Mr. Festing Jones has written a large book about his friend, and
written it very well.[A] It is candid, and it is sincere; the work
of a lover at once of Butler and of truth; it neither extenuates the
faults nor magnifies the virtues of its subject so far as the author
could perceive them; and it makes it possible to understand why Butler
was so underrated in his lifetime, though not at once why he was so
overrated after his death. That remains a problem which cannot be
resolved by saying that his friends trumpeted him into it, or that
posthumous readers enjoyed seeing him belabour his betters, which his
contemporaries had not. It is true that _The Way of All Flesh_ did not
appear until he was dead, and also true that _The Way of All Flesh_
is a witty and malicious novel, whose malice and wit Mr. Shaw had
prepared London to admire. Perhaps it is true, once more, that we are
more scornful of the old orthodoxy than our fathers were, and less
careful whose feelings are hurt. But I must confess that I should not
have expected any age to be so complacent about caricaturing one's
father and mother as our own was. However, for those who admire that
sort of thing--and there must be many--I doubt if they will find
it better done anywhere, with more gusto or more point. Dickens is
believed to have put his father into _David Copperfield_, not, I
think, his mother. But one can love Mr. Micawber, and Dickens would
not have so drawn him without love. We are led to Butler's favourite
distinction between _gnosis_ and _agapé_. There's no doubt about the
_gnosis_ that went to the making of Theobald and Christina. But where
was _agapé_?
[Footnote A: _Samuel Butler, Author of "Erewhon"_ (1835-1902): _a
Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. Two Vols. Macmillan, 1919.]
Butler was in many respects a fortunate man, and should have been
a happy one. He had a good education, good health, a sufficiency of
means. Even when his embarrassments were at their heaviest he could
always afford to do as he pleased. He could draw a little, play a
little, write more than a little; he loved travel, and covered all
Southern Europe in his time; he had good friends, a good mistress, a
faithful servant; he had a strong sense of humour, feared nobody, had
a hundred interests. Why, then, did he think himself a failure? Why
was the sense of it to cloud much of his writing, and much of Mr.
Jones's biography?
He had his drawbacks--who has not? He did not get on with his father,
criticised his mother; his sisters scraped the edges of his nerves; a
man to whom he was extremely generous betrayed him. The like of these
things must happen to mortal men. Butler knew that as well as any one.
But his books were not read; the great men whom he attacked ignored
him. He thought himself to be something, they treated him as nothing,
and the public followed them. He knew all about it, and Mr. Jones
knows all about it. He had unseated the secure with _Erewhon_,
outraged the orthodox with _Fairhaven_, flouted the biologists,
himself being no biologist, plunged into Homeric criticism without
archæology, swum against the current in Shakespearianism, enjoyed
himself immensely, playing _l'enfant terrible_, and treading on
every corn he could find--and then he was angry because the sufferers
pretended that they had no corns. How could he expect it both ways?
If he was serious, why did he write as if he was not? And if he had
tender feelings himself--as he obviously had--why should he expect
all the people he attacked with his pinpricks to have none? It was not
reasonable.
The answer to these questions is to be found in some little weaknesses
of his which Mr. Jones's biography, all unconsciously, reveals.
Butler, it is clear, was morbidly vain. Many writers are so, but few
let their vanity take them so far. Learn from Mr. Jones. In 1879 he
and Butler met Edward Lear in an inn at Varese. He told them a little
tale about a tipsy man from Manchester--rather a good little tale. "I
do not remember that Edward Lear told us anything else particularly
amusing, but then neither did we tell him anything particularly
amusing. Butler was seldom at his best with a celebrated man. He
was not successful himself, and had a sub-aggressive feeling that
a celebrated man probably did not deserve his celebrity; if he did
deserve it, let him prove it." There is no getting away from that
symptom, which is as unreasonable as it is perverse. Celebrated men
are not usually so anxious to "prove" their celebrity as all that
comes to. It is bad enough to be "celebrated." It was hard lines on
old Lear to sulk with him because he would not show off. If he had
wanted to do that he would not have gone to Varese. But that is
mortified vanity. The same thing happened when he met Mr. Birrell at
dinner in 1900. Then it was the celebrity who took pains to save
his host and hostess from a frosty dinner party. The same thing is
recalled of meetings with Sir George Trevelyan and Lord Morley earlier
in the book. It is all pretty stupid; but when a man is ridden by a
vanity like that there can be no healthy pleasure to be got out of
writing for its own sake. You must have your public flat on its back
before your vanity will be soothed.
Another failing of Butler's, shared, I am sorry to say, by Mr. Jones,
was a love of little jokes and an inability to see when and where they
could be worked off, or perhaps I ought to say when they were worked
out. A great many of them were pinpricks rather than jokes; he only
made them "to annoy." Well, they did, and they do, annoy--not because
they were jokes, but because they were feeble jokes. "If it is thought
desirable to have an article on the _Odyssey_, I have abundant, most
aggravating and impudent matter about Penelope and King Menelaus"--so
he wrote to Mr. H. Quilter, who naturally jumped at it. Here is
another gem which Mr. Jones seems to admire: "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."
All that can be said for that is that it is vivacious, and that it has
helped Mr. Shaw, who has certainly bettered the instruction. There
are others which are a good deal more annoying than that. Jokes about
infanticide and Jesus Christ defeat themselves, and always will. They
are on a level with jokes about death or one's mother; they recoil
and smite the smiter on the nose. I confess that I find the joke
about Charles Lamb irritating. Butler said that he could not read
Lamb because Canon Ainger went to tea with his (Butler's) sisters. His
gibes at Dante are as bad--in fact they are worse, aggravated by the
fact that, having never read (he assures us) a word of him, he puts
him down as one of the seven humbugs of Christendom. He would not read
Dante because he had liked Virgil, nor Virgil because Tennyson liked
him. "We are not amused," as Queen Victoria said of another little
joke.
