Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (62 page)

" Little Birds.''
Events, and Persons.

Stanza 1.Banquet.

2.Chancellor.

3.Empress and Spinach (II.
325).

4.Warden's Return.

5.Professor's Lecture (II.
339).

6.Other Professor's song (I.
138).

7.Petting of Uggug.

8.Baron Doppelgeist.

9.Jester and Bear (I.
119).
Little Foxes.

10.Bruno's Dinner-Bell ; Little Foxes.

I will publish the answer to this puzzle in the Preface to a little book of "Original Games and Puzzles," now in course of preparation.

I have reserved, for the last, one or two rather more serious topics.

I had intended, in this Preface, to discuss more fully, than I had done in the previous Volume, the ' Morality of Sportwith special reference to letters I have received from lovers of Sport, in which they point out the many great advantages which men get from it, and try to prove that the suffering, which it inflicts on animals, is too trivial to be regarded.

But, when I came to think the subject out, and to arrange the whole of the arguments ' pro ' and ' con I found it much too large for treatment here.
Some day, I hope to publish an essay on this subject.
At present, I will content myself with stating the net result I have arrived at.

It is, that God has given to Man an absolute right to take the lives of other animals, for any reasonable cause, such as the supply of food : but that He has not given to Man the right to inflict pain, unless when necessary: that mere pleasure, or advantage, does not constitute such a necessity: and, consequently, that pain, inflicted for the purposes of Sport, is cruel, and therefore wrong.
But I find it a far more complex question than I had supposed ; and that the 'case', on the side of the Sportsman, is a much stronger one than I had supposed.
So, for the present, I say no more about it.

Objections have been raised to the severe language I have put into the mouth of ' Arthur \ at p.
277, on the subject of 'Sermons,' and at pp.
273, 274, on the subjects of Choral Services and ' Choristers.'

I have already protested against the assumption that I am ready to endorse the opinions of characters in my story.
But, in these two instances, I admit that I am much in sympathy with ' Arthur.'
In my opinion, far too many sermons are expected from our preachers; and, as a consequence, a great many are preached, which are not worth listening to ; and, as a consequence of that, we are very apt not to listen.
The reader of this paragraph probably heard a sermon last Sunday morning?
Well, let him, if he can, name the text, and state how the preacher treated it!

Then, as to ' Choristers,' and all the other accessories—of music, vestments, processions, &c.,—which have come, along with them, into fashion—while freely admitting that the ' Ritual' movement was sorely needed, and that it has effected a vast improvement in our Church-Services, which had become dead and dry to the last degree, I hold that, like many other desirable movements, it has gone too far in the opposite direction, and has introduced many new dangers.

For the Congregation this new movement involves the danger of learning to think that the Services are done for them ; and that their bodily presence is all they need contribute.
And, for Clergy and Congregation alike, it involves the danger of regarding these elaborate Services as ends in themselves, and of forgetting that they are simply means, and the very hollowest of mockeries, unless they bear fruit in our lives.

For the Choristers it seems to involve the danger of self-conceit, as described at p.
274 (N.B.
" stagy- entrances " is a misprint for "stage-entrances"), the danger of regarding those parts of the Service, where their help is not required, as not worth attending to, the danger of coming to regard the Service as a mere outward forma series of postures to be assumed, and of words to be said or sung, while the thoughts are elsewhereand the danger of ' familiarity'

breeding ' contempt' for sacred things.

Let me illustrate these last two forms of danger, from my own experience.
Not long ago, I attended a Cathedral-Service, and was placed immediately behind a row of men, members of the Choir; and I could not help noticing that they treated the Lessons as a part of the Service to which they needed not to give any attention, and as affording them a convenient opportunity for arranging music-books, &c., &c.
Also I have frequently seen a row of little choristers, after marching in procession to their places, kneel down, as if about to pray, and rise from their knees after a minute spent in looking about them, it being but too evident that the attitude was a mere mockery.
Surely it is very dangerous, for these children, to thus accustom them to pretend to pray?
As an instance of irreverent treatment of holy things, I will mention a custom, which no doubt many of my readers have noticed in Churches where the Clergy and Choir enter in procession, viz.
that, at the end of the private devotions, which are carried on in the vestry, and which are of course inaudible to the Congregation, the final " Amen" is shouted, loud enough to be heard all through the Church.
This serves as a signal, to the Congregation, to prepare to rise when the procession appears : and it admits of no dispute that it is for this purpose that it is thus shouted.
When we remember to Whom that " Amen " is really addressed, and consider that it is here used for the same purpose as one of the Church-bells, we must surely admit that it is a piece of gross irreverence?
To me it is much as if I were to see a Bible used as a footstool.

