out over his life and works; and indeed there has already been many a
skirmish in that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor Mr.
Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival. Ultimately Butler's
vogue is due to the fact that he is a friend of the Georgian revolution
against idealism in the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary
acclaim with which he is now received is his reward for having long ago
prepared to betray the Victorians into the hands of a ruthless
posterity. He was a traitor to his own times, and therefore it follows
that he was a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which we may
all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor whom we have received
within our lines is whether he will make us a good citizen. We should
like to know pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his
countrymen--whether through defects in his own temper and character or
through a clear-eyed and righteous indignation with the incorrigible
viciousness of their manners and institutions. We should like to know
what vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hitherto the
Georgians have been more eloquent in their disillusions than in their
visions, and have inclined to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent
without much inspecting his solution.
The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering attack on family life,
notably in "The Way of All Flesh"; and many a studious literary man with
a talkative wife and eight romping children would, of course, admit an
occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bachelor apartments. Mr.
Jones tells us that Theobald and Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness
Butler uncovers, were drawn without exaggeration from his own father and
mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of pitiless satire. Butler
appears to have hated his father, despised his mother and loathed his
sisters in all truth and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and
contemptuous feelings towards them all through his life; he studied
these feelings, made notes on them, jested out of them, lived in them,
reduced them to a philosophy of domestic antipathy.
He was far more learned than any other English author in the psychology
of impiety. When he heard some one say, "Two are better than one," he
exclaimed, "Yes, but the man who said that did not know my sisters."
When he was forty-eight years old he wrote to a friend that his father
was in poor health and not likely to recover; "but may hang on for
months or go off with the N. E. winds which we are sure to have later
on." In the same letter he writes that he is going to strike out forty
weak pages in "Erewhon" and stick in forty stronger ones on the "trial
of a middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a suitable
age.'" His father's one unpardonable offense was not dying early and so
enlarging his son's income. If this had been a jest, it would have been
a little coarse for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears to think it
very amusing, proves clearly enough that it was not a jest, but an
obsession, and a horrid obsession it was. Now a man who attacks the
family because his father does not die as promptly as could be desired
is not likely to propose a happy substitute: his mood is not
reconstructive, funny though it may be in two old boys of fifty, like
Butler and Jones, living along like spoiled children on allowances,
Butler from his father, Jones from his mother.
The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant attack on "romantic"
relations between the sexes. Before the advent of Shaw he poured poison
on the roots of that imaginative love in which all normal men and
maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy cloud shot through
with golden lights.
His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, capable of passion, a
face distinctly virile, rather harshly bearded, with broad masculine
eyebrows. Was he ever in love? If not, why was he not? Elementary
questions which his biographer after a thousand pages leaves unanswered.
Mr. Jones asserts that both Overton and Ernest in "The Way of All Flesh"
are in the main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes much
evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence in this fact, that
Butler, unlike his hero, was never in prison. Did Butler, like his hero,
have children and farm them out? The point is of some interest in the
case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conventional family.
Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with such women as the
late Queen Victoria would not have approved, relations which J. B.
Yeats has, however, publicly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cynical
enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes pains to tell us that
his own grandfather was never married. He does not hesitate to
acknowledge abundance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access
of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking is the order of
the day and the special pride of contemporary Erewhonians? Why did a
young man of Butler's tastes leave the church and go into exile in New
Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute biographer perhaps find a
more "realistic" explanation than difficulties over infant baptism? Mr.
Shaw told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird." In some
respects he was also a sly old bird.
Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled by Mr. Shaw we may be
sure that the author of "Man and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge
Butler's prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea we may now
trace quite definitely to his relations with Miss Savage, a witty,
sensible, presumably virtuous woman of about his own age, living in a
club in London, who urged him to write fiction, read all his
manuscripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in women's magazines
and corresponded with him for years till she died, without his
knowledge, in hospital from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay
in his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altogether his
most interesting personality. Mr. Jones says that being unable to find
any one who could authorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on
his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imagine that any relation
of hers who may read her letters will experience any feelings other than
pride and delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of Alethea
Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea was handsome. Miss Savage,
he says, was short, fat, had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness
which I used to associate with ladies who had been at school with my
mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss Savage loved him; this bored
him; and the correspondence would lapse till he felt the need of her
cheery friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, "I wish that
you did not know wrong from right." Mr. Jones believes that she was
alluding to his scrupulousness in matters of business. Butler himself
construed the words as an overture to which he was indisposed to
respond. The debate on this point and the pretty uncertainty in which it
is left can surely arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings
than "pride and delight."
