Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (228 page)

This reminds one of the wonderful description in Mr.
Kipling's "City of Dreadful Night."
It is not generally known that Mr.
Dodgson was a fervent admirer of Mr.
Kipling's works; indeed during the last few years of his life I think he took more pleasure in his tales than in those of any other modern author.

Dr.
Liddon's fame as a preacher had reached the Russian clergy, with the result that he and Mr.
Dodgson found many doors open to them which are usually closed to travellers in Russia.
After their visit to Nijni Novgorod they returned to Moscow, whence, escorted by Bishop Leonide, Suffragan Bishop of Moscow, they made an expedition to the Troitska Monastery.

August 12th
.—A most interesting day.
We breakfasted at half-past five, and soon after seven left by railway, in company with Bishop Leonide and Mr.
Penny, for Troitska Monastery.
We found the Bishop, in spite of his limited knowledge of English, a very conversational and entertaining fellow-traveller.
The service at the cathedral had already begun when we reached it, and the Bishop took us in with him, through a great crowd which thronged the building, into a side room which opened into the chancel, where we remained during the service, and enjoyed the unusual privilege of seeing the clergy communicate—a ceremony for which the doors of the chancel are always shut, and the curtains drawn, so that the congregation never witness it.
It was a most elaborate ceremony, full of crossings, and waving of incense before everything that was going to be used, but also clearly full of much deep devotion....
In the afternoon we went down to the Archbishop's palace, and were presented to him by Bishop Leonide.
The Archbishop could only talk Russian, so that the conversation between him and Liddon (a most interesting one, which lasted more than an hour) was conducted in a very original fashion—the Archbishop making a remark in Russian, which was put into English by the Bishop; Liddon then answered the remark in French, and the Bishop repeated his answer in Russian to the Archbishop.
So that a conversation, entirely carried on between two people, required the use of three languages!

The Bishop had kindly got one of the theological students, who could talk French, to conduct us about, which he did most zealously, taking us, among other things, to see the subterranean cells of the hermits, in which some of them live for many years.
We were shown the doors of two of the inhabited ones; it was a strange and not quite comfortable feeling, in a dark narrow passage where each had to carry a candle, to be shown the low narrow door of a little cellar, and to know that a human being was living within, with only a small lamp to give him light, in solitude and silence day and night.

His experiences with an exorbitant
drojky
—driver at St.
Petersburg are worthy of record.
They remind one of a story which he himself used to tell as having happened to a friend of his at Oxford.
The latter had driven up in a cab to Tom Gate, and offered the cabman the proper fare, which was, however, refused with scorn.
After a long altercation he left the irate cabman to be brought to reason by the porter, a one-armed giant of prodigious strength.
When he was leaving college, he stopped at the gate to ask the porter how he had managed to dispose of the cabman.
"Well, sir," replied that doughty champion, "I could not persuade him to go until I floored him."

After a hearty breakfast I left Liddon to rest and write letters, and went off shopping, &c., beginning with a call on Mr.
Muir at No.
61, Galerne Ulitsa.
I took a
drojky
to the house, having first bargained with the driver for thirty
kopecks
; he wanted forty to begin with.
When we got there we had a little scene, rather a novelty in my experience of
drojky
—driving.
The driver began by saying "
Sorok
" (forty) as I got out; this was a warning of the coming storm, but I took no notice of it, but quietly handed over the thirty.
He received them with scorn and indignation, and holding them out in his open hand, delivered an eloquent discourse in Russian, of which
sorok
was the leading idea.
A woman, who stood by with a look of amusement and curiosity, perhaps understood him.
I
didn't, but simply held out my hand for the thirty, returned them to the purse and counted out twenty-five instead.
In doing this I felt something like a man pulling the string of a shower-bath—and the effect was like it—his fury boiled over directly, and quite eclipsed all the former row.
I told him in very bad Russian that I had offered thirty once, but wouldn't again; but this, oddly enough, did not pacify him.
Mr.
Muir's servant told him the same thing at length, and finally Mr.
Muir himself came out and gave him the substance of it sharply and shortly—but he failed to see it in a proper light.
Some people are very hard to please.

