Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon: the man and his work

Front matter

SAMUEUBUTLER

AUTHOR OF EREWHON

PR

Preface

I HAVE first of all to thank Mr H. Festing Jones for help and suggestions on many points in the pages that follow. My thanks are due also to Mr R. A. Streatfeild, Samuel Butler's literary executor, and Mr A. C. Fifield, the publisher, for permission to make quotations from Butler's works ; and to Mr Bernard Shaw for kindly lending me the manuscript of an unpublished paper on Charles Darwin which I have made use of in Chapter IV. The Bibliography at the end of the book has been compiled with the help of " The Biographical Statement " in The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, and revised and enlarged by Mr Festing Jones and Mr A. T. Bartholomew of the Cambridge University Library, both of whom I have to thank for permission to insert it.

J. F. H.

Contents

Introduction ....

P40E

I. Early Years ....

Introduction

In one of the most vivid chapters of his Physics and Politics, Walter Bagehot, that alert critic of the mid- Victorians, puts forward a theory to account for the way a different character or ethos distinguishes different ages. Indeed, like national character, the character of an age or society is an incalculable thing ; yet Bagehot draws an interesting analogy with literature, which in some measure may explain its origin. He notes that certain historical periods, not only in our development but in that of practically all Europe, are notable for a definite, predominant type of literary production. The Elizabethan age, in the light of the forces liberated by the Renascence, was an age of drama ; in Queen Anne's time the noisy pamphleteers and the quiet, respectable writers of the periodical essay vied with one another in claiming public attention ; while in our own day it seems that the novel, which has so woefully declined from its early, English excellence, is the most important literary form.

So, in a literary sense, the age hangs together, and " men catch the words that are in the air." Yet too often the traditional style cramps the innovator ; and, as Bagehot says, he writes his own words at the risk of contemporary neglect. Wordsworth is quoted as an instance. And Wordsworth is an interesting example, because, above and beyond his own originality, it was in no small degree the external circumstances of the time which made him what he was — leaving aside the fact that in Blake, much more interesting as a personality, he had an important forerunner. At any rate Wordsworth, certainly an innovator, succeeded in impressing himself on his generation. He was the central figure of the Romantic Revival so largely fed by the new, often disturbing "ideas" that bubbled across the Channel after 1789. The movement that he represented coloured the literary history of a large part of the nineteenth century; and its influence, unlike most literary influences, became a real factor in social life. Thus the two phenomena which Bagehot tried to explain, in this case touch and meet.

Apart from this broad tendency at the opening of the last century there are others which, beginning a little earlier, worked under cover of it. At the end of the eighteenth century we may trace a very definite movement against so-called indelicacy. Fielding's Tom Jones, interestingly foreshadovr'ing the action of a modem Town Council, was practically put upon the Lidex; the stage was ruled by artificiality; Mrs Sherwood, a little later, wrote her amazing History of the Fairchild Family, which exerted so deadly an influence on succeeding generations of English children ; Mr Bowdler was to exercise his busy blue pencil with satisfying effect on the works of Shakespeare. So the forces of nineteenth-century sentimentalism — forces which were to swell to an unnatural size — ^were already mustering themselves, even if below the surface. The age became more and more acquiescent, more and more complacent — ^traits which are to be recognised in almost every department of national life. Material prosperity, increasing with the progress of the

Industrial Revolution ; national satisfaction after the successes in the Napoleonic wars ; a blunt, adventurous type of prose writing, which gave no heed to any of the deeper problems of life, supplied the environment in which men found themselves. It sufficed for them. They were quite content it should remain as it was.

In the political thought of the age we may trace a similar tendency. The first half of the century, it is true, so far as theory of government was concerned, was dominated by the old Benthamite utilitarianism — the " greatest happiness principle," according to which the prospect of pleasure and the fear of pain are the guiding influences in any course of action. It was a convenient and unanswerable theory which Bentham worked out with the utmost psychological minuteness ; and its importance for us lies in the fact that it was a stepping-stone to the typically Victorian attitude of laissez-faire, the distinctive political creed of the second half of the century. Individualism was thus enthroned, and State interference became anathema. So Victorian complacency was nourished and fostered by the political circumstances of the time.

