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Page 55
A COMMENTARY UPON BUTLER
Mr. Festing Jones has written a large book about his friend, and
written it very well.[A] It is candid, and it is sincere; the work
of a lover at once of Butler and of truth; it neither extenuates the
faults nor magnifies the virtues of its subject so far as the author
could perceive them; and it makes it possible to understand why Butler
was so underrated in his lifetime, though not at once why he was so
overrated after his death. That remains a problem which cannot be
resolved by saying that his friends trumpeted him into it, or that
posthumous readers enjoyed seeing him belabour his betters, which his
contemporaries had not. It is true that _The Way of All Flesh_ did not
appear until he was dead, and also true that _The Way of All Flesh_
is a witty and malicious novel, whose malice and wit Mr. Shaw had
prepared London to admire. Perhaps it is true, once more, that we are
more scornful of the old orthodoxy than our fathers were, and less
careful whose feelings are hurt. But I must confess that I should not
have expected any age to be so complacent about caricaturing one's
father and mother as our own was. However, for those who admire that
sort of thing--and there must be many--I doubt if they will find
it better done anywhere, with more gusto or more point. Dickens is
believed to have put his father into _David Copperfield_, not, I
think, his mother. But one can love Mr. Micawber, and Dickens would
not have so drawn him without love. We are led to Butler's favourite
distinction between _gnosis_ and _agap�_. There's no doubt about the
_gnosis_ that went to the making of Theobald and Christina. But where
was _agap�_?
[Footnote A: _Samuel Butler, Author of "Erewhon"_ (1835-1902): _a
Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. Two Vols. Macmillan, 1919.]
Butler was in many respects a fortunate man, and should have been
a happy one. He had a good education, good health, a sufficiency of
means. Even when his embarrassments were at their heaviest he could
always afford to do as he pleased. He could draw a little, play a
little, write more than a little; he loved travel, and covered all
Southern Europe in his time; he had good friends, a good mistress, a
faithful servant; he had a strong sense of humour, feared nobody, had
a hundred interests. Why, then, did he think himself a failure? Why
was the sense of it to cloud much of his writing, and much of Mr.
Jones's biography?
He had his drawbacks--who has not? He did not get on with his father,
criticised his mother; his sisters scraped the edges of his nerves; a
man to whom he was extremely generous betrayed him. The like of these
things must happen to mortal men. Butler knew that as well as any one.
But his books were not read; the great men whom he attacked ignored
him. He thought himself to be something, they treated him as nothing,
and the public followed them. He knew all about it, and Mr. Jones
knows all about it. He had unseated the secure with _Erewhon_,
outraged the orthodox with _Fairhaven_, flouted the biologists,
himself being no biologist, plunged into Homeric criticism without
arch�ology, swum against the current in Shakespearianism, enjoyed
himself immensely, playing _l'enfant terrible_, and treading on
every corn he could find--and then he was angry because the sufferers
pretended that they had no corns. How could he expect it both ways?
If he was serious, why did he write as if he was not? And if he had
tender feelings himself--as he obviously had--why should he expect
all the people he attacked with his pinpricks to have none? It was not
reasonable.
The answer to these questions is to be found in some little weaknesses
of his which Mr. Jones's biography, all unconsciously, reveals.
Butler, it is clear, was morbidly vain. Many writers are so, but few
let their vanity take them so far. Learn from Mr. Jones. In 1879 he
and Butler met Edward Lear in an inn at Varese. He told them a little
tale about a tipsy man from Manchester--rather a good little tale. "I
do not remember that Edward Lear told us anything else particularly
amusing, but then neither did we tell him anything particularly
amusing. Butler was seldom at his best with a celebrated man. He
was not successful himself, and had a sub-aggressive feeling that
a celebrated man probably did not deserve his celebrity; if he did
deserve it, let him prove it." There is no getting away from that
symptom, which is as unreasonable as it is perverse. Celebrated men
are not usually so anxious to "prove" their celebrity as all that
comes to. It is bad enough to be "celebrated." It was hard lines on
old Lear to sulk with him because he would not show off. If he had
wanted to do that he would not have gone to Varese. But that is
mortified vanity. The same thing happened when he met Mr. Birrell at
dinner in 1900. Then it was the celebrity who took pains to save
his host and hostess from a frosty dinner party. The same thing is
recalled of meetings with Sir George Trevelyan and Lord Morley earlier
in the book. It is all pretty stupid; but when a man is ridden by a
vanity like that there can be no healthy pleasure to be got out of
writing for its own sake. You must have your public flat on its back
before your vanity will be soothed.
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