Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

The Humour of Homer and Other Essays

Introduction
By R. A. Streatfeild

The nucleus of this book is the collection of essays by Samuel Butler, which was originally published by Mr. Grant Richards in 1904 under the title Essays on Life, Art and Science, and reissued by Mr. Fifield in 1908. To these are now added another essay, entitled “The Humour of Homer,” a biographical sketch of the author kindly contributed by Mr. Henry Festing Jones, which will add materially to the value of the edition, and a portrait in photogravure from a photograph taken in 1889—the period of the essays.

From a photograph made by Pizzetta in Varallo in 1889. Emery Walker Ltd., ph. sc.

“The Humour of Homer” was originally delivered as a lecture at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street on the 30th January, 1892, the day on which Butler first promulgated his theory of the Trapanese origin of the Odyssey in a letter to the Athenæum. Later in the same year it was published with some additional matter by Messrs. Metcalfe and Co. of Cambridge. For the next five years Butler was engaged upon researches into the origin and authorship of the Odyssey, the results of which are embodied in his book The Authoress of the “Odyssey,” originally published by Messrs. Longman in 1897. Butler incorporated a good deal of “The Humour of Homer” into The Authoress of the “Odyssey,” but the section relating to the Iliad naturally found no place in the later work. For the sake of this alone “The Humour of Homer” deserves to be better known. Written as it was for an artisan audience and professing to deal only with one side of Homer’s genius, “The Humour of Homer” must not, of course, be taken as an exhaustive statement of Butler’s views upon Homeric questions. It touches but lightly on important points, particularly regarding the origin and authorship of the Odyssey, which are treated at much greater length in The Authoress of the “Odyssey.”

Nevertheless, “The Humour of Homer” appears to me to have a special value as a kind of general introduction to Butler’s more detailed study of the Odyssey. His attitude towards the Homeric poems is here expressed with extraordinary freshness and force. What that attitude was is best explained by his own words: “If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.” Butler did not undervalue the philological and archæological importance of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it was mainly as human documents that they appealed to him. This, I am inclined to suspect, was the root of the objection of academic critics to him and his theories. They did not so much resent the suggestion that the author of the Odyssey was a woman; they could not endure that he should be treated as a human being.

Of the remaining essays two were originally delivered as lectures; the others appeared first in The Universal Review in 1888, 1889 and 1890. I should perhaps explain why two other essays which also appeared in The Universal Review are not included in this collection. The first of these, entitled “L’Affaire Holbein-Rippel,” relates to a drawing of Holbein’s “Danse des Paysans” in the Basle Museum, which is usually described as a copy, but which Butler believed to be the work of Holbein himself. This essay requires to be illustrated in so elaborate a manner that it was impossible to include it in a book of this size. The second essay, which is a sketch of the career of the sculptor Tabachetti, was published as the first section of an article, entitled “A Sculptor and a Shrine,” of which the second part is here given under the title “The Sanctuary of Montrigone.” The section devoted to the sculptor contains all that Butler then knew about Tabachetti, but since it was written various documents have come to light, principally through the investigations of Cavaliere Francesco Negri, of Casale Monferrato, which negative some of Butler’s conclusions. Had Butler lived, I do not doubt that he would have revised his essay in the light of Cavaliere Negri’s discoveries, the value of which he fully recognized. As it stands the essay requires so much revision that I have decided to omit it altogether and to postpone giving English readers a full account of Tabachetti’s career until a second edition of Butler’s “Ex Voto,” in which Tabachetti’s work is discussed in detail, is required. Meanwhile I have given a brief summary of the main facts of Tabachetti’s life in a note (p. 195) to the essay on “Art in the Valley of Saas.” Anyone who desires further details concerning the sculptor and his work will find them in Cavaliere Negri’s pamphlet “Il Santuario di Crea” (Alessandria, 1902).

The three essays grouped together under the title The Deadlock in Darwinism may be regarded as a postscript to Butler’s four books on evolution, viz. Life and Habit, Evolution Old and New, Unconscious Memory, and Luck or Cunning? When these essays were first published in book form in 1904, I ventured to give a brief summary of Butler’s position with regard to the main problem of evolution. I need now only refer readers to Mr. Festing Jones’s biographical sketch and, for fuller details, to the masterly introduction contributed by Professor Marcus Hartog to the new edition of Unconscious Memory (A. C. Fifield, 1910), and recently reprinted in his Problems of Life and Reproduction (John Murray, 1913), in which Butler’s work in the field of biology and his share in the various controversies connected with the study of evolution are discussed with the authority of a specialist.

R. A. STREATFEILD. July, 1913.

Sketch of the Life of Samuel Butler
Author of Erewhon
(1835-1902)
by Henry Festing Jones

Note

This sketch of Butler’s life, together with the portrait which forms the frontispiece to this volume, first appeared in December, 1902, in The Eagle, the magazine of St. John’s College, Cambridge. I revised the sketch and read it before the British Homœopathic Association at 43 Russell Square, London, W.C., on the 9th February, 1910; some of Butler’s music was performed by Miss Grainger Kerr, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, and Mr. H. J. T. Wood, the secretary of the Association. I again revised it and read it before the Historical Society of St. John’s College, Cambridge, in the combination room of the college on the 16th November, 1910; the Master (Mr. R. F. Scott), who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University, was in the chair, and a vote of thanks was proposed by Professor William Bateson, F.R.S.

As the full Memoir of Butler on which I am engaged is not yet ready for publication, I have again revised the sketch, and it is here published in response to many demands for some account of his life.

H. F. J.
August, 1913.

Sketch of the Life of Samuel Butler
Author of Erewhon (1835-1902)

Samuel Butler was born on the 4th December, 1835, at the Rectory, Langar, near Bingham, in Nottinghamshire. His father was the Rev. Thomas Butler, then Rector of Langar, afterwards one of the canons of Lincoln Cathedral, and his mother was Fanny Worsley, daughter of John Philip Worsley of Arno’s Vale, Bristol, sugar-refiner. His grandfather was Dr. Samuel Butler, the famous headmaster of Shrewsbury School, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. The Butlers are not related either to the author of Hudibras, or to the author of the Analogy, or to the present Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Butler’s father, after being at school at Shrewsbury under Dr. Butler, went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge; he took his degree in 1829, being seventh classic and twentieth senior optime; he was ordained and returned to Shrewsbury, where he was for some time assistant master at the school under Dr. Butler. He married in 1832 and left Shrewsbury for Langar. He was a learned botanist, and made a collection of dried plants which he gave to the Town Museum of Shrewsbury.

Butler’s childhood and early life were spent at Langar among the surroundings of an English country rectory, and his education was begun by his father. In 1843, when he was only eight years old, the first great event in his life occurred; the family, consisting of his father and mother, his two sisters, his brother and himself, went to Italy. The South-Eastern Railway stopped at Ashford, whence they travelled to Dover in their own carriage; the carriage was put on board the steamboat, they crossed the Channel, and proceeded to Cologne, up the Rhine to Basle and on through Switzerland into Italy, through Parma, where Napoleon’s widow was still reigning, Modena, Bologna, Florence, and so to Rome. They had to drive where there was no railway, and there was then none in all Italy except between Naples and Castellamare. They seemed to pass a fresh custom-house every day, but, by tipping the searchers, generally got through without inconvenience. The bread was sour and the Italian butter rank and cheesy—often uneatable. Beggars ran after the carriage all day long and when they got nothing jeered at the travellers and called them heretics. They spent half the winter in Rome, and the children were taken up to the top of St. Peter’s as a treat to celebrate their father’s birthday. In the Sistine Chapel they saw the cardinals kiss the toe of Pope Gregory XVI, and in the Corso, in broad daylight, they saw a monk come rolling down a staircase like a sack of potatoes, bundled into the street by a man and his wife. The second half of the winter was spent in Naples. This early introduction to the land which he always thought of and often referred to as his second country made an ineffaceable impression upon him.

In January, 1846, he went to school at Allesley, near Coventry, under the Rev. E. Gibson. He seldom referred to his life there, though sometimes he would say something that showed he had not forgotten all about it. For instance, in 1900 Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, now the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, showed him a medieval missal, laboriously illuminated. He found that it fatigued him to look at it, and said that such books ought never to be made. Cockerell replied that such books relieved the tedium of divine service, on which Butler made a note ending thus:

Give me rather a robin or a peripatetic cat like the one whose loss the parishioners of St. Clement Danes are still deploring. When I was at school at Allesley the boy who knelt opposite me at morning prayers, with his face not more than a yard away from mine, used to blow pretty little bubbles with his saliva which he would send sailing off the tip of his tongue like miniature soap bubbles; they very soon broke, but they had a career of a foot or two. I never saw anyone else able to get saliva bubbles right away from him and, though I have endeavoured for some fifty years and more to acquire the art, I never yet could start the bubble off my tongue without its bursting. Now things like this really do relieve the tedium of church, but no missal that I have ever seen will do anything except increase it.

In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H. Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury are reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at Roughborough in The Way of All Flesh, Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy.

During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went straight to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of other composers had only awakened and intensified. He became as one of the listening brethren who stood around “when Jubal struck the chorded shell” in the Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day:

Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well.

This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of double pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing he ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to bring Solomon that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies of “With thee th’ unsheltered moor I’d trace.” He often tried to like the music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give them up—they bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace, an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the Messiah, failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the greatness of these composers, but he was out of sympathy with them, and never could forgive the last two for having led music astray from the Handel tradition and paved the road from Bach to Beethoven. Everything connected with Handel interested him. He remembered old Mr. Brooke, Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been present at the Handel Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss Susannah Apthorp, of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon Handel’s knee. He often regretted that these were his only links with “the greatest of all composers.”

Besides his love for Handel he had a strong liking for drawing, and, during the winter of 1853-4, his family again took him to Italy, where, being now eighteen, he looked on the works of the old masters with intelligence.

In October, 1854, he went into residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He showed no aptitude for any particular branch of academic study, nevertheless he impressed his friends as being likely to make his mark. Just as he used reminiscences of his own schooldays at Shrewsbury for Ernest’s life at Roughborough, so he used reminiscences of his own Cambridge days for those of Ernest. When the Simeonites, in The Way of All Flesh, “distributed tracts, dropping them at night in good men’s letter boxes while they slept, their tracts got burnt or met with even worse contumely.” Ernest Pontifex went so far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a copy of the parody “dropped into each of the Simeonites’ boxes.” Ernest did this in the novel because Butler had done it in real life. Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of the University Library, has found, among the Cambridge papers of the late J. Willis Clark’s collection, three printed pieces belonging to the year 1855 bearing on the subject. He speaks of them in an article headed “Samuel Butler and the Simeonites,” and signed A. T. B. in the Cambridge Magazine, 1st March, 1913; the first is “a genuine Simeonite tract; the other two are parodies. All three are anonymous. At the top of the second parody is written ‘By S. Butler, March 31.’” The article gives extracts from the genuine tract and the whole of Butler’s parody.

Besides parodying Simeonite tracts, Butler wrote various other papers during his undergraduate days, some of which, preserved by one of his contemporaries, who remained a lifelong friend, the Rev. Canon Joseph M’Cormick, now Rector of St. James’s, Piccadilly, are reproduced in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).

He also steered the Lady Margaret first boat, and Canon M’Cormick told me of a mishap that occurred on the last night of the races in 1857. Lady Margaret had been head of the river since 1854, Canon M’Cormick was rowing 5, Philip Pennant Pearson (afterwards P. Pennant) was 7, Canon Kynaston, of Durham (whose name formerly was Snow), was stroke, and Butler was cox. When the cox let go of the bung at starting, the rope caught in his rudder lines, and Lady Margaret was nearly bumped by Second Trinity. They escaped, however, and their pursuers were so much exhausted by their efforts to catch them that they were themselves bumped by First Trinity at the next corner. Butler wrote home about it:

11 March, 1857. Dear Mamma: My foreboding about steering was on the last day nearly verified by an accident which was more deplorable than culpable the effects of which would have been ruinous had not the presence of mind of No. 7 in the boat rescued us from the very jaws of defeat. The scene is one which never can fade from my remembrance and will be connected always with the gentlemanly conduct of the crew in neither using opprobrious language nor gesture towards your unfortunate son but treating him with the most graceful forbearance; for in most cases when an accident happens which in itself is but slight, but is visited with serious consequences, most people get carried away with the impression created by the last so as to entirely forget the accidental nature of the cause and if we had been quite bumped I should have been ruined, as it is I get praise for coolness and good steering as much as and more than blame for my accident and the crew are so delighted at having rowed a race such as never was seen before that they are satisfied completely. All the spectators saw the race and were delighted; another inch and I should never have held up my head again. One thing is safe, it will never happen again.

The Eagle, “a magazine supported by members of St. John’s College,” issued its first number in the Lent term of 1858; it contains an article by Butler “On English Composition and Other Matters,” signed “Cellarius”:

Most readers will have anticipated me in admitting that a man should be clear of his meaning before he endeavours to give it any kind of utterance, and that, having made up his mind what to say, the less thought he takes how to say it, more than briefly, pointedly and plainly, the better.

From this it appears that, when only just over twenty-two, Butler had already discovered and adopted those principles of writing from which he never departed.

In the fifth number of the Eagle is an article, “Our Tour,” also signed “Cellarius”; it is an account of a tour made in June, 1857, with a friend whose name he Italianized into Giuseppe Verdi, through France into North Italy, and was written, so he says, to show how they got so much into three weeks and spent only £25; they did not, however, spend quite so much, for the article goes on, after bringing them back to England, “Next day came safely home to dear old St. John’s, cash in hand 7d.” [{19}]

Butler worked hard with Shilleto, an old pupil of his grandfather, and was bracketed 12th in the Classical Tripos of 1858. Canon M’Cormick told me that he would no doubt have been higher but for the fact that he at first intended to go out in mathematics; it was only during the last year of his time that he returned to the classics, and his being so high as he was spoke well for the classical education of Shrewsbury.

It had always been an understood thing that he was to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman; accordingly, after taking his degree, he went to London and began to prepare for ordination, living and working among the poor as lay assistant under the Rev. Philip Perring, Curate of St. James’s, Piccadilly, an old pupil of Dr. Butler at Shrewsbury. [{20}] Placed among such surroundings, he felt bound to think out for himself many theological questions which at this time were first presented to him, and, the conclusion being forced upon him that he could not believe in the efficacy of infant baptism, he declined to be ordained.

It was now his desire to become an artist; this, however, did not meet with the approval of his family, and he returned to Cambridge to try for pupils and, if possible, to get a fellowship. He liked being at Cambridge, but there were few pupils and, as there seemed to be little chance of a fellowship, his father wished him to come down and adopt some profession. A long correspondence took place in the course of which many alternatives were considered. There are letters about his becoming a farmer in England, a tutor, a homœopathic doctor, an artist, or a publisher, and the possibilities of the army, the bar, and diplomacy. Finally it was decided that he should emigrate to New Zealand. His passage was paid, and he was to sail in the Burmah, but a cousin of his received information about this vessel which caused him, much against his will, to get back his passage money and take a berth in the Roman Emperor, which sailed from Gravesend on one of the last days of September, 1859. On that night, for the first time in his life, he did not say his prayers. “I suppose the sense of change was so great that it shook them quietly off. I was not then a sceptic; I had got as far as disbelief in infant baptism, but no further. I felt no compunction of conscience, however, about leaving off my morning and evening prayers—simply I could no longer say them.”

The Roman Emperor, after a voyage every incident of which interested him deeply, arrived outside Port Lyttelton. The captain shouted to the pilot who came to take them in:

“Has the Robert Small arrived?”

“No,” replied the pilot, “nor yet the Burmah.”

And Butler, writing home to his people, adds the comment: “You may imagine what I felt.”

The Burmah was never heard of again.

He spent some time looking round, considering what to do and how to employ the money with which his father was ready to supply him, and determined upon sheep-farming. He made several excursions looking for country, and ultimately took up a run which is still called Mesopotamia, the name he gave it because it is situated among the head-waters of the Rangitata.

It was necessary to have a horse, and he bought one for £55, which was not considered dear. He wrote home that the horse’s name was “Doctor”: “I hope he is a Homœopathist.” From this, and from the fact that he had already contemplated becoming a homœopathic doctor himself, I conclude that he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Robert Ellis Dudgeon, the eminent homœopathist, while he was doing parish work in London. After his return to England Dr. Dudgeon was his medical adviser, and remained one of his most intimate friends until the end of his life. Doctor, the horse, is introduced into Erewhon Revisited; the shepherd in Chapter XXVI tells John Higgs that Doctor “would pick fords better than that gentleman could, I know, and if the gentleman fell off him he would just stay stock still.”

Butler carried on his run for about four and a half years, and the open-air life agreed with him; he ascribed to this the good health he afterwards enjoyed. The following, taken from a notebook he kept in the colony and destroyed, gives a glimpse of one side of his life there; he preserved the note because it recalled New Zealand so vividly.

April, 1861. It is Sunday. We rose later than usual. There are five of us sleeping in the hut. I sleep in a bunk on one side of the fire; Mr. Haast, [{22}] a German who is making a geological survey of the province, sleeps upon the opposite one; my bullock-driver and hut-keeper have two bunks at the far end of the hut, along the wall, while my shepherd lies in the loft among the tea and sugar and flour. It was a fine morning, and we turned out about seven o’clock.

