Samuel Butler: A Sketch
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Henry Festing Jones >> Samuel Butler: A Sketch
This etext was prepared from the 1921 Jonathan Cape edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.
SAMUEL BUTLER: A SKETCH
by Henry Festing Jones
Samuel Butler was born on the 4th December, 1835, at the Rectory,
Langar, near Bingham, in Nottinghamshire. His father was the Rev.
Thomas Butler, then Rector of Langar, afterwards one of the canons of
Lincoln Cathedral, and his mother was Fanny Worsley, daughter of John
Philip Worsley of Arno's Vale, Bristol, sugar-refiner. His
grandfather was Dr. Samuel Butler, the famous headmaster of
Shrewsbury School, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. The Butlers are
not related either to the author of 'Hudibras', or to the author of
the 'Analogy', or to the present Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge.
Butler's father, after being at school at Shrewsbury under Dr.
Butler, went up to St. John's College, Cambridge; he took his degree
in 1829, being seventh classic and twentieth senior optime; he was
ordained and returned to Shrewsbury, where he was for some time
assistant master at the school under Dr. Butler. He married in 1832
and left 1 Shrewsbury for Langar. He was a learned botanist, and
made a collection of dried plants which he gave to the Town Museum of
Shrewsbury.
Butler's childhood and early life were spent at Langar among the
surroundings of an English country rectory, and his education was
begun by his father. In 1843, when he was only eight years old, the
first great event in his life occurred; the family, consisting of his
father and mother, his two sisters, his brother and himself, went to
Italy. The South-Eastern Railway stopped at Ashford, whence they
travelled to Dover in their own carriage; the carnage was put on
board the steamboat, they crossed the Channel, and proceeded to
Cologne, up the Rhine to Basle and on through Switzerland into Italy,
through Parma, where Napoleon's widow was still reigning, Modena,
Bologna, Florence, and so to Rome. They had to drive where there was
no railway, and there was then none in all Italy except between
Naples and Castellamare. They seemed to pass a fresh custom-house
every day, but, by tipping the searchers, generally got through
without inconvenience. The bread was sour and the Italian butter
rank and cheesy--often uneatable. Beggars ran after the carriage all
day long, and when they got nothing jeered at the travellers and
called them heretics. They spent half the winter in Rome, and the
children were taken up to the top of St. Peter's as a treat to
celebrate their father's birthday. In the Sistine Chapel they saw
the cardinals kiss the toe of Pope Gregory XVI., and in the Corso, in
broad daylight, they saw a monk come rolling down a staircase like a
sack of potatoes, bundled into the street by a man and his wife. The
second half of the winter was spent in Naples. This early
introduction to the land which he always thought of and often
referred to as his second country made an ineffaceable impression
upon him.
In January, 1846, he went to school at Allesley, near Coventry, under
the Rev. E. Gibson. He seldom referred to his life there, though
sometimes he would say something that showed he had not forgotten all
about it. For instance, in 1900, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, now the
Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, showed him a medieval
missal, laboriously illuminated. He found that it fatigued him to
look at it, and said that such books ought never to be made.
Cockerell replied that such books relieved the tedium of divine
service, on which Butler made a note ending thus:
Give me rather a robin or a peripatetic cat like the one whose loss
the parishioners of St. Clement Danes are still deploring. When I
was at school at Allesley the boy who knelt opposite me at morning
prayers, with his face not more than a yard away from mine, used to
blow pretty little bubbles with his saliva which he would send
sailing off the tip of his tongue like miniature soap bubbles; they
very soon broke, but they had a career of a foot or two. I never saw
anyone else able to get saliva bubbles right away from him and,
though I have endeavoured for some fifty years and more to acquire
the art, I never yet could start the bubble off my tongue without its
bursting. Now things like this really do relieve the tedium of
church, but no missal that I have ever seen will do anything except
increase it.
In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H.
Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury
are reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at Roughborough
in 'The Way of All Flesh', Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy.
