EMOIR OF 
 
 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 IHUR QUILLER-COOCH 
 
3tl}ata, JJew ^otk 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell university Library 
 PR 4349.B62Q6 1917 
 
 Memoir of Arthur Joh^^^ 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013448174 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
(anwryWal^/r ^ sc 
 
 £.f, f^jLr 
 
MEMOIR 
 
 OF 
 
 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 By SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COOCH 
 
 KING EDWARD VII PROFESSOR OF BNGLISR LITERATURE 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 1917 
 
950431U 
 
 [All rights reserved] 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I WAS correcting the last proofs of this Memoir, 
 and had almost reached the moment of marking 
 them " for press," when news came that the 
 friend was dead to whom they should have been 
 posted — Mr. Reginald Smith, K.C., head of the 
 publishing house of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
 The book, up to then, had required no Preface. 
 All who helped us to write it helped in affection 
 for Butler's memory ; the mere mention of their 
 names, as they occur in the following pages, 
 carries its implication of gratitude ; and the 
 adviser who stood behind us would have depre- 
 cated being thanked in a Preface. 
 
 It is now permissible to say that Reginald 
 Smith, as an old friend of Butler's, was a friend to 
 this Memoir from the beginning : and worth while, 
 perhaps, to record also that he had found a deep 
 and serious pleasure of late, as Butler's corre- 
 spondence revealed a strong guiding principle 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 of life, in recognising it and comparing it with 
 his own. I send off these pages with the thought 
 that, however and wherever another hfe shall 
 renew it, I have been privileged in this world by 
 the friendship and counsel of those two men. 
 
 ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH. 
 
 New Year's Day, 
 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 C»kr. PACE 
 
 I. Parentage — Childhood — Bradfield (1844- 
 
 1857) I 
 
 II. Eton (1837-1863) 21 
 
 III. Cambridge Recollection of A. J. B. (1863-1870) 42 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Trinity Fellowship (1867-1870) . 
 
 61 
 
 V. 
 
 Whitehall — Marriage — Weybridge — 
 
 
 
 Dante (1870-1887) 
 
 87 
 
 VI. 
 
 Alpine and Other Tramps .... 
 
 123 
 
 VII. 
 
 Rivington's and Cassell's (1887-1895). 
 
 152 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Weybridge — ^Translations (1895-1898). 
 
 183 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Record Office — Last Days (1898-1910) 
 
 199 
 
 
 Appendix.— Dante and the Renaissance . 
 
 229 
 
 
 Bibliography . . ... 
 
 253 
 
 
 Index 
 
 257 
 
 PORTRAITS 
 
 Arthur John Butler . . Frontispiece 
 
 From a photograph by Frederick HoUyer 
 
 At Clovelly, 1870 . . . Facing page 78 
 
MEMOIR OF 
 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Parentage— Childhood— Brad FIELD 
 
 1844-1857 
 
 Arthur John Butler was born on the 21st of 
 June, 1844, at Putney ; the eldest child of the 
 Reverend William John Butler — then curate of 
 Puttenham, near Guildford, afterwards succes- 
 sively Vicar of Wantage, Canon of Worcester, and 
 Dean of Lincoln — and his wife Emma, daughter 
 of George Henry Barnett, banker, of Glympton 
 Park, Woodstock. 
 
 A word must be said at the outset upon this 
 parentage : for in it were united two strong char- 
 acters which, though apparently diverse in their 
 strength, drew no little of it from a common strain 
 of ancestry, and as male ?ind female wonderfully 
 complemented, balanced, sustained one another 
 
2 MEMOIR OF ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 until for both of them, grown old, death closed 
 in a week the long account of mutual service. 
 
 The Butlers came originally from Pembroke- 
 shire. But William Butler's mother was of Irish 
 descent ; daughter of a Captain Robert Patrick 
 whose sister Mehetabel — an Irish beauty — had 
 been captured and run off with by Stratford 
 Canning, uncle of George Canning the statesman. 
 The head of the Cannings disapproved of the 
 match and abjured Stratford ; who died and left 
 a young family disinherited of all save good looks, 
 personal charm, and force of character — ^inalien- 
 able gifts which their mother bestowed and 
 courageously improved. Of the children, Strat- 
 ford grew up to be the greatest British diplomatist 
 of his century. Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe ; 
 William to attain a canonry of Windsor ; Charles 
 to be aide-de-camp to the Duke of WeUington and 
 perish at Waterloo ; Elizabeth to marry the banker 
 George Barnett (above mentioned) and bear a 
 daughter, Emma, who married William Butler. 
 
 To bring this Canning-Patrick connection to a 
 point in the birth of Arthur Butler— his paternal 
 great-grandfather and maternal great-grand- 
 mother were brother and sister. 
 

 
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4 MEMOIR OF 
 
 William Butler, educated at Westminster 
 School and Trinity College, Cambridge, had, on 
 leaving his University, made acquaintance with 
 John Keble, Manning, Wilberforce, Charles 
 Marriott and others of the Oxford Movement, and 
 had taken from their teaching the firm trend of 
 his life. While mistrustful of Ritualism as in- 
 expedient and provocative, a superfluous chal- 
 lenge of English Protestant prejudice (ever apt 
 to wax hottest over inessential forms), to the 
 central purpose of restoring the Church's authority 
 and discipline in this land he set his face like a 
 flint. The loss of these had been nobly lamented 
 long ago, in a passage of Jeremy Taylor's Polemical 
 Discourses : 
 
 I shall only crave leave that I may remember 
 Jerusalem, and call to mind the pleasure of the 
 temple, the order of her services, the beauty of 
 her buildings, the sweetness of her songs, the 
 decency of her ministrations, the assiduity and 
 economy of her Priests and Levites, the daily 
 sacrifice, and that eternal fire of devotion that 
 went not out by day nor by night. These were 
 the pleasures of our peace ; and there is a re- 
 manent felicity in the very memory of those 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 5 
 
 spiritual delights which we then enjoyed as ante- 
 pasts of Heaven and consignations to an immor- 
 tality of joys. And it may he so again when it shall 
 please God, Who hath the heart of all princes in 
 His hand and turneth them as the rivers of waters ; 
 and when men will consider the invaluable loss 
 that is consequent, and the danger of sin that is 
 appendant, to the destroying of such forms of 
 discipline and devotion in which God was purely 
 worshipped, and this Church was edified, and the 
 people instructed to great degrees of piety, know- 
 ledge and devotion. 
 
 That which Bishop Taylor had been content to 
 mourn, Butler was determined to revive so far as 
 one man might in his own sphere of activity. 
 That sphere he found in June 1846 (the child 
 Arthur being then just two years old) when — 
 through the offices of his wife's uncle, William 
 Canning the Canon — the Dean and Chapter of 
 Windsor offered him the living of Wantage. 
 
