SAMUEL BUTLER. By C. Joad. (Parsons. 4s. 6i1.) Mn. Joan's
new book is concerned with a figure to whom his mind is especially sympathetic, for Samuel Butler, as a scientist, a sociologist and a philosophical speculator not only was a brilliant iconoclast but had otherwise an ingrained tendency to take sides. Though so .eccentric, retiring, and diffident in his private life, he was in public combative and polemical, with, for all his perversity, a thoroughly John Bullish respect for the plain man, the athlete and the aristocrat, and a vivid disrespect for everything academical. All this has suited our author admirably, and he is particularly good on Samuel Butler's theory that the man who lives unconsciously and without introspection is the superior of the man who must think everything out, and who must always return to first principles and, in short, generally practise Part de faire &Sidle les chosen faciles- an art so largely and successfully practised to-day. We find in Mr. Joad's book an excellent choice and regrouping of significant facts, and an interesting comparison between Butler's theory of creative evolution, and Mr. Shaw's, as he sets it out in Back to Methuselah. He has, in fact, taken the speculations of this tangled and perverse old man of genius and has made of them a clear narrative and an interesting evaluation. But the reader cannot help wishing that somehow the subject had struck more sparks. Mr. Jowl is obliged, for instance, though he tries to avoid it, to show us the theorizer as well as his theories, and here the reader feels the picture might easily have had more life. The book is over-tabulated, for the excellent index could have performed so much of-the work that the author has given to sub-headings, and their absence would have left him freer to give that life beauty and roundness to his outlines by which subtlety in truth is probably most easily conveyed. However, the reader's grumbles will really be a compliment to Mr. Joad ; from most writers he would have been content with a little book in aatay ways so excellent.
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