the sitter, after studying every line and touch of it, is supposed, was
supposed by Butler himself, not to have perceived that it was intended
for her. This, however, we must regard as hardly possible in the case of
one so passionately clear-sighted, but there were many reasons why she
should adopt such an attitude. Eliza Mary Ann Savage was a governess,
whom Butler met about 1870, when he and she were art students together
at Heatherley's. They were nearly of the same age, which at that time
would be thirty-four. They were immediately drawn together by a singular
parallelism in temper and sympathy. Miss Savage read the MS. of Erewhon,
and minutely criticized it. From this time, 1871 to 1885, when she died,
Butler submitted to her everything he wrote, and, obstinate as he was in
the face of all other censures, invariably remodelled his work in
accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. She supported him in all
his enthusiasms, and shared all his prejudices. She was a very well-read
woman, and was able to follow Butler into the remotest recesses of his
studies. She responded to his lightest touch like a delicate musical
instrument, and yet was rigid in opposing any divergence from what she
conceived to be the normal line his talent ought to take. She was as
stringently hostile to Christianity, as contemptuous of Darwin and
Huxley, as infatuated about Handel, as haughtily an enfant terrible of
the intelligence as he was, and the degree to which the admirers of
Butler's books are indebted to her can never be definitely known, but is
certainly very great.
Alethea Pontifex, in _The Way of All Flesh_, is tall, handsome, with
fine blue eyes. Miss Savage was short, insignificant, and plain, with
brown eyes; she suffered from hip disease; physically, she was quite
unattractive. This introduces into the real history an element of pathos
and of pain which raises it to a far higher level of human interest than
the novel has to offer us. To Miss Savage, in her isolated state, Butler
was the whole world; and it is perfectly evident--Mr. Festing Jones need
not hesitate so conscientiously in admitting it--that she was
absorbingly, unalterably in love with Butler. She lived, quite
unupbraiding, in the intermittent light of his countenance. For nearly
twenty years they were, mentally, like a devoted husband and wife, yet
the anomaly of their relations never struck Butler, to whom Miss Savage
was a comrade of perfect sympathy, and no more. He did not observe,
until Miss Savage was dead, that she had felt towards him otherwise than
he felt towards her. He wrote, "I valued her, but she perfectly
understood that I could do no more." Did she? Mr. Festing Jones prints a
sonnet of Butler's, written in 1901, which seems to me to be one of the
most amazing pieces of self-revelation that I know:
And now, though twenty years are come and gone,
That little lame lady's face is with me still;
Never a day but what, on every one,
She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.
She said she wished I knew not wrong from right;
It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen
Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite,
Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.
'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 rebels, what can he do?
I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.
Such fragments of Miss Savage's letters as Mr. Festing Jones prints show
that she was an admirable correspondent. Butler put her letters together
in a separate collection, edited, annotated, and ready for the Press.
This is to be published some day in a volume by itself, and will have a
pathetic value. But I confess to a certain feeling of regret that the
inner being of this obscure, pathetic, and self-sacrificing woman should
be immolated any further on the altar of Butler's egotism. My own
instinct would be to say: Let poor Miss Savage, out of whose painful and
imperfect existence so much "copy" has already been made, sleep on
undisturbed under her mouldering headstone at Finchley. But Mr. Festing
Jones knows best.
The most agreeable parts of this biography, at all events those which
give us the most genial impression of Butler as a companion, deal with
his repeated visits to Italy. These tours inspired, or were used to
produce material for, a very pleasant section of his literary work. If
we distinguish between the wit and picturesqueness of the ornament in
Butler's controversial writings, and the actual basal texture of those
writings, I do not see how a reasonable criticism can any longer pretend
to set high value on his angry denunciations of the whole Darwinian
theory of evolution, or on his diatribes about Unconscious Memory. There
is a terrible work of his, published in 1887, called _Luck or Cunning as
the Main Means of Organic Modification_; there is another, of 1882,
called _Evolution, Old and New_. They are unreadable. His religious
polemic was even more disagreeable than his scientific, and the
lumbering sarcasm of the attack on Christianity, called _The Fair
Haven_, is an epitome of all that is most unpleasing in the attitude of
Butler. Unctuous sarcasm so sustained as to deceive the very elect, and
"affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy," have a tendency to
grow rancid in the passage of years, and to become exceedingly
unappetizing. Samuel Butler, whose rashness was astounding, had the
courage to call his homonym of the _Analogy_ a "poor creature"! What
would Joseph Butler, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, think of the
author of _The Fair Haven_?