 Wantage, an ancient market town on the 
 northern edge of the Berkshire Downs, famous 
 as the birthplace of two great Englishmen, King 
 Alfred and Bishop Butler, was known to enjoy a 
 severe but healthy climate along with an evil 
 
6 MEMOIR OF 
 
 reputation, summarised in the nickname " Black 
 Wantage." Apart from the weekly corn-market 
 attended by farmers from the Vale of the 
 White Horse, rope-making (on the decline) 
 and a new iron foundry furnished its staple 
 industries. It had no resident gentry, and missed 
 alike the amenities of town and of country life. It 
 possessed, indeed, a stately church, in lamentable 
 disrepair ; with a Latin school and a dame school 
 (both in the churchyard). Thirty-six children 
 attended the dame school, out of a population of 
 3282. For a century and a half the benefice had 
 been held by non-resident vicars, who placed a 
 curate in the vicarage at a petty stipend. The 
 last of this line of curates, when William Butler 
 visited the church to prospect, preached a sermon 
 " drier than hay. Not a word of sense in it. 
 I only wonder so many people can sit through 
 such discourses. . . . Lengthy too. This leads 
 me to consider . . . and all that." 
 
 The new Vicar, who was to change " all that " 
 and much besides, arrived in the beginning of 1847 
 and installed his family in the thatched parsonage 
 (supposed to date from the sixteenth century) . At 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 7 
 
 first his parishioners applauded his energy ; for he 
 threw himself with zest into municipal affairs, 
 attending all meetings of town governors and 
 commissioners, pressing for a drainage system 
 (badly needed) and taking an active part in getting 
 the town lighted with gas. Wantage, says an 
 anonymous writer in the Bristol Times, at the 
 close of his first year, 
 
 though it has two inns, three tailors and 
 drapers, one policeman, a brace of watchmen, 
 and gas lamps, is little better than streets of 
 farmhouses confronting each other, with flocks 
 and herds feeding out in the rear. . . . While 
 strolling about on Saturday evening, I found 
 the church door open, and entered. There were 
 some men at work repairing and restoring the 
 chancel. . . . The new clergyman is of the new 
 school — zealous, anxious, ever in his work. He 
 is evidently one of the race of clergymen who 
 have of late years sprung up to replace the old 
 high-and-dry denomination, and competes in 
 energy and zeal with the evangelical order — one 
 of a class who emerge from Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge with ideas already formed of pastoral duty, 
 with plans prepared and purposes fixed to carry 
 them out with a kind of Christian chivalry. . . . 
 
8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Wantage has been one of those places which have 
 commonly been considered an appanage to some 
 cathedral stall, or a fat gift for some favoured 
 pluralist, who thought it no sin, as Lord Eldon 
 said, to shear the sheep he did not feed. The Dean 
 of St. George's Chapel at Windsor was the last of 
 the favoured few to whom Wantage fell. Twice 
 a year he arrived with a carpet bag at the Bear 
 Inn, received his tithes, and returned, without 
 leaving either his carpet bag or his blessing behind 
 him. After such a pastor any ordinary con- 
 scientious clergyman must have been a change 
 for the better ; and the present being more 
 than commonly painstaking, the consequences 
 of increased zeal began to be gradually seen in 
 increased congregations ; pew-doors, the latches of 
 which had rusted in their staples, were gradually 
 opened ; seats, from which the moths had not been 
 disturbed for years, began to fill . . . and on the 
 Sunday I was there the edifice was completely 
 filled with smock-frocks and broadcloth. I liked the 
 sermon, because I thought it an original one : none 
 of those firstly, secondly, and thirdly compilations. 
 
 For the deeds by which he transformed the 
 parish, the exemplary work for which the name of 
 " Butler of Wantage " went abroad on men's lips ; 
 how he founded the famous Wantage Sisterhood of 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 9 
 
 St. Mary, parent of some thirty or forty societies 
 all over England ; how he restored the parish 
 church ; how he wrought for the children's 
 education until, when he came to lay down his 
 charge, the dame school in the churchyard with 
 its thirty-six scholars had made way for buildings 
 in which were taught more than 750, varpng in 
 age from three to nineteen or twenty ; for the 
 remarkable succession of curates he inspired, 
 trained, sent forth — for the full story, in short, 
 the reader is referred to the Life and Letters of 
 William John Butler, published by Messrs. Mac- 
 millan & Co. in 1898. 
 
 But much of this work met with fierce — even 
 unusually fierce — opposition ; the fiercer perhaps 
 because the Vicar, at aU events in these early days 
 of his incumbency, was not a man amenable to 
 compromise. They were days of the " Gorham 
 Judgment," of public rage against " Puseyism " 
 and " Puseyites," of Cardinal Wiseman's " Papal 
 aggression " ; and several secessions from the 
 Sisterhood to the Church of Rome lent excuse 
 to men who suspected this rigid priest for a .sort 
 of Papist in disguise even while he was straining 
 every nerve to keep men and women of troubled 
 
10 MEMOIR OF 
 
 conscience true to the Church of their fathers. 
 The storm broke at a vestry meeting which re- 
 fused him leave to apply for a faculty to restore 
 the parish church. The Vicar, setting his face 
 like a flint, became highly unpopular. Insulting 
 inscriptions were chalked upon the walls, and the 
 Sisters used to go out late at night to wash them 
 off. He would say grimly that he expected to be 
 hanged on one of the lamp-posts with which he 
 had helped to provide the town. 
 
 Throughout these troubles Mrs. Butler never 
 faltered in her help, which she gave in the most 
 practical way. Outside the house the Vicar was 
 a man of many affairs, organising, commanding, 
 consulted on a hundred details, controlling all 
 to a purpose. Of the internal economies of the 
 vicarage he knew as little as his children did, or 
 less. Mrs. Butler kept all accounts, domestic and 
 parochial, and the domestic purse, setting him 
 absolutely free from financial worries. He used 
 to say that since his marriage he had only drawn 
 one cheque, which was returned with the com- 
 ment, " Signature not known." Says the Life^ 
 and Letters : 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER ii 
 
 She had resolved at the outset never to be a 
 hindrance to him in his clerical duties, and so 
 through the long years of toil at Wantage she had 
 been content to lead a self-denying life ; to forgo 
 many of the pleasant refreshments which some- 
 times sweeten the life of a hard-working clergy- 
 man's wife ; to see but little of him during the day 
 when he was busy in the schools and in the parish, 
 or in the evening when he would be holding classes. 
 And in this retired life not many knew what reason 
 her husband had to be proud of the intellectual 
 powers which she never sought ±o display. 
 
