Essays Irish and American

by John Butler Yeats

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.

He always occupied one place in the school chosen so that he could be as close as possible to the model and might paint with small brushes his kind of John Bellini art. There he would stand very intent and mostly quite silent, intent also on our casual conversation, watchful for the moment when he could make some sally of wit that would crush his victim. He had thick eyebrows and grey eyes,—or were they light hazel? These eyes would sometimes look tired as he plied his hopeless task of learning how to paint. But the discovery of any mental slavery or insincerity among our band of students would bring a dangerous light into them, and he would say things that perhaps hurt very much men who were absolutely sincere, however mistaken. Then Butler, who respected, as he often told me, every kind of sincerity, would humble himself and make apologies that were not always accepted, and in the grey eyes, like a little fire on a cold hearth, I would see a melting kindness that it must have been hard to resist. The virtuous are not always the generous, neither are they always as wise as Solomon.

At that time I was a very busy student working from morning to night, otherwise I should have tried to see more of Butler. There is nothing so winning as a look of helpful kindness in a mocking face. Besides, he was a good deal my senior and seniority is attractive to ingenuous youth; and I was then ingenuous. I sometimes think I have lost all my opportunities; the chance of knowing Butler well was one of these. Slowly I have come to feel that affection for human nature which is at the root of all poetry and art, whether the poet be pessimist or optimist. Had I stayed much with Butler I should have learned my lesson almost at once. Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light” was not much to his taste, and he cared nothing for the high ethics of Wordsworth. An affectionate mother, such as we have among the peasants of Ireland, where mother-love is a passion, does not want her children to be good half as much as she wants them to be happy. It was so Butler regarded poor, struggling and deceived human nature. There was the source of his “good nature” and of his influence. In this he was pre-eminently English of the English, and in this there was nothing of the system maker or the philanthropist. Nor was he a philosopher or anything else except a mere man touching and handling the concrete matters of everyday life. With tenderness of humour and a most real poetry he touched, healingly, all the sores of ailing humanity.

Butler liked women but disapproved of marriage. He liked women because, as I heard him say, they are so good natured. They would laugh with him but never at him. Then they are obedient and teachable and the dominie within him liked pupils. His attitude towards them was a smiling indulgence. The charming women of those backward days were still in the Middle Ages, apologetic, almost penitential, as if they asked pardon for being so beautiful or so merry and engaging, and did not a bit mind if Butler regarded them as inferior, especially as towards them he was always kindly and fatherly and innocent. It is quite easy to see why Butler disliked marriage; it would have curtailed his freedom to follow out all his queer vagaries of Butlerian thought and inclination. This consideration does not affect the ordinary Englishman of coarser grain, tenacious of his ancient right to do what he likes with his own, his own being his wife and children and servants and “all that he possesses.” The ordinary Englishman lives alone in his English home, lord and master of it, with his wife second in command. Butler, of course, could not so live; therefore to keep his liberty he dismissed forever the thought of a married home. Had he married I have no doubt he would have chosen a helpmate not likely to dispute his supremacy. I knew Miss Savage, the model for his good woman in “The Way of All Flesh.” She was a student at the art school and not very young, and she was lame; life had disciplined her. She was fair, with a roundish face and light blue eyes that were very sensitive and full of light; a small head, her features charmingly mobile and harmonious. She radiated goodness and sense. She kept herself very much to herself, yet all liked her, even though we never spoke to her. Butler soon discovered that she laughed easily; but as usual he was cautious. One day he consulted me as to whether he could with safety ask her a school-boy riddle he had picked up somewhere, a school-boy riddle in that, though quite innocent, it was not altogether nice. I don’t remember how I advised, only that they became fast friends.