Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (244 page)

Facsimile of a letter

from H.
Furniss to Lewis Carroll,

August 23, 1886
.

SYLVIE AND BRUNO.

From a drawing

by Henry Holiday
.

CHAPTER VII

(1888—1891)

A systematic life—"Memoria Technica"—Mr.
Dodgson's shyness—"A Lesson in Latin"—The "Wonderland" Stamp-Case—"Wise Words about Letter-Writing"—Princess Alice—"Sylvie and Bruno"—"The night cometh"—"The Nursery 'Alice'"—Coventry Patmore—Telepathy—Resignation of Dr.
Liddell—A letter about Logic.

An old bachelor is generally very precise and exact in his habits.
He has no one but himself to look after, nothing to distract his attention from his own affairs; and Mr.
Dodgson was the most precise and exact of old bachelors.
He made a précis of every letter he wrote or received from the 1st of January, 1861, to the 8th of the same month, 1898.
These précis were all numbered and entered in reference-books, and by an ingenious system of cross-numbering he was able to trace a whole correspondence, which might extend through several volumes.
The last number entered in his book is 98,721.

He had scores of green cardboard boxes, all neatly labelled, in which he kept his various papers.
These boxes formed quite a feature of his study at Oxford, a large number of them being arranged upon a revolving bookstand.
The lists, of various sorts, which he kept were innumerable; one of them, that of unanswered correspondents, generally held seventy or eighty names at a time, exclusive of autograph-hunters, whom he did not answer on principle.
He seemed to delight in being arithmetically accurate about every detail of life.

He always rose at the same early hour, and, if he was in residence at Christ Church, attended College Service.
He spent the day according to a prescribed routine, which usually included a long walk into the country, very often alone, but sometimes with another Don, or perhaps, if the walk was not to be as long as usual, with some little girl-friend at his side.
When he had a companion with him, he would talk the whole time, telling delightful stories, or explaining some new logical problem; if he was alone, he used to think out his books, as probably many another author has done and will do, in the course of a lonely walk.
The only irregularity noticeable in his mode of life was the hour of retiring, which varied from 11 p.m.
to four o'clock in the morning, according to the amount of work which he felt himself in the mood for.

He had a wonderfully good memory, except for faces and dates.
The former were always a stumbling-block to him, and people used to say (most unjustly) that he was intentionally short-sighted.
One night he went up to London to dine with a friend, whom he had only recently met.
The next morning a gentleman greeted him as he was walking.
"I beg your pardon," said Mr.
Dodgson, "but you have the advantage of me.
I have no remembrance of having ever seen you before this moment."
"That is very strange," the other replied, "for I was your host last night!"
Such little incidents as this happened more than once.
To help himself to remember dates, he devised a system of mnemonics, which he circulated among his friends.
As it has never been published, and as some of my readers may find it useful, I reproduce it here.

My "Memoria Technica" is a modification of Gray's; but, whereas he used both consonants and vowels to represent digits, and had to content himself with a syllable of gibberish to represent the date or whatever other number was required, I use only consonants, and fill in with vowels
ad libitum,
and thus can always manage to make a real word of whatever has to be represented.

The principles on which the necessary 20 consonants have been chosen are as follows:—

1.
"b" and "c," the first two consonants in the alphabet.

2.
"d" from "duo," "w" from "two."

3.
"t" from "tres," the other may wait awhile.

4.
"f" from "four," "q" from "quattuor."

5.
"l" and "v," because "l" and "v" are the Roman symbols for "fifty" and "five."

6.
"s" and "x" from "six."

7.
"p" and "m" from "septem."

8.
"h" from "huit," and "k" from the Greek "okto."

9.
"n" from "nine"; and "g" because it is so like a "9."

0.
"z" and "r" from "zero."

There is now one consonant still waiting for its digit, viz., "j," and one digit waiting for its consonant, viz., "3," the conclusion is obvious.

The result may be tabulated thus:—

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

0

b

d

t

f

l

s

p

h

n

z

c

w

j

q

v

x

m

k

g

r

When a word has been found, whose last consonants represent the number required, the best plan is to put it as the last word of a rhymed couplet, so that, whatever other words in it are forgotten, the rhyme will secure the only really important word.

Now suppose you wish to remember the date of the discovery of America, which is 1492; the "1" may be left out as obvious; all we need is "492."

Write it thus:—

    4 9 2

    f n d

    q g w

and try to find a word that contains "f" or "q," "n" or "g," "d" or "w."
A word soon suggests itself—"found."

The poetic faculty must now be brought into play, and the following couplet will soon be evolved:—

"Columbus sailed the world around,

Until America was F O U N D."

If possible, invent the couplets for yourself; you will remember them better than any others.

June
, 1888.

