The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 32

There is no conception of the faith that a man should do his duty cheerfully with all his might though, as far as he can see, he will never be paid directly or indirectly either here or hereafter. Still less is there any conception that unless a man has this faith he is not worth thinking about. There is no sense that as we have received freely so we should give freely and be only too thankful that we have anything to give at all. Furthermore there does not appear to be even the remotest conception that this honourable, comfortable and sustaining faith is, like all other high faiths, to be brushed aside very peremptorily at the bidding of common-sense.

What a pity it is that Christian never met Mr. Common-Sense with his daughter, Good-Humour, and her affianced husband, Mr. Hate-Cant; but if he ever saw them in the distance he steered clear of them, probably as feeling that they would be more dangerous than Giant Despair, Vanity Fair and Apollyon all together--for they would have stuck to him if he had let them get in with him. Among other things they would have told him that, if there was any truth in his opinions, neither man nor woman ought to become a father or mother at all, inasmuch as their doing so would probably entail eternity of torture on the wretched creature whom they were launching into the world. Life in this world is risk enough to inflict on another person who has not been consulted in the matter, but death will give quittance in full. To weaken our faith in this sure and certain hope of peace eternal (except so far as we have so lived as to win life in others after we are gone) would be a cruel thing, even though the evidence against it were overwhelming, but to rob us of it on no evidence worth a moment's consideration and, apparently, from no other motive than the pecuniary advantage of the robbers themselves is infamy. For the Churches are but inst.i.tutions for the saving of men's souls from h.e.l.l.

This is true enough. Nevertheless it is untrue that in practice any Christian minister, knowing what he preaches to be both very false and very cruel, yet insists on it because it is to the advantage of his own order. In a way the preachers believe what they preach, but it is as men who have taken a bad 10 pounds note and refuse to look at the evidence that makes for its badness, though, if the note were not theirs, they would see at a glance that it was not a good one.

For the man in the street it is enough that what the priests teach in respect of a future state is palpably both cruel and absurd while, at the same time, they make their living by teaching it and thus prey upon other men's fears of the unknown. If the Churches do not wish to be misunderstood they should not allow themselves to remain in such an equivocal position.

But let this pa.s.s. Bunyan, we may be sure, took all that he preached in its most literal interpretation; he could never have made his book so interesting had he not done so. The interest of it depends almost entirely on the unquestionable good faith of the writer and the strength of the impulse that compelled him to speak that which was within him. He was not writing a book which he might sell, he was speaking what was borne in upon him from heaven. The message he uttered was, to my thinking, both low and false, but it was truth of truths to Bunyan.

No. This will not do. The Epistles of St. Paul were truth of truths to Paul, but they do not attract us to the man who wrote them, and, except here and there, they are very uninteresting. Mere strength of conviction on a writer's part is not enough to make his work take permanent rank. Yet I know that I could read the whole of The Pilgrim's Progress (except occasional episodical sermons) without being at all bored by it, whereas, having spent a penny upon Mr.

Stead's abridgement of Joseph Andrews, I had to give it up as putting me out of all patience. I then spent another penny on an abridgement of Gulliver's Travels, and was enchanted by it. What is it that makes one book so readable and another so unreadable? Swift, from all I can make out, was a far more human and genuine person than he is generally represented, but I do not think I should have liked him, whereas Fielding, I am sure, must have been delightful. Why do the faults of his work overweigh its many great excellences, while the less great excellences of the Voyage to Lilliput outweigh its more serious defects?

I suppose it is the prolixity of Fielding that fatigues me. Swift is terse, he gets through what he has to say on any matter as quickly as he can and takes the reader on to the next, whereas Fielding is not only long, but his length is made still longer by the disconnectedness of the episodes that appear to have been padded into the books--episodes that do not help one forward, and are generally so exaggerated, and often so full of horse-play as to put one out of conceit with the parts that are really excellent.

Whatever else Bunyan is he is never long; he takes you quickly on from incident to incident and, however little his incidents may appeal to us, we feel that he is never giving us one that is not bona fide so far as he is concerned. His episodes and incidents are introduced not because he wants to make his book longer but because he cannot be satisfied without these particular ones, even though he may feel that his book is getting longer than he likes.

And here I must break away from this problem, leaving it unsolved.

[1897.]

