is the most subtly gifted English essayist since Charles Lamb. It
is not surprising that he has (now for many years) been referred to
as "the incomparable Max," for what other contemporary has never
once missed fire, never failed to achieve perfection in the field
of his choice? Whether in caricature, short story, fable, parody,
or essay, he has always been consummate in grace, tact, insouciant
airy precision. I hope you will not miss "No. 2 The Pines" (in _And
Even Now_, from which this selection also comes), a reminiscence of
his first visit to Swinburne in 1899. That beautiful (there is no
other word) essay shows an even ampler range of Mr. Beerbohm's
powers: a tenderness and lovely grace that remind one, almost
against belief, that the gay youth of the '90's now mellows
deliciously with the end of the fifth decade. He was so enormously
old in 1896, when he published his first book and called it his
_Works_; he seems much younger now: he is having his first
childhood.
This portrait of the unfortunate cleric annihilated by Dr. Johnson
is a triumphant example of the skill with which a perfect artist
can manœuver a trifle, carved like an ivory trinket; in such
hands, subtlety never becomes mere tenuity.
Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1872; studied at Charterhouse
School and Merton College, Oxford; and was a brilliant figure in
the _Savoy_ and _Yellow Book_ circles by the time he was
twenty-four. His genius is that of the essay in its purest
distillation: a clear cross-section of life as seen through the
lens of self; the pure culture (in the biological sense) of
observing personality.
I have often wondered how it came about (though the matter is
wholly nonpertinent) that Mr. Beerbohm married an American
lady--quite a habit with English essayists, by the way: Hilaire
Belloc and Bertrand Russell did likewise. _Who's Who_ says she was
from Memphis, which adds lustre to that admirable city.
He now lives in Italy.
Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it
were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the
rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my
weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he
asked a question, and received an answer.
This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at Streatham, in the
well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. Johnson, on the morning of that day,
had entertained Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to
dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived early. It seems that
Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson "what were the best
English sermons for style." In the interval before dinner, accordingly,
Boswell reeled off the names of several divines whose prose might or
might not win commendation. "Atterbury?" he suggested. "JOHNSON: Yes,
Sir, one of the best. BOSWELL: Tillotson? JOHNSON: Why, not now. I
should not advise any one to imitate Tillotson's style; though I don't
know; I should be cautious of censuring anything that has been applauded
by so many suffrages.--South is one of the best, if you except his
peculiarities, and his violence, and sometimes coarseness of
language.--Seed has a very fine style; but he is not very theological.
Jortin's sermons are very elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is very
elegant, though he has not made it his principal study.--And you may add
Smalridge. BOSWELL: I like Ogden's Sermons on Prayer very much, both
for neatness of style and subtility of reasoning. JOHNSON: I should like
to read all that Ogden has written. BOSWELL: What I want to know is,
what sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence.
JOHNSON: We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for
anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name I
do not recollect: Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the passions?
JOHNSON: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may."
The suddenness of it! Bang!--and the rabbit that had popped from its
burrow was no more.
I know not which is the more startling--the début of the unfortunate
clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn't Boswell told
us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so careful
and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the clergyman
was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the company.
Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that sooner or
later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in
our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company around Johnson
he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his
self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell's page it startles
us. In Johnson's massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable
man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest.
Others might, if they had something in them, stand out slightly. This
unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he
lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That deficiency, however, does
not account for the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson's
strongest and most inveterate feelings was his veneration for the Cloth.
To any one in Holy Orders he habitually listened with a grace and
charming deference. To-day, moreover, he was in excellent good humor. He
was at the Thrales', where he so loved to be; the day was fine; a fine
dinner was in close prospect; and he had had what he always declared to
be the sum of human felicity--a ride in a coach. Nor was there in the
question put by the clergyman anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was
one whom Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had always been
agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very emotional. What drew the
blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in
which it was asked. And I think we can guess what that manner was.
Say the words aloud: "Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the
passions?" They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic
sense, _cannot_ be said except in a high, thin voice.
You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous
baritone or bass. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To
make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice:
you must pipe them.
Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew well,
the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him very
loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergyman, when
at length he suddenly mustered courage to 'cut in,' let his high, thin
voice soar _too_ high, insomuch that it was a kind of scream. On no
other hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which Johnson
turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we may be sure, mean to be cruel.
The old lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But the force of paw
and claws was not the less lethal. We have endless testimony to the
strength of Johnson's voice; and the very cadence of those words, "They
were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may," convinces me
that the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder roar. Boswell does
not record that there was any further conversation before the
announcement of dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been temporarily
deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My heart goes out to the
poor dear clergyman exclusively.
I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I
slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due
process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what I
omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress any
one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that even
the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would
assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally
shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in
time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given
himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved
by the fact that he did snatch the opportunity for asking that question.
