SAMUEL BUTLER

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 111, 12 May 1934, Page 18

SAMUEL BUTLER

NOTEBOOK SELECTIONS

A new volume of selections from Samuel Butler's notebooks has been issued. "John o' London," in the

course of a long review, describes Butler as the greatest intellectual and moral sharpshooter of his ago. Mr. Bernard Shan' has frequently acknowledged his debt to Butler.

A man may have a, greater number of ideas than lie knows how to use, but they need not go to waste, remarks the writer. Such a man was Samuel Butler, tlie insurgent author of "Erowhon," "Ercwhon Revisited," "Life anil Habit," "Unconscious Memory," "Evolution Old and New," etc., and that staggering "The Way of All Flesh." It is not with these, his finished works, that wo arc concerned, however, but with his amazing stockpot of ideas, memories, -wise saws, and modern instances which are represented in the posthumous volume of " Notebooks/ edited by his intimate friend, Pesting Jones, in 1912, and the further selections edited by the late Mr. Bartholomew. Butler's Notebooks, kept I privately and not for publication, are a rereord of first thoughts, half-formed intentions, guesses at truth, and things seen and heard by him in overj'day life in which he found suggestions. They reveal in endless and whimsical variety the workings of a most original mind. The orthodoxies of religion, science, and art of his age were his targets, and many of its most venerated prophets his bugbear. His attacks and jibes on Darwin, Huxley, Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, Arnold, and Morley, to name no other of the "great Victorians," though new in their present form, were characteristic then as now. Butler constituted himself the dustman of his period, only he tried to cart away a great deal of material which his. age did not regard as rubbish and which, to millions, is still pure gold. Yet ho was rio ruthless iconoclast, but a man who thought for himself in all honesty and was wholeheartedly on the side of the angels. These Notes, indeed, revive old battles so vividly that one is fain to declare that Butler's soul still goes marching on. To understand (and forgive) many of Butler's audacities, one has to remember the home of ferocious Victorian piety and strictness in which he was brought up and from which ho had to escape in order to find himself.

It was in the wilderness of his "Mesopotamia" in New Zealand that he healed his soul and gathered his strength, remarked Mr. Bernard Shaw recently when suggesting that New Zealand should erect a statue to him.

Among Butler's self-communings is tho following about a funeral: — "Jones, telling me about J. A. Cooper's funeral, said: 'And then a gentleman in a white surplice met us at the gate and announced himself as tho Resurrection and the Life. A man looked down into the grave when tho body was lowered, and said, cheerfully, "It seems to bo a nice gravelly soil," and then all went away.' " Epitomising the Erewhon law which sent criminals to hospital and the sick to gaol:—"I must remind myself to call Tennyson the Darwin of Poetry and Darwin the Tennyson of Science," which shows that Butler could be really uastv.

"I put these Notes down as things to start from, but I confess I often cannot see what I once saw in them." Butler's readers can nod assent and still be grateful.