When staying at a friend's house at Kronstadt he wrote:—

Liddon had surrendered his overcoat early in the day, and when going we found it must be recovered from the waiting-maid, who only talked Russian, and as I had left the dictionary behind, and the little vocabulary did not contain
coat
, we were in some difficulty.
Liddon began by exhibiting his coat, with much gesticulation, including the taking it half-off.
To our delight, she appeared to understand at once—left the room, and returned in a minute with—a large clothes-brush.
On this Liddon tried a further and more energetic demonstration; he took off his coat, and laid it at her feet, pointed downwards (to intimate that in the lower regions was the object of his desire), smiled with an expression of the joy and gratitude with which he would receive it, and put the coat on again.
Once more a gleam of intelligence lighted up the plain but expressive features of the young person; she was absent much longer this time, and when she returned, she brought, to our dismay, a large cushion and a pillow, and began to prepare the sofa for the nap that she now saw clearly was the thing the dumb gentleman wanted.
A happy thought occurred to me, and I hastily drew a sketch representing Liddon, with one coat on, receiving a second and larger one from the hands of a benignant Russian peasant.
The language of hieroglyphics succeeded where all other means had failed, and we returned to St.
Petersburg with the humiliating knowledge that our standard of civilisation was now reduced to the level of ancient Nineveh.

At Warsaw they made a short stay, putting up at the Hotel d'Angleterre:—

Our passage is inhabited by a tall and very friendly grey-hound, who walks in whenever the door is opened for a second or two, and who for some time threatened to make the labour of the servant, who was bringing water for a bath, of no effect, by drinking up the water as fast as it was brought.

From Warsaw they went on to Leipzig, and thence to Giessen, where they arrived on September 4th.

We moved on to Giessen, and put up at the "Rappe Hotel" for the night, and ordered an early breakfast of an obliging waiter who talked English.
"Coffee!"
he exclaimed delightedly, catching at the word as if it were a really original idea, "Ah, coffee—very nice—and eggs?
Ham with your eggs?
Very nice—" "If we can have it broiled," I said.
"Boiled?"
the waiter repeated, with an incredulous smile.
"No, not
boiled
," I explained—"
broiled
."
The waiter put aside this distinction as trivial, "Yes, yes, ham," he repeated, reverting to his favourite idea.
"Yes, ham," I said, "but how cooked?"
"Yes, yes, how cooked," the waiter replied, with the careless air of one who assents to a proposition more from good nature than from a real conviction of its truth.

Sept.
5th
.—At midday we reached Ems, after a journey eventless, but through a very interesting country-valleys winding away in all directions among hills clothed with trees to the very top, and white villages nestling away wherever there was a comfortable corner to hide in.
The trees were so small, so uniform in colour, and so continuous, that they gave to the more distant hills something of the effect of banks covered with moss.
The really unique feature of the scenery was the way in which the old castles seemed to grow, rather than to have been built, on the tops of the rocky promontories that showed their heads here and there among the trees.
I have never seen architecture that seemed so entirely in harmony with the spirit of the place.
By some subtle instinct the old architects seem to have chosen both form and colour, the grouping of the towers with their pointed spires, and the two neutral tints, light grey and brown, on the walls and roof, so as to produce buildings which look as naturally fitted to the spot as the heath or the harebells.
And, like the flowers and the rocks, they seemed instinct with no other meaning than rest and silence.

And with these beautiful words my extracts from the Diary may well conclude.
Lewis Carroll's mind was completely at one with Nature, and in her pleasant places of calm and infinite repose he sought his rest—and has found it.

CHAPTER IV

(1868—1876)

Death of Archdeacon Dodgson—Lewis Carroll's rooms at Christ Church—"Phantasmagoria"—Translations of "Alice"—"Through the Looking-Glass"—"Jabberwocky" in Latin—C.S.
Calverley—"Notes by an Oxford Chiel"—Hatfield—Vivisection—"The Hunting of the Snark."

The success of "Alice in Wonderland" tempted Mr.
Dodgson to make another essay in the same field of literature.
His idea had not yet been plagiarised, as it was afterwards, though the book had of course been parodied, a notable instance being "Alice in Blunderland," which appeared in
Punch
.
It was very different when he came to write "Sylvie and Bruno"; the countless imitations of the two "Alice" books which had been foisted upon the public forced him to strike out in a new line.
Long before the publication of his second tale, people had heard that Lewis Carroll was writing again, and the editor of a well-known magazine had offered him two guineas a page, which was a high rate of pay in those days, for the story, if he would allow it to appear in serial form.

The central idea was, as every one knows, the adventures of a little girl who had somehow or other got through a looking-glass.
The first difficulty, however, was to get her through, and this question exercised his ingenuity for some time, before it was satisfactorily solved.
The next thing was to secure Tenniel's services again.
At first it seemed that he was to be disappointed in this matter; Tenniel was so fully occupied with other work that there seemed little hope of his being able to undertake any more.
He then applied to Sir Noel Paton, with whose fairy-pictures he had fallen in love; but the artist was ill, and wrote in reply, "Tenniel is
the
man."
In the end Tenniel consented to undertake the work, and once more author and artist settled down to work together.
Mr.
Dodgson was no easy man to work with; no detail was too small for his exact criticism.
"Don't give Alice so much crinoline," he would write, or "The White Knight must not have whiskers; he must not be made to look old"—such were the directions he was constantly giving.

