and maintained throughout the century would take many times the space
of the present paper to show in anything but the briefest and barest
epitome. Almost all Prior's own shorter later poems would have to be
quoted; Swift, though so much greater in prose, and though best in
verse on the severer side, especially in the magnificent and quite
sufficiently authenticated _Judgment Day_ verses, could not be left
out; and it might be possible to make more fight than even lovers of
the eighteenth century have recently made for Gray. But perhaps the
scraps and orts of lesser men of letters--though sometimes not lesser
_men_--show the strong point of the century even more convincingly.
Where will you find more musical lightness of a certain easy but far
from unpoetical kind than in those verses on Strawberry Hill in which
Pulteney almost paid his rather heavy debts in more serious ways to the
House of Walpole? Or than in the others in which he and Chesterfield
combined to estimate "Hanover Bremen and Verden," that is to say, the
whole continental dominions for which George the Second was making
England fight, as worthless compared with the charms of Molly Lepell?
Go lower still, take a professional littérateur and laureate like
William Whitehead, to whom hardly anybody save Mr. Austin Dobson (and
it is certainly no small exception) has been favourable, and read
the piece on Celia, which is a more or less independent expansion
of Ausonius on Crispa. It begins with a sort of pettish avowal of
ignorance how the mischief of love came, and goes on with rather rude
depreciations of the lady's face, figure, air, and even sense. Then it
slides rapidly into a sort of grudging allowance:
Her voice, her touch, _might_ give the alarm--
'Twas both perhaps or neither,
and then capitulates headlong:
In short 'twas that provoking charm
Of Celia altogether!
Trivial, of course, but then it ought to be trivial, and the trivial
can be, and is, here super-trivialised.
One might go on, even in this skipping fashion, for a long time till
one came to the great political satires of the close of the century,
but once more time and space forbid. As it has been frivolously said:
You have only to search
In Dodsley and Pearch
(the standard ten volumes of eighteenth-century miscellaneous poetry)
and you will find; though, of course, if you only look for bad things
you will find them, too, in plenty. But even this collection is by
no means exhaustive, and with some of the more famous verse-writers
it does not deal at all; while we have in this survey confessedly
left most of them alone. What has been intended is to show that
making of the common uncommon by means of treatment in verse was not
an unknown thing between 1700 and 1800; that it was attempted and
achieved in various kinds. Finally, if the attempts were rarely and the
achievements hardly ever in kinds that can be called the very highest,
one may at least urge that there is not an absolute vacuum between the
loftiest mountain-tops of poetry and the actual plain of prose--that
Parnassus has lower slopes, some of which are not so _very_ low
SAMUEL BUTLER[6]
[6] _Samuel Butler: a Memoir. By H. Festing Jones. 2 vols.
Macmillan. 42s. net._
By EDWARD SHANKS
Samuel Butler was a philosopher whose favourite doctrine was expressed
in the words _pas trop de zèle_; and he spent a great part of his life
complaining a little too eagerly that the world was not sufficiently
zealous in the appreciation of his works. His reception and his
reputation did indeed deserve a considerable part of the almost
excessive attention which he lavished on them; for at this moment, now
that the first is accomplished and the second enormous, they make a
very curious subject for study. In his notebooks they occur again and
again as themes for his meditation. "I am the _enfant terrible_," he
says, "of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot,
get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I
can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." "I
have chosen the fighting-road," he says elsewhere, "rather than the
hang-on-to-a-great-man road, and what can a man who does this look for
except that people should try to silence him in whatever way they think
will be most effectual? In my case they have thought it best to pretend
that I am non-existent." There is something pathetic in the spectacle
of a man pursuing "the fighting-road" with no one to fight him and
heaving bricks into the middle of persons who obstinately continue to
ignore his existence. There is something more pathetic in the spectacle
of an original thinker and a great wit sitting down in isolation to
pen these apologies for his obscure position, always affecting to
be indifferent to it and never deceiving anyone. For Butler was not
indifferent to his lack of success. Had his been a true and not an
assumed indifference he could not have returned to the subject so
often as he does and in so many keys. He betrays himself again and
again beyond mistake. He was an intensely, a morbidly sensitive man,
one to whom success would have been very pleasant. He was damaged, and
confirmed in oddity, by the want of it. He missed it because of what
first started him in oddity--that is to say, an unfortunate childhood.