The correspondence with Miss Savage, again, does not reveal a pleasant
personality. Indeed, the discomfort one gets from it is at times
painful. Mr. Jones says that she bored Butler, and I don't wonder at
it. The wonder would rather be that she did not set his teeth on
edge if it were not that he was nearly as bad as she was. It is not
a matter of facetiousness--I dare say he never tired of that; and
perhaps the thinness of the jokes--little misreadings of hymns, things
about the Mammon of Righteousness, and so on--in a kind of way added
to the fun of them. It is their subject matter which offends. They
commonly turn upon the health of the respective parents and the
chances of an attack carrying them off. _Queste cose_, as the hero
said of the suicide, _non si fanno_. But I suppose that if you could
put your mother's death-bed into a novel, you could do almost anything
in that kind.
I am myself singularly moved, with Coventry Patmore, to love the
lovely who are not beloved--but not the unlovely. Those little jokes,
and many others, are by no means lovely, and if Butler repeated them
as often as Mr. Jones does, it is not surprising that he was avoided
by many who missed or dreaded the point. His lecture on the _Humour
of Homer_ made Mr. Garnett unhappy and Miss Jane Harrison cross, Mr.
Jones says. I don't doubt it. It is very cheap humour indeed, and no
more Homer's than mine is. It is entirely Butler's humour about
Homer, a very different thing. Its impudence did not mitigate
the aggravation, but made it more acute. If he had picked out a
fairy-tale, rather than two glorious poems--_Little Red Riding Hood_,
_The Three Bears_, _Rumpelstiltskin_, for example--he could have been
as facetious as he pleased. But that would not suit him. There would
have been no darts to fling. Butler was a _banderillero_. All right;
but then don't complain that the Miss Harrisons, Darwins, and others
shake off your darts and go about their business, which, oddly enough,
is not to gore and trample the _banderillero_; don't be huffed because
you are held for a _gamin_. Butler wanted it both ways.
The conclusion is irresistible that Butler's controversial books were
not primarily written to discover truth, but because he was vain
and wished at once to be sensational and annoying. He resented the
greatness of the great, or the celebrity of the celebrated; his vanity
was wounded. He sought, then, for "most aggravating and impudent
matter" to wound them in turn who had vicariously wounded him. He
"learned" them to be toads, or celebrities, or tried to. But his love
of little jokes betrayed him. He, a sort of minnow, thought to trouble
the pool where the great fish were oaring at ease by flirting the
surface with his tail. It seemed to him that he was throwing up a fine
volume of water; but the great fish held their way unconscious in the
deep. Chiefly, therefore, he failed with all his cleverness. Brain he
had, logic he had; the heart was a-wanting and the intention faltered.
_Gnosis_ again and _agapé_!
Brain he had, logic he had; but brain must follow upon emotional
intention if it is to create; and logic must follow upon sound
premisses if it is to convince. Now if his prime intention was to
annoy, or, if you granted him his premisses, Butler would never miss
the mark. But is that intention worthy of more than it earned? I don't
think so. And can you grant him his premisses? I don't think that you
can. He argued _a priori_, apparently always. I am not a biologist,
nor was he, but if I know enough of scientific method to be sure that
biologists cannot argue that way, so undoubtedly did he. What should
Darwin, who had spent years in patient accumulation of fact, have
to say to him? In Homeric criticism--_a priori_ again. He had an
instinct--he owns it was no more--that the _Odyssey_ was written by a
woman. Then he studied the _Odyssey_ to prove that it was. Perhaps
a woman did write it, and perhaps it will one day be proved. The
_Odyssey_, as Butler used it, will never prove it. So also with the
Sicilian origin of the poem. He got his idea, and went to Trapani
to fit it in. It does not seem to have occurred to him that all the
things he found there are to be found also in the Ionian Islands and
might be found in half a hundred other places in a sea pullulating
with islands or a coast-line cut about like a jigsaw puzzle. But it
won't do, of course. No one knew that better than he.
Mr. Jones says that "Butler's judgments were arrived at by thinking
the matter out for himself." I don't know what judgments he means: in
the context he is talking about "other writers." Among such he would
not, perhaps, include Dante, Virgil or Charles Lamb. If he includes
Homer and Shakespeare there would be a good deal to say. I don't
believe he had thought about the authorship of the _Odyssey_ at all
until he had assumed what he afterwards spent his time and pains in
supporting. As to Shakespeare's age when he wrote his Sonnets, I don't
myself find that the Sonnets support him. Those which he quotes in
particular show that W.H. was a youth, but not that the author was.
But there, again, he was arguing _a priori_. He desired to prove what
he set out to prove, and the scholars disregarded him. Mr. Bridges, in
a letter which Mr. Jones has the candour to quote, puts the matter as
neatly as may be. "I am very sorry indeed that you have been so clever
as to make up so good (or bad) a story: but I willingly recognise that
no one has brought the matter into so clear a light as you have done.
You are always perspicuous, and nothing but good can come of such
conscientious work as yours. Still, you must remember that you proved
Darwin to be an arch-impostor; and there was no fault in your logic.
It is not the logic that fails in this book." No. It was not the
logic.