There is nothing of this incongruity in the books which are founded on
memories of Italian travel. Here the charm of Butler's style is
expended, with a thousand oddities and playfulnesses, on subjects which
blossom in its atmosphere. It is very strange that _Alps and
Sanctuaries_ (1882), and _Ex Voto_ (1888), should share the neglect
which was so unbrokenly the fate of Butler's publications, for these
were charming and original to a high degree, and they illustrate,
without any disadvantage, the whimsical penetration of his mind and the
playful melody of his style at its best. _The Authoress of the Odyssey_
(1897), which Hellenists found it impossible to take as a serious
contribution to scholarship, was another of these by-products of travel
in Sicily, and contained very numerous pages, which, whether convincing
or no, were exceedingly picturesque and entertaining. No cultivated man
or woman will, in the future, visit Trapani or ascend to the platforms
of Mount Eryx without remembering how Butler was taken to the grotto
where Ulysses hid his treasure, or how the Sicilian descendants of the
Cyclopes treated him as a royal personage.
Not much new light is thrown on the purely literary characteristics of
Butler by Mr. Festing Jones's biography. He has not dwelt at length on
the individual works, nor at all on the general position of their author
among his contemporaries. He left himself no space to go into such
questions, being fully occupied with the task of interpreting and
illuminating the personal characteristics of his subject. He is an
unflinching portraitist, and in a painting of Oliver Cromwell from the
life would be sure to do full justice to the wen. The rugged surface of
Samuel Butler lends itself to such realism--and I will not say that Mr.
Jones does not approach the confines of the superfluous in the excessive
minuteness of his notes. We are assured that Butler took eight
handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks with him when he went abroad, and
that he very wisely carried diarrhoea pills in the handle half of his
Gladstone bag. When Butler bought himself a new wash-hand basin, in
1887, the fact is duly recorded. We are told that once, in 1886, he
swept every corner of every room of his lodgings with tea-leaves, and
that it made him perspire freely. That there will be readers who do not
care how many times Butler brushed his hair every day, nor on what
occasion he wore "the high hat which appears in the corner of the
picture in his room," I am not inclined to deny, but I am not of them.
These little things, recounted with Mr. Festing Jones's humorous
serenity, are my delight. If some contemporary had recorded the fact
that Shakespeare habitually soaked the crust of his manchet in his last
mouthful of sack, or that he wore out his left shoe faster than his
right, how grateful we should be for the information. Only, there must
come into our consideration: Are Butler and Shakespeare figures of equal
significance, apart from their shoes and their hair-brushes?
There is less room for divergence of judgment on the question of the way
in which Mr. Jones has revealed the moral and social characteristics of
his hero. Here he could hardly be excessive. The amiability, the
ruggedness, the nervous instability, the obstinacy as of a rock, the
tenderness and the sardonic bitterness which made up so strange an
amalgam, are all frankly revealed. It is for us to arrange them, if we
can, into a consistent portrait of a most inconsistent figure. Here is,
taken at random, an entry of Butler's own, which gives a good example of
several of his characteristics:
17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a young
Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog--an English terrier. We
were alone in the carriage the greater part of the time, and I
suppose the poor dog was bored; at any rate, after a while, he made
up to me. He licked me all over my face, and then began to pretend
that my coat pocket had got a rat in it which he must catch. I was
so flattered at being made up to by anyone or anything who seemed
to tell me I was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for
rats all over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful
English, and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish
Legation, and was very clever and nice.