"The subject of this memoir," so Butler once suggested that his
biography ought to begin, "was the son of rich but dishonest
parents." Dishonest they may have been: respectable they certainly
were. Dr. Butler, the first distinguished member of the family, was
for twenty-seven years headmaster of Shrewsbury, a man with all the
attributes of the great schoolmasters of the early nineteenth century,
an imposing figure, who, towards the end of his life, became Bishop
of Lichfield. His son was not so distinguished. His sole claim to be
remembered, if his canonry be disregarded, is the fact that somehow
or other he became the father of Samuel Butler. There is much detail,
in Mr. Festing Jones's enormous book, on Butler's early life and his
relation to his parents; but there is nothing quite so significant as
an anecdote which occurs in the second volume:
At Saas he made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. MacCarthy, who were
staying in the hotel with their son, an Eton boy. One day the father
and son had been for an excursion and the father returned alone. The
anxious mother, hearing that her boy preferred speculating in short
cuts to accompanying his father, borrowed a red umbrella to make
herself conspicuous, and went out "to look for Desmond." Presently
she came upon Butler loaded up with his camera and toiling along on
his way back after a fatiguing day. He told her he had seen a little
white figure among the trees on the mountain-side and had no doubt it
was her son who, he assured her, would be all right, and he himself
was loitering, intending to be overtaken so that they might arrive at
the hotel together.
"You see," he explained, "I know he will be late for dinner, and it
may make things a little easier for him if he does not come in alone."
Years afterwards Mrs. MacCarthy told me that she had been reading
_The Way of All Flesh_, and had remembered this incident and had
for the first time understood why Butler thought that her son would
require the presence of an elderly gentleman to protect him from his
parents if he came in late for dinner.
This throws a curious and unexpected sidelight on Butler's childhood
from the effects of which he never recovered. His parents learnt the
art of bringing up children from a book which adjured them to "Break
your child's will early or he will break yours later on." They did
not break it, but unquestionably they deformed it. This may have been
done on principle. To Butler, however, it sometimes seemed to spring
from other motives. "I have felt," he once said of his father, "that
he has always looked upon me as something which he could badger with
impunity." He said that, like Ernest Pontifex, with regard to his
father he could remember no feeling during his childhood except fear
and shrinking.
Nor was this life of terror and pain lightened by any gracious or
liberal influences. The world which Mr. Festing Jones exhibits to us
in his opening chapters is full of the drabbest and most depressing
horrors of Early Victorianism. Its measure can be taken by a single
story which Butler preserved:
Archdeacon Bather was lunching with my grandfather some two or three
years after the Archdeacon had lost his first wife. Dr. Butler dearly
loved a hard crust of bread baked nearly black, and it so happened
that a piece was set by his plate with hardly any crust, and what
little there was, very thin. My aunt, then Miss Butler, observing
what had happened, at once said:
"Oh, Papa, this won't do at all! I will find you a piece more to your
liking." Whereon she went to the kitchen and returned with a crust
baked exactly to Dr. Butler's taste.
When Archdeacon Bather saw this he said to himself: "That is the
young woman for me"; and shortly afterwards he proposed and was
accepted.
