SAMUELBUTLER6

Silent nymph with curious eye,Who in the purple evening lieOn the mountain's lonely van;

the following description of the landscape in general with its unusual and extraordinarily true conclusion:

And swelling to embrace the light,Spreads around beneath the sight,

in which everybody who has after climbing a hill turned round and seen the prospect must acknowledge the felicity of "swelling," though he may never have formulated the appearance before; the details of wood, and ruin, and river, with the sudden and just sufficient moral:

A little rule, a little sway,A sunbeam on a winter's day;

for the castle, and for the rivers:

Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,Wave succeeding wave they go,A various journey to the deep,Like human life to endless sleep;

the fillings in of various detail and the penultimate passage formed into a sort of roundel:

Now, even now, my joys run highAs on the mountain turf I lie,While the wanton Zephyr singsAnd in the vale perfumes his wings;While the waters murmur deep,While the shepherd charms his sheep,While the birds unbounded fly,And with music fill the sky—Now, even now, my joys run high;

with the finale to Peace and Quiet, close allied to Pleasure—all these and all the rest of the 150 lines or so of the poem have their own appropriate agreeableness. And it will be very dangerous for anyone to try the usual sneer at eighteenth-century convention, lest haply he be thought to be blinded or hoodwinked by conventions of another sort. He has, for instance, been taught to think "wanton Zephyr" very bad. But has he quite realised the simplicity and perfection with which the single word "sings" distinctively characterises the rush of the wind aloft, and the next line brings before the mind's senses the flowers and crops and woods, from which the "perfume" is derived below? Is "unbounded," in the particular and yet fully legitimate sense, quite what Edmond de Goncourt used disdainfully to call "everybody's epithet" for the apparently limitless freedom of the birds' flight? Without quoting the whole piece it would be impossible to show the singular uniformity of pictorial and musical skill which distinguishes it; but this can be left, with complete security of mind, to anyone who gives it an impartial reading to discover for himself. Even the impartial reader is not recommended to proceed fromGrongar HilltoThe Ruins of Rome, as the poet in this latter piece most unwisely invites him to do—still less toThe Fleece. But no attempt is being made here to prove that the eighteenth century never produced bad poetry: one merely endeavours to point out that it sometimes produced good.

ThePrayer for Indifferenceis much less varied in kind, and much more limited in degree, of attraction, but it is perhaps subtler. The personalapplication of it can escape no reader of Fanny Burney's Diaries, but is not necessary to appreciation. The idea is that of an appeal to Oberon for a "balm" slightly different from that which plays so important a part inA Midsummer Night's Dream—a spell causing neither love nor hate, but only indifference. The metre is ordinary ballad or common measure; the language not very different from the ordinary poetic diction of the time. You are not, as inGrongar Hill, made to believe that you are not in the eighteenth century at all, or, if at all, as far from its usual and central ways and thoughts as Grongar itself was and is from London. But, by a quaint and pleasing paradox, the suppliant infuses into her prayer qualities which were the very opposite of that which she prays for, and which in a certain sense might be said to be the quality of the century itself at least on the common estimate. Indifference—in the sense of abstinence from enthusiasm—certainlywasaffected by many, and positively approved by some, in those days. But when the lady says:

I ask no kind return in love,No tempting charm to please—Far from the heart such gifts removeThat sighs for peace and ease,

there is a quiver in verse and phrase and sense alike which indicates and expresses very effectively aspirations quite different from indifference. And the quiver becomes a throb, emphasised by the repetition of that potent word "far," as she goes on:

Nor ease, nor peace that heart can knowThat, like the needle true,Turns at the touch of joy or woe,But, turning, trembles too.Far as distress the soul can wound,'Tis pain in each degree;'Tis bliss, but to a certain bound,Beyond, 'tis agony.

Nor ease, nor peace that heart can knowThat, like the needle true,Turns at the touch of joy or woe,But, turning, trembles too.

Far as distress the soul can wound,'Tis pain in each degree;'Tis bliss, but to a certain bound,Beyond, 'tis agony.

And there is not much less real passion, though the expression has become ironic instead of direct, in the concluding stanza:

And what of life remains to meI'll pass in sober ease:Half-pleased, contented I will be—Content but half to please.

Now it is probably hopeless to expect readers who have been thoroughly broken to other styles of poetry themselves to be contented, to be even "half-pleased" with this. The metre will seem to them jog-trot, the language hopelessly prosaic, the expression, as Nietzsche says of John Stuart Mill, "offensively clear"; the absence of any attempt at elaborate ornament or elaborate ugliness almost more offensive still. And it may also seemidle boasting or sheer mendacity to observe that there are people who delight in intricate versification, who love even metaphysical ambiguousness and obscurity; people for whom Blake is not too uncommonplace or Rossetti too flamboyant, or—to come to more recent days, while keeping to the equal waters of the dead—Mary Coleridge too problematic, who yet can enjoy this verse very much indeed, and feel that, having known it, they could not do without it, which some have held to be the great test of poetry. Indeed, to them, not the least interesting point about it is that itdoestake the form and colour of the time to so large an extent and vindicates its indispensableness thereby. On the other hand, if anyone says, "But I do not perceive the quiver, or feel the throb of which you talk," why, of course, there is nothing more to be done or said. For that person Mrs. Greville's work is undoubtedly not poetry. But whether his or her state is the more gracious, because of the fact, is a further question, though one on which we need not enter. The whole purport of this paper is once more to make an effort to establish the old position that there are many mansions in the Heaven of Poetry, and that the mere fact that some one does not care to live in or to recognise the existence of this or that among them does not prove that they ought to be pulled down or that they do not exist at all.