The inventor found this "Memoria Technica" very useful in helping him to remember the dates of the different Colleges.
He often, of course, had to show his friends the sights of Oxford, and the easy way in which, asked or unasked, he could embellish his descriptions with dates used to surprise those who did not know how the thing was done.
The couplet for St.
John's College ran as follows:—

"They must have a bevel

To keep them so LEVEL."

The allusion is to the beautiful lawns, for which St.
John's is famous.

In his power of remembering anecdotes, and bringing them out just at the right moment, Mr.
Dodgson was unsurpassed.
A guest brought into Christ Church Common Room was usually handed over to him to be amused.
He was not a good man to tell a story to—he had always heard it before; but as a
raconteur
I never met his equal.
And the best of it was that his stories never grew—except in number.

One would have expected that a mind so clear and logical and definite would have fought shy of the feminine intellect, which is generally supposed to be deficient in those qualities; and so it is somewhat surprising to find that by far the greater number of his friends were ladies.
He was quite prepared to correct them, however, when they were guilty of what seemed to him unreasoning conduct, as is shown by the following extract from a letter of his to a young lady who had asked him to try and find a place for a governess, without giving the latter's address:—

Some of my friends are business-men, and it is pleasant to see how methodical and careful they are in transacting any business-matter.
If, for instance, one of them were to write to me, asking me to look out for a place for a French governess in whom he was interested, I should be sure to admire the care with which he would give me
her name in full
—(in extra-legible writing if it were an unusual name)—as well as her address.
Some of my friends are not men of business.

So many such requests were addressed to him that at one time he had a circular letter printed, with a list of people requiring various appointments or assistants, which he sent round to his friends.

In one respect Lewis Carroll resembled the stoic philosophers, for no outward circumstance could upset the tranquillity of his mind.
He lived, in fact, the life which Marcus Aurelius commends so highly, the life of calm contentment, based on the assurance that so long as we are faithful to ourselves, no seeming evils can really harm us.
But in him there was one exception to this rule.
During an argument he was often excited.
The war of words, the keen and subtle conflict between trained minds—in this his soul took delight, in this he sought and found the joy of battle and of victory.
Yet he would not allow his serenity to be ruffled by any foe whom he considered unworthy of his steel; he refused to argue with people whom he knew to be hopelessly illogical—definitely refused, though with such tact that no wound was given, even to the most sensitive.

He was modest in the true sense of the term, neither overestimating nor underrating his own mental powers, and preferring to follow his own course without regarding outside criticism.
"I never read anything about myself or my books," he writes in a letter to a friend; and the reason he used to give was that if the critics praised him he might become conceited, while, if they found fault, he would only feel hurt and angry.
On October 25, 1888, he wrote in his Diary: "I see there is a leader in to-day's
Standard
on myself as a writer; but I do not mean to read it.
It is not healthy reading, I think."

He hated publicity, and tried to avoid it in every way.
"Do not tell any one, if you see me in the theatre," he wrote once to Miss Marion Terry.
On another occasion, when he was dining out at Oxford, and some one, who did not know that it was a forbidden subject, turned the conversation on "Alice in Wonderland," he rose suddenly and fled from the house.
I could multiply instances of this sort, but it would be unjust to his memory to insist upon the morbid way in which he regarded personal popularity.
As compared with self-advertisement, it is certainly the lesser evil; but that it
is
an evil, and a very painful one to its possessor, Mr.
Dodgson fully saw.
Of course it had its humorous side, as, for instance, when he was brought into contact with lion-hunters, autograph-collectors,
et hoc genus omne
.
He was very suspicious of unknown correspondents who addressed questions to him; in later years he either did not answer them at all, or used a typewriter.
Before he bought his typewriter, he would get some friend to write for him, and even to sign "Lewis Carroll" at the end of the letter.
It used to give him great amusement to picture the astonishment of the recipients of these letters, if by any chance they ever came to compare his "autographs."

On one occasion the secretary of a "Young Ladies' Academy" in the United States asked him to present some of his works to the School Library.
The envelope was addressed to "Lewis Carroll, Christ Church," an incongruity which always annoyed him intensely.
He replied to the Secretary, "As Mr.
Dodgson's books are all on Mathematical subjects, he fears that they would not be very acceptable in a school library."

Some fourteen or fifteen years ago, the Fourth-class of the Girl's Latin School at Boston, U.S., started a magazine, and asked him if they might call it
The Jabberwock.
He wrote in reply:—

Mr.
Lewis Carroll has much pleasure in giving to the editors of the proposed magazine permission to use the title they wish for.
He finds that the Anglo-Saxon word "wocer" or "wocor" signifies "offspring" or "fruit."
Taking "jabber" in its ordinary acceptation of "excited and voluble discussion," this would give the meaning of "the result of much excited discussion."
Whether this phrase will have any application to the projected periodical, it will be for the future historian of American literature to determine.
Mr.
Carroll wishes all success to the forthcoming magazine.