Readers will remember the scene in _The Way of All Flesh_ in which
Theobald, driving away for his honeymoon, insists that Christina shall
order their dinner at the first stop, and in which Christina protests
with tears her nervousness, and Theobald replies, "It is a wife's duty
to order her husband's dinner; you are my wife, and I shall expect you
to order mine." A sensitive child, neglected or even ill-treated by its
parents, might, if the relations of the parents between themselves had
anything beautiful or kindly, see some possibilities of happiness in
the institution of the family. But Samuel Butler was brought up in a
world where no such possibilities seemed to exist. He came to believe,
Mr. Festing Jones tells us, that, like Habakkuk, _le père de famille
est capable de tout_. It has often been maintained that the greatest
poets and artists do nothing throughout life but draw on those fresh
and lovely impressions which they have gathered in childhood. When
he was a child Butler acquired habits of suspicion against all those
surrounding him who were not connected with him by freely-chosen bonds
of friendship. Canon Butler bullied him on moral grounds; and he grew
to suspect every claim made on him, every exhortation addressed to
him, on moral grounds. Ernest Pontifex is described on one occasion
as assuming the expression of a puppy which is being scolded for
something it does not understand; and Butler did indeed develop some
of the habits of an ill-treated dog. He shied and snarled at a lifted
hand, which might have been lifted in kindness or in ignorance of his
existence. Having, as he supposed, penetrated the fraud of the family,
he felt a distrust of all human institutions. He suspected the world of
being in a conspiracy to pretend that parents were naturally kind to
their children, that Christ rose from the dead, and that Tennyson was a
great poet. And, turning from all these discredited shows, he devoted
himself in isolation to the care of his own idiosyncrasies and the
companionship of a very few, very intimate friends.
Here, where he might in one case have suspected with justice, he was
all blind trust. The story of Charles Paine Pauli is one of the most
extraordinary that have been brought to light in human records in
recent years. A correspondent who knew him and admired him wrote not
long ago to the _Times_, not to controvert Mr. Festing Jones's account
of the relations between him and Butler, but to protest, in an almost
agonised manner, that there must be some explanation of it; and this is
precisely what the reader, who did not know Pauli, feels when he comes
upon these pages. But there seems to be no explanation.
In 1859 Butler rebelled against his father, and finally decided that he
could not take Orders, basing his refusal on "doubts," which in after
years seemed to him no less absurd than the doctrines against which
they were directed. As a result of this, he emigrated to New Zealand,
taking with him an allowance from Canon Butler and a promise of support
in capital, in order that he might establish himself as a sheep-farmer.
In this occupation he was, against all the probabilities, moderately
successful and, largely owing to the rapidly-developing condition of
the colony, managed to turn an original capital of £4400 into the sum
of £8000. But finding the life uncongenial, he concluded that it would
be wiser to invest his money in New Zealand, where the current rate of
interest was 10 per cent., and go home and live on the proceeds. While
he was making preparations to this end, a previous slight acquaintance
with Pauli developed into an intimate friendship. Pauli was handsome,
fascinating, well dressed, ineffably well mannered. He was, in fact,
the Towneley of _The Way of All Flesh_, though Providence, not doing
as well by him as by Towneley, had omitted to make him rich. He was
actually poor and in ill-health, and anxious to go to England in order
that he might recover. He then proposed to get called to the Bar and
to return to New Zealand to practise. Butler, who believed himself
to be worth about £800 a year, promptly lavished on this creature
the generosity and tenderness which had found no outlet during his
childhood. He offered to lend him £100 for his passage, and to allow
him £200 a year for three years--that is, until his return to New
Zealand as a barrister. They accordingly made the passage together;
and Butler kept his promise, and more than kept it, extending the
allowance, even through the time of his acutest financial difficulties,
until Pauli's death in 1897. It was then discovered that at one time
Pauli had been earning £900 a year, and that even at the last he earned
between £500 and £700. He left a fortune of £9000; but Butler was not
mentioned in the will and received his invitation to the funeral from
the undertaker.
