THE LITERARY MAUSOLEUM OF SAMUEL BUTLER
"Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate
the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of
material, their slipshod style, their love of tedious panegyric,
their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?"
_--Lytton Strachey._
Samuel Butler's "Note-books" and "The Authoress of the Odyssey" added to
the delights of the spring of 1915, which I spent in Sicily. The former,
which is the quintessence of his wisdom and his impudence, gave
revealing peeps into the mental and emotional make-up of the man who in
"Erewhon" forecast the advent of the supremacy of machines and
anticipated Mrs. Eddy in considering disease a sin and a crime, and the
latter gave a quickened interest to Trapani, Segesta, and many other
places, some of which have since become shrines in my memory.
From these "Note-Books" and from "The Way with All Flesh," which gave a
remarkable vista of his own unconscious mind as well as those of his
ancestors, I made a vivid picture of the author. It has been blurred,
and in some respects quite erased by the two massive biographic volumes
recently given to the world by Mr. Henry Festing Jones,[A] and which
depicts him in all the nakedness of his virtues and his infirmities,
revealing an unloving and unlovable character. Some day it will be
explained to us why we cannot be left in possession of the cherished
delusions that add to our happiness, increase our good-will toward our
fellow men, and in no wise impair the reputations of those to whom they
are directed.
[A] "Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon,'" a memoir by Henry Festing
Jones, Macmillan & Co., London, 1919.
One of the things that is most difficult to forgive a biographer is the
wealth of sordid details they give us about our gods. Who can forgive
Ranieri, for instance, for having told us with so much particularity
that Leopardi hated to change his shirt or to take a bath, that he had a
passion for cheap sweets, that he insisted upon keeping the servants of
the household where he was a guest up until midnight in order that he
might have his principal meal, that he was morbidly susceptible to
adulation? It does not advantage any one to know such things, even if
they are true, and if it serves any laudable purpose I am not aware that
it has been set forth.
Mr. Jones's biography is painfully candid and distressingly frank and
confidential.
Samuel Butler's life was one of rebellion and resignation, of contention
and strife, of unhappiness and unyieldingness, of disappointment and
suspicion, of wrongheartedness and rightmindedness, of rude energy and
crude revery. He had a vanity of his intellectual capacity that
transcends all understanding and a passion for what he called doing
things thoroughly. He believed in the music of Handel, in the art of
Giovanni Bellini, and his credo was the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians, which apotheosizes charity and
humility. Samuel Butler may have had charity and humility on his lips,
but I fail to find from reading his biography that they ever got as far
as his heart. He had an unhappy childhood, a perturbed adolescence, a
lonely and isolated early manhood, an obsessed maturity, and an
emotionally sterile old age. He hated his father, he pitied his mother,
he barely tolerated his sisters, and he suspected the integrity and
motives of his illustrious contemporaries who, though polite to him,
personally ignored him controversially. Indeed, part of the time he must
have felt himself a modern, though tame Ishmael, his hand against every
man, and every man's hand against him.
Although he had a few forgiving, appreciative friends, a constant and
ardent mistress, and a devoted servant who mothered and domineered him,
engrossing interests and boundless energy, still he was chronically
unhappy, the sweetness of his soul being embittered by contempt of his
fellow men.
The offspring of a narrow-minded, obstinate, inflexible, selfish father
and a gentle, reverential, yielding, and kindly mother, it was taken for
granted that he would follow in the footsteps of his father and
grandfather and become a clergyman. He found when he began to take
thought that he could not accept the Christian miracles or believe in a
personal, anthropomorphic God. So he went to New Zealand and became a
successful sheep-grazer, and within five years he had more than doubled
the four thousand pounds which he had been able to screw from his
father.
His life during these years is interesting in so much as it shows how a
man of education and breeding lived in the bush while developing
intellectually. The devil often tempted him there, but not always with
success, though he became terribly fussed over the death and
resurrection of Christ. He thought and wrote about it, but he was not
successfully delivered from his dilemma until the idea of "Erewhon" took
possession of him. This idea was that machines were about to supplant
the human race and be developed into a higher kind of life. When the
conception first seized him he wrote to Charles Darwin, whom he started
by admiring and ended by despising, that he developed it "for mere fun
and because it amused him and without a particle of serious meaning." He
had Butler's "Analogy" in his head as the book at which it should be
aimed, but when "Erewhon" appeared most readers thought he had "The
Origin of Species" in mind.