It may, however, be admitted—in fact no admission or confession is required, no idea of contesting or denying having been entertained—that neither the qualities ofGrongar Hillnor those of thePrayer, that still less the general characteristics of the group of romantic precursors from Collins to Blake distinguish eighteenth-century poetry generally. And it may in the same way be further allowed that some of the actual characteristics of this poetry in general are notstrictlypoetic at all. Its didacticism is perhaps the chief of these; but there are undoubtedly others. And we are busy not with what is not poetical in eighteenth-century verse, but with what is poetical in eighteenth-century poetry. There are two departments in which it is almost pre-eminent, in which it is certainly very distinguished. The strict poeticalness of both of them has indeed been denied by extremists. All of us probably have heard it said, perhaps some of us have said it ourselves, that rhetoric is not poetry; and (though here there may not have been so much agreement) that "light" verse, whether regularly satiric or not, is at best poetry by allowance and, short of the best, not poetry at all. Now undoubtedly some rhetoric is not poetry, and a good deal of light verse is poetry only by extremely generous allowance. But the complete ostracising of either kind from the poetical city involves two propositions which are contentious in the extreme, and which I and those who think with me hold to be abominable heresies. The one is that "All depends on the subject" in poetry, and the other is that "Verse is not an essential feature of poetry."Wemaintain that anything can be treated poetically, though some things are very rebellious to such treatment, and that though rhetoric is strictly a characteristic of prose, it cam be, so tospeak, super-saturated with poetry when it adopts poetical form, the same contention extending to the subjects of satiric or of merely light verse. A great deal of the abundant rhetorical verse of the eighteenth century is no doubt not poetry, or not very poetical poetry, and a good deal of its abundant satire, not a very little of itsvers de sociétéand trifles is not poetry or not very poetical. But, on the other hand, not a very little of both kinds is poetry, and the reason and origin of its poetical character are by no means uninteresting to trace. There is no room, and indeed not much occasion, to do this at length here. Suffice it to say that for its rhetorical verse the century was very much indebted to Dryden, and that for its light verse it was still more indebted to Prior.

The positions of the two were indeed different, for Dryden was a dead man when the century opened, though he had died on its very eve, while Prior was an actual member of its first great literary group. And, further, Dryden's influence, though it continued to some extent directly through the whole time, was largely exercised at second-hand through Pope, while Prior's was first-hand all through. For which reasons we need not say anything more here on Dryden himself, while we must say something on Prior. But the rhetorical influence which had produced such great poetry (for great it is, let who will gainsay) as the finest passages of Dryden's satires, the opening ofReligio Laici, the "wandering fires" paragraph inThe Hind and the Panther, and not a few things in the neglected plays, was well justified of its children in the following century. I have never seen any successful attempt to deny the name of poetry to such magnificent things as the close ofThe Dunciadand the close ofThe Vanity of Human Wishes. I have never seen any real fight at all made for this denial except the endeavour to turn them, as scapegoats, into the wilderness of rhetoric. And that, as I have said already, is really a begging of the question. Most certainly there is rhetoric which is not poetry—there is a very great deal of it—in fact most of it; as certainly there is rhetoric which is. And the passages which may claim that name in the eighteenth century, if never quite so great as the two just mentioned, are very numerous. There is that fine one in Tickell's epitaph on Cadogan which, after the eclipse of eighteenth-century verse in the earlier nineteenth, Thackeray was the first to rediscover:

Ah, no! when once the mortal yields to fateThe blast of Fame's sweet trumpet sounds too late—Too late to stay the spirit on its flightOr soothe the new inhabitant of light,

with its later address to Fame herself:

Thou music, warbling to the deafened ear!Thou incense, wasted on the funeral bier!

There is Akenside's still finerEpistle to Curio, which Macaulay laughed at rather ignobly as unpractical. Well, Akenside, like Macaulay himself, was a Whig, and I am a Tory; nor are the ideals expressed in the following linesby any means mine. But if they are not fine lines, if they are not, though in one of the outer provinces no doubt, poetical, I will acknowledge that I know nothing at all about poetry:

Ye shades immortal, who by Freedom led,Or in the field or on the scaffold bled,Bend from your radiant seats a joyful eye,And view the crown of all your labours nigh.See Freedom mounting her eternal throne,The sword submitted, and the laws her own;See public power chastised beneath her stand,With eyes intent and uncorrupted hand,See private life by wisest arts reclaimed,See ardent youth to noblest manners framed,See us acquire whate'er was sought by you,If Curio! only Curio! will be true.

Well, once more, Curio,aliasPulteney, wasnottrue, but deserted Akenside's party and became Earl of Bath and possessor of no small part thereof. And private life and ardent youth were not reclaimed much in the days of the historic Charteris and the fictitious Lovelace. And the practical realisation of something like Akenside's undoubted principles and aspirations was the French Revolution fifty and the Russian Revolution nearer two hundred years later. But all this has nothing to do with the question whether in this passage also rhetoric, which hardly anybody will deny to it, has not passed under the influence and received the transforming force of poetry. I say it has, though I am perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I myself like best. But one of the cries which the critic should never be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness, is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out. The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.

