And the third cause is a negative one. The perpetual substitution of hypothesis for fact (which is the great mark of dons today) ends by getting men into a state of mind where they can no longer weigh the proportions of evidence: they can no longer distinguish between the certain, the probable, and the absurd. Thus, it was but a little time ago that an Oxford don came out with a miracle. He said he had discovered any number of classical passages containing concealed anagrams, furnishing the most astonishing information; for instance, that Euripides, when he was a little boy, wrote the plays of Aeschylus. A stopper was put on him, however, by a man who wrote to the Spectator (of all papers), proving that the said don’s name was but thinly concealed in an anagram of the opening lines of the Iliad, so that he must have written that excellent poem, not when he was a little boy, but long before he was born. And so much for that.
Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore: Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost incomprehensible to the other. I have sometimes thought that whenever the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin channel) and storm and loot Instow. Pretty well every modern set of human habitations has this contrast of rich and poor quarters, but when there is water flowing in between them it is the more striking: with hard work on one side of the stream and the fruits of it in leisure upon the other.
My voyage was over. I had brought up in Bideford River before the long bridge of Bideford, and I made all quiet for the night, and for a long time to come. For there would I leave the Nona in charge, till I could take her out again.
Swaying in the cabin that night also, I finished writing the “Chanty of the Nona,” of which if any man say that it is a vile piece of verse, I am ready to agree with him, but if another man say that it heartens him, and fills him with the sea, why, I am ready to agree with him also. It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a place of rest. We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.
I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much, after thirty, over literary fame: if it comes, let it come, but for God’s sake let us have no publicity with it, for to be pointed at and known is to live in a glass cage. And very much do I applaud those men who do what in youth I myself desired to do, but was unable to do, that is, to write consistently under a false name, and carefully cover one’s tracks. I wanted to write verse under one name, history under another, travel under another—but fate was too strong.
Of the men who have done this in my time the most successful was Dodgson, the mathematical don at Christ Church—that is, of The House. He had calculated well; and the immense fame of Lewis Carroll and of Alice in Wonderland left him private and secure.
Mention of that book also makes me consider how false is nearly all literary fame, or, rather, how great an element of falsity there is in nearly all such fame. Alice in Wonderland is a very remarkable book, as are, indeed, other books of Dodgson’s, though not all. But a large element in its vast diffusion was its consonance with a particular “drawing-room” mood of a particular day. I shall be called blasphemous, I know, but I am perfectly certain that Alice will not long survive the ease and unquestioned security of the England of her day. For every implication in morals, and even in humour, with which Dodgson’s books are crammed, sprang from that security and that ease. Nor is there a stronger symptom of so abnormal a passage in human affairs as was the English gentry’s generation of 1833–99 (abnormal, for normal men live under a strain and a peril, and in active defence against the barbarian or the menacing enemy) than the delight of Dodgson’s vast audience in nonsense: in the humour which is founded upon folly as contrasted with the wit that is founded upon wisdom. Even the facile composition of odd childish words, which had a slightly reminiscent sound, was sufficient to delight that generation. But when the terrors and the heroisms permanently return, the sawdust will run out of such things.
And, after all, what is the possession of literary fame? Can