The usual mutton and bread for breakfast with a pudding made of flour and water baked in the camp oven after a joint of meat—Yorkshire pudding, but without eggs. While we were at breakfast a robin perched on the table and sat there a good while pecking at the sugar. We went on breakfasting with little heed to the robin, and the robin went on pecking with little heed to us. After breakfast Pey, my bullock-driver, went to fetch the horses up from a spot about two miles down the river, where they often run; we wanted to go pig-hunting.

I go into the garden and gather a few peascods for seed till the horses should come up. Then Cook, the shepherd, says that a fire has sprung up on the other side of the river. Who could have lit it? Probably someone who had intended coming to my place on the preceding evening and has missed his way, for there is no track of any sort between here and Phillips’s. In a quarter of an hour he lit another fire lower down, and by that time, the horses having come up, Haast and myself—remembering how Dr. Sinclair had just been drowned so near the same spot—think it safer to ride over to him and put him across the river. The river was very low and so clear that we could see every stone. On getting to the river-bed we lit a fire and did the same on leaving it; our tracks would guide anyone over the intervening ground.

Besides his occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the piano, to read and to write. In the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the University and in the colony. He also read the Origin of Species, which, as everyone knows, was published in 1859. He became “one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the Origin of Species” (Unconscious Memory, close of Chapter I). This dialogue, unsigned, was printed in the Press, Canterbury, New Zealand, on 20th December, 1862. A copy of the paper was sent to Charles Darwin, who forwarded it to a, presumably, English editor with a letter, now in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand, speaking of the dialogue as “remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate an account of Mr. D’s theory.” It is possible that Butler himself sent the newspaper containing his dialogue to Mr. Darwin; if so he did not disclose his name, for Darwin says in his letter that he does not know who the author was. Butler was closely connected with the Press, which was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first Superintendent of the Province, in May, 1861; he frequently contributed to its pages, and once, during FitzGerald’s absence, had charge of it for a short time, though he was never its actual editor. The Press reprinted the dialogue and the correspondence which followed its original appearance on 8th June, 1912.

On 13th June, 1863, the Press printed a letter by Butler signed “Cellarius” and headed “Darwin among the Machines,” reprinted in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912). The letter begins:

“Sir: There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances”; and goes on to say that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral, and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, “so now, in the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian types of the race.” He then speaks of the minute members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved from the clumsy brass clocks of the thirteenth century. Then comes the question: Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate. In 1863 Butler’s family published in his name A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which, as the preface states, was compiled from his letters home, his journal and extracts from two papers contributed to the Eagle. These two papers had appeared in the Eagle as three articles entitled “Our Emigrant” and signed “Cellarius.” The proof sheets of the book went out to New Zealand for correction and were sent back in the Colombo, which was as unfortunate as the Burmah, for she was wrecked. The proofs, however, were fished up, though so nearly washed out as to be almost undecipherable. Butler would have been just as well pleased if they had remained at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, for he never liked the book and always spoke of it as being full of youthful priggishness; but I think he was a little hard upon it. Years afterwards, in one of his later books, after quoting two passages from Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he considered the second to be a recantation of the first, he wrote: “When Mr. Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune.” And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit.

Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864 and returned via Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he dedicated Life and Habit. He arrived in August, 1864, in London, where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, a painting-room and a pantry, at 15 Clifford’s Inn, second floor (north). The net financial result of the sheep-farming and the selling out was that he practically doubled his capital, that is to say he had about £8000. This he left in New Zealand, invested on mortgage at 10 per cent, the then current rate in the colony; it produced more than enough for him to live upon in the very simple way that suited him best, and life in the Inns of Court resembles life at Cambridge in that it reduces the cares of housekeeping to a minimum; it suited him so well that he never changed his rooms, remaining there thirty-eight years till his death.

He was now his own master and able at last to turn to painting. He studied at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, which had formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler’s time, was being carried on by Francis Stephen Gary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Gary, who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby and is well known as the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb. Among his fellow-students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that the young artists got hold of the legend, which is in some of the books about Lamb, that when Francis Stephen Gary was a boy and there was a talk at his father’s house as to what profession he should take up, Lamb, who was present, said:

“I should make him an apo-po-pothe-Cary.”

They used to repeat this story freely among themselves, being, no doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed. Anyone who wants to know what kind of an artist F. S. Cary was can see his picture of Charles and Mary Lamb in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1865 Butler sent from London to New Zealand an article entitled “Lucubratio Ebria,” which was published in the Press of 29th July, 1865. It treated machines from a point of view different from that adopted in “Darwin among the Machines,” and was one of the steps that led to Erewhon and ultimately to Life and Habit. The article is reproduced in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).

Butler also studied art at South Kensington, but by 1867 he had begun to go to Heatherley’s School of Art in Newman Street, where he continued going for many years. He made a number of friends at Heatherley’s, and among them Miss Eliza Mary Anne Savage. There also he first met Charles Gogin, who, in 1896, painted the portrait of Butler which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. He described himself as an artist in the Post Office Directory, and between 1868 and 1876 exhibited at the Royal Academy about a dozen pictures, of which the most important was “Mr. Heatherley’s Holiday,” hung on the line in 1874. He left it by his will to his college friend Jason Smith, whose representatives, after his death, in 1910, gave it to the nation and it is now in the National Gallery of British Art. Mr. Heatherley never went away for a holiday; he once had to go out of town on business and did not return till the next day; one of the students asked him how he had got on, saying no doubt he had enjoyed the change and that he must have found it refreshing to sleep for once out of London.

“No,” said Heatherley, “I did not like it. Country air has no body.”

The consequence was that, whenever there was a holiday and the school was shut, Heatherley employed the time in mending the skeleton; Butler’s picture represents him so engaged in a corner of the studio. In this way he got his model for nothing. Sometimes he hung up a looking-glass near one of his windows and painted his own portrait. Many of these he painted out, but after his death we found a little store of them in his rooms, some of the early ones very curious. Of the best of them one is now at Canterbury, New Zealand, one at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and one at the Schools, Shrewsbury.

This is Butler’s own account of himself, taken from a letter to Sir Julius von Haast; although written in 1865 it is true of his mode of life for many years:

I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived, I was always very fond of it and mean to stick to it; it suits me and I am not without hopes that I shall do well at it. I live almost the life of a recluse, seeing very few people and going nowhere that I can help—I mean in the way of parties and so forth; if my friends had their way they would fritter away my time without any remorse; but I made a regular stand against it from the beginning and so, having my time pretty much in my own hands, work hard; I find, as I am sure you must find, that it is next to impossible to combine what is commonly called society and work.

But the time saved from society was not all devoted to painting. He modified his letter to the Press about “Darwin among the Machines” and, so modified, it appeared in 1865 as “The Mechanical Creation” in the Reasoner, a paper then published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. And his mind returned to the considerations which had determined him to decline to be ordained. In 1865 he printed anonymously a pamphlet which he had begun in New Zealand, the result of his study of the Greek Testament, entitled The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the four Evangelists critically examined. After weighing this evidence and comparing one account with another, he came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ did not die upon the cross. It is improbable that a man officially executed should escape death, but the alternative, that a man actually dead should return to life, seemed to Butler more improbable still and unsupported by such evidence as he found in the gospels. From this evidence he concluded that Christ swooned and recovered consciousness after his body had passed into the keeping of Joseph of Arimathæa. He did not suppose fraud on the part of the first preachers of Christianity; they sincerely believed that Christ died and rose again. Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the truth but kept silence. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from Butler’s mind.

In 1869, having been working too hard, he went abroad for a long change. On his way back, at the Albergo La Luna, in Venice, he met an elderly Russian lady in whose company he spent most of his time there. She was no doubt impressed by his versatility and charmed, as everyone always was, by his conversation and original views on the many subjects that interested him. We may be sure he told her all about himself and what he had done and was intending to do. At the end of his stay, when he was taking leave of her, she said:

“Et maintenant, Monsieur, vous allez créer,” meaning, as he understood her, that he had been looking long enough at the work of others and should now do something of his own.

This sank into him and pained him. He was nearly thirty-five, and hitherto all had been admiration, vague aspiration and despair; he had produced in painting nothing but a few sketches and studies, and in literature only a few ephemeral articles, a collection of youthful letters and a pamphlet on the Resurrection; moreover, to none of his work had anyone paid the slightest attention. This was a poor return for all the money which had been spent upon his education, as Theobald would have said in The Way of All Flesh. He returned home dejected, but resolved that things should be different in the future. While in this frame of mind he received a visit from one of his New Zealand friends, the late Sir F. Napier Broome, afterwards Governor of Western Australia, who incidentally suggested his rewriting his New Zealand articles. The idea pleased him; it might not be creating, but at least it would be doing something. So he set to work on Sundays and in the evenings, as relaxation from his profession of painting, and, taking his New Zealand article, “Darwin among the Machines,” and another, “The World of the Unborn,” as a starting point and helping himself with a few sentences from A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, he gradually formed Erewhon. He sent the MS. bit by bit, as it was written, to Miss Savage for her criticism and approval. He had the usual difficulty about finding a publisher. Chapman and Hall refused the book on the advice of George Meredith, who was then their reader, and in the end he published it at his own expense through Messrs. Trübner.

Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell told me that in 1912 Mr. Bertram Dobell, second-hand bookseller of Charing Cross Road, offered a copy of Erewhon for £1 10s.; it was thus described in his catalogue: “Unique copy with the following note in the author’s handwriting on the half-title: ‘To Miss E. M. A. Savage this first copy of Erewhon with the author’s best thanks for many invaluable suggestions and corrections.’” When Mr. Cockerell inquired for the book it was sold. After Miss Savage’s death in 1885 all Butler’s letters to her were returned to him, including the letter he wrote when he sent her this copy of Erewhon. He gave her the first copy issued of all his books that were published in her lifetime, and, no doubt, wrote an inscription in each. If the present possessors of any of them should happen to read this sketch I hope they will communicate with me, as I should like to see these books. I should also like to see some numbers of the Drawing-Room Gazette, which about this time belonged to or was edited by a Mrs. Briggs. Miss Savage wrote a review of Erewhon, which appeared in the number for 8th June, 1872, and Butler quoted a sentence from her review among the press notices in the second edition. She persuaded him to write for Mrs. Briggs notices of concerts at which Handel’s music was performed. In 1901 he made a note on one of his letters that he was thankful there were no copies of the Drawing-Room Gazette in the British Museum, meaning that he did not want people to read his musical criticisms; nevertheless, I hope some day to come across back numbers containing his articles.

The opening of Erewhon is based upon Butler’s colonial experiences; some of the descriptions remind one of passages in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, where he speaks of the excursions he made with Doctor when looking for sheep-country. The walk over the range as far as the statues is taken from the Upper Rangitata district, with some alterations; but the walk down from the statues into Erewhon is reminiscent of the Leventina Valley in the Canton Ticino. The great chords, which are like the music moaned by the statues, are from the prelude to the first of Handel’s Trois Leçons; he used to say:

“One feels them in the diaphragm—they are, as it were, the groaning and labouring of all creation travailing together until now.”

There is a place in New Zealand named Erewhon, after the book; it is marked on the large maps, a township about fifty miles west of Napier in the Hawke Bay Province (North Island). I am told that people in New Zealand sometimes call their houses Erewhon and occasionally spell the word Erehwon which Butler did not intend; he treated wh as a single letter, as one would treat th. Among other traces of Erewhon now existing in real life are Butler’s Stones on the Hokitika Pass, so called because of a legend that they were in his mind when he described the statues.

The book was translated into Dutch in 1873 and into German in 1897.

Butler wrote to Charles Darwin to explain what he meant by the “Book of the Machines”: “I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I never meant to do and should be shocked at having done.” Soon after this Butler was invited to Down and paid two visits to Mr. Darwin there; he thus became acquainted with all the family and for some years was on intimate terms with Mr. (now Sir) Francis Darwin.

It is easy to see by the light of subsequent events that we should probably have had something not unlike Erewhon sooner or later, even without the Russian lady and Sir F. N. Broome, to whose promptings, owing to a certain diffidence which never left him, he was perhaps inclined to attribute too much importance. But he would not have agreed with this view at the time; he looked upon himself as a painter and upon Erewhon as an interruption. It had come, like one of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn, pestering him and refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily shape. It was only a little one, and he saw no likelihood of its having any successors. So he satisfied its demands and then, supposing that he had written himself out, looked forward to a future in which nothing should interfere with the painting. Nevertheless, when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of The Fair Haven, which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author, John Pickard Owen. In the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, are two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages in forming the MS. of The Fair Haven. To have published this book as by the author of Erewhon would have been to give away the irony and satire. And he had another reason for not disclosing his name; he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the authorship of Erewhon was satisfied, the weekly sales fell from fifty down to only two or three. But, as he always talked openly of whatever was in his mind, he soon let out the secret of the authorship of The Fair Haven, and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition.

One result of his submitting the MS. of Erewhon to Miss Savage was that she thought he ought to write a novel, and urged him to do so. I have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with the idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to ascertain whether he was likely to succeed with a novel. The result seems to have satisfied him, for, not long after The Fair Haven, he began The Way of All Flesh, sending the MS. to Miss Savage, as he did everything he wrote, for her approval and putting her into the book as Ernest’s Aunt Alethea. He continued writing it in the intervals of other work until her death in February, 1885, after which he did not touch it. It was published in 1903 by Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor.

Soon after The Fair Haven Butler began to be aware that his letter in the Press, “Darwin among the Machines,” was descending with further modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about evolution which took shape as Life and Habit; but the writing of this very remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the painting interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada. He had been persuaded by a college friend, a member of one of the great banking families, to call in his colonial mortgages and to put the money into several new companies. He was going to make thirty or forty per cent instead of only ten. One of these companies was a Canadian undertaking, of which he became a director; it was necessary for someone to go to headquarters and investigate its affairs; he went, and was much occupied by the business for two or three years. By the beginning of 1876 he had returned finally to London, but most of his money was lost and his financial position for the next ten years caused him very serious anxiety. His personal expenditure was already so low that it was hardly possible to reduce it, and he set to work at his profession more industriously than ever, hoping to paint something that he could sell, his spare time being occupied with Life and Habit, which was the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other.

Following his letter in the Press, wherein he had seen machines as in process of becoming animate, he went on to regard them as living organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves. What would follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as machines which we had manufactured as parts of our bodies? In the first place, how did we come to make them without knowing anything about it? But then, how comes anybody to do anything unconsciously? The answer usually would be: By habit. But can a man be said to do a thing by habit when he has never done it before? His ancestors have done it, but not he. Can the habit have been acquired by them for his benefit? Not unless he and his ancestors are the same person. Perhaps, then, they are the same person.

In February, 1876, partly to clear his mind and partly to tell someone, he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake, Thomas William Gale Butler, a fellow art-student who was then in New Zealand; so much of the letter as concerns the growth of his theory is given in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912) and a résumé of the theory will be found at the end of the last of the essays in this volume, “The Deadlock in Darwinism.” In September, 1877, when Life and Habit was on the eve of publication, Mr. Francis Darwin came to lunch with him in Clifford’s Inn and, in course of conversation, told him that Professor Ray Lankester had written something in Nature about a lecture by Dr. Ewald Hering of Prague, delivered so long ago as 1870, “On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter.” This rather alarmed Butler, but he deferred looking up the reference until after December, 1877, when his book was out, and then, to his relief, he found that Hering’s theory was very similar to his own, so that, instead of having something sprung upon him which would have caused him to want to alter his book, he was supported. He at once wrote to the Athenæum, calling attention to Hering’s lecture, and then pursued his studies in evolution.

Life and Habit was followed in 1879 by Evolution Old and New, wherein he compared the teleological or purposive view of evolution taken by Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck with the view taken by Charles Darwin, and came to the conclusion that the old was better. But while agreeing with the earlier writers in thinking that the variations whose accumulation results in species were originally due to intelligence, he could not take the view that the intelligence resided in an external personal God. He had done with all that when he gave up the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He proposed to place the intelligence inside the creature (“The Deadlock in Darwinism” post).

In 1880 he continued the subject by publishing Unconscious Memory. Chapter IV of this book is concerned with a personal quarrel between himself and Charles Darwin which arose out of the publication by Charles Darwin of Dr. Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin. We need not enter into particulars here, the matter is fully dealt with in a pamphlet, Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: A Step towards Reconciliation, which I wrote in 1911, the result of a correspondence between Mr. Francis Darwin and myself. Before this correspondence took place Mr. Francis Darwin had made several public allusions to Life and Habit; and in September, 1908, in his inaugural address to the British Association at Dublin, he did Butler the posthumous honour of quoting from his translation of Hering’s lecture “On Memory,” which is in Unconscious Memory, and of mentioning Butler as having enunciated the theory contained in Life and Habit.

In 1886 Butler published his last book on evolution, Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification? His other contributions to the subject are some essays, written for the Examiner in 1879, “God the Known and God the Unknown,” which were re-published by Mr. Fifield in 1909, and the articles “The Deadlock in Darwinism” which appeared in the Universal Review in 1890 and are contained in this volume; some further notes on evolution will be found in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).

It was while he was writing Life and Habit that I first met him. For several years he had been in the habit of spending six or eight weeks of the summer in Italy and the Canton Ticino, generally making Faido his headquarters. Many a page of his books was written while resting by the fountain of some subalpine village or waiting in the shade of the chestnuts till the light came so that he could continue a sketch. Every year he returned home by a different route, and thus gradually became acquainted with every part of the Canton and North Italy. There is scarcely a town or village, a point of view, a building, statue or picture in all this country with which he was not familiar. In 1878 he happened to be on the Sacro Monte above Varese at the time I took my holiday; there I joined him, and nearly every year afterwards we were in Italy together.