 A glimpse of the Vicar in the midst of these 
 activities may be given from a chapter of re- 
 miniscences contributed by one of the most 
 brilliant of his curates, the Rev. V. S. Stuckey 
 Coles. It belongs, in fact, to a period considerably 
 later than that with which we are dealing ; but 
 few lives ran on lines more steadily continuous 
 than did those of one Wantage household : 
 
 Early rising never laid aside is always impres- 
 sive to lads, to whom it is always difficult, and the 
 wonderful arrangements of the first hours of the 
 Vicar's day were more than surprising. Before 
 ten-o'clock matins he had said his prayers, often 
 been at the altar either of the home or of the parish 
 
12 MEMOIR OF 
 
 church, taken a class of pupil teachers, said Terce 
 with his own household, and done a good deal to- 
 wards dealing with the day's letters. I can hardly 
 explain how it was, but he was the otily man whom 
 I remember to have said the offices as quickly as 
 he did without irreverence. . . . 
 
 We met every day in the Vicar's study at one 
 o'clock, and sometimes waited for him, as his work 
 at the Home was growing and kept him longer than 
 he wished. He would rush in, talk to us while he 
 washed his hands, arrange a number of details, lay 
 his finger on some of our weak points, make a joke 
 or two, tell us news (which he always seemed to 
 find time to get at), and finally, as I have already 
 said, pass with unfeigned reverence but unabated 
 energy into the Oratory for Sext. After dinner 
 there was another conference and Nones. . . . 
 
 Amid all this one discovers few references to the 
 subject of this Memoir beyond a chapce word of 
 two in his father's letters to Keble : " A. is growing 
 a fat, strong boy." " A.'s hair is as curly as ever." 
 As Thucydides said of the early tribes of Hellas' 
 so far as my research has gone I surmise that he 
 did nothing of importance in one way or another. 
 A sister, Frances Charlotte (" Fanny "), had been 
 born before the move to Wantage : other children 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 13 
 
 came to the nursery then and kept Mrs. Butler 
 busy — Grace Harriet, b. 1847 ; William George, 
 b, 1849 '> Edith Emma, b. 185 1 ; Mary Avice, 
 b. 1855. From various casually dropped hints in 
 the family correspondence one gathers that from 
 the first the child had a great capacity for brotherly 
 love (as in later years for friendship), and the very 
 earliest letters seem to declare to me a strength of 
 filial affection, almost of adoration, to which no 
 man of my acquaintance was ever more constant 
 to the end of his days. In June 1849 ^^' with his 
 sisters Fanny and Grace (aged four and two), is 
 away from home on a visit to his grandfather 
 Barnett at Glympton Park ; their devoted aunt, 
 Miss Barnett, looking after the pair. His father 
 writes him a birthday letter, the anxious love of 
 which reveals itself in the script, carefully written 
 in print that the child may read it easily. But — 
 after the fatal way of fathers in the last century — 
 the words merely improve the occasion : " Dearest 
 Boy, your birthday brings a great many thoughts 
 into Mammy's mind and into mine. First we think 
 how good God has been to us in giving you, whom 
 we love very much, into our hands. . . . Your 
 
14 MEMOIR OF 
 
 dear Mammy and I wish to save you, as much as 
 we can, from being unhappy when you grow up, 
 and this is the reason why we tell you always and 
 sometimes punish you when you do wrong now," 
 etc. ciBca pectora patrum ! The aunt writes 
 home and, reporting everything, reports for us 
 incidentally how much wiser is the heart of a child. 
 A. awakes in a strange bed, jumps out, and is 
 actually some way down the passage to kiss his 
 mother good-morning before he recollects that she 
 is not here. " I did not think," goes on the fond 
 writer, " a year could make such a difference in 
 Ar.'s steadiness. ... I can't but think in a few 
 more months he will have learnt to learn, and then 
 nearly all difficulty we have will be over. His 
 countenance is more lovely than ever. He often 
 sits by me for an hour when I read some American 
 travels which amuse him, and his face, as he looks 
 up at me to make a remark or ask a question, 
 is the sweetest and most intelligent I ever saw." 
 His uncle, the Canon, pronounces him " a nice 
 fellow — very nice fellow — very like George 
 Canning." 
 
 He learns to ride, at any rate, and takes a great 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 15 
 
 interest in the ponds by the road ; wants to know 
 
 if clergymen are allowed to baptize in ponds and 
 
 rivers ; and announces that when he grows up he 
 
 means to carry a Prayer Book in his pocket, so 
 
 that meeting with a heathen he may be ready to 
 
 baptize him straight away. He does his Latin 
 
 lesson well, but the letters in his copy are too close 
 
 together, and having perused a book of Chemistry, 
 
 he thinks they must be suffering from " affinity." 
 
 There are worse afflictions than the wrong- 
 
 headedness of parishioners. In the spring of 185 1 
 
 the family at Wantage suffered its first heavy 
 
 sorrow in the death of " Fanny," an event which 
 
 seems to have touched her six-year-old brother 
 
 less with grief than with a kind of holy awe. Miss 
 
 Barnett, ever helpful, is at the Vicarage, of course. 
 
 She writes : 
 
 The sweet child had snowdrops in her hand, 
 and violets and primroses, and the tiny white 
 everlasting all around her. She looked very lovely, 
 though utterly unlike life. Arthur, after the first 
 time — when, as he expressed it, he " felt shy " — 
 delighted in going to look at her and kiss her, not 
 shrinking even from the cold. ... He has been so 
 very quiet and gentle both to Emma [his mother] 
 
i6 MEMOIR OF 
 
 and to me, and helping to keep the Httle ones 
 quiet. His one great wish was to be close to 
 Fanny to the last, and he had his wish : for when 
 the school children were ranged on each side of the 
 gravel walk, and the choristers in their surplices 
 were ready to carry the little cof&n on the Ipier 
 covered with a white pall, Mr. Vincent called for 
 Arthur, and he was allowed to walk behind the bier 
 and, as he thought, to help to carry it ; and then, 
 while it was resting before the altar and the 
 choristers had taken their places in the stalls, still 
 Arthur stood motionless at the head of the coffin, 
 quite alone, and looking with his sweet grave 
 reverent face a meet chief-mourner for such an 
 innocent. It was the most touching sight I ever 
 gazed on, and one of the most beautiful. 
 
 Miss Barnett's words, " I can't but think in a 
 few more months he will have learnt to learn" seems 
 to take some illumination from the next letter (of 
 June 1852). Among Mrs. Butler's domestic duties 
 that of teaching the children was not the least 
 arduous. She even prepared Arthur's Latin lesson 
 with him before it went up to his father. The boy 
 was now eight, and his parents hoped he might 
 win an entrance scholarship at Bradfield College 
 (St. Andrew's) not far away : at least, the father 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 17 
 
 judged it possible. The mother was less sanguine. 
 She writes to Miss Barnett : 
 
 My present phase of persuasion is that Ar. will 
 neither obtain this nor any other scholarship or 
 scholastic or collegiate distinction. . . . He never 
 struggles as I remember always doing for my 
 top masters : and really and truly I had no vanity 
 in my early days to egg me on. It was simply 
 that the pain of not doing well at lessons was so 
 enormous that I could not but buy it off by any 
 amount of previous trouble and exertion. 
 