As an instance of the dangers, for the Clergy themselves, introduced by this new movement, let me mention the fact that, according to my experience, Clergymen of this school are specially apt to retail comic anecdotes, in which the most sacred names and wordssometimes actual texts from the Bibleare used as themes for jesting.
Many such things are repeated as having been originally said by children, whose utter ignorance of evil must no doubt acquit them, in the sight of God, of all blame; but it must be otherwise for those who consciously use such innocent utterances as material for their unholy mirth.

Let me add, however, most earnestly, that I fully believe that this profanity is, in many cases, ^conscious : the ' environment' (as I have tried to explain at p.
123) makes all the difference between man and man ; and I rejoice to think that many of these profane storieswhich I find so painful to listen to, and should feel it a sin to repeatgive to their ears no pain, and to their consciences no shock ; and that they can utter, not less sincerely than myself, the two prayers, " Hallowed be Thy Name," and " from hardness of heart, and contempt of Thy Word and Commandment, Good Lord, deliver us!"
To which I would desire to add, for their sake and for my own, Keble's beautiful petition, help us, this and every day, To live more nearly as we pray I" It is, in fact, for its consequences—for the grave dangers, both to speaker and to hearer, which it involves—rather than for what it is in itself \ that I mourn over this clerical habit of profanity in social talk.
To the believing hearer it brings the danger of loss of reverence for holy things, by the mere act of listening to, and enjoying, such jests ; and also the temptation to retail them for the amusement of others.
To the unbelieving hearer it brings a welcome confirmation of his theory that religion is a fable, in the spectacle of its accredited champions thus betraying their trust.
And to the speaker himself it must surely bring the danger of loss of faith.
For surely such jests, if uttered with no consciousness of harm, must necessarily be also uttered with no consciousness, at the moment, of the reality of God, as a living being, who hears all we say.
And he, who allows himself the habit of thus uttering holy words, with no thought of their meaning, is but too likely to find that, for him, God has become a myth, and heaven a poetic fancy—that, for him, the light of life is gone, and that he is at heart an atheist, lost in " a darkness that may be felt?

There is, I fear, at the present time, an increasing tendency to irreverent treatment of the name of God and of subjects connected with religion.
Some of our theatres are helping this downward movement by the gross caricatures of clergymen which they put upon the stage: some of our clergy are themselves helping it, by showing that they can lay aside the spirit of reverence, along with their surplices, and can treat as jests, when outside their churches, names and things to which they pay an almost superstitious veneration when inside: the u Salvation Army" has, I fear, with the best intentions, done much to help it, by the coarse familiarity with which they treat holy things : and surely every one, who desires to live in the spirit of the prayer " Hallowed be thy Name" ought to do what he can, however little that may be, to check it.
So I have gladly taken this unique opportunity, however unfit the topic may seem for the Preface to a book of this kind, to express some thoughts which have weighed on my mind for a long time.
I did not expect, when I wrote the Preface to Vol.
I, that it would be read to any appreciable extent : but I rejoice to believe, from evidence that has reached me, that it has been read by many, and to hope that this Preface will also be so : and I think- that, among them, some will be found ready to sympathise with the views I have put forwards, and ready to help, with their prayers and their example, the revival, in Society, of the waning spirit of reverence.

Christmas, 1893.

CHAPTER ONE

BRUNO’S LESSONS

DURING the next month or two my solitary town-life seemed, by contrast, unusually dull and tedious.
I missed the pleasant friends I had left behind at Elveston—the genial interchange of thought—the sympathy which gave to one’s ideas a new and vivid reality: but, perhaps more than all, I missed the companionship of the two Fairies—or Dream-Children, for I had not yet solved the problem as to who or what they were—whose sweet playfulness had shed a magic radiance over my life.

In office-hours—which I suppose reduce most men to the mental condition of a coffee-mill or a mangle—time sped along much as usual: it was in the pauses of life, the desolate hours when books and newspapers palled on the sated appetite, and when, thrown back upon one’s own dreary musings, one strove—all in vain—to people the vacant air with the dear faces of absent friends, that the real bitterness of solitude made itself felt.

One evening, feeling my life a little more wearisome than usual, I strolled down to my Club, not so much with the hope of meeting any friend there, for London was now ‘out of town’, as with the feeling that here, at least, I should hear ‘sweet words of human speech’, and come into contact with human thought.

However, almost the first face I saw there was that of a friend.
Eric Lindon was lounging, with rather a ‘bored’ expression of face, over a newspaper; and we fell into conversation with a mutual satisfaction which neither of us tried to conceal.

After a while I ventured to introduce what was just then the main subject of my thoughts.
‘And so the Doctor’ (a name we had adopted by a tacit agreement, as a convenient compromise between the formality of ‘Doctor Forester’ and the intimacy—to which Eric Lindon hardly seemed entitled—of ‘Arthur’) ‘has gone abroad by this time, I suppose?
Can you give me his present address?’

