what he considered to be his life-work in a statement which is not
dated but which must have been written in 1899 or later. It begins
with (1) The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease
[_Erewhon_], and ends with (17) The elucidation of Shakespeare's
_Sonnets_ [_Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered_.] "The foregoing," he
continues, "is the list of my mares'-nests, and it is, I presume, this
list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares'-nests
in his diatribe on my _Odyssey_ theory in the _Classical Review_." The
two to which he probably attached most importance, to judge from the
bitterness of his remarks on their reception, were his intervention
into the great evolution dispute and his great discovery that the
_Odyssey_ was written by a female inhabitant of Trapani in Sicily.
With regard to the second he continually complained that no classical
scholar had ever replied to his arguments. It was once remarked in
answer to this, that if a classical scholar published a book arguing
that no player of Rugby football ought to be allowed to pass the
ball to another without obtaining a signed receipt for it, the great
community of Rugby footballers, intent on other matters, would
probably ignore his suggestion. Butler's claim may perhaps be left
there. Yet he did apparently take it seriously, in spite of his failure
to deal with the singular fact that no scrap of confirmation of his
theory has survived from the writings or the traditions of antiquity.
His "mares'-nests," he said, "were simply sovereigns which he found
lying in public places and which people would not notice and be at
the trouble of picking up." They were mostly, however, one cannot
help suspecting, recommended to him less because they seemed to be
sovereigns than because other people would not pick them up. They were,
in fact, the notions of a crank, who, having acquired a distrust of the
rest of the world, took pains to differ from it as much as he could.
His theories of evolution hold a different position. Darwin's theory
has now been so greatly modified, as much by his supporters as by
his opponents, that it cannot be said any longer to hold the field
as he first presented it; and Butler's attitude has been in a manner
justified. But this change has been accomplished not by the acceptance
of Butler's views but by the work of experimental biologists. He
did, in fact, offer many general principles, some well founded, some
mistaken, all stimulating, for the consideration of practical workers;
and it would not be possible to assert, without an exhaustive enquiry
into the history of the matter, that his writings have had no influence
on the development of science. But Charles Darwin and his followers
were practical men--men no doubt with faults, with the intolerance and
impatience of the laity that are often to be found in the scientific
investigator. It is not hard to see why they received Butler with
tepid interest, and finally ignored him when he forsook their path
of enquiry. For they did ignore him: they did not, as he supposed,
conspire to silence him. He seems to have believed that Darwin was a
sort of Anti-Christ malevolently determined to force on humanity a
diabolical belief of his own invention; and he was only too ready to
suspect him of unscrupulous dealing and machinations. When he conceived
that Darwin had engineered an attack on him, though he obtained an
expression of regret for an accident, he flung violently into print,
and did, though he remained ignorant of the fact, get from Darwin and
his friends the attention as an enemy which they would not bestow on
him as a scientist. His letter to the _Athenæum_ seriously perturbed
Darwin, who drafted two replies to it, and submitted them for advice to
the members of his family and to Professor Huxley. The advice given was
against replying; and Butler was accordingly confirmed in his opinion.
But this was an opinion which a less suspicious man would have been
slower in forming and readier to discard.
Darwin was not, in his career or in his handling of Butler, a model of
the urbane virtues. Butler did right to protest against the sacerdotal
attitude which Victorian men of science frequently adopted. But he did
wrong not to realise that Darwin did not take him altogether seriously,
and why this was so. Butler's challenging manner of writing, the
prickly defensiveness which he developed on the smallest provocation,
must have been disagreeable to the great investigator who had spent
years of careful research into the problems which Butler airily
settled at his writing-table in the intervals of other pursuits.
Darwin is perhaps to blame, but not so greatly to blame as Butler
contended, if he regarded Butler at first as a well-disposed, and then
as an ill-disposed, amateur; and that was in effect his view of the
whole matter. When he sent _Evolution Old and New_ to Dr. Krause, he
expressed the hope that the German writer "would not expend much powder
and shot on Mr. Butler, for he really is not worthy of it. His book is
merely ephemeral." And it was in fact ephemeral or nearly so. Butler's
works on evolution contain many inspired guesses; but the inherent
value of these ceases to have much more than a historical interest
when they are confirmed by practical observation. If they are not so
confirmed they remain open to question, though they may have their uses
in suggesting paths for research. Butler's place in science is somewhat
below that of Goethe, who did after all make a practical discovery
which remains valid to-day.
