A " GALILEO OF MARES' NESTS.”*
Incedis per ignes suppositos cineri doloso is a convenient tag for the occasion. It is not a purely personal matter to recall how once a family friend sent me a guinea to reward some slight success at a Public School. I wrote gratefully in return that I was spending my guinea on books. This evidently pleased him, for later he inquired kindly, and in person, what books I had bought. I told him The Note Books of Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited (I had Erewhon already), and Butler's Humour of Homer essays. From the gleam in my benefactor's eye I soon knew that the unprofitable servant who laid his talent in a napkin had done very, very wisely compared with me.
I was not unprepared then for a remark by a prominent member of the school staff that The Way of All Flesh was a book that no gentleman would read.
This bitter feeling against Butler was not an idiosyncrasy of this family friend, usually a very liberal judge of contemporary work, nor of this Public School Master's, but the general opinion of a considerable group of critics and writers who flourished at the end of last century and the beginning of this new one. Let us attempt to discover why, remembering that these have been ten years of constant change of heart all round ; while I regard Butler with much of my original warmth, it is for very different reasons than those of 1918. The Spectator has certainly not stood still, though it is still Spectator enough to allow my Horatian tag, and there will be few of its readers who can still dismiss Butler as a conceited, irritable, immoral, ignorant and half-insane buffoon, as was the custom in many quarters until recently. Butler was writing books until his death in 1902, losing money on every book : Erewhon, published anonymously as far back as 1872, was almost the only one that paid its way, and on the rest, as Butler's account shows, he lost over one thousand pounds.
His life was a curious one. Born in 1835 in a Nottingham rectory, the son of a head-master of Shrewsbury School, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, he went to Cambridge and was about to be ordained, after some months of work among the poor in London, when he came to have doubts about the efficacy of infant baptism and declined to take orders. He sailed to New Zealand in 1859, where in five years' time he made sufficient fortune from sheep-farming to enable him to spend the rest of his life quietly in Clifford's Inn, London, and there, except for brief holidays in France, Italy and Sicily, he remained till his death, adventurously opening new countries of the mind, as he had once in New Zealand opened the new sheep-grazing country beyond the ranges of which we read in Erewhon. Of these mental adventures he himself writes : " I am not one of those who have travelled along a set road towards an end that I have foreseen and desired to reach. I have made a succession of jaunts or pleasure trips from meadow to meadow, but no long journey, unless life itself be reckoned so. Nevertheless, I have strayed into no field in which I have not found a flower that was worth the finding :
I have gone into no public place in which I have not found sovereigns lying about on the ground which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up." Butler had a • The Shrewsbury Edition of Samuel Buller, In ZO Volumes. Vol. L and II. London: Cape. LL21.1 few good friends, leisure and, except for one short period, no economic anxiety : he had access to the British Museum, where he usually spent the greater part of his day : he had finally a well-stocked and well-balanced mind and a deadly thoroughness in pushing any inquiry in which he was engaged to its extreme limits. His chief hatred was smugness and his favourite quotation the Homeric line, Above all things,
I hate the man who says one thing but hides another in his heart."
He could not suffer fools either gladly or sadly, and seldiim realized that the people who, he thought, should have accepted his views, could not afford to do so because their academic or social position, or their source of income, or similar very powerful and complex interests were inex- tricably bound up with the vieNt he was challenging. Each failure to be understood he felt keenly, though trying to disguise it, and his way with the eminent thinkers of the day recalls that of the Irishman in France. '4 Parlez-vous Francais ? ' says I. Oui, monsieur,' says he. ' Then lend me the loan of a gridiron,' says I. Pardon, monsieur,' says he. Parlez-vouS Francais ? ' says I. Mais oui, monsieur,' says he. THEN LEND ME THE LOAN OF A GRIDIRON,' Says 1. ' Comment, monsieur ? ' says he. ' COME ON, THEN ! says I, and with that I struck him in the eye." After dealing out a few such blows in the eye, Butler at last despaired of the intelligence of his contemporaries, and from his line strategic position at Clifford's Inn began his assault on posterity ; he desired, he said, not immortality, because he did not intend to be a bore, but a good threescore and ten years of vicarious .existence. In his diary he made out a list of his achievements up to 1899 to support the claim, and a strangely contrasted list it is. Butler, reading it through, adds : " suppose it was this list that made Mr. Arthur Platt call me The Galileo of Mares' Nests.' " He puts science and philosophy first. Historically, Butler's books on the great evolution controversy arc very important as he was almost the only writer to attack Darwinism from any other than the Book of Genesis standpoint ; he was a neo-Lamarckian, and held that Darwin, with whom he had personally quarrelled, was not only absurdly wrong in ascribing so much importance to natural selection as a factor of development, but