THE HATES OF SAMUEL BUTLER

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21975, 26 December 1936, Page 13

THE HATES OF SAMUEL BUTLER

One might disagree with Samuel Butler on every subject under the sun and beyond it; but it would be hard to dislike him, though, according to his own account of himself, he liked few and cared for truth, not for its sake, but for his own. His cousin said that in argument he was like a snipe because his mind tacked hither and thithci before it flew straight, but the darting simile is inept; he was more like n kca, impish, sidelong, at times almost garrulous, but taloned for a swoop. His family would have found traits in a sphinx; one of them discovered a touch of humanity in Euclid because of his “which is absurd,” seeing in it, evidently, a chuckle or a snort. Originality in them seemed hereditary. It eased Butler to set down his hates, and he indulged himself almost to inebriety. His bugbear was orthodoxy and the unity of the family was an unfailing target. He fairly chortled over the man who said that the only thing he had in common with his brother was a wish for the literal accuracy of the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer. He would rather, I think, have been sown as a dragon’s tooth than have acknowledged a debt to any father, earthly or heavenly: and he would have pitied Minerva her spring-from the head of Jove. Children, he felt, should be separated from their parents, and he wrote gnomishly of the sweets of losing a father, which meant, ho said, a new lease of life. A sick friend of his—was it the demure and infallible Jones? —said that the one thing on his conscience was that he had been too good to his mother: and Butler’s own retort to the woman who said she would be a sister to him was “Not so bad as that.” His father was a clergyman; but to his son the Church was “the lowest of dissipations.” The Bigwigs His hates were legion. Of modern art he said that it was to the Early Masters as wax flowers to wild, in which he was reactionary; for the cry nowadays is to create according to one’s own times. He advised folk to go to Parma, because it was possible to hate Correggio more intelligently at Parma. Prom the scientists he had scars that were slow to heal. He claimed that, as an irritant, he provoked the life of Erasmus Darwin and once he said, and not for effect, “A man may attack Christ but not Darwin or the scientific or literary bigwigs.” He assailed the foundations of morality and thought folk rather liked it; but when he filled his quiver against Darwin they were up In arms. He hated all poetry, particularly French, and to those wincing ears of his only Homer and Shakespeare sang. Swinburne, he thought never so feeble as when he was trying to bo strong and, having made Lang rude and angry, he “did not care.” Jones, whose capacity for quips kept Butler at heel and who was his selfconstituted dare, looked askance nl many of the established writers. “Jones and I.” he wrote, “see through Tennyson and Thackeray and cordially dislike them.” His use of the demure to back the outrageous fascinated Butler even more than his power of going one better in the kind of jibe in which they specialised. .To return to his opinions of the Writers, he claimed that George Eliot got the chapter on machines in “Theophrastus Such” from “Erewhon.” Morley he called, With no compunction, "a jawing ass”; and he complained of his own pusillanimity because he had. from a fear to displease, fallen in with his friends’ estimate of Trevelyan, whom he did not consider a strong personality. Goethe disgusted him outright and Maeterlinck, he considered, had been recognised too young to have the stuff of genius in him. Besides, his gods seemed to be Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Carlyle, and Emerson—and Butler would have none of them. Ibsen repelled and bored him, and the supreme insult was offered when Walker compared him with MeTedith. Nor was he more tender With the annalists. “God,” he said, “cannot alter the past, and no doubt that is the reason why He is obliged to connive at the existence of historians.” Ho mentioned, almost in one breath, his hatred of Professor Clifford and of the statues at the Crystal Palace and, in the next, exclaimed vehemently that it Was better for him to be indiscreet and dishonourable in the publication of private letters in his “Life of Dr. Butler” than that the truth be con-

Heart and Head at War (specially written tor the PRESg.I [By EILEEN DUGGANJ

cealed. It was evident that this was a defiant answer to enemies which the book had made him and which, like de Bergerac, he flaunted. He was slower to sour against Garnett; but the latter’s lukewarm reception of his surveys of classics rankled and he complained that he had drifted to Sydney Lee and the hacks. He made no bones about “The Times” critics, who became “obviously incompetent and obviously Insincere.” ■ I Apostle and Prophet He had his fling at Daniel in the Old Testament and at Paul in the New. The lions, he felt, drew the line at prophets and in his opinion Paul would not stand up to a field mouse or a cock-canary. Personal acquaintance with either might have convinced him that it is safer to bait the dead; but so many of Butler’s sayings are so plainly hyperbolic mischief that ’he seems like a child released suddenly from parental control and endowed by freedom with a dazzling impudence. He gave many a shrewd’ nip as a sociologist, as these words prove:— The poor.arc compelled to work and use their muscles and when there are no more poor there will ere long be no more muscles. The poor are a mode whereby the physical energy of the race is* conserved. Though ho once wrote of a prince whose life was spoiled by an uninvited fairy with the gift of compassion, he played perilously with that condemned emotio'n. There is in “Erowhon” a passage that gives testimony of this; It was written of a New Zealand landscape: Oh wonderful! wonderful! so lonely and so solemn, with the sad, grey clouds above and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the mountain side as though its little heart were breaking. Then there came a lean and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect, trotting back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this gully and now that, and now she stands listening with uplifted head that she may hear the distant walling and obey it. Aha! they sec and rush towards each other, Alas! they are both mistaken; the ewe isiVt that lamb’s ewe; they are neither kin nor kind to one another and part in coldness. Each must cry louder and wan* der farther yet; may luck be with them both that they may find their own at nightfall. Here the satirist who smote at shams felt, as one greater had felt before him, the open agony of lost sheep. The Arrow That Returns That his sardonic wit cost him dear is evidenced by his mutter that it is natural to have more friends dead than living. On one occasion he repeated a most violent diatribe made against him, and added pensively, “I do not take this view of the matter myself.” This sudden descent into mildness gave an exhilarating bathos. At another time, when an academy of English letters was mooted, he repeated the fulminations of other writers and, with the same disarming, rueful drop, he added: “I am saved from having to lash myself into fury upon any such score, for no-one even mentioned my name atf a possible academician.” Again, though he accused himself of hypocrisy in attending the Shrewsbury School Dinner, was there not in it for him an innocent, unacknowledged pleasure? Me was human. He has left for his own epitaph: “He hated not Wisely but too well,” but others who may have as many Hates do not feel the need of the urge for public avowals; and the warmth and generosity of his friendships, so rare in a greedy world, prove that his heart and his head were always in conflict. In a poem lamenting the departure of his young friend, Hans Faesch, he used the words, “Grade you and guard yoU* Heaven,” and “Take him into Thy holy keeping, O Lord,” and added in a letter that he used the words because he knew of no others “that express a very deeply felt hope so Well as those.” Nor must it be forgotten that his Ernest, In “The Way of All Flesh,” is sustained by faith in ‘‘a something as yet but darkly known which makes right right and wrong wrong.” There have been few men more grateful for friendship than Samuel Butler; and his Courtesy, if selective, was almost Gallic in its charm. Always one divides his insolences because, apart from a serious arid valiant loathing for cant, his hobby was hair-raising. Remove those marshalled odiums, those serried hates, and after their ablation what is left? A gamin with his tongue out and a lonely urchin at that, haunted by his oWll dictutn that those who appeal to the sword of logic shall perish by it.