Some of his "mares'-nests," then, were "mares'-nests" from the
beginning. Others, neglected when they might have been useful, had
begun to be superannuated when they first attracted attention. But
Butler, apart from his theories and his discoveries, remains as an
observer of life and a teacher of conduct. Passages of this nature
exist in all his works; but, generally speaking, his claim to be
accepted as a philosopher rests on five books, _Erewhon_, _Erewhon
Revisited_, the _Note-books_, _The Way of All Flesh_, and Mr. Festing
Jones's biography.
Mr. Festing Jones observes that "I was struck by his uncompromising
sincerity. If a subject interested him, he took infinite pains to
find out all he could about it first-hand, thought it over and formed
an opinion of his own, without reference to what anyone else thought
or said." In demonstration of this, Mr. Jones relates the following
reminiscence:
We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her; I said, as
though taking the odd trick with the ace of trumps:
"Well, at all events, she wrote three splendid novels."
He replied in a low voice, reluctantly but decidedly: "They are not
splendid."
These four words shifted the subject under discussion from the
splendour or otherwise of Charlotte Brontë's novels to the sincerity
or otherwise of my opinion.
It was no doubt well that Mr. Jones's sincerity should be probed; and
this is in fact what Butler does at his best. He challenges established
opinions and forces those who hold them to consider whether they have
any good ground for doing so. But the reader who is not dazzled by
Butler's originality of judgment in this instance will ask himself
whether the sentence which Mr. Jones quotes is anything more than a
very facile assertion. He will then perhaps ask himself how often
Butler's original pronouncements on established reputations are of the
same order. He will certainly find some. In the _Note-books_ there is
an elaborate arraignment of Raphael. It may not be convincing; but the
critic has produced his arguments. Here, also, may be found Butler's
explanation of his hostility towards post-Handelian music. But one
may search the two volumes of the biography for a considerable time
without finding his appreciation of any book published in his own time.
Here, again, we must be just: Butler did like one book. It was called
_Pusley, or My Summer in a Garden_; its author was Charles Dudley
Warner; and Butler said, "I like _Pusley_ very much and have read it
all."
But the majority of his opinions are on the model of the much-quoted
passage in the _Note-books_:
Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt
Italian at sixty in order to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no
good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson--well, Tennyson goes without
saying.
That is an exceedingly witty way of expressing an indolent prejudice;
and those who share that particular chain of prejudices may well
rejoice in it, without supposing that it proves their case. But this
particular form of humour and Butler's independence of attitude would
be slightly more entertaining if he had occasionally replaced the
reputations he smashed with these hammer-strokes by some discovery of
his own. Unfortunately, it is not easy to remember any unknown author
whom he brought into the light--unless Nausicaa be taken as an example.
But this is, in a way, the defect of his qualities. It is easy, too
easy, to grow incensed with him when he inanely doubts any convention
or opinion that comes in sight. It is possible to remark of him,
adapting the remark made of Dr. Johnson, that he may have been very
sensible at bottom, but that there was a great deal of nonsense on
top. But the fact remains that by challenging everything he did detect
a great many frauds, and he did let the light of scepticism into a
great many topics where scepticism is a healthy attitude. If his view
of family life was bigoted and unreasonable, there is a great deal of
use in the reminder that family life is not necessarily perfect and
needs a deal of watching to keep it from being very imperfect indeed.
Some of the assumptions he challenged have now disappeared. We no
longer believe that good looks and good manners are the unmistakable
indices of an ill heart; and we are becoming convinced that it is
better to have these attributes than to be without them. But these
lessons can be enforced as Butler continually enforces them. It was
his fate that life made him a suspicious man. But suspicion made him
a doubting, questioning, and therefore enquiring man. And his natural
gift of humour taught him what he has ever since been teaching others,
that it is possible to be serious without being solemn. This was
perhaps the most valuable thing he had to say to a society emerging
from the Victorian era and passing over into another that was to be
as desperately serious as we are now realising. It is a reflection
pathetically ironical that his loudest followers in these days should
be persons whom he would very likely have described as Simeonites of
the intellect.
