source of pleasure to all but the hasty reader, who, indeed, should be
advised not to approach Butler at all. The charm of his mind lies in its
divagations, its inconsistencies, its puerile and lovable
self-revelations, and all these are encouraged by the wandering style
common to the author and to his biographer. One of the most
clear-sighted of his friends, trying to sum up his character at his
death, said that "he was too versatile a genius ever to be in the front
rank of one particular line, and he had too much fun in him to be really
serious when he ought to have been." But why ought he to have been
"really serious," and why should he have sought "front rank" in one
particular line? This is the inevitable way in which a man of ingenious
originality is misjudged by those who have loved him most and who think
they understood him best. Butler was not remarkable, and does not now
deserve the reputation which his name enjoys, on account of the subjects
about which he chose to write, nor on account of the measure of decorum
with which he approached those themes, but in consequence of the sinuous
charm, the irregular and arresting originality of his approach itself,
his fame having been indeed rather delayed, and the purgatory of his
obscurity prolonged, by the want of harmony between most of the subjects
he selected and the manner in which it was native to himself to treat
those subjects. In other words, what makes Butler a difficult theme for
analysis is that, unlike most authors, his genius is not illuminated,
but positively obscured for a student of to-day, by the majority of his
controversial writings. He was not a prophet; he was an inspired
"crank." He is most characteristic, not when he is discussing Evolution,
or Christianity, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare, or the Trapanese Origin
of the "Odyssey," but when he is meandering along, endlessly,
paradoxically, in the act of written conversation about everything at
large and nothing in particular, with himself as the central theme.
The most valuable of Butler's imaginative writings, and indeed the most
important from almost every point of view, are the two romances which
stand respectively at the opening and at the close of his career, like
two golden pillars supporting the roof of his reputation. His earliest
publication (for the slight and brief budget of letters from New Zealand
was not published by himself) was Erewhon--or "Nowhere"--a fantastic
Utopia of the class started a century and a half ago by Paltock in his
fascinating adventures of _Peter Wilkins_. Like Wilkins, the hero of
_Erewhon_ flies from civilization, and discovers in the Antarctic world
a race of semi-human beings, who obey a strict code of morals consistent
in itself, but in complete divergence from ours on many important
points. I discover no evidence that Butler ever saw Paltock's romance,
and he would probably have been scornful of the Glums and Gowries, and
of the gentle winged people wrapped in throbbing robes of their own
substance. But I think some dim report of an undiscovered country where
ethics were all turned topsy-turvy may have started him on _Erewhon_.
The other novel, that which closes Butler's career as a writer, is _The
Way of All Flesh_, without a careful consideration of which, by the
light of information now supplied by Mr. Festing Jones, no sketch of
Butler's career can, for the future, be attempted.
As early as 1873, Butler confided to Miss Savage--of whose place in his
life and influence upon his genius I shall presently have to speak--that
he was contemplating the composition of an autobiographical novel. She
read the opening, and wrote, "as far as it goes it is perfect, and if
you go on as you have begun, it will be a beautiful book." In case he
got tired of it, what he had already written might make "a very nice
finished sketch for a magazine." Evidently Miss Savage, who had an
almost uncanny penetration into Butler's nature, had little confidence
in his perseverance in the conduct of so large a design. She urged him
on, however, and it very early occurred to her that the value of the
story would consist in its complete veracity as an autobiography. She
faced Butler with the charge that he was not being faithful to himself
in this matter, and she said, "Is the narrator of the story to be an
impartial historian or a special pleader?" Butler wriggled under her
strictures, but failed to escape from them. Finally she faced him with a
direct question:
You have chosen the disguise of an old man of seventy-three
[exactly double Butler's real age at that time], and must speak and
act as such. An old man of seventy-three would scarcely talk as you
do, unless he was constantly in your company, and was a very docile
old man indeed--and I don't think the old man who is telling the
story is at all docile.
