(2 of 5)
On the other side the following points should be made. Butler was a great purifier. He deflated Victorian optimism, but remained a healthy and vigorous and decently optimistic mind. The Way of All Flesh is not a hymn of hate against his father, but in greater part a caricature of himself as a young man. The delay in its publication was due to a desire not to hurt the feelings of his sister Charlotte. He would have married Mme Dumas, about whom Mr. Muggeridge tells an incredibly scandalous story; but she herself did not wish it, because under the terms of her husband's will she would have forfeited her income. Henry Festing Jones was not "one Festing Jones," but a musician of some distinction and the author of Butler's biography—a first-class work that was given the James Tait Black prize for the best biography of its year. He also wrote two valuable books on Sicily. Butler took issue with Darwin on no trivial point of evolutionary dogma. He was the first to note that the Abbé Lamarck had long before defined the principle of evolution, and without resorting to a theory of natural selection—the weakest element of Darwin's case.
Butler did not say that Homer was a woman. He wrote a learned and sober book in demonstration of the strong possibility that the Odyssey as opposed to the Iliad was written by a woman. His hypothesis is all the more remarkable in that he does not seem to have come across the classical reference charging Homer with having stolen the substance of the Odyssey from a woman writer called Phantasia. Butler also wrote an extremely interesting book on Shakespeare's Sonnets; it was Butler who started the close scrutiny of the homosexual element in them.
Lastly, Butler was never an atheist. He never ceased to regard himself as a 'Broad Churchman.'
LAURA RIDING
Lugano-Paradiso, Switzerland
Awful!
Sirs:
TIME, April 5, 1937, page 41, second paragraph AWFUL!! The President of the General Federation of Women's Clubs of these United States to be dubbed "first vice president"—referring to Mrs. Roberta Campbell Lawson! I am only one of a million federated clubwomen to protest.
ELIZABETH B. KING
President
Woman's Club of New Kensington
New Kensington, Pa.
TIME'S apologies to President Roberta Campbell Lawson of the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the 2,000,000 U. S. Clubwomen behind her.—ED.
White Man's Lies
Sirs:
Referring to the exasperation of Pan American's Captain Edwin Musick (TIME, April 5, p. 63). He is not the first man to find his irritation of no concern to Samoans. The following trivial footnote to an important page in aviation history may be pertinent.
In the summer of 1923, the U. S. S. Milwaukee lay in the harbor of Pago-Pago, second port of a long shakedown cruise to Suva, Sydney, Rabaul, Nouméa, etc. Coming on deck that morning I heard the engine roar of one of the biplanes she carried, and as I stepped over the hatch coaming I saw the plane just beginning to lift from the thrust of the catapult. Almost immediately, from an elevation of, perhaps, two hundred feet, she fell into the bay. Thus ended man's first brief flight in Samoa.