One might, perhaps, have expected that such a view would bring into play a sturdy independence of opinion, a dislike of humbug, an unwillingness to worship the conventionally accepted gods of literature, art or science. But this was not so in fact. The Victorians were never happy unless there was someone on a pedestal to worship. To be a " great man " it was necessary to contrive for oneself a social vogue. It is interesting to watch the way these illustrious people of the age kept their celebrity by a stupid, pompous affectation of superiority. The great men became fashionable — fashionable just like blue china or pre- Raphaelite pictures. And in an age of fads and crazes it could hardly be otherwise. George Eliot, the cold, arrogant, successful woman, is a good illustration. One reads about her absurd Sunday "at homes," in St John's Wood, with nothing but amusement. They became a sort of ritual ; women, apparently, were admitted only in exceptional circumstances ; the conversation was of the loftiest intellectual character. The new-comer, the visitor of the week, was permitted the place of honour by George Eliot's side, as described in a reminiscence of one of these tea-parties. It must have been a forbidding ceremonial, enlivened only by the genial presence of George Henry Lewes, who, we cannot doubt, was silently amused at the melancholy affair. Indeed the posing silliness of it all in a small way is an illustrative feature of the period.

In his brief study of Victorian literature,^ Mr Chesterton, writing from quite another point of view, speaks at some length of what he calls, perhaps a little obscurely, " the Victorian compromise " — ^which compromise he finds to be one of the most strongly marked traits of the middle and later decades of the century. He represents the Victorian school as showing its distinctive spirit in a series of revolts against that particular and prevailing tendency which drifted across the Channel after the French Revolution. Thus, according to him, " rationalism triumphant " was the peculiar temper which distinguished what may roughly be described as Victorianism — or at any rate its beginnings—and against this background one can trace fairly easily the successive attempts — ^whether it be

^ The Victorian Age in Literature.

Carlyle, or Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites, or Newman, or Matthew Arnold standing somewhat apart — one can trace the successive attempts to discredit this soUdly scientific school. This generalisation is as roughly accurate as such things often are ; and it must not be forgotten that the so-called scientific school, no less than the men and movements in revolt against it, was made up of individuals possessing, much more than they possessed anything else, the vices and virtues of their time. Chiefly they all managed to acquire a degree of professional dullness which alone would have fixed them unmistakably, so far as chronology is concerned.

To return, however, one might accept Mr Chesterton's formula, good enough for our purpose, as a sort of point d'appui. The question may then occur : How is it possible to fit a man like Butler, the subject of this study, into any system, however wide and comprehensively, or uncomprehensively, vague; how are we to classify one who, above all others, belonged to no school, was traceable, it may fairly be said, to no influence at all direct in character, looking back to, and fitting in with, none of those particular habits of thought at any rate in the age just preceding and merging into his own ? On an external view, of course, it might be maintained that Butler harmonised with the solid, scientific background of Victorian thought — harmonised with it, yet was not of it. Again, as we have already hinted, one might quite easily say that Samuel Butler stood outside the Victorian system. And this would be the truest description of him. He did not stand outside it in the sense that he neglected it, gave it no attention. It always interested him;

if it had not been as it was Butler's work could never have been what it is in character and outlook. Butler was outside the Victorian convention in that his sympathies ran directly counter to those of his age and also because, temperamentally, he was able to see the deceits and weaknesses of the society around him. So he defies the labellers, the people whose delight it is to fix a man's precise position in the letters of his day. Indeed of all amusements, perhaps, none is more futile than this attempt to pigeon-hole and classify genius. Genius can admit of no classification.

One might mention half-a-dozen writers — Voltaire, Fielding, Defoe, Swift and Nietzsche, perhaps, in an indistinct way — ^whose work has some similarities to that of Butler. But the comparisons serve very little useful purpose ; they do not bring us much nearer to understanding him. And it must inevitably be so in a man who went his own way, thought for himself, and wrote his own words, not those of other people. On every subject that engaged his attention he came to an independent decision. His was a life, in a mental sense, hindered by no useless encumbrances ; things which he knew to have no value or meaning for him he discarded, whether they were doctrines, dogmas, books or people. In one case, however, there is evidence that he had studied carefully and wisely : Swift was a writer whose work Butler, quite early in life, read and assimilated ; indeed the mental attitude of the greatest English satirist must have appealed to him as none other could do— with the possible exception of Fielding. Fielding's personality interested Butler much more than his work, whereas with Swift it was the quick terseness of the writing which particularly claimed his attention. Yet here also he must have felt the strong personal presence — ^which he always looked for behind the written word — giving life and force to the whole. There are points of contact, too, between Butler and Defoe, that great master of realism. On many occasions Butler's vraisemblable method reminds us of this eighteenth-century writer. The successful affectation of reality, as opposed to fiction, which Butler practised once at least with complete success, is in the best tradition of Defoe — ^Defoe so bluntly described by someone as " perhaps the greatest liar who ever lived."