Young or old, Butler was never "docile," and he was not inclined to give
up his idealism without a struggle. But Miss Savage was indomitable. She
continued to undermine what she called "the special pleader," on the
ground that "I prefer an advocate in flesh and blood." Under this
pressure, and stimulated by Miss Savage's ingenuous annotations, Butler
adopted more and more a realistic tone, and kept the story more and more
closely on autobiographic lines. It was progressing steadily when Butler
had to go to Canada on the business expedition which cost him so many
months of his life, and when he returned to London he did not resume the
novel. He took it up again in 1878, and disliked it; it needed Miss
Savage's energy to start him again with proper gusto. Mr. Festing Jones
was by this time upon the spot, and though he does not say so, he
probably supported Miss Savage. They were the Aaron and Hur who held up
the arms of this incorrigible "special pleader," and insisted that he
should stick to the truth, and not embroider it. In 1884 _The Way of All
Flesh_ was finished; in 1885 it underwent some revision, and after that
was not touched again.
So long as Butler was alive, the uncompromising revelations of his
family life, and the bitterness of the censure of living persons, which
the novel contained, made it impossible to dream of issuing it. To do so
would have been to break a nest of hornets over Butler's pate. But the
moment he was dead, his executor, the late Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, acting
upon the author's known wishes, published _The Way of All Flesh_. This
was in 1903, and the publication synchronized with the surprising burst
of critical appreciation which the announcement of Butler's death had
awakened in the Press. In almost all unprejudiced quarters the value of
_The Way of All Flesh_ as a sincere and masterly contribution to
imaginative literature, was acknowledged, although it took five years
more for a second edition of the book to be called for. Butler, however,
was recognized at last as an author of distinguished merit, and there
was a reverberation of curiosity concerning so remarkable a man who had
walked about among us for nearly seventy years without attracting any
particular attention. This curiosity, it was indicated by his admirers,
could now be assuaged by a study of _The Way of All Flesh_, which was a
faithful portrait of the writer, and of all the persons who had checked
his growth or encouraged his development. So the legend was started that
no real _Life of Samuel_ Butler was required, because in _The Way of All
Flesh_ we already possessed a complete one.
Apart from the fact that the best of autobiographies can never be the
"real life," because it can never depict the man quite as others saw
him, it now transpires--and this is perhaps the most important feature
of Mr. Festing Jones's admirable volumes--that the novel cannot be
accepted as an autobiography sound at all points. In spite of the
warnings of Miss Savage, and, oddly enough, most of all in the person of
Miss Savage herself, Butler was incapable of confronting the incidents
of his own life without colouring them, and without giving way to
prejudice in the statement of plain facts. He disliked excessively the
atmosphere of middle-class Evangelicism in which he had been brought up,
and we must dislike it too, but we need not dislike the persons involved
so bitterly as Butler did. It was narrow, sterile and cruel, and it
deserved no doubt the irony which Butler expended upon it. So long as we
regard _The Way of All Flesh_ as a story, invented with the help of
recollections which the novelist was at liberty to modify in any way he
thought desirable, there is no quarrel to be picked with any part of it.
But when we are led, as we have been, to take it as a full and true
record of Butler's own life, with nothing changed but the names of the
persons, we see by the light of Mr. Festing Jones that this is an
absolutely untenable position. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not an
autobiography, but a romance founded on recollection.
The author of _Erewhon_, who was christened Samuel, not in honour of the
author of _Hudibras_, but in memory of his own grandfather, the Bishop
of Lichfield and Coventry, was the son of Canon Thomas Butler, incumbent
of Langor-with-Branston, in Nottinghamshire, where the younger Samuel
was born on the 4th of December, 1835. Readers of _The Way of All Flesh_
may recognize the Butler family at Langor in the very unflattering
picture of the Pontifexes in that novel. The Bishop's grandson disliked
him very much indeed--"bullying, irritable, stupid old turkey-cock"--until
1887, when he got hold of the Bishop's letters and papers, "and fell
over head and ears in love with him." He excused his earlier sarcasms by
saying--"When I wrote harshly describing him, I knew nothing about my
grandfather except that he had been a great schoolmaster--and I do not
like schoolmasters; and then a bishop--and I do not like bishops; and
that he was supposed to be like my father." For the latter, who is
Theobald Pontifex in _The Way of All Flesh_, he never expressed any
leniency whatever, yet it is impossible to avoid hoping that if he had
studied his father, as at the age of fifty he studied his grandfather,
he might have relented a little in that instance also.
