Life and Habit and Myself
At the Century Club I was talking with a man who asked me why I did not publish the substance of what I had been saying. I believed he knew me and said:
“Well, you know, there’s Life and Habit.”
He did not seem to rise at all, so I asked him if he had seen the book.
“Seen it?” he answered. “Why, I should think every one has seen Life and Habit: but what’s that got to do with it?”
I said it had taken me so much time lately that I had had none to spare for anything else. Again he did not seem to see the force of the remark and a friend, who was close by, said:
“You know, Butler wrote Life and Habit.”
He would not believe it, and it was only after repeated assurance that he accepted it. It was plain he thought a great deal of Life and Habit and had idealised its author, whom he was disappointed to find so very commonplace a person. Exactly the same thing happened to me with Erewhon. I was glad to find that Life and Habit had made so deep an impression at any rate upon one person.
A Disappointing Person
I suspect I am rather a disappointing person, for every now and then there is a fuss and I am to meet some one who would very much like to make my acquaintance, or some one writes me a letter and says he has long admired my books, and may he, etc.? Of course I say “Yes,” but experience has taught me that it always ends in turning some one who was more or less inclined to run me into one who considers he has a grievance against me for not being a very different kind of person from what I am. These people however (and this happens on an average once or twice a year) do not come solely to see me, they generally tell me all about themselves and the impression is left upon me that they have really come in order to be praised. I am as civil to them as I know how to be but enthusiastic I never am, for they have never any of them been nice people, and it is my want of enthusiasm for themselves as much as anything else which disappoints them. They seldom come again. Mr. Alfred Tylor was the only acquaintance I have ever made through being sent for to be looked at, or letting some one come to look at me, who turned out a valuable ally; but then he sent for me through mutual friends in the usual way.