There is less specific prejudice against "light" poetry on the part of poetical highfliers than there is against poetical rhetoric, but there is some. Once more I venture to disallow this prejudicein totoas far as kind is concerned, though, of course, each individual specimen of that kind must pass its individual muster as a piece of intenser thought or feeling, expressed in appropriate language and inspired by the charm of verse-music. For that, though no one ever has defined or will define poetry, is one of the divers good approaches to a description of it. Now here, as was briefly said above, the eighteenth century possessed, for nearly the whole of its first quarter as an actual living practitioner, and for the whole of the rest of it as a past contemporary of still living persons, an unsurpassed general of light verse in Matthew Prior. On the whole I know few English poets whohave so seldom had full justice done to them. No competent judge, indeed, has ever denied Prior's excellence in pure lightness, but there have been frequent failures to allow for that undercurrent of seriousness, sadness, and almost passion—that "feeling in earnest while thinking in jest," according to the best definition of humour—which characterises him. Thackeray has, indeed, equalled, but in obvious and even frank following, the great lines written (or not written) in Mézeray'sHistory of France; but hardly anyone else has come near them in irony and melancholy and music, blended as three appeals in one. There is even a touch, though more than a touch would have been out of place, in the famousChild of Quality, and a great deal more, not quite so perfectly expressed, in theLines to Charles Montague. If the touch of sadness be for the moment unwelcome, there isDaphne and Apolloor the famousEnglish Padlock, with a dozen or several dozen others ready to hand. And to go to yet anothernuance, the recent discovery at Longleat ofJinny the Just, with its touches of sincere sorrow and the three unequalled stanzas of kindly irony:

Thus still, while her morning unseen fled away,In ord'ring the linen and making the tea,That she scarce could have time for the psalms of the day—And while after dinner the night came so soonThat half she proposed very seldom was done,With twenty "God bless me's, how this day has gone!"While she read, and accounted, and paid, and abated,Ate and drank, played and worked, laughed and cried, loved and hated,As answered the end of her being created,

Thus still, while her morning unseen fled away,In ord'ring the linen and making the tea,That she scarce could have time for the psalms of the day—

And while after dinner the night came so soonThat half she proposed very seldom was done,With twenty "God bless me's, how this day has gone!"

While she read, and accounted, and paid, and abated,Ate and drank, played and worked, laughed and cried, loved and hated,As answered the end of her being created,

especially with that last unsurpassable line; all these and many more exemplify and illustrate that indescribable raising of the expression—that making the common as if it were not common—which is the essence of poetry and the privilege of verse.

How this side of the matter was produced (in the mathematical sense) and maintained throughout the century would take many times the space of the present paper to show in anything but the briefest and barest epitome. Almost all Prior's own shorter later poems would have to be quoted; Swift, though so much greater in prose, and though best in verse on the severer side, especially in the magnificent and quite sufficiently authenticatedJudgment Dayverses, could not be left out; and it might be possible to make more fight than even lovers of the eighteenth century have recently made for Gray. But perhaps the scraps and orts of lesser men of letters—though sometimes not lessermen—show the strong point of the century even more convincingly. Where will you find more musical lightness of a certain easy but far from unpoetical kind than in those verses on Strawberry Hill in which Pulteney almost paid his rather heavy debts in more serious ways to the House of Walpole? Or than in the others in which he and Chesterfield combined to estimate "Hanover Bremen and Verden," that is to say,the whole continental dominions for which George the Second was making England fight, as worthless compared with the charms of Molly Lepell? Go lower still, take a professional littérateur and laureate like William Whitehead, to whom hardly anybody save Mr. Austin Dobson (and it is certainly no small exception) has been favourable, and read the piece on Celia, which is a more or less independent expansion of Ausonius on Crispa. It begins with a sort of pettish avowal of ignorance how the mischief of love came, and goes on with rather rude depreciations of the lady's face, figure, air, and even sense. Then it slides rapidly into a sort of grudging allowance:

Her voice, her touch,mightgive the alarm—'Twas both perhaps or neither,

and then capitulates headlong:

In short 'twas that provoking charmOf Celia altogether!

Trivial, of course, but then it ought to be trivial, and the trivial can be, and is, here super-trivialised.

One might go on, even in this skipping fashion, for a long time till one came to the great political satires of the close of the century, but once more time and space forbid. As it has been frivolously said:

You have only to searchIn Dodsley and Pearch

(the standard ten volumes of eighteenth-century miscellaneous poetry) and you will find; though, of course, if you only look for bad things you will find them, too, in plenty. But even this collection is by no means exhaustive, and with some of the more famous verse-writers it does not deal at all; while we have in this survey confessedly left most of them alone. What has been intended is to show that making of the common uncommon by means of treatment in verse was not an unknown thing between 1700 and 1800; that it was attempted and achieved in various kinds. Finally, if the attempts were rarely and the achievements hardly ever in kinds that can be called the very highest, one may at least urge that there is not an absolute vacuum between the loftiest mountain-tops of poetry and the actual plain of prose—that Parnassus has lower slopes, some of which are not soverylow

6Samuel Butler: a Memoir. By H. Festing Jones. 2 vols. Macmillan. 42s. net.

By EDWARD SHANKS

SAMUELButler was a philosopher whose favourite doctrine was expressed in the wordspas trop de zèle; and he spent a great part of his life complaining a little too eagerly that the world was not sufficiently zealous in the appreciation of his works. His reception and his reputation did indeed deserve a considerable part of the almost excessive attention which he lavished on them; for at this moment, now that the first is accomplished and the second enormous, they make a very curious subject for study. In his notebooks they occur again and again as themes for his meditation. "I am theenfant terrible," he says, "of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." "I have chosen the fighting-road," he says elsewhere, "rather than the hang-on-to-a-great-man road, and what can a man who does this look for except that people should try to silence him in whatever way they think will be most effectual? In my case they have thought it best to pretend that I am non-existent." There is something pathetic in the spectacle of a man pursuing "the fighting-road" with no one to fight him and heaving bricks into the middle of persons who obstinately continue to ignore his existence. There is something more pathetic in the spectacle of an original thinker and a great wit sitting down in isolation to pen these apologies for his obscure position, always affecting to be indifferent to it and never deceiving anyone. For Butler was not indifferent to his lack of success. Had his been a true and not an assumed indifference he could not have returned to the subject so often as he does and in so many keys. He betrays himself again and again beyond mistake. He was an intensely, a morbidly sensitive man, one to whom success would have been very pleasant. He was damaged, and confirmed in oddity, by the want of it. He missed it because of what first started him in oddity—that is to say, an unfortunate childhood.

