The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 67

When I am dead I would rather people thought me better than I was instead of worse; but if they think me worse, I cannot help it and, if it matters at all, it will matter more to them than to me. The one reputation I deprecate is that of having been ill-used. I deprecate this because it would tend to depress and discourage others from playing the game that I have played. I will therefore forestall misconception on this head.

As regards general good-fortune, I am nearly fifty-five years old and for the last thirty years have never been laid up with illness nor had any physical pain that I can remember, not even toothache.

Except sometimes, when a little over-driven, I have had uninterrupted good health ever since I was about five-and-twenty.

Of mental suffering I have had my share--as who has not?--but most of what I have suffered has been, though I did not think so at the time, either imaginary, or unnecessary and, so far, it has been soon forgotten. It has been much less than it very easily might have been if the luck had not now and again gone with me, and probably I have suffered less than most people, take it all round. Like every one else, however, I have the scars of old wounds; very few of these wounds were caused by anything which was essential in the nature of things; most, if not all of them, have been due to faults of heart and head on my own part and on that of others which, one would have thought, might have been easily avoided if in practice it had not turned out otherwise.

For many years I was in a good deal of money difficulty, but since my father's death I have had no trouble on this score--greatly otherwise. Even when things were at their worst, I never missed my two months' summer Italian trip since 1876, except one year and then I went to Mont St. Michel and enjoyed it very much. It was those Italian trips that enabled me to weather the storm. At other times I am engrossed with work that fascinates me. I am surrounded by people to whom I am attached and who like me in return so far as I can judge. In Alfred [his clerk and attendant] I have the best body- guard and the most engaging of any man in London. I live quietly but happily. And if this is being ill-used I should like to know what being well-used is.

I do not deny, however, that I have been ill-used. I have been used abominably. The positive amount of good or ill fortune, however, is not the test of either the one or the other; the true measure lies in the relative proportion of each and the way in which they have been distributed, and by this I claim, after deducting all bad luck, to be left with a large balance of good.

Some people think I must be depressed and discouraged because my books do not make more noise; but, after all, whether people read my books or no is their affair, not mine. I know by my sales that few read my books. If I write at all, it follows that I want to be read and miss my mark if I am not. So also with Narcissus. Whatever I do falls dead, and I would rather people let me see that they liked it.

To this extent I certainly am disappointed. I am sorry not to have wooed the public more successfully. But I have been told that winning and wearing generally take something of the gilt off the wooing, and I am disposed to acquiesce cheerfully in not finding myself so received as that I need woo no longer. If I were to succeed I should be bored to death by my success in a fortnight and so, I am convinced, would my friends. Retirement is to me a condition of being able to work at all. I would rather write more books and music than spend much time over what I have already written; nor do I see how I could get retirement if I were not to a certain extent unpopular.

It is this feeling on my own part--omnipresent with me when I am doing my best to please, that is to say, whenever I write--which is the cause why I do not, as people say, "get on." If I had greatly cared about getting on I think I could have done so. I think I could even now write an anonymous book that would take the public as much as Erewhon did. Perhaps I could not, but I think I could. The reason why I do not try is because I like doing other things better.

What I most enjoy is running the view of evolution set forth in Life and Habit and making things less easy for the hacks of literature and science; or perhaps even more I enjoy taking snapshots and writing music, though aware that I had better not enquire whether this last is any good or not. In fact there is nothing I do that I do not enjoy so keenly that I cannot tear myself away from it, and people who thus indulge themselves cannot have things both ways. I am so intent upon pleasing myself that I have no time to cater for the public. Some of them like things in the same way as I do; that cla.s.s of people I try to please as well as ever I can. With others I have no concern, and they know it so they have no concern with me. I do not believe there is any other explanation of my failure to get on than this, nor do I see that any further explanation is needed.

[1890.]

ii

Two or three people have asked me to return to the subject of my supposed failure and explain it more fully from my own point of view.

I have had the subject on my notes for some time and it has bored me so much that it has had a good deal to do with my not having kept my Note-Books posted recently.

Briefly, in order to scotch that snake, my failure has not been so great as people say it has. I believe my reputation stands well with the best people. Granted that it makes no noise, but I have not been willing to take the pains necessary to achieve what may be called guinea-pig review success, because, although I have been in financial difficulties, I did not seriously need success from a money point of view, and because I hated the kind of people I should have had to court and kow-tow to if I went in for that sort of thing. I could never have carried it through, even if I had tried, and instinctively declined to try. A man cannot be said to have failed, because he did not get what he did not try for. What I did try for I believe I have got as fully as any reasonable man can expect, and I have every hope that I shall get it still more both so long as I live and after I am dead.