He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of the
neighboring church? I think so. It would account for his having been
invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor's
pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the edge of a
chair in the background. He has colorless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a
face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding
chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-colored. His hands
are clasped tight before him, the knuckles standing out sharply. This
constriction does not mean that he is steeling himself to speak. He has
no positive intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he
wishing in the back of his mind that he could say something--something
whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, after a pause for
thought, "Why, yes, Sir. That is most justly observed" or "Sir, this has
never occurred to me. I thank you"--thereby fixing the observer forever
high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the chance presents
itself. "We have," shouts Johnson, "no sermons addressed to the
passions, that are good for anything." I see the curate's frame quiver
with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and--no, I can't bear it, I
shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill,
followed by something thunderous.
Presently I reopen my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that
young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.
Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the Established
Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what Seed and South?
And, by the way, who _were_ they, these worthies? It is a solemn thought
that so little is conveyed to us by names which to the palæo-Georgians
conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a
big wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath
him. But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all
very elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled
full calf, and no palæo-Georgian gentleman's library will be complete
without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but,
bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels
are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a
very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years
hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and
sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly
as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now. "Yes, Sir,"
some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, "Wells is
one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his
concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of
problems, but is not very creational.--Caine's books are very edifying.
I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is
very edifying.--And you may add Upton Sinclair." "What I want to know,"
says the disciple, "is, what English novels may be selected as specially
enthralling." The pundit answers: "We have no novels addressed to the
passions that are good for anything, if you mean that kind of
enthralment." And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will
not remember) inquires: "Are not Mrs. Glyn's novels addressed to the
passions?" and is in due form annihilated. Can it be that a time will
come when readers of this passage in our pundit's Life will take more
interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those
great names put together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate
between (say) Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above
Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must
remember that things are not always what they seem.
Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by
his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past
favors, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if by
so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a
correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human,
but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson
and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect of them.
They either know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles.
Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not
elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us
keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than
merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the
Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well
became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But
at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in the bud.
And that is what in fact happened, I'm sure of it. A robust man might
have rallied under the blow. Not so our friend. Those who knew him in
infancy had not expected that he would be reared. Better for him had
they been right. It is well to grow up and be ordained, but not if you
are delicate and very sensitive, and shall happen to annoy the greatest,
the most stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. "A
Clergyman" never held up his head or smiled again after the brief
encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline.
Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall's almond trees he was no more.
I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.
SAMUEL BUTLER: DIOGENES OF THE VICTORIANS
_By_ STUART P. SHERMAN
Professor Sherman's cold compress, applied to the Butler cult,
caused much suffering in some regions, where it was said to be more
than a cooling bandage--in fact, a wet blanket. In the general
rough-and-tumble among critical standards during recent years, Mr.
Sherman is one of those who have dealt some swinging blows in favor
of the Victorians and the literary Old Guard--which was often
square but rarely hollow.
Stuart Pratt Sherman, born in Iowa in 1881, graduated from Williams
in 1903, has been since 1911 professor of English at the University
of Illinois. His own account of his adventures, written without
intended publication, is worth consideration. He says:
"My life hasn't been quite as dryly 'academic,' nor as simply
'middle-Western,' as the record indicates. For example: I lived in
Los Angeles from my 5th to my 13th year, and then went on a seven
months' adventure in gold mining in the Black Cañon of Arizona,
where I had some experience with drouth in the desert, etc. That is
not 'literary.'
"Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little paper about
some college friends at Williams. I was in college with Harry James
Smith (author of _Mrs. Bumpstead Lee_), Max Eastman, and
'Go-to-Hell' Whittlesey. As editor of the _Williams Monthly_ I have
accepted and rejected manuscripts of both the two latter, and have
reminiscences of their literary youth.
"Then I spent a summer in the _Post_ and _Nation_ in 1908, which is
a pleasant chapter to remember; another summer teaching at
Columbia; this past summer teaching at the University of
California. My favorite recreations are climbing little mountains,
chopping wood, and canoeing on Lake Michigan.
"This summer I have been picking out a place to die in--or rather
looking over the sites offered in California. I lean towards the
high Sierras, up above the Yosemite Valley.
"My ambition in life is to retire--perhaps at the age of
seventy--and write only for amusement. When I can abandon the task
of improving my contemporaries, I hope to become a popular
author."
Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact contemporary
of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords in more than one
spirited encounter; and Sherman is likely to give as good as he
takes in such scuffles, or even rather better. It is high time that
his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning were better known in
the market-place.