"The subject of this memoir," so Butler once suggested that his biography ought to begin, "was the son of rich but dishonest parents." Dishonest they may have been: respectable they certainly were. Dr. Butler, the first distinguished member of the family, was for twenty-seven years headmaster of Shrewsbury, a man with all the attributes of the great schoolmasters of the early nineteenth century, an imposing figure, who, towards the end of his life, became Bishop of Lichfield. His son was not so distinguished. His sole claim to be remembered, if his canonry be disregarded, is the fact that somehow or other he became the father of Samuel Butler. There is much detail, in Mr. Festing Jones's enormous book, on Butler'searly life and his relation to his parents; but there is nothing quite so significant as an anecdote which occurs in the second volume:

At Saas he made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. MacCarthy, who were staying in the hotel with their son, an Eton boy. One day the father and son had been for an excursion and the father returned alone. The anxious mother, hearing that her boy preferred speculating in short cuts to accompanying his father, borrowed a red umbrella to make herself conspicuous, and went out "to look for Desmond." Presently she came upon Butler loaded up with his camera and toiling along on his way back after a fatiguing day. He told her he had seen a little white figure among the trees on the mountain-side and had no doubt it was her son who, he assured her, would be all right, and he himself was loitering, intending to be overtaken so that they might arrive at the hotel together."You see," he explained, "I know he will be late for dinner, and it may make things a little easier for him if he does not come in alone."Years afterwards Mrs. MacCarthy told me that she had been readingThe Way of All Flesh, and had remembered this incident and had for the first time understood why Butler thought that her son would require the presence of an elderly gentleman to protect him from his parents if he came in late for dinner.

"You see," he explained, "I know he will be late for dinner, and it may make things a little easier for him if he does not come in alone."

Years afterwards Mrs. MacCarthy told me that she had been readingThe Way of All Flesh, and had remembered this incident and had for the first time understood why Butler thought that her son would require the presence of an elderly gentleman to protect him from his parents if he came in late for dinner.

This throws a curious and unexpected sidelight on Butler's childhood from the effects of which he never recovered. His parents learnt the art of bringing up children from a book which adjured them to "Break your child's will early or he will break yours later on." They did not break it, but unquestionably they deformed it. This may have been done on principle. To Butler, however, it sometimes seemed to spring from other motives. "I have felt," he once said of his father, "that he has always looked upon me as something which he could badger with impunity." He said that, like Ernest Pontifex, with regard to his father he could remember no feeling during his childhood except fear and shrinking.

Nor was this life of terror and pain lightened by any gracious or liberal influences. The world which Mr. Festing Jones exhibits to us in his opening chapters is full of the drabbest and most depressing horrors of Early Victorianism. Its measure can be taken by a single story which Butler preserved:

Archdeacon Bather was lunching with my grandfather some two or three years after the Archdeacon had lost his first wife. Dr. Butler dearly loved a hard crust of bread baked nearly black, and it so happened that a piece was set by his plate with hardly any crust, and what little there was, very thin. My aunt, then Miss Butler, observing what had happened, at once said:"Oh, Papa, this won't do at all! I will find you a piece more to your liking." Whereon she went to the kitchen and returned with a crust baked exactly to Dr. Butler's taste.When Archdeacon Bather saw this he said to himself: "That is the young woman for me"; and shortly afterwards he proposed and was accepted.

"Oh, Papa, this won't do at all! I will find you a piece more to your liking." Whereon she went to the kitchen and returned with a crust baked exactly to Dr. Butler's taste.

When Archdeacon Bather saw this he said to himself: "That is the young woman for me"; and shortly afterwards he proposed and was accepted.

Readers will remember the scene inThe Way of All Fleshin which Theobald, driving away for his honeymoon, insists that Christina shall order their dinner at the first stop, and in which Christina protests with tears hernervousness, and Theobald replies, "It is a wife's duty to order her husband's dinner; you are my wife, and I shall expect you to order mine." A sensitive child, neglected or even ill-treated by its parents, might, if the relations of the parents between themselves had anything beautiful or kindly, see some possibilities of happiness in the institution of the family. But Samuel Butler was brought up in a world where no such possibilities seemed to exist. He came to believe, Mr. Festing Jones tells us, that, like Habakkuk,le père de famille est capable de tout. It has often been maintained that the greatest poets and artists do nothing throughout life but draw on those fresh and lovely impressions which they have gathered in childhood. When he was a child Butler acquired habits of suspicion against all those surrounding him who were not connected with him by freely-chosen bonds of friendship. Canon Butler bullied him on moral grounds; and he grew to suspect every claim made on him, every exhortation addressed to him, on moral grounds. Ernest Pontifex is described on one occasion as assuming the expression of a puppy which is being scolded for something it does not understand; and Butler did indeed develop some of the habits of an ill-treated dog. He shied and snarled at a lifted hand, which might have been lifted in kindness or in ignorance of his existence. Having, as he supposed, penetrated the fraud of the family, he felt a distrust of all human institutions. He suspected the world of being in a conspiracy to pretend that parents were naturally kind to their children, that Christ rose from the dead, and that Tennyson was a great poet. And, turning from all these discredited shows, he devoted himself in isolation to the care of his own idiosyncrasies and the companionship of a very few, very intimate friends.