If, however, people mean that I am to explain how it is I have not made more noise in spite of my own indolence in matter, the answer is that those who do not either push the themselves into noise, or give some one else a substantial interest in pushing them, never do get made a noise about. How can they? I was too lazy to go about from publisher to publisher and to decline to publish a book myself if I could not find some one to speculate in it. I could take any amount of trouble about writing a book but, so long as I could lay my hand on the money to bring it out with, I found publishers' antechambers so little to my taste that I soon tired and fell back on the short and easy method of publishing my book myself. Of course, therefore, it failed to sell. I know more about these things now, and will never publish a book at my own risk again, or at any rate I will send somebody else round the antechambers with it for a good while before I pay for publishing it.

I should have liked notoriety and financial success well enough if they could have been had for the asking, but I was not going to take any trouble about them and, as a natural consequence, I did not get them. If I had wanted them with the same pa.s.sionate longing that has led me to pursue every enquiry that I ever have pursued, I should have got them fast enough. It is very rarely that I have failed to get what I have really tried for and, as a matter of fact, I believe I have been a great deal happier for not trying than I should have been if I had had notoriety thrust upon me.

I confess I should like my books to pay their expenses and put me a little in pocket besides--because I want to do more for Alfred than I see my way to doing. As a natural consequence of beginning to care I have begun to take pains, and am advising with the Society of Authors as to what will be my best course. Very likely they can do nothing for me, but at any rate I shall have tried.

One reason, and that the chief, why I have made no noise, is now explained. It remains to add that from first to last I have been unorthodox and militant in every book that I have written. I made enemies of the parsons once for all with my first two books.

[Erewhon and The Fair Haven.] The evolution books made the Darwinians, and through them the scientific world in general, even more angry than The Fair Haven had made the clergy so that I had no friends, for the clerical and scientific people rule the roast between them.

I have chosen the fighting road rather than the hang-on-to-a-great- man road, and what can a man who does this look for except that people should try to silence him in whatever way they think will be most effectual? In my case they have thought it best to pretend that I am non-existent. It is no part of my business to complain of my opponents for choosing their own line; my business is to defeat them as best I can upon their own line, and I imagine I shall do most towards this by not allowing myself to be made unhappy merely because I am not fussed about, and by going on writing more books and adding to my pile.

My Work

Why should I write about this as though any one will wish to read what I write?

People sometimes give me to understand that it is a piece of ridiculous conceit on my part to jot down so many notes about myself, since it implies a confidence that I shall one day be regarded as an interesting person. I answer that neither I nor they can form any idea as to whether I shall be wanted when I am gone or no. The chances are that I shall not. I am quite aware of it. So the chances are that I shall not live to be 85; but I have no right to settle it so. If I do as Captain Don did [Life of Dr. Butler, I, opening of Chapter VIII], and invest every penny I have in an annuity that shall terminate when I am 89, who knows but that I may live on to 96, as he did, and have seven years without any income at all? I prefer the modest insurance of keeping up my notes which others may burn or no as they please.

I am not one of those who have travelled along a set road towards an end that I have foreseen and desired to reach. I have made a succession of jaunts or pleasure trips from meadow to meadow, but no long journey unless life itself be reckoned so. Nevertheless, I have strayed into no field in which I have not found a flower that was worth the finding, I have gone into no public place in which I have not found sovereigns lying about on the ground which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up. They have been things which any one else has had--or at any rate a very large number of people have had--as good a chance of picking up as I had. My finds have none of them come as the result of research or severe study, though they have generally given me plenty to do in the way of research and study as soon as I had got hold of them. I take it that these are the most interesting--or whatever the least offensive word may be:

1. The emphasising the a.n.a.logies between crime and disease.

[Erewhon.]

2. The emphasising also the a.n.a.logies between the development of the organs of our bodies and of those which are not incorporate with our bodies and which we call tools or machines. [Erewhon and Luck or Cunning?]

3. The clearing up the history of the events in connection with the death, or rather crucifixion, of Jesus Christ; and a reasonable explanation, first, of the belief on the part of the founders of Christianity that their master had risen from the dead and, secondly, of what might follow from belief in a single supposed miracle. [The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, The Fair Haven and Erewhon Revisited.]

4. The perception that personal ident.i.ty cannot be denied between parents and offspring without at the same time denying it as between the different ages (and hence moments) in the life of the individual and, as a corollary on this, the ascription of the phenomena of heredity to the same source as those of memory. [Life and Habit.]

5. The tidying up the earlier history of the theory of evolution.

[Evolution Old and New.]