From this time one begins to see how extraordinarily laborious were all
of Butler's writings. "Erewhon" was not published until eight years
later, during which time he had written and rewritten, corrected and
re-corrected, pruned, elaborated, and incorporated sentences from
letters, records of experiences which he had while prospecting for and
developing his sheeprun, and innumerable notes from a commonplace book
which he early acquired the art of keeping. Ten years after its
publication he wrote to an indiscriminating, ardent admirer: "I don't
like 'Erewhon'; still it is good for me."
The next book he wrote, "The Fair Haven," he liked very much, but few
others did. When he was a very young man he had written a pamphlet on
the Resurrection. He was disappointed that it made little or no
impression. Finally he decided it had been written too seriously. It
then occurred to him to treat the subject as he had treated the analogy
of crime and disease in "Erewhon." The book purports to be written by
the son of a clergyman, the antithesis of Butler's father, insane before
the manuscript was completed, and of a mother, the replica of his own
mother. A brother gives the book to the world, prefixing a memoir of the
author modelled after Butler. The book fell flat. The few who resented
it were the sensitive orthodox whose feelings were outraged. Butler
could not understand why he was unable to induce people to reconsider
the gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
The second distinctive characteristic of Butler's make-up was his spirit
of God-I-thank-thee-that-I-am-not-as-other-men.
When Butler left New Zealand he had eight thousand pounds, partly in his
pocket and partly invested in the country that had been so bountiful to
him; he decided to return to England and devote himself to painting,
which he felt convinced was the field of activity in which he gave real
promise. It was then from the exceeding high mountain that he saw
Charles Payne Pauli, of Winchester, and Pembroke College, Oxford, who
had gone out to the colony and found employment on a newspaper. One
evening Pauli called upon Butler and stayed talking until midnight. "I
suddenly became aware that I had become intimate with a personality
quite different from that of any one whom I had ever known." Within a
few months there was established a strange intimacy, "one of those
one-sided friendships when a diffident, poetical shy man becomes devoted
to the confident, showy, real man as a dog to his master." He loaned
Pauli one hundred pounds that he might return with him to England; he
maintained him in London until Pauli was called to the bar; then he put
him on an allowance which he continued for many years and which used up
one-half of his savings and earnings.
When Pauli began to earn a comfortable income at the bar he treated
Butler with scorn, though accepting money and food from him. When he
died none of the nine thousand pounds which he had accumulated was left
to Butler. Indeed, the latter did not know of his death until he saw a
notice of it in the London _Times_. However, his love for Pauli, which
surpassed understanding, surmounted all obstacles and he wrote a long,
detailed account of the relation between himself and Pauli which, his
biographer says, if ever printed in full, will be "very painful
reading."
Some time before he broke with Pauli he started a friendship with
another man which fortunately did not test his indulgence and his
generosity to a similar extent, but it was no less remarkable. Indeed,
it was more so, for Butler was now fifty-six, and he poured the depleted
vessels of his affection upon Hans Rudolf Faesch in such a way as
practically to submerge this young man. I doubt if there is anything in
literature of men's friendships which for intensity of passion and
affection surpasses the letters which Butler addressed to the young
Swiss. The poem, "Out in the Night," addressed to Faesch on his
departure for Singapore, is a genuine, impassioned expression of grief
coming straight from the heart. And the letters to Faesch are truly
remarkable documents. In fact, the letter written to Hans Faesch after
he had started for Singapore, when Butler was fifty-nine years old,
might well have been written by Pericles to Aspasia or by a sentimental
youth to his dulcina. "I should be ashamed of myself for having felt so
keenly and spoken with as little reserve as I have if it were any one
but you; but I feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me
when it is about you." And yet we speak of Anglo-Saxon frigidity and
aloofness!
Butler would seem never to have been in love in the ordinary usual way.
We are justified in concluding that he had only a tenderness for
"Madame," who "during the twenty years of intimacy with Butler had no
rivals." Certainly he never was in love with Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage,
an extraordinary woman whose mentality is reflected in all of Butler's
books. From 1871, when he was writing "Erewhon," until her death, in
1885, Butler submitted to Miss Savage everything he wrote, and
remodelled in accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. Not only
did he submit the drafts of his books to her, but the suggestions of
many of them originated with her. If ever the soul and spirit of one
person operated through another, the soul and spirit of this brilliant
woman operated through the apparent mental elaborations of Samuel
Butler. She understood him as no one else understood him; she loved him
as no other woman loved him. Her devotion to him, her appreciation of
his talent, her unrequited love, her unfailing humor and mirth, her
incomparable courage when confronted with serious disease and with
death, and her apparent willingness that her talent should shine through
him is one of the most extraordinary things in literature. I am at a
loss to understand why neither his biographers nor the critics of
Butler's writings have given the subject adequate consideration.
