above par and maintained them on an inverted pedal with all the other
markets fluctuating iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn
every one to his own way in the _Messiah_. He thought something of the
kind ought to have been done, and in the absence of Handel and Dr. Morell
we determined to write an oratorio that should attempt to supply the
want. In order to make our libretto as plausible as possible, we adopted
the dictum of Monsieur Jourdain's Maitre a danser: "Lorsqu'on a des
personnes a faire parler en musique, il faut bien que, pour la
vraisemblance, on donne dans la bergerie." Narcissus is accordingly a
shepherd in love with Amaryllis; they come to London with other shepherds
and lose their money in imprudent speculations on the Stock Exchange. In
the second part the aunt and godmother of Narcissus, having died at an
advanced age worth one hundred thousand pounds, all of which she has
bequeathed to her nephew and godson, the obstacle to his union with
Amaryllis is removed. The money is invested in consols and all ends
happily.
In December, 1886, Butler's father died, and his financial difficulties
ceased. He engaged Alfred Emery Cathie as clerk, but made no other
change, except that he bought a pair of new hair brushes and a larger
wash-hand basin. Any change in his mode of life was an event. When in
London he got up at 6.30 in the summer and 7.30 in the winter, went into
his sitting-room, lighted the fire, put the kettle on and returned to
bed. In half an hour he got up again, fetched the kettle of hot water,
emptied it into the cold water that was already in his bath, refilled the
kettle and put it back on the fire. After dressing, he came into his
sitting-room, made tea and cooked, in his Dutch oven, something he had
bought the day before. His laundress was an elderly woman, and he could
not trouble her to come to his rooms so early in the morning; on the
other hand, he could not stay in bed until he thought it right for her to
go out; so it ended in his doing a great deal for himself. He then got
his breakfast and read the Times. At 9.30 Alfred came, with whom he
discussed anything requiring attention, and soon afterwards his laundress
arrived. Then he started to walk to the British Museum, where he arrived
about 10.30, every alternate morning calling at the butcher's in Fetter
Lane to order his meat. In the Reading Room at the Museum he sat at
Block B ("B for Butler") and spent an hour "posting his notes"--that is
reconsidering, rewriting, amplifying, shortening, and indexing the
contents of the little note-book he always carried in his pocket. After
the notes he went on till 1.30 with whatever book he happened to be
writing.
On three days of the week he dined in a restaurant on his way home, and
on the other days he dined in his chambers where his laundress had cooked
his dinner. At two o'clock Alfred returned (having been home to dinner
with his wife and children) and got tea ready for him. He then wrote
letters and attended to his accounts till 3.45, when he smoked his first
cigarette. He used to smoke a great deal, but, believing it to be bad
for him, took to cigarettes instead of pipes, and gradually smoked less
and less, making it a rule not to begin till some particular hour, and
pushing this hour later and later in the day, till it settled itself at
3.45. There was no water laid on in his rooms, and every day he fetched
one can full from the tap in the court, Alfred fetching the rest. When
anyone expostulated with him about cooking his own breakfast and fetching
his own water, he replied that it was good for him to have a change of
occupation. This was partly the fact, but the real reason, which he
could not tell everyone, was that he shrank from inconveniencing anybody;
he always paid more than was necessary when anything was done for him,
and was not happy then unless he did some of the work himself.
At 5.30 he got his evening meal, he called it his tea, and it was little
more than a facsimile of breakfast. Alfred left in time to post the
letters before six. Butler then wrote music till about 8, when he came
to see me in Staple Inn, returning to Clifford's Inn by about 10. After
a light supper, latterly not more than a piece of toast and a glass of
milk, he played one game of his own particular kind of Patience, prepared
his breakfast things and fire ready for the next morning, smoked his
seventh and last cigarette, and went to bed at eleven o'clock.
He was fond of the theatre, but avoided serious pieces. He preferred to
take his Shakespeare from the book, finding that the spirit of the plays
rather evaporated under modern theatrical treatment. In one of his books
he brightens up the old illustration of _Hamlet_ without the Prince of
Denmark by putting it thus: "If the character of Hamlet be entirely
omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast
for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be
likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even
frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any
kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to
the last the habit of going to one pantomime every winter.
There were about twenty houses where he visited, but he seldom accepted
an invitation to dinner--it upset the regularity of his life; besides, he
belonged to no club and had no means of returning hospitality. When two
colonial friends called unexpectedly about noon one day, soon after he
settled in London, he went to the nearest cook-shop in Fetter Lane and
returned carrying a dish of hot roast pork and greens. This was all very
well once in a way, but not the sort of thing to be repeated
indefinitely.
