Modern Essays Part 11

I know not which is the more startling--the debut of the unfortunate clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn't Boswell told us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so careful and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the clergyman was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the company.

Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that sooner or later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in our minds. We may a.s.sume that in the minds of the company around Johnson he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his self-a.s.sertion startled every one just as on Boswell's page it startles us. In Johnson's ma.s.sive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest.

Others might, if they had something in them, stand out slightly. This unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That deficiency, however, does not account for the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson's strongest and most inveterate feelings was his veneration for the Cloth.

To any one in Holy Orders he habitually listened with a grace and charming deference. To-day, moreover, he was in excellent good humor. He was at the Thrales', where he so loved to be; the day was fine; a fine dinner was in close prospect; and he had had what he always declared to be the sum of human felicity--a ride in a coach. Nor was there in the question put by the clergyman anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was one whom Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had always been agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very emotional. What drew the blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in which it was asked. And I think we can guess what that manner was.

Say the words aloud: "Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the pa.s.sions?" They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic sense, _cannot_ be said except in a high, thin voice.

You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous baritone or ba.s.s. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice: you must pipe them.

Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew well, the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him very loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergyman, when at length he suddenly mustered courage to 'cut in,' let his high, thin voice soar _too_ high, insomuch that it was a kind of scream. On no other hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which Johnson turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we may be sure, mean to be cruel.

The old lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But the force of paw and claws was not the less lethal. We have endless testimony to the strength of Johnson's voice; and the very cadence of those words, "They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may," convinces me that the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder roar. Boswell does not record that there was any further conversation before the announcement of dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been temporarily deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My heart goes out to the poor dear clergyman exclusively.

I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what I omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress any one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that even the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would a.s.suredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved by the fact that he did s.n.a.t.c.h the opportunity for asking that question.

He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of the neighboring church? I think so. It would account for his having been invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor's p.r.o.nouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the edge of a chair in the background. He has colorless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-colored. His hands are clasped tight before him, the knuckles standing out sharply. This constriction does not mean that he is steeling himself to speak. He has no positive intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he wishing in the back of his mind that he could say something--something whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, after a pause for thought, "Why, yes, Sir. That is most justly observed" or "Sir, this has never occurred to me. I thank you"--thereby fixing the observer forever high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the chance presents itself. "We have," shouts Johnson, "no sermons addressed to the pa.s.sions, that are good for anything." I see the curate's frame quiver with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and--no, I can't bear it, I shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill, followed by something thunderous.

Presently I reopen my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.

Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the Established Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what Seed and South?

And, by the way, who _were_ they, these worthies? It is a solemn thought that so little is conveyed to us by names which to the palaeo-Georgians conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a big wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath him. But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all very elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled full calf, and no palaeo-Georgian gentleman's library will be complete without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but, bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now. "Yes, Sir,"

some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, "Wells is one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of problems, but is not very creational.--Caine's books are very edifying.

I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is very edifying.--And you may add Upton Sinclair." "What I want to know,"

says the disciple, "is, what English novels may be selected as specially enthralling." The pundit answers: "We have no novels addressed to the pa.s.sions that are good for anything, if you mean that kind of enthralment." And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will not remember) inquires: "Are not Mrs. Glyn's novels addressed to the pa.s.sions?" and is in due form annihilated. Can it be that a time will come when readers of this pa.s.sage in our pundit's Life will take more interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those great names put together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate between (say) Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must remember that things are not always what they seem.

Every man ill.u.s.trious in his day, however much he may be gratified by his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past favors, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if by so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a correct att.i.tude towards him forever. This is very natural and human, but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect of them.

They either know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles.

Let us keep our pity for the seething ma.s.s of divines who were not elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in the bud.

And that is what in fact happened, I'm sure of it. A robust man might have rallied under the blow. Not so our friend. Those who knew him in infancy had not expected that he would be reared. Better for him had they been right. It is well to grow up and be ordained, but not if you are delicate and very sensitive, and shall happen to annoy the greatest, the most stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. "A Clergyman" never held up his head or smiled again after the brief encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline.

Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall's almond trees he was no more.

I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.

SAMUEL BUTLER: DIOGENES OF THE VICTORIANS

_By_ STUART P. SHERMAN

Professor Sherman's cold compress, applied to the Butler cult, caused much suffering in some regions, where it was said to be more than a cooling bandage--in fact, a wet blanket. In the general rough-and-tumble among critical standards during recent years, Mr.

Sherman is one of those who have dealt some swinging blows in favor of the Victorians and the literary Old Guard--which was often square but rarely hollow.

Stuart Pratt Sherman, born in Iowa in 1881, graduated from Williams in 1903, has been since 1911 professor of English at the University of Illinois. His own account of his adventures, written without intended publication, is worth consideration. He says:

"My life hasn't been quite as dryly 'academic,' nor as simply 'middle-Western,' as the record indicates. For example: I lived in Los Angeles from my 5th to my 13th year, and then went on a seven months' adventure in gold mining in the Black Canon of Arizona, where I had some experience with drouth in the desert, etc. That is not 'literary.'

"Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little paper about some college friends at Williams. I was in college with Harry James Smith (author of _Mrs. b.u.mpstead Lee_), Max Eastman, and 'Go-to-h.e.l.l' Whittlesey. As editor of the _Williams Monthly_ I have accepted and rejected ma.n.u.scripts of both the two latter, and have reminiscences of their literary youth.

"Then I spent a summer in the _Post_ and _Nation_ in 1908, which is a pleasant chapter to remember; another summer teaching at Columbia; this past summer teaching at the University of California. My favorite recreations are climbing little mountains, chopping wood, and canoeing on Lake Michigan.

"This summer I have been picking out a place to die in--or rather looking over the sites offered in California. I lean towards the high Sierras, up above the Yosemite Valley.

"My ambition in life is to retire--perhaps at the age of seventy--and write only for amus.e.m.e.nt. When I can abandon the task of improving my contemporaries, I hope to become a popular author."

Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact contemporary of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords in more than one spirited encounter; and Sherman is likely to give as good as he takes in such scuffles, or even rather better. It is high time that his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning were better known in the market-place.

UNTIL I met the Butlerians I used to think that the religious spirit in our times was very precious, there was so little of it. I thought one should hold one's breath before it as before the flicker of one's last match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it should go out?" I said; but my apprehension was groundless. It can never go out. The religious spirit is indestructible and constant in quant.i.ty like the sum of universal energy in which matches and suns are alike but momentary sparkles and phases. This great truth I learned of the Butlerians: Though the forms and objects of religious belief wax old as a garment and are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious thing, endures forever. Destroy a man's faith in G.o.d and he will worship humanity; destroy his faith in humanity and he will worship science; destroy his faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy his faith in himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.

What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of course, that Butler, poor dear, as the English say, was the least worshipful of men. He was not even--till his posthumous disciples made him so--a person of any particular importance. One writing a private memorandum of his death might have produced something like this: Samuel Butler was an unsociable, burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante in art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty cynic of inquisitive temper and, comprehensively speaking, the unregarded Diogenes of the Victorians. Son of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835, educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordination. But, as we are told, because of scruples regarding infant baptism he abandoned the prospect of holy orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep-farming for five years. In 1864, returning to England with 8,000, he established himself for life at Clifford's Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting, adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional trips to Sicily and Italy, and wrote a dozen books, which generally fell dead from the press, on religion, literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon,"

however, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by 1899 sold between three and four thousand copies. Butler made few friends and apparently never married. He died in 1902. His last words were: "Have you brought the cheque book, Alfred?" His body was cremated and the ashes were buried in a garden by his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing to mark the spot.

Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly part betokens no contempt for fame. Denied contemporary renown, he had firmly set his heart on immortality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suffrage of his countrymen, he would go down by the shrewd use of his cheque book; he would buy his way in. He bought the publication of most of the books produced in his lifetime. He diligently prepared ma.n.u.scripts for posthumous publication and acc.u.mulated and arranged great ma.s.ses of materials for a biographer. He insured an interest in his literary remains by bequeathing them and all his copyrights to his literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an interest in a biographer by persuading Henry Festing Jones, a f.e.c.kless lawyer of Butlerian proclivities, to abandon the law and become his musical and literary companion. In return for these services Mr. Jones received between 1887 and 1900 an allowance of 200 a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of 500, the musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and privilege of a.s.sisting Streatfeild with the propagation of Butler's fame, together with their own, in the next generation.

These good and faithful servants performed their duties with exemplary zeal and astuteness. In 1903, the year following the Master's death, Streatfeild published "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was capable of walking off on its own legs and exciting general curiosity about its author--curiosity intensified by the announcement that the novel had been written between 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation there began the systematic annual relaunching of old works, with fresh introductions and memoirs and a piecemeal feeding out of other literary remains, culminating in 1917 with the publication of "The Note-Books," a skilful collection and condensation of the whole of Butler's intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908, the Erewhon dinner had been inst.i.tuted. In spite of mild deprecation, this feast, with its two toasts to his Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, a.s.sumed from the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of believers. Among these was conspicuous on the second occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not quite certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to receive honor, whether he was himself to be regarded as the beloved disciple or rather as the one for whom Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had prepared the way with "free and future-piercing suggestions."

By 1914 Streatfeild was able to declare that no fragment of Butler's was too insignificant to publish. In 1915 and 1916 appeared extensive critical studies by Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 1919 at last arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative memoir in two enormous volumes with portraits, doc.u.ments, sumptuous index, elaborate bibliography and a pious accounting to the public for the original ma.n.u.scripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at St. John's College, the Bodleian, the British Museum, the Library of Congress and at various shrines in Italy and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh consideration of the man in relation to his work.

The unconverted will say that such a monument to such a man is absurdly disproportionate. But Butler is now more than a man. He is a spiritual ancestor, leader of a movement, moulder of young minds, founder of a faith. His monument is designed not merely to preserve his memory but to mark as well the present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir appears to have been written primarily for them. The faithful will no doubt find it delicious; and I, though an outsider, got through it without fatigue and with a kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity.

It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies its puzzling and complex subject. Mr. Jones is not of the biographers who look into the heart of a man, reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accordance with it. He works from the outside, inward, and gradually achieves life and reality by an immense acc.u.mulation of objective detail, without ever plucking out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery. What was the man's "master pa.s.sion" and his master faculty? Butler himself did not know; consequently he could not always distinguish his wisdom from his folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and an egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his wounds in self-a.s.sertion and his hesitancies in an external aggressiveness. Mr.

Jones pierces the sh.e.l.l here and there, but never removes it.

Considering his opportunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his subject based on his own direct observation; and, with all his ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating indiscretions, he is frequently silent as a tomb where he must certainly possess information for which every reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the happy reincarnation of moderation, common sense and fearless honesty.

The whole case of the Georgians against the Victorians might be fought out over his life and works; and indeed there has already been many a skirmish in that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor Mr.

Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival. Ultimately Butler's vogue is due to the fact that he is a friend of the Georgian revolution against idealism in the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary acclaim with which he is now received is his reward for having long ago prepared to betray the Victorians into the hands of a ruthless posterity. He was a traitor to his own times, and therefore it follows that he was a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which we may all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor whom we have received within our lines is whether he will make us a good citizen. We should like to know pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his countrymen--whether through defects in his own temper and character or through a clear-eyed and righteous indignation with the incorrigible viciousness of their manners and inst.i.tutions. We should like to know what vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hitherto the Georgians have been more eloquent in their disillusions than in their visions, and have inclined to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent without much inspecting his solution.

The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering attack on family life, notably in "The Way of All Flesh"; and many a studious literary man with a talkative wife and eight romping children would, of course, admit an occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bachelor apartments. Mr.

