Essays Irish and American

Recollections of Samuel Butler

I knew Butler. In the year 1867-68 I was a pupil at Heatherleigh’s Art School, Newman Street, London, and Butler was there also. It is not true that Butler had talent. To be a painter after the manner of John Bellini was for years the passion of his life. It was vain; he had no talent. At the time I knew him he was beginning to see this and it was pathetic! We tried to comfort him and would have cheered him with false hopes. All the intellect in the world won’t make a painter if it is not the right kind of intellect.

A Scotch friend of mine and his, whom Butler loved because of his knowledge of music, would sometimes say, “Yes, Mr. Butler, you are a dominie”--and he would chuckle slowly in his Scotch manner. Like a dominie he kept us all in order. We called each other briefly by our surnames without the prefix of the Mr.--Butler was always Mr. Butler. Once a daring citizen of London ventured, “Have you been to the Alhambra, Butler?” He pronounced it “Al’ambra”--that gave Butler his opportunity. The Englishman in possession of all his aitches can always hold the many in check because of their deficiency in aitches. “Is there an aitch in the word?” said Butler. Never again did my poor friend venture, or for that matter any of us.

The Irishman likes his equal and is, as every one admits, the best of comrades; the German likes his superior; but the Englishman likes to be with his inferior and is not comfortable in any other relation. He is sent to the public school and the university by his anxious parents and guardians that he may acquire the superior manner. There are two sneers in England, the cockney variety which no one respects, and the university and public school sneer which compels respect, even among foreigners. It impressed Goethe. The footman puts it on but overdoes it, so that at a glance we know it to be counterfeit. Butler was the politest, the most ceremonious of men, but the sneer was there and all the more palpable because so carefully veiled.

We were art students and tried to be Bohemian, or would have done so had not Butler been one of us. There was a student whom he much liked; one day he took him in hand and in his most paternal manner admonished him that he must not use the word “chap.” Butler was an Englishman through and through and an Englishman of “class.” The Englishman of class will part with his faith, with his wife and children, with his money, even, or his reputation and be cheerful about it, but closer than his skin sticks to him his class conceit; and in his accent, his voice, his gestures, his phrases he carefully preserves all its insignia. Possessed of these he knows he may go anywhere and associate with anyone; it is a passport entitling him to a nobleman’s freedom. Every Englishman, gentle or simple, either by force or by patient groping will try for a sheltered spot where he may have his own thoughts and his own ways hampered by none. But the Englishman of class is freest of all; a policeman, even he, will hesitate to interfere with you if he knows that you are a gentleman.

In his “Way of All Flesh,” Butler describes English home life and he enables us to see that affection and sympathy do not form part of it. Butler, the product of that life, sets little importance on either affection or sympathy; and yet there never was a kinder man. Good nature was fundamental in his character and was, I think, the source of most of his writings and opinions. The English going about life in an intensely selfish way and doing this on principle are obliged to have strict laws strictly enforced; yet outside these laws they claim and allow the utmost license of action and thought. It is their distinction among nations that they love personal liberty so much,--that is for themselves, for they are quite ready to enslave other people. With this love for personal freedom has grown up, side by side with it and as part and parcel of it, an immense appreciation of human nature itself. Against this appreciation Puritanism has vainly and indeed dolorously struggled. Butler’s good nature was due to his liking for human nature itself; hence his zeal against all the conventions and illusions and veiling “respectabilities” that would snatch from human nature its proper food.

The continental nations may hate human nature and produce their Goyas, but such art among Englishmen excites only a lazy contempt. Notwithstanding their passion for law and rule, a necessary thing among people so selfishly bent on their own gains, the Englishman does not actually hate his neighbour, even though he keeps aloof from him. He has indeed a genial relish for the selfishness in his neighbour which is so strong in himself. Edmund Burke has some such sentence as “the good nature and integrity of this ancient people.” The Dutch, being a freedom-loving people, have a similar good nature. Rembrandt and Shakespeare get artistic pleasure out of the ugly but with laughter, not as in Goya with a grin of hatred. Indeed, looking at some of Goya’s work, one is forced to believe that he hated even the people who looked at his pictures and wished through them to insult and offend all his friends,--a kind of disorderly impulse which in him and others prompts to the disgusting and obscene in art. Butler’s emancipated intellect had won for his soul and senses a freedom which he wished to share with others; he had as it were acquired a freedom to be on good terms with himself. To be sure, a Scotchman is on good terms with himself when he is conceited. Butler wanted people to be on good terms with their senses and appetites and everything else that goes into our make-up as men, to all of which Scotch conceit is the enemy. For this he was always fighting, and he began to fight at Heatherleigh’s Art School. He found us, as he thought, enslaved by this or that convention or illusion and by his mockeries and his wit worked for our liberation.