Bunyan and the Odyssey

Anything worse than The Pilgrim's Progress in the matter of defiance of literary canons can hardly be conceived. The allegory halts continually; it professes to be spiritual, but nothing can be more carnal than the golden splendour of the eternal city; the view of life and the world generally is flat blasphemy against the order of things with which we are surrounded. Yet, like the Odyssey, which flatly defies sense and criticism (no, it doesn't; still, it defies them a good deal), no one can doubt that it must rank among the very greatest books that have ever been written. How Odyssean it is in its sincerity and downrightness, as well as in the marvellous beauty of its language, its freedom from all taint of the schools and, not least, in complete victory of genuine internal zeal over a scheme initially so faulty as to appear hopeless.

I read that part where Christian pa.s.ses the lions which he thought were free but which were really chained and it occurred to me that all lions are chained until they actually eat us and that, the moment they do this, they chain themselves up again automatically, as far as we are concerned. If one dissects this pa.s.sage it fares as many a pa.s.sage in the Odyssey does when we dissect it. Christian did not, after all, venture to pa.s.s the lions till he was a.s.sured that they were chained. And really it is more excusable to refuse point-blank to pa.s.s a couple of lions till one knows whether they are chained or not--and the poor wicked people seem to have done nothing more than this,--than it would be to pa.s.s them. Besides, by being told, Christian fights, as it were, with loaded dice.

Poetry

The greatest poets never write poetry. The Homers and Shakespeares are not the greatest--they are only the greatest that we can know.

And so with Handel among musicians. For the highest poetry, whether in music or literature, is ineffable--it must be felt from one person to another, it cannot be articulated.

Verse

Versifying is the lowest form of poetry; and the last thing a great poet will do in these days is to write verses.

I have been trying to read Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece but cannot get on with them. They teem with fine things, but they are got-up fine things. I do not know whether this is quite what I mean but, come what may, I find the poems bore me. Were I a schoolmaster I should think I was setting a boy a very severe punishment if I told him to read Venus and Adonis through in three sittings. If, then, the magic of Shakespeare's name, let alone the great beauty of occasional pa.s.sages, cannot reconcile us (for I find most people of the same mind) to verse, and especially rhymed verse as a medium of sustained expression, what chance has any one else?

It seems to me that a sonnet is the utmost length to which a rhymed poem should extend.

Verse, Poetry and Prose

The preface to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is verse, but it is not poetry. The body of the work is poetry, but it is not verse.

Ancient Work

If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.

Nausicaa and Myself

I am elderly, grey-bearded and, according to my clerk, Alfred, disgustingly fat; I wear spectacles and get more and more bronchitic as I grow older. Still no young prince in a fairy story ever found an invisible princess more effectually hidden behind a hedge of dullness or more fast asleep than Nausicaa was when I woke her and hailed her as Auth.o.r.ess of the Odyssey. And there was no difficulty about it either--all one had to do was to go up to the front door and ring the bell.

Telemachus and Nicholas Nickleby

The virtuous young man defending a virtuous mother against a number of powerful enemies is one of the ignes fatui of literature. The scheme ought to be very interesting, and often is so, but it always fails as regards the hero who, from Telemachus to Nicholas Nickleby, is always too much of the good young man to please.

Gads.h.i.+ll and Trapani

While getting our lunch one Sunday at the east end of the long room in the Sir John Falstaff Inn, Gads.h.i.+ll, we overheard some waterside- looking dwellers in the neighbourhood talking among themselves. I wrote down the following:-

Bill: Oh, yes. I've got a mate that works in my shop; he's chucked the Dining Room because they give him too much to eat. He found another place where they gave him four pennyworth of meat and two vegetables and it was quite as much as he could put up with.

George: You can't kid me, Bill, that they give you too much to eat, but I'll believe it to oblige you, Bill. Shall I see you to-night?

Bill: No, I must go to church.

George: Well, so must I; I've got to go.

So at Trapani, I heard two small boys one night on the quay (I am sure I have written this down somewhere, but it is less trouble to write it again than to hunt for it) singing with all their might, with their arms round one another's necks. I should say they were about ten years old, not more.

I asked Ign.a.z.io Giacalone: "What are they singing?"

He replied that it was a favourite song among the popolino of Trapani about a girl who did not want to be seen going about with a man.

"The people in this place," says the song, "are very ill-natured, and if they see you and me together, they will talk," &c.

I do not say that there was any descent here from Nausicaa's speech to Ulysses, but I felt as though that speech was still in the air.

[Od. VI. 273.]

I reckon Gads.h.i.+ll and Trapani as perhaps the two most cla.s.sic grounds that I frequent familiarly, and at each I have seemed to hear echoes of the scenes that have made them famous. Not that what I heard at Gads.h.i.+ll is like any particular pa.s.sage in Shakespeare.

Waiting to be Hired