The incident could hardly be more trifling, but it is inimitably told;
and it reveals not merely a mastery of minute description, but the
self-tormenting temperament of a man of extraordinary talent who, for
some unfathomable reason, though love was in his heart, was for ever out
of harmony with the world, and suspicious of those whom he would fain
have ingratiated. Those are the main lineaments which Mr. Festing
Jones's biography reveals, and they are those of a miniaturist touching
his ivory with a fastidious brush, and of a "born orphan" who could not
find a home in the wilderness of jarring humanity.
A NOTE ON CONGREVE
Congreve's principal Continental critic has remarked that literary
history has behaved towards him in a very stepmotherly fashion (_sehr
stiefmuetterlich_). There is no other English poet of equal rank of the
last two centuries and a half whose biography has been so persistently
neglected. When, in 1888, I wrote my _Life of Congreve_ I had had no
predecessor since John Oldmixon, masquerading under the pseudonym of
"Charles Wilson," published that farrago of lies and nonsense which he
called _Memoirs of The Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve,
Esq._, in 1730. In this kingdom of the blind, however one-eyed, I
continue to be king, since in the thirty-three years succeeding the
issue of my biography no one has essayed to do better what I did as well
as I could. The only exception is the _William Congreve, sein Leben und
seine Lustspiele_, published in 1897 by Dr. D. Schmid, who was, I
believe, and perhaps still is, a professor in the University of Graz in
Austria. I darted, full of anticipation, to the perusal of Dr. Schmid's
volume, but was completely disappointed. He reposes upon me with a
touching uniformity; he quotes me incessantly and with courteous
acknowledgment; but I am unable to discover in his whole monograph one
grain of fact, or correction of fact, not known to me in 1888.
In spite of this, I have always believed that someone with more patience
and skill than I possess would be able to add much to our knowledge of a
man who lived with the Pope and Swift and Addison of whom we know so
much. The late George A. Aitken, who seemed to carry about with him a
set of Roentgen rays which he applied to the members of the Age of Anne,
would have been the man to do it. Not very long before his lamented
death I urged the task upon Aitken; but his mind was set on other
things, on Prior in particular. I do not know why it is that Congreve,
one of the great dramatists of the world, perhaps our greatest social
playwright, seems to lack personal attractiveness. It is a scandal that
he has never been edited. His plays are frequently, but always
imperfectly, reprinted, and without any editorial care. I was rejoiced
to see that Mr. Montague Summers, than whom no one living is more
competent to carry out such a labour, proposed to edit Congreve's plays.
But even he did not intend to include the poems, the novel, or the
letters; and I have heard no more of his project. To the book collector
the folio publications of Congreve in verse are precious and amusing,
but they have never attracted the notice of a bibliographer. Scholarship
has, indeed, been _stiefmuetterlich_ towards Congreve, as the Austrian
critic said.
My excuse for recalling this subject is the fact that I am able, through
the kindness of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, to announce the existence of a work
by Congreve hitherto unknown and unsuspected in its original form. In
the matchless library of Mr. Wise there lurks an anonymous quarto of
which the complete title is: "_An Impossible Thing._ A Tale. London:
Printed: And Sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXX." This was shown
by Mr. Wise to several of our best authorities, who combined in the
conjecture that it must be a hitherto unknown work by Prior. Yet since
the poet's death--and this shows how little anybody reads Congreve--the
contents of Mr. Wise's quarto have appeared in each successive edition
of the Poems. But before this was perceived the truth had dawned upon
Mr. Wise, who, turning over the _Historical Account of the English
Poets_, a publication by Curll in 1720, found that the following entry
occurs in the "Corrigenda":
Mr. Congreve. This Gentleman has lately oblig'd us with two Tales from
Fontaine, entitled,
I. The Impossible Thing.
II. The Man That lost his Heifer.
These form his pamphlet of the same year, 1720. When Mr. Wise was kind
enough to point this out to me it was only left for me to add that the
anonymous _Historical Account_ was the work of Giles Jacob, the friend
whose notes on Congreve's life form the nucleus of all we know about
him. Thus the authorship of the two poems was proved. And it was only
after that proof that I turned to the index of the old editions and
found there the two poems, lurking unsuspected. I blush to recall the
painful incident.