A singular and enlightening circumstance in the intercourse between
Butler and Pauli unhappily prevents Mr. Festing Jones from making this
astonishing but veracious narrative entirely lifelike. The charming
young man did not reciprocate the feelings of his pathetic and somewhat
uncouth adorer. "I had felt from the very beginning," says Butler,
"that my intimacy with Pauli was only superficial, and I also perceived
more and more that I bored him." Pauli confessed that he had never
been more miserable in his life than once when he spent a holiday with
Butler at Dieppe. Consequently it soon came about that the essential
part of the relations between them was the punctual payment of the
allowance. Latterly, they only met three times a week, when Pauli
lunched in Butler's chambers. He discontinued informing Butler of his
changes of address, so that at the end Butler did not know where he was
living, and Mr. Festing Jones met him "only on business, for he would
have nothing to do with any of Butler's friends in any other way."
Butler learnt of his death from an announcement in the _Times_.
Truly a mysterious creature! And his friend is very comprehensible in
supposing that there must be some explanation. Possibly Mr. Festing
Jones, if he had met him otherwise than purely on business, might have
given us some impression of his personality which would have let in
light on this dark business. As it is, we must content ourselves with
wonder at the extraordinary situations which human nature is capable of
creating. But this unhappy friendship is worth examining, apart from
its intrinsic curiosity, because it presents in extremity an essential
and determining part of Butler's life. His devotion and loyalty to his
friends were perhaps the most beautiful things in his character and do
much to redeem his somewhat unlovely attitude of snarling and suspicion
towards all strangers.
Life might be thought to have treated him savagely in following up
his parents with the hardly less cruel Pauli. He disguised the shock
of his discovery on Pauli's death by remarking that he would now save
not only £200 a year, but also the cost of those three lunches a week
in Clifford's Inn. Yet a nature that opened itself so trustingly, so
defencelessly, must have suffered on finding its bounty abused. But in
his other friends, in Miss Savage, in his clerk, Alfred Emery Cathie,
and in Mr. Festing Jones he had ample compensations. He was a man who
at first sight was not readily liked. He was awkward and nervous in
the company of strangers, and it is likely that he did not disguise
so well as he supposed his grave misgivings that they were either
pretentious scoundrels or conceited hypocrites. He was always badly
and carelessly dressed; and though his portraits, when one is used to
them and can associate them with the best one knows of his mind, become
attractive, there can be no denial that his appearance was on the most
lenient showing decidedly grotesque, that of a difficult, taciturn,
maliciously observant gnome, roughly carved in a hard wood. It took
some time and some degree of intuition to penetrate behind this mask.
Those who did so were rewarded and rewarded him. Miss Savage, who used
to meet him first at Heatherley's art-classes, was not attracted by him
for a considerable time. When at last she was, it was by a flash of
remarkable intuition. In commenting on one of his books, she writes:
I like the cherry-eating scene, too, because it reminded me of your
eating cherries when first I knew you. One day when I was going to
the gallery, a very hot day, I remember, I met you on the shady side
of Berners Street eating cherries out of a basket. Like your Italian
friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the
basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word. I pulled out a
handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either. I
had not before perceived you to be different from anyone else.
It is not certain whether Miss Savage became a Butlerian or whether
Butler acquired something of what we consider his characteristic
attitude of mind from her. If it was not so, then her spirit leapt at
once to answer his as soon as she had perceived the possibility of
common interests between them, for her first letters to him are written
in his own vein. She entered immediately into his concerns, read all
his books in manuscript, criticised them, gave them more praise than
they received from anyone else, and abused his enemies with a gusto
equal to his. The only trouble between them in their long connection
was his gnawing fear that she wanted to marry him. And he did not want
to marry anyone, let alone her who was
Plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and overkind.
But if all these disabilities had been removed, he would still have
been disinclined to marry her. He did not believe in marriage, had a
hatred of the family; and he slunk away snarling from the danger like a
terror-stricken wild animal at the sight of a trap, only to reproach
himself in after years for unkindness to his friend. But his relations
with women were not, and he did not intend that they should be, of the
sort that lead to marriage. He had mistresses, whom he visited. Mr. J.