Ernest Pontifex says, in _The Way of All Flesh_, that he could remember
no feeling towards his parents during his childhood except fear and
shrinking. To Butler, fathers in general, as a class, were "capable de
tout," like the prophet Habakkuk. Mr. Festing Jones prints a very
explicit paper he has found on this subject, the least distressing
paragraph in which is the last, where Butler says, "An unkind fate never
threw two men together who were more naturally uncongenial than my
father and myself." Canon Butler was an evangelical clergyman of the
Simeonite type, which flourished so intensely before and during the
development of the High Church revival. He believed in bringing up
children rigidly, from their infancy, in the strict practice of external
religion. If they were recalcitrant, the love of God must be driven into
them by their being whipped or shut up in a cupboard, or docked of some
little puerile pleasure. Samuel Butler secretly rebelled, from babyhood,
against this stern evangelical discipline, and the Canon, who had no
imagination, simply redoubled his severities. It is an amusing touch, in
this record of a dismal childhood, to learn that Samuel was excessively
pleased, at the age of eight, by hearing an Italian lady in Naples say
that a dear young friend of hers--poor unfortunate fellow, _povero
disgrasiato_!--had been obliged to murder his uncle and his aunt.
Probably the pleasure the little boy felt in hearing of this
"misfortune" was the earliest expression of that rebellious and
fantastic dislike of conventionality which was to run through the whole
series of the man's works.
In the letters from Butler to his family, written at school and at
college, there is, however, no trace of the violent antagonism which he
afterwards believed that he had always felt. It is true that a boy who
writes to his father and mother, and indeed in similar circumstances a
man too, is constrained to resign himself to a certain innocent
hypocrisy. Very few children are able to send to their parents, and very
few parents are able to endure from their children, a perfectly sincere
description of their crude sentiments during adolescence. But if Samuel
Butler was really tormented at home, as Ernest Pontifex was, it is odd
that some note of hostility should not have crept into his juvenile
correspondence. However, Mr. Festing Jones, who is as judicious as a
Lord of Appeal, seems to entertain no doubt that Canon Butler was a holy
horror, so that we must bow to his opinion.
The earliest overt evidence of a falling out between father and son is
delayed until, in Mr. Jones's unfaltering narrative, we reach the son's
twenty-third year. He does not seem, at first, to have combated his
father's obstinate demand that he should take orders in the Church of
England. That Canon Butler, a clergyman of clergymen, should have
desired to see his Samuel take this step, ought not to seem
unreasonable, though it certainly proved unlucky. In the novel, it will
be remembered, Ernest Pontifex actually was ordained, but to this length
Samuel Butler never proceeded. He went to a parish in the east of London
to work with a parson who had been one of his grandfather's pupils at
Shrewsbury. There his faith in the efficacy of infant baptism was
shaken, and presently falling, brought down about his ears the whole
fabric of Simeonite Christianity in which he had so assiduously been
trained. He suddenly, and no doubt abruptly, wrote to the Canon and said
that he "declined to be ordained." From a carnal as well as a spiritual
point of view this must have been a nasty shock for his parents, and Mr.
Festing Jones tells us "there was a long and painful correspondence."
This he mercifully spares us, but refers us to _The Way of All Flesh_,
where Butler made dauntless use of it.
The financial situation was difficult. Canon Butler was fairly
well-to-do, but he had other children to provide for, and Samuel, who
refused to be a clergyman, went on refusing, as it must have seemed to
his father, to be anything at all. Like the poet Cowley, he
neither great at Court nor in the War,
Nor at the Exchange would be, nor at the wrangling Bar.
All professions were suggested, and each in vain. At last it was decided
that Samuel should emigrate to New Zealand, and become a sheep farmer.