This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the chivalry which used
to be practised by those who bore what the Victorians called "the grand
old name of gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss
Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-health, Butler made
notes on his correspondence reproaching himself for his ill-treatment of
her. "He also," says his biographer, "tried to express his remorse" in
two sonnets from which I extract some lines:
She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day;
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain,
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and overkind.
'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man
Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
A man will yield for pity if he can,
But if the flesh rebel what can he do?
I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.
In these Butlerian times one who should speak of "good taste" would
incur the risk of being called a prig. Good taste is no longer "in." Yet
even now, in the face of these sonnets, may not one exclaim, Heaven
preserve us from the remorseful moments of a Butlerian Adonis of fifty!
The descendants of eminent Victorians may well be thankful that their
fathers had no intimate relations with Butler. There is a familiar story
of Whistler, that when some one praised his latest portrait as equal to
Velasquez, he snapped back, "Yes, but why lug in Velasquez?" Butler,
with similar aversion for rivals, but without Whistler's extempore wit,
slowly excogitated his killing sallies and entered them in his
note-books or sent them in a letter to Miss Savage, preserving a copy
for the delectation of the next age: "I do not see how I can well call
Mr. Darwin the Pecksniff of Science, though this is exactly what he is;
but I think I may call Lord Bacon the Pecksniff of his age and then, a
little later, say that Mr. Darwin is the Bacon of the Victorian Era." To
this he adds another note reminding himself to call "Tennyson the Darwin
of Poetry, and Darwin the Tennyson of Science." I can recall but one
work of a contemporary mentioned favorably in the biography; perhaps
there are two. The staple of his comment runs about as follows:
"Middlemarch" is a "longwinded piece of studied brag"; of "John
Inglesant," "I seldom was more displeased with any book"; of "Aurora
Leigh," "I dislike it very much, but I liked it better than Mrs.
Browning, or Mr., either"; of Rossetti, "I dislike his face and his
manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends"; of George
Meredith, "No wonder if his work repels me that mine should repel him";
"all I remember is that I disliked and distrusted Morley"; of Gladstone,
"Who was it said that he was 'a good man in the very worst sense of the
words'?" The homicidal spirit here exhibited may be fairly related to
his anxiety for the death of his father.
It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free-thinkers to attack
Christianity with reverence and discrimination in an attempt to preserve
its substance while removing obstacles to the acceptance of its
substance. Butler was Voltairean. When he did not attack mischievously
like a gamin, he attacked vindictively like an Italian laborer whose
sweetheart has been false to him. I have seen it stated that he was a
broad churchman and a communicant; and Mr. Jones produces a letter from
a clergyman testifying to his "saintliness." But this must be some of
Mr. Jones's fun. From Gibbon, read on the voyage to New Zealand, Butler
imbibed, he says, in a letter of 1861, "a calm and philosophic spirit of
impartial and critical investigation." In 1862 he writes: "For the
present I renounce Christianity altogether. You say people must have
something to believe in. I can only say that I have not found my
digestion impeded since I left off believing in what does not appear to
be supported by sufficient evidence." When in 1865 he printed his
"Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," the manner of his
attack was impish; and so was the gleeful exchange of notes between him
and Miss Savage over the way the orthodox swallowed the bait. In his
notebook he wrote: "Mead is the lowest of the intoxicants, just as
Church is the lowest of the dissipations, and carraway seed the lowest
of the condiments." He went to church once in 1883 to please a friend
and was asked whether it had not bored him as inconsistent with his
principles. "I said that, having given up Christianity, I was not going
to be hampered by its principles. It was the substance of Christianity,
and not its accessories of external worship, that I had objected to ...
so I went to church out of pure cussedness." Finally, in a note of 1889:
"There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social
arrangements--I mean we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of
suicide, nor cheap and easy divorce--till Jesus Christ's ghost has been
laid; and the best way to lay it is to be a moderate churchman."
Robert Burns was a free-thinker, but he wrote the "Cotter's Saturday
Night"; Renan was a free-thinker, but he buried his God in purple;
Matthew Arnold was a free-thinker, but he gave new life to the religious
poetry of the Bible; Henry Adams believed only in mathematical physics,
but he wrote of Mont St. Michel and Chartres with chivalrous and almost
Catholic tenderness for the Virgin: for in all these diverse men there
was reverence for what men have adored as their highest. There was
respect for a tomb, even for the tomb of a God. Butler, having
transferred his faith to the Bank of England, diverted himself like a
street Arab with a slingshot by peppering the church windows. He
established manners for the contemporary Butlerian who, coming down to
breakfast on Christmas morning, exclaims with a pleased smile, "Well,
this is the birthday of the hook-nosed Nazarene!"
