"There is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a severe mortification. I have never failed to read the literary supplement of the Times." So says Mr. Somerset Maugham. The first part of the statement is difficult to believe after reading "The Moon and Sixpence." The latter part may be true, but it can't be truer than the statement that any one, possessed of ordinary decency and sensibility, and belief that love, sentiment, kindliness, generosity, altruism, forgiveness, and faith are the seven lamps that illumine our path on our way to immortality, will subject his flesh to severe mortification, while being interested and sometimes even amused by reading Mr. Maugham's new book.
[CHAPTER IX
THE LITERARY MAUSOLEUM OF SAMUEL BUTLER]
"Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their love of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?"
—Lytton Strachey.
Samuel Butler's "Note-books" and "The Authoress of the Odyssey" added to the delights of the spring of 1915, which I spent in Sicily. The former, which is the quintessence of his wisdom and his impudence, gave revealing peeps into the mental and emotional make-up of the man who in "Erewhon" forecast the advent of the supremacy of machines and anticipated Mrs. Eddy in considering disease a sin and a crime, and the latter gave a quickened interest to Trapani, Segesta, and many other places, some of which have since become shrines in my memory.
From these "Note-Books" and from "The Way with All Flesh," which gave a remarkable vista of his own unconscious mind as well as those of his ancestors, I made a vivid picture of the author. It has been blurred, and in some respects quite erased by the two massive biographic volumes recently given to the world by Mr. Henry Festing Jones,[A] and which depicts him in all the nakedness of his virtues and his infirmities, revealing an unloving and unlovable character. Some day it will be explained to us why we cannot be left in possession of the cherished delusions that add to our happiness, increase our good-will toward our fellow men, and in no wise impair the reputations of those to whom they are directed.
One of the things that is most difficult to forgive a biographer is the wealth of sordid details they give us about our gods. Who can forgive Ranieri, for instance, for having told us with so much particularity that Leopardi hated to change his shirt or to take a bath, that he had a passion for cheap sweets, that he insisted upon keeping the servants of the household where he was a guest up until midnight in order that he might have his principal meal, that he was morbidly susceptible to adulation? It does not advantage any one to know such things, even if they are true, and if it serves any laudable purpose I am not aware that it has been set forth.
Mr. Jones's biography is painfully candid and distressingly frank and confidential.
Samuel Butler's life was one of rebellion and resignation, of contention and strife, of unhappiness and unyieldingness, of disappointment and suspicion, of wrongheartedness and rightmindedness, of rude energy and crude revery. He had a vanity of his intellectual capacity that transcends all understanding and a passion for what he called doing things thoroughly. He believed in the music of Handel, in the art of Giovanni Bellini, and his credo was the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, which apotheosizes charity and humility. Samuel Butler may have had charity and humility on his lips, but I fail to find from reading his biography that they ever got as far as his heart. He had an unhappy childhood, a perturbed adolescence, a lonely and isolated early manhood, an obsessed maturity, and an emotionally sterile old age. He hated his father, he pitied his mother, he barely tolerated his sisters, and he suspected the integrity and motives of his illustrious contemporaries who, though polite to him, personally ignored him controversially. Indeed, part of the time he must have felt himself a modern, though tame Ishmael, his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him.