Some years ago a youthful Austrian psychopath, Weininger, wrote a book, "Geschlecht und Charakter," which had great popularity. It was widely read in the original and in translations. Amongst other things that he discussed was the sex endowment of man. The hundred per cent male is very uncommon, and he is rarely encountered amongst creative artists. The feminine percentage in them is considerable, often more than fifty per cent. Samuel Butler had many feminine traits. He was vain, gossipy, vindictive, swayed by his emotions, and he allowed himself to be wooed by a woman. He took from Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage without giving a quid pro quo or even acknowledgment. He did not have the courage to say to her in the flesh what he said of her in the grave. He sold to the public as of his own manufacture the warp and woof of her intellectual weavings. Her letters, which form such a large part of the first volume of these memoirs and which Butler wrote to her father "the like of which I have never elsewhere seen," testify the public debt to her contracted in the name of Samuel Butler.
The wit, humor, irony, and sarcasm of these letters all combine to reveal a remarkable soul and rare personality. For twenty years she was a true, steadfast, resourceful, sympathetic helpmate to Samuel Butler. He accepted her amatory homage and her literary co-operation, and she might legitimately have inferred from his letters that she was somatically as well as spiritually sympathetic. Many women have convinced themselves that their passion was reciprocated by men who gave less tangible evidence of it than Samuel Butler gave Miss Savage. That she loved him there can be no doubt, but her unæsthetic appearance appalled him, her halting stride annoyed him, and her loving attentions bored him. Some years after her death he composed two sonnets to her memory, the first exquisitely vulgar, the second painfully pathetic.
"She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day;
The more she wrote, the more unmoved was I,
The more she gave, the less could I repay,
Therefore I grieve not that I was not loved
But that, being loved, I could not love again.
I liked; but like and love are far removed;
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain.
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell
That, though I loved her in a certain sort,
Yet did I love too wisely but not well.
Ah! had she been more beauteous or less kind
She might have found me of another mind.
"And now, though twenty years are come and gone,
That little lame lady's face is with me still;
Never a day but what, on every one,
She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.
She said she wished I knew not wrong from right;
It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen
Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite,
Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.
'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man
Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
A man will yield for pity if he can,
But if the flesh rebels what can he do?
I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
The wrong I did in that I did no wrong."
Her memory deserves a better fate than interment in Mr. Jones's huge mausoleum.
The third of Samuel Butler's distinguishing characteristics was that he was incapable of falling in love with any one but himself.
He labored prodigiously to become a painter, and during his life he succeeded in having five pictures hung in the Royal Academy exposition. However, he never got out of Class C as a painter, and when he was forty-one he forsook the brush for the pen. Meanwhile he had (according to his father) killed his mother by the publication of "Erewhon," launched "The Fair Haven," got thoroughly enmeshed in the teachings of Darwin and the contentions of Mivart, Lamarck, and others, plunged into Hellenic literature to give it specificity of origin and display, and was otherwise very busy pushing over statues of heroes which he mistook for tin soldiers. Early in life he began keeping notes. His principle was that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the wing. When he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went. He was his own Boswell with all of that immortal's colloquiality and ingenuousness. He did not hesitate to make frank comments on the people he met, and photographic descriptions of such individuals, of his family and friends, and their letters went to make up the novel (if novel a narrative of fact can be called) through which he was made known to the general public, and by which he will probably be longest remembered, namely, "The Way of All Flesh." It was begun when he was thirty-one and finished fifteen years later. Because it is autobiographical, and biographical of his family and friends, he found the necessity of frequently rewriting it, as time, event, and God changed them.
This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of that book. It had an artificial popularity—Mr. G. Bernard Shaw being the artificer. There was one thing about it concerning which every one agreed: to pillory your parents in public is the equivalent of beating them up in private.
The fourth of Samuel Butler's characteristics was insensitiveness to what is generally called refinement or finer feeling. Though an artist he had little æsthetic awareness. If he knew the canons of good taste he did not subscribe to them. What he called his little jokes, which Mr. Jones relates with great gustfulness, is the ample proof of this accusation. "What is more subversive of a sultan's dignity than pinching his leg? Pinching his sultana's leg." "We shall not get infanticide, permission of suicide, cheap and easy divorce, and other social arrangements till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid." Cheap and vulgar prostitution of intellectual possession a gentleman would call it.
Mr. Jones and Alfred, clerk, valet, and general attendant, "a live young thing about the place, and a cheerful addition to 15 Clifford's Inn," became very intimate with Butler. Mr. Jones had been a barrister, but had abandoned the law and was under a modest retainer of two hundred a year from Butler to give him Boswellian service. They found Butler companionable, and there are such indications as letters from casual acquaintances, particularly in Italy, to show that he was agreeable and sympathetic to some persons.