Butler's moral note is rather attractive to young and middle-aged
persons: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making
ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done." His ethics is
founded realistically on physiology and economics; for "goodness is
naught unless it tends towards old age and sufficiency of means."
Pleasure, dressed like a quiet man of the world, is the best teacher:
"The devil, when he dresses himself in angels' clothes, can only be
detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt
this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at
all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but
more respectable and on the whole more trustworthy guide." There we have
something of the tone of our genial Franklin; but Butler is a Franklin
without a single impulse of Franklin's wide benevolence and practical
beneficence, a Franklin shorn of the spirit of his greatness, namely,
his immensely intelligent social consciousness.
Having disposed of Christianity, orthodox and otherwise, and having
reduced the morality of "enlightened selfishness" to its lowest terms,
Butler turned in the same spirit to the destruction of orthodox
Victorian science. We are less concerned for the moment with his
substance than with his character and manner as scientific
controversialist. "If I cannot," he wrote, "and I know I cannot, get the
literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know
I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." Though such professional
training as he had was for the church and for painting, he seems never
to have doubted that his mother wit was sufficient equipment,
supplemented by reading in the British Museum, for the overthrow of men
like Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, who from boyhood had given their lives
to collecting, studying and experimenting with scientific data. "I am
quite ready to admit," he records, "that I am in a conspiracy of one
against men of science in general." Having felt himself covertly
slighted in a book for which Darwin was responsible, he vindictively
assailed, not merely the work, but also the character of Darwin and his
friends, who, naturally inferring that he was an unscrupulous "bounder"
seeking notoriety, generally ignored him.
His first "contribution" to evolutionary theory had been a humorous
skit, written in New Zealand, on the evolution of machines, suggested by
"The Origin of Species," and later included in "Erewhon." To support
this whimsy he found it useful to revive the abandoned "argument from
design"; and mother wit, still working whimsically, leaped to the
conception that the organs of our bodies are machines. Thereupon he
commenced serious scientific speculator, and produced "Life and Habit,"
1878; "Evolution Old and New," 1879; "Unconscious Memory," 1880; and
"Luck or Cunning," 1886. The germ of all his speculations, contained in
his first volume, is the notion of "the oneness of personality existing
between parents and offspring up to the time that the offspring leaves
the parent's body"; thence develops his theory that the offspring
"unconsciously" remembers what happened to the parents; and thence his
theory that a vitalistic purposeful cunning, as opposed to the Darwinian
chance, is the significant factor in evolution. His theory has something
in common with current philosophical speculation, and it is in part, as
I understand, a kind of adumbration, a shrewd guess, at the present
attitude of cytologists. It has thus entitled Butler to half a dozen
footnotes in a centenary volume on Darwin; but it hardly justifies his
transference of Darwin's laurels to Button, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin and
himself; nor does it justify his reiterated contention that Darwin was
a plagiarist, a fraud, a Pecksniff and a liar. He swelled the ephemeral
body of scientific speculation; but his contribution to the verified
body of science was negligible, and the injuries that he inflicted upon
the scientific spirit were considerable.
For their symptomatic value, we must glance at Butler's sallies into
some other fields. He held as an educational principle that it is hardly
worth while to study any subject till one is ready to use it. When in
his fifties he wished to write music, he took up for the first time the
study of counterpoint. Mr. Garnett having inquired what subject Butler
and Jones would take up when they had finished "Narcissus," Butler said
that they "might write an oratorio on some sacred subject"; and when
Garnett asked whether they had anything in particular in mind, he
replied that they were thinking of "The Woman Taken in Adultery." In the
same decade he cheerfully applied for the Slade professorship of art at
Cambridge; and he took credit for the rediscovery of a lost school of
sculpture.
At the age of fifty-five he brushed up his Greek, which he "had not
wholly forgotten," and read the "Odyssey" for the purposes of his
oratorio, "Ulysses." When he got to Circe it suddenly flashed upon him
that he was reading the work of a young woman! Thereupon he produced his
book, "The Authoress of the Odyssey," with portrait of the authoress,
Nausicaa, identification of her birthplace in Sicily, which pleased the
Sicilians, and an account of the way in which she wrote her poem. It was
the most startling literary discovery since Delia Bacon burst into the
silent sea on which Colonel Fabyan of the biliteral cypher is the latest
navigator. That the classical scholars laughed at or ignored him did not
shake his belief that the work was as important as anything he had done.