He was always a delightful companion, and perhaps at his gayest on these occasions. “A man’s holiday,” he would say, “is his garden,” and he set out to enjoy himself and to make everyone about him enjoy themselves too. I told him the old schoolboy muddle about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco and saying: “We shall this day light up such a fire in England as I trust shall never be put out.” He had not heard it before and, though amused, appeared preoccupied, and perhaps a little jealous, during the rest of the evening. Next morning, while he was pouring out his coffee, his eyes twinkled and he said, with assumed carelessness:

“By the by, do you remember?—wasn’t it Columbus who bashed the egg down on the table and said ‘Eppur non si muove’?”

He was welcome wherever he went, full of fun and ready to play while doing the honours of the country. Many of the peasants were old friends, and every day we were sure to meet someone who remembered him. Perhaps it would be an old woman labouring along under a burden; she would smile and stop, take his hand and tell him how happy she was to meet him again and repeat her thanks for the empty wine bottle he had given her after an out-of-door luncheon in her neighbourhood four or five years before. There was another who had rowed him many times across the Lago di Orta and had never been in a train but once in her life, when she went to Novara to her son’s wedding. He always remembered all about these people and asked how the potatoes were doing this year and whether the grandchildren were growing up into fine boys and girls, and he never forgot to inquire after the son who had gone to be a waiter in New York. At Civiasco there is a restaurant which used to be kept by a jolly old lady, known for miles round as La Martina; we always lunched with her on our way over the Colma to and from Varallo-Sesia. On one occasion we were accompanied by two English ladies and, one being a teetotaller, Butler maliciously instructed La Martina to make the sabbaglione so that it should be forte and abbondante, and to say that the Marsala, with which it was more than flavoured, was nothing but vinegar. La Martina never forgot that when she looked in to see how things were going, he was pretending to lick the dish clean. These journeys provided the material for a book which he thought of calling “Verdi Prati,” after one of Handel’s most beautiful songs; but he changed his mind, and it appeared at the end of 1881 as Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino with more than eighty illustrations, nearly all by Butler. Charles Gogin made an etching for the frontispiece, drew some of the pictures, and put figures into others; half a dozen are mine. They were all redrawn in ink from sketches made on the spot, in oil, water-colour, and pencil. There were also many illustrations of another kind—extracts from Handel’s music, each chosen because Butler thought it suitable to the spirit of the scene he wished to bring before the reader. The introduction concludes with these words: “I have chosen Italy as my second country, and would dedicate this book to her as a thank-offering for the happiness she has afforded me.”

In the spring of 1883 he began to compose music, and in 1885 we published together an album of minuets, gavottes, and fugues. This led to our writing Narcissus, which is an Oratorio Buffo in the Handelian manner—that is as nearly so as we could make it. It is a mistake to suppose that all Handel’s oratorios are upon sacred subjects; some of them are secular. And not only so, but, whatever the subject, Handel was never at a loss in treating anything that came into his words by way of allusion or illustration. As Butler puts it in one of his sonnets:

He who gave eyes to ears and showed in sound
All thoughts and things in earth or heaven above—
From fire and hailstones running along the ground
To Galatea grieving for her love—
He who could show to all unseeing eyes
Glad shepherds watching o’er their flocks by night,
Or Iphis angel-wafted to the skies,
Or Jordan standing as an heap upright—

And so on. But there is one subject which Handel never treated—I mean the Money Market. Perhaps he avoided it intentionally; he was twice bankrupt, and Mr. R. A. Streatfeild tells me that the British Museum possesses a MS. letter from him giving instructions as to the payment of the dividends on £500 South Sea Stock. Let us hope he sold out before the bubble burst; if so, he was more fortunate than Butler, who was at this time of his life in great anxiety about his own financial affairs. It seemed a pity that Dr. Morell had never offered Handel some such words as these:

The steadfast funds maintain their wonted state
While all the other markets fluctuate.

Butler wondered whether Handel would have sent the steadfast funds up above par and maintained them on an inverted pedal with all the other markets fluctuating iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn every one to his own way in the Messiah. He thought something of the kind ought to have been done, and in the absence of Handel and Dr. Morell we determined to write an oratorio that should attempt to supply the want. In order to make our libretto as plausible as possible, we adopted the dictum of Monsieur Jourdain’s Maître à danser: “Lorsqu’on a des personnes à faire parler en musique, il faut bien que, pour la vraisemblance, on donne dans la bergerie.” Narcissus is accordingly a shepherd in love with Amaryllis; they come to London with other shepherds and lose their money in imprudent speculations on the Stock Exchange. In the second part the aunt and godmother of Narcissus, having died at an advanced age worth one hundred thousand pounds, all of which she has bequeathed to her nephew and godson, the obstacle to his union with Amaryllis is removed. The money is invested in consols and all ends happily.

In December, 1886, Butler’s father died, and his financial difficulties ceased. He engaged Alfred Emery Cathie as clerk, but made no other change, except that he bought a pair of new hair brushes and a larger wash-hand basin. Any change in his mode of life was an event. When in London he got up at 6.30 in the summer and 7.30 in the winter, went into his sitting-room, lighted the fire, put the kettle on and returned to bed. In half an hour he got up again, fetched the kettle of hot water, emptied it into the cold water that was already in his bath, refilled the kettle and put it back on the fire. After dressing, he came into his sitting-room, made tea and cooked, in his Dutch oven, something he had bought the day before. His laundress was an elderly woman, and he could not trouble her to come to his rooms so early in the morning; on the other hand, he could not stay in bed until he thought it right for her to go out; so it ended in his doing a great deal for himself. He then got his breakfast and read the Times. At 9.30 Alfred came, with whom he discussed anything requiring attention, and soon afterwards his laundress arrived. Then he started to walk to the British Museum, where he arrived about 10.30, every alternate morning calling at the butcher’s in Fetter Lane to order his meat. In the Reading Room at the Museum he sat at Block B (“B for Butler”) and spent an hour “posting his notes”—that is reconsidering, rewriting, amplifying, shortening, and indexing the contents of the little note-book he always carried in his pocket. After the notes he went on till 1.30 with whatever book he happened to be writing.

On three days of the week he dined in a restaurant on his way home, and on the other days he dined in his chambers where his laundress had cooked his dinner. At two o’clock Alfred returned (having been home to dinner with his wife and children) and got tea ready for him. He then wrote letters and attended to his accounts till 3.45, when he smoked his first cigarette. He used to smoke a great deal, but, believing it to be bad for him, took to cigarettes instead of pipes, and gradually smoked less and less, making it a rule not to begin till some particular hour, and pushing this hour later and later in the day, till it settled itself at 3.45. There was no water laid on in his rooms, and every day he fetched one can full from the tap in the court, Alfred fetching the rest. When anyone expostulated with him about cooking his own breakfast and fetching his own water, he replied that it was good for him to have a change of occupation. This was partly the fact, but the real reason, which he could not tell everyone, was that he shrank from inconveniencing anybody; he always paid more than was necessary when anything was done for him, and was not happy then unless he did some of the work himself.

At 5.30 he got his evening meal, he called it his tea, and it was little more than a facsimile of breakfast. Alfred left in time to post the letters before six. Butler then wrote music till about 8, when he came to see me in Staple Inn, returning to Clifford’s Inn by about 10. After a light supper, latterly not more than a piece of toast and a glass of milk, he played one game of his own particular kind of Patience, prepared his breakfast things and fire ready for the next morning, smoked his seventh and last cigarette, and went to bed at eleven o’clock.

He was fond of the theatre, but avoided serious pieces. He preferred to take his Shakespeare from the book, finding that the spirit of the plays rather evaporated under modern theatrical treatment. In one of his books he brightens up the old illustration of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark by putting it thus: “If the character of Hamlet be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role.” Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going to one pantomime every winter.

There were about twenty houses where he visited, but he seldom accepted an invitation to dinner—it upset the regularity of his life; besides, he belonged to no club and had no means of returning hospitality. When two colonial friends called unexpectedly about noon one day, soon after he settled in London, he went to the nearest cook-shop in Fetter Lane and returned carrying a dish of hot roast pork and greens. This was all very well once in a way, but not the sort of thing to be repeated indefinitely.

On Thursdays, instead of going to the Museum, he often took a day off, going into the country sketching or walking, and on Sundays, whatever the weather, he nearly always went into the country walking; his map of the district for thirty miles round London is covered all over with red lines showing where he had been. He sometimes went out of town from Saturday to Monday, and for over twenty years spent Christmas at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

There is a Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia with many chapels, each containing life-sized statues and frescoes illustrating the life of Christ. Butler had visited this sanctuary repeatedly, and was a great favourite with the townspeople, who knew that he was studying the statues and frescoes in the chapels, and who remembered that in the preface to Alps and Sanctuaries he had declared his intention of writing about them. In August, 1887, the Varallesi brought matters to a head by giving him a civic dinner on the Mountain. Everyone was present, there were several speeches and, when we were coming down the slippery mountain path after it was all over, he said to me:

“You know, there’s nothing for it now but to write that book about the Sacro Monte at once. It must be the next thing I do.”

Accordingly, on returning home, he took up photography and, immediately after Christmas, went back to Varallo to photograph the statues and collect material. Much research was necessary and many visits to out-of-the-way sanctuaries which might have contained work by the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he was rescuing from oblivion and identifying with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. One of these visits, made after his book was published, forms the subject of “The Sanctuary of Montrigone,” reproduced in this volume. Ex Voto, the book about Varallo, appeared in 1888, and an Italian translation by Cavaliere Angelo Rizzetti was published at Novara in 1894.

“Quis Desiderio . . .?” the second essay in this volume, was developed in 1888 from something in a letter from Miss Savage nearly ten years earlier. On the 15th of December, 1878, in acknowledging this letter, Butler wrote:

I am sure that any tree or flower nursed by Miss Cobbe would be the very first to fade away and that her gazelles would die long before they ever came to know her well. The sight of the brass buttons on her pea-jacket would settle them out of hand.

There was an enclosure in Miss Savage’s letter, but it is unfortunately lost; I suppose it must have been a newspaper cutting with an allusion to Moore’s poem and perhaps a portrait of Miss Frances Power Cobbe—pea-jacket, brass buttons, and all.

On the 10th November, 1879, Miss Savage, having been ill, wrote to Butler:

I have been dipping into the books of Moses, being sometimes at a loss for something to read while shut up in my apartment. You know that I have never read the Bible much, consequently there is generally something of a novelty that I hit on. As you do know your Bible well, perhaps you can tell me what became of Aaron. The account given of his end in Numbers XX is extremely ambiguous and unsatisfactory. Evidently he did not come by his death fairly, but whether he was murdered secretly for the furtherance of some private ends, or publicly in a State sacrifice, I can’t make out. I myself rather incline to the former opinion, but I should like to know what the experts say about it. A very nice, exciting little tale might be made out of it in the style of the police stories in All the Year Round called “The Mystery of Mount Hor or What became of Aaron?” Don’t forget to write to me.

Butler’s people had been suggesting that he should try to earn money by writing in magazines, and Miss Savage was falling in with the idea and offering a practical suggestion. I do not find that he had anything to tell her about the death of Aaron. On 23rd March, 1880, she wrote:

Dear Mr. Butler: Read the subjoined poem of Wordsworth and let me know what you understand its meaning to be. Of course I have my opinion, which I think of communicating to the Wordsworth Society. You can belong to that Society for the small sum of 2/6 per annum. I think of joining because it is cheap.

“The subjoined poem” was the one beginning: “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” and Butler made this note on the letter:

To the foregoing letter I answered that I concluded Miss Savage meant to imply that Wordsworth had murdered Lucy in order to escape a prosecution for breach of promise.

Miss Savage to Butler.

2nd April, 1880: My dear Mr. Butler: I don’t think you see all that I do in the poem, and I am afraid that the suggestion of a DARK SECRET in the poet’s life is not so very obvious after all. I was hoping you would propose to devote yourself for a few months to reading the Excursion, his letters, &c., with a view to following up the clue, and I am disappointed though, to say the truth, the idea of a crime had not flashed upon me when I wrote to you. How well the works of great men repay attention and study! But you, who know your Bible so well, how was it that you did not detect the plagiarism in the last verse? Just refer to the account of the disappearance of Aaron (I have not a Bible at hand, we want one sadly in the club) but I am sure that the words are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage meant. 1901. S. B.] Cassell’s Magazine have offered a prize for setting the poem to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be treated musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it.

Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage’s letters in 1901, could not see the resemblance between Wordsworth’s poem and Numbers XX., he at once saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore’s heroine whom he had been keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory ever since his letter about Miss Frances Power Cobbe. He now sent Lucy to keep her company and often spoke of the pair of them as probably the two most disagreeable young women in English literature—an opinion which he must have expressed to Miss Savage and with which I have no doubt she agreed.

In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues at Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the British Museum had removed Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians from its accustomed shelf in the Reading Room. Soon afterwards Harry Quilter asked him to write for the Universal Review and he responded with “Quis Desiderio . . .?” In this essay he compares himself to Wordsworth and dwells on the points of resemblance between Lucy and the book of whose assistance he had now been deprived in a passage which echoes the opening of Chapter V of Ex Voto, where he points out the resemblances between Varallo and Jerusalem.

Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archæological Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his father for their Quarterly Journal. This he undertook to do when he should have finished Ex Voto. In December, 1888, his sisters, with the idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his grandfather’s correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839. On looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with an almost Chinese reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the Archæological Society to absolve him from his promise to write the memoir, set about a full life of Dr. Butler, which was not published till 1896. The delay was caused partly by the immense quantity of documents he had to sift and digest, the number of people he had to consult and the many letters he had to write, and partly by something that arose out of Narcissus, which we published in June, 1888.

Butler was not satisfied with having written only half of this work; he wanted it to have a successor, so that by adding his two halves together, he could say he had written a whole Handelian oratorio. While staying with his sisters at Shrewsbury with this idea in his mind, he casually took up a book by Alfred Ainger about Charles Lamb and therein stumbled upon something about the Odyssey. It was years since he had looked at the poem, but, from what he remembered, he thought it might provide a suitable subject for musical treatment. He did not, however, want to put Dr. Butler aside, so I undertook to investigate. It is stated on the title-page of both Narcissus and Ulysses that the words were written and the music composed by both of us. As to the music, each piece bears the initials of the one who actually composed it. As to the words, it was necessary first to settle some general scheme and this, in the case of Narcissus, grew in the course of conversation. The scheme of Ulysses was constructed in a more formal way and Butler had perhaps rather less to do with it. We were bound by the Odyssey, which is, of course, too long to be treated fully, and I selected incidents that attracted me and settled the order of the songs and choruses. For this purpose, as I out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in the smallness of my Greek, I used The Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb, which we should have known nothing about but for Ainger’s book. Butler acquiesced in my proposals, but, when it came to the words themselves, he wrote practically all the libretto, as he had done in the case of Narcissus; I did no more than suggest a few phrases and a few lines here and there.

We had sent Narcissus for review to the papers, and, as a consequence, about this time, made the acquaintance of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, then musical critic of the Times; he introduced us to that learned musician William Smith Rockstro, under whom we studied medieval counterpoint while composing Ulysses. We had already made some progress with it when it occurred to Butler that it would not take long and might, perhaps, be safer if he were to look at the original poem, just to make sure that Lamb had not misled me. Not having forgotten all his Greek, he bought a copy of the Odyssey and was so fascinated by it that he could not put it down. When he came to the Phœacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria he felt he must be reading the description of a real place and that something in the personality of the author was eluding him. For months he was puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set about translating the poem. In August, 1891, he had preceded me to Chiavenna and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect me, he made this note:

It was during the few days I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel Grotta Crimée) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the Odyssey. I did not find out its having been written at Trapani till January, 1892.

He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca was drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and the Ægadean Islands. As soon as he could after this discovery he went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in all respects suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how things kept turning up to support his view. It is all in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897 and dedicated to his friend Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi.

His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August—a hot time of the year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring. He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, “thus,” as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me, “honouring a great man’s memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation.” Besides showing that the Odyssey was written by a woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the received theories.

It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it affected any of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no weight of authority could make him say that it did. This matter of the geography of the Iliad is only one among many commonly received opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason to dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write.

It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that he learnt nearly the whole of the Odyssey and the Iliad by heart. He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when saying the poems over to himself. These two little books are now in the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was, however, disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or two at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had learnt first; but he was about sixty at the time. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, on which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble in this respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order, and one consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of the poet’s work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those who were less familiar with it. “A commentary on a poem,” he would say, “may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you want to form an opinion about it and its author.”

It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more than the book—the work of man; the painter more than the picture; the composer more than the music. “If a writer, a painter, or a musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist.” Handel was, of course, “the greatest of all musicians.” Among the painters he chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare, Homer, and the Authoress of the Odyssey; and in architecture the man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum. Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in the company of inferior people when he had these. And he treated those he met in daily life in the same spirit: it was what he found them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others thought about them was of little or no consequence.

And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously—namely, Erewhon and the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle had been slumbering during all those years and at last rose again in the form of a sequel to Erewhon. In Erewhon Revisited Mr. Higgs returns to find that the Erewhonians now believe in him as a god in consequence of the supposed miracle of his going up in a balloon to induce his heavenly father to send the rain. Mr. Higgs and the reader know that there was no miracle in the case, but Butler wanted to show that whether it was a miracle or not did not signify provided that the people believed it to be one. And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple which is being dedicated to him and his worship.

