Philosophers and Novelists

Samuel Butler. By Clara G. Stiliman. (Seeker. 168.)

Zola. By Henri Barbusse. (Dent. 10s. lid.) " This belief, to which the individualist to-day must cling, is that somehow, out of the nettle of mechanism he can pluck the flower of freedom, and . . . can yet recreate himself, world without end. At this point, of course, the individualist has become a symbol, but a symbol from which the actual individual can partake in a sort of transubstantiation."

POSSIBLY, possibly not ! The quotation is from the general summing up of Butler's philosophy at the end of Mrs. Clara Stillman's book. I give it, not because I desire to discuss its truth (assuming that I knew what it meant), but because it typifies so precisely the sort of book that Mrs. Stillman has written. It.is honest, painstaking, sincere and scholarly. It sets out the facts, every one of the facts, about Butler's life ; it arranges them consecutively in a clear and orderly manner, and its comments upon the facts are sane and reason- able.

Mrs. Stillman does not make the common mistake of the early phases of the Butler revival of underrating Butler the philosopher in order to compensate for an exaggerated respect for Butler the novelist. Butler did not care a, row of pins about his novel writing ; he even rated Ere:whon pretty low, • although rot so low as its earnings-262 10s. Brewhon was the only one of Butler's books which during his life-tim. earned anything at all, so he was very proud of the 162 10 But what did seem to him of momentous importance was the issue of his controversy with the Darwinists, the issue of creative evolution. The universe, he held, was not a machine ; evolution not a chance but a deliberate process ; and, holding these beliefs, he held too that it was his business in life to make the scientists share them.

The scientists have not yet come round—at least, all of them have not ; but they no longer, as Butler's antagonists did, regard science as a sort of revelation by means of which the external world is presented to the mind of the scientist exactly as it is. " I have been trying to paint a picture," Butler wrote in the last chapter of loTe'atidHabit, and Mrs. Stillman comments very properly upon the extent to which modern scientists have come to share Butler's view of his and their function ; "the most advanced of modern physicists

too," she points out, have come to realize that they are " painting pictures." In the same vein Mrs. Stillman rightly emphasizes the importance of acquainting oneself with Butler's

biology and philosophy, if one is to get full enjoyment out of his purely literary work. Erexhon and The Way of all Flesh

abound with illustrations of the biological thesis—notably Butler's persistent habit of treating human beings as or- ganisms contriving to do the best they can with the limited means at their disposal. His reputation," she concludes, " rests only upon a fragment of what he did," yet " the fall significance even of the fragment escapes the reader who has no knowledge . . . of his philosophic works."

Mrs. Stillman, there is no doubt of it, has written an admir- able book, but it is a very solemn ones' solemn as the quotation at the head of this review. Being solemn, inevitably it leaves something out. The mischievousness of Butler, his delight in shocking the pundits for the sheer fun of the thing, his high spirits and his impudence—all these slip through the meshes of Mrs. Stillman's acaderidemet. Samuel Butler spent his intellectual fortune in buying penny crackers to put beneath the pedestals of the great I All will remember Mr. Norman' Douglas' famons description,. and it is just this concept of Butler—Ale concept of a little boy cocking snooks at the universe and the great=that one would never have gathered from Mrs. Stillman's impeccably Bostonian treatment.

Between the earnest, formidable and somewhat gloomy Zola "and" the gay, fantaitie genius of Samuel Butler there is little enough in common. What they both possessed in high measure was the capacity and the will to shock nineteenth- century society ; • and not-only the contemporary bourgeois society which was revolted by the naturalism of L'Assomoir and La Terre, and would have been no less revolted by the exposi of family life contained in The -Way of all Flesh, had Butler had the heart or possessed the courage to publish it in the early 'eighties when it was finished, but also contemporary literary society. Both were imbued with a contempt for fine writing as such—a contempt which sprang from a funda- mental indifference to art as compared with truth. What mattered, each was convinced, was what one said. Provided one cared enough for that, the manlier in which one said it could be left to look after itself. " Look after the sense and the sounds will look after. themselves " might' have been the motto of both men. Listen, for example, to Butler " Men like Newman and Robert Louis Stevenson seem to have taken pains to acquire what they called a style, as a preliminary measure, as something which they had to form before their writings could be of any value. I should like to put it on record that I never took the smallest pains with my style, have never thought about it, and do not know or want to know whether it is a style at all or whether it is not, as I believe and hope, just common, simple

straightforwardness. I cannot conceive bow any man. can take thought for his style without loss to himself and his readers."

Now listen to Zola—or rather to Barbusse summing up Zola.

" We must rank Zola amongst the writers who, being more than writers, convinced that's truth is a benefit to civilization, stretch out their hands to the men of their time."

Society, Barbusse insists, is sick, and, while it is sick, artists have a duty beyond the duty to their art, the duty namely, to use their art as an instrument to make society sound.

" Be of some service, be useful to the community of men otherwise than-by blessing them with beauty ... that is the duty which in the chaos of artiste will distinguish the new men."

In this sense literary art should be a kind of journalism. Zola thoroughly agreed, in fact he is hailed by Barbusse as the first of the " new men." Conceive the atmosphere in which Zola began to write—the atmosphere of Flaubert and the Goncourts--" there is no subject ; the style is everything," Flaubert is quoted as saying ; and the Gonoourts com- mented " The idea is merely the peg on which to hang sonorities"—and the shock tactics of Zola's methods will be the better realized.

M. Barbusse's book consists of a series of vivid portraits- 0-close-ups " would be the technical description—of scenes either typical or critical in Zola's life. We see Zola moving into a new house, sitting up all night to write J'accuse, realizing his inciaimetenee as a speaker—" the arts of writing and of public speaking, when they exist in the same persons are mutually harmful," comments Barbusse—dominating the circle of his literary friends. Barbusse's view is that Zola's naturalism was a negative creed which should have but did not become Socialism. Zola was born too early to be a full- blooded Socialist, although in the last few years of his life he flirted with Socialism, and some of the sentences quoted from Trois Villes read like passages from a Communist manifesto. M. Barbusse's study is written in what the publishers call " vivid, rugged prose." It may be so, but I for one am fre- quently totally at a loss to understand what he means.

C. E. M. JoAD.