 Is it not strange that woman, who usually learns 
 thus and for this kind of approbation, will never — 
 though she be as wise in other matters as Mrs. 
 Butler — understand that men as a rule do not ? 
 The males of our kind, even the very young, work 
 at a job because it interests them ; which, after 
 all, is no bad reason. 
 
 I think we may fairly set down much of the 
 gloom of these remarks to Mrs. Butler's fear of 
 raising hopes that might be disappointed : yet it 
 remains true that Arthur had a way throughout 
 life of learning what he liked. 
 
 On August i6th, father, mother, and son took 
 
 B 
 
i8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 carriage and drove to Bradfield across the Downs ; 
 a journey "which imphes a certain amount of 
 losing of way, and much grand sight of ' effects ' 
 and breathing of pure air." There were hills to 
 be walked, and the party did not reach the College 
 until about seven o'clock, when everyone had gone 
 in to dinner, "which feast we joined without 
 toilette." They found four other candidates 
 gathered for the ordeal, of ages ranging from 
 ten-and-a-half to twelve-and-a-half : " therefore," 
 writes the anxious mother, " xmless he does 
 wonders, the examiners will of course elect the 
 elder ones." Two days later, back again at 
 Wantage, she announced the result : 
 
 I have greatly wished for carrier pigeons or 
 private electric telegraph since yesterday morn- 
 ing. So great and overwhelming a surprise I never 
 had as when W. came into the room at Bradfield 
 when I was finishing the Pack, and said, " Our 
 Arthur has got it ! " From all we could gather the 
 day before from our cross-examination of Arthur, 
 we felt more than ever sure that he would not be 
 elected. He could recall so few of the questions 
 and answers that we judged he had hardly been , 
 examined at all, and that from his being so much 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 19 
 
 younger than the others they had left him pretty 
 nearly alone. . . . But it was all a curious part of 
 the unconsciousness of his mind. When once the 
 business was over, he thought no more of it. . . . 
 The Holy Communion was celebrated after the 
 8.30 service, the various parents forming the con- 
 gregation. Afterwards the two masters, Mr, 
 Stevens and Mr. Marriott, laid their heads to- 
 gether and after deliberation the fathers were 
 summoned. W. heard Arthur's name read out, 
 but thought it was in a list of candidates, so 
 utterly surprised was he. . . , Then the people 
 called Arthur, who was quietly reading or 
 playing. . , , Dearest child ! how he rushed to 
 tell me ! , . . 
 
 He is much more occupied with his new puppy's 
 charms to-day than he was with his scholarship 
 yesterday. 
 
 But Arthur has already found time to send a 
 line to his beloved Aunt : 
 
 My dear Lizzy, — I have only just come home 
 from Bradfield. Pardon me for writing such a 
 short letter to you, for there will be more good 
 news on the other side. I will write another letter 
 to-morrow. 
 
 Turn over quickly. 
 
20 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 Your affectionate nephew and godson, 
 Arthur J. Butler, 
 
 Scholar of St. Andrew's College, BradfieU, Berkshire. 
 
 Answers of congratulation lie before me, from 
 his avmt and grandfather (Mr. Barnett had a warm 
 love for the boy, and believed in scholarship apart 
 from 'scholarships'). They do not, however, 
 differ much from most letters of aunts and grand- 
 fathers upon these happy occasions ; and il may 
 be thought that parents and relatives have already 
 taken up room enough in this memoir. My excuse 
 must be that Wantage was Arthur Butler's home 
 until his marriage in 1875 ; that it was a somewhat 
 remarkable one ; that, above all, no one can under- 
 stand him unless by understanding the ineradicable 
 tincture he took from it or the fidelity with which 
 every fibre in the grown man thrilled back to it. 
 
 " True to the kindred points of heaven and home " 
 
 says something eminently true of him, though it 
 does not say all. 
 
 He remained at Bradfield until 1857. In the 
 summer half after Easter of that year, by especial 
 wish of his grandfather, he proceeded to Eton. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Eton 
 1857-1863 
 
 It is plain to me, as I read the family letters of 
 this period, that Mr. and Mrs. Butler were inclined 
 to be over-anxious about the boy on whom they 
 had pinned so many hopes ; that the parental 
 care was a little too watchful, the hand of guid- 
 ance a thought too officious to be entirely wise. 
 Arthur was their eldest child ; and I cannot avoid 
 seeing that this unworldly pair started, as many 
 worldly people start to be parents, on the set 
 hope that their offspring would combine their 
 own best qualities to advance upon their oAvn 
 attainments, be much like themselves — only 
 better. 
 
 Certain letters from Dr. Sanderson, the boy's 
 master at Bradfield, divine this excessive soUci- 
 
22 MEMOIR OF 
 
 tude and most delicately admonish it. I must 
 quote a passage or two which do honour to this 
 good man's memory : 
 
 Oct. 5, 1852. . . . Your little boy is very well 
 and happy. What you speak of, viz. his difficulty 
 in fixing his thoughts promptly upon what is going 
 on in class or elsewhere, we have noticed. He 
 seems fond of following out a line of thought, and 
 this often leads him quite away from present 
 realities into brown studies. I do very much hope 
 you will not be anxious at his not making any 
 continued and regular progress in the amount of 
 his knowledge at present. He wants rather dis- 
 cipline of mind than that it should be stored. . . . 
 And at his age he requires bodily vigour to keep 
 pace with the activity of his mind, and indeed 
 rather for a time to outstrip it. . . . He is a good 
 little fellow and a great favourite, and promises 
 very well to be an excellent scholar and a good 
 man. I can't tell you how jealous I am lest his 
 mind be overtaxed. We will take care that he 
 does not waste his time ; but he is very young 
 and looks delicate, as you say. 
 
 Dec. 25, 1852. — You will have seen in Arthur all 
 that you need hear. We none of us at Bradfield 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 23 
 
 hoped to see any improvement in him. His mind 
 was not only so pure and simple, but sufficiently 
 well stored also for his age, that we looked rather 
 that he should be kept as he was than gain any- 
 thing. That was my great anxiety, and I watched 
 him closely. I am very thankful to think that 
 his first contact with his world has not taken away 
 that freshness of mind and open-heartedness which 
 was so noticeable. 
 
 March 4,1853. — I am always very anxious about 
 him. . . . You know well the only great dread 
 I have about him. He must not ripen too fast, 
 'there, are two fears if he does — that his health will 
 be fatally injured, or his brain wiU be weakened. 
 