UNTIL I met the Butlerians I used to think that the religious spirit in
our times was very precious, there was so little of it. I thought one
should hold one's breath before it as before the flicker of one's last
match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it should go out?" I said;
but my apprehension was groundless. It can never go out. The religious
spirit is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum of
universal energy in which matches and suns are alike but momentary
sparkles and phases. This great truth I learned of the Butlerians:
Though the forms and objects of religious belief wax old as a garment
and are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious thing, endures
forever. Destroy a man's faith in God and he will worship humanity;
destroy his faith in humanity and he will worship science; destroy his
faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy his faith in
himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.
What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of course, that Butler,
poor dear, as the English say, was the least worshipful of men. He was
not even--till his posthumous disciples made him so--a person of any
particular importance. One writing a private memorandum of his death
might have produced something like this: Samuel Butler was an
unsociable, burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante in
art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty cynic of inquisitive
temper and, comprehensively speaking, the unregarded Diogenes of the
Victorians. Son of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835,
educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordination. But, as we
are told, because of scruples regarding infant baptism he abandoned the
prospect of holy orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with
capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep-farming for five
years. In 1864, returning to England with £8,000, he established himself
for life at Clifford's Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting,
adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional trips to Sicily and
Italy, and wrote a dozen books, which generally fell dead from the
press, on religion, literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon,"
however, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by 1899 sold between
three and four thousand copies. Butler made few friends and apparently
never married. He died in 1902. His last words were: "Have you brought
the cheque book, Alfred?" His body was cremated and the ashes were
buried in a garden by his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing
to mark the spot.
Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly part betokens no
contempt for fame. Denied contemporary renown, he had firmly set his
heart on immortality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for
it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suffrage of his
countrymen, he would go down by the shrewd use of his cheque book; he
would buy his way in. He bought the publication of most of the books
produced in his lifetime. He diligently prepared manuscripts for
posthumous publication and accumulated and arranged great masses of
materials for a biographer. He insured an interest in his literary
remains by bequeathing them and all his copyrights to his literary
executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an interest in a biographer by
persuading Henry Festing Jones, a feckless lawyer of Butlerian
proclivities, to abandon the law and become his musical and literary
companion. In return for these services Mr. Jones received between 1887
and 1900 an allowance of £200 a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of
£500, the musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and
privilege of assisting Streatfeild with the propagation of Butler's
fame, together with their own, in the next generation.
These good and faithful servants performed their duties with exemplary
zeal and astuteness. In 1903, the year following the Master's death,
Streatfeild published "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with
satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was capable of walking
off on its own legs and exciting general curiosity about its
author--curiosity intensified by the announcement that the novel had
been written between 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation there
began the systematic annual relaunching of old works, with fresh
introductions and memoirs and a piecemeal feeding out of other literary
remains, culminating in 1917 with the publication of "The Note-Books," a
skilful collection and condensation of the whole of Butler's
intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908, the Erewhon dinner had been
instituted. In spite of mild deprecation, this feast, with its two
toasts to his Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, assumed from
the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of believers. Among these
was conspicuous on the second occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not
quite certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to receive honor,
whether he was himself to be regarded as the beloved disciple or rather
as the one for whom Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had
prepared the way with "free and future-piercing suggestions."
By 1914 Streatfeild was able to declare that no fragment of Butler's was
too insignificant to publish. In 1915 and 1916 appeared extensive
critical studies by Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 1919 at last
arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative memoir in two
enormous volumes with portraits, documents, sumptuous index, elaborate
bibliography and a pious accounting to the public for the original
manuscripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at St. John's
College, the Bodleian, the British Museum, the Library of Congress and
at various shrines in Italy and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh
consideration of the man in relation to his work.
The unconverted will say that such a monument to such a man is absurdly
disproportionate. But Butler is now more than a man. He is a spiritual
ancestor, leader of a movement, moulder of young minds, founder of a
faith. His monument is designed not merely to preserve his memory but to
mark as well the present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir
appears to have been written primarily for them. The faithful will no
doubt find it delicious; and I, though an outsider, got through it
without fatigue and with a kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity.
It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies its puzzling and
complex subject. Mr. Jones is not of the biographers who look into the
heart of a man, reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accordance
with it. He works from the outside, inward, and gradually achieves life
and reality by an immense accumulation of objective detail, without
ever plucking out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery. What
was the man's "master passion" and his master faculty? Butler himself
did not know; consequently he could not always distinguish his wisdom
from his folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and an
egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his wounds in
self-assertion and his hesitancies in an external aggressiveness. Mr.
Jones pierces the shell here and there, but never removes it.
Considering his opportunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his
subject based on his own direct observation; and, with all his
ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating indiscretions, he is
frequently silent as a tomb where he must certainly possess information
for which every reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do
not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the happy
reincarnation of moderation, common sense and fearless honesty.