The existence of his son George was an after-thought and gave occasion for the second leading idea of the book—the story of a father trying to win the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in order to show himself worthy of it—and succeeding.

Butler’s health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he was unfit to travel, but was determined to go, and was looking forward to meeting Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to accompany over the Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx. But he did not get beyond Palermo; there he was so much worse that he could not leave his room. In a few weeks he was well enough to be removed to Naples, and Alfred went out and brought him home to London. He was taken to a nursing home in St. John’s Wood where he lay for a month, attended by his old friend Dr. Dudgeon, and where he died on the 18th June, 1902.

There was a great deal he still wanted to do. He had intended to revise The Way of All Flesh, to write a book about Tabachetti, and to publish a new edition of Ex Voto with the mistakes corrected. Also he wished to reconsider the articles reprinted in this volume and was looking forward to painting more sketches and composing more music. While lying ill and very feeble within a few days of the end, and not knowing whether it was to be the end or not, he said to me:

“I am much better to-day. I don’t feel at all as though I were going to die. Of course, it will be all wrong if I do get well, for there is my literary position to be considered. First I write Erewhon—that is my opening subject; then, after modulating freely through all my other books and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my original key and write Erewhon Revisited. Obviously, now is the proper moment to come to a full close, make my bow and retire; but I believe I am getting well after all. It’s very inartistic, but I cannot help it.”

Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he is serious or jesting. He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield: “Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as indeed who can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a fair amount of success.” To veil his own earnestness he turned most naturally to humour, employing it in a spirit of reverence, as all the great humorists have done, to express his deepest and most serious convictions. He was aware that he ran the risk of being misunderstood by some, but he also knew that it is useless to try to please all, and, like Mozart, he wrote to please himself and a few intimate friends.

I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and sympathy; nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great and can never be known—it was sometimes exercised in unexpected ways, as when he gave my laundress a shilling because it was “such a beastly foggy morning”; nor of his slightly archaic courtliness—unless among people he knew well he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail—he kept accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening, and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to say: “II sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poète.”

Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel’s Six Great Fugues. He called this “The Old Man Fugue,” and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by one who was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made young Ernest Pontifex in The Way of all Flesh offer it to Edward Overton as an epitaph for his Aunt Alethea. Butler, however, left off wanting any tombstone long before he died. In accordance with his wish his body was cremated, and a week later Alfred and I returned to Woking and buried his ashes under the shrubs in the garden of the crematorium, with nothing to mark the spot.

The Humour of Homer [{59}]

The first of the two great poems commonly ascribed to Homer is called the Iliad—a title which we may be sure was not given it by the author. It professes to treat of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles that broke out while the Greeks were besieging the city of Troy, and it does, indeed, deal largely with the consequences of this quarrel; whether, however, the ostensible subject did not conceal another that was nearer the poet’s heart—I mean the last days, death, and burial of Hector—is a point that I cannot determine. Nor yet can I determine how much of the Iliad as we now have it is by Homer, and how much by a later writer or writers. This is a very vexed question, but I myself believe the Iliad to be entirely by a single poet.

The second poem commonly ascribed to the same author is called the Odyssey. It deals with the adventures of Ulysses during his ten years of wandering after Troy had fallen. These two works have of late years been believed to be by different authors. The Iliad is now generally held to be the older work by some one or two hundred years.

The leading ideas of the Iliad are love, war, and plunder, though this last is less insisted on than the other two. The key-note is struck with a woman’s charms, and a quarrel among men for their possession. It is a woman who is at the bottom of the Trojan war itself. Woman throughout the Iliad is a being to be loved, teased, laughed at, and if necessary carried off. We are told in one place of a fine bronze cauldron for heating water which was worth twenty oxen, whereas a few lines lower down a good serviceable maid-of-all-work is valued at four oxen. I think there is a spice of malicious humour in this valuation, and am confirmed in this opinion by noting that though woman in the Iliad is on one occasion depicted as a wife so faithful and affectionate that nothing more perfect can be found either in real life or fiction, yet as a general rule she is drawn as teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking the sex that has the effrontery to deem itself her lord and master. Whether or no this view may have arisen from any domestic difficulties between Homer and his wife is a point which again I find it impossible to determine.

We cannot refrain from contemplating such possibilities. If we are to be at home with Homer there must be no sitting on the edge of one’s chair dazzled by the splendour of his reputation. He was after all only a literary man, and those who occupy themselves with letters must approach him as a very honoured member of their own fraternity, but still as one who must have felt, thought, and acted much as themselves. He struck oil, while we for the most part succeed in boring only; still we are his literary brethren, and if we would read his lines intelligently we must also read between them. That one so shrewd, and yet a dreamer of such dreams as have been vouchsafed to few indeed besides himself—that one so genially sceptical, and so given to looking into the heart of a matter, should have been in such perfect harmony with his surroundings as to think himself in the best of all possible worlds—this is not believable. The world is always more or less out of joint to the poet—generally more so; and unfortunately he always thinks it more or less his business to set it right—generally more so. We are all of us more or less poets—generally, indeed, less so; still we feel and think, and to think at all is to be out of harmony with much that we think about. We may be sure, then, that Homer had his full share of troubles, and also that traces of these abound up and down his work if we could only identify them, for everything that everyone does is in some measure a portrait of himself; but here comes the difficulty—not to read between the lines, not to try and detect the hidden features of the writer—this is to be a dull, unsympathetic, incurious reader; and on the other hand to try and read between them is to be in danger of running after every Will o’ the Wisp that conceit may raise for our delusion.

I believe it will help you better to understand the broad humour of the Iliad, which we shall presently reach, if you will allow me to say a little more about the general characteristics of the poem. Over and above the love and war that are his main themes, there is another which the author never loses sight of—I mean distrust and dislike of the ideas of his time as regards the gods and omens. No poet ever made gods in his own image more defiantly than the author of the Iliad. In the likeness of man created he them, and the only excuse for him is that he obviously desired his readers not to take them seriously. This at least is the impression he leaves upon his reader, and when so great a man as Homer leaves an impression it must be presumed that he does so intentionally. It may be almost said that he has made the gods take the worse, not the better, side of man’s nature upon them, and to be in all respects as we ourselves—yet without virtue. It should be noted, however, that the gods on the Trojan side are treated far more leniently than those who help the Greeks.

The chief gods on the Grecian side are Juno, Minerva, and Neptune. Juno, as you will shortly see, is a scolding wife, who in spite of all Jove’s bluster wears the breeches, or tries exceedingly hard to do so. Minerva is an angry termagant—mean, mischief-making, and vindictive. She begins by pulling Achilles’ hair, and later on she knocks the helmet from off the head of Mars. She hates Venus, and tells the Grecian hero Diomede that he had better not wound any of the other gods, but that he is to hit Venus if he can, which he presently does ‘because he sees that she is feeble and not like Minerva or Bellona.’ Neptune is a bitter hater.

Apollo, Mars, Venus, Diana, and Jove, so far as his wife will let him, are on the Trojan side. These, as I have said, meet with better, though still somewhat contemptuous, treatment at the poet’s hand. Jove, however, is being mocked and laughed at from first to last, and if one moral can be drawn from the Iliad more clearly than another, it is that he is only to be trusted to a very limited extent. Homer’s position, in fact, as regards divine interference is the very opposite of David’s. David writes, “Put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man; there is no sure help but from the Lord.” With Homer it is, “Put not your trust in Jove neither in any omen from heaven; there is but one good omen—to fight for one’s country. Fortune favours the brave; heaven helps those who help themselves.”

The god who comes off best is Vulcan, the lame, hobbling, old blacksmith, who is the laughing-stock of all the others, and whose exquisitely graceful skilful workmanship forms such an effective contrast to the uncouth exterior of the workman. Him, as a man of genius and an artist, and furthermore as a somewhat despised artist, Homer treats, if with playfulness, still with respect, in spite of the fact that circumstances have thrown him more on the side of the Greeks than of the Trojans, with whom I understand Homer’s sympathies mainly to lie.

The poet either dislikes music or is at best insensible to it. Great poets very commonly are so. Achilles, indeed, does on one occasion sing to his own accompaniment on the lyre, but we are not told that it was any pleasure to hear him, and Patroclus, who was in the tent at the time, was not enjoying it; he was only waiting for Achilles to leave off. But though not fond of music, Homer has a very keen sense of the beauties of nature, and is constantly referring both in and out of season to all manner of homely incidents that are as familiar to us as to himself. Sparks in the train of a shooting-star; a cloud of dust upon a high road; foresters going out to cut wood in a forest; the shrill cry of the cicale; children making walls of sand on the sea-shore, or teasing wasps when they have found a wasps’ nest; a poor but very honest woman who gains a pittance for her children by selling wool, and weighs it very carefully; a child clinging to its mother’s dress and crying to be taken up and carried—none of these things escape him. Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey do we ever receive so much as a hint as to the time of year at which any of the events described are happening; but on one occasion the author of the Iliad really has told us that it was a very fine day, and this not from a business point of view, but out of pure regard to the weather for its own sake.

With one more observation I will conclude my preliminary remarks about the Iliad. I cannot find its author within the four corners of the work itself. I believe the writer of the Odyssey to appear in the poem as a prominent and very fascinating character whom we shall presently meet, but there is no one in the Iliad on whom I can put my finger with even a passing idea that he may be the author. Still, if under some severe penalty I were compelled to find him, I should say it was just possible that he might consider his own lot to have been more or less like that which he forecasts for Astyanax, the infant son of Hector. At any rate his intimate acquaintance with the topography of Troy, which is now well ascertained, and still more his obvious attempt to excuse the non-existence of a great wall which, according to his story, ought to be there and which he knew had never existed, so that no trace could remain, while there were abundant traces of all the other features he describes—these facts convince me that he was in all probability a native of the Troad, or country round Troy. His plausibly concealed Trojan sympathies, and more particularly the aggravated exaggeration with which the flight of Hector is described, suggest to me, coming as they do from an astute and humorous writer, that he may have been a Trojan, at any rate by the mother’s side, made captive, enslaved, compelled to sing the glories of his captors, and determined so to overdo them that if his masters cannot see through the irony others sooner or later shall. This, however, is highly speculative, and there are other views that are perhaps more true, but which I cannot now consider.

I will now ask you to form your own opinions as to whether Homer is or is not a shrewd and humorous writer.

Achilles, whose quarrel with Agamemnon is the ostensible subject of the poem, is son to a marine goddess named Thetis, who had rendered Jove an important service at a time when he was in great difficulties. Achilles, therefore, begs his mother Thetis to go up to Jove and ask him to let the Trojans discomfit the Greeks for a time, so that Agamemnon may find he cannot get on without Achilles’ help, and may thus be brought to reason.

Thetis tells her son that for the moment there is nothing to be done, inasmuch as the gods are all of them away from home. They are gone to pay a visit to Oceanus in Central Africa, and will not be back for another ten or twelve days; she will see what can be done, however, as soon as ever they return. This in due course she does, going up to Olympus and laying hold of Jove by the knee and by the chin. I may say in passing that it is still a common Italian form of salutation to catch people by the chin. Twice during the last summer I have been so seized in token of affectionate greeting, once by a lady and once by a gentleman.

Thetis tells her tale to Jove, and concludes by saying that he is to say straight out ‘yes’ or ‘no’ whether he will do what she asks. Of course he can please himself, but she should like to know how she stands.

“It will be a plaguy business,” answers Jove, “for me to offend Juno and put up with all the bitter tongue she will give me. As it is, she is always nagging at me and saying I help the Trojans, still, go away now at once before she finds out that you have been here, and leave the rest to me. See, I nod my head to you, and this is the most solemn form of covenant into which I can enter. I never go back upon it, nor shilly-shally with anybody when I have once nodded my head.” Which, by the way, amounts to an admission that he does shilly-shally sometimes.

Then he frowns and nods, shaking the hair on his immortal head till Olympus rocks again. Thetis goes off under the sea and Jove returns to his own palace. All the other gods stand up when they see him coming, for they do not dare to remain sitting while he passes, but Juno knows he has been hatching mischief against the Greeks with Thetis, so she attacks him in the following words:

“You traitorous scoundrel,” she exclaims, “which of the gods have you been taking into your counsel now? You are always trying to settle matters behind my back, and never tell me, if you can help it, a single word about your designs.”

“‘Juno,’ replied the father of gods and men, ‘you must not expect to be told everything that I am thinking about: you are my wife, it is true, but you might not be able always to understand my meaning; in so far as it is proper for you to know of my intentions you are the first person to whom I communicate them either among the gods or among mankind, but there are certain points which I reserve entirely for myself, and the less you try to pry into these, or meddle with them, the better for you.’”

“‘Dread son of Saturn,’ answered Juno, ‘what in the world are you talking about? I meddle and pry? No one, I am sure, can have his own way in everything more absolutely than you have. Still I have a strong misgiving that the old merman’s daughter Thetis has been talking you over. I saw her hugging your knees this very self-same morning, and I suspect you have been promising her to kill any number of people down at the Grecian ships, in order to gratify Achilles.’”

“‘Wife,’ replied Jove, ‘I can do nothing but you suspect me. You will not do yourself any good, for the more you go on like that the more I dislike you, and it may fare badly with you. If I mean to have it so, I mean to have it so, you had better therefore sit still and hold your tongue as I tell you, for if I once begin to lay my hands about you, there is not a god in heaven who will be of the smallest use to you.’

“When Juno heard this she thought it better to submit, so she sat down without a word, but all the gods throughout Jove’s mansion were very much perturbed. Presently the cunning workman Vulcan tried to pacify his mother Juno, and said, ‘It will never do for you two to go on quarrelling and setting heaven in an uproar about a pack of mortals. The thing will not bear talking about. If such counsels are to prevail a god will not be able to get his dinner in peace. Let me then advise my mother (and I am sure it is her own opinion) to make her peace with my dear father, lest he should scold her still further, and spoil our banquet; for if he does wish to turn us all out there can be no question about his being perfectly able to do so. Say something civil to him, therefore, and then perhaps he will not hurt us.’

“As he spoke he took a large cup of nectar and put it into his mother’s hands, saying, ‘Bear it, my dear mother, and make the best of it. I love you dearly and should be very sorry to see you get a thrashing. I should not be able to help you, for my father Jove is not a safe person to differ from. You know once before when I was trying to help you he caught me by the foot and chucked me from the heavenly threshold. I was all day long falling from morn to eve, but at sunset I came to ground on the island of Lemnos, and there was very little life left in me, till the Sintians came and tended me.’

“On this Juno smiled, and with a laugh took the cup from her son’s hand. Then Vulcan went about among all other gods drawing nectar for them from his goblet, and they laughed immoderately as they saw him bustling about the heavenly mansion.”

Then presently the gods go home to bed, each one in his own house that Vulcan had cunningly built for him or her. Finally Jove himself went to the bed which he generally occupied; and Jove his wife went with him.

There is another quarrel between Jove and Juno at the beginning of the fourth book.

The gods are sitting on the golden floor of Jove’s palace and drinking one another’s health in the nectar with which Hebe from time to time supplies them. Jove begins to tease Juno, and to provoke her with some sarcastic remarks that are pointed at her though not addressed to her directly.

“‘Menelaus,’ he exclaimed, ‘has two good friends among the goddesses, Juno and Minerva, but they only sit still and look on, while Venus on the other hand takes much better care of Paris, and defends him when he is in danger. She has only just this moment been rescuing him when he made sure he was at death’s door, for the victory really did lie with Menelaus. We must think what we are to do about all this. Shall we renew strife between the combatants or shall we make them friends again? I think the best plan would be for the City of Priam to remain unpillaged, but for Menelaus to have his wife Helen sent back to him.’

“Minerva and Juno groaned in spirit when they heard this. They were sitting side by side, and thinking what mischief they could do to the Trojans. Minerva for her part said not one word, but sat scowling at her father, for she was in a furious passion with him, but Juno could not contain herself, so she said—

“‘What, pray, son of Saturn, is all this about? Is my trouble then to go for nothing, and all the pains that I have taken, to say nothing of my horses, and the way we have sweated and toiled to get the people together against Priam and his children? You can do as you please, but you must not expect all of us to agree with you.’

“And Jove answered, ‘Wife, what harm have Priam and Priam’s children done you that you rage so furiously against them, and want to sack their city? Will nothing do for you but you must eat Priam with his sons and all the Trojans into the bargain? Have it your own way then, for I will not quarrel with you—only remember what I tell you: if at any time I want to sack a city that belongs to any friend of yours, it will be no use your trying to hinder me, you will have to let me do it, for I only yield to you now with the greatest reluctance. If there was one city under the sun which I respected more than another it was Troy with its king and people. My altars there have never been without the savour of fat or of burnt sacrifice and all my dues were paid.’

“‘My own favourite cities,’ answered Juno, ‘are Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ. Sack them whenever you may be displeased with them. I shall not make the smallest protest against your doing so. It would be no use if I did, for you are much stronger than I am, only I will not submit to seeing my own work wasted. I am a goddess of the same race as yourself. I am Saturn’s eldest daughter and am not only nearly related to you in blood, but I am wife to yourself, and you are king over the gods. Let it be a case, then, of give and take between us, and the other gods will follow our lead. Tell Minerva, therefore, to go down at once and set the Greeks and Trojans by the ears again, and let her so manage it that the Trojans shall break their oaths and be the aggressors.’”

This is the very thing to suit Minerva, so she goes at once and persuades the Trojans to break their oath.

