“INSTANCE OF HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING OF THE DATE 1867”
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.