On Thursdays, instead of going to the Museum, he often took a day off,
going into the country sketching or walking, and on Sundays, whatever the
weather, he nearly always went into the country walking; his map of the
district for thirty miles round London is covered all over with red lines
showing where he had been. He sometimes went out of town from Saturday
to Monday, and for over twenty years spent Christmas at Boulogne-sur-Mer.
There is a Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia with many chapels, each
containing life-sized statues and frescoes illustrating the life of
Christ. Butler had visited this sanctuary repeatedly, and was a great
favourite with the townspeople, who knew that he was studying the statues
and frescoes in the chapels, and who remembered that in the preface to
_Alps and Sanctuaries_ he had declared his intention of writing about
them. In August, 1887, the Varallesi brought matters to a head by giving
him a civic dinner on the Mountain. Everyone was present, there were
several speeches and, when we were coming down the slippery mountain path
after it was all over, he said to me:
"You know, there's nothing for it now but to write that book about the
Sacro Monte at once. It must be the next thing I do."
Accordingly, on returning home, he took up photography and, immediately
after Christmas, went back to Varallo to photograph the statues and
collect material. Much research was necessary and many visits to out-of-
the-way sanctuaries which might have contained work by the sculptor
Tabachetti, whom he was rescuing from oblivion and identifying with the
Flemish Jean de Wespin. One of these visits, made after his book was
published, forms the subject of "The Sanctuary of Montrigone." _Ex
Voto_, the book about Varallo, appeared in 1888, and an Italian
translation by Cavaliere Angelo Rizzetti was published at Novara in 1894.
"Quis Desiderio . . . ?" (_The Humour of Homer and Other Essays_) was
developed in 1888 from something in a letter from Miss Savage nearly ten
years earlier. On the 15th of December, 1878, in acknowledging this
letter, Butler wrote:
I am sure that any tree or flower nursed by Miss Cobbe would be the
_very_ first to fade away and that her gazelles would die long before
they ever came to know her _well_. The sight of the brass buttons on
her pea-jacket would settle them out of hand.
There was an enclosure in Miss Savage's letter, but it is unfortunately
lost; I suppose it must have been a newspaper cutting with an allusion to
Moore's poem and perhaps a portrait of Miss Frances Power
Cobbe--pea-jacket, brass buttons, and all.
On the 10th November, 1879, Miss Savage, having been ill, wrote to
Butler:
I have been dipping into the books of Moses, being sometimes at a loss
for something to read while shut up in my apartment. You know that I
have never read the Bible much, consequently there is generally
something of a novelty that I hit on. As you do know your Bible well,
perhaps you can tell me what became of Aaron. The account given of
his end in Numbers xx. is extremely ambiguous and unsatisfactory.
Evidently he did not come by his death fairly, but whether he was
murdered secretly for the furtherance of some private ends, or
publicly in a State sacrifice, I can't make out. I myself rather
incline to the former opinion, but I should like to know what the
experts say about it. A very nice, exciting little tale might be made
out of it in the style of the police stories in _All the rear Round_
called "The Mystery of Mount Hor or What became of Aaron?" Don't
forget to write to me.
Butler's people had been suggesting that he should try to earn money by
writing in magazines, and Miss Savage was falling in with the idea and
offering a practical suggestion. I do not find that he had anything to
tell her about the death of Aaron. On 23rd March, 1880, she wrote:
Dear Mr. Butler: Read the subjoined poem of Wordsworth and let me know
what you understand its meaning to be. Of course I have my opinion,
which I think of communicating to the Wordsworth Society. You can
belong to that Society for the small sum of 2/6 per annum. I think of
joining because it is cheap.
"The subjoined poem" was the one beginning: "She dwelt among the
untrodden ways," and Butler made this note on the letter:
To the foregoing letter I answered that I concluded Miss Savage meant to
imply that Wordsworth had murdered Lucy in order to escape a prosecution
for breach of promise.
_Miss Savage to Butler_.
2nd April, 1880: My dear Mr. Butler: I don't think you see all that I
do in the poem, and I am afraid that the suggestion of a DARK SECRET
in the poet's life is not so very obvious after all. I was hoping you
would propose to devote yourself for a few months to reading the
_Excursion_, his letters, &c., with a view to following up the clue,
and I am disappointed though, to say the truth, the idea of a _crime_
had not flashed upon me when I wrote to you. How well the works of
_great_ men repay attention and study! But you, who know your Bible
so well, how was it that you did not detect the plagiarism in the last
verse? Just refer to the account of the disappearance of Aaron (I
have not a Bible at hand, we want one sadly in the club) but I am sure
that the words are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage meant.