In a later book we are told that Jove has positively forbidden the gods to interfere further in the struggle. Juno therefore determines to hoodwink him. First she bolted herself inside her own room on the top of Mount Ida and had a thorough good wash. Then she scented herself, brushed her golden hair, put on her very best dress and all her jewels. When she had done this, she went to Venus and besought her for the loan of her charms.

“‘You must not be angry with me, Venus,’ she began, ‘for being on the Grecian side while you are yourself on the Trojan; but you know every one falls in love with you at once, and I want you to lend me some of your attractions. I have to pay a visit at the world’s end to Oceanus and Mother Tethys. They took me in and were very good to me when Jove turned Saturn out of heaven and shut him up under the sea. They have been quarrelling this long time past and will not speak to one another. So I must go and see them, for if I can only make them friends again I am sure that they will be grateful to me for ever afterwards.’”

Venus thought this reasonable, so she took off her girdle and lent it to Juno, an act by the way which argues more good nature than prudence on her part. Then Juno goes down to Thrace, and in search of Sleep the brother of Death. She finds him and shakes hands with him. Then she tells him she is going up to Olympus to make love to Jove, and that while she is occupying his attention Sleep is to send him off into a deep slumber.

Sleep says he dares not do it. He would lull any of the other gods, but Juno must remember that she had got him into a great scrape once before in this way, and Jove hurled the gods about all over the palace, and would have made an end of him once for all, if he had not fled under the protection of Night, whom Jove did not venture to offend.

Juno bribes him, however, with a promise that if he will consent she will marry him to the youngest of the Graces, Pasithea. On this he yields; the pair then go up to the top of Mount Ida, and Sleep gets into a high pine tree just in front of Jove.

As soon as Jove sees Juno, armed as she for the moment was with all the attractions of Venus, he falls desperately in love with her, and says she is the only goddess he ever really loved. True, there had been the wife of Ixion and Danae, and Europa and Semele, and Alcmena, and Latona, not to mention herself in days gone by, but he never loved any of these as he now loved her, in spite of his having been married to her for so many years. What then does she want?

Juno tells him the same rigmarole about Oceanus and Mother Tethys that she had told Venus, and when she has done Jove tries to embrace her.

“What,” exclaims Juno, “kiss me in such a public place as the top of Mount Ida! Impossible! I could never show my face in Olympus again, but I have a private room of my own and”—“What nonsense, my love!” exclaims the sire of gods and men as he catches her in his arms. On this Sleep sends him into a deep slumber, and Juno then sends Sleep to bid Neptune go off to help the Greeks at once.

When Jove awakes and finds the trick that has been played upon him, he is very angry and blusters a good deal as usual, but somehow or another it turns out that he has got to stand it and make the best of it.

In an earlier book he has said that he is not surprised at anything Juno may do, for she always has crossed him and always will; but he cannot put up with such disobedience from his own daughter Minerva. Somehow or another, however, here too as usual it turns out that he has got to stand it. “And then,” Minerva exclaims in yet another place (VIII. 373), “I suppose he will be calling me his grey-eyed darling again, presently.”

Towards the end of the poem the gods have a set-to among themselves. Minerva sends Mars sprawling, Venus comes to his assistance, but Minerva knocks her down and leaves her. Neptune challenges Apollo, but Apollo says it is not proper for a god to fight his own uncle, and declines the contest. His sister Diana taunts him with cowardice, so Juno grips her by the wrist and boxes her ears till she writhes again. Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, then challenges Mercury, but Mercury says that he is not going to fight with any of Jove’s wives, so if she chooses to say she has beaten him she is welcome to do so. Then Latona picks up poor Diana’s bow and arrows that have fallen from her during her encounter with Juno, and Diana meanwhile flies up to the knees of her father Jove, sobbing and sighing till her ambrosial robe trembles all around her.

“Jove drew her towards him, and smiling pleasantly exclaimed, ‘My dear child, which of the heavenly beings has been wicked enough to behave in this way to you, as though you had been doing something naughty?’

“‘Your wife, Juno,’ answered Diana, ‘has been ill-treating me; all our quarrels always begin with her.’”

* * * * *

The above extracts must suffice as examples of the kind of divine comedy in which Homer brings the gods and goddesses upon the scene. Among mortals the humour, what there is of it, is confined mainly to the grim taunts which the heroes fling at one another when they are fighting, and more especially to crowing over a fallen foe. The most subtle passage is the one in which Briseis, the captive woman about whom Achilles and Agamemnon have quarrelled, is restored by Agamemnon to Achilles. Briseis on her return to the tent of Achilles finds that while she has been with Agamemnon, Patroclus has been killed by Hector, and his dead body is now lying in state. She flings herself upon the corpse and exclaims—

“How one misfortune does keep falling upon me after another! I saw the man to whom my father and mother had married me killed before my eyes, and my three own dear brothers perished along with him; but you, Patroclus, even when Achilles was sacking our city and killing my husband, told me that I was not to cry; for you said that Achilles himself should marry me, and take me back with him to Phthia, where we should have a wedding feast among the Myrmidons. You were always kind to me, and I should never cease to grieve for you.”

This may of course be seriously intended, but Homer was an acute writer, and if we had met with such a passage in Thackeray we should have taken him to mean that so long as a woman can get a new husband, she does not much care about losing the old one—a sentiment which I hope no one will imagine that I for one moment endorse or approve of, and which I can only explain as a piece of sarcasm aimed possibly at Mrs. Homer.

* * * * *

And now let us turn to the Odyssey, a work which I myself think of as the Iliad’s better half or wife. Here we have a poem of more varied interest, instinct with not less genius, and on the whole I should say, if less robust, nevertheless of still greater fascination—one, moreover, the irony of which is pointed neither at gods nor woman, but with one single and perhaps intercalated exception, at man. Gods and women may sometimes do wrong things, but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just referred to, they are never laughed at. The scepticism of the Iliad is that of Hume or Gibbon; that of the Odyssey (if any) is like the occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar’s daughter. When Jove says he will do a thing, there is no uncertainty about his doing it. Juno hardly appears at all, and when she does she never quarrels with her husband. Minerva has more to do than any of the other gods or goddesses, but she has nothing in common with the Minerva whom we have already seen in the Iliad. In the Odyssey she is the fairy god-mother who seems to have no object in life but to protect Ulysses and Telemachus, and keep them straight at any touch and turn of difficulty. If she has any other function, it is to be patroness of the arts and of all intellectual development. The Minerva of the Odyssey may indeed sit on a rafter like a swallow and hold up her ægis to strike panic into the suitors while Ulysses kills them; but she is a perfect lady, and would no more knock Mars and Venus down one after the other than she would stand on her head. She is, in fact, a distinct person in all respects from the Minerva of the Iliad. Of the remaining gods Neptune, as the persecutor of the hero, comes worst off; but even he is treated as though he were a very important person.

In the Odyssey the gods no longer live in houses and sleep in four-post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. Nobody knows exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there is neither rain nor hail nor snow, and the wind never beats roughly; but it abides in everlasting sunshine, and in great peacefulness of light wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever. It is hardly possible to conceive anything more different from the Olympus of the Iliad.

Another very material point of difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of detail. Thus the giant Polyphemus drives in his ewes home from their pasture, and milks them. The lambs of course have not been running with them; they have been left in the yards, so they have had nothing to eat. When he has milked the ewes, the giant lets each one of them have her lamb—to get, I suppose, what strippings it can, and beyond this what milk the ewe may yield during the night. In the morning, however, Polyphemus milks the ewes again. Hence it is plain either that he expected his lambs to thrive on one pull per diem at a milked ewe, and to be kind enough not to suck their mothers, though left with them all night through, or else that the writer of the Odyssey had very hazy notions about the relations between lambs and ewes, and of the ordinary methods of procedure on an upland dairy-farm.

In nautical matters the same inexperience is betrayed. The writer knows all about the corn and wine that must be put on board; the store-room in which these are kept and the getting of them are described inimitably, but there the knowledge ends; the other things put on board are “the things that are generally taken on board ships.” So on a voyage we are told that the sailors do whatever is wanted doing, but we have no details. There is a shipwreck, which does duty more than once without the alteration of a word. I have seen such a shipwreck at Drury Lane. Anyone, moreover, who reads any authentic account of actual adventures will perceive at once that those of the Odyssey are the creation of one who has had no history. Ulysses has to make a raft; he makes it about as broad as they generally make a good big ship, but we do not seem to have been at the pains to measure a good big ship.

I will add no more however on this head. The leading characteristics of the Iliad, as we saw, were love, war, and plunder. The leading idea of the Odyssey is the infatuation of man, and the key-note is struck in the opening paragraph, where we are told how the sailors of Ulysses must needs, in spite of every warning, kill and eat the cattle of the sun-god, and perished accordingly.

A few lines lower down the same note is struck with even greater emphasis. The gods have met in council, and Jove happens at the moment to be thinking of Ægisthus, who had met his death at the hand of Agamemnon’s son Orestes, in spite of the solemn warning that Jove had sent him through the mouth of Mercury. It does not seem necessary for Jove to turn his attention to Clytemnestra, the partner of Ægisthus’s guilt. Of this lady we are presently told that she was naturally of an excellent disposition, and would never have gone wrong but for the loss of the protector in whose charge Agamemnon had left her. When she was left alone without an adviser—well, if a base designing man took to flattering and misleading her—what else could be expected? The infatuation of man, with its corollary, the superior excellence of woman, is the leading theme; next to this come art, religion, and, I am almost ashamed to add, money. There is no love-business in the Odyssey except the return of a bald elderly married man to his elderly wife and grown-up son after an absence of twenty years, and furious at having been robbed of so much money in the meantime. But this can hardly be called love-business; it is at the utmost domesticity. There is a charming young princess, Nausicaa, but though she affects a passing tenderness for the elderly hero of her creation as soon as Minerva has curled his bald old hair for him and tittivated him up all over, she makes it abundantly plain that she will not look at a single one of her actual flesh and blood admirers. There is a leading young gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not πεπνυμενος, or canny, well-principled, and discreet; he has an amiable and most sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at meal times—he will cry in the forenoon on an empty stomach as much as anyone pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and cry at the same time. Well, there is no lady provided either for this nice young man or for Telemachus. They are left high and dry as bachelors. Two goddesses indeed, Circe and Calypso, do one after the other take possession of Ulysses, but the way in which he accepts a situation which after all was none of his seeking, and which it is plain he does not care two straws about, is, I believe, dictated solely by a desire to exhibit the easy infidelity of Ulysses himself in contrast with the unswerving constancy and fidelity of his wife Penelope. Throughout the Odyssey the men do not really care for women, nor the women for men; they have to pretend to do so now and again, but it is a got-up thing, and the general attitude of the sexes towards one another is very much that of Helen, who says that her husband Menelaus is really not deficient in person or understanding: or again of Penelope herself, who, on being asked by Ulysses on his return what she thought of him, said that she did not think very much of him nor very little of him; in fact, she did not think much about him one way or the other. True, later on she relents and becomes more effusive; in fact, when she and Ulysses sat up talking in bed and Ulysses told her the story of his adventures, she never went to sleep once. Ulysses never had to nudge her with his elbow and say, “Come, wake up, Penelope, you are not listening”; but, in spite of the devotion exhibited here, the love-business in the Odyssey is artificial and described by one who had never felt it, whereas in the Iliad it is spontaneous and obviously genuine, as by one who knows all about it perfectly well. The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on the gas—when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.

A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture to say that if the Odyssey were to appear anonymously for the first time now, and to be sent round to the papers for review, there is not even a professional critic who would not see that it is a woman’s writing and not a man’s. But letting this pass, I can hardly doubt, for reasons which I gave in yesterday’s Athenæum, and for others that I cannot now insist upon, that the poem was written by a native of Trapani on the coast of Sicily, near Marsala. Fancy what the position of a young, ardent, brilliant woman must have been in a small Sicilian sea-port, say some eight or nine hundred years before the birth of Christ. It makes one shudder to think of it. Night after night she hears the dreary blind old bard Demodocus drawl out his interminable recitals taken from our present Iliad, or from some other of the many poems now lost that dealt with the adventures of the Greeks before Troy or on their homeward journey. Man and his doings! always the same old story, and woman always to be treated either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore and booby, man?

“I wish, my dear,” exclaims her mother Arete, after one of these little outbreaks, “that you would do it yourself. I am sure you could do it beautifully if you would only give your mind to it.”

“Very well, mother,” she replies, “and I will bring in all about you and father, and how I go out for a washing-day with the maids,”—and she kept her word, as I will presently show you.

I should tell you that Ulysses, having got away from the goddess Calypso, with whom he had been living for some seven or eight years on a lonely and very distant island in mid-ocean, is shipwrecked on the coast of Phæacia, the chief town of which is Scheria. After swimming some forty-eight hours in the water he effects a landing at the mouth of a stream, and, not having a rag of clothes on his back, covers himself up under a heap of dried leaves and goes to sleep. I will now translate from the Odyssey itself.

“So here Ulysses slept, worn out with labour and sorrow; but Minerva went off to the chief town of the Phæacians, a people who used to live in Hypereia near the wicked Cyclopes. Now the Cyclopes were stronger than they and plundered them, so Nausithous settled them in Scheria far from those who would loot them. He ran a wall round about the city, built houses and temples, and allotted the lands among his people; but he was gathered to his fathers, and the good king Alcinous was now reigning. To his palace then Minerva hastened that she might help Ulysses to get home.

“She went straight to the painted bedroom of Nausicaa, who was daughter to King Alcinous, and lovely as a goddess. Near her there slept two maids-in-waiting, both very pretty, one on either side of the doorway, which was closed with a beautifully made door. She took the form of the famous Captain Dumas’s daughter, who was a bosom friend of Nausicaa and just her own age; then coming into the room like a breath of wind she stood near the head of the bed and said—

“‘Nausicaa, what could your mother have been about to have such a lazy daughter? Here are your clothes all lying in disorder, yet you are going to be married almost directly, and should not only be well-dressed yourself, but should see that those about you look clean and tidy also. This is the way to make people speak well of you, and it will please your father and mother, so suppose we make to-morrow a washing day, and begin the first thing in the morning. I will come and help you, for all the best young men among your own people are courting you, and you are not going to remain a maid much longer. Ask your father, then, to have a horse and cart ready for us at daybreak to take the linen and baskets, and you can ride too, which will be much pleasanter for you than walking, for the washing ground is a long way out of the town.’

“When she had thus spoken Minerva went back to Olympus. By and by morning came, and as soon as Nausicaa woke she began thinking about her dream. She went to the other end of the house to tell her father and mother all about it, and found them in their own room. Her mother was sitting by the fireside spinning with her maids-in-waiting all around her, and she happened to catch her father just as he was going out to attend a meeting of the Town Council which the Phæacian aldermen had convened. So she stopped him and said, ‘Papa, dear, could you manage to let me have a good big waggon? I want to take all our dirty clothes to the river and wash them. You are the chief man here, so you ought to have a clean shirt on when you attend meetings of the Council. Moreover, you have five sons at home, two of them married and the other three are good-looking young bachelors; you know they always like to have clean linen when they go out to a dance, and I have been thinking about all this.’”

You will observe that though Nausicaa dreams that she is going to be married shortly, and that all the best young men of Scheria are in love with her, she does not dream that she has fallen in love with any one of them in particular, and that thus every preparation is made for her getting married except the selection of the bridegroom.

You will also note that Nausicaa has to keep her father up to putting a clean shirt on when he ought to have one, whereas her young brothers appear to keep herself up to having a clean shirt ready for them when they want one. These little touches are so lifelike and so feminine that they suggest drawing from life by a female member of Alcinous’s own family who knew his character from behind the scenes.

I would also say before proceeding further that in some parts of France and Germany it is still the custom to have but one or at most two great washing days in the year. Each household is provided with an enormous quantity of linen, which when dirty is just soaked and rinsed, and then put aside till the great washing day of the year. This is why Nausicaa wants a waggon, and has to go so far afield. If it was only a few collars and a pocket-handkerchief or two she could no doubt have found water enough near at hand. The big spring or autumn wash, however, is evidently intended.

Returning now to the Odyssey, when he had heard what Nausicaa wanted Alcinous said:

“‘You shall have the mules, my love, and whatever else you have a mind for, so be off with you.’

“Then he told the servants, and they got the waggon out and harnessed the mules, while the princess brought the clothes down from the linen room and placed them on the waggon. Her mother got ready a nice basket of provisions with all sorts of good things, and a goatskin full of wine. The princess now got into the waggon, and her mother gave her a golden cruse of oil that she and her maids might anoint themselves.

“Then Nausicaa took the whip and reins and gave the mules a touch which sent them off at a good pace. They pulled without nagging, and carried not only Nausicaa and her wash of clothes, but the women also who were with her.

“When they got to the river they went to the washing pools, through which even in summer there ran enough pure water to wash any quantity of linen, no matter how dirty. Here they unharnessed the mules and turned them out to feed in the sweet juicy grass that grew by the river-side. They got the clothes out of the waggon, brought them to the water, and vied with one another in treading upon them and banging them about to get the dirt out of them. When they had got them quite clean, they laid them out by the seaside where the waves had raised a high beach of shingle, and set about washing and anointing themselves with olive oil. Then they got their dinner by the side of the river, and waited for the sun to finish drying the clothes. By and by, after dinner, they took off their head-dresses and began to play at ball, and Nausicaa sang to them.”

I think you will agree with me that there is no haziness—no milking of ewes that have had a lamb with them all night—here. The writer is at home and on her own ground.

