Books of the Day CARROLL AND DODGSON, Evelyn Waugh

511

STALIN, john Hallett

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LORD RUTHERFORD, C. P. Snow ...

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AFTER THE DELUGE, R. C. K. Ensor 5,4 LOVE FOR A COUNTRY, Ronald Gartland, M.P. ... 5,4 FOUR WAYS OF PHILOSOPHY, C. E. M. toad ... • • .

516

MORE PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME, Anthony Powell

516

THE DAUGHTERS OF GEORGE III, Christopher Hobhouse

518

NEW VERSE ANTHOLOGY, Desmond Hawkins

520

PLAYS FROM ST. HILARY, A. L. Rowse ...

520

AFTER MANY A SUMMER, Derek V erschoyle

522

THE FLYING GOAT, Graham Greene ..

524

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, L. A. G. Strong...

524

CARROLL AND DODGSON

By EVELYN WAUGH

OF recent years the Nonesuch Press has set itself the modest but valuable work of providing a flat-dwellers' library of classic writers. The selection has been judicious, the form convenient, the price moderate. It is true that for the same Rim the collector could in most cases have provided himself with a complete edition at second-hand, but the readers for whom the Nonesuch Press now caters have neither time to cultivate the bookshops ror space to accommodate their harvest. The Nonesuch Library is " contemporary " in intention and achievement. In The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, however, it is attempting something rather different. It is highly unlikely that a rival edition will appear in the near future ; none but a half-dozen specialists possess, in any form, the greater part of the contents. The volume must be judged as a definitive edition and, as such, it exhibits certain easily avoidable defects. With regard to its form there is little cause of complaint ; it is easier to handle and to read than most " omnibus " books. It is regrettable that the beautiful illus- trations of the Hunting of the Snark had to be omitted ; Harry Furniss's drawings for Sylvie and Bruno, though deplorable, played, as the author's preface shows, a considerable part in the book's composition and deserved their place in the text. But judged by strictly contemporary standards the volume, physically, is satisfactory.

Its composition, however, is less happy. The editor effectively conceals both his identity and his intentions. " Everything Lewis Carroll wrote appears in this volume," he jauntily announces, ignoring a distinction which Dodgson himself was at constant pains to observe. For he includes in the volume not only the work published under the pseudonym of " Lewis Carroll," but much which Dodgson wrote under his own name, anonymously, and under easily recognisable, transposed initials. The undeclared and untenable presupposition seems to be that whenever Dodgson was not being wholly professional, he was " Lewis Carroll " ; thus the most prosaic, donnish witticisms which he employed during his academic life are attributed to one of the most fantastic imaginations of the century. The task of editorship was, indeed, singularly complex. The only orderly solution would have been to confine all that was not published under the pseudonym " Lewis Carroll," to an extensive appendix designed to illuminate the author's obscure character. What the None- Rich editor has done is to comb a don's life work for anything likely to amuse—extracts from common-room memoranda, Illustrations of logical forms, essays in academic controversy, light and serious, religious and political opinions—and lump them all together without preface or adequate notes, under the pseudonym which their author scrupulously preserved for a unique species of work.

Mr. Alexander Woolcott takes no responsibility for the editorship, but contributes a chatty introduction which does, id fact, give the reader some consolation by steering his attention where he will be least disappointed. Dodgson's character constitutes a nice psychological problem, and this jumble of papers, rudely presented though it is, contains a multitude of significant data. (Incidentally, Mr. Wool- cott is at fault in declaring that Alice in Wonderland has not been subjected to psycho-analysis ; it has been so treated,

The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. (The Nonesuch Press. 12s. 6d.) more than once, with highly painful results.) Dodgson is revealed as a man of precise and fastidious mind. As an academic wit he specialised in fanciful exaggeration and

parody ; Stephen Leacock and the authors of io66 and All That are in direct succession from him, and I do not know of any predecessors. In his serious moods, which seem to have pre- dominated in his everyday life, Dodgson was deeply concerned with such questions as the cruelty of blood-sports and vivisec- tion, religious observance, and in particular with a morbidly scrupulous abhorrence of anything coarse or blasphemous. BoVvdler's edition of Shakespeare disgusted him by its lewd- ness, and one of his dinner-parties was ruined for him by a guest repeating the tale of a child's innocent irreverence. In all this he was an extreme but perfectly intelligible type of his age and class. The mystery is the transition by which Dodg- son became " Lewis Carroll," one of the great imaginative writers of the language. The most nutritious text for this study is Sylvie and Bruno.

It is easy to see why this book and its sequel failed to achieve the fame of Alice. They are wholly different in temper and only the explicit statements of the author's preface and of certain apostrophes in the text can convince the reader that they were ever intended for children. The main story, in which the fanciful passages are embedded, is a typical Victorian novel. An invalid narrator goes to stay with a friend who has for a long time nurtured an undeclared devotion for the daughter of a neighbouring Earl ; the devotion is undeclared because the lover is a poor country doctor ; he inherits a fortune which makes him an eligible suitor but his diffidence persists and he is anticipated by a dashing but sceptical cousin. Lady Muriel at first inclines to the rival but his scepticism proves insurmountable and, after despairing, the doctor is accepted ; on the day of his wedding duty calls him to a plague- stricken village where he is believed for a time to have perished —in the company of three religious ministers, Anglican, Wesleyan and Catholic. The cousin for the second time performs an act of heroism, rescues the doctor, restores him to Lady Muriel, and proclaims a partial conversion to the tenets of revealed religion, too late, however, to recover Lady Muriel's affections.

The peculiarity of the book lies in the fact that the narrator of this simple tale is intermittently haunted by two dream-children named Sylvie and Bruno. Sylvie has some undefined affinity to Lady Muriel, but Bruno, her junior, is a creation of unique horror, who babbles throughout in baby-talk, like the " control " of a " medium." These children first appear as characters in a dream and are part of a Ruritanian State named Outland. Soon, however, Outland and its intrigues disappear, and the children pop up during the narrator's waking hours. They come to tea with the Earl and puzzle him with a bunch of exotic flowers; Bruno becomes so concrete that only the rival lover's gallantry saves him from being run down by a railway train. Except for this single occasion, however, they play no part in the main story; they are not supernatural visitants of the type of A Midsummer Night's Dream, who appear in order to solve or complicate the affairs of the world, but aberrations of the narrator's mind which, one cannot help guessing, correspond to some psychological peculiarity of Dodgson's.

The construction of the book, and the author's elaborate and obfuscating analysis of it, deserve the closest scrutiny. There is only space in this article to suggest one explanation which occurred to one reader. It seems to me likely that Dodgson was tortured by religious scepticism ; his abnormal tenderness of conscience with regard to blasphemy is explicable if we think of him as treasuring a religious faith so fragile that a child's prattle endangered it. He believed that the only way he could protect his faith was by escaping more and more from con- temporary life—in his scholarship into remote and fanciful abstractions, in literature into nonsense. In order to keep his mind from rational speculation he cultivated a habit of day-dreaming and peopled his consciousness with fantastic characters. Children became for him the symbols of innocent faith and accordingly the only tolerable companions ; converse with them gave his fantasies literary form. This, in the light of what we know of Victorian Oxford, seems to me a plausible explanation, or at least, a line of enquiry. It is, anyway, an absorbing topic and we may be grateful to the Nonesuch editor, shoddily as he has done his work, for providing the opportunity for its discussion.