Samuel Butler - The Notebooks of Samuel Butler

SAMUEL BUTLER

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-4171-2

Introductory

In "The Doctor's Dilemma" there is a saucy reference to an unprofessional heretic who has views on art, science, morals and religion. Old Sir Patrick Cullen shocks the heretic's disciple by not even recognizing the name. "Bernard Shaw?" he ponders, "I never heard of him. He's a Methodist preacher, I suppose." Louis is horrified. "No, no. He's the most advanced man now living: he isn't anything." The old doctor is not set back an inch. These "advanced" men who impress the young by employing the accumulations of geniushe knows them. "I assure you, young man," he informs Louis, "my father learnt the doctrine of deliverance from sin from John Wesley's own lips before you or Mr. Shaw were born."

It is a pleasant thing to claim that the man you admire is "advanced" and to believe serenely that you are progressive along with him. It is also a convenient thing to employ such question-begging phrases as heterodox, radical, free-thinker, anarchist. The trouble with such phrases, indicative and exciting as they are, is their plain relativity to something reprehensible that only you yourself have in mind. The world is full of moss-grown places called Newtown and Newburg and Nykbing and Neuville. It is also full of moss-grown writers who once were advanced and revolutionary. If a writer is to be paraded as heterodox it has to be shown that he does something more than take up an agreeable position. It has to be shown that he has a manner, a method, of dealing with things that really deserve to be considered advanced.

This is Samuel Butler's claim on posterity. The urgently intelligent son of a dull English clergyman, he certainly did not lack incentives to heterodoxy. Besides that he was born in 1835 and was one of the first of Darwin's admirers, as later he was one of the first of his critics. But there was more than reflex action in Samuel Butler's heterodoxy. He was never anything so regular as an anarchist. He distrusted authority in religion and art and science without discarding religious, artistic or scientific values. He thought freely without being a freethinker, and radically without being a radical. To say he was lawless would entirely misrepresent him, he was not nearly so much a revolutionary as a conscientious objector on the loose. Here again he fell into none of the ordinary classifications. He was not a missionary. He had as little ambition to form a new orthodoxy as to attach himself to an old one. He had a marked propensity, that of thinking for himselfone of those perplexing propensities that nothing seems to determine, that may occur in an emperor or his slave and no one know how or why. And that propensity, the capital distinction of his many-sided life, gave him emancipation in a way that no one could have predicted and that was long quite difficult to label.

It was difficult to label mainly because Samuel Butler's intellectual adventure had come to an end before the label was invented. Samuel Butler was above everything a pragmatist, one of those forerunners of pragmatism who did not become conscious of its "universal mission" or its "conquering destiny," who nevertheless employed the method intuitively and "made momentous contributions to truth by its means." It is tragic, in many ways, that Butler had not the benefit of the formulation of pragmatism. Had he possessed it, however, he could not have been more closely, more consistently, its exponent. "Pragmatism," said William James in 1907, "represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of the finality of truth." This was the attitude Samuel Butler achieved for himself and the one which these Note-Books so fully and singularly exemplify.

There is a kind of man whose sensations come at the double, who must take them down as they fly by or lose them eternally. Butler's Note-Books were not kept for such a purpose. It was not his senses that were imperious for a scribe: it was his ruminations, his ideas. He was painter and musician as well as writer, and he was writer in the most general interpretation, but his chief characteristic was not, so to speak, sensuous impressionability. It was an incessant intellectual activity. He had "the principle of stopping everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes, as the true painter will stop anywhere and everywhere to sketch," but the notes were not wild or woodland, they were memoranda in his endless discovery of wisdom. Occasionally the spectacle of the world urged him to record emotion, and he observes that from the age of twelve the music of his well-beloved Hndel was never a day out of his head. But it was the opinions and ideas he derived from experience that stirred him to write in his Note-Books. Experience did not so much enamor him as stimulate his mind.

The vivacity of Samuel Butler's mind is astonishing. He was not brilliant in the sense that his expression was dazzling. Dazzling writers like George Meredith were distasteful to him, and he felt little of their need to give acuity to the words that were to convey poignant experiences. Neither did he wish to incite passion or ecstasy. He held everything, even his God, at arm's length, and the light by which he examined his world was daylight. Because of his sharp curiosity, however, his independence and audacity and humorous scepticism, he achieved that kind of penetrativeness which is often called brilliant. Penetrative he was to an extraordinary degree and over an area that few men of his time even dreamed of encompassing. He was dry on occasion and on occasion captious, but he never said a heartless thing or a foolish. And from the first line he wrote to the last there is not a single dishonest utterance. Almost every one who writes is tempted now and then to say something which is not quite authentic, to use a hackneyed phrase if not a hackneyed thought. Samuel Butler authenticated everything he uttered. During his growing years and indeed all through his life he found himself brushed aside by the pundits. From pretentiousness he suffered as only a modest man can suffer, and he abhorred it. One result of it was to accentuate his own priestlessness and simplicity. He could easily have got himself up as an authority. It is a thing that almost any busybody with a plodding secretary can accomplish. Butler leaned over backwards to avoid doing it. He even went so far as to suspect everything that had the air of being professional, and to take a perverse pleasure in offering to machine-made scholars his own hand-made heterodox views. And not only were his views pragmatically decided, so were the bases on which he formed them. It is significant that though he was born in 1835 and lived to 1902 he got more out of Hndel in music and Bellini in painting than out of any other masters. Homer and Shakespeare happened to interest him, but he paid no attention whatever to those "imaginary obligations" of an academic or journalistic order which keep most people from discovering what they really value. Tolstoy and Ibsen, Morris and Karl Marx, were Butler's contemporaries. They might as well have lived in Kamchatka for any chance they had of crossing the threshold of his hospitable but resolutely unfashionable mind.