Some years ago a youthful Austrian psychopath, Weininger, wrote a book,
"Geschlecht und Charakter," which had great popularity. It was widely
read in the original and in translations. Amongst other things that he
discussed was the sex endowment of man. The hundred per cent male is
very uncommon, and he is rarely encountered amongst creative artists.
The feminine percentage in them is considerable, often more than fifty
per cent. Samuel Butler had many feminine traits. He was vain, gossipy,
vindictive, swayed by his emotions, and he allowed himself to be wooed
by a woman. He took from Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage without giving a quid
pro quo or even acknowledgment. He did not have the courage to say to
her in the flesh what he said of her in the grave. He sold to the public
as of his own manufacture the warp and woof of her intellectual
weavings. Her letters, which form such a large part of the first volume
of these memoirs and which Butler wrote to her father "the like of which
I have never elsewhere seen," testify the public debt to her contracted
in the name of Samuel Butler.
The wit, humor, irony, and sarcasm of these letters all combine to
reveal a remarkable soul and rare personality. For twenty years she was
a true, steadfast, resourceful, sympathetic helpmate to Samuel Butler.
He accepted her amatory homage and her literary co-operation, and she
might legitimately have inferred from his letters that she was
somatically as well as spiritually sympathetic. Many women have
convinced themselves that their passion was reciprocated by men who gave
less tangible evidence of it than Samuel Butler gave Miss Savage. That
she loved him there can be no doubt, but her unæsthetic appearance
appalled him, her halting stride annoyed him, and her loving attentions
bored him. Some years after her death he composed two sonnets to her
memory, the first exquisitely vulgar, the second painfully pathetic.
"She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day;
The more she wrote, the more unmoved was I,
The more she gave, the less could I repay,
Therefore I grieve not that I was not loved
But that, being loved, I could not love again.
I liked; but like and love are far removed;
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain.
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell
That, though I loved her in a certain sort,
Yet did I love too wisely but not well.
Ah! had she been more beauteous or less kind
She might have found me of another mind.
"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."
Her memory deserves a better fate than interment in Mr. Jones's huge
mausoleum.
The third of Samuel Butler's distinguishing characteristics was that he
was incapable of falling in love with any one but himself.
He labored prodigiously to become a painter, and during his life he
succeeded in having five pictures hung in the Royal Academy exposition.
However, he never got out of Class C as a painter, and when he was
forty-one he forsook the brush for the pen. Meanwhile he had (according
to his father) killed his mother by the publication of "Erewhon,"
launched "The Fair Haven," got thoroughly enmeshed in the teachings of
Darwin and the contentions of Mivart, Lamarck, and others, plunged into
Hellenic literature to give it specificity of origin and display, and
was otherwise very busy pushing over statues of heroes which he mistook
for tin soldiers. Early in life he began keeping notes. His principle
was that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the
wing. When he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or
amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went.
He was his own Boswell with all of that immortal's colloquiality and
ingenuousness. He did not hesitate to make frank comments on the people
he met, and photographic descriptions of such individuals, of his family
and friends, and their letters went to make up the novel (if novel a
narrative of fact can be called) through which he was made known to the
general public, and by which he will probably be longest remembered,
namely, "The Way of All Flesh." It was begun when he was thirty-one and
finished fifteen years later. Because it is autobiographical, and
biographical of his family and friends, he found the necessity of
frequently rewriting it, as time, event, and God changed them.
This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of that book.
It had an artificial popularity--Mr. G. Bernard Shaw being the
artificer. There was one thing about it concerning which every one
agreed: to pillory your parents in public is the equivalent of beating
them up in private.
The fourth of Samuel Butler's characteristics was insensitiveness to
what is generally called refinement or finer feeling. Though an artist
he had little æsthetic awareness. If he knew the canons of good taste he
did not subscribe to them. What he called his little jokes, which Mr.
Jones relates with great gustfulness, is the ample proof of this
accusation. "What is more subversive of a sultan's dignity than pinching
his leg? Pinching his sultana's leg." "We shall not get infanticide,
permission of suicide, cheap and easy divorce, and other social
arrangements till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid." Cheap and vulgar
prostitution of intellectual possession a gentleman would call it.