So Butler's literary position is indeterminate. A classic by training, he was also a man of science, novelist, philosopher and. art critic. And in addition to these literary interests he composed music and painted pictures. To everything he undertook, provided it interested him — ^and all these things interested him — ^he gave the completest attention, working with a conscientious care quite unusual in those who find that they can obtain attractive results with little labour. He never traded upon his own great natural abilities. He was, in one important aspect of his character, a marvel of industry and thoroughness. It is his general position, however, as a satirist and ironist that constitutes his greatest importance. We have already, in a vague and inadequate way, tried to point out some of the characteristics of Victorian society, the society into which Butler was born. An attempt to catch the ethos, the tone of such a society, must be very much of a failure. And yet there are a few external marks which serve to indicate what the later- Victorian age was like. The gibes at its expense, like the gibe at the middle classes, are old and threadwom ; perhaps they are none the less justified for that. The important thing is that Butler was bom into that age, and more important still, what he said about it has no small meaning for us at this present time. He was the one great writer, the social satirist, who saw through the humbug and deception of contemporary life. Li his freshness and freedom he stands as the completest counterweight to the foolish sentimentalisms of certain of the Victorians. And in a period which produced more useless things — ^and this in a wide sense — ^than almost any other, a cheap age of false values and misplaced enthusiasms, unaccountable prejudices, astonishing deficiency in artistic perception and yet with it a bewildering lack of real practical efficiency, in such an age it was a thing of incalculable value to possess one man who could hold up the follies of his day to the light of common-sense — ^and behold that they were very stupid follies. And just because Butler was in advance of his own time — ^there was much of the wide, prophetic spirit in his work — ^what he wrote has a very real value to-day.

Mr Gilbert Cannan, in his study of Butler,^ has, in the opening chapter, described him very well against the backgroimd of his unfortunate age. He would have us consider what the England of that time was like : it was, as Mr Cannan sees it, the age of commerciaUsm and the Great Exhibition, when Shakespeare was considered "not altogether proper, and had a greater successor in Tennyson " ; a gloomy age of antimacassars and family prayers. And, indeed, the disease of complacency had eaten so far into English

* Samuel Butler. A Critical Study by Gilbert Cannan, 1915.

vitals that a satire like Butler's Erewhon was admitted to be valid, but of no importance. Butler himself, of course, was convinced of the importance of the things satirised in his book no less than of the legitimacy of his satire. In this first-published book he did not quite realise what he was after ; but it swept together many of the vagrant ideas that had been worrying him to get themselves expressed ; it enabled him, also, to see where he stood in relation to the society in which he had to live. We shall return to Erewhon, for a completer analysis, in a subsequent chapter.

It was thus that Butler made his first tilt at conventionally accepted windmills. He was testing his powers, he was using up old material. And he must have been gratified at the time if he was aware that he had written something that no othet living man could possibly have written. The merits of the anonymous book were recognised ; and it was only later, when its true authorship was revealed, and when also the revealed author was discovered writing other quite different books of a somewhat puzzling character, it was only then that the decision went forth — the reviewers and literary men decided it — that Butler was much too dangerous and unrestrained as a writer and must be left severely alone. It is to the credit of Butler's age at any rate that it discovered so early the dangerous quality in his work. Its instinct was protective, and, as shown in the sequel, it had marked down its man and eliminated him fairly successfully from the number of people who " really mattered." So the conspiracy of silence continued, and Butler worked quietly away on the lines he had laid down. The contempt, the neglect of people who, like himself, were presumably engaged in a search for truth was certainlybewildering ; the conspiracy, however, only served to vitalise his powers ; his ideas became clearer to himself, and in his writing he forged a perfectly plain and adequate instrument to express them. In this respect again he is in the completest contrast to the rest of his age, with its talk of " style," its affected "illustrations," its polishing of sentences to the necessary " exquisite " point.

Butler, in any case, could never have identified himself with those people from whom he was so successfully cut off. His aloofness was the attitude of a man who must criticise what is around him because there is so much to criticise. And one of the chief interests about Butler, to us who can get some bird's-eye view of his life, is the spectacle of a comparatively lonely man — as we reckon loneliness — doing his work and publishing his books at his own expense, on which, coimting the whole output, the loss was little short of one thousand pounds. Reckoned by modem monetary standards, his life work was a failure. Yet it is only necessary to cast an eye over recent scientific research, or observe the tendencies of the younger school of creative writers, to see how wide Butler's influence has been since his death, in 1902. Indeed the emergence of Samuel Butler into the light of day has been a literary event of the last thirteen years ; and it has now become possible to see the splendid sense of what he wrote — on all those diverse topics which interested him, so long obscured by the men of the age last past, who did their work so effectively. We speak here of Butler's common-sense, fully aware of his theory of the female authorship of the Odyssey, which has been a stumbling-block to many ; to this subject we shall return in a later chapter.