Of the value of his writings judged as literature it is not so easy
to speak with confidence. _Erewhon_ is not so much a novel as a
collection of essays roughly pressed into a common mould. They are
not merely disconnected, they are also composed on different planes
of satire, at different removes from reality, so that the reader as
he goes from chapter to chapter has an uncomfortable sense of being
jolted from level to level. Yet the satire, on its varying levels, is
extraordinarily easy, ingenious, and penetrating; and, in another key
again, the opening chapters make one of the best introductions to a
story of exploration ever written. _Erewhon Revisited_ is the book of
an old man; and it has much of the beauty so often to be found in such
compositions. The manner of its writing was very different from that of
its predecessor, and it is impossible to complain of any unevenness in
its structure. Nevertheless the satire is not so easy. It is a little
strained, a little too ingenious, a little too closely calculated to
make good reading. Butler himself picked out the best part of the book
when he complained that none of his critics had noticed the idea of a
father attempting by noble conduct to deserve the good opinion of a
newly-found and adored son. Thus, at the end of his life, still haunted
by early memories, he attempted to fashion in imagination what should
have been and completely to invert the facts of his own childhood.
_The Way of All Flesh_ is precisely the opposite of this. It has
long been known to be of the photographic order of novels; but how
minutely photographic it is we could not know until the appearance of
Mr. Jones's book. This need not, and should not, affect our judgment
of it, even when we are informed that Theobald's delightful letters
are almost literal transcriptions from those of Canon Butler. We can
very well continue to admire the inimitable accuracy and vividness
with which these real scenes are described, while we suffer from the
painful bitterness of this exhaustive improvisation on the old theme
of parents and children. But the whole book is not of equal merit.
It begins to weaken at the point where Ernest's career diverges from
Butler's own experience; and when it reaches the catastrophe it sinks
into improbabilities from which it never recovers. The Ernest, whose
thoughts and feelings at Cambridge have been described, and who was
Butler, would never have made that disastrous mistake over Miss
Maitland's real profession. Butler did not in fact ever make it, nor
did he ever develop into the super-prig which Ernest became after his
release from prison.
Butler's reputation will probably rest more and more, as time goes
on, on his _Note-books_ and on Mr. Jones's biography, which might be
described together as the story of a distrustful man. Indeed, posterity
reading these alone, will probably miss little of what it should
retain: for Butler was careful of his best things, and most of them
are to be found here as well as in the books in which he enshrined
them among more perishable material. On the strength of these two
books he will remain a definite and unforgettable character, though
he may, probably will, recede in importance, perhaps even to the
level of those wits whose "table-talk" is read by the curious in every
generation.
But even so, there he will be still: a man whom fate tortured into
such distrust of his fellows as to make him question everything and
teach others to do the same. He suffered intensely in the process
that made him what he was: he suffered again, much more than he would
ever admit, from the ineffaceable results of the process. "I do not
deny, however," he bursts out, "that I have been ill-used. I have been
used abominably." This cry rings truer, echoes longer in the memory,
than the assertion which follows that he considered the balance of
good fortune to have been on his side. By one of those contrivances
of events with which fate marks the lives of distinguished men, an
atmosphere of distrust followed him on to his death-bed and beyond it.
For the doctors disagreed during his last illness, and Mr. Festing
Jones doubts the accuracy of the causes given in the certificate of
death.
THE CRYSTAL VASE
By MAURICE HEWLETT
I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly
in life, thank goodness, nothing happened. Jane Austen, it has been
objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly
did--but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the
novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events;
events--well, that means that there were collisions. They may have been
mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and there
were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of cases,
there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to be
interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it is
not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most. No, it
is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which we care
about; and as mental process is always going on, and the state of the
soul never the same for two moments together, there is ample material
for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish, which might
indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper or the Annual Register.
Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will read anybody
else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives in a cage, cut
off from every other man-Jack; because we are incapable of knowing what
is going on in the mind of our nearest and dearest, and because we burn
for the assurance we may get by evidence of homogeneity procurable from
any human source. Man is a creature of social instinct condemned by
his nature to be solitary. Creatures in all outward respects similar
to himself are awhirl about him. They cannot help him, nor he them; he
cannot even be sure, for all he may assume it, that they share his hope
and calling.
Ensphered in flesh we live and die,
And see a myriad souls adrift,
Our likes, and send our voiceless cry
Shuddering across the void: "The truth
Succour! The truth!" None can reply.
That is the state of our case. We can cope with mere events, comedy,
tragedy, farce. The things that happen to us are not our life. They are
imposed upon life, they come and go. But life is a secret process. We
only see the accretions.