Here, where he might in one case have suspected with justice, he was all blind trust. The story of Charles Paine Pauli is one of the most extraordinary that have been brought to light in human records in recent years. A correspondent who knew him and admired him wrote not long ago to theTimes, not to controvert Mr. Festing Jones's account of the relations between him and Butler, but to protest, in an almost agonised manner, that there must be some explanation of it; and this is precisely what the reader, who did not know Pauli, feels when he comes upon these pages. But there seems to be no explanation.

In 1859 Butler rebelled against his father, and finally decided that he could not take Orders, basing his refusal on "doubts," which in after years seemed to him no less absurd than the doctrines against which they were directed. As a result of this, he emigrated to New Zealand, taking with him an allowance from Canon Butler and a promise of support in capital, in order that he might establish himself as a sheep-farmer. In this occupation he was, against all the probabilities, moderately successful and, largely owing to the rapidly-developing condition of the colony, managed to turn an original capital of £4400 into the sum of £8000. But finding the life uncongenial, he concluded that it would be wiser to invest his money in New Zealand, where the current rate of interest was 10 per cent., and go home and live onthe proceeds. While he was making preparations to this end, a previous slight acquaintance with Pauli developed into an intimate friendship. Pauli was handsome, fascinating, well dressed, ineffably well mannered. He was, in fact, the Towneley ofThe Way of All Flesh, though Providence, not doing as well by him as by Towneley, had omitted to make him rich. He was actually poor and in ill-health, and anxious to go to England in order that he might recover. He then proposed to get called to the Bar and to return to New Zealand to practise. Butler, who believed himself to be worth about £800 a year, promptly lavished on this creature the generosity and tenderness which had found no outlet during his childhood. He offered to lend him £100 for his passage, and to allow him £200 a year for three years—that is, until his return to New Zealand as a barrister. They accordingly made the passage together; and Butler kept his promise, and more than kept it, extending the allowance, even through the time of his acutest financial difficulties, until Pauli's death in 1897. It was then discovered that at one time Pauli had been earning £900 a year, and that even at the last he earned between £500 and £700. He left a fortune of £9000; but Butler was not mentioned in the will and received his invitation to the funeral from the undertaker.

A singular and enlightening circumstance in the intercourse between Butler and Pauli unhappily prevents Mr. Festing Jones from making this astonishing but veracious narrative entirely lifelike. The charming young man did not reciprocate the feelings of his pathetic and somewhat uncouth adorer. "I had felt from the very beginning," says Butler, "that my intimacy with Pauli was only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored him." Pauli confessed that he had never been more miserable in his life than once when he spent a holiday with Butler at Dieppe. Consequently it soon came about that the essential part of the relations between them was the punctual payment of the allowance. Latterly, they only met three times a week, when Pauli lunched in Butler's chambers. He discontinued informing Butler of his changes of address, so that at the end Butler did not know where he was living, and Mr. Festing Jones met him "only on business, for he would have nothing to do with any of Butler's friends in any other way." Butler learnt of his death from an announcement in theTimes.

Truly a mysterious creature! And his friend is very comprehensible in supposing that there must be some explanation. Possibly Mr. Festing Jones, if he had met him otherwise than purely on business, might have given us some impression of his personality which would have let in light on this dark business. As it is, we must content ourselves with wonder at the extraordinary situations which human nature is capable of creating. But this unhappy friendship is worth examining, apart from its intrinsic curiosity, because it presents in extremity an essential and determining part of Butler's life. His devotion and loyalty to his friends were perhaps the most beautiful things in his character and do much to redeem his somewhat unlovely attitude of snarling and suspicion towards all strangers.

Life might be thought to have treated him savagely in following up his parents with the hardly less cruel Pauli. He disguised the shock of his discovery on Pauli's death by remarking that he would now save not only £200 a year, but also the cost of those three lunches a week in Clifford's Inn. Yet a nature that opened itself so trustingly, so defencelessly, must have suffered on finding its bounty abused. But in his other friends, in Miss Savage, in his clerk, Alfred Emery Cathie, and in Mr. Festing Jones he had ample compensations. He was a man who at first sight was not readily liked. He was awkward and nervous in the company of strangers, and it is likely that he did not disguise so well as he supposed his grave misgivings that they were either pretentious scoundrels or conceited hypocrites. He was always badly and carelessly dressed; and though his portraits, when one is used to them and can associate them with the best one knows of his mind, become attractive, there can be no denial that his appearance was on the most lenient showing decidedly grotesque, that of a difficult, taciturn, maliciously observant gnome, roughly carved in a hard wood. It took some time and some degree of intuition to penetrate behind this mask. Those who did so were rewarded and rewarded him. Miss Savage, who used to meet him first at Heatherley's art-classes, was not attracted by him for a considerable time. When at last she was, it was by a flash of remarkable intuition. In commenting on one of his books, she writes:

I like the cherry-eating scene, too, because it reminded me of your eating cherries when first I knew you. One day when I was going to the gallery, a very hot day, I remember, I met you on the shady side of Berners Street eating cherries out of a basket. Like your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word. I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from anyone else.

