Samuel Butler1

SAMUEL BUTLER was a philosopher whose favourite doctrine was expressed in the words pas 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 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 the enfant 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-agreat-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 1 Samuel Butler: a Memoir. By H. Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan)

position, always affecting to be indifferent to it and never deceiving any one. 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.

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"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 head master 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 'Erewhon' Butler. There is much detail in Mr. Festing Jones's enormous book on Butler's early 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 reading The Way of All Flesh, and had remembered this incident and for the first time had 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