“When they had done folding the clothes and were putting the mules to the waggon before starting home again, Minerva thought it was time Ulysses should wake up and see the handsome girl who was to take him to the city of the Phæacians. So the princess threw a ball at one of the maids, which missed the maid and fell into the water. On this they all shouted, and the noise they made woke up Ulysses, who sat up in his bed of leaves and wondered where in the world he could have got to.

“Then he crept from under the bush beneath which he had slept, broke off a thick bough so as to cover his nakedness, and advanced towards Nausicaa and her maids; these last all ran away, but Nausicaa stood her ground, for Minerva had put courage into her heart, so she kept quite still, and Ulysses could not make up his mind whether it would be better to go up to her, throw himself at her feet, and embrace her knees as a suppliant—[in which case, of course, he would have to drop the bough] or whether it would be better for him to make an apology to her at a reasonable distance, and ask her to be good enough to give him some clothes and show him the way to the town. On the whole he thought it would be better to keep at arm’s length, in case the princess should take offence at his coming too near her.”

Let me say in passing that this is one of many passages which have led me to conclude that the Odyssey is written by a woman. A girl, such as Nausicaa describes herself, young, unmarried, unattached, and hence, after all, knowing little of what men feel on these matters, having by a cruel freak of inspiration got her hero into such an awkward predicament, might conceivably imagine that he would argue as she represents him, but no man, except such a woman’s tailor as could never have written such a masterpiece as the Odyssey, would ever get his hero into such an undignified scrape at all, much less represent him as arguing as Ulysses does. I suppose Minerva was so busy making Nausicaa brave that she had no time to put a little sense into Ulysses’ head, and remind him that he was nothing if not full of sagacity and resource. To return—

Ulysses now begins with the most judicious apology that his unaided imagination can suggest. “I beg your ladyship’s pardon,” he exclaims, “but are you goddess or are you a mortal woman? If you are a goddess and live in heaven, there can be no doubt but you are Jove’s daughter Diana, for your face and figure are exactly like hers,” and so on in a long speech which I need not further quote from.

“Stranger,” replied Nausicaa, as soon as the speech was ended, “you seem to be a very sensible well-disposed person. There is no accounting for luck; Jove gives good or ill to every man, just as he chooses, so you must take your lot, and make the best of it.” She then tells him she will give him clothes and everything else that a foreigner in distress can reasonably expect. She calls back her maids, scolds them for running away, and tells them to take Ulysses and wash him in the river after giving him something to eat and drink. So the maids give him the little gold cruse of oil and tell him to go and wash himself, and as they seem to have completely recovered from their alarm, Ulysses is compelled to say, “Young ladies, please stand a little on one side, that I may wash the brine from off my shoulders and anoint myself with oil; for it is long enough since my skin has had a drop of oil upon it. I cannot wash as long as you keep standing there. I have no clothes on, and it makes me very uncomfortable.”

So they stood aside and went and told Nausicaa. Meanwhile (I am translating closely), “Minerva made him look taller and stronger than before; she gave him some more hair on the top of his head, and made it flow down in curls most beautifully; in fact she glorified him about the head and shoulders as a cunning workman who has studied under Vulcan or Minerva enriches a fine piece of plate by gilding it.”

Again I argue that I am reading a description of as it were a prehistoric Mr. Knightley by a not less prehistoric Jane Austen—with this difference that I believe Nausicaa is quietly laughing at her hero and sees through him, whereas Jane Austen takes Mr. Knightley seriously.

“Hush, my pretty maids,” exclaimed Nausicaa as soon as she saw Ulysses coming back with his hair curled, “hush, for I want to say something. I believe the gods in heaven have sent this man here. There is something very remarkable about him. When I first saw him I thought him quite plain and commonplace, and now I consider him one of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life. I should like my future husband [who, it is plain, then, is not yet decided upon] to be just such another as he is, if he would only stay here, and not want to go away. However, give him something to eat and drink.”

Nausicaa now says they must be starting homeward; so she tells Ulysses that she will drive on first herself, but that he is to follow after her with the maids. She does not want to be seen coming into the town with him; and then follows another passage which clearly shows that for all the talk she has made about getting married she has no present intention of changing her name.

“‘I am afraid,’ she says, ‘of the gossip and scandal which may be set on foot about me behind my back, for there are some very ill-natured people in the town, and some low fellow, if he met us, might say, ‘Who is this fine-looking stranger who is going about with Nausicaa? Where did she pick him up? I suppose she is going to marry him, or perhaps he is some shipwrecked sailor from foreign parts; or has some god come down from heaven in answer to her prayers, and she is going to live with him? It would be a good thing if she would take herself off and find a husband somewhere else, for she will not look at one of the many excellent young Phæacians who are in love with her’; and I could not complain, for I should myself think ill of any girl whom I saw going about with men unknown to her father and mother, and without having been married to him in the face of all the world.’”

This passage could never have been written by the local bard, who was in great measure dependent on Nausicaa’s family; he would never speak thus of his patron’s daughter; either the passage is Nausicaa’s apology for herself, written by herself, or it is pure invention, and this last, considering the close adherence to the actual topography of Trapani on the Sicilian Coast, and a great deal else that I cannot lay before you here, appears to me improbable.

Nausicaa then gives Ulysses directions by which he can find her father’s house. “When you have got past the courtyard,” she says, “go straight through the main hall, till you come to my mother’s room. You will find her sitting by the fire and spinning her purple wool by firelight. She will make a lovely picture as she leans back against a column with her maids ranged behind her. Facing her stands my father’s seat in which he sits and topes like an immortal god. Never mind him, but go up to my mother and lay your hands upon her knees, if you would be forwarded on your homeward voyage.” From which I conclude that Arete ruled Alcinous, and Nausicaa ruled Arete.

Ulysses follows his instructions aided by Minerva, who makes him invisible as he passes through the town and through the crowds of Phæacian guests who are feasting in the king’s palace. When he has reached the queen, the cloak of thick darkness falls off, and he is revealed to all present, kneeling at the feet of Queen Arete, to whom he makes his appeal. It has already been made apparent in a passage extolling her virtue at some length, but which I have not been able to quote, that Queen Arete is, in the eyes of the writer, a much more important person than her husband Alcinous.

Every one, of course, is very much surprised at seeing Ulysses, but after a little discussion, from which it appears that the writer considers Alcinous to be a person who requires a good deal of keeping straight in other matters besides clean linen, it is settled that Ulysses shall be fêted on the following day and then escorted home. Ulysses now has supper and remains with Alcinous and Arete after the other guests are gone away for the night. So the three sit by the fire while the servants take away the things, and Arete is the first to speak. She has been uneasy for some time about Ulysses’ clothes, which she recognized as her own make, and at last she says, “Stranger, there is a question or two that I should like to put to you myself. Who in the world are you? And who gave you those clothes? Did you not say you had come here from beyond the seas?”

Ulysses explains matters, but still withholds his name, nevertheless Alcinous (who seems to have shared in the general opinion that it was high time his daughter got married, and that, provided she married somebody, it did not much matter who the bridegroom might be) exclaimed, “By Father Jove, Minerva, and Apollo, now that I see what kind of a person you are and how exactly our opinions coincide upon every subject, I should so like it if you would stay with us always, marry Nausicaa, and become my son-in-law.” Ulysses turns the conversation immediately, and meanwhile Queen Arete told her maids to put a bed in the corridor, and make it with red blankets, and it was to have at least one counterpane. They were also to put a woollen nightgown for Ulysses. “The maids took a torch, and made the bed as fast as they could: when they had done so they came up to Ulysses and said, ‘This way, sir, if you please, your room is quite ready’; and Ulysses was very glad to hear them say so.”

On the following day Alcinous holds a meeting of the Phæacians and proposes that Ulysses should have a ship got ready to take him home at once: this being settled he invites all the leading people, and the fifty-two sailors who are to man Ulysses’ ship, to come up to his own house, and he will give them a banquet—for which he kills a dozen sheep, eight pigs, and two oxen. Immediately after gorging themselves at the banquet they have a series of athletic competitions, and from this I gather the poem to have been written by one who saw nothing very odd in letting people compete in sports requiring very violent exercise immediately after a heavy meal. Such a course may have been usual in those days, but certainly is not generally adopted in our own.

At the games Alcinous makes himself as ridiculous as he always does, and Ulysses behaves much as the hero of the preceding afternoon might be expected to do—but on his praising the Phæacians towards the close of the proceedings Alcinous says he is a person of such singular judgment that they really must all of them make him a very handsome present. “Twelve of you,” he exclaims, “are magistrates, and there is myself—that makes thirteen; suppose we give him each one of us a clean cloak, a tunic, and a talent of gold,”—which in those days was worth about two hundred and fifty pounds.

This is unanimously agreed to, and in the evening, towards sundown, the presents began to make their appearance at the palace of King Alcinous, and the king’s sons, perhaps prudently as you will presently see, place them in the keeping of their mother Arete.

When the presents have all arrived, Alcinous says to Arete, “Wife, go and fetch the best chest we have, and put a clean cloak and a tunic in it. In the meantime Ulysses will take a bath.”

Arete orders the maids to heat a bath, brings the chest, packs up the raiment and gold which the Phæacians have brought, and adds a cloak and a good tunic as King Alcinous’s own contribution.

Yes, but where—and that is what we are never told—is the £250 which he ought to have contributed as well as the cloak and tunic? And where is the beautiful gold goblet which he had also promised?

“See to the fastening yourself,” says Queen Arete to Ulysses, “for fear anyone should rob you while you are asleep in the ship.”

Ulysses, we may be sure, was well aware that Alcinous’s £250 was not in the box, nor yet the goblet, but he took the hint at once and made the chest fast without the delay of a moment, with a bond which the cunning goddess Circe had taught him.

He does not seem to have thought his chance of getting the £250 and the goblet, and having to unpack his box again, was so great as his chance of having his box tampered with before he got it away, if he neglected to double-lock it at once and put the key in his pocket. He has always a keen eye to money; indeed the whole Odyssey turns on what is substantially a money quarrel, so this time without the prompting of Minerva he does one of the very few sensible things which he does, on his own account, throughout the whole poem.

Supper is now served, and when it is over, Ulysses, pressed by Alcinous, announces his name and begins the story of his adventures.

It is with profound regret that I find myself unable to quote any of the fascinating episodes with which his narrative abounds, but I have said I was going to lecture on the humour of Homer—that is to say of the Iliad and the Odyssey—and must not be diverted from my subject. I cannot, however, resist the account which Ulysses gives of his meeting with his mother in Hades, the place of departed spirits, which he has visited by the advice of Circe. His mother comes up to him and asks him how he managed to get into Hades, being still alive. I will translate freely, but quite closely, from Ulysses’ own words, as spoken to the Phæacians.

“And I said, ‘Mother, I had to come here to consult the ghost of the old Theban prophet Teiresias, I have never yet been near Greece, nor set foot on my native land, and have had nothing but one long run of ill luck from the day I set out with Agamemnon to fight at Troy. But tell me how you came here yourself? Did you have a long and painful illness or did heaven vouchsafe you a gentle easy passage to eternity? Tell me also about my father and my son? Is my property still in their hands, or has someone else got hold of it who thinks that I shall not return to claim it? How, again, is my wife conducting herself? Does she live with her son and make a home for him, or has she married again?’

“My mother answered, ‘Your wife is still mistress of your house, but she is in very great straits and spends the greater part of her time in tears. No one has actually taken possession of your property, and Telemachus still holds it. He has to accept a great many invitations, and gives much the sort of entertainments in return that may be expected from one in his position. Your father remains in the old place, and never goes near the town; he is very badly off, and has neither bed nor bedding, nor a stick of furniture of any kind. In winter he sleeps on the floor in front of the fire with the men, and his clothes are in a shocking state, but in summer, when the warm weather comes on again, he sleeps out in the vineyard on a bed of vine leaves. He takes on very much about your not having returned, and suffers more and more as he grows older: as for me I died of nothing whatever in the world but grief about yourself. There was not a thing the matter with me, but my prolonged anxiety on your account was too much for me, and in the end it just wore me out.’”

In the course of time Ulysses comes to a pause in his narrative and Queen Arete makes a little speech.

“‘What do you think,’ she said to the Phæacians, ‘of such a guest as this? Did you ever see anyone at once so good-looking and so clever? It is true, indeed, that his visit is paid more particularly to myself, but you all participate in the honour conferred upon us by a visitor of such distinction. Do not be in a hurry to send him off, nor stingy in the presents you make to one in so great need; for you are all of you very well off.’”

You will note that the queen does not say “we are all of us very well off.”

“Then the hero Echeneus, who was the oldest man among them, added a few words of his own. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘there cannot be two opinions about the graciousness and sagacity of the remarks that have just fallen from Her Majesty; nevertheless it is with His Majesty King Alcinous that the decision must ultimately rest.’

“‘The thing shall be done,’ exclaimed Alcinous, ‘if I am still king over the Phæacians. As for our guest, I know he is anxious to resume his journey, still we must persuade him if we can to stay with us until to-morrow, by which time I shall be able to get together the balance of the sum which I mean to press on his acceptance.’”

So here we have it straight out that the monarch knew he had only contributed the coat and waistcoat, and did not know exactly how he was to lay his hands on the £250. What with piracy—for we have been told of at least one case in which Alcinous had looted a town and stolen his housemaid Eurymedusa—what with insufficient changes of linen, toping like an immortal god, swaggering at large, and open-handed hospitality, it is plain and by no means surprising that Alcinous is out at elbows; nor can there be a better example of the difference between the occasional broad comedy of the Iliad and the delicate but very bitter satire of the Odyssey than the way in which the fact that Alcinous is in money difficulties is allowed to steal upon us, as contrasted with the obvious humour of the quarrels between Jove and Juno. At any rate we can hardly wonder at Ulysses having felt that to a monarch of such mixed character the unfastened box might prove a temptation greater than he could resist. To return, however, to the story—

“If it please your Majesty,” said he, in answer to King Alcinous, “I should be delighted to stay here for another twelve months, and to accept from your hands the vast treasures and the escort which you are go generous as to promise me. I should obviously gain by doing so, for I should return fuller-handed to my own people and should thus be both more respected and more loved by my acquaintance. Still to receive such presents—”

The king perceived his embarrassment, and at once relieved him. “No one,” he exclaimed, “who looks at you can for one moment take you for a charlatan or a swindler. I know there are many of these unscrupulous persons going about just now with such plausible stories that it is very hard to disbelieve them; there is, however, a finish about your style which convinces me of your good disposition,” and so on for more than I have space to quote; after which Ulysses again proceeds with his adventures.

When he had finished them Alcinous insists that the leading Phæacians should each one of them give Ulysses a still further present of a large kitchen copper and a three-legged stand to set it on, “but,” he continues, “as the expense of all these presents is really too heavy for the purse of any private individual, I shall charge the whole of them on the rates”: literally, “We will repay ourselves by getting it in from among the people, for this is too heavy a present for the purse of a private individual.” And what this can mean except charging it on the rates I do not know.

Of course everyone else sends up his tripod and his cauldron, but we hear nothing about any, either tripod or cauldron, from King Alcinous. He is very fussy next morning stowing them under the ship’s benches, but his time and trouble seem to be the extent of his contribution. It is hardly necessary to say that Ulysses had to go away without the £250, and that we never hear of the promised goblet being presented. Still he had done pretty well.

I have not quoted anything like all the absurd remarks made by Alcinous, nor shown you nearly as completely as I could do if I had more time how obviously the writer is quietly laughing at him in her sleeve. She understands his little ways as she understands those of Menelaus, who tells Telemachus and Pisistratus that if they like he will take them a personally conducted tour round the Peloponnese, and that they can make a good thing out of it, for everyone will give them something—fancy Helen or Queen Arete making such a proposal as this. They are never laughed at, but then they are women, whereas Alcinous and Menelaus are men, and this makes all the difference.

And now in conclusion let me point out the irony of literature in connection with this astonishing work. Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have already been married many years before it begins: it is marked by a total absence of love-business in such sense as we understand it: its interest centres mainly in the fact of a bald elderly gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, being eaten out of house and home during his absence by a number of young men who are courting the supposed widow—a widow who, if she be fair and fat, can hardly also be less than forty. Can any subject seem more hopeless? Moreover, this subject so initially faulty is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency, ignorance of commonly known details, and disregard of ordinary canons, that can hardly be surpassed, and yet I cannot think that in the whole range of literature there is a work which can be decisively placed above it. I am afraid you will hardly accept this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than this can dullness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty that people have begun to see that they are by different authors. There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure’s valuable work, a band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two thousand years were considered to have been finally refuted. Can there be any more scathing satire upon the value of literary criticism? It would seem as though Minerva had shed the same thick darkness over both the poems as she shed over Ulysses, so that they might go in and out among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge from generation to generation, and none should see them. If I am right, as I believe I am, in holding the Odyssey to have been written by a young woman, was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed behind a more impenetrable hedge of dulness?—and she will have to sleep a good many years yet before anyone wakes her effectually. But what else can one expect from people, not one of whom has been at the very slight exertion of noting a few of the writer’s main topographical indications, and then looking for them in an Admiralty chart or two? Can any step be more obvious and easy—indeed, it is so simple that I am ashamed of myself for not having taken it forty years ago. Students of the Odyssey for the most part are so engrossed with the force of the zeugma, and of the enclitic particle yε; they take so much more interest in the digamma and in the Æolic dialect, than they do in the living spirit that sits behind all these things and alone gives them their importance, that, naturally enough, not caring about the personality, it remains and always must remain invisible to them.