 I find him a little dull in class this half-year ; 
 more so, certainly, than at the close of the last. 
 This may be because there has been an interrup- 
 tion of some weeks. It also may be from his want 
 of rest — entire rest — ^in the holidays. (I know 
 you will forgive my writing what I from my heart 
 believe to be important in his case, although you 
 may think me wrong.) The object of all early 
 education is to prepare a youth so that he shall 
 be able to devote himself to whatever calling he 
 follows with all his powers at their full vigour and 
 completely cultivated. . . . For a boy of eighteen 
 to know a certain amount of facts is not the end. 
 
24 MEMOIR OF 
 
 but that he should be prepared to give his atten- 
 tion wholly to his calling. His actual attained 
 knowledge is mainly incidental, and only so far 
 an end as it is implied in the true end. Now, if 
 this is the case, I cannot but think it unwise 
 to strain a boy's mind at a very early age and 
 fill it with facts which other boys have not to 
 receive till two or three years later. ... I will 
 be wholly responsible for this forbearing treat- 
 ment being the best for him, and that with it he 
 will make in the end the greater man. You will 
 wonder at my sajing that it was, to my mind, a 
 great mistake setting him at Greek. . . . Can you 
 find out from him what he feels about having 
 been put into another seat in Church ? I fancy 
 he is vexed at it. I would not of course ask him 
 for the world. 
 
 I have copied out these passages at length as 
 well for their own sake — so redolent are they of 
 gentle wisdom, so honourably (rescued from a 
 private letter) they testify to this dead school- 
 master's conscience in his calling — as because they 
 throw some light on the hopes and disappoint- 
 ments of the next few pages. 
 
 " His first contact with his world "—in that 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 25 
 
 phrase lies the secret. It is so difficult for parents, 
 and especially for strong-minded parents, ta 
 realise that the child's world is not theirs, that 
 it claims him, and that often what seems to them 
 but languor and idleness is a stage under which 
 the growing individual soul is forced, by delicacy 
 and affection, to take cover, to maintain its 
 strength, its independence, its inalienable right. 
 In face of two strong parents, bent on shaping 
 him, A. J. B. always delicately and reverentially, 
 but always obstinately, preserved a soul of his 
 own. 
 
 His sister, Mrs. Guinness (" Grace "), records 
 that— 
 
 His school life, beginning at eight years old, 
 took him away from home very early ; but in his 
 holidays we were always companions. He was 
 very fond of trying chemical experiments, and 
 many strange odours and compounds ensued. 
 
 We were accustomed to going to the daily 
 Services, as a matter of course, and he always went 
 once a day when at home, and was specially at- 
 tached to certain Gregorian chants and hymns. 
 From the time that he was nine years old he 
 
26 memoir; of 
 
 always shared in the annual holiday with our 
 parents — generally abroad ; and he and I were 
 allowed to go about alone in the towns, or for 
 piountain walks. 
 
 We shall have more to say of these holiday 
 tours by and by. Mrs. Guinness goes on : 
 
 I should not say that he was a studious boy ; 
 but he was always picking up odds and ends of 
 information and repeating things he had by 
 heart — from Arundines Cami and such like ; full 
 of ability but not of application, which worried my 
 Father , . . who insisted on his working in the 
 holidays, and kept him in his study to supervise 
 this. . . . Part of the holidays were always spent 
 with our grandfather, Mr. Barnett, either in 
 London or at Glympton. He was very fond of 
 Arthur, and used to read classics with him. Then 
 our Aunt Lizzie quite worshipped A. J. B., and 
 indulged him in every way. She also taught him 
 before he went to Bradfield. But it was always 
 attributed to his Mother's grounding him so well 
 in Latin that he got the scholarship when he was 
 eight. He rose quickly in the forms at Bradfield 
 and was working with much older boys : so my 
 Father decided to take him away and send him to 
 Eton. At first it was intended he should go into 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 27 
 
 College : but he did not try to get a good place, 
 and my Grandfather, as an old Oppidan, did 
 not wish him to be a Colleger. So that was 
 given up. 
 
 We have collected hints enough to supply a 
 portrait of him as he first went up to Eton, the 
 second " half " in 1857, a few weeks before his 
 thirteenth birthday : a good-looking, fair boy, 
 seemingly " younger than his years " and some- 
 what fragile (but this was illusory ; for his frame, 
 always lean and thorough^bred, hardened with 
 manhood and grew capable of great endurance, 
 as his mountaineering was to prove) ; home loving, 
 devout, cherished in an atmosphere of care ; but 
 saved from priggishness by an open innocence and 
 a nature equally open to take the world on trust, 
 alert for experience, with a happy instinct of 
 seeking it through friendship. 
 
 In his first letter from Eton he writes home 
 to his mother : 
 
 You are quite right in calling this place " hor- 
 rible " ; for in spite of iall the comforts it certainly 
 is worse than I thought. The way the fellows 
 
28 MEMOIR OF ■ 
 
 behave in Chapel is dreadful. They talk, laugh, 
 and play all through service. 
 
 He is in a " Dame's House " at first (Mrs. de 
 Rosen's) but afterwards boards with Dr. Balston, 
 later with Mr. Dupuis, lastly with the Rev. 
 Edmond Warre (subsequently Headmaster, 1884- 
 1905, and now Provost of Eton). He starts by 
 taking Remove and reports that " the Examination 
 was not hard." He is " up to " Mr. Marriott— 
 " whom I like very much : he explains things " — 
 and at once attends, with the rest of the School, 
 the funeral of the Duchess of Gloucester, last 
 surviving daughter of George III. 
 
 We — ^that is about 300 boys — ^stood on the 
 wall, and the rest in the road in front of the Chapel. 
 . . . There were seventy-three carriage horses, 
 altogether. The Duchess of Atholl came in- 
 stead of the Queen, and yet her son, TuUibardine, 
 did not wear a black cloth band round his hat as 
 nearly all the other fellows did. Very hkely you 
 will see one round mine on Monday. 
 
 A week or two later he is expecting a visit — 
 for the Fourth of June festivities— from his grand- 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 29 
 
 father and one of his aunts. " But," he writes 
 to Aunt Lizzie, " if you meant that Grandpapa 
 could breakfast in my room, I am afraid that is 
 quite impracticable." (Grandparents, alas ! un- 
 like the sun in childhood, can come a whit too 
 soon and bring too long a day.) " The boats 
 start at 6.30 p.m., and lock-up is ten minutes after 
 the fireworks. . . . You cannot imagine how I 
 like Eton. I have got about ten plants ; fuchsias, 
 geraniums, verbenas and a white pink (a lily of 
 the valley, too. I had another, but gave away 
 the root). Tell Aunt Doddie that I shall have 
 a glorious nosegay for her on the 4th. I am 
 going to have lots of cuttings made, to take home. 
 Do you take cuttings of fuchsias, or how do you 
 plant them ? . . . P.S. — I have spent 8s. id. on my 
 flowers. There are men who sell them at the wall." 
 