During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went
straight to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of
other composers had only awakened and intensified. He became as one
of the listening brethren who stood around "when Jubal struck the
chorded shell" in the 'Song for Saint Cecilia's Day':
Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well.
This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy
and Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of
double pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing
he ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was
to bring 'Solomon' that he might refresh his memory as to the
harmonies of "With thee th' unsheltered moor I'd trace." He often
tried to like the music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself
compelled to give them up--they bored him too much. Nor was he more
successful with the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a
sort of Horace, an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart,
who must have loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to
the 'Messiah', failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the
greatness of these composers, but he was out of sympathy with them,
and never could forgive the last two for having led music astray from
the Handel tradition, and paved the road from Bach to Beethoven.
Everything connected with Handel interested him. He remembered old
Mr. Brooke, Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been present at
the Handel Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss Susannah
Apthorp, of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon Handel's
knee. He often regretted that these were his only links with "the
greatest of all composers.
Besides his love for Handel he had a strong liking for drawing, and,
during the winter of 1853-4, his family again took him to Italy,
where, being now eighteen, he looked on the works of the old masters
with intelligence.
In October, 1854, he went into residence at St. John's College,
Cambridge. He showed no aptitude for any particular branch of
academic study, nevertheless he impressed his friends as being likely
to make his mark. Just as he used reminiscences of his own
schooldays at Shrewsbury for Ernest's life at Roughborough, so he
used reminiscences of his own Cambridge days for those of Ernest.
When the Simeonites, in 'The Way of All Flesh', "distributed tracts,
dropping them at night in good men's letter boxes while they slept,
their tracts got burnt or met with even worse contumely." Ernest
Pontifex went so far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a
copy of the parody "dropped into each of the Simeonites' boxes."
Ernest did this in the novel because Butler had done it in real life.
Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of the University Library, has found, among
the Cambridge papers of the late J. Willis Clark's collection, three
printed pieces belonging to the year 1855 bearing on the subject. He
speaks of them in an article headed "Samuel Butler and the
Simeonites," and signed A. T. B. in the 'Cambridge Magazine', 1st
March, 1913; the first is "a genuine Simeonite tract; the other two
are parodies. All three are anonymous. At the top of the second
parody is written 'By S. Butler, March 31.'" The article gives
extracts from the genuine tract and the whole of Butler's parody.
Besides parodying Simeonite tracts, Butler wrote various other papers
during his undergraduate days, some of which, preserved by one of his
contemporaries, who remained a lifelong friend, the Rev. Canon Joseph
M'Cormick, now Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly, are reproduced in
'The Note-Books of Samuel Butler' (1912).
He also steered the Lady Margaret first boat, and Canon M'Cormick
told me of a mishap that occurred on the last night of the races in
1857. Lady Margaret had been head of the river since 1854, Canon
M'Cormick was rowing 5, Philip Pennant Pearson (afterwards P.
Pennant) was 7, Canon Kynaston, of Durham (whose name formerly was
Snow), was stroke, and Butler was cox. When the cox let go of the
bung at starting, the rope caught in his rudder lines, and Lady
Margaret was nearly bumped by Second Trinity. They escaped, however,
and their pursuers were so much exhausted by their efforts to catch
them that they were themselves bumped by First Trinity at the next
corner. Butler wrote home about it:
11 March, 1857. Dear Mamma: My foreboding about steering was on the
last day nearly verified by an accident which was more deplorable
than culpable the effects of which would have been ruinous had not
the presence of mind of No. 7 in the boat rescued us from the very
jaws of defeat. The scene is one which never can fade from my
remembrance and will be connected always with the gentlemanly conduct
of the crew in neither using opprobrious language nor gesture towards
your unfortunate son but treating him with the most graceful
forbearance; for in most cases when an accident happens which in
itself is but slight, but is visited with serious consequences, most
people get carried away with the impression created by the last so as
to entirely forget the accidental nature of the cause and if we had
been quite bumped I should have been ruined, as it is I get praise
for coolness and good steering as much as and more than blame for my
accident and the crew are so delighted at having rowed a race such as
never was seen before that they are satisfied completely. All the
spectators saw the race and were delighted; another inch and I should
never have held up my head again. One thing is safe, it will never
happen again.
The 'Eagle', "a magazine supported by members of St. John's College,"
issued its first number in the Lent term of 1858; it contains an
article by Butler "On English Composition and Other Matters," signed
"Cellarius":
Most readers will have anticipated me in admitting that a man should
be clear of his meaning before he endeavours to give it any kind of
utterance, and that, having made up his mind what to say, the less
thought he takes how to say it, more than briefly, pointedly and
plainly, the better.
From this it appears that, when only just over twenty-two, Butler had
already discovered and adopted those principles of writing from which
he never departed.
In the fifth number of the 'Eagle' is an article, "Our Tour," also
signed "Cellarius"; it is an account of a tour made in June, 1857,
with a friend whose name he Italianized into Giuseppe Verdi, through
France into North Italy, and was written, so he says, to show how
they got so much into three weeks and spent only 25 pounds; they did
not, however, spend quite so much, for the article goes on, after
bringing them back to England, "Next day came safely home to dear old
St. John's, cash in hand 7d." {1}
Butler worked hard with Shilleto, an old pupil of his grandfather,
and was bracketed 12th in the Classical Tripos of 1858. Canon
M'Cormick told me that he would no doubt have been higher but for the
fact that he at first intended to go out in mathematics; it was only
during the last year of his time that he returned to the classics,
and his being so high as he was spoke well for the classical
education of Shrewsbury.
It had always been an understood thing that he was to follow in the
footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman;
accordingly, after taking his degree, he went to London and began to
prepare for ordination, living and working among the poor as lay
assistant under the Rev. Philip Perring, Curate of St. James's,
Piccadilly, an old pupil of Dr. Butler at Shrewsbury. {2} Placed
among such surroundings, he felt bound to think out for himself many
theological questions which at this time were first presented to him,
and, the conclusion being forced upon him that he could not believe
in the efficacy of infant baptism, he declined to be ordained.
It was now his desire to become an artist; this, however, did not
meet with the approval of his family, and he returned to Cambridge to
try for pupils and, if possible, to get a fellowship. He liked being
at Cambridge, but there were few pupils and, as there seemed to be
little chance of a fellowship, his father wished him to come down and
adopt some profession. A long correspondence took place in the
course of which many alternatives were considered. There are letters
about his becoming a farmer in England, a tutor, a homoepathic
doctor, an artist, or a publisher, and the possibilities of the army,
the bar, and diplomacy. Finally it was decided that he should
emigrate to New Zealand. His passage was paid, and he was to sail in
the 'Burmah', but a cousin of his received information about this
vessel which caused him, much against his will, to get back his
passage money and take a berth in the 'Roman Emperor', which sailed
from Gravesend on one of the last days of September, 1859. On that
night, for the first time in his life, he did not say his prayers.
"I suppose the sense of change was so great that it shook them
quietly off. I was not then a sceptic; I had got as far as disbelief
in infant baptism, but no further. I felt no compunction of
conscience, however, about leaving off my morning and evening
prayers--simply I could no longer say them."
The 'Roman Emperor', after a voyage every incident of which
interested him deeply, arrived outside Port Lyttelton. The captain
shouted to the pilot who came to take them in:
"Has the 'Robert Small' arrived?"
"No," replied the pilot, "nor yet the 'Burmah'."
And Butler, writing home to his people, adds the comment: "You may
imagine what I felt."
The 'Burmah' was never heard of again.
He spent some time looking round, considering what to do and how to
employ the money with which his father was ready to supply him, and
determined upon sheep-farming. He made several excursions looking
for country, and ultimately took up a run which is still called
Mesopotamia, the name he gave it because it is situated among the
head-waters of the Rangitata.
It was necessary to have a horse, and he bought one for 55 pounds,
which was not considered dear. He wrote home that the horse's name
was "Doctor": "I hope he is a Homoeopathist." From this, and from
the fact that he had already contemplated becoming a homoeopathic
doctor himself, I conclude that he had made the acquaintance of Dr.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon, the eminent homoeopathist, while he was doing
parish work in London. After his return to England Dr. Dudgeon was
his medical adviser, and remained one of his most intimate friends
until the end of his life. Doctor, the horse, is introduced into
'Erewhon Revisited'; the shepherd in Chapter XXVI tells John Hicks
that Doctor "would pick fords better than that gentleman could, I
know, and if the gentleman fell off him he would just stay stock
still."
Butler carried on his run for about four and a half years, and the
open-air life agreed with him; he ascribed to this the good health he
afterwards enjoyed. The following, taken from a notebook he kept in
the colony and destroyed, gives a glimpse of one side of his life
there; he preserved the note because it recalled New Zealand so
vividly.
April, 1861. It is Sunday. We rose later than usual. There are
five of us sleeping in the hut. I sleep in a bunk on one side of the
fire; Mr. Haast, {3} a German who is making a geological survey of
the province, sleeps upon the opposite one; my bullock-driver and
hut-keeper have two bunks at the far end of the hut, along the wall,
while my shepherd lies in the loft among the tea and sugar and flour.
It was a fine morning, and we turned out about seven o'clock.
The usual mutton and bread for breakfast with a pudding made of flour
and water baked in the camp oven after a joint of meat--Yorkshire
pudding, but without eggs. While we were at breakfast a robin
perched on the table and sat there a good while pecking at the sugar.
We went on breakfasting with little heed to the robin, and the robin
went on pecking with little heed to us. After breakfast Pey, my
bullock-driver, went to fetch the horses up from a spot about two
miles down the river, where they often run; we wanted to go pig-
hunting.
I go into the garden and gather a few peascods for seed till the
horses should come up. Then Cook, the shepherd, says that a fire has
sprung up on the other side of the river. Who could have lit it?
Probably someone who had intended coming to my place on the preceding
evening and has missed his way, for there is no track of any sort
between here and Phillips's. In a quarter of an hour he lit another
fire lower down, and by that time, the horses having come up, Haast
and myself--remembering how Dr. Sinclair had just been drowned so
near the same spot--think it safer to ride over to him and put him
across the river. The river was very low and so clear that we could
see every stone. On getting to the river-bed we lit a fire and did
the same on leaving it; our tracks would guide anyone over the
intervening ground.
Besides his occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the
piano, to read and to write. In the library of St. John's College,
Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully
annotated by him at the University and in the colony. He also read
the 'Origin of Species', which, as everyone knows, was published in
1859. He became "one of Mr. Darwin's many enthusiastic admirers, and
wrote a philosophic dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry
and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even
literature can assume) upon the 'Origin of Species'" ('Unconscious
Memory', close of Chapter I). This dialogue, unsigned, was printed
in the 'Press', Canterbury, New Zealand, on 20th December, 1862. A
copy of the paper was sent to Charles Darwin, who forwarded it to a,
presumably, English editor with a letter, now in the Canterbury
Museum, New Zealand, speaking of the dialogue as "remarkable from its
spirit and from giving so clear and accurate an account of Mr. D's
theory." It is possible that Butler himself sent the newspaper
containing his dialogue to Mr. Darwin; if so he did not disclose his
name, for Darwin says in his letter that he does not know who the
author was. Butler was closely connected with the 'Press', which was
founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first Superintendent of the
Province, in May, 1861; he frequently contributed to its pages, and
once, during FitzGerald's absence, had charge of it for a short time,
though he was never its actual editor. The 'Press' reprinted the
dialogue and the correspondence which followed its original
appearance on 8th June, 1912.
On 13th June, 1863, the 'Press' printed a letter by Butler signed
"Cellarius" and headed "Darwin among the Machines," reprinted in 'The
Note-Books of Samuel Butler' (1912). The letter begins:
"Sir: There are few things of which the present generation is more
justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily
taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances"; and goes on to
say that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral,
and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, "so now, in
the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we
as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the
antediluvian types of the race." He then speaks of the minute
members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal
which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved
from the clumsy brass clocks of the thirteenth century. Then comes
the question: Who will be man's successor? To which the answer is:
We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the
machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being
that machines are, or are becoming, animate.
In 1863 Butler's family published in his name 'A First Year in
Canterbury Settlement', which, as the preface states, was compiled
from his letters home, his journal and extracts from two papers
contributed to the 'Eagle'. These two papers had appeared in the
'Eagle' as three articles entitled "Our Emigrant" and signed
"Cellarius." The proof-sheets of the book went out to New Zealand
for correction and were sent back in the Colombo, which was as
unfortunate as the 'Burmah', for she was wrecked. The proofs,
however, were fished up, though so nearly washed out as to be almost
undecipherable. Butler would have been just as well pleased if they
had remained at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, for he never liked
the book and always spoke of it as being full of youthful
priggishness; but I think he was a little hard upon it. Years
afterwards, in one of his later books, after quoting two passages
from Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he considered the second to
be a recantation of the first, he wrote: "When Mr. Allen does make
stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune."
And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too
much in the same spirit.
Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864, and returned
via Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose
acquaintance he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli,
to whom he dedicated 'Life and Habit'. He arrived in August, 1864,
in London, where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a
bedroom, a painting-room and a pantry, at 15, Clifford's Inn, second
floor (north). The net financial result of the sheep-farming and the
selling out was that he practically doubled his capital, that is to
say he had about 8,000 pounds. This he left in New Zealand, invested
on mortgage at 10 per cent., the then current rate in the colony; it
produced more than enough for him to live upon in the very simple way
that suited him best, and life in the Inns of Court resembles life at
Cambridge in that it reduces the cares of housekeeping to a minimum;
it suited him so well that he never changed his rooms, remaining
there thirty-eight years till his death.
He was now his own master and able at last to turn to painting. He
studied at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, which had
formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler's time, was being
carried on by Francis Stephen Cary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis
Cary, who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby, and is
well known as the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb.
Among his fellow-students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that
the young artists got hold of the legend, which is in some of the
books about Lamb, that when Francis Stephen Cary was a boy and there
was a talk at his father's house as to what profession he should take
up, Lamb, who was present, said:
"I should make him an apo-po-pothe-Cary."
They used to repeat this story freely among themselves, being, no
doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious
pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art
education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed.
Anyone who wants to know what kind of an artist F. S. Cary was can
see his picture of Charles and Mary Lamb in the National Portrait
Gallery.
In 1865 Butler sent from London to New Zealand an article entitled
"Lucubratio Ebria," which was published in the 'Press' of 29th July,
1865. It treated machines from a point of view different from that
adopted in "Darwin among the Machines," and was one of the steps that
led to 'Erewhon' and ultimately to 'Life and Habit'. The article is
reproduced in 'The Note-Books of Samuel Butler' (1912).
Butler also studied art at South Kensington, but by 1867 he had begun
to go to Heatherley's School of Art in Newman Street, where he
continued going for many years. He made a number of friends at
Heatherley's, and among them Miss Eliza Mary Anne Savage. There also
he first met Charles Gogin, who, in 1896, painted the portrait of
Butler which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. He described
himself as an artist in the Post Office Directory, and between 1868
and 1876 exhibited at the Royal Academy about a dozen pictures, of
which the most important was "Mr. Heatherley's Holiday," hung on the
line in 1874. He left it by his will to his college friend Jason
Smith, whose representatives, after his death, in 1910, gave it to
the nation, and it is now in the National Gallery of British Art.
Mr. Heatherley never went away for a holiday; he once had to go out
of town on business and did not return till the next day; one of the
students asked him how he had got on, saying no doubt he had enjoyed
the change and that he must have found it refreshing to sleep for
once out of London.