If I have helped to make it any less invisible to yourselves, let me ask you to pardon the somewhat querulous tone of my concluding remarks.

Quis Desiderio . . .? [{99}]

Like Mr. Wilkie Collins, I, too, have been asked to lay some of my literary experiences before the readers of the Universal Review. It occurred to me that the Review must be indeed universal before it could open its pages to one so obscure as myself; but, nothing daunted by the distinguished company among which I was for the first time asked to move, I resolved to do as I was told, and went to the British Museum to see what books I had written. Having refreshed my memory by a glance at the catalogue, I was about to try and diminish the large and ever-increasing circle of my non-readers when I became aware of a calamity that brought me to a standstill, and indeed bids fair, so far as I can see at present, to put an end to my literary existence altogether.

I should explain that I cannot write unless I have a sloping desk, and the reading-room of the British Museum, where alone I can compose freely, is unprovided with sloping desks. Like every other organism, if I cannot get exactly what I want I make shift with the next thing to it; true, there are no desks in the reading-room, but, as I once heard a visitor from the country say, “it contains a large number of very interesting works.” I know it was not right, and hope the Museum authorities will not be severe upon me if any of them reads this confession; but I wanted a desk, and set myself to consider which of the many very interesting works which a grateful nation places at the disposal of its would-be authors was best suited for my purpose.

For mere reading I suppose one book is pretty much as good as another; but the choice of a desk-book is a more serious matter. It must be neither too thick nor too thin; it must be large enough to make a substantial support; it must be strongly bound so as not to yield or give; it must not be too troublesome to carry backwards and forwards; and it must live on shelf C, D, or E, so that there need be no stooping or reaching too high. These are the conditions which a really good book must fulfil; simple, however, as they are, it is surprising how few volumes comply with them satisfactorily; moreover, being perhaps too sensitively conscientious, I allowed another consideration to influence me, and was sincerely anxious not to take a book which would be in constant use for reference by readers, more especially as, if I did this, I might find myself disturbed by the officials.

For weeks I made experiments upon sundry poetical and philosophical works, whose names I have forgotten, but could not succeed in finding my ideal desk, until at length, more by luck than cunning, I happened to light upon Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians, which I had no sooner tried than I discovered it to be the very perfection and ne plus ultra of everything that a book should be. It lived in Case No. 2008, and I accordingly took at once to sitting in Row B, where for the last dozen years or so I have sat ever since.

The first thing I have done whenever I went to the Museum has been to take down Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians and carry it to my seat. It is not the custom of modern writers to refer to the works to which they are most deeply indebted, and I have never, that I remember, mentioned it by name before; but it is to this book alone that I have looked for support during many years of literary labour, and it is round this to me invaluable volume that all my own have page by page grown up. There is none in the Museum to which I have been under anything like such constant obligation, none which I can so ill spare, and none which I would choose so readily if I were allowed to select one single volume and keep it for my own.

On finding myself asked for a contribution to the Universal Review, I went, as I have explained, to the Museum, and presently repaired to bookcase No. 2008 to get my favourite volume. Alas! it was in the room no longer. It was not in use, for its place was filled up already; besides, no one ever used it but myself. Whether the ghost of the late Mr. Frost has been so eminently unchristian as to interfere, or whether the authorities have removed the book in ignorance of the steady demand which there has been for it on the part of at least one reader, are points I cannot determine. All I know is that the book is gone, and I feel as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have felt when he became aware that Lucy was in her grave, and exclaimed so emphatically that this would make a considerable difference to him, or words to that effect.

Now I think of it, Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians was very like Lucy. The one resided at Dovedale in Derbyshire, the other in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. I admit that I do not see the resemblance here at this moment, but if I try to develop my perception I shall doubtless ere long find a marvellously striking one. In other respects, however, than mere local habitat the likeness is obvious. Lucy was not particularly attractive either inside or out—no more was Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians; there were few to praise her, and of those few still fewer could bring themselves to like her; indeed, Wordsworth himself seems to have been the only person who thought much about her one way or the other. In like manner, I believe I was the only reader who thought much one way or the other about Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians, but this in itself was one of the attractions of the book; and as for the grief we respectively felt and feel, I believe my own to be as deep as Wordsworth’s, if not more so.

I said above, “as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have felt”; for anyone imbued with the spirit of modern science will read Wordsworth’s poem with different eyes from those of a mere literary critic. He will note that Wordsworth is most careful not to explain the nature of the difference which the death of Lucy will occasion to him. He tells us that there will be a difference; but there the matter ends. The superficial reader takes it that he was very sorry she was dead; it is, of course, possible that he may have actually been so, but he has not said this. On the contrary, he has hinted plainly that she was ugly, and generally disliked; she was only like a violet when she was half-hidden from the view, and only fair as a star when there were so few stars out that it was practically impossible to make an invidious comparison. If there were as many as even two stars the likeness was felt to be at an end. If Wordsworth had imprudently promised to marry this young person during a time when he had been unusually long in keeping to good resolutions, and had afterwards seen someone whom he liked better, then Lucy’s death would undoubtedly have made a considerable difference to him, and this is all that he has ever said that it would do. What right have we to put glosses upon the masterly reticence of a poet, and credit him with feelings possibly the very reverse of those he actually entertained?

Sometimes, indeed, I have been inclined to think that a mystery is being hinted at more dark than any critic has suspected. I do not happen to possess a copy of the poem, but the writer, if I am not mistaken, says that “few could know when Lucy ceased to be.” “Ceased to be” is a suspiciously euphemistic expression, and the words “few could know” are not applicable to the ordinary peaceful death of a domestic servant such as Lucy appears to have been. No matter how obscure the deceased, any number of people commonly can know the day and hour of his or her demise, whereas in this case we are expressly told it would be impossible for them to do so. Wordsworth was nothing if not accurate, and would not have said that few could know, but that few actually did know, unless he was aware of circumstances that precluded all but those implicated in the crime of her death from knowing the precise moment of its occurrence. If Lucy was the kind of person not obscurely portrayed in the poem; if Wordsworth had murdered her, either by cutting her throat or smothering her, in concert, perhaps, with his friends Southey and Coleridge; and if he had thus found himself released from an engagement which had become irksome to him, or possibly from the threat of an action for breach of promise, then there is not a syllable in the poem with which he crowns his crime that is not alive with meaning. On any other supposition to the general reader it is unintelligible.

We cannot be too guarded in the interpretations we put upon the words of great poets. Take the young lady who never loved the dear gazelle—and I don’t believe she did; we are apt to think that Moore intended us to see in this creation of his fancy a sweet, amiable, but most unfortunate young woman, whereas all he has told us about her points to an exactly opposite conclusion. In reality, he wished us to see a young lady who had been a habitual complainer from her earliest childhood; whose plants had always died as soon as she bought them, while those belonging to her neighbours had flourished. The inference is obvious, nor can we reasonably doubt that Moore intended us to draw it; if her plants were the very first to fade away, she was evidently the very first to neglect or otherwise maltreat them. She did not give them enough water, or left the door of her fern-case open when she was cooking her dinner at the gas stove, or kept them too near the paraffin oil, or other like folly; and as for her temper, see what the gazelles did; as long as they did not know her “well,” they could just manage to exist, but when they got to understand her real character, one after another felt that death was the only course open to it, and accordingly died rather than live with such a mistress. True, the young lady herself said the gazelles loved her; but disagreeable people are apt to think themselves amiable, and in view of the course invariably taken by the gazelles themselves anyone accustomed to weigh evidence will hold that she was probably mistaken.

I must, however, return to Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians. I will leave none of the ambiguity about my words in which Moore and Wordsworth seem to have delighted. I am very sorry the book is gone, and know not where to turn for its successor. Till I have found a substitute I can write no more, and I do not know how to find even a tolerable one. I should try a volume of Migne’s Complete Course of Patrology, but I do not like books in more than one volume, for the volumes vary in thickness, and one never can remember which one took; the four volumes, however, of Bede in Giles’s Anglican Fathers are not open to this objection, and I have reserved them for favourable consideration. Mather’s Magnalia might do, but the binding does not please me; Cureton’s Corpus Ignatianum might also do if it were not too thin. I do not like taking Norton’s Genuineness of the Gospels, as it is just possible someone may be wanting to know whether the Gospels are genuine or not, and be unable to find out because I have got Mr. Norton’s book. Baxter’s Church History of England, Lingard’s Anglo-Saxon Church, and Cardwell’s Documentary Annals, though none of them as good as Frost, are works of considerable merit; but on the whole I think Arvine’s Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote is perhaps the one book in the room which comes within measurable distance of Frost. I should probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. “I am not curious,” as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, “but I like to know,” and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing a moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of course, that there are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling them either moral or religious, though some of them certainly seem as if they might fairly find a place in Mr. Arvine’s work. There are some things, however, which it is better not to know, and take it all round I do not think I should be wise in putting myself in the way of temptation, and adopting Arvine as the successor to my beloved and lamented Frost.

Some successor I must find, or I must give up writing altogether, and this I should be sorry to do. I have only as yet written about a third, or from that—counting works written but not published—to a half of the books which I have set myself to write. It would not so much matter if old age was not staring me in the face. Dr. Parr said it was “a beastly shame for an old man not to have laid down a good cellar of port in his youth”; I, like the greater number, I suppose, of those who write books at all, write in order that I may have something to read in my old age when I can write no longer. I know what I shall like better than anyone can tell me, and write accordingly; if my career is nipped in the bud, as seems only too likely, I really do not know where else I can turn for present agreeable occupation, nor yet how to make suitable provision for my later years. Other writers can, of course, make excellent provision for their own old ages, but they cannot do so for mine, any more than I should succeed if I were to try to cater for theirs. It is one of those cases in which no man can make agreement for his brother.

I have no heart for continuing this article, and if I had, I have nothing of interest to say. No one’s literary career can have been smoother or more unchequered than mine. I have published all my books at my own expense, and paid for them in due course. What can be conceivably more unromantic? For some years I had a little literary grievance against the authorities of the British Museum because they would insist on saying in their catalogue that I had published three sermons on Infidelity in the year 1820. I thought I had not, and got them out to see. They were rather funny, but they were not mine. Now, however, this grievance has been removed. I had another little quarrel with them because they would describe me as “of St. John’s College, Cambridge,” an establishment for which I have the most profound veneration, but with which I have not had the honour to be connected for some quarter of a century. At last they said they would change this description if I would only tell them what I was, for, though they had done their best to find out, they had themselves failed. I replied with modest pride that I was a Bachelor of Arts. I keep all my other letters inside my name, not outside. They mused and said it was unfortunate that I was not a Master of Arts. Could I not get myself made a Master? I said I understood that a Mastership was an article the University could not do under about five pounds, and that I was not disposed to go sixpence higher than three ten. They again said it was a pity, for it would be very inconvenient to them if I did not keep to something between a bishop and a poet. I might be anything I liked in reason, provided I showed proper respect for the alphabet; but they had got me between “Samuel Butler, bishop,” and “Samuel Butler, poet.” It would be very troublesome to shift me, and bachelor came before bishop. This was reasonable, so I replied that, under those circumstances, if they pleased, I thought I would like to be a philosophical writer. They embraced the solution, and, no matter what I write now, I must remain a philosophical writer as long as I live, for the alphabet will hardly be altered in my time, and I must be something between “Bis” and “Poe.” If I could get a volume of my excellent namesake’s Hudibras out of the list of my works, I should be robbed of my last shred of literary grievance, so I say nothing about this, but keep it secret, lest some worse thing should happen to me. Besides, I have a great respect for my namesake, and always say that if Erewhon had been a racehorse it would have been got by Hudibras out of Analogy. Someone said this to me many years ago, and I felt so much flattered that I have been repeating the remark as my own ever since.

But how small are these grievances as compared with those endured without a murmur by hundreds of writers far more deserving than myself. When I see the scores and hundreds of workers in the reading-room who have done so much more than I have, but whose work is absolutely fruitless to themselves, and when I think of the prompt recognition obtained by my own work, I ask myself what I have done to be thus rewarded. On the other hand, the feeling that I have succeeded far beyond my deserts hitherto, makes it all the harder for me to acquiesce without complaint in the extinction of a career which I honestly believe to be a promising one; and once more I repeat that, unless the Museum authorities give me back my Frost, or put a locked clasp on Arvine, my career must be extinguished. Give me back Frost, and, if life and health are spared, I will write another dozen of volumes yet before I hang up my fiddle—if so serious a confusion of metaphors may be pardoned. I know from long experience how kind and considerate both the late and present superintendents of the reading-room were and are, but I doubt how far either of them would be disposed to help me on this occasion; continue, however, to rob me of my Frost, and, whatever else I may do, I will write no more books.

Note by Dr. Garnett, British Museum.—The frost has broken up. Mr. Butler is restored to literature. Mr. Mudie may make himself easy. England will still boast a humorist; and the late Mr. Darwin (to whose posthumous machinations the removal of the book was owing) will continue to be confounded.—R. GARNETT.

Ramblings in Cheapside [{110}]

Walking the other day in Cheapside I saw some turtles in Mr. Sweeting’s window, and was tempted to stay and look at them. As I did so I was struck not more by the defences with which they were hedged about, than by the fatuousness of trying to hedge that in at all which, if hedged thoroughly, must die of its own defencefulness. The holes for the head and feet through which the turtle leaks out, as it were, on to the exterior world, and through which it again absorbs the exterior world into itself—“catching on” through them to things that are thus both turtle and not turtle at one and the same time—these holes stultify the armour, and show it to have been designed by a creature with more of faithfulness to a fixed idea, and hence one-sidedness, than of that quick sense of relative importances and their changes, which is the main factor of good living.

The turtle obviously had no sense of proportion; it differed so widely from myself that I could not comprehend it; and as this word occurred to me, it occurred also that until my body comprehended its body in a physical material sense, neither would my mind be able to comprehend its mind with any thoroughness. For unity of mind can only be consummated by unity of body; everything, therefore, must be in some respects both knave and fool to all that which has not eaten it, or by which it has not been eaten. As long as the turtle was in the window and I in the street outside, there was no chance of our comprehending one another.

Nevertheless, I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so effectually buttonhole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most men have an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner. My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting to think that I ought to be allowed to convert the turtles—I mean I had no money in my pocket. No missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but even so small a sum as half a crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion, credit, trust, faith—things that, though highly material in connection with money, are still of immaterial essence.

The steps are perfectly plain. The men who caught the turtles brought a fairly strong and definite opinion to bear upon them, that passed into action, and later on into money. They thought the turtles would come that way, and verified their opinion; on this, will and action were generated, with the result that the men turned the turtles on their backs and carried them off. Mr. Sweeting touched these men with money, which is the outward and visible sign of verified opinion. The customer touches Mr. Sweeting with money, Mr. Sweeting touches the waiter and the cook with money. They touch the turtle with skill and verified opinion. Finally, the customer applies the clinching argument that brushes all sophisms aside, and bids the turtle stand protoplasm to protoplasm with himself, to know even as it is known.

But it must be all touch, touch, touch; skill, opinion, power, and money, passing in and out with one another in any order we like, but still link to link and touch to touch. If there is failure anywhere in respect of opinion, skill, power, or money, either as regards quantity or quality, the chain can be no stronger than its weakest link, and the turtle and the clinching argument will fly asunder. Of course, if there is an initial failure in connection, through defect in any member of the chain, or of connection between the links, it will no more be attempted to bring the turtle and the clinching argument together, than it will to chain up a dog with two pieces of broken chain that are disconnected. The contact throughout must be conceived as absolute; and yet perfect contact is inconceivable by us, for on becoming perfect it ceases to be contact, and becomes essential, once for all inseverable, identity. The most absolute contact short of this is still contact by courtesy only. So here, as everywhere else, Eurydice glides off as we are about to grasp her. We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.

Presently my own blind finger-ends fished up the conclusion, that as I had neither time nor money to spend on perfecting the chain that would put me in full spiritual contact with Mr. Sweeting’s turtles, I had better leave them to complete their education at someone else’s expense rather than mine, so I walked on towards the Bank. As I did so it struck me how continually we are met by this melting of one existence into another. The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions go, but definitions seldom go far. What, for example, can seem more distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor? Yet these are commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow new ones, than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his bank—failure of his bank’s action may be as fatal to a man as failure of his heart. I have said nothing about the medical or spiritual adviser, but most men grow into the society that surrounds them by the help of these four main tap-roots, and not only into the world of humanity, but into the universe at large. We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost ad libitum, but these are low developments, and correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those of us again who are not highly enough organized to have grown a solicitor or banker can generally repair the loss of whatever social organization they may possess as freely as lizards are said to grow new tails; but this with the higher social, as well as organic, developments is only possible to a very limited extent.

The doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls—a doctrine to which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy corollaries—crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated together, far from it; but that, as we can often recognize a transmigrated mind in an alien body, so we not less often see a body that is clearly only a transmigration, linked on to someone else’s new and alien soul. We meet people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits. We see them going about in omnibuses, railway carriages, and in all public places. The cards have been shuffled, and they have drawn fresh lots in life and nationalities, but anyone fairly well up in medieval and last-century portraiture knows them at a glance.

Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I recognized, only he seemed to have got younger. He was with a friend, and his face was in continual play, but for some little time I puzzled in vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him before. All of a sudden I remembered he was King Francis I of France. I had hitherto thought the face of this king impossible, but when I saw it in play I understood it. His great contemporary Henry VIII keeps a restaurant in Oxford Street. Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many years, and only retired when the railway was opened. Titian once made me a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones. At Modena I had my hair cut by a young man whom I perceived to be Raffaelle. The model who sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first lady in a confectionery establishment at Montreal. She has a little motherly pimple on the left side of her nose that is misleading at first, but on examination she is readily recognized; probably Raffaelle’s model had the pimple too, but Raffaelle left it out—as he would.