Butler's literary position in his own time is well summed up in one of his notes, called " Myself and liiy Books." He confesses himself to be quite aware of the reasons which contributed to making his work unsuccessful; he was prepared for its failure, but in no wise deterred from the course he had prescribed. " I attacked people," he says, " who were at once unscrupulous and powerful, and I made no alliances. I did this because I did not want to be bored and have my time wasted and my pleasures curtailed. I had money enough to live on, and preferred addressing myself to posterity rather than to any except a very few of my own contemporaries. Those few I have always kept well in mind. I think of them continually when in doubt about any passage, but beyond those few I will not go. Posterity will give a man a fair hearing ; his own times will not do so if he is attacking vested interests, and I have attacked two powerful sets of vested interests at once. [The Church and Science.] What is the good of addressing people who will not listen ? I have addressed the next generation and have therefore said many things which want time before they become palatable. Any man who wishes his work to stand will sacrifice a good deal of his immediate audience for the sake of being attractive to a much larger number of people later on. He cannot gain his later audience xmless he has been fearless and thorough-going, and if he is this he is sure to have to tread on the corns of a great many of those who live at the same time with him, however little he may wish to do so. He must not expect these people to help him on, nor wonder if, for a time, they succeed in snuffing him out. It is part of the swim that it should be so. Only, as one who believes himself to have practised what he preaches, let me assure anyone who has money of his own that to write fearlessly for posterity and not get paid for it is m^uch better fun than I can imagine its being to write like, we will say, George Eliot, and mxake a lot of money by it."

This passage was written in 1883, and it explains quite sincerely, we believe, Butler's position. It may seem at first sight to be either a naive utterance or the complaint of a disappointed man. It is, however, much more a piece of genuine sincerity, one of the remarkable features about Butler's writing. Always he faced problems squarely and said so exactly what he thought as to be even, at times, somewhat disconcerting. He speaks here about attacking people because he did not v/ant to be bored ; and we fancy the meaning of this is that insincere people who subscribe to doctrines in which inwardly they do not believe will have to submit to them ad nauseam all their lives, and so sink deeper and deeper into the slough of boredom and self-deception. The passage is interesting also because it shows Butler's realisation of his position as a writer, and his faith in a later generation. The value of his work he was quite willing to leave not proven. And this faith in a posterity is characteristic of Butler ; it appears again in his notion of immortality — ^that the dead can only live by their work, vicariously, in the thoughts and deeds of others. Lastly, the note just quoted refers more than once to the two audiences which, mentally at any rate, Butler always opposed to each other. He felt strongly that the majority of his contemporaries could take no interest in his work ; he wrote therefore for a much smaller select audience, and a later generation, both of which would recognise the value of his achievement. This dual element in Butler's hearers is essential and worthy of special emphasis.

We have said that Butler's study of English society was an interested one ; it was, also, much more than that — ^it was an amused study. In a sense he stands for civilisation looking at itself and laughing in the realisation of how funny it all is. It is funny because of its inconsistencies, its unreasonableness, because of the utterly anomalous laws, conventions, institutions which man, a reasonable animal, has built up. Measured by his own standards of common-sense, man's practice tallies very ill with his reasoned theory. Many of his institutions admit of no justification ; attempt on his part to justify them^ spells failure. Butler recognised all this and his curiosity drove him on to examine the strange phenomenon. He examined it, and as a result told his generation many unpalatable truths about itself. So, in one way, he reminds us of the Wise Youth in Richard Feverel — ^although it is a comparison, we are sure, he would have disliked and repudiated. For it is true that Meredith's character is more of a symbol than a person ; about Butler there is nothing bloodless or inhtunan. Yet both of them in their aloof, amused attitude, their laughter at the capers of mankind — ^the laughter, perhaps, of m^odem and rather pagan deities — ^represent a type sufficiently rare to demand attention.

