little fellow; and Carrie Coote, about eight, was Columbine, a very pretty graceful little thing. In a few years' time she will be just _the_ child to act "Alice," if it is ever dramatised. The harlequin was a little girl named Gilchrist, one of the most beautiful children, in face and figure, that I have ever seen. I must get an opportunity of photographing her. Little Bertie Coote, singing "Hot Codlings," was curiously like the pictures of Grimaldi.

It need hardly be said that the little girl was Miss Constance Gilchrist. Mr. Dodgson sent her a copy of "Alice in Wonderland," with a set of verses on her name.

Many people object altogether to children appearing on the stage; it is said to be bad for their morals as well as for their health. A letter which Mr. Dodgson once wrote in the _St. James's Gazette_ contains a sufficient refutation of the latter fancy:--

I spent yesterday afternoon at Brighton, where for five hours I enjoyed the society of three exceedingly happy and healthy little girls, aged twelve, ten, and seven. I think that any one who could have seen the vigour of life in those three children--the intensity with which they enjoyed everything, great or small, that came in their way--who could have watched the younger two running races on the Pier, or have heard the fervent exclamation of the eldest at the end of the afternoon, "We _have_ enjoyed ourselves!" would have agreed with me that here, at least, there was no excessive "physical strain," nor any _imminent_ danger of "fatal results"! A drama, written by Mr. Savile Clarke, is now being played at Brighton, and in this (it is called "Alice in Wonderland") all three children have been engaged. They had been acting every night this week, and _twice_ on the day before I met them, the second performance lasting till half-past ten at night, after which they got up at seven next morning to bathe! That such (apparently) severe work should co-exist with blooming health and buoyant spirits seems at first sight a paradox; but I appeal to any one who has ever worked _con amore_ at any subject whatever to support me in the a.s.sertion that, when you really love the subject you are working at, the "physical strain" is absolutely _nil_; it is only when working "against the grain" that any strain is felt, and I believe the apparent paradox is to be explained by the fact that a taste for _acting_ is one of the strongest pa.s.sions of human nature, that stage-children show it nearly from infancy, and that, instead of being miserable drudges who ought to be celebrated in a new "Cry of the Children,"

they simply _rejoice_ in their work "even as a giant rejoiceth to run his course."

Mr. Dodgson's general views on the mission of the drama are well shown by an extract from a circular which he sent to many of his friends in 1882:--