Sylvie and Bruno
By Lewis Carroll.
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Volume I
Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.
Preface
One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, at chapter 6, was drawn by “Miss Alice Havers.” I did not state this on the titlepage, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, at chapter 25, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed “Fairy Sylvie” and “Bruno’s Revenge,” are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairytale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for “Aunt Judy’s Magazine,” which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story. As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me—who knows how?—with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought—as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the “flint” of one’s own mind by the “steel” of a friend’s chance remark—but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, apropos of nothing—specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, “an effect without a cause.” Such, for example, was the last line of “The Hunting of the Snark,” which came into my head (as I have already related in “The Theatre” for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book—one, my Lady’s remark, “it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does,” at chapter 7; the other, Eric Lindon’s badinage about having been in domestic service, at chapter 22.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature—if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling—which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word “chaos”: and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated:
