Timidity & Temerity

SAMUEL BUTLER (118 pp.)--G. D. H. Cole--Alan Swallow ($2).

It went on for years--every time Bernard Shaw put on a new play, British critics said it showed the influence of Ibsen, or Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or some other subversive foreigner. "I confess," cried Shaw (in 1906), "there is something flattering in this simple faith in my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher." But it was high time, he said, for him to scotch this "unpatriotic habit" by setting the critics straight.

As always, Shaw enjoyed himself. He trotted out a string of British and Irish influencers whom most of the critics had never heard of or never deigned to bother with. But high up on Shaw's eccentric list was eccentric Samuel Butler (1835-1902), novelist and creative evolutionist. "It drives one almost to despair," snapped Shaw, "when one sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler's posthumous Way of All Flesh making so little impression that when I produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily fresh, free, and future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with . . . vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche . . . Really, the English do not deserve to have great men."

Economist G.D.H. Cole's brief study of Samuel Butler (which is one of a new British list named the English Novelists Series) is, like Butler himself, full of pig-headed notions, but clear, brisk and never dull.

Good Shepherd. Butler's crusty father, a Church of England canon, intended his son for the ministry. He was outraged when the young man refused ordination on the grounds that infant baptism was probably ineffectual and that the Gospel stories told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were too contradictory to be credible. The canon then ordered his son to become a schoolmaster or a barrister. Instead, Butler set sail for New Zealand and, helped by money from his father, became a prosperous sheep rancher. Five years later he returned to England, having sold out for a sum on which he was able to live for much of his life.

Butler accused the canon of encouraging in him the despicable traits of unquestioning faith and conventional obedience, while damping down every speculative impulse. Once independent of the old man, Butler flew to the opposite extreme, making speculation his whole career.

Author Cole notes that Butler, for all his audacity, "was by nature a timid soul, and never ceased to be afraid of his own deviations from the normal." Yet Butler did not fly from the safety of the conventional world into the equally safe and, in its own way, equally conventional bosom of the latest "progressive" movement. He called himself Ishmael, and prepared to take on all comers, old or new.

A Positive Benefit. "Do not expend much powder and shot on Mr. Butler," Charles Darwin advised one of his supporters, "for he is really not worthy of it. His work is merely ephemeral." But Butler, who hated Darwin's evolutionary theory of "natural selection" as much as he hated the Established Church, expressed his own views early in his career by denouncing, in four large volumes, the idea that man "survived or perished according to a process of 'natural selection' into which neither God's will nor man's nor any being's appeared to enter at all." We survive, Butler argued (and Shaw after him) because "there is in each of us a certain limited power of adaptation, which makes it possible for us to face without disaster, or even with positive benefit, unexpected situations." Only if the unexpected, like an overdose of vaccine, demands too much of our strength and will, do we succumb.

Butler did everything he could to insure himself against such a succumbing. In his bachelor apartment in London, he hoarded his independence like a miser. From behind this barricade he attacked every idea that he disliked, kept all distractions at arm's length. He had a French mistress, Mme. Lucie Dumas, for 20 years, during 15 of which he was too careful even to tell her what his name was.

Butler believed that he was by nature a painter, spent years turning out mediocre canvases and damning art critics who had never heard of the "great" artist (a 16th Century Fleming named Jean de Wespin, alias Giovanni Tabachetti). He composed minuets, gavottes and fugues in the manner of Germany's Handel. He translated the Iliad and the-Odyssey into a breezy English that made the dons wince ("Calypso trembled with rage when she heard this. 'You gods,' she exclaimed, 'ought to be ashamed of yourselves' "), then added insult to injury by claiming that the "Homer" of the Odyssey was the pseudonym of an unknown Sicilian woman.

Devil's Disciple. Butler invaded science and theology with the same contumacious temerity. He denied both the Crucifixion and Resurrection; nonetheless, he believed in "God"--a Butler-made vital spirit of whom he Shavianly said: "God is not so white as he is painted, and he gets on better with the Devil than people think." Like Carl Jung, he believed in a collective unconscious--an inborn "memory" of human habit and behavior handed down through the generations. The art of living, he held, was to keep a tricky but common-sensical balance between this vital inheritance and the equally vital capacity for adaptation.

Butler wrote 27 books. Only two are at -all well known today. One is Erewhon ("Nowhere" roughly spelled backwards), a brilliant fantasy about a world in which sickness is treated as a crime and crime as a sickness (as is coming to be the case today) and civilization rests upon two banks, one (financial) which men invest in but deprecate, the other (religious) which the)L praise to high Heaven but seldom invest in. The second survivor, Butler's only, real novel, The Way of All Flesh, is a unique period-study of Victorian home life.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.