 Thus, quickly, of course, the child surrenders 
 to the charm of Eton — a surrender not incom- 
 patible, for a boy of Butler's quick gifts, with a 
 certain degree of idleness. 
 
 The parents at home are watchful, and storm- 
 signals begin to be hoisted in the correspondence. 
 
30 MEMOIR OF 
 
 But in the holidays — at home, whither his heart 
 faithfully reverts, and during the August excursions 
 abroad (which the family henceforward takes 
 regularly) — he is the same child as ever, eager, 
 affectionate, and unspoilt. I have before me 
 a small pocket-book journal of the first of these 
 foreign trips, taken in this first holiday of 1857 — 
 Dover to Calais, Lille, Liege, Aix la Chapelle, 
 Cologne, the Rhine by steamboat, Basle, Geneva, 
 Chamounix, the St. Bernard (" and saw the dogs. 
 They have 5 : 4 males — 2 not quite pure breed — 
 and I female ; it had just pupped "). A great 
 number of cathedrals appear to have been visited 
 and — perhaps by consequence — a number of 
 trains and steamers missed ; but the recoird^is 
 not otherwise remarkable. Between 1859 and 
 his death (seven years later) the party sometimes 
 included that famous scholar, James Riddell of 
 Balliol, to whom A. J. B. became devoted. The 
 "Professor" returned the boy's affection, and 
 cherished a hope that in due course he might win 
 a Balliol scholarship. Conscious or unconscious 
 of this doom the little victim plays, enjoying him- 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 31 
 
 self thoroughly as he undergoes his first appren- 
 ticeship in mountaineering. 
 
 But back at Eton he is learning, among other 
 things, how to idle ; and the inevitable storm comes 
 heralded by a letter from his mathematical master, 
 Mr. Brandreth. Mr. Brandreth has been invited 
 to pay a visit to Wantage, to be " pumped " (it 
 is pretty evident) concerning his pupil's progress. 
 The good honest man shies at this — " the life one 
 leads here, scarcely speaking to anybody but the 
 boys and having no calls to any continuous mental 
 effort, destroys one's relish of company." More- 
 over, he has nothing cheerful to report. He goes on : 
 
 Do not, however, think me unreasonably ex- 
 acting, or suppose that I forget that thinking for 
 an hour is fully as difficult as holding out a poker 
 for that time — but I do think a boy of your 
 son's age and capabilities ought to recognise that 
 though rowing up to Monkey and Maidenhead 
 is excellent in its place,^ it should not be done till 
 
 * A. J. B. was never actually in the Boats at Eton, his parents de- 
 murring to the expense. But he came to Eton with some knowledge 
 of the rudiments of rowing, learnt at Glympton in an old river-punt 
 fitted with rowlocks ; and two House wins (with " Rowly " Melgund) 
 proved that he could " stay " over a race. He rowed a respectable 
 oar in the " Monarch " ; but took his thwart there by virtue of his 
 position in the School, 
 
32 MEMOIR OF 
 
 he is sure that such boys as Fortescue and Puller 
 minor do not siap up by themselves Trigonometry 
 enough to beat him, or let little Puller, whom he 
 beat by four to one last year in Algebra, come up 
 within two marks of him this. I think he should 
 remember a little more animi imperio corporis 
 servitio magis utimUr : alterum nobis cum Ms, 
 alterum cum belluis commune est. . . . Excuse me 
 if I use stronger language than the decent plati- 
 tudes in which schoolmasters usually praise their 
 pupils. I am really vexed and annoyed, and 
 equally unwilling to accept either of these con- 
 clusions : (i) that the boy has beeii thoroughly 
 idle [and] has found no difficulties, (2) that he 
 has distrusted my will, (3) that he has distrusted 
 my ability to help him over them. 
 
 This is bad ; but worse follows in a second 
 letter from the agitated man : 
 
 July 26, 1861. — I wish you would hold me 
 excused from coming to you next week. The fact 
 is that the more I think of your boy the more 
 disappointed I am, and I am sure I should find 
 no pleasure in it. I think the education here not 
 what it used to be : so much more is exacted by 
 tutors and masters that boys hardly have the 
 sense of their responsibility to work. They are 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 33 
 
 satisfied with satisfying their tutor, and do not 
 think of satisfying themselves. Instead of getting 
 what they can out of their tutors they leave their 
 tutors to get what they can out of them. Perhaps 
 I have gone to the other extreme. . . . 
 
 I daresay I shall recover my temper by next 
 half : but at present I really must ask to be ex- 
 cused from running the risk of showing it in your 
 own house. 
 
 The Vicar posts this letter to Arthur, and 
 writes : 
 
 I am much disappointed by a letter which I 
 received this morning from Mr. Brandreth. I 
 fear that you have again done very much below 
 your powers. If I am mistaken, you can let rne 
 know. 
 
 You will see that he — rightly, as I think, and 
 on your account — declines to pay me that visit 
 which we had arranged a few weeks since. 
 
 I am quite sure of one thing, my dear Arthur : 
 and that is, that it would be quite unpardonable 
 in me if I were not to cast about how to put an 
 end to this state of things. You know better 
 than anyone the intense pleasure which it gives 
 to your mother and myself when you do well, 
 and how anxious we are to make you happy. I 
 
34 MEIiiOIR OF 
 
 am thankful that she is not at Wantage, for it 
 would go far towards marring her peace of mind 
 if she saw this letter. I really dare not show it 
 to her, 
 
 A few days still remain of the half-year. Do 
 what you can in them. Gather up the frag- 
 ments ; and remember that henceforth I shall 
 consider myself bound to see to work in the 
 Holidays as I have never, except in the matter of 
 Upper Division trials, done before. Your loving 
 
 father, 
 
 W. J. B. 
 
 The following reminiscences of A. J. B. at 
 Eton are kindly jotted down for me by the Rev. 
 V. S. Stuck^y Coles : 
 
 Arthur Butler was two Divisions above me at 
 Eton, and" he was near the head of a Division 
 in which were Frederick William Puller, now a 
 Cowley Father, the present Sir [Charles] Thomas 
 Acland, and Stephen Gladstone. I became in- 
 terested in him for his father's sake, who was a 
 conspicuous figure among the clergy who belonged 
 to the Anglo-Catholic Revival. After a time I 
 went to stay at Wantage with one of Mr. Butler's 
 curates, and he questioned me about his son. I 
 told him that I thought Arthur sometimes went 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 35 
 
 to the " Christopher," where there was a bar 
 which was thought superior to the college " Tap." 
 (I was rather a prig about these places, having 
 been indoctrinated by a Cambridge Etonian who 
 had coached me before I came to Eton. He 
 induced my father to get me to promise never to 
 go to " Tap " ; and I had a bad time.) 
 