It is not certain whether Miss Savage became a Butlerian or whether Butler acquired something of what we consider his characteristic attitude of mind from her. If it was not so, then her spirit leapt at once to answer his as soon as she had perceived the possibility of common interests between them, for her first letters to him are written in his own vein. She entered immediately into his concerns, read all his books in manuscript, criticised them, gave them more praise than they received from anyone else, and abused his enemies with a gusto equal to his. The only trouble between them in their long connection was his gnawing fear that she wanted to marry him. And he did not want to marry anyone, let alone her who was

Plain and lame and fat and short,Forty and overkind.

But if all these disabilities had been removed, he would still have been disinclined to marry her. He did not believe in marriage, had a hatred of the family; and he slunk away snarling from the danger like a terror-strickenwild animal at the sight of a trap, only to reproach himself in after years for unkindness to his friend. But his relations with women were not, and he did not intend that they should be, of the sort that lead to marriage. He had mistresses, whom he visited. Mr. J. B. Yeats, in a recent paper of reminiscences, has repeated his avowals on this point in a manner which conveys well enough Butler's view that his lapses were caused by a necessity of the flesh. Mr. Festing Jones reinforces this impression. One of his mistresses, referred to as "Madame," was, after a long connection, allowed to visit his chambers in Clifford's Inn. No other gained this privilege; and Butler extended it to her as he might have done to an old and well-tried servant. Butler did not love these women, he frequented them. He was insensible to the notion that there might be anything beautiful in the relations between the sexes, as he was insensible to the notion that there might be anything of value written in verse. Theobald and Christina pretended to like poetry: Theobald and Christina pretended to love one another and him. It was all of a piece with their pretence that Christianity was a religion of kindliness and enlightenment.

So he remained a bachelor, and, when Miss Savage was dead, contented himself with the intimate companionship of Mr. Jones and Alfred, his clerk. After he had resigned the ambition of becoming a painter, after his odd and disastrous excursion in the world of business, his daily life was that of an eccentric gentleman with a small independent income. He read and wrote in the British Museum, he went for walks in the country and took holidays in Italy, he published his books at his own expense, and he scrambled out of invitations to dinner as best he could. For a hobby he wrote music in collaboration with Mr. Festing Jones, oratorios which were to be as much like Handel's oratorios as possible. The first of them,Narcissus, was inspired by his own misfortunes in business, and the final chorus ran:

How blest the prudent man, the maiden pure,Whose income is both ample and secure,Arising from consolidated ThreePer Cent. Annuities, paid quarterly!

"We remembered Handel's treatment of 'continually,'" says Mr. Festing Jones, "and thought we could not do better than imitate it for our words 'paid quarterly.'"

And so his life went on and his interests drifted through the theory of evolution, the authorship of theOdyssey, the life of his grandfather, and the meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The sales of his books pursued a course by no means so varied, but steadily declined. In 1899, when he drew up a statement of profit and loss, the average sales of his eleven books, excludingErewhon, which was the first, amounted to 306 copies each. Of hisSelections from Previous Works, 120 copies were sold in fifteen years. OfThe Authoress of the Odyssey, 165 copies were sold. He might well have added discouragementto his first cause of bitterness. The religion of Christ produced Canon Butler, the religion of science produced Darwin, the religion of good looks and good breeding produced Pauli. On paper he was indomitable. He swore he had enjoyed life, that on the balance his good luck overbalanced the bad. But he swore a little too often, he explained a little too much in detail for this to have been quite true. And then, at the very end of his life, the luck turned, and his last book, by a strange irony, was produced at the publisher's own risk, the greatest triumph in his literary career which Butler was able to see since the success of his first book. After he was dead his reputation, magically assisted with incantations by Mr. Bernard Shaw and others, sprang up to an amazing height, like the plant grown from the Indian enchanter's bean.

Now the world is confronted with a situation in which the neglected philosopher of Clifford's Inn has attained an importance he never dreamt of and perhaps would not have approved. "Above all things," he said, "let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing inme." This useful motto was printed on the menu of the first Erewhon dinner; but a great number of his disciples have disregarded the admonition. I was once the witness of one undergraduate trying to proselytise another and telling him that it was a worthy ambition to desire to be like Christ. "I don't want to be like anyone else," replied the second undergraduate, "but if I did, I shouldn't choose Christ, I should choose Samuel Butler." This is at once an extreme instance and one strictly guarded against Butler's own disapproval: for the kernel of the remark would meet with his applause. But it illustrates the direction in which many of his admirers have more frenetically rushed. It is an ironic fate for so ironic a philosopher that his teaching should have become a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for so many solemn and ridiculous persons.

What, after all, is his total achievement? He himself summed up what he considered to be his life-work in a statement which is not dated but which must have been written in 1899 or later. It begins with (1) The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease [Erewhon], and ends with (17) The elucidation of Shakespeare'sSonnets[Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered.] "The foregoing," he continues, "is the list of my mares'-nests, and it is, I presume, this list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares'-nests in his diatribe on myOdysseytheory in theClassical Review." The two to which he probably attached most importance, to judge from the bitterness of his remarks on their reception, were his intervention into the great evolution dispute and his great discovery that theOdysseywas written by a female inhabitant of Trapani in Sicily. With regard to the second he continually complained that no classical scholar had ever replied to his arguments. It was once remarked in answer to this, that if a classical scholar published a book arguing that no player of Rugby football ought to be allowed to pass the ball to another without obtaining a signed receipt for it, the great community of Rugby footballers, intent on other matters, wouldprobably ignore his suggestion. Butler's claim may perhaps be left there. Yet he did apparently take it seriously, in spite of his failure to deal with the singular fact that no scrap of confirmation of his theory has survived from the writings or the traditions of antiquity. His "mares'-nests," he said, "were simply sovereigns which he found lying in public places and which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up." They were mostly, however, one cannot help suspecting, recommended to him less because they seemed to be sovereigns than because other people would not pick them up. They were, in fact, the notions of a crank, who, having acquired a distrust of the rest of the world, took pains to differ from it as much as he could.