‘He is still at Elveston—I believe,’ was the reply.
‘But I have not been there since I last met you.’

I did not know which part of this intelligence to wonder at most.
‘And might I ask—if it isn’t taking too much of a liberty—when your wedding-bells are to—or perhaps they have rung, already?’

‘No,’ said Eric, in a steady voice, which betrayed scarcely a trace of emotion: ‘that engagement is at an end.
I am still "Benedick the unmarried man".’

After this, the thick-coming fancies—all radiant with new possibilities of happiness for Arthur—were far too bewildering to admit of any further conversation, and I was only too glad to avail myself of the first decent excuse, that offered itself, for retiring into silence.

The next day I wrote to Arthur, with as much of a reprimand for his long silence as I could bring myself to put into words, begging him to tell me how the world went with him.

Needs must that three or four days—possibly more—should elapse before I could receive his reply; and never had I known days drag their slow length along with a more tedious indolence.

To while away the time, I strolled, one afternoon, into Kensington Gardens, and, wandering aimlessly along any path that presented itself, I soon became aware that I had somehow strayed into one that was wholly new to me.
Still, my elfish experiences seemed to have so completely faded out of my life that nothing was further from my thoughts than the idea of again meeting my fairy-friends, when I chanced to notice a small creature moving among the grass that fringed the path, that did not seem to be an insect, or a frog, or any other living thing that I could think of.
Cautiously kneeling down, and making an ex tempore cage of my two hands, I imprisoned the little wanderer, and felt a sudden thrill of surprise and delight on discovering that my prisoner was no other than Bruno himself!

Bruno took the matter very coolly, and, when I had replaced him on the ground, where he would be within easy conversational distance, he began talking, just as if it were only a few minutes since last we had met.

‘Doos oo know what the Rule is,’ he enquired, ‘when oo catches a Fairy, withouten its having tolded oo where it was?’

(Bruno’s notions of English Grammar had certainly not improved since our last meeting.)

‘No,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know there was any Rule about it.’

‘I think oo’ve got a right to eat me,’ said the little fellow, looking up into my face with a winning smile.
‘But I’m not pruffickly sure.
Oo’d better not do it wizout asking.’

It did indeed seem reasonable not to take so irrevocable a step as that, without due enquiry.
‘I’ll certainly ask about it, first,’ I said.
‘Besides, I don’t know yet whether you would be worth eating!’

‘I guess I’m deliciously good to eat,’ Bruno remarked in a satisfied tone, as if it were something to be rather proud of.

‘And what are you doing here, Bruno?’

‘That’s not my name!’
said my cunning little friend.
‘Don’t oo know my name’s "Oh Bruno!"?
That’s what Sylvie always calls me, when I says mine lessons.’

‘Well then, what are you doing here, oh Bruno?’

‘Doing mine lessons, a-course!’
With that roguish twinkle in his eye, that always came when he knew he was talking nonsense.

‘Oh, that’s the way you do your lessons, is it?
And do you remember them well?’

‘Always can ‘member mine lessons,’ said Bruno.
‘It’s Sylvie’s lessons that’s so dreffully hard to ‘member!’
He frowned, as if in agonies of thought, and tapped his forehead with his knuckles.
‘I ca’n’t think enough to understand them!’
he said despairingly.

‘It wants double thinking, I believe!’

‘But where’s Sylvie gone?’

‘That’s just what I want to know!’
said Bruno disconsolately.
‘What ever’s the good of setting me lessons, when she isn’t here to ‘splain the hard bits?’

‘I’ll find her for you!’
I volunteered; and, getting up, I wandered round the tree under whose shade I had been reclining, looking on all sides for Sylvie.
In another minute I again noticed some strange thing moving among the grass, and, kneeling down, was immediately confronted with Sylvie’s innocent face, lighted up with a joyful surprise at seeing me, and was accosted, in the sweet voice I knew so well, with what seemed to be the end of a sentence whose beginning I had failed to catch.

‘—and I think he ought to have finished them by this time.
So I’m going back to him.
Will you come too?
It’s only just round at the other side of this tree.’

It was but a few steps for me; but it was a great many for Sylvie; and I had to be very careful to walk slowly, in order not to leave the little creature so far behind as to lose sight of her.

To find Bruno’s lessons was easy enough: they appeared to be neatly written out on large smooth ivy-leaves, which were scattered in some confusion over a little patch of ground where the grass had been worn away; but the pale student, who ought by rights to have been bending over them, was nowhere to be seen: we looked in all directions, for some time in vain; but at last Sylvie’s sharp eyes detected him, swinging on a tendril of ivy, and Sylvie’s stern voice commanded his instant return to terra firma and to the business of Life.