A NOVEL WHICH PRECEDED ITS PUBLIC

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23044, 21 November 1936, Page 4

A NOVEL WHICH PRECEDED ITS PUBLIC

BUTLER’S INDICTMENT OF PARENTAL INHUMANITY “The Way of All Flesh,” By Samuel Butler. Illustrated by Donia Nachshen. London: Cape, 17s.

The history of “The Way, of All Flesh” as a published work is interesting and unusual. It first appeared in 1903, within a year of Butlers death, and four years elapsed before the original edition of 1500 copies was exhausted. So slow was the sale that the publishers allowed it to go out of print. By 1908 a fresh demand sprang up, following probably Shaw’s glowing acknowledgment In the preface to “Major Barbara.” In 1910 it was twice reprinted, and from that time it has continued to appear in new editions. But it was the post-war vears that brought “ The Way of All Flesh that acclaim which it enjoys to-day. These facts are of an extraordinary significance, for they show how far in advance of his generation Samuel Butler was as a novelist, just as he had earlier indicated his forwardness to his time in scientific and social thought. It is the more remarkable in that “ The Way of All Flesh ” was written full two-score years before its publication. Butler commenced it about. 1872, and did not work at it after 1884. The book as we have it to-day was in measure of time the work of a Victorian novelist—and a first novel at that: not until two eras had passed, and the most devastating war in history procured a revolution in thought, was it given general critical and public recognition. There could be but two explanations of that. One, that The Way of All Flesh ” was an intriguing “ period piece,” in which those who were of a more sophisticated age might discover a socio-historical charm; the other, that in this work a new generation found expression of an attitude to life, an iconoclastic attack upon certain timehonoured ideals, which fitted exactly its own yet scarcely-formulated revolt against outmoded values. Nobody who knows “ The Way of All Flesh ” can be in doubt which of these explanations of its tardy acceptance is the true one. There is nothing in the book, except its background, and certain staid, cruel manners in behaviour and thought which failed to survive the nineteenth century, that is “period.” Psychologically this novel is unrelated to the stream of Victorian fiction, and philosophically it enunciates a credo which, in the time of its writing, would have been considered nothing else but criminal. When he wrote it Butler was so far ahead of the mental habit of England that even now. when the mass-mental-ity of civilisation has suffered a violent conversion by war and depression, he is still startling at times, and arresting all the time. When one speaks of "acceptance” of* "The Way of All Flesh ” to-day, it is not placid acceptance, but the admission of general principles that may still be furiously debated, analysed, modified, and defended. It is a work that has waited fully half a century to find the audience to whom it was addressed. There is, perhaps, a better understanding of the savagery of the attack in “The Way of All Flesh” to be derived from without the pages of the book itself. The new and handsome edition before us is* alone, a compact and complete challenge to the perception of the modern reader, and a test of his appreciation. But it is better read with some introductory inquiry into the life of Butler and his personal convictions. Bernard Shaw, reviewing a new edition in 1919, declared that Butler is the only man known to history who has “ immortalised and actually endeared himself, by parricide and matricide Jong drawn out.” This form of murder by authorship is now, for good or ill. an accepted canon in fiction writing. It is too often pettily-in-spired, by the desire to startle, to wound, to win notoriety. Butler, it is safe to say. had no such definite intent. He knew, no doubt, that his brutal exposure of the period-condi-tioned personalities of his parents would have shocked the world around him and gained him the full measure of notoriety, but his purpose was apart from deliberate desire to inflict hurt, or extract a revenge on individuals. In his notes and letters we find the troubled instinct to respectful regard for a parent he could not love or honour arguing with a determination to speak—for his own fullness of being and. implicitly, for those who have suffered as he—the truth, the whole truth as he saw it. upon a subject uncanvassed in the conventional ‘code for filial conduct. The antagonism between Butler and his father, which has its cruel expression in that of Fontifex and Ernest in The Way

of All Flesh.” is an exposition, in personal terms, of an author’s philosophical conclusions. It is autobiography sublimated into a thesis for the instruction of mankind. Thus Butler wrote: Whenever I am able to get behind the scenes, I find a deep gulf separating the generations; the instinctive antagonism between the two is far too general to be explained as due to abnormal incompatibility. Nor can it be explained on the ground of serious defect either in the older or the younger generation; the young of one generation becomes the old of the next, and both old and young always seem good sort of people enough to everyone except their near belongings. The explanation is rather that the general antipathy between parents and children is part of the same story with the antipathy that prevails throughout Nature between an incipient species and the unmodified individuals of the race from which it is arising. The first, thing that a new form does is to exterminate its predecessor; the old form knows this, and will therefore do its best to prevent the new form arising. Every generation is a new species up to a certain point—and hence every older generation regards It with suspicion. . . . Neither that apologia, if it can be so called, nor any other of Butler’s frequent mental questings into the impulses which motivated “The Way of All Flesh,” alters the keen, even, callous exposure of parental arrogance and lack of sympathy which the book contains. We cannot acquit Butler of malice, arising from a deep and suppressed sense of injury, in his delineation of the several portraits from life in the novel; but we can, to-day, and must, allow him a purpose which transcended the personal. “ The Way of All Flesh ” is an attack on blindness rather than ill-will, and in its several searching examinations of human laws the terrible harvest of intellectual arrogance, the most memorable and noteworthy is that of the injury a generation with no power of introspection may inflict upon the next. The new Cape edition of “The Way of All Flesh ” is a pleasant example of modem typographical format, and the black and white illustrations by Donia Nachshen, in full page and in the text, are a delight. J. M.