6. The exposure and discomfiture of Charles Darwin and Wallace and their followers. [Evolution Old and New, Unconscious Memory, Luck or Cunning? and "The Deadlock in Darwinism" in the Universal Review republished in Essays on Life, Art and Science.] {376}

7. The perception of the principle that led organic life to split up into two main divisions, animal and vegetable. [Alps and Sanctuaries, close of Chapter XIII: Luck or Cunning?]

8. The perception that, if the kinetic theory is held good, our thought of a thing, whatever that thing may be, is in reality an exceedingly weak dilution of the actual thing itself. [Stated, but not fully developed, in Luck or Cunning? Chapter XIX, also in some of the foregoing notes.]

9. The rest.i.tution to Giovanni and Gentile Bellini of their portraits in the Louvre and the finding of five other portraits of these two painters of whom Crowe and Cavalcaselle and Layard maintain that we have no portrait. [Letters to the Athenaeum, &c.]

10. The restoration to Holbein of the drawing in the Basel Museum called La Danse. [Universal Review, Nov., 1889.]

11. The calling attention to Gaudenzio Ferrari and putting him before the public with something like the emphasis that he deserves.

[Ex Voto.]

12. The discovery of a life-sized statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Gaudenzio Ferrari. [Ex Voto.]

13. The unearthing of the Flemish sculptor Jean de Wespin (called Tabachetti in Italy) and of Giovanni Antonio Paracca. [Ex Voto.]

14. The finding out that the Odyssey was written at Trapani, the clearing up of the whole topography of the poem, and the demonstration, as it seems to me, that the poem was written by a woman and not by a man. Indeed, I may almost claim to have discovered the Odyssey, so altered does it become when my views of it are adopted. And robbing Homer of the Odyssey has rendered the Iliad far more intelligible; besides, I have set the example of how he should be approached. [The Auth.o.r.ess of the Odyssey.]

15. The attempt to do justice to my grandfather by writing The Life and Letters of Dr. Butler for which, however, I had special facilities.

16. In Narcissus and Ulysses I made an attempt, the failure of which has yet to be shown, to return to the principles of Handel and take them up where he left off.

17. The elucidation of Shakespeare's Sonnets. [Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered.]

I say nothing here about my novel [The Way of All Flesh] because it cannot be published till after my death; nor about my translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nevertheless these three books also were a kind of picking up of sovereigns, for the novel contains records of things I saw happening rather than imaginary incidents, and the principles on which the translations are made were obvious to any one willing to take and use them.

The foregoing is the list of my "mares'-nests," and it is, I presume, this list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares'- Nests in his diatribe on my Odyssey theory in the Cla.s.sical Review.

I am not going to argue here that they are all, as I do not doubt, sound; what I want to say is that they are every one of them things that lay on the surface and open to any one else just as much as to me. Not one of them required any profundity of thought or extensive research; they only required that he who approached the various subjects with which they have to do should keep his eyes open and try to put himself in the position of the various people whom they involve. Above all, it was necessary to approach them without any preconceived theory and to be ready to throw over any conclusion the moment the evidence pointed against it. The reason why I have discarded so few theories that I have put forward--and at this moment I cannot recollect one from which there has been any serious attempt to dislodge me--is because I never allowed myself to form a theory at all till I found myself driven on to it whether I would or no. As long as it was possible to resist I resisted, and only yielded when I could not think that an intelligent jury under capable guidance would go with me if I resisted longer. I never went in search of any one of my theories; I never knew what it was going to be till I had found it; they came and found me, not I them. Such being my own experience, I begin to be pretty certain that other people have had much the same and that the soundest theories have come unsought and without much effort.

The conclusion, then, of the whole matter is that scientific and literary fortunes are, like money fortunes, made more by saving than in any other way--more through the exercise of the common vulgar essentials, such as sobriety and straightforwardness, than by the more showy enterprises that when they happen to succeed are called genius and when they fail, folly. The streets are full of sovereigns crying aloud for some one to come and pick them up, only the thick veil of our own insincerity and conceit hides them from us. He who can most tear this veil from in front of his eyes will be able to see most and to walk off with them.

I should say that the sooner I stop the better. If on my descent to the nether world I were to be met and welcomed by the shades of those to whom I have done a good turn while I was here, I should be received by a fairly ill.u.s.trious crowd. There would be Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Holbein, Tabachetti, Paracca and D'Enrico; the Auth.o.r.ess of the Odyssey would come and Homer with her; Dr. Butler would bring with him the many forgotten men and women to whom in my memoir I have given fresh life; there would be Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck; Shakespeare also would be there and Handel. I could not wish to find myself in more congenial company and I shall not take it too much to heart if the shade of Charles Darwin glides gloomily away when it sees me coming.

XXV--POEMS

Prefatory Note