 Some time after, Arthur Butler waited one day 
 in the Ante-Chapel till my Division came down, 
 and said, " Why did you tell my father that I drank 
 at the ' Christopher ' ? " I forget what answer 
 I made, but Arthur never referred to the subject 
 again, and I do not think he bore any malice. I 
 think he chose the place and time of his remon- 
 strance that it might be made without any further 
 discussion. , . . I think Arthur's father said to 
 me later, " It was not true that Arthur drank at 
 the * Christopher '," taking his son's denial as 
 final. 
 
 Arthur Butler and I were contrasted very 
 strongly. He was the mainly reticent son of a 
 strong leader of the Revival ; I was an ardent 
 and somewhat foolish fellow, dissatisfied with my 
 own father, who was an admirable clergyman, 
 because he did not find himself at that time in 
 the same stream. I envied Butler his father, 
 and thought he did not value his good fortune. 
 
36 MEMOIR OF 
 
 He never had anything to do with the attempts 
 at Tractarian movements which went on amongst 
 some of us. Nor did he favour some audacious 
 literary enterprises which were more or less sup- 
 ported by names which have since come to the 
 front — Sir William Anson and Sir Frederick 
 Pollock. Arthur Butler did his proper work well 
 and quietly, kept his own counsel, observed what 
 happened at home and at school, and got a good 
 training for his excellent abilities. 
 
 It has always seemed to me that he illustrates 
 a theory I am inclined to believe in, that most 
 capable men take after their mothers in mind, 
 as the daughters after their fathers, Mrs. Butler 
 was a friend of Charlotte Yonge, and shared with 
 her the austere refinement and severe self-dis- 
 cipline of the Tractarian lady. I feel that I know 
 Arthur better as reflected in his mother than in 
 the little I saw of him at school. 
 
 Arthur Butler was very kind to me. When 
 I arrived as a deacon, in a cassock, at Wantage 
 (I have been afflicted with obesity from a child), 
 he remarked, " The round man has got at last 
 into the round hole " ; and he always approved 
 of me as a person who was meant to be what I 
 had become, even if he thought I had been want- 
 ing in restraint when. I was a boy. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 37 
 
 James Riddell — " Professor " to A. J. B., as 
 to the rest of the family — has been urgent for 
 some time that Arthur shall try for a scholarship 
 at Balliol, of which he is Tutor. But the boy — 
 whose heart is set on going to Cambridge and to 
 Trinity, his father's college — ^holds to this purpose 
 under cover of his usual light-hearted insouciance. 
 His parents are secretly on his side. On October 
 13, 1861, Mrs. Butler writes that Grace has 
 driven over to Farnboro' Road to inquire for a 
 hamper which has gone astray and " to meet 
 Professor. He stays with us till Thursday next. 
 We must try to beg you off Balliol, though it 
 is very difficult to withstand his kind desire of 
 having you if possible." 
 
 The boy yields to his friend's importunity, 
 goes up and sits for the Balliol scholarship in 
 November 1861, and does not get it — ^partly 
 because he is too young (17), partly because he 
 is not trying very hard. Riddell reports on " the 
 Arturian performance " : 
 
 As to his general place, I should think he may 
 have come about thirteenth, the real competition 
 
38 MEMOIR OF 
 
 being among the first nine. This number of 
 leading horses was greater than usual — ^the year 
 being an unusually good one. It struck me on 
 the whole that Arthur is rather young for his years 
 — ^in fact quite as young as be looks. 
 
 The writer then discusses the papers in detail, 
 and winds up : 
 
 I think I have anatomised the dear boy 
 enough. What I have said he needs is time. It 
 was a great pleasure to have him staying with 
 me. He came of himself to both Chapels daily. 
 One of his studies was a little book on Hebrew 
 accentuation which lay on my table." 
 
 All this — ^with all the correspondence, all testi- 
 mony of surviving relatives and friends, and all 
 I know of him later and gathered in many talks 
 — makes up for me a clear and fairly consistent 
 portrait of a boy whose mental powers, somewhat 
 overpressed in the nursery (he could read easily 
 at the age of four), and constantly in danger of 
 being overpressed — taught at any rate to be sus- 
 picious of that danger — found shelter, and perhaps 
 refreshment, in such idling as a clever boy may 
 easily command in a great Public School ; and 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 39 
 
 I see them by consequence, after lying dormant 
 through an instinct of self-preservation, in some 
 ways tardy in developing. I note, on the one side, 
 that — whatever he is losing — ^he is preserving his 
 independence, " the essential jewel of his soul." 
 I note further that if he does not want a scholar- 
 ship — ^in college at Eton, or again at Balhol — he 
 misses it, and with a courtesy as gentle as is his 
 obstinacy to pursue what he desires. The fault 
 of it (if it be a fault) lies in his being nowise am- 
 bitious, or ambitious only for what he likes. 
 
 None the less, Butler, holding to this way, rose 
 before leaving Eton to be a quite considerable 
 person in the school : " Newcastle Select," 1861-3 ; 
 Tomline Prizeman, 1862 ; and finally Captain of 
 Oppidans. He had, moreover (if one may say so 
 who, by difference of age and accident of circum- 
 stance, entered late into the privilege), a great 
 capacity for friendship and no small discrimination 
 in its exercise. To alter a phrase of Burke's, he 
 cultivated friendships, yet so as to have them at 
 once strong and selected : in evidence of which 
 at this point it is enough to quote a short list of 
 
40 MEMOIR OF 
 
 his particular friends during his last years at Eton 
 and add that he kept them through life : Stephen 
 James Fremantle (of whom more shall be told 
 by-and-by) ; Lord Francis Hervey ; H. W. H. 
 Hoare; Anson (afterwards Sir William Anson, 
 Warden of All Souls, whose recent death all Oxford 
 laments and whom to know was to admire the most 
 perfect union of public conscience with private 
 sincerity, charm and wit) ; Pollock (Sir Frederick 
 Pollock, who will hereafter have something to say 
 in these pages). In the 1862 competition for the 
 Newcastle Butler was bracketed third with Fre- 
 mantle and Pollock, and in 1863 was again 
 bracketed third with Pollock. There is a tradition 
 that this time he would have been an easy winner 
 but for the burden imposed on him of supervising, 
 as Captain of Oppidans, the preparations just then 
 being n;ade by the school for a welcome to Edward, 
 Prince of Wales, and his bride Alexandra. His 
 brother William, who had followed him to Eton, 
 records that " odds were laid on him when I was 
 only a lower boy." 
 
 Fremantle, Anson, and Hervey went on to 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 41 
 
 Oxford : Pollock, with Butler, to Cambridge. 
 These names will recur in this Memoir. The 
 strict historian here pauses to record that among 
 this band Butler was affectionately known as 
 " Pig " — because in person, habit, and mind he 
 so little resembled one. 
 