However, the separate publication of the two poems in a quarto of 1720
is a wholly unrecorded fact, and important to bibliographers. _The
Peasant in Search of his Heifer_ is added apparently as an
after-thought, to fill up the sheet. _An Impossible Thing_ opens with
these lines:
To thee, Dear Dick, this Tale I send,
Both as a Critick and a Friend.
I tell it with some Variation
(Not altogether a Translation)
From _La Fontaine_; an Author, _Dick_,
Whose Muse would touch thee to the quick.
The Subject is of that same kind
To which thy Heart seems most inclin'd.
How Verse may alter it, God knows;
Thou lov'st it well, I'm sure, in Prose.
So without Preface, or Pretence,
To hold thee longer in Suspense,
I shall proceed, as I am able,
To the Recital of my Fable.
He does proceed, not without considerable indelicacy, but in excellent
running verse. The "Dick" who was to enjoy it I conjecture--and in this
Mr. Austin Dobson confirmed me--to have been Richard Shelton, who is
connected with Prior's _Alma and A Case Stated_. Prior and Congreve have
so much in common that it is tantalizing not to be able to persuade
them to throw light upon one another; they were haunting the same
coffee-houses when Swift was writing to Stella in 1710.
The discovery, after 200 years, of a unique copy of an unsuspected
separate publication by Congreve confirms a suspicion of mine that other
such pamphlets may exist. The earliest attempt at a bibliography was
made by Giles Jacob, evidently under the poet's own eye, in 1720. Jacob
gives a list of poems, with which "the ingenious Mr. Congreve, besides
his excellent Dramatick Works, has oblig'd the Publick," but he adds no
dates. Of these poems the first is _An Epistle to the Right Honourable
Charles Lord Halifax_, and the six next are odes of each of which we
possess the text in folio form. But of the _Epistle to Halifax_ no
separate edition is known, and it appears first in the octavo of 1710.
But I cannot help suspecting that Giles Jacob possessed, or could refer
to, a folio sheet of (probably) 1694, the year in which Halifax, to
reward Congreve for the dedication of _The Double Dealer_, is supposed
to have appointed him a Commissioner for licensing hackney coaches. But
I have shown how confused is all the evidence with regard to Congreve's
offices, which roused Thackeray to such superfluous indignation. Perhaps
the shilly-shallying of Charles Montague had something to do with the
suppression of an original folio of the _Epistle_, if it ever existed.
In any case, a single sheet with, or more likely without, the signature
of Mr. Congreve is worth looking out for.
As thirty-three years have passed since my _Life of Congreve_ was
published I venture to take occasion to mention here one or two slight
matters which I should like any possessors of that volume to
interpolate. If I had the opportunity to issue a new edition I should
further enlarge on a matter which I did make prominent, the very leading
part which the veteran Dryden took in advancing the fortunes of his
young and hitherto unknown rival. The episode is a charming one, and I
have now some instances of it which escaped me in 1888. As is known,
Congreve came up from the country some time in 1692. He was introduced
by Southerne to Dryden, who took a great fancy to him at once. Dryden
was preparing a composite translation of _Juvenal_, and he gave the
young man the Eleventh Satire to turn. Next came Dryden's Persius, to
which Congreve prefixed a splendid poem of compliment: the triumph of
_The Old Bachelor_ followed in January. All this, and more, I worked
out; but one very interesting evidence of Dryden's assiduous kindness
escaped me. In 1705 was published as a folio pamphlet the _Ode on Mrs.
Arabella Hunt singing_, and I supposed that this was the original
appearance of this pindaric, which is one of Congreve's best. But my
attention has been arrested by observing that 1705 was the year in which
Arabella Hunt died, and also that so early as 1693 Dryden published this
ode in his _Third Miscellany_. The Arabella Hunt ode therefore belongs
to the beginning, and not, as I supposed, to the close, of Congreve's
brief poetic career. It is a beautiful thing:
Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease;
Be every loud tempestuous thought at peace;
And every ruder gasp of breath
Be calm, as in the arms of Death,
and ends with a Keats-like couplet:
Wishing forever in that state to lie,
For ever to be dying so, yet never die.