"Perhaps it was," he would have remarked, if any one else had written
it. "I am a prose man," he wrote to Robert Bridges, "and, except Homer
and Shakespeare"--he should have added Nausicaa--"I have read absolutely
nothing of English poetry and _very little_ of English prose." His
inacquaintance with English poetry, however, did not embarrass him,
when, two years after bringing out his Sicilian authoress, he cleared up
the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor did it prevent his
dismissing the skeptical Dr. Furnivall, after a discussion at an A. B.
C. shop, as a poor old incompetent. "Nothing," said Alethea Pontifex,
speaking for her creator, "is well done nor worth doing unless, take it
all round, it has come pretty easily." The poor old doctor, like the
Greek scholars and the professional men of science, had blunted his wits
by too much research.
Butler maintained that every man's work is a portrait of himself, and
in his own case the features stand out ruggedly enough. Why should any
one see in this infatuated pursuer of paradox a reincarnation of the
pagan wisdom? In his small personal affairs he shows a certain
old-maidish tidiness and the prudence of an experienced old bachelor,
who manages his little pleasures without scandal. But in his
intellectual life what vestige do we find of the Greek or even of the
Roman sobriety, poise and decorum? In one respect Butler was
conservative: he respected the established political and economic order.
But he respected it only because it enabled him, without bestirring
himself about his bread and butter, to sit quietly in his rooms at
Clifford's Inn and invent attacks on every other form of orthodoxy. With
a desire to be conspicuous only surpassed by his desire to be original
he worked out the central Butlerian principle; videlicet: The fact that
all the best qualified judges agree that a thing is true and valuable
establishes an overwhelming presumption that it is valueless and false.
With his feet firmly planted on this grand radical maxim he employed his
lively wit with lawyer-like ingenuity to make out a case against family
life, of which he was incapable; against imaginative love, of which he
was ignorant; against chivalry, otherwise the conventions of gentlemen,
which he had but imperfectly learned; against Victorian men of letters,
whom, by his own account, he had never read; against altruistic
morality and the substance of Christianity, which were repugnant to his
selfishness and other vices; against Victorian men of science, whose
researches he had never imitated; and against Elizabethan and classical
scholarship, which he took up in an odd moment as one plays a game of
solitaire before going to bed. To his disciples he could not bequeath
his cleverness; but he left them his recipe for originality, his manners
and his assurance, which has been gathering compound interest ever
since. In the original manuscript of "Alps and Sanctuaries" he consigned
"Raffaele, along with Socrates, Virgil [the last two displaced later by
Plato and Dante], Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Goethe, Beethoven, and
_another_, to limbo as the Seven Humbugs of Christiandom." Who was the
unnamed seventh?
BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS
_By_ H. M. TOMLINSON
I shall not forget with what a thrill of delight I came upon H. M.
Tomlinson's _Old Junk_, the volume of essays from which this is
borrowed. One feels, in stumbling upon such a book, much as some
happy and astounded readers must have felt in 1878 when _An Inland
Voyage_ came out. It makes one wonder, submitting one's self to the
moving music and magic of that prose, so simple and yet so subtle
in its flavor, whether poetry is not, after all, an inferior and
more mechanic form. "The cool element of prose," that perfect
phrase of Milton's, comes back to mind. How direct and satisfying a
passage to the mind Mr. Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build
and cumulate, how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate
loops and ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand
of the dunes that he describes in one essay. And through it all, as
intangible but as real and beautifying as moonlight, there is the
pervading brightness of a particular way of looking at the world,
something for which we have no catchword, the illumination of a
spirit at once humorous, melancholy, shrewd, lovely and humane.
Somehow, when one is caught in the web of that exquisite,
considered prose, the awkward symbols of speech seem transparent;
we come close to a man's mind.
In Mr. Tomlinson's three books--_The Sea and the Jungle_ (1912),
_Old Junk_ (1920) and _London River_ (1921) is revealed one of the
most sincere and perfect workmen in contemporary prose.
H. M. Tomlinson was born in 1873; among his early memories he
records: "I was an office boy and a clerk among London's ships, in
the last days of the clippers. And I am forced to recall some of
the things--such as bookkeeping in a jam factory and stoking on a
tramp steamer." He joined the staff of the London _Morning Leader_
in 1904; which was later merged with the _Daily News_, and to this
journal he was attached for several years. During the War he was a
correspondent in France; at the danger of incurring his anger
(should he see this) I quote Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe on this phase of
his work:--"One who was the friend of all, a sweet and fine spirit
moving untouched amid the ruin and terror, expressing itself
everywhere with perfect simplicity, and at times with a shattering
candor."
In 1917 he became associate editor of the London _Nation_, where,
if you are interested, you may find his initials almost weekly.