Though he avoided marriage, his flesh was weak. “I have a little needle-woman, a good little thing. I have given her a sewing machine. I go to see her.” As he made his confession he retired backwards, bowing his head several times as in mockery of himself and acknowledgment of a sad necessity from which even he was not exempt. For it was given to him also to tread “The Way of All Flesh.” It was always part of his philosophy that he should confess his sins, besides being a necessity to his social nature and one of his most engaging qualities.
Though he professed to despise Greek plays he was a good classical scholar. Outside the classics he had read nothing except Shakespeare and “The Origin of Species” and the Bible. For him “The Origin of Species” was the book of books. If he took a fancy to a student he would watch him for a few days and then approach him with cautious ceremony—he was always ceremonious—and ask him if he had read the book and perhaps offer to lend it to him. I am proud to remember that he lent it to me. “The Origin of Species” had, as he told me, completely destroyed his belief in a personal God; so occasionally instead of the usual question he would ask the student if he believed in God. In this he did not confine himself to students. There was a nude model named Moseley who often sat to us at Heatherleigh’s. He liked this model, in whom he found a whimsical uprightness that appealed to his sense of things. Once in the deep silence of the class I heard him asking, “Moseley, do you believe in God?” Without altering a muscle or a change of expression, Moseley replied, “No, sir, don’t believe in old Bogey.” The form of the answer was unexpected; its cheerful cockney impudence was beyond even Butler’s reach of courage. He retired in confusion, and we laughed. We liked a laugh at Butler’s expense. Besides, in those days most of us were orthodox; in fact had never given a thought to the question of Deity. But that fear kept them quiet, there were some valiant spirits who would have cried out against him, since then as well as now, in America as well as in England, an orthodox inertia was characteristic of artists. They do not go to church, they never give a thought to religion, but they are profoundly orthodox in a deep, untroubled somnolency. I remember that one man, a very successful student, did engage in controversy and was highly sentimental in a dandified, affected way. Butler’s reply was one word repeated several times—“Pooh!” that ended it. I have no doubt that that gentleman still retains his orthodoxy. When a belief rests on nothing you cannot knock away its foundations.
Butler’s father was a wealthy dean of the Church of England, and, I fancy, pompous and authoritative. He told me that his father never became excited unless the dinner was late. When he broke away from orthodoxy and announced his intention of becoming an artist instead of a clergyman, his family refused him all assistance. Nor is it true that his father helped him in his New Zealand venture. He himself told me that he managed to borrow from friends £10,000, and that he was more proud of that than of anything else in his life. He stayed in New Zealand four years, after which a lucky turn on the market enabled him to return to England and repay the money, while keeping enough to support himself in his pursuit of art. He liked to tell of his New Zealand life and of his hatred of sheep. They were always getting lost, so that he said the word “sheep” would be found engraved on his heart. He did not know one of his horses from another or from anybody else’s horse, and said he was like the Lord, whose delight is not in the strength of a horse.
Sam Butler’s desire for truth and his stripping away from life and belief all the veils of illusion was the characteristic of a man truly poetic. He and his pupil, G. B. Shaw, by their passion for sincerity, help the imaginative life. When Michael Angelo maintained that only the Italians understood art, Vittoria Colonna pointed out that the German pictures touched the feelings. “Yes,” he replied, “because of the weakness of our sensibilities.” Poetry and the imaginative life can only flourish where truth is of supreme moment; an education which contents itself with half-knowledge and half-thought will inevitably produce a crowd of sentimentalists and false poets and rhetoricians. The great artist and the great poet have rigorous minds. Michael Angelo said of those German pictures that they were only fit for “women, ecclesiastics and people of quality.” After all a poet must believe, and without rigorous thinking there is no sense of belief.
To know things thoroughly, or not at all,—this was the habit of Butler’s mind, derived from his classical education, in which the whole stress is on the minutiæ of scholarship. For instance, he told me that he never studied music till he was twenty-one years of age, after which he gave to it every moment he could spare. Yet he only cared for Händel, content that all the rest should be to him an unknown world. What he could not study thoroughly he would not study at all. In his eyes superficial knowledge was superficial ignorance and the mental habits engendered by it disastrous. Among painters he valued chiefly those who, like John Bellini, are thorough to minuteness. Though he professed to despise style he was a precisian in words. At a restaurant which he and I frequented for our midday meal he met a man who said he never “used” hasty pudding. This application of the verb “use” was to him a source of endless amusement. I have heard him tell the story many times.
I think he read Shakespeare continually. I know he read no other poetry, although he did glance once a little wistfully at Whitman,—“the catalogue man,” he called him. All the same he was a genuine Englishman and brooded in the imaginative mood of a self-centred solitude which could not be shared with anyone, as the sympathetic Frenchman lives in the imaginative mood of an expansive existence which he would share with everyone.
I remember the last time I saw Butler. I was sitting at breakfast, alone, in a lodging in an out of the way part of London, having come from Ireland the night before after an absence of seven or eight years. I saw him passing and in glad surprise at once raised the window, meaning to hail him. But I reflected sadly and changed my mind, closing the window and returning to my breakfast, as I thought: “God forbid that I should intrude myself uninvited on any Englishman.”