His theories of evolution hold a different position. Darwin's theory has now been so greatly modified, as much by his supporters as by his opponents, that it cannot be said any longer to hold the field as he first presented it; and Butler's attitude has been in a manner justified. But this change has been accomplished not by the acceptance of Butler's views but by the work of experimental biologists. He did, in fact, offer many general principles, some well founded, some mistaken, all stimulating, for the consideration of practical workers; and it would not be possible to assert, without an exhaustive enquiry into the history of the matter, that his writings have had no influence on the development of science. But Charles Darwin and his followers were practical men—men no doubt with faults, with the intolerance and impatience of the laity that are often to be found in the scientific investigator. It is not hard to see why they received Butler with tepid interest, and finally ignored him when he forsook their path of enquiry. For they did ignore him: they did not, as he supposed, conspire to silence him. He seems to have believed that Darwin was a sort of Anti-Christ malevolently determined to force on humanity a diabolical belief of his own invention; and he was only too ready to suspect him of unscrupulous dealing and machinations. When he conceived that Darwin had engineered an attack on him, though he obtained an expression of regret for an accident, he flung violently into print, and did, though he remained ignorant of the fact, get from Darwin and his friends the attention as an enemy which they would not bestow on him as a scientist. His letter to theAthenæumseriously perturbed Darwin, who drafted two replies to it, and submitted them for advice to the members of his family and to Professor Huxley. The advice given was against replying; and Butler was accordingly confirmed in his opinion. But this was an opinion which a less suspicious man would have been slower in forming and readier to discard.

Darwin was not, in his career or in his handling of Butler, a model of the urbane virtues. Butler did right to protest against the sacerdotal attitude which Victorian men of science frequently adopted. But he did wrong not to realise that Darwin did not take him altogether seriously, and why this was so. Butler's challenging manner of writing, the prickly defensiveness which he developed on the smallest provocation, must have been disagreeable tothe great investigator who had spent years of careful research into the problems which Butler airily settled at his writing-table in the intervals of other pursuits. Darwin is perhaps to blame, but not so greatly to blame as Butler contended, if he regarded Butler at first as a well-disposed, and then as an ill-disposed, amateur; and that was in effect his view of the whole matter. When he sentEvolution Old and Newto Dr. Krause, he expressed the hope that the German writer "would not expend much powder and shot on Mr. Butler, for he really is not worthy of it. His book is merely ephemeral." And it was in fact ephemeral or nearly so. Butler's works on evolution contain many inspired guesses; but the inherent value of these ceases to have much more than a historical interest when they are confirmed by practical observation. If they are not so confirmed they remain open to question, though they may have their uses in suggesting paths for research. Butler's place in science is somewhat below that of Goethe, who did after all make a practical discovery which remains valid to-day.

Some of his "mares'-nests," then, were "mares'-nests" from the beginning. Others, neglected when they might have been useful, had begun to be superannuated when they first attracted attention. But Butler, apart from his theories and his discoveries, remains as an observer of life and a teacher of conduct. Passages of this nature exist in all his works; but, generally speaking, his claim to be accepted as a philosopher rests on five books,Erewhon,Erewhon Revisited, theNote-books,The Way of All Flesh, and Mr. Festing Jones's biography.

Mr. Festing Jones observes that "I was struck by his uncompromising sincerity. If a subject interested him, he took infinite pains to find out all he could about it first-hand, thought it over and formed an opinion of his own, without reference to what anyone else thought or said." In demonstration of this, Mr. Jones relates the following reminiscence:

We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her; I said, as though taking the odd trick with the ace of trumps:"Well, at all events, she wrote three splendid novels."He replied in a low voice, reluctantly but decidedly: "They are not splendid."These four words shifted the subject under discussion from the splendour or otherwise of Charlotte Brontë's novels to the sincerity or otherwise of my opinion.

We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her; I said, as though taking the odd trick with the ace of trumps:

"Well, at all events, she wrote three splendid novels."

He replied in a low voice, reluctantly but decidedly: "They are not splendid."

These four words shifted the subject under discussion from the splendour or otherwise of Charlotte Brontë's novels to the sincerity or otherwise of my opinion.

It was no doubt well that Mr. Jones's sincerity should be probed; and this is in fact what Butler does at his best. He challenges established opinions and forces those who hold them to consider whether they have any good ground for doing so. But the reader who is not dazzled by Butler's originality of judgment in this instance will ask himself whether the sentence which Mr. Jones quotes is anything more than a very facile assertion. He will then perhaps ask himself how often Butler's original pronouncements on established reputations are of the same order. He will certainly find some. In theNote-booksthere is an elaborate arraignment of Raphael. It may not be convincing; but the critic has produced his arguments. Here,also, may be found Butler's explanation of his hostility towards post-Handelian music. But one may search the two volumes of the biography for a considerable time without finding his appreciation of any book published in his own time. Here, again, we must be just: Butler did like one book. It was calledPusley, or My Summer in a Garden; its author was Charles Dudley Warner; and Butler said, "I likePusleyvery much and have read it all."

But the majority of his opinions are on the model of the much-quoted passage in theNote-books:

Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt Italian at sixty in order to study Dante, and we knew 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.

