SAMUEL BUTLER (118 pp.)—G. D. H. Cole—Alan Swallow ($2).
It went on for years—every time Bernard Shaw put on a new play, British critics said it showed the influence of Ibsen, or Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or some other subversive foreigner. "I confess," cried Shaw (in 1906), "there is something flattering in this simple faith in my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher." But it was high time, he said, for him to scotch this "unpatriotic habit" by setting the critics straight.
As always, Shaw enjoyed himself. He trotted out a string of British and Irish influencers whom most of the critics had never heard of or never deigned to bother with. But high up on Shaw's eccentric list was eccentric Samuel Butler (1835-1902), novelist and creative evolutionist. "It drives one almost to despair," snapped Shaw, "when one sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler's posthumous Way of All Flesh making so little impression that when I produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily fresh, free, and future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with . . . vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche . . . Really, the English do not deserve to have great men."
Economist G.D.H. Cole's brief study of Samuel Butler (which is one of a new British list named the English Novelists Series) is, like Butler himself, full of pig-headed notions, but clear, brisk and never dull.
Good Shepherd. Butler's crusty father, a Church of England canon, intended his son for the ministry. He was outraged when the young man refused ordination on the grounds that infant baptism was probably ineffectual and that the Gospel stories told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were too contradictory to be credible. The canon then ordered his son to become a schoolmaster or a barrister. Instead, Butler set sail for New Zealand and, helped by money from his father, became a prosperous sheep rancher. Five years later he returned to England, having sold out for a sum on which he was able to live for much of his life.
Butler accused the canon of encouraging in him the despicable traits of unquestioning faith and conventional obedience, while damping down every speculative impulse. Once independent of the old man, Butler flew to the opposite extreme, making speculation his whole career.
Author Cole notes that Butler, for all his audacity, "was by nature a timid soul, and never ceased to be afraid of his own deviations from the normal." Yet Butler did not fly from the safety of the conventional world into the equally safe and, in its own way, equally conventional bosom of the latest "progressive" movement. He called himself Ishmael, and prepared to take on all comers, old or new.