Samuel Butler and Miss Savage
By CATHERINE CARSWELL BUTLER began to annotate this correspondence immediately after Miss Savage's death, and he finished the pious work Some fifteen years later under the shadow of his own. He saw that it ought not to be published until he had " long followed her," but he desired it to appear eventually as " a Memorial of her " and to " show what manner of woman she was " whose ghost haunted almost every day after her physical existence had ceased to oppress him.
There can never have been a stranger amende honorable. The annotations have to be read to be believed, but once read they cannot be diSbelieved. 'Some readeri will ascribe their nature to what-the modern jargon calls " a streak of cruelty " in Butler, which means; presumably, a bigger streak than may be found in the next man. Others may perceive them to be actuated by his conviction that nothing less than honesty— the complete and caddish honesty usually denied to himself by the English gentleman, except in the company Of other English gentlemenwould meet the situation.
Without' the annotations the letters would be ineffective. Butler's judgement that Miss Savage wrote " nothing not worth preserving," even while she wrote " nothing but the Merest goSsip," wants. qualification. It takes a Jane Austen to put a perennial head on feminine small beer. Confessedly he did not shine in his own letters, and hers, although they convey some of her quality and furnish living flashes of her wit, would hardly endure print but for their association with him and with the pain which he tells us underlies them. So steadily does she disguise the pain that, uninformed, we might never detect it. Even now the suggestion has been made that 'it ,existed only in Butler's vanity. Alas this convenient notion does not bear examination.
As thing§ are, we were prepared for the worst by passages
Festing Jones's Memoir, by references in the Note-Books, and by three appalling sonnets which are known to I3utlerians. The editors of this volume, taking their cue from Festing Jones, find in these last the " final sublimation " of Butler's "puzzled wondering and remorse." Questioning the adequacy of this pronouncement, we doubt still more the rightness of appending them. to this separate scheme of penitence. We are told that Butler's " intentions have been respected " by the omission of nothing he put in. But what are we to say of the unauthorised admisSien of these and other. " relevant documents" ? They create an emphasis that horrifies more than it clarifies.
Butler has been dead more than twenty years, and the, task of isSuing. his Savage memorial has been further helped by the lack of living representatives of the lady for whom it was designed. Had such existed they might, one fancies, have refused their sanction for the printing of what Butler is the first to call " a painful business." This would have deprived us • of a singular record of a wholly English, emphatically • Victorian lady and gentleman, 'taken in a snare from which gentility forbade escape, and revealed in an aspect Of tragic life for which lack of passion spun the plot.
For consider what they were, this he and she. Samuel was a solitary rebel, not against institutions or even conventions, but against the particularly English dishonesty of mind and hypocrisy of heart and body which had thwarted his life. liy natural habit sensual, sympathetic and sensitive, his youthful experiences had bred in him a horror of anything unhappy, crippled or starved, so that he would not willingly even eat a stunted vegetable. In friendship ardent, generous and punctilious (he feared that Pauli, bored and unloving as he
Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E. M. A. Savage. 1871-1885. (Cape. 10s. 6d.) was, might kill himself were his own devotion in question), he tried in all things else, save in honesty with himself, to practise as he preached the realism of compromise. Eliza had a mind, a spirit and an early background that sistered his. She had further had the strength, before recognising in him a brother soul, to cast up her reckoning with life, and to accept, smiling, an atrociously debit balance.
. Their verdicts on each other do not surprise us. " I don't think there is anybody quite so good as you," she writes to him. Of her he says, " She was incomparably the best and most brilliant woman that I had ever known."
But Butler was a man, and to many women an attractive man. Moreover he had escaped from his young miseries, to New Zealand and, repeatedly, to Italy, where his cramped spirit could stretch itself. Whereas Miss Savage (they remained to the last Mr. Butler and Miss Savage and yours very truly) was a congenital cripple, who, if she toiled up the outside steps of the British Museum (no• doubt because he went there daily) quailed before the nine shallow indoor ones tp the ladies' cloak-room, where no trace of him could reward her. Fat, old-maidish, dowdy, in appearance " a shock and a disappointment," her face was redeemed only by a " most attractive expression of friendliness and good. humour." Her " sunless life " had been relieved neither by love nor travel. At first a governess, later the assistant-secretary of a Society of Lady Artists, she lived with sick and aged parents, and disliked, while she was dutiful towards, her mother. Her only intimate, with whom she had quarrelled though not to the breaking off of friendship, was a " dear good silly little chirrupy lady artist with a spinal complaint," who described her dead friend to Butler by the tabooed word. " bright." Her love of all the arts far exceeded her achieve- ment in any. Her wit, having no literary outlet save The Brawing-Room Gazette and no appreciative audience save herself, became acidulated while it • remained quick. For three years after first meeting Butler at Heatherley's Art. School she never missed an opportunity of snubbing him." Then a bag of cherries shared in the street enabled her to " find him out," and for the next fourteen years she was his confidential and ever encouraging friend and critic. More she never explicitly asked to be. Indeed he made it clear from the first upon what the very existence of their friendship must depend. Short of asking her to break off that friendship, what else could he do?
When they shared the cherries they were only in their middle thirties, he being a year older than she. Everything indicates that he had a lively and tender feeling for women, perhaps that he was, with a few exceptions, happier in their company than in that of men. But he feared to commit himself to any one woman except upon a strictly physical understanding, for which be preferred to pay—shall we say, like the English gentleman he was ?—not otherwise than in cash. But a differently endowed Miss Savage might have overcome this and some other difficulties. Marriage, after all, is a way of paying in cash, and Butler hankered for a son.
The remorse he felt upon hearing of her death after an operation for cancer, she having spared him the knowledge that she had been for sonic tinie' ill, was doubtless less for his inability to have made her his wife than for his " meagre and egotistical " performance as her friend. But the second, he never forgot, depended on the firit. Alive, she failed to interest him ; dead, lie could." never think of her without pain." He tried the more to be painfully honest with himself in his account of both states. Perhaps only by so doing did he conic to appreciate her.' She Would, with her " wicked laugh," have appreciated his effort. .Somore soberly may we.
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