That is an exceedingly witty way of expressing an indolent prejudice; and those who share that particular chain of prejudices may well rejoice in it, without supposing that it proves their case. But this particular form of humour and Butler's independence of attitude would be slightly more entertaining if he had occasionally replaced the reputations he smashed with these hammer-strokes by some discovery of his own. Unfortunately, it is not easy to remember any unknown author whom he brought into the light—unless Nausicaa be taken as an example.

But this is, in a way, the defect of his qualities. It is easy, too easy, to grow incensed with him when he inanely doubts any convention or opinion that comes in sight. It is possible to remark of him, adapting the remark made of Dr. Johnson, that he may have been very sensible at bottom, but that there was a great deal of nonsense on top. But the fact remains that by challenging everything he did detect a great many frauds, and he did let the light of scepticism into a great many topics where scepticism is a healthy attitude. If his view of family life was bigoted and unreasonable, there is a great deal of use in the reminder that family life is not necessarily perfect and needs a deal of watching to keep it from being very imperfect indeed. Some of the assumptions he challenged have now disappeared. We no longer believe that good looks and good manners are the unmistakable indices of an ill heart; and we are becoming convinced that it is better to have these attributes than to be without them. But these lessons can be enforced as Butler continually enforces them. It was his fate that life made him a suspicious man. But suspicion made him a doubting, questioning, and therefore enquiring man. And his natural gift of humour taught him what he has ever since been teaching others, that it is possible to be serious without being solemn. This was perhaps the most valuable thing he had to say to a society emerging from the Victorian era and passing over into another that was to be as desperately serious as we are now realising. It is a reflection pathetically ironical that his loudest followers in these days should be persons whom he would very likely have described as Simeonites of the intellect.

Of the value of his writings judged as literature it is not so easy to speak with confidence.Erewhonis not so much a novel as a collection of essays roughly pressed into a common mould. They are not merely disconnected, they are also composed on different planes of satire, at different removes from reality, so that the reader as he goes from chapter to chapter has an uncomfortable sense of being jolted from level to level. Yet the satire, on its varying levels, is extraordinarily easy, ingenious, and penetrating; and, in another key again, the opening chapters make one of the best introductions to a story of exploration ever written.Erewhon Revisitedis the book of an old man; and it has much of the beauty so often to be found in such compositions. The manner of its writing was very different from that of its predecessor, and it is impossible to complain of any unevenness in its structure. Nevertheless the satire is not so easy. It is a little strained, a little too ingenious, a little too closely calculated to make good reading. Butler himself picked out the best part of the book when he complained that none of his critics had noticed the idea of a father attempting by noble conduct to deserve the good opinion of a newly-found and adored son. Thus, at the end of his life, still haunted by early memories, he attempted to fashion in imagination what should have been and completely to invert the facts of his own childhood.

The Way of All Fleshis precisely the opposite of this. It has long been known to be of the photographic order of novels; but how minutely photographic it is we could not know until the appearance of Mr. Jones's book. This need not, and should not, affect our judgment of it, even when we are informed that Theobald's delightful letters are almost literal transcriptions from those of Canon Butler. We can very well continue to admire the inimitable accuracy and vividness with which these real scenes are described, while we suffer from the painful bitterness of this exhaustive improvisation on the old theme of parents and children. But the whole book is not of equal merit. It begins to weaken at the point where Ernest's career diverges from Butler's own experience; and when it reaches the catastrophe it sinks into improbabilities from which it never recovers. The Ernest, whose thoughts and feelings at Cambridge have been described, and who was Butler, would never have made that disastrous mistake over Miss Maitland's real profession. Butler did not in fact ever make it, nor did he ever develop into the super-prig which Ernest became after his release from prison.

Butler's reputation will probably rest more and more, as time goes on, on hisNote-booksand on Mr. Jones's biography, which might be described together as the story of a distrustful man. Indeed, posterity reading these alone, will probably miss little of what it should retain: for Butler was careful of his best things, and most of them are to be found here as well as in the books in which he enshrined them among more perishable material. On the strength of these two books he will remain a definite and unforgettable character, though he may, probably will, recede in importance, perhaps evento the level of those wits whose "table-talk" is read by the curious in every generation.

But even so, there he will be still: a man whom fate tortured into such distrust of his fellows as to make him question everything and teach others to do the same. He suffered intensely in the process that made him what he was: he suffered again, much more than he would ever admit, from the ineffaceable results of the process. "I do not deny, however," he bursts out, "that I have been ill-used. I have been used abominably." This cry rings truer, echoes longer in the memory, than the assertion which follows that he considered the balance of good fortune to have been on his side. By one of those contrivances of events with which fate marks the lives of distinguished men, an atmosphere of distrust followed him on to his death-bed and beyond it. For the doctors disagreed during his last illness, and Mr. Festing Jones doubts the accuracy of the causes given in the certificate of death.

By MAURICE HEWLETT

I HAVEoften wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly in life, thank goodness, nothing happened. Jane Austen, it has been objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly did—but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events; events—well, that means that there were collisions. They may have been mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and there were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of cases, there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to be interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it is not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most. No, it is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which we care about; and as mental process is always going on, and the state of the soul never the same for two moments together, there is ample material for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish, which might indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper or the Annual Register. Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will read anybody else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives in a cage, cut off from every other man-Jack; because we are incapable of knowing what is going on in the mind of our nearest and dearest, and because we burn for the assurance we may get by evidence of homogeneity procurable from any human source. Man is a creature of social instinct condemned by his nature to be solitary. Creatures in all outward respects similar to himself are awhirl about him. They cannot help him, nor he them; he cannot even be sure, for all he may assume it, that they share his hope and calling.

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