1901. S. B.] _Cassell's Magazine_ have offered a prize for setting
the poem to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be treated
musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it.
Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage's letters in 1901, could not
see the resemblance between Wordsworth's poem and Numbers xx., he at once
saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore's heroine whom he had been
keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory ever since his letter
about Miss Frances Power Cobbe. He now sent Lucy to keep her company and
often spoke of the pair of them as probably the two most disagreeable
young women in English literature--an opinion which he must have
expressed to Miss Savage and with which I have no doubt she agreed.
In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues at
Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the British
Museum had removed Frost's _Lives of Eminent Christians_ from its
accustomed shelf in the Reading Room. Soon afterwards Harry Quilter
asked him to write for the _Universal Review_ and he responded with "Quis
Desiderio . . . ?" In this essay he compares himself to Wordsworth and
dwells on the points of resemblance between Lucy and the book of whose
assistance he had now been deprived in a passage which echoes the opening
of Chapter V of _Ex Voto_, where he points out the resemblances between
Varallo and Jerusalem.
Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archaeological
Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his
father for their Quarterly Journal. This he undertook to do when he
should have finished _Ex Voto_. In December, 1888, his sisters, with the
idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his grandfather's
correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839. On looking over these
very voluminous papers he became penetrated with an almost Chinese
reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the Archaeological Society
to absolve him from his promise to write the memoir, set about a full
life of Dr. Butler, which was not published till 1896. The delay was
caused partly by the immense quantity of documents he had to sift and
digest, the number of people he had to consult, and the many letters he
had to write, and partly by something that arose out of _Narcissus_,
which we published in June, 1888.
Butler was not satisfied with having written only half of this work; he
wanted it to have a successor, so that by adding his two halves together,
he could say he had written a whole Handelian oratorio. While staying
with his sisters at Shrewsbury with this idea in his mind, he casually
took up a book by Alfred Ainger about Charles Lamb and therein stumbled
upon something about the _Odyssey_. It was years since he had looked at
the poem, but, from what he remembered, he thought it might provide a
suitable subject for musical treatment. He did not, however, want to put
Dr. Butler aside, so I undertook to investigate. It is stated on the
title-page of both _Narcissus_ and _Ulysses_ that the words were written
and the music composed by both of us. As to the music, each piece bears
the initials of the one who actually composed it. As to the words, it
was necessary first to settle some general scheme and this, in the case
of _Narcissus_, grew in the course of conversation. The scheme of
_Ulysses_ was constructed in a more formal way and Butler had perhaps
rather less to do with it. We were bound by the _Odyssey_, which is, of
course, too long to be treated fully, and I selected incidents that
attracted me and settled the order of the songs and choruses. For this
purpose, as I out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in the smallness of my Greek, I
used _The Adventures of Ulysses_ by Charles Lamb, which we should have
known nothing about but for Ainger's book. Butler acquiesced in my
proposals, but, when it came to the words themselves, he wrote
practically all the libretto, as he had done in the case of _Narcissus_;
I did no more than suggest a few phrases and a few lines here and there.
We had sent _Narcissus_ for review to the papers, and, as a consequence,
about this time, made the acquaintance of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, then
musical critic of the _Times_; he introduced us to that learned musician
William Smith Rockstro, under whom we studied medieval counterpoint while
composing _Ulysses_. We had already made some progress with it when it
occurred to Butler that it would not take long and might, perhaps, be
safer if he were to look at the original poem, just to make sure that
Lamb had not misled me. Not having forgotten all his Greek, he bought a
copy of the _Odyssey_ and was so fascinated by it that he could not put
it down. When he came to the Phoeacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria he
felt he must be reading the description of a real place and that
something in the personality of the author was eluding him. For months
he was puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set about
translating the poem. In August, 1891, he had preceded me to Chiavenna,
and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect me, he made this
note:
It was during the few days that I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel
Grotta Crimee) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the
_Odyssey_. I did not find out its having been written at Trapani till
January, 1892.
He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca was
drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty charts for
the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the conclusion that
the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and the AEgadean Islands.
As soon as he could after this discovery he went to Sicily to study the
locality and found it in all respects suitable for his theory; indeed, it
was astonishing how things kept turning up to support his view. It is
all in his book _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, published in 1897 and
dedicated to his friend Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi.