On June 21st Archdeacon Dodgson died, after an illness of only a few days' duration.
Lewis Carroll was not summoned until too late, for the illness took a sudden turn for the worse, and he was unable to reach his father's bedside before the end had come.
This was a terrible shock to him; his father had been his ideal of what a Christian gentleman should be, and it seemed to him at first as if a cloud had settled on his life which could never be dispelled.
Two letters of his, both of them written long after the sad event, give one some idea of the grief which his father's death, and all that it entailed, caused him.
The first was written long afterwards, to one who had suffered a similar bereavement.
In this letter he said:—

We are sufficiently old friends, I feel sure, for me to have no fear that I shall seem intrusive in writing about your great sorrow.
The greatest blow that has ever fallen on
my
life was the death, nearly thirty years ago, of my own dear father; so, in offering you my sincere sympathy, I write as a fellow-sufferer.
And I rejoice to know that we are not only fellow-sufferers, but also fellow-believers in the blessed hope of the resurrection from the dead, which makes such a parting holy and beautiful, instead of being merely a blank despair.

The second was written to a young friend, Miss Edith Rix, who had sent him an illuminated text:

My dear Edith,—I can now tell you (what I wanted to do when you sent me that text-card, but felt I could not say it to
two
listeners, as it were)
why
that special card is one I like to have.
That text is consecrated for me by the memory of one of the greatest sorrows I have known—the death of my dear father.
In those solemn days, when we used to steal, one by one, into the darkened room, to take yet another look at the dear calm face, and to pray for strength, the one feature in the room that I remember was a framed text, illuminated by one of my sisters, "Then are they glad, because they are at rest; and so he bringeth them into the haven where they would be!"
That text will always have, for me, a sadness and a sweetness of its own.
Thank you again for sending it me.
Please don't mention this when we meet.
I can't
talk
about it.

Always affectionately yours,

C.
L.
DODGSON.

The object of his edition of Euclid Book V., published during the course of the year, was to meet the requirements of the ordinary Pass Examination, and to present the subject in as short and simple a form as possible.
Hence the Theory of Incommensurable Magnitudes was omitted, though, as the author himself said in the Preface, to do so rendered the work incomplete, and, from a logical point of view, valueless.
He hinted pretty plainly his own preference for an equivalent amount of Algebra, which would be complete in itself.
It is easy to understand this preference in a mind so strictly logical as his.

So far as the object of the book itself is concerned, he succeeded admirably; the propositions are clearly and beautifully worked out, and the hints on proving Propositions in Euclid Book V., are most useful.

PROF.
FARADAY.

From a photograph by Lewis Carroll
.

In November he again moved into new rooms at Christ Church; the suite which he occupied from this date to the end of his life was one of the best in the College.
Situated at the north-west corner of Tom Quad, on the first floor of the staircase from the entrance to which the Junior Common Room is now approached, they consist of four sitting-rooms and about an equal number of bedrooms, besides rooms for lumber, &c.
From the upper floor one can easily reach the flat college roof.
Mr.
Dodgson saw at once that here was the very place for a photographic studio, and he lost no time in obtaining the consent of the authorities to erect one.
Here he took innumerable photographs of his friends and their children, as indeed he had been doing for some time under less favourable conditions.
One of his earliest pictures is an excellent likeness of Professor Faraday.

His study was characteristic of the man; oil paintings by A.
Hughes, Mrs.
Anderson, and Heaphy proclaimed his artistic tastes; nests of pigeon-holes, each neatly labelled, showed his love of order; shelves, filled with the best books on every subject that interested him, were evidence of his wide reading.
His library has now been broken up and, except for a few books retained by his nearest relatives, scattered to the winds; such dispersions are inevitable, but they are none the less regrettable.
It always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned.
Talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless.

LEWIS CARROLL'S STUDY

AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.

Lewis Carroll's dining-room has been the scene of many a pleasant little party, for he was very fond of entertaining.
In his Diary, each of the dinners and luncheons that he gave is recorded by a small diagram, which shows who his guests were, and their several positions at the table.
He kept a
menu
book as well, that the same people might not have the same dishes too frequently.
He sometimes gave large parties, but his favourite form of social relaxation was a
dîner à deux
.