mischievously deceitful in the exposition of his scientific observations. Luck or Cunning Life and Habit, and Evolution, Old and New, though somewhat put out of date by the newer developments of Mendelism, are not to any extent denied in their scientific principle : and for the clearness of their English and the sweet malice of their polemics are to be read with the mine enjoyment as Whistler's Gentle Arm of Making Enemies. Whistler and Butler, though then views on art were not sympathetic, had much in common, particularly in their bantering style. Butler, we may notice, cared nothing for style as such. Helutd bitter things to say about R.L. S. and Pater and Matthew Arnold (" Mr. Walter Pater's style is to me like the face of some old woman who has been to Madame Rachel and had herself enamelled "), and only valued writing which was straightforward and studied the convenience of its reader. Besides his philosophic-scientific writings, among the most important of which is his little-read God the Known and God the Unknown, Butler could claim to have contributed notably to Shakespearean, Homeric and Biblical criticism ; his edition of the Sonnets conies nearer than any I know to making them read intelligibly as a story ; the strange Authoress of the Odyssey theory, which is the one that most infuriated Butler's own generation when they discovered he was not joking, rests on arguments which have never been controverted, and that not because they were unworthy of cont 'aversion : the Fair Haven, an essay on the events of the Crucifixion, is a reasonable, reverent and most unusual treatment of familiar history, well illus- trating Butler's remark about picking up sovereigns in public places. Butler was a painter—he exhibited at the Royal Academy—and a good deal of his criticism was research into the history of art, rediscovery of forgotten sculptors and painters and allotment of unknown works. Butler was also a musician with a strange dog-like attachment to Handel, in whose honour, with the collaboration of Mr. besting Jones, his biographer, lie wrote a comic operetta, Narcissus, which is now regarded as a first-clans musical jeu &esprit.
Butler was also a poet, and as such will be remembered if not for his sonnets at any rate for his Psalm of Montreal. which the Spectator, to its great credit, first published in the 'seventies. Butler was also a humorous essayist and an aphorist. Of his humour of Homer collection and Note Books the world wilt not soon tire. Butler was lastly a novelist ; his two Erewhons and The Way of All Flesh play a very important part in the history of the modern novel. Was there ever another Johannes factotum whose work was as consistently distinguished as Butler's ? I doubt it, and yet Butler's actual achievements often do seem to me less im- portant than the manner in which they were achieved. His age needed not a Juvenal to lash its vices ; for it was a pro- gressive age singularly free from the more glaring and violent vices ; it needed an enfant terrible to shy a few stones at its club windows and ask a few awkward questions in its drawing-rooms. Butler was the child for the task ; his stones smashed many panes and his example smashed many more. His questions vexed many a drawing-room, and he was duly slippered by the critics and sent out through the door. He continued at the keyhole, and his fate was not so horrible that other children did not press his questions and shout them in the street : the beginnings of most contemporary movements towards freedom of opinion on religion, aesthetics or philosophy can be traced to Butler. To give a single instance, I do not remember seeing it noted that Butler in Erezchon Revisited as good as prophesied the psycho-analyst ; he looked forward to the time when crime and illness should be interchangeable terms ; and the " straightener " was to be a man to whom patients confessed their delinquencies and who undertook to cure them. This must have read grotesquely in 1872 ; but to-day there is a rush to the psycho- analyst for confessing the most horrible morbid tendencies, and instead of holding up his hands in horror, the straightener undertakes quite calmly and, usually, I may add, quite ineffectually, to cure these.
Butler foresaw his success with posterity and took care to curb any possible excesses of admiration. He has a message both for his generation and for ours in the following from the Note Books :- " 0 critics, cultured critics,
Who will praise me after I am dead, Who will see in me both more and less than I intended, But who will swear that whatever it was it was all perfectly right ;
You will think you are better than the people who when I was
alive swore that whatever I did was wrong, And damned my books for me as fast as I could write, But you will nut be better ; you will be just the same, neither better nor worse, And you will go for some future Butler as your fathers have gone for me.
Oh ! how I should have hated you !
There follows a plea to the " Nice People " (who will be sick of him because the critics thrust his genius down their throats) to neglect him, burlesque him, boil him down, do whatever they like with him, but " do not think that if I were living I should not aid and abet you." That is characteristic of the man. ROBERT GRAVES.
[Mr. Craves has every right to express his own views over his own signature, but surely he is wrong in thinking that there was a dead-set made against Butler. The Spectator not only printed a poem by him, but treated his work seriously, and this was the general opinion of people of cultivation. We can never remember a time when Butler was discon- sidered by thinking people, though doubtless he had many enemies and detractors.—En. Spectator.]
Previous page