His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August--a hot time of the year,
but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned to Sicily
every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring. He made many
friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi
called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, "thus," as Ingroja
wrote when he announced the event to me, "honouring a great man's memory,
handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly
English nation." Besides showing that the _Odyssey_ was written by a
woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also
translated the _Iliad_, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad
to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him
to disagree with the received theories.
It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It was
enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it affected any
of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after giving it his
best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no weight of
authority could make him say that it did. This matter of the geography
of the _Iliad_ is only one among many commonly received opinions which he
examined for himself and found no reason to dispute; on these he
considered it unnecessary to write.
It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that he
learnt nearly the whole of the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ by heart. He
had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket and
referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when saying the
poems over to himself. These two little books are now in the library of
St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however, disappointed to find
that he could not retain more than a book or two at a time and that, on
learning more, he forgot what he had learnt first; but he was about sixty
at the time. Shakespeare's Sonnets, on which he published a book in
1899, gave him less trouble in this respect; he knew them all by heart,
and also their order, and one consequence of this was that he wrote some
sonnets in the Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of
the poet's work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by
those who are less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would
say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you can
consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you want to
form an opinion about it and its author."
It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more than
the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture; the
composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a musician
makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which I myself hold
to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting in so far as it
reveals the personality of the artist." Handel was, of course, "the
greatest of all musicians." Among the painters he chiefly loved Giovanni
Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and
De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare, Homer, and the Authoress of the
_Odyssey_; and in architecture the man, whoever he was, who designed the
Temple of Neptune at Paestum. Life being short, he did not see why he
should waste any of it in the company of inferior people when he had
these. And he treated those he met in daily life in the same spirit: it
was what he found them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others
thought about them was of little or no consequence.
And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two
subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously--namely,
_Erewhon_ and the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed
miracle had been slumbering during all those years and at last rose again
in the form of a sequel to _Erewhon_. In _Erewhon Revisited_ Mr. Higgs
returns to find that the Erewhonians now believe in him as a god in
consequence of the supposed miracle of his going up in a balloon to
induce his heavenly father to send the rain. Mr. Higgs and the reader
know that there was no miracle in the case, but Butler wanted to show
that whether it was a miracle or not did not signify provided that the
people believed it be one. And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple
which is being dedicated to him and his worship.
The existence of his son George was an afterthought and gave occasion for
the second leading idea of the book--the story of a father trying to win
the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in order to show
himself worthy of it--and succeeding.
Butler's health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily
on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he was unfit to
travel, but was determined to go, and was looking forward to meeting Mr.
and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to accompany over the
Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx. But he did not get beyond
Palermo; there he was so much worse that he could not leave his room. In
a few weeks he was well enough to be removed to Naples, and Alfred went
out and brought him home to London. He was taken to a nursing home in
St. John's Wood where he lay for a month, attended by his old friend Dr.
Dudgeon, and where he died on the 18th June, 1902.
There was a great deal he still wanted to do. He had intended to revise
_The Way of All Flesh_, to write a book about Tabachetti, and to publish
a new edition of _Ex Voto_ with the mistakes corrected. Also he wished
to reconsider the articles reprinted in _The Humour of Homer_, and was
looking forward to painting more sketches and composing more music. While
lying ill and very feeble within a few days of the end, and not knowing
whether it was to be the end or not, he said to me:
"I am much better to-day. I don't feel at all as though I were going to
die. Of course, it will be all wrong if I do get well, for there is my
literary position to be considered. First I write _Erewhon_--that is my
opening subject; then, after modulating freely through all my other books
and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my original key and write
_Erewhon Revisited_. Obviously, now is the proper moment to come to a
full close, make my bow and retire; but I believe I am getting well,
after all. It's very inartistic, but I cannot help it."
Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he is
serious or jesting. He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield: "Earnestness was his
greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as indeed who can?
it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a
fair amount of success." To veil his own earnestness he turned most
naturally to humour, employing it in a spirit of reverence, as all the
great humorists have done, to express his deepest and most serious
convictions. He was aware that he ran the risk of being misunderstood by
some, but he also knew that it is useless to try to please all, and, like
Mozart, he wrote to please himself and a few intimate friends.
I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and sympathy;
nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great and can never
be known--it was sometimes exercised in unexpected ways, as when he gave
my laundress a shilling because it was "such a beastly foggy morning";
nor of his slightly archaic courtliness--unless among people he knew well
he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his
punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail--he kept
accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also
of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening,
and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-
six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years
of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange
mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to
say: "Il sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete."