Samuel Butler: A Sketch
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Henry Festing Jones >> Samuel Butler: A Sketch
On three days of the week he dined in a restaurant on his way home,
and on the other days he dined in his chambers where his laundress
had cooked his dinner. At two o'clock Alfred returned (having been
home to dinner with his wife and children) and got tea ready for him.
He then wrote letters and attended to his accounts till 3.45, when he
smoked his first cigarette. He used to smoke a great deal, but,
believing it to be bad for him, took to cigarettes instead of pipes,
and gradually smoked less and less, making it a rule not to begin
till some particular hour, and pushing this hour later and later in
the day, till it settled itself at 3.45. There was no water laid on
in his rooms, and every day he fetched one can full from the tap in
the court, Alfred fetching the rest. When anyone expostulated with
him about cooking his own breakfast and fetching his own water, he
replied that it was good for him to have a change of occupation.
This was partly the fact, but the real reason, which he could not
tell everyone, was that he shrank from inconveniencing anybody; he
always paid more than was necessary when anything was done for him,
and was not happy then unless he did some of the work himself.
At 5.30 he got his evening meal, he called it his tea, and it was
little more than a facsimile of breakfast. Alfred left in time to
post the letters before six. Butler then wrote music till about 8,
when he came to see me in Staple Inn, returning to Clifford's Inn by
about 10. After a light supper, latterly not more than a piece of
toast and a glass of milk, he played one game of his own particular
kind of Patience, prepared his breakfast things and fire ready for
the next morning, smoked his seventh and last cigarette, and went to
bed at eleven o'clock.
He was fond of the theatre, but avoided serious pieces. He preferred
to take his Shakespeare from the book, finding that the spirit of the
plays rather evaporated under modern theatrical treatment. In one of
his books he brightens up the old illustration of 'Hamlet' without
the Prince of Denmark by putting it thus: "If the character of
Hamlet be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry
Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the
theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by
performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly,
when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too
much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit
of going to one pantomime every winter.
There were about twenty houses where he visited, but he seldom
accepted an invitation to dinner--it upset the regularity of his
life; besides, he belonged to no club and had no means of returning
hospitality. When two colonial friends called unexpectedly about
noon one day, soon after he settled in London, he went to the nearest
cook-shop in Fetter Lane and returned carrying a dish of hot roast
pork and greens. This was all very well once in a way, but not the
sort of thing to be repeated indefinitely.
On Thursdays, instead of going to the Museum, he often took a day
off, going into the country sketching or walking, and on Sundays,
whatever the weather, he nearly always went into the country walking;
his map of the district for thirty miles round London is covered all
over with red lines showing where he had been. He sometimes went out
of town from Saturday to Monday, and for over twenty years spent
Christmas at Boulogne-sur-Mer.
There is a Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia with many chapels, each
containing life-sized statues and frescoes illustrating the life of
Christ. Butler had visited this sanctuary repeatedly, and was a
great favourite with the townspeople, who knew that he was studying
the statues and frescoes in the chapels, and who remembered that in
the preface to 'Alps and Sanctuaries' he had declared his intention
of writing about them. In August, 1887, the Varallesi brought
matters to a head by giving him a civic dinner on the Mountain.
Everyone was present, there were several speeches and, when we were
coming down the slippery mountain path after it was all over, he said
to me:
"You know, there's nothing for it now but to write that book about
the Sacro Monte at once. It must be the next thing I do."
Accordingly, on returning home, he took up photography and,
immediately after Christmas, went back to Varallo to photograph the
statues and collect material. Much research was necessary and many
visits to out-of-the-way sanctuaries which might have contained work
by the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he was rescuing from oblivion and
identifying with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. One of these visits,
made after his book was published, forms the subject of "The
Sanctuary of Montrigone." 'Ex Voto', the book about Varallo,
appeared in 1888, and an Italian translation by Cavaliere Angelo
Rizzetti was published at Novara in 1894.
"Quis Desiderio . . . ?" ('The Humour of Homer and Other Essays')
was developed in 1888 from something in a letter from Miss Savage
nearly ten years earlier. On the 15th of December, 1878, in
acknowledging this letter, Butler wrote:
I am sure that any tree or flower nursed by Miss Cobbe would be the
VERY first to fade away and that her gazelles would die long before
they ever came to know her WELL. The sight of the brass buttons on
her pea-jacket would settle them out of hand.
There was an enclosure in Miss Savage's letter, but it is
unfortunately lost; I suppose it must have been a newspaper cutting
with an allusion to Moore's poem and perhaps a portrait of Miss
Frances Power Cobbe--pea-jacket, brass buttons, and all.
On the 10th November, 1879, Miss Savage, having been ill, wrote to
Butler:
I have been dipping into the books of Moses, being sometimes at a
loss for something to read while shut up in my apartment. You know
that I have never read the Bible much, consequently there is
generally something of a novelty that I hit on. As you do know your
Bible well, perhaps you can tell me what became of Aaron. The
account given of his end in Numbers xx. is extremely ambiguous and
unsatisfactory. Evidently he did not come by his death fairly, but
whether he was murdered secretly for the furtherance of some private
ends, or publicly in a State sacrifice, I can't make out. I myself
rather incline to the former opinion, but I should like to know what
the experts say about it. A very nice, exciting little tale might be
made out of it in the style of the police stories in 'All the rear
Round' called "The Mystery of Mount Hor or What became of Aaron?"
Don't forget to write to me.
Butler's people had been suggesting that he should try to earn money
by writing in magazines, and Miss Savage was falling in with the idea
and offering a practical suggestion. I do not find that he had
anything to tell her about the death of Aaron. On 23rd March, 1880,
she wrote:
Dear Mr. Butler: Read the subjoined poem of Wordsworth and let me
know what you understand its meaning to be. Of course I have my
opinion, which I think of communicating to the Wordsworth Society.
You can belong to that Society for the small sum of 2/6 per annum. I
think of joining because it is cheap.
"The subjoined poem" was the one beginning: "She dwelt among the
untrodden ways," and Butler made this note on the letter:
To the foregoing letter I answered that I concluded Miss Savage meant
to imply that Wordsworth had murdered Lucy in order to escape a
prosecution for breach of promise.
Miss Savage to Butler.
2nd April, 1880: My dear Mr. Butler: I don't think you see all that
I do in the poem, and I am afraid that the suggestion of a DARK
SECRET in the poet's life is not so very obvious after all. I was
hoping you would propose to devote yourself for a few months to
reading the 'Excursion', his letters, &c., with a view to following
up the clue, and I am disappointed though, to say the truth, the idea
of a CRIME had not flashed upon me when I wrote to you. How well the
works of GREAT men repay attention and study! But you, who know your
Bible so well, how was it that you did not detect the plagiarism in
the last verse? Just refer to the account of the disappearance of
Aaron (I have not a Bible at hand, we want one sadly in the club) but
I am sure that the words are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage
meant. 1901. S. B.] 'Cassell's Magazine' have offered a prize for
setting the poem to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be
treated musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it.
Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage's letters in 1901, could
not see the resemblance between Wordsworth's poem and Numbers xx., he
at once saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore's heroine whom
he had been keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory ever
since his letter about Miss Frances Power Cobbe. He now sent Lucy to
keep her company and often spoke of the pair of them as probably the
two most disagreeable young women in English literature--an opinion
which he must have expressed to Miss Savage and with which I have no
doubt she agreed.
In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues
at Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the
British Museum had removed Frost's 'Lives of Eminent Christians' from
its accustomed shelf in the Reading Room. Soon afterwards Harry
Quilter asked him to write for the 'Universal Review' and he
responded with "Quis Desiderio . . . ?" In this essay he compares
himself to Wordsworth and dwells on the points of resemblance between
Lucy and the book of whose assistance he had now been deprived in a
passage which echoes the opening of Chapter V of 'Ex Voto', where he
points out the resemblances between Varallo and Jerusalem.
Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archaeological
Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his
father for their Quarterly Journal. This he undertook to do when he
should have finished 'Ex Voto'. In December, 1888, his sisters, with
the idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his
grandfather's correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839. On
looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with
an almost Chinese reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the
Archaeological Society to absolve him from his promise to write the
memoir, set about a full life of Dr. Butler, which was not published
till 1896. The delay was caused partly by the immense quantity of
documents he had to sift and digest, the number of people he had to
consult, and the many letters he had to write, and partly by
something that arose out of 'Narcissus', which we published in June,
1888.
Butler was not satisfied with having written only half of this work;
he wanted it to have a successor, so that by adding his two halves
together, he could say he had written a whole Handelian oratorio.
While staying with his sisters at Shrewsbury with this idea in his
mind, he casually took up a book by Alfred Ainger about Charles Lamb
and therein stumbled upon something about the 'Odyssey'. It was
years since he had looked at the poem, but, from what he remembered,
he thought it might provide a suitable subject for musical treatment.
He did not, however, want to put Dr. Butler aside, so I undertook to
investigate. It is stated on the title-page of both 'Narcissus' and
'Ulysses' that the words were written and the music composed by both
of us. As to the music, each piece bears the initials of the one who
actually composed it. As to the words, it was necessary first to
settle some general scheme and this, in the case of 'Narcissus', grew
in the course of conversation. The scheme of 'Ulysses' was
constructed in a more formal way and Butler had perhaps rather less
to do with it. We were bound by the 'Odyssey', which is, of course,
too long to be treated fully, and I selected incidents that attracted
me and settled the order of the songs and choruses. For this
purpose, as I out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in the smallness of my
Greek, I used 'The Adventures of Ulysses' by Charles Lamb, which we
should have known nothing about but for Ainger's book. Butler
acquiesced in my proposals, but, when it came to the words
themselves, he wrote practically all the libretto, as he had done in
the case of 'Narcissus'; I did no more than suggest a few phrases and
a few lines here and there.
We had sent 'Narcissus' for review to the papers, and, as a
consequence, about this time, made the acquaintance of Mr. J. A.
Fuller Maitland, then musical critic of the 'Times'; he introduced us
to that learned musician William Smith Rockstro, under whom we
studied medieval counterpoint while composing 'Ulysses'. We had
already made some progress with it when it occurred to Butler that it
would not take long and might, perhaps, be safer if he were to look
at the original poem, just to make sure that Lamb had not misled me.
Not having forgotten all his Greek, he bought a copy of the 'Odyssey'
and was so fascinated by it that he could not put it down. When he
came to the Phoeacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria he felt he must
be reading the description of a real place and that something in the
personality of the author was eluding him. For months he was
puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set about
translating the poem. In August, 1891, he had preceded me to
Chiavenna, and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect
me, he made this note:
It was during the few days that I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel
Grotta Crimee) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the
'Odyssey'. I did not find out its having been written at Trapani
till January, 1892.
He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca
was drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty
charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the
conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and
the AEgadean Islands. As soon as he could after this discovery he
went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in all respects
suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how things kept
turning up to support his view. It is all in his book 'The Authoress
of the Odyssey', published in 1897 and dedicated to his friend
Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi.
His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August--a hot time of the
year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned
to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring.
He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the
people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel
Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me,
"honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity,
and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing
that the 'Odyssey' was written by a woman in Sicily and translating
the poem into English prose, he also translated the 'Iliad', and, in
March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein
described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the
received theories.
It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It
was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it
affected any of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after
giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no
weight of authority could make him say that it did. This matter of
the geography of the 'Iliad' is only one among many commonly received
opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason to
dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write.
It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that
he learnt nearly the whole of the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad' by heart.
He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket
and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when
saying the poems over to himself. These two little books are now in
the library of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however,
disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or two
at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had learnt
first; but he was about sixty at the time. Shakespeare's Sonnets, on
which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble in this
respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order, and one
consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the
Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of the poet's
work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those
who are less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would
say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you
can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you
want to form an opinion about it and its author."
It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more
than the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture;
the composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a
musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which
I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting
in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist." Handel was,
of course, "the greatest of all musicians." Among the painters he
chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari,
Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare,
Homer, and the Authoress of the 'Odyssey'; and in architecture the
man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum.
Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in the
company of inferior people when he had these. And he treated those
he met in daily life in the same spirit: it was what he found them
to be that attracted or repelled him; what others thought about them
was of little or no consequence.
And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two
subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously--
namely, 'Erewhon' and the evidence for the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. The idea of what might follow from belief in one
single supposed miracle had been slumbering during all those years
and at last rose again in the form of a sequel to 'Erewhon'. In
'Erewhon Revisited' Mr. Higgs returns to find that the Erewhonians
now believe in him as a god in consequence of the supposed miracle of
his going up in a balloon to induce his heavenly father to send the
rain. Mr. Higgs and the reader know that there was no miracle in the
case, but Butler wanted to show that whether it was a miracle or not
did not signify provided that the people believed it be one. And so
Mr. Higgs is present in the temple which is being dedicated to him
and his worship.
The existence of his son George was an afterthought and gave occasion
for the second leading idea of the book--the story of a father trying
to win the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in
order to show himself worthy of it--and succeeding.
Butler's health had already begun to fail, and when he started for
Sicily on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he
was unfit to travel, but was determined to go, and was looking
forward to meeting Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to
accompany over the Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx. But he
did not get beyond Palermo; there he was so much worse that he could
not leave his room. In a few weeks he was well enough to be removed
to Naples, and Alfred went out and brought him home to London. He
was taken to a nursing home in St. John's Wood where he lay for a
month, attended by his old friend Dr. Dudgeon, and where he died on
the 18th June, 1902.
There was a great deal he still wanted to do. He had intended to
revise 'The Way of All Flesh', to write a book about Tabachetti, and
to publish a new edition of 'Ex Voto' with the mistakes corrected.
Also he wished to reconsider the articles reprinted in 'The Humour of
Homer', and was looking forward to painting more sketches and
composing more music. While lying ill and very feeble within a few
days of the end, and not knowing whether it was to be the end or not,
he said to me:
"I am much better to-day. I don't feel at all as though I were going
to die. Of course, it will be all wrong if I do get well, for there
is my literary position to be considered. First I write 'Erewhon'--
that is my opening subject; then, after modulating freely through all
my other books and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my
original key and write 'Erewhon Revisited'. Obviously, now is the
proper moment to come to a full close, make my bow and retire; but I
believe I am getting well, after all. It's very inartistic, but I
cannot help it."
Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he
is serious or jesting. He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield: "Earnestness
was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as
indeed who can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he
managed to veil it with a fair amount of success." To veil his own
earnestness he turned most naturally to humour, employing it in a
spirit of reverence, as all the great humorists have done, to express
his deepest and most serious convictions. He was aware that he ran
the risk of being misunderstood by some, but he also knew that it is
useless to try to please all, and, like Mozart, he wrote to please
himself and a few intimate friends.
I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and
sympathy; nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great
and can never be known--it was sometimes exercised in unexpected
ways, as when he gave my laundress a shilling because it was "such a
beastly foggy morning"; nor of his slightly archaic courtliness--
unless among people he knew well he usually left the room backwards,
bowing to the company; nor of his punctiliousness, industry, and
painstaking attention to detail--he kept accurate accounts not only
of all his property by double entry but also of his daily
expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening, and his
handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-six
than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years
of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange
mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him
well to say: "Il sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete."
Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should
like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject
of the last of Handel's 'Six Great Fugues'. He called this "The Old
Man Fugue," and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by
one who was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made
young Ernest Pontifex in 'The Way of All Flesh' offer it to Edward
Overton as an epitaph for his Aunt Alethea. Butler, however, left
off wanting any tombstone long before he died. In accordance with
his wish his body was cremated, and a week later Alfred and I
returned to Woking and buried his ashes under the shrubs in the
garden of the crematorium, with nothing to mark the spot.
Footnotes:
{1} I am indebted to one of Butler's contemporaries at Cambridge,
the Rev. Dr. T. G. Bonney, F.R.S., and also to Mr. John F. Harris,
both of St. John's College, for help in finding and dating Butler's
youthful contributions to the 'Eagle'.
{2} This gentleman, on the death of his father in 1866, became the
Rev. Sir Philip Perring, Bart.
{3} The late Sir Julius von Haast, K.C.M.G., appointed Provincial
Geologist in 1860, was ennobled by the Austrian Government and
knighted by the British. He died in 1887.