It is now plain that this ode was published as a book at the death of
the singer, but had been composed at least twelve years earlier. Another
instance of Dryden's connexion with Congreve, which I observed too late
to record it, is the fact that the latter contributed a song to the
_Love Triumphant_ of the former in 1694. In the dedication of that play
Dryden speaks of "my most ingenious friend, Mr. Congreve," who has
observed "the mechanic unities" of time and space strictly. _Love
Triumphant_ was Dryden's last play, and its failure was complete. A
spiteful letter-writer of the time gloats over its damnation because it
will "vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness." All this confirms the
idea that the elder poet's complaisance in the younger was matter of
general knowledge, and Dryden's withdrawal from the ungrateful theatre
must have been a blow to Congreve, who, however, practically stepped at
once into Dryden's shoes.
Another biographical crumb. Charles Hopkins, one of the poet-sons of
Ezekiel Hopkins, the once-famous Bishop of Derry, was a _protege_ of
Dryden, and in 1697 brought out his second play, _Boadicea_, which he
dedicated to Congreve in a long poem, from which we learn that Hopkins
was an intimate friend and disciple of the author of _The Double
Dealer_.
You taught me first my Genius and my Power,
Taught me to know my own, but gave me more.
He praises Congreve's verses, and then goes on to say, in lines of
conspicuous warmth and sincerity:
Nor does your Verse alone our Passions move;
Beyond the Poet, we the Person love.
In you, and almost only you, we find
Sublimity of Wit and Candour of the Mind.
Both have their Charms, and both give that delight.
'Tis pity that you should, or should not write.
He proceeds, enthusiastically, in this strain, and closes at last in
words which still carry a melodious echo:
Here should I, not to tire your patience, end,
But who can part so soon, with such a Friend?
You know my Soul, like yours, without design,
You know me yours, and I too know you mine.
I owe you all I am, and needs must mourn
My want of Power to make you some return.
Since you gave all, do not a part refuse,
But take this slender Offering of the Muse.
Friendship, from servile Interest free, secures
My Love, sincerely, and entirely yours.
This is by no means the only occasion on which Charles Hopkins
proclaimed his gratitude and affection. As early as 1694 he paid a
tribute of friendship to Congreve, who wrote a prologue to Hopkins's
first tragedy, _Pyrrhus King of Epirus_ (1695). I think we may presume
that it was owing to the greater poet's influence that Pyrrhus was put
on the stage, for Congreve wrote a prologue, in which he warmly
recommended it, saying:
'Tis the first Flight of a just-feather'd Muse,
adding, to the audience:
Then spare the Youth; or if you'll damn the Play,
Let him but first have his, then take your Day,
words which Congreve would hardly have used unless he had been
responsible for the production.
It is odd that Hopkins should speak so humbly and Congreve dwell on his
friend's inexperience, since Hopkins was at least six years older than
Congreve, who was now twenty-seven and pretended to be only twenty-five.
He enjoyed no further advantage from the devoted attachment of Charles
Hopkins, who retired immediately to his father's home in Londonderry.
Already he felt the decay of "a weak and sickly tenement," and his last
play, pathetically entitled _Friendship Improv'd_ (1697), was sent to
London from Londonderry with a preface that bewailed his broken health.
According to Giles Jacob, he was "a martyr to the cause of hard
drinking, and a too Passionate fondness for the fair Sex." The same
authority says that Hopkins "was always more ready to serve others than
mindful of his own Affairs," and we can well believe it. An hour before
his death, which took place in 1700, Charles Hopkins, "when in great
pain," wrote a last copy of verses, which have been preserved. And so
Congreve lost this most faithful henchman at the very moment when his
own last and perhaps greatest play, _The Way of the World_, failed on
the stage, and when he was most in need of sympathy.