Jones tells us that Theobald and Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness Butler uncovers, were drawn without exaggeration from his own father and mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of pitiless satire. Butler appears to have hated his father, despised his mother and loathed his sisters in all truth and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and contemptuous feelings towards them all through his life; he studied these feelings, made notes on them, jested out of them, lived in them, reduced them to a philosophy of domestic antipathy.

He was far more learned than any other English author in the psychology of impiety. When he heard some one say, "Two are better than one," he exclaimed, "Yes, but the man who said that did not know my sisters."

When he was forty-eight years old he wrote to a friend that his father was in poor health and not likely to recover; "but may hang on for months or go off with the N. E. winds which we are sure to have later on." In the same letter he writes that he is going to strike out forty weak pages in "Erewhon" and stick in forty stronger ones on the "trial of a middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a suitable age.'" His father's one unpardonable offense was not dying early and so enlarging his son's income. If this had been a jest, it would have been a little coa.r.s.e for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears to think it very amusing, proves clearly enough that it was not a jest, but an obsession, and a horrid obsession it was. Now a man who attacks the family because his father does not die as promptly as could be desired is not likely to propose a happy subst.i.tute: his mood is not reconstructive, funny though it may be in two old boys of fifty, like Butler and Jones, living along like spoiled children on allowances, Butler from his father, Jones from his mother.

The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant attack on "romantic"

relations between the s.e.xes. Before the advent of Shaw he poured poison on the roots of that imaginative love in which all normal men and maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy cloud shot through with golden lights.

His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, capable of pa.s.sion, a face distinctly virile, rather harshly bearded, with broad masculine eyebrows. Was he ever in love? If not, why was he not? Elementary questions which his biographer after a thousand pages leaves unanswered.

Mr. Jones a.s.serts that both Overton and Ernest in "The Way of All Flesh"

are in the main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes much evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence in this fact, that Butler, unlike his hero, was never in prison. Did Butler, like his hero, have children and farm them out? The point is of some interest in the case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conventional family.

Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with such women as the late Queen Victoria would not have approved, relations which J. B.

Yeats has, however, publicly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cynical enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes pains to tell us that his own grandfather was never married. He does not hesitate to acknowledge abundance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking is the order of the day and the special pride of contemporary Erewhonians? Why did a young man of Butler's tastes leave the church and go into exile in New Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute biographer perhaps find a more "realistic" explanation than difficulties over infant baptism? Mr.

Shaw told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird." In some respects he was also a sly old bird.

Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled by Mr. Shaw we may be sure that the author of "Man and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge Butler's prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea we may now trace quite definitely to his relations with Miss Savage, a witty, sensible, presumably virtuous woman of about his own age, living in a club in London, who urged him to write fiction, read all his ma.n.u.scripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in women's magazines and corresponded with him for years till she died, without his knowledge, in hospital from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay in his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altogether his most interesting personality. Mr. Jones says that being unable to find any one who could authorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imagine that any relation of hers who may read her letters will experience any feelings other than pride and delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of Alethea Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea was handsome. Miss Savage, he says, was short, fat, had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness which I used to a.s.sociate with ladies who had been at school with my mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss Savage loved him; this bored him; and the correspondence would lapse till he felt the need of her cheery friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, "I wish that you did not know wrong from right." Mr. Jones believes that she was alluding to his scrupulousness in matters of business. Butler himself construed the words as an overture to which he was indisposed to respond. The debate on this point and the pretty uncertainty in which it is left can surely arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings than "pride and delight."

This brings us to the Butlerian subst.i.tute for the chivalry which used to be practised by those who bore what the Victorians called "the grand old name of gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-health, Butler made notes on his correspondence reproaching himself for his ill-treatment of her. "He also," says his biographer, "tried to express his remorse" in two sonnets from which I extract some lines:

She was too kind, wooed too persistently, Wrote moving letters to me day by day;

Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain, For she was plain and lame and fat and short, Forty and overkind.