B. Yeats, in a recent paper of reminiscences, has repeated his avowals
on this point in a manner which conveys well enough Butler's view that
his lapses were caused by a necessity of the flesh. Mr. Festing Jones
reinforces this impression. One of his mistresses, referred to as
"Madame," was, after a long connection, allowed to visit his chambers
in Clifford's Inn. No other gained this privilege; and Butler extended
it to her as he might have done to an old and well-tried servant.
Butler did not love these women, he frequented them. He was insensible
to the notion that there might be anything beautiful in the relations
between the sexes, as he was insensible to the notion that there might
be anything of value written in verse. Theobald and Christina pretended
to like poetry: Theobald and Christina pretended to love one another
and him. It was all of a piece with their pretence that Christianity
was a religion of kindliness and enlightenment.
So he remained a bachelor, and, when Miss Savage was dead, contented
himself with the intimate companionship of Mr. Jones and Alfred, his
clerk. After he had resigned the ambition of becoming a painter, after
his odd and disastrous excursion in the world of business, his daily
life was that of an eccentric gentleman with a small independent
income. He read and wrote in the British Museum, he went for walks in
the country and took holidays in Italy, he published his books at his
own expense, and he scrambled out of invitations to dinner as best he
could. For a hobby he wrote music in collaboration with Mr. Festing
Jones, oratorios which were to be as much like Handel's oratorios as
possible. The first of them, _Narcissus_, was inspired by his own
misfortunes in business, and the final chorus ran:
How blest the prudent man, the maiden pure,
Whose income is both ample and secure,
Arising from consolidated Three
Per Cent. Annuities, paid quarterly!
"We remembered Handel's treatment of 'continually,'" says Mr. Festing
Jones, "and thought we could not do better than imitate it for our
words 'paid quarterly.'"
And so his life went on and his interests drifted through the theory
of evolution, the authorship of the _Odyssey_, the life of his
grandfather, and the meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The sales of his
books pursued a course by no means so varied, but steadily declined. In
1899, when he drew up a statement of profit and loss, the average sales
of his eleven books, excluding _Erewhon_, which was the first, amounted
to 306 copies each. Of his _Selections from Previous Works_, 120 copies
were sold in fifteen years. Of _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, 165
copies were sold. He might well have added discouragement to his first
cause of bitterness. The religion of Christ produced Canon Butler, the
religion of science produced Darwin, the religion of good looks and
good breeding produced Pauli. On paper he was indomitable. He swore he
had enjoyed life, that on the balance his good luck overbalanced the
bad. But he swore a little too often, he explained a little too much
in detail for this to have been quite true. And then, at the very end
of his life, the luck turned, and his last book, by a strange irony,
was produced at the publisher's own risk, the greatest triumph in his
literary career which Butler was able to see since the success of his
first book. After he was dead his reputation, magically assisted with
incantations by Mr. Bernard Shaw and others, sprang up to an amazing
height, like the plant grown from the Indian enchanter's bean.
Now the world is confronted with a situation in which the neglected
philosopher of Clifford's Inn has attained an importance he never
dreamt of and perhaps would not have approved. "Above all things," he
said, "let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in _me_."
This useful motto was printed on the menu of the first Erewhon dinner;
but a great number of his disciples have disregarded the admonition.
I was once the witness of one undergraduate trying to proselytise
another and telling him that it was a worthy ambition to desire to
be like Christ. "I don't want to be like anyone else," replied the
second undergraduate, "but if I did, I shouldn't choose Christ, I
should choose Samuel Butler." This is at once an extreme instance and
one strictly guarded against Butler's own disapproval: for the kernel
of the remark would meet with his applause. But it illustrates the
direction in which many of his admirers have more frenetically rushed.
It is an ironic fate for so ironic a philosopher that his teaching
should have become a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for so many solemn
and ridiculous persons.