Aside from these there is very little in these two massive volumes to testify to the kindness, gentleness, simpleness, and humility of Samuel Butler. Apparently he disliked every one with whom he had to do or with whom he came in contact, save Mr. Pauli, Mr. Faesch, Lord Beaconsfield, and Richard Garnett. Still he was pleased with Mr. Garnett's discomfiture on hearing his lecture on "The Humor of Homer." Searching Mr. Jones's plethoric volumes carefully, it is difficult to find kind or appreciative words for contemporary or forebear.

"How many years was it before I learned to dislike Thackeray or Tennyson as much as I do now?" "Middlemarch is a long-winded piece of studied brag." "What a wretch Carlyle must be to run Goethe as he has done!" "We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her." "I do not like Mr. W. J. Stillman at all." "I do not remember that Edwin Lear told us anything particularly amusing." "All I remember about John Morley is that I disliked and distrusted him." "I dislike Rossetti's face and his manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends." "No, I do not like Lamb; you see Canon Anger writes about him, and Canon Anger goes to tea with my sisters." "Blake was no good because he learned Italian at over sixty in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without saying." "I said I was glad Stanley was dead." "I never read a line of Marcus Aurelius that left me wiser than I was before." Speaking of Maeterlinck, who was then coming to his estate, "Now a true genius cannot so soon be recognized. If a man of thirty-five can get such admiration he is probably a very good man, but he is not one of those who will redeem Israel." Though Butler was fascinated by G. Bellini, he surely had heard of Raphael.

Darwin, Wallace, Ray Lankester, most of the scientists of his time who did not fully agree with him; novelists, philosophers, artists, poets—all excited his disapproval. When he was fifty-three he made a note to remind himself to call Tennyson the Darwin of poetry and Darwin the Tennyson of science. Thus would he empty the vials of his wrath and contempt.

He acided his system, as the Italians say, with hatred and envy of his fellow man who had achieved fame or who was upon the road to it. It is difficult to rid one's mind of the thought that the motive that prompted him to literary work was that he might show how contemptibly inadequate the masters were or had been, all of them save Handel and G. Bellini.

Samuel Butler took himself with great solemnity. He believed what he wanted to believe and he believed he knew about many things far better than experts and empiricists. When they did not agree with him he took great umbrage and wrote disagreeable letters to them or made disparaging references to them in his notes. "He never could form an opinion on a subject until he had established his volatile thoughts and caged them in a note. This enabled him to make up his mind." Thus he made up his mind, aided by Miss Savage, that "The Odyssey" was written by a female, or, to use his felicitous expression, "any woman save Mrs. Barrett Browning."

Samuel Butler's most deforming characteristic was lack of reverence. He was endowed with an orderly mind. It was his passion and pastime to train and develop it. He never let anything stand in the way of accomplishing that purpose. His greatest literary gift was his capacity for presenting evidence. His chief weakness was his incapacity to gather evidence. He assumed certain things and then proceeded to prove to the reader that they were facts. This is a procedure that has never had favor in the courts or in the laboratories. Neither has it been accepted as a legitimate procedure in what might be called constructive literature, critical or creative. The only place where it has ever been received with favor is the pulpit, and Samuel Butler was the true son of the cloth which he did so much to deride and from which he believed he had divested himself.

We should never have known what a pathetic figure he was if Mr. Jones had not seen fit in his affection and his obsession to reveal him to us. We can forgive Mr. Jones for this, however, because of his belief that Samuel Butler is immortal. Would that we could also forgive him for publishing a portrait of Mr. Butler standing before the hearth in the sitting-room of his home—in his shirt-sleeves! We could not have been more shocked had we found that he wore garters around his arms to regulate the length of his shirt-sleeves. England indeed is changed. This life of Butler gives the lie to Britishers' reputation for stolidity and formality.

[CHAPTER X
SAINTS AND SINNERS]

Many a pia mater has been stretched to aching in the past few years by thoughts of death and its harvest of human flower in first, fresh bloom. Mystics have tried to give death a symbolic significance; they would have us believe that it has or will have a repercussion in some occult way beneficent to the world and those who are allowed to tarry here. "What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its daily practices to treat as final? May it not be that the answer of the whole world, which is busy with the question, will bring into being a new adaptation of living to dying—a new Death?" is the way one of them expresses herself. Were we concerned herein with death, either new or old, we might deny her premise any foundation, and reason therefore that any conclusion she might incline to draw must be false and misleading. The world has in its heart to-day a yearning for promise and proof of immortality such as its composite heart has never had. That Christianity as practised fails to satisfy that yearning, does not justify the allegation that the thinkers of the world have become materialists.