Mr. Jones and Alfred, clerk, valet, and general attendant, "a live young
thing about the place, and a cheerful addition to 15 Clifford's Inn,"
became very intimate with Butler. Mr. Jones had been a barrister, but
had abandoned the law and was under a modest retainer of two hundred a
year from Butler to give him Boswellian service. They found Butler
companionable, and there are such indications as letters from casual
acquaintances, particularly in Italy, to show that he was agreeable and
sympathetic to some persons.
Aside from these there is very little in these two massive volumes to
testify to the kindness, gentleness, simpleness, and humility of Samuel
Butler. Apparently he disliked every one with whom he had to do or with
whom he came in contact, save Mr. Pauli, Mr. Faesch, Lord Beaconsfield,
and Richard Garnett. Still he was pleased with Mr. Garnett's
discomfiture on hearing his lecture on "The Humor of Homer." Searching
Mr. Jones's plethoric volumes carefully, it is difficult to find kind or
appreciative words for contemporary or forebear.
"How many years was it before I learned to dislike Thackeray or Tennyson
as much as I do now?" "Middlemarch is a long-winded piece of studied
brag." "What a wretch Carlyle must be to run Goethe as he has done!" "We
talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her." "I do not like
Mr. W. J. Stillman at all." "I do not remember that Edwin Lear told us
anything particularly amusing." "All I remember about John Morley is
that I disliked and distrusted him." "I dislike Rossetti's face and his
manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends." "No, I do
not like Lamb; you see Canon Anger writes about him, and Canon Anger
goes to tea with my sisters." "Blake was no good because he learned
Italian at over sixty in order to read Dante, and we know 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." "I said I was glad Stanley was dead." "I never read a line of
Marcus Aurelius that left me wiser than I was before." Speaking of
Maeterlinck, who was then coming to his estate, "Now a true genius
cannot so soon be recognized. If a man of thirty-five can get such
admiration he is probably a very good man, but he is not one of those
who will redeem Israel." Though Butler was fascinated by G. Bellini, he
surely had heard of Raphael.
Darwin, Wallace, Ray Lankester, most of the scientists of his time who
did not fully agree with him; novelists, philosophers, artists,
poets--all excited his disapproval. When he was fifty-three he made a
note to remind himself to call Tennyson the Darwin of poetry and Darwin
the Tennyson of science. Thus would he empty the vials of his wrath and
contempt.
He acided his system, as the Italians say, with hatred and envy of his
fellow man who had achieved fame or who was upon the road to it. It is
difficult to rid one's mind of the thought that the motive that prompted
him to literary work was that he might show how contemptibly inadequate
the masters were or had been, all of them save Handel and G. Bellini.
Samuel Butler took himself with great solemnity. He believed what he
wanted to believe and he believed he knew about many things far better
than experts and empiricists. When they did not agree with him he took
great umbrage and wrote disagreeable letters to them or made disparaging
references to them in his notes. "He never could form an opinion on a
subject until he had established his volatile thoughts and caged them in
a note. This enabled him to make up his mind." Thus he made up his mind,
aided by Miss Savage, that "The Odyssey" was written by a female, or, to
use his felicitous expression, "any woman save Mrs. Barrett Browning."
Samuel Butler's most deforming characteristic was lack of reverence. He
was endowed with an orderly mind. It was his passion and pastime to
train and develop it. He never let anything stand in the way of
accomplishing that purpose. His greatest literary gift was his capacity
for presenting evidence. His chief weakness was his incapacity to gather
evidence. He assumed certain things and then proceeded to prove to the
reader that they were facts. This is a procedure that has never had
favor in the courts or in the laboratories. Neither has it been accepted
as a legitimate procedure in what might be called constructive
literature, critical or creative. The only place where it has ever been
received with favor is the pulpit, and Samuel Butler was the true son of
the cloth which he did so much to deride and from which he believed he
had divested himself.
We should never have known what a pathetic figure he was if Mr. Jones
had not seen fit in his affection and his obsession to reveal him to us.
We can forgive Mr. Jones for this, however, because of his belief that
Samuel Butler is immortal. Would that we could also forgive him for
publishing a portrait of Mr. Butler standing before the hearth in the
sitting-room of his home--in his shirt-sleeves! We could not have been
more shocked had we found that he wore garters around his arms to
regulate the length of his shirt-sleeves. England indeed is changed.
This life of Butler gives the lie to Britishers' reputation for
stolidity and formality.