HE HATED SHEEP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 11

HE HATED SHEEP

SAMUEL BUTLER, 1835-1902. ‘By Py N. * Furbank. Cambridge University Press. HIS short critical study by a young English scholar sets out to rehabilitate Butler and rebut the attack upon him in "Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Earnest Atheist. Furbank believes that

Butler’s life must be seen not as "a prolonged, unsuccessful quarrel between two halves of a discordant nature, but as a violent, devastating and comparatively short battle in early manhood, from which he emerged in some ways immensely strengthened, though in others irretrievably scarred, crippled and benumbed." The book is critica? and balanced, an excellent reassessment of the present literary standing of Samuel Butler, reinforced by many apt quotations from his writings. Butler’s crotchets are placed under a searching and at times rather austere scrutiny. His childish possessiveness, which induced him to "adopt" a few musicians, writers or painters-Handel, Giovanni Bellini, and Holbein-and reject all others, is admirably sketched. The amusing and amused Miss Savage is put in better perspective, and Butler’s armed attitude to her derided as "a sort of gomic bachelor’s conviction that fun and easy friendliness and wit on a spinster’s part can only be a superior sort of husband-hunting." Possibly we owe The Way of All Flesh to her encouragement, for it did not, like Erewhon, come to him and insist on being written. Furbank finds interesting-parallels between Butler’s Erewhon Revisited, Lytton’s The Coming Race, and Morris’s News from Nowhere. WHe_te-examines Mrs. R. S. Garnett’s Samuel Butler and his Family Relations and finds that it does not achieve its respectable purpose of proving that the Butlers were not as nasty as Samuel thought them. Gold is where you find it, and Mr. Furbank’s last chapter, on the Butler Collection, is surprisingly fresh and significant. He regards Butler’s residence in New Zealand as exhibiting his first ‘achievement of independence and "the beginnings of those tenacious orthodoxies within which he was to take refuge:" He quotes J. B. Yeats (the painter-brother of the poet), his fellow art student in the years immediately after Butler’s return to England: "He liked to tell of his New Zealand life, and of his hatred of sheep. They were always getting lost ...." Butler too was lost, in his own England, just as Oscar Wilde was (continued on next page)

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lost. Furbank compares these two writers in whom "an intimate personal grievance against society led to rather similar results, Butler, however wisely avoided personal dealings with society, and Wilde’s tragedy ... . should be seen as the counterpart of Butler’s exaggerated prudence." Mr. Furbank is more than an acute critic and well-equipped scholar: he writes with a grace and irony that allow | us to get the full benefit of his insight.

David

Hall