SAMUEL BUTLER

Southland Times, Issue 23047, 14 November 1936, Page 13

SAMUEL BUTLER

Letter To Von Haast (Specially Written for The Southland Times.)

(By

L. B. INCH).

Samuel Butler like many others engaged in creative work or literary pursuits, in corresponding with his friends gives intimate little glimpses of his views and his working that. do not appear in any of his formal books. Butler’s hopes and aspirations are shown in a letter written by him to the great Canterbury geologist Sir Julius von Haast in February 1867—one of a good number of prized possessions of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington included in the gift to the nation by the estate of the late Sir Joseph Kinsey. “15 Clifford's Inn, February 28, 1867. “My dear Dr, Thank you exceedingly for your very kind and welcome letter received last mail; it is with the greatest pleasure that from time to time I hear from you and write; I trust that you will one day come to England and that we may have a smoke and a yarn. HA! HA! That put into my head how I rejected your proffered politeness by saying ‘I hate cigars!’ when you offered me one. “I see notices of you from time to time in the papers and am sure that you are leaving your mark behind you in a most valuable manner. I trust I may yet leave mine, but improvement is slow compared with one’s wishes. Sometimes I find myself painting almost really well, and then I make horrid failures. However, I am sanguine. I work without interruption and very hard. My average is fully seven hours a day at painting, independently of music and writing though of this last I have not done much lately. “I would offer to paint a head of you from a photo, but experience tells me that it does not pay. The photographs suppress the more delicate details of light and shade and exaggerate the stronger ones, making them very deceptive to paint from. I have had to paint several and find that it does me positive harm and never results in so satisfactory a head as I can get from the life. I am speaking of the ordinary photographs, but I should think a good big life-sized, or nearly life-sized, one would be manageable, only then there is the colour.

“I think the foreign schools of painting are very much ahead of our English one and shall try to have a good study of them at the Paris exhibition to which I intend making a trip this year. Thank you very much for promising to send my father another herbarium. It must be a deuce of a trouble to you and I hardly enough know how to thank you. If you do I will paint you when you come to London—l really will. “I was very much shocked at seeing the account of poor young Dobson’s murder and thought of the great grief it must have been to Mrs Haast. I trust that she and the child (or is it children?) are well. Believe me, dear Dr.—Yours very truly, S. BUTLER.” .