Only nine years earlier, a Church of England colony had been founded at
Canterbury, in the South Island, and the town of Christchurch had been
founded. It had enjoyed a great success, and by the year 1859, when
Butler landed, almost all the sheep lands had been already taken up. At
last he found an unoccupied run at the "back of beyond," and built a
little homestead for himself, which he called Mesopotamia. It is
needless to dwell on this episode of Butler's life, further than to
point out that it proved him capable of sustained physical industry and
of considerable financial adroitness. The remainder of his career hardly
suggests the possession of either. The New Zealand episode is
sufficiently dealt with in Butler's own book, _A First Year in
Canterbury Settlement_, which, by the way, shows no trace of the
author's subsequent merit as a writer. In June, 1864, he sailed homeward
from the port of Lyttelton, but not alone, and we now approach the
strangest incident of his life.
It was to be expected that the L4,400 which Butler had received from his
father in 1859 would by this time have dwindled to zero. Not at all; it
had swelled to L8,000. But just before he left New Zealand a young man,
called Charles Pauli, whom he had known but very slightly as a
journalist in Christchurch, and who had no claim upon Butler of any sort
or species, came to him and asked him to pay for his passage back to
England, and to advance him L200 a year for three years. "To me," wrote
Butler in 1897, "in those days this seemed perfectly easy; and Pauli, I
have not the smallest doubt, intended and fully believed--for his
temperament was always sanguine--that he should be able to repay me."
Butler had very little insight into the "temperament" of Pauli, and the
whole of the extraordinary story increases our conviction that this
sardonic and sarcastic analyst of imaginary life was as powerless as a
child in face of reality. The dreadful Pauli adventure, told for the
first time by Mr. Festing Jones, in his deliberate, unimpassioned way,
is the most amazing revelation of simplicity traded upon by fraud that
it is possible to imagine.
There soon proved to be a complete absence of harmony in the tastes of
Butler and Pauli, who had really nothing in common. Yet they settled
together, when they arrived in London, in rooms in Clifford's Inn, Fleet
Street. There Butler lived for all the rest of his life, thirty-eight
years; but presently Pauli went elsewhere. Then the relations of the two
became incomprehensible. Pauli was very irritable, and constantly found
fault with Butler. He refused to let Butler know his address, and yet
was continually sponging upon him. He said that he could get no help
from his own parents, and that Butler stood between him and starvation.
For three years Pauli did not attempt to work. At last, in 1867, he was
called to the Bar. He lunched with Butler three times a week, when he
always said that he was earning nothing. Butler's own statement, written
in 1898, the year after Pauli's death, is as follows:
I have no means of ascertaining how much Pauli had from me between
the years 1864 and 1881 (but it exceeded L3,500). I kept no
accounts; I took no receipts from him; the understanding was that
he would repay me when he came into his reversion.... In 1879 I
only admitted to my father having helped Pauli from time to time;
the fact was, I had done everything.... I had more than shared
every penny I had with him, but I believed myself to be doing it
out of income, and to have a right to do it.
Throughout the long periods in which Butler was hard pressed for
sufficient money to exist--times in which there were painful and
unseemly squabbles about an allowance between his father and himself--he
was supporting Pauli, whose means of subsistence he took no pains to
investigate, and who, in full cognition of Butler's attenuated sources
of income, punctually took half for himself. Mr. Festing Jones's
statement is amazing:
Pauli was called to the Bar in 1867, and took chambers in Lincoln's
Inn for his work. He told Butler where they were, so that he could
write if he had any communication to make to him that would not
wait till they met; but Butler was not to go there. Of course, he
could have gone, but he did not. He could have found out in a
hundred ways where Pauli lived if he had set about it; but, knowing
that Pauli did not wish it, he did nothing.
At last, in 1897, after having shared his poverty with this strange
friend for thirty-three years, Butler read in _The Times_ that Pauli was
dead. Then, at last, he made inquiries, and found that for a great many
years past Pauli's income from the law had exceeded L700 a year, and for
nearly twenty had been over L1,000. Pauli left L9,000, not a penny of it
to Butler, whose parasite he had been for the greater part of his life,
when every five-pound note was of consequence to Butler. One knows not
which to be more astounded at--heartless greediness on the one side, or
fatuous simplicity on the other. When all the evidence came out at last
beyond all further concealment, Butler wrote: "I understand now why
Pauli preserved such an iron silence when I implored him to deal with me
somewhat after the fashion in which I had dealt with him." [That is to
say, in telling him precisely what Butler's exact financial position
was.] "The iniquity of the whole thing, as it first struck me in full
force, upset me."