There is a further feature of Samuel Butler's work which must not go by imnoticed in a general introduction. This feature is the remarkable interdependence of thought shown in everything he wrote. He was never a pedant nor a specialist. He had the gift of seizing the vital connection between varieties of, at first sight, unconnected things, focusing and showing the material relevance between widely different points of view of thought and life. The classics, science, music, painting, philosophy jostled each other in claiming his attention ; but between each one of these studies he had established a real and vital connection. It is just in this that one may see the differences between what is called genius and talent. Genius is not in the least an intensified, a sort of superlative, talent ; it is simply the capacity for showing the wide meaning of apparently isolated experiences, for correlating the various ideas and aspects of life so that each one of them may throw a new light from its own particular angle. Walter Bagehot — ^with whom, as the sane critic of the mid-Victorian period, Butler has some points of similarity — ^has pointed out, in his famous essay on Shakespeare, the value to a writer of that " experiencing nature " which enables him to bring his knowledge of affairs into intimate relation with his written work, to write not in vacuo but with everything tested by his acquaintance with human life as he has observed it. " His mind," says Bagehot of Shakespeare, " did not form in early life a classified list of all the objects in the universe, and learn no more about the universe ever after. . . . What truly indicates excellent knowledge is the habit of constant, sudden, and alm.ost imconscious allusion, which implies familiarity, for it can arise from that alone ... a species of incidental, casual, and perpetual reference to ' the mighty world of eye and ear.' " These passages, as well as anything we know, explain also Butler's peculiar gifts. Kis work carries with it, pre-eminently, the sense of having lived the things he wrote.

And Butler's " constant, sudden, and almost imconscious allusions," his illustrations, in othet words, have a real relation to their context. These illustrations are not embroideries, pieces of prettiness, inserted to fill out the text, or because the writer liked the look of them. Butler's illustrations indeed differ from those of the Tennyson school in that they do actually illustrate. Open a book of his almost at random — Alps and Sanctuaries, for instance. Notice there his remarks on the individuality of the Italians — ^the Italians above all things must be themselves. The surest sign of national decadence among them is a desire for German life and German traditions. "I will not say," he remarks, "that priggishness is absolutely imknown among the North Italians ; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic ; and if an Italian happens to be a prig he will, like Tacitus, invariably show a hankering after German institutions." Here the illustration is perfectly natural and adequate. We know, even without the bias of schoolday recollections, that Tacitus was as Butler describes him. And Tacitus was an Italian.

This is just a slight example of Butler's illustrative method so conspicuous in all his work. His mind was a well-filled storehouse of ideas and references, each one of which had its own particular relevance. In his written work we frequently come across the same idea or allusion, clothed in a slightly different form, which reveals a mental compactness, yet with it a width of range and vision, unequalled in any recent writer. So these ideas and fancies, theories and thoughts about life — "the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually winging their way across the field of his vision," as Mr Festing Jones aptly described them — constantly recur throughout all his books. Very little, as we have said, was isolated. In Erezvhon, for example, we have that notion of the World of the Unborn, a world peopled by disembodied beings who could only gain admittance to this other world we know, by taking a drug, losing their memory and importiming two married people to get them bom. Licidentally this is a comment on death and the question : What happens at that, the other, end of life ? We meet the notion again, however, in the Notebooks, where he writes about an imaginary son who was always begging him to bring him into the world, and whose pleadings he sometimes could hardly resist. And so it was with each one of his books : when painting or writing music or what not they came to him, forced themselves upon him and pestered and worried till they got themselves written.

Such an intimate and original relationship of ideas shov/s, at any rate, independence. There was no conscious striving after consistency ; it was much more that, v/ith Butler, the very composition of his temperament made everything he studied fit systematically into his general outlook. His quarrel with Darwin, for instance, was over something fundamental in his ov/n point of view and in the Darwinian teaching.

Has intelligence a place in the evolutionary process ? Butler, of course, was quite convinced that it has; and he felt himself bound to criticise vehemently anyone, no matter what his prestige or his position, who would oust intelUgence from the universe. He expressed the difference between himself and Darwin quite shortly in the title of one of his scientific books, iMck, or Cunning? And Butler's scientific theories, which are finding such startling justification to-day, may be considered as among his most important intellectual contributions : not quite his ultimate conclusions, how^ever, for out of them grew a distinctive philosophy which is the real apex of his work, linked on to all else that he did through these scientific opinions. Thus of these opinions his novel. The Way of All Flesh, is, in one point of viev,% a practical illustration. The book was true enough to the life that he knew, and, as Mr Salter points out in his Essays on Two Moderns, it is interesting to notice the discrepancy which here appears between one aspect of his scientific theory and the practical side, the real life dealt with in the novel. That was a working out in practice, and in one particular case — his own — ^which could not endanger the position he had taken up.^