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Page 56
Another failing of Butler's, shared, I am sorry to say, by Mr. Jones,
was a love of little jokes and an inability to see when and where they
could be worked off, or perhaps I ought to say when they were worked
out. A great many of them were pinpricks rather than jokes; he only
made them "to annoy." Well, they did, and they do, annoy--not because
they were jokes, but because they were feeble jokes. "If it is thought
desirable to have an article on the _Odyssey_, I have abundant, most
aggravating and impudent matter about Penelope and King Menelaus"--so
he wrote to Mr. H. Quilter, who naturally jumped at it. Here is
another gem which Mr. Jones seems to admire: "There will be no
comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements--I mean
we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of suicide, nor cheap
and easy divorce--till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid."
All that can be said for that is that it is vivacious, and that it has
helped Mr. Shaw, who has certainly bettered the instruction. There
are others which are a good deal more annoying than that. Jokes about
infanticide and Jesus Christ defeat themselves, and always will. They
are on a level with jokes about death or one's mother; they recoil
and smite the smiter on the nose. I confess that I find the joke
about Charles Lamb irritating. Butler said that he could not read
Lamb because Canon Ainger went to tea with his (Butler's) sisters. His
gibes at Dante are as bad--in fact they are worse, aggravated by the
fact that, having never read (he assures us) a word of him, he puts
him down as one of the seven humbugs of Christendom. He would not read
Dante because he had liked Virgil, nor Virgil because Tennyson liked
him. "We are not amused," as Queen Victoria said of another little
joke.
The correspondence with Miss Savage, again, does not reveal a pleasant
personality. Indeed, the discomfort one gets from it is at times
painful. Mr. Jones says that she bored Butler, and I don't wonder at
it. The wonder would rather be that she did not set his teeth on
edge if it were not that he was nearly as bad as she was. It is not
a matter of facetiousness--I dare say he never tired of that; and
perhaps the thinness of the jokes--little misreadings of hymns, things
about the Mammon of Righteousness, and so on--in a kind of way added
to the fun of them. It is their subject matter which offends. They
commonly turn upon the health of the respective parents and the
chances of an attack carrying them off. _Queste cose_, as the hero
said of the suicide, _non si fanno_. But I suppose that if you could
put your mother's death-bed into a novel, you could do almost anything
in that kind.
I am myself singularly moved, with Coventry Patmore, to love the
lovely who are not beloved--but not the unlovely. Those little jokes,
and many others, are by no means lovely, and if Butler repeated them
as often as Mr. Jones does, it is not surprising that he was avoided
by many who missed or dreaded the point. His lecture on the _Humour
of Homer_ made Mr. Garnett unhappy and Miss Jane Harrison cross, Mr.
Jones says. I don't doubt it. It is very cheap humour indeed, and no
more Homer's than mine is. It is entirely Butler's humour about
Homer, a very different thing. Its impudence did not mitigate
the aggravation, but made it more acute. If he had picked out a
fairy-tale, rather than two glorious poems--_Little Red Riding Hood_,
_The Three Bears_, _Rumpelstiltskin_, for example--he could have been
as facetious as he pleased. But that would not suit him. There would
have been no darts to fling. Butler was a _banderillero_. All right;
but then don't complain that the Miss Harrisons, Darwins, and others
shake off your darts and go about their business, which, oddly enough,
is not to gore and trample the _banderillero_; don't be huffed because
you are held for a _gamin_. Butler wanted it both ways.
The conclusion is irresistible that Butler's controversial books were
not primarily written to discover truth, but because he was vain
and wished at once to be sensational and annoying. He resented the
greatness of the great, or the celebrity of the celebrated; his vanity
was wounded. He sought, then, for "most aggravating and impudent
matter" to wound them in turn who had vicariously wounded him. He
"learned" them to be toads, or celebrities, or tried to. But his love
of little jokes betrayed him. He, a sort of minnow, thought to trouble
the pool where the great fish were oaring at ease by flirting the
surface with his tail. It seemed to him that he was throwing up a fine
volume of water; but the great fish held their way unconscious in the
deep. Chiefly, therefore, he failed with all his cleverness. Brain he
had, logic he had; the heart was a-wanting and the intention faltered.
_Gnosis_ again and _agap�_!
Brain he had, logic he had; but brain must follow upon emotional
intention if it is to create; and logic must follow upon sound
premisses if it is to convince. Now if his prime intention was to
annoy, or, if you granted him his premisses, Butler would never miss
the mark. But is that intention worthy of more than it earned? I don't
think so. And can you grant him his premisses? I don't think that you
can. He argued _a priori_, apparently always. I am not a biologist,
nor was he, but if I know enough of scientific method to be sure that
biologists cannot argue that way, so undoubtedly did he. What should
Darwin, who had spent years in patient accumulation of fact, have
to say to him? In Homeric criticism--_a priori_ again. He had an
instinct--he owns it was no more--that the _Odyssey_ was written by a
woman. Then he studied the _Odyssey_ to prove that it was. Perhaps
a woman did write it, and perhaps it will one day be proved. The
_Odyssey_, as Butler used it, will never prove it. So also with the
Sicilian origin of the poem. He got his idea, and went to Trapani
to fit it in. It does not seem to have occurred to him that all the
things he found there are to be found also in the Ionian Islands and
might be found in half a hundred other places in a sea pullulating
with islands or a coast-line cut about like a jigsaw puzzle. But it
won't do, of course. No one knew that better than he.
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