The novel which I dreamed of writing has recently been done, or rather
begun, by Miss Dorothy Richardson. She betters the example of Jane
Austen by telling us much more about what seems to be infinitely less,
but is not so in reality. She dips into the well whereof Miss Austen
skims the surface. She has essayed to report the mental process of a
young woman's lifetime from moment to moment. In the course of four, if
not five, volumes nothing has happened yet but the death of a mother
and the marriage of a sister or so. She may write forty, and I shall
be ready for the forty-first. Mental process, the states of the soul,
emotional reaction--these as they are moved in us by other people are
Miss Richardson's subject-matter, and according as these are handled
is the interest we can devote to her novels. These flitting things are
Miss Richardson's game, and they are the things which interest us most
in ourselves, and the things which we desire to know most about in our
neighbours.
But of course it won't do. Miss Richardson does not, and cannot, tell
us all. A novel is a piece of art which does not so much report life
as transmute it. She takes up what she needs for her purpose, and
that may not be our purpose. And so it is with poetry--we don't go to
that for the facts, but for the essence of fact. The poet who told us
all about himself at some particular pass would write a bad poem, for
it is his affair to transfigure rather than transmute, to move us by
beauty at least as much as by truth. What we look for so wistfully in
each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished
article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry
which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that
which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact,
to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer.
Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now
no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so
it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think, by
analysis, to track the successive waves of mental process in _In
Memoriam_. Again, _The Angel in the House_ brought Patmore as near to
self-explication as a poet can go. Shakespeare's Sonnets offer a more
doubtful field of experiment.
What then? Shall we go to the letter-writers--to Madame de Sévigné, to
Gray, to Walpole and Cowper, Byron and Lamb? A letter-writer implies
a letter-reader, and just that inadequacy of spoken communication
will smother up our written words. Madame de Sévigné must placate her
high-sniffing daughter, Gray must please himself; Walpole must at any
cost be lively, Cowper must be urbane to Lady Hesketh or deprecate
the judgment of the Reverend Mr. Newton. Byron was always before the
looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose
that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin
thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree
with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be
merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic
turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it
in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on account of my
dying day, and because women have cancers." Where will you match that
but from Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched thing to
confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I can utter can be
taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature." So
I find him in his letters, swayed rather by his fancies than his states
of soul, until indeed that soul of his was wrung by agony of mind and
disease of body. Revelation, then, like gouts of blood, did issue, but
of that I do not now write. No man is sane at such a crisis.
_Parva componere magnis_, there is a letter contained in _The Early
Diary of Frances Burney_ (ed. Mrs. A. R. Ellis, 1889) more completely
apocalyptic than anything else of the kind accessible to me. Its writer
was Maria Allen, daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife, therefore
half-sister to the charming Burney girls. She was a young lady who
could let herself go, in act as well as on paper, and withal, as
Fanny judged her, "flighty, ridiculous, uncommon, lively, comical,
entertaining, frank, and undisguised"--or because of it--she did
contrive to unfold her panting and abounding young self more thoroughly
than the many times more expert. You have her here in the pangs of a
love affair, of how long standing I don't know, but now evidently in
a bad state of miss-fire. It was to end in elopement, post-chaise,
clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth century. Here it is in an
earlier state, all mortification, pouting and hunching of the shoulder.
I reproduce it with Maria's punctuation, which shows it to have
proceeded, as no doubt she did herself, in gasps:
"I was at the Assembly, forced to go entirely against my own
Inclination. But I always have sacrificed my own inclinations to the
will of other people--could not resist the pressing Importunity of--Bet
Dickens--to go--tho' it proved Horribly stupid. I drank tea at the
---- told old Turner--I was determined not to dance--he would not
believe me--a wager ensued--half-a-crown provided I followed my own
Inclinations--agreed--Mr. Audley asked me. I refused--sat still--yet
followed my own Inclinations. But four couple began--Martin (c'etait
Lui) was there--yet stupid--nimporte--quite Indifferent--on both
sides--Who had I--to converse with the whole Evening--not a female
friend--none there--not an acquaintance--All Dancing--who then--I've
forgot--nimporte--I broke my earring--how--heaven knows--foolishly
enough--one can't always keep on the Mask of Wisdom--well n'importe
I danced a Minute a quatre the latter end of the Eve--with a
stupid Wretch--need I name him--They danced cotillions almost the
whole Night--two sets--yet I did not join them--Miss Jenny Hawkins
danced--with who--can't you guess--well--n'importe----"
* * * * *
There is more, but my pen is out of breath. Nobody but Mr. Jingle ever
wrote like that; and in so far as Maria Allen may be said to have had a
soul, there in its little spasms is the soul of Maria Allen, with all
the _malentendus_ of the ballroom and all the surgings of a love affair
at cross-purposes thrown in.