25 NOVEMBER 1899, Page 19

A LEWIS CARROLL SCRAP-BOOK.* THE severest criticism on this miscellaneous,

ill-assorted,

ill-

named, but extremely readable, volume is to be found in Lewis Carroll's own words. In the charming article on "Alice' on the Stage" which he wrote for the Theatre of April, 1887, after condemning work that is forced or perfunctory, he goes on to say :—" 'Alice' and the 'Looking Glass' are made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of them- selves. Poor these may have been, but at least they were the best I had to offer, and I can desire no higher praise to be written of me than the words of a Poet, written of a Poet— 'He gave the people of his best,

The worst he kept, the best he gave.'"

For the reprinting of such a poem as "She's All My Fancy Painted Him" there is the excellent excuse that it contains something more than the germ of one of the best bits of mystification in Alice in. Wonderland. The same remark applies to the "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" on p. 37, which bears the date 1855, and is none other than the first • The Lewis Carroll Piaure-Book : a Selection from the Unpublished Writings and Drawings of Lewis Carroll, together wah Reprints from Basra and Un- acknowledged Work. Edited by Stuart Dodgsou Collin,gwood, B.A., Christ Church, Oxford. London : T. Fisher Unwin. [6.1]

quatrain of "Jabberwocky." But no valid purpose has been served by the publication of most of the pieces from the series of MS. family magazines of which he was the editor and mainstay. Indeed, what Mr. Collingwood says of the earlier magazines which he has left untouched applies to most of the contributions here reproduced: they might have been written by any intelligent schoolboy. We may, how- ever, except the delightful illustrated zoological paper on "Fishs "—the metal toy fish " made in Germany," and dirigible with a magnet—and some entirely characteristic "Hints for Etiquette; or, Dining out Made Easy," from which we may extract the following :- VIII.

"The practice of taking soup with the next gentleman but one is now wisely discontinued ; but the custom of asking your host his opinion of the weather immediately on the removal of the first course still prevails."

ix.

"To use a fork with your soup, intimating at the same time to your hostess that you are reserving the spoon for the beefsteaks, is a practice wholly exploded."

xvir.

"We do not recommend the practice of eating cheese with a knife and fork in one hand, and a spoon and wineglass in the other; there is a kind of awkwardness in the action which no amount of practice can entirely dispel."

xxvir.

"Proposing the health of the boy in buttons immediately on the removal of the cloth, is a custom springing from regard to his tender years, rather than from a strict adherence to the rules of etiquette."

The second chapter illustrates the misnomer involved in the choice of the title. A "picture-book," rightly or wrongly, is generally taken to mean a volume suitable for juvenile readers. But here we find nearly a third of the volume devoted to a reprint of those admirably witty academic squibs, "The New Method of the Evaluation of 11," "The

Dynamics of a Parti-cle," "The New Belfry," &c., which Mr. Dodgson collected in 1874 under the heading " Nates by an Oxford Chiel." Mr. Collingwood has been fortunate enough

to secure the Beryline of Mr. Lewis Sergeant, who has appended a number of elucidatory comments to each of these papers, but even so, they presuppose a familiarity with the recent academic his ory of Oxford which limits their appeal to an esoteric audience. Still, even the non-University

reader can hardly fail to be charmed by such exquisite fooling as the introduction to "The Dynamics of a Parti- cle," or the series of definitions, postulates, and axioms with which it opens,—e.g., "Plain superficiality is the

character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points." The introduction which the author gave as an illustration of "the advantage of introducing the human element into the hitherto barren region of mathematics" runs as follows :—

" • It was a lovely Autumn evening, and the glorious effects of chromatic aberration were beginning to show themselves in the atmosphere as the earth revolved away from the great western luminary, when two lines might have been observed wending their weary way across a plain superficies. The elder of the two bad by long practice acquired the art, so painful to young and impul- sive loci, of lying evenly between her extreme points; but the younger, in her girlish impetuosity, was ever longing to diverge and become an hyperbola or some such romantic and boundless curve. They bad lived and loved : fate and the intervening superficies had hitherto kept them asunder, but this was no longer to be : a line had intersected them, making the two interior angles together less than two right angles. It was a moment never to be forgotten, and, as they journeyed on, a whisper thrilled along the superficies in isochronons waves of sound. " Yes ! we shall at length meet if continually produced! " ' (Jacobi's Course of Mathematics, Chap. I.) " Thanks to Thackeray's Barba:lire and the above, G. P. R. James's two horsemen are secure of immortality.

From the delightful paper, " Alice' on the Stage," we have already taken toll, but may add a curious extract from the

passage on the three Queens. Speaking of the White Queen, Lewis Carroll observes : "There is a character strangely like her in Wilkie Collins's novel No Ham e : by two different converging paths we have somehow reached the same ideal, and Mrs. Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin- sisters." To the Theatre he also contributed another paper

on "The Stage and the Spirit of Reverence," in which the legitimate and illegitimate use of oaths on the boards is handled with delicacy as well as common-sense. Facing one

of the pages of this essay is a portrait of Mae Irene Van- brugh in her childhood from the pen of Lewis Carroll himself. One would have liked to hear his views on the subject of The Gay Lord Quex.

The chapter headed "An Irresponsible Correspondent" contains a number of delightful letters from Lewis Carroll to his child friends, sometimes a tissue of whimsical absurdities —as in the case of the letter which suggests a list of presents which might be given him on his birthday, "which comes once every seven years on the fifth Tuesday in April"— occasionally striking a serious note, but always indicating complete appreciation of the child's standpoint. One of these friends, now a married lady with six eons, says :—" As a child he gave one the sense of such perfect understanding, and this knowledge of child nature was the same whether the child was only seven years of age, or in her teens. A grown-up child was his horror. He called one day just after I had put my hair up,' and I, with girlish pride, was pleased he should be there to see. My satisfaction received a blow when he said, 'I will take you for a walk if you let your hair down your back, but not unless.' What girl could refuse the attraction of a walk with him P" The volume is completed with unpub- lished fragments of his " Cnriosa Mathematica, Part III.," accounts of his games and puzzles—doublets, syzygies, castle croquet, dm— and a chapter headed" Miscellanea Carrolliana," in which we may specially notice the entertaining narrative, "Isa's Visit to Oxford "; the beautiful sermon to children preached at Eastbourne; and the reminiscences contributed by Professor York Powell and Canon Duckworth. In an appendix Mr. Collingwood gives the famous Light-Green, per- version of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (written, we believe, by the late Mr. Hilton), and a most amusing version of "Jabberwocky" in doggerel elegiacs, by the late Mr. Hassard Dodgson.

We could wish, in conclusion, that Mr. Collingwood'e manifest devotion to his uncle's memory and the general good taste he has shown in his commentary, had been equalled by his literary discrimination and sense of proportion. His book, as the foregoing sketch of its contents will sufficiently indicate, is partly a collection of supplementary undigested binvraphical material—excellent in its way—partly "remains," p bl =bed and unpublished, of all degrees of excellence. Working on the basis furnished by this and Mr. Coning- wood's previous volume, it is to be hoped that some experi- enced literary craftsman will some day give us an artistic memoir of a fascinating personality and a great, though uneval, humourist.