This "squalid and miserable story" is told with inexorable fullness by
Mr. Festing Jones. What is very remarkable about it is the evidence it
gives of Butler's irregular penetration into character. He could be
extremely acute in one direction and absolutely obtuse in another. The
incredible indulgence which permitted him to be the dupe and victim of a
scoundrel like Pauli for more than thirty years seems incompatible with
the intense and suspicious analysis which he expended on the motives of
his father. After all, when the worst of Canon Butler is admitted, he
was a Christian and a gentleman by the side of the appalling Pauli. Yet
Butler would sacrifice his father, and actually tell falsehoods, for the
purpose of screening and enriching Pauli (see Vol. I., p. 114), of whose
villainy he could at any moment have assured himself, and with whom he
practically admits that he had nothing in common.
The Pauli episode is valuable in supplying light on certain defects in
Butler's intellectual composition. In measure, it tends to explain the
inconsistencies, the irregularities of his mental life, and of his
action as a scholar. He was the opposite of those who see life steadily,
and see it whole. He had no wide horizons, but he investigated a corner
or a section of a subject with a burning glass which left all other
parts of the surface in darkness. There were Paulis on his mental
horizon; there were in almost everything he approached passages where
his want of appreciation, his want (let us boldly say) of elementary
insight, produced the oddest effect of imperfection. His literary
judgments were _saugrenu_ to the last extreme. What are we to think of a
man who lays if down that "Blake was no good because he learnt Italian
to study Dante, and 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"? There is no critical meaning in
such outbursts; they would be almost imbecile in their aimless petulance
if we did not understand that Virgil and Dante and Blake lay in the dark
segment of Butler's vision, and that he had not so much formed an
adverse opinion of their merits as no opinion at all. If, as
surprisingly he did on every occasion, he heaped contempt on Virgil, it
was simply because he wanted to get Virgil well out of the way of Homer,
on whom his enthusiasm was concentrated.
It was so in all things. Butler despised the great Venetian painters,
not because he had devoted attention to their faults, but because they
stood in the way of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, to whom he had
dedicated a frenzied cult. "Titian, Leonardo, Raffaelle and Michel
Angelo, well, to speak quite plainly, I like none of them," he wrote in
the last year of his life. In music it was just the same. Butler
attached himself, from early youth to the grave, to Handel in an almost
maniacal infatuation. In order to clear a space, as it were, round this
solitary object of his worship, he covered Beethoven and Bach with
contempt; and if anyone forced him to listen to the "Requiem" of Mozart,
he stopped his ears and hummed "Loathsome urns, disclose your treasure,"
to drown the hideous Austrian discord. For Butler, "Bach wriggles;
Wagner writhes." All the masterpieces of the world of music he sweeps
together in a universal disapproval as "heartless failures," whereas of
Handel's least remarkable passages he calls out, "Can human genius do
more?" The result is that Butler is interesting and sometimes valuable
when he praises; when he blames, he is sometimes amusing, but more often
impertinent and tiresome. What is the point of calling Plato one of the
"Seven Humbugs of Christendom," or of talking of "that damned Republic"?
To pretend to admire these peevish outbursts, however much we may be
stimulated by the better sides of Butler's intelligence, is abject.
No section of Mr. Resting Jones's biography is more interesting than
that in which, in the patient, judicious manner in which he so eminently
excels, he depicts the relation of Butler to Miss Savage. Readers of
_The Way of All Flesh_ are familiar with the figure of Alethea Pontifex,
who occupies the position of heroine in that novel. It has long been
known that this was the portrait of a friend whom Butler had studied,
confided in, and deeply valued. In what degree it was an accurate
portrait has not hitherto been known. I have no hesitation in saying
that the chapters which deal with this situation--and they are executed
with as much delicacy as realism--form the most unhackneyed and the
most exciting section of Mr. Jones's volumes. They illuminate in
portions, and they leave darker than ever in other parts, the rugged
surface of Butler's extraordinary character; and I regret that
exigencies of space do not permit me to do justice to documents so
remarkable. But yet, something I must say.