Handel, of course, is Madame Patey. Give Madame Patey Handel’s wig and clothes, and there would be no telling her from Handel. It is not only that the features and the shape of the head are the same, but there is a certain imperiousness of expression and attitude about Handel which he hardly attempts to conceal in Madame Patey. It is a curious coincidence that he should continue to be such an incomparable renderer of his own music. Pope Julius II was the late Mr. Darwin. Rameses II is a blind woman now, and stands in Holborn, holding a tin mug. I never could understand why I always found myself humming “They oppressed them with burthens” when I passed her, till one day I was looking in Mr. Spooner’s window in the Strand, and saw a photograph of Rameses II. Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits, near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road.

Michael Angelo is a commissionaire; I saw him on board the Glen Rosa, which used to run every day from London to Clacton-on-Sea and back. It gave me quite a turn when I saw him coming down the stairs from the upper deck, with his bronzed face, flattened nose, and with the familiar bar upon his forehead. I never liked Michael Angelo, and never shall, but I am afraid of him, and was near trying to hide when I saw him coming towards me. He had not got his commissionaire’s uniform on, and I did not know he was one till I met him a month or so later in the Strand. When we got to Blackwall the music struck up and people began to dance. I never saw a man dance so much in my life. He did not miss a dance all the way to Clacton, nor all the way back again, and when not dancing he was flirting and cracking jokes. I could hardly believe my eyes when I reflected that this man had painted the famous “Last Judgment,” and had made all those statues.

Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter at Brissago on the Lago Maggiore, only he is better-tempered-looking, and has a more intellectual expression. He gave me his ideas upon beauty: “Tutto ch’ è vero è bello,” he exclaimed, with all his old self-confidence. I am not afraid of Dante. I know people by their friends, and he went about with Virgil, so I said with some severity, “No, Dante, il naso della Signora Robinson è vero, ma non è bello”; and he admitted I was right. Beatrice’s name is Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland. I used to sit at my window and hear people call “Towler, Towler, Towler,” fifty times in a forenoon. She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how often they called Towler, everyone came before she did. I suppose they spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, however, met anyone else with this name. She was a sweet, artless little hussy, who made me play the piano to her, and she said it was lovely. Of course I only played my own compositions; so I believed her, and it all went off very nicely. I thought it might save trouble if I did not tell her who she really was, so I said nothing about it.

I met Socrates once. He was my muleteer on an excursion which I will not name, for fear it should identify the man. The moment I saw my guide I knew he was somebody, but for the life of me I could not remember who. All of a sudden it flashed across me that he was Socrates. He talked enough for six, but it was all in dialetto, so I could not understand him, nor, when I had discovered who he was, did I much try to do so. He was a good creature, a trifle given to stealing fruit and vegetables, but an amiable man enough. He had had a long day with his mule and me, and he only asked me five francs. I gave him ten, for I pitied his poor old patched boots, and there was a meekness about him that touched me. “And now, Socrates,” said I at parting, “we go on our several ways, you to steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest—which of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in heaven knows, but we know not.”

I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the same refractory hair that he always had. It was very interesting to watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become positively posthumous. One morning I was told the Beethovens were going away, and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the stairs. The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have been surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-the-box. “Sono indentro?” said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes. The porters knew what I meant, and laughed. But there is no end to the list of people whom I have been able to recognize, and before I had got through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.

I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie’s, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library. I once heard two ladies disputing in a railway carriage as to whether one of them had or had not been wasting money. “I spent it in books,” said the accused, “and it’s not wasting money to buy books.” “Indeed, my dear, I think it is,” was the rejoinder, and in practice I agree with it. Webster’s Dictionary, Whitaker’s Almanack, and Bradshaw’s Railway Guide should be sufficient for any ordinary library; it will be time enough to go beyond these when the mass of useful and entertaining matter which they provide has been mastered. Nevertheless, I admit that sometimes, if not particularly busy, I stop at a second-hand bookstall and turn over a book or two from mere force of habit.

I know not what made me pick up a copy of Æschylus—of course in an English version—or rather I know not what made Æschylus take up with me, for he took me rather than I him; but no sooner had he got me than he began puzzling me, as he has done any time this forty years, to know wherein his transcendent merit can be supposed to lie. To me he is, like the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal. There are true immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are, five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs. It comforts me to remember that Aristophanes liked Æschylus no better than I do. True, he praises him by comparison with Sophocles and Euripides, but he only does so that he may run down these last more effectively. Aristophanes is a safe man to follow, nor do I see why it should not be as correct to laugh with him as to pull a long face with the Greek Professors; but this is neither here nor there, for no one really cares about Æschylus; the more interesting question is how he contrived to make so many people for so many years pretend to care about him.

Perhaps he married somebody’s daughter. If a man would get hold of the public ear, he must pay, marry, or fight. I have never understood that Æschylus was a man of means, and the fighters do not write poetry, so I suppose he must have married a theatrical manager’s daughter, and got his plays brought out that way. The ear of any age or country is like its land, air, and water; it seems limitless but is really limited, and is already in the keeping of those who naturally enough will have no squatting on such valuable property. It is written and talked up to as closely as the means of subsistence are bred up to by a teeming population. There is not a square inch of it but is in private hands, and he who would freehold any part of it must do so by purchase, marriage, or fighting, in the usual way—and fighting gives the longest, safest tenure. The public itself has hardly more voice in the question who shall have its ear, than the land has in choosing its owners. It is farmed as those who own it think most profitable to themselves, and small blame to them; nevertheless, it has a residuum of mulishness which the land has not, and does sometimes dispossess its tenants. It is in this residuum that those who fight place their hope and trust.

Or perhaps Æschylus squared the leading critics of his time. When one comes to think of it, he must have done so, for how is it conceivable that such plays should have had such runs if he had not? I met a lady one year in Switzerland who had some parrots that always travelled with her and were the idols of her life. These parrots would not let anyone read aloud in their presence, unless they heard their own names introduced from time to time. If these were freely interpolated into the text they would remain as still as stones, for they thought the reading was about themselves. If it was not about them it could not be allowed. The leaders of literature are like these parrots; they do not look at what a man writes, nor if they did would they understand it much better than the parrots do; but they like the sound of their own names, and if these are freely interpolated in a tone they take as friendly, they may even give ear to an outsider. Otherwise they will scream him off if they can.

I should not advise anyone with ordinary independence of mind to attempt the public ear unless he is confident that he can out-lung and out-last his own generation; for if he has any force, people will and ought to be on their guard against him, inasmuch as there is no knowing where he may not take them. Besides, they have staked their money on the wrong men so often without suspecting it, that when there comes one whom they do suspect it would be madness not to bet against him. True, he may die before he has out screamed his opponents, but that has nothing to do with it. If his scream was well pitched it will sound clearer when he is dead. We do not know what death is. If we know so little about life which we have experienced, how shall we know about death which we have not—and in the nature of things never can? Everyone, as I said years ago in Alps and Sanctuaries, is an immortal to himself, for he cannot know that he is dead until he is dead, and when dead how can he know anything about anything? All we know is, that even the humblest dead may live long after all trace of the body has disappeared; we see them doing it in the bodies and memories of those that come after them; and not a few live so much longer and more effectually than is desirable, that it has been necessary to get rid of them by Act of Parliament. It is love that alone gives life, and the truest life is that which we live not in ourselves but vicariously in others, and with which we have no concern. Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of the number of them that enter into life—although we know it not.

Æschylus did so order himself; but his life is not of that inspiriting kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only—or being believed to have fought it. His voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a man must utter or die—nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the allusions and hard passages in Æschylus of which we can make neither head nor tail are in reality only puffs of some of the literary leaders of his time.

The lady above referred to told me more about her parrots. She was like a Nasmyth’s hammer going slow—very gentle, but irresistible. She always read the newspaper to them. What was the use of having a newspaper if one did not read it to one’s parrots?

“And have you divined,” I asked, “to which side they incline in politics?”

“They do not like Mr. Gladstone,” was the somewhat freezing answer; “this is the only point on which we disagree, for I adore him. Don’t ask more about this, it is a great grief to me. I tell them everything,” she continued, “and hide no secret from them.”

“But can any parrot be trusted to keep a secret?”

“Mine can.”

“And on Sundays do you give them the same course of reading as on a week-day, or do you make a difference?”

“On Sundays I always read them a genealogical chapter from the Old or New Testament, for I can thus introduce their names without profanity. I always keep tea by me in case they should ask for it in the night, and I have an Etna to warm it for them; they take milk and sugar. The old white-headed clergyman came to see them last night; it was very painful, for Jocko reminded him so strongly of his late . . . ”

I thought she was going to say “wife,” but it proved to have been only of a parrot that he had once known and loved.

One evening she was in difficulties about the quarantine, which was enforced that year on the Italian frontier. The local doctor had gone down that morning to see the Italian doctor and arrange some details. “Then, perhaps, my dear,” she said to her husband, “he is the quarantine.” “No, my love,” replied her husband. “The quarantine is not a person, it is a place where they put people”; but she would not be comforted, and suspected the quarantine as an enemy that might at any moment pounce out upon her and her parrots. So a lady told me once that she had been in like trouble about the anthem. She read in her Prayer Book that in choirs and places where they sing “here followeth the anthem,” yet the person with this most mysteriously sounding name never did follow. They had a choir, and no one could say the church was not a place where they sang, for they did sing—both chants and hymns. Why, then, this persistent slackness on the part of the anthem, who at this juncture should follow her papa, the rector, into the reading-desk? No doubt he would come some day, and then what would he be like? Fair or dark? Tall or short? Would he be bald and wear spectacles like papa, would he be young and good-looking? Anyhow, there was something wrong, for it was announced that he would follow, and he never did follow; therefore there was no knowing what he might not do next.

I heard of the parrots a year or two later as giving lessons in Italian to an English maid. I do not know what their terms were. Alas! since then both they and their mistress have joined the majority. When the poor lady felt her end was near she desired (and the responsibility for this must rest with her, not me) that the birds might be destroyed, as fearing that they might come to be neglected, and knowing that they could never be loved again as she had loved them. On being told that all was over, she said, “Thank you,” and immediately expired.

Reflecting in such random fashion, and strolling with no greater method, I worked my way back through Cheapside and found myself once more in front of Sweeting’s window. Again the turtles attracted me. They were alive, and so far at any rate they agreed with me. Nay, they had eyes, mouths, legs, if not arms, and feet, so there was much in which we were both of a mind, but surely they must be mistaken in arming themselves so very heavily. Any creature on getting what the turtle aimed at would overreach itself and be landed not in safety but annihilation. It should have no communion with the outside world at all, for death could creep in wherever the creature could creep out; and it must creep out somewhere if it was to hook on to outside things. What death can be more absolute than such absolute isolation? Perfect death, indeed, if it were attainable (which it is not), is as near perfect security as we can reach, but it is not the kind of security aimed at by any animal that is at the pains of defending itself. For such want to have things both ways, desiring the livingness of life without its perils, and the safety of death without its deadness, and some of us do actually get this for a considerable time, but we do not get it by plating ourselves with armour as the turtle does. We tried this in the Middle Ages, and no longer mock ourselves with the weight of armour that our forefathers carried in battle. Indeed the more deadly the weapons of attack become the more we go into the fight slug-wise.

Slugs have ridden their contempt for defensive armour as much to death as the turtles their pursuit of it. They have hardly more than skin enough to hold themselves together; they court death every time they cross the road. Yet death comes not to them more than to the turtle, whose defences are so great that there is little left inside to be defended. Moreover, the slugs fare best in the long run, for turtles are dying out, while slugs are not, and there must be millions of slugs all the world over for every single turtle. Of the two vanities, therefore, that of the slug seems most substantial.

In either case the creature thinks itself safe, but is sure to be found out sooner or later; nor is it easy to explain this mockery save by reflecting that everything must have its meat in due season, and that meat can only be found for such a multitude of mouths by giving everything as meat in due season to something else. This is like the Kilkenny cats, or robbing Peter to pay Paul; but it is the way of the world, and as every animal must contribute in kind to the picnic of the universe, one does not see what better arrangement could be made than the providing each race with a hereditary fallacy, which shall in the end get it into a scrape, but which shall generally stand the wear and tear of life for some time. “Do ut des” is the writing on all flesh to him that eats it; and no creature is dearer to itself than it is to some other that would devour it.

Nor is there any statement or proposition more invulnerable than living forms are. Propositions prey upon and are grounded upon one another just like living forms. They support one another as plants and animals do; they are based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than the cash of irrefragable conviction. The whole universe is carried on on the credit system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails, a system based on faith fails also.

Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter. If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand so great a drain even on so great a reserve? Probably there is not, but happily there can be no such panic, for even though the cultured classes may do so, the uncultured are too dull to have brains enough to commit such stupendous folly. It takes a long course of academic training to educate a man up to the standard which he must reach before he can entertain such questions seriously, and by a merciful dispensation of Providence university training is almost as costly as it is unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on demonstration.

So I turned my steps homewards; I saw a good many more things on my way home, but I was told that I was not to see more this time than I could get into twelve pages of the Universal Review; I must therefore reserve any remark which I think might perhaps entertain the reader for another occasion.

The Aunt, the Nieces, and the Dog [{127}]

When a thing is old, broken, and useless we throw it on the dust-heap, but when it is sufficiently old, sufficiently broken, and sufficiently useless we give money for it, put it into a museum, and read papers over it which people come long distances to hear. By and by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is rediscovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilization. So when people are old, indigent, and in all respects incapable, we hold them in greater and greater contempt as their poverty and impotence increase, till they reach the pitch when they are actually at the point to die, whereon they become sublime. Then we place every resource our hospitals can command at their disposal, and show no stint in our consideration for them.

It is the same with all our interests. We care most about extremes of importance and of unimportance; but extremes of importance are tainted with fear, and a very imperfect fear casteth out love. Extremes of unimportance cannot hurt us, therefore we are well disposed towards them; the means may come to do so, therefore we do not love them. Hence we pick a fly out of a milk-jug and watch with pleasure over its recovery, for we are confident that under no conceivable circumstances will it want to borrow money from us; but we feel less sure about a mouse, so we show it no quarter. The compilers of our almanacs well know this tendency of our natures, so they tell us, not when Noah went into the ark, nor when the temple of Jerusalem was dedicated, but that Lindley Murray, grammarian, died January 16th, 1826. This is not because they could not find so many as three hundred and sixty-five events of considerable interest since the creation of the world, but because they well know we would rather hear of something less interesting. We care most about what concerns us either very closely, or so little that practically we have nothing whatever to do with it.

I once asked a young Italian, who professed to have a considerable knowledge of English literature, which of all our poems pleased him best. He replied without a moment’s hesitation:

“Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.”

He said this was better than anything in Italian. They had Dante and Tasso, and ever so many more great poets, but they had nothing comparable to “Hey diddle diddle,” nor had he been able to conceive how anyone could have written it. Did I know the author’s name, and had we given him a statue? On this I told him of the young lady of Harrow who would go to church in a barrow, and plied him with whatever rhyming nonsense I could call to mind, but it was no use; all of these things had an element of reality that robbed them of half their charm, whereas “Hey diddle diddle” had nothing in it that could conceivably concern him.

So again it is with the things that gall us most. What is it that rises up against us at odd times and smites us in the face again and again for years after it has happened? That we spent all the best years of our life in learning what we have found to be a swindle, and to have been known to be a swindle by those who took money for misleading us? That those on whom we most leaned most betrayed us? That we have only come to feel our strength when there is little strength left of any kind to feel? These things will hardly much disturb a man of ordinary good temper. But that he should have said this or that little unkind and wanton saying; that he should have gone away from this or that hotel and given a shilling too little to the waiter; that his clothes were shabby at such or such a garden-party—these things gall us as a corn will sometimes do, though the loss of a limb may not be seriously felt.

I have been reminded lately of these considerations with more than common force by reading the very voluminous correspondence left by my grandfather, Dr. Butler, of Shrewsbury, whose memoirs I am engaged in writing. I have found a large number of interesting letters on subjects of serious import, but must confess that it is to the hardly less numerous lighter letters that I have been most attracted, nor do I feel sure that my eminent namesake did not share my predilection. Among other letters in my possession I have one bundle that has been kept apart, and has evidently no connection with Dr. Butler’s own life. I cannot use these letters, therefore, for my book, but over and above the charm of their inspired spelling, I find them of such an extremely trivial nature that I incline to hope the reader may derive as much amusement from them as I have done myself, and venture to give them the publicity here which I must refuse them in my book. The dates and signatures have, with the exception of Mrs. Newton’s, been carefully erased, but I have collected that they were written by the two servants of a single lady who resided at no great distance from London, to two nieces of the said lady who lived in London itself. The aunt never writes, but always gets one of the servants to do so for her. She appears either as “your aunt” or as “She”; her name is not given, but she is evidently looked upon with a good deal of awe by all who had to do with her.

The letters almost all of them relate to visits either of the aunt to London, or of the nieces to the aunt’s home, which, from occasional allusions to hopping, I gather to have been in Kent, Sussex, or Surrey. I have arranged them to the best of my power, and take the following to be the earliest. It has no signature, but is not in the handwriting of the servant who styles herself Elizabeth, or Mrs. Newton. It runs:—