Books: Butler Scalped

THE EARNEST ATHEIST—Malcolm Muggeridge—Putnam ($2.75).

Of late years Samuel Butler has been known mainly as the author of The Way of All Flesh, one of the best of modern English novels. But that fame is posthumous : the book was not published until 1903, the year after Butler died. In his lifetime he was not widely known, even less esteemed. Last week a compatriot who seemed to believe that Butler’s own generation had him just about to rights, yanked Butler unceremoniously out of the Hall of Fame, gave him a dreadful tanning. It would be an understatement to say that Malcolm Muggeridge has debunked Butler: he has flayed him, skinned him alive. So savage a job, in fact, is The Earnest Atheist that impartial observers may find themselves sympathizing with the victim.

Butler published The Way of All Flesh posthumously because it was obviously autobiographical, and the villain of the story was his father. His hatred of his father was one of the guiding motives of his life. His rebellion against the stifling upbringing in his home, a gloomy country parsonage, led him to rebel against other sacred authorities, so that a later generation regarded him as “the first great exploder of Victorian hypocrisy, the pioneer rebel and inveigher against cant.” Wrong, says Muggeridge. Far from being the great Anti, Butler was the Ultimate Victorian; his wildest crusades simply took him further into a Never-never Land. And Butler, says Muggeridge, was a thin-skinned snob, a spiteful prig.

Some of the items in Muggeridge’s indictment are fairly damning. At school and college Butler was a grind who was ashamed of being one, who prided himself rather on being a hanger-on of one of the best sets. He refused to be dragooned into the Church, instead vacillated a while, then let his father set him up as a sheep-rancher in New Zealand. There he prospered, in five years nearly doubled his investment. And there he picked up the first of his own hangers-on, one Pauli, a somewhat shady gentleman whom Butler supported thenceforth till Pauli’s death. Back in England again, Butler settled down in London to read at the British Museum, write, wait for the comfortable inheritance which would come to him when his father died. All Butler’s books were published at his own expense, and only one (Erewhon) made money. All of them annoyed or offended his father, but Butler was careful not to plague his parent to the point of disinheriting him.

His life in London was old-maidishly regulated. He had a male secretary, a male confidant (one Testing Jones, whom he also supported, and who wrote Butler’s official biography), one female friend, a lame, brilliant spinster whom Butler suspected of having designs on him. Every morning he spent at the Museum. Every Wednesday afternoon he visited his mistress, Mme Dumas (he shared her with Jones, who went on Tuesdays), paid her £1 a week. When Butler and Jones were abroad, the secretary paid her, took her out once or twice himself. This arrangement continued till Mme Dumas’ death, when all three went to the funeral. On days other than Wednesdays, Butler worked away at one of his books. His books were deliberately controversial but often failed to start a controversy. One of them tried to prove that Homer was a woman. At first one of Darwin’s most enthusiastic supporters, Butler later took issue with him on a point of evolutionary dogma, started a protracted sniping which Darwin mostly ignored.

Butler finally came into his long-awaited inheritance when he was 49. His mother, whom he had also disliked, had died some years before. Now he could safely publish his magnum opus, The Way of All Flesh, his hymn of hate against his parents. Instead he set to work and revised it. Says Muggeridge: it was well for Butler’s literary reputation that he did not live to rewrite it, as he intended. For Butler grew sentimental with age, might well have softened down what even Muggeridge admits is in its way a masterpiece into a merely snivelling tale.