 He left Eton at the end of the first half, 1863. 
 In April he sat for a Minor Scholarship at Cam- 
 bridge, and was elected. In those days one could 
 not be admitted scholar of Trinity save on a 
 " Minor " Scholarship. He had — ^in that curiously 
 idle yet persistent way which I trace through the 
 packets of family anxiety on which, if he ever 
 retorted, no retort is preserved — won his set hope, 
 to be admitted a Scholar of Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge. Next year (1864) he duly improved 
 upon Minor Scholar by winning a Bell Scholar- 
 ship. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Cambridge Recollection of A. J. B. 
 
 1863-1870 
 
 Contributed by Henry Jackson, O.M., Litt.D., Regiits 
 Professor of Greek in the University 
 
 Arthur John Butler's name was entered on 
 the boards of Trinity College, i6th September 1862. 
 On i8th April 1863 he was elected to a Minor 
 Scholarship, and in October 1863 he began resi- 
 dence. In 1864 he was elected to the second Bell 
 Scholarship. On 29th April 1865 he was ad- 
 mitted a foundation scholar of the college. (At 
 that time no one was allowed to compete 
 for a foundation scholarship before the Easter 
 vacation of his second year.) In 1867 he was 
 placed 19th Junior Op time in the Mathematical 
 Tripos and 8th in the First Class of the Classical 
 Tripos. He was admitted Fellow, nth October 
 1869, and vacated his fellowship by marriage 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 43 
 
 early in 1875. He took the degree of B.A. in 
 1867, and that of M.A. in 1870, These are the 
 bald facts of Butler's Cambridge career. 
 
 I began to know Butler in his freshman's term, 
 when I, five years his senior, was a Bachelor 
 Scholar, taking pupils and reading for a fellowship. 
 We met for the first time at the rooms of his 
 tutor, Robert Burn, frankest and kindest of men. 
 Butler sat beside me at dinner. He was boyish, 
 good-looking, bright, eager, self-possessed. (There 
 is a photograph which admirably represents his 
 appearance at that time. By the way, in those 
 days and for long afterwards he carried an eye- 
 glass, and, like his father, dispensed with the 
 customary string. It was his boast that once, 
 when his boat upset, he did not lose his eyeglass 
 during immersion.) Then as always he was very 
 ready to make friends : and he and I talked hard 
 all the evening. During the preceding Long Vaca- 
 tion he had spent several weeks at Oxford, where 
 his father, at that time Vicar of Wantage, had 
 intimate friends : and as I had spent two or three 
 days at Balliol in 1862, we had no lack of topics 
 of conversation. I do not remember what was 
 
44 MEMOIR OF 
 
 the next step in our acquaintance ; but I am 
 sure that we were soon sufficiently intimate to 
 argue, to dispute, and very flatly to contradict 
 one another. 
 
 Amongst his contemporaries Butler had many 
 friends. I fancy that there was just then at 
 Trinity an unusually large number of conspicuous 
 Etonians, and, as a matter of course, he had 
 known all of them at school. In particular, I 
 think of R. G. Arbuthnot, F. W. Puller, G. H. 
 Inck, J. R. Selwyn, Frederick Pollock, V. H. B. 
 Kennett-Barrington, and Edmond Fitzmaurice. 
 Butler's Minor Scholarship brought him into touch 
 with reading men such as Sidney Colvin and 
 W. K. Clifford. He was a zealous member of the 
 Third Trinity Boat Club, and so became ac- 
 quainted with men who frequented the river, 
 and especially with " Westminsters," such as 
 G. T. M. O'Brien, A. J. Mackey, and F. W. 
 Maclean. I think that he was a member of the 
 Rifle Corps, and this must have brought him into 
 relations with yet another group. Then again, 
 at my rooms and elsewhere, he met and became 
 acquainted with men, senior to himself, such as 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 45 
 
 J. W. Clark, B.A. 1856 ; Henry Sidgwick, B.A. 
 1859 ; W. E. Currey, B.A. 1863 ; A. Cockshott, 
 B.A. 1864; J. H. Swainson, B.A. 1864; J. J. 
 PuUeine, B.A. 1865 ; W. P. Crawley, B.A. 1866 ; 
 and he renewed his friendship with Henry Brand- 
 reth, B.A. 1857, whose pupil in mathematics 
 he had been at Eton, and who came back into 
 residence about this time. These typical names 
 at once occur to me ; but I am well aware that 
 many might be added to the list. Presently, his 
 election into a little essay society which, during 
 ninety years, has linked together successive genera- 
 tions of Cambridge men, still further enlarged 
 the range of his friendships. 
 
 Fifty years ago an undergraduate was classed 
 under one or other of two heads : he was either 
 a " reading man " or a " rowing man." But it 
 must be explained that the verb " row " rhymed 
 with " cow " and " now " and not with " blow " 
 and " know," and that it had nothing to do with 
 exercise taken on the river. Butler was, of course, 
 a " reading man." But again, there were then, 
 as no doubt there are now, two sorts of reading 
 men. There were some who gave to preparation 
 
46 MEMOIR OF 
 
 for a Tripos or for two Triposes a whole-hearted 
 devotion, and read in a business-like way seven 
 or eight hours a day ; and again there were others 
 who, having read liard at school, were carried 
 away at the University by the delights of free- 
 dom, and allowed miscellaneous reading and the 
 society of their contemporaries to trench upon 
 hours which might have been given to the 
 methodical study of mathematics or classics or 
 both. I think that Butler was a reading man of 
 the latter sort. He never dropped his mathe- 
 matics ; but I suspect that he added little to what 
 he had read at school. In classics he read steadily, 
 and added largely to his knowledge ; but I do 
 not think that he tried to make the most of him- 
 self for the purpose of the Tripos. I have to 
 acknowledge that in this respect all my sym- 
 pathies were with him : for I too, in my under~ 
 graduate years, had become weary of the routine 
 of school studies and had taken advantage of the 
 greater freedom of the University. I have some- 
 times wondered whether — " in the long run," 
 as economists say — we gained or lost by our in- 
 dependence ; but it is certain that preparation 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 47 
 
 for life is more important than five-jnile successes ; 
 and, looking backwards, I am not altogether 
 sorry that in those days some of us were a little 
 indifferent to academic competitions and successes. 
 I think that Butler read with Richard Shilleto, 
 the great " coach " or private tutor, from whom, 
 rather than from college lecturers, the better 
 classical men received their training. But some- 
 how I knew very little about Butler's prepara- 
 tions for the two Triposes. I suppose that there 
 were other things to occupy our thoughts ; and, 
 although I became an Assistant Tutor a month 
 or two before he took the Classical Tripos, I did 
 not see any of his work. 
 
 In the sixties the B.A. period was even more 
 enjoyable than the undergraduate years. Freed 
 from the slavery of the Tripos, the Bachelor 
 Scholar of Trinity who proposed to " sit " for a 
 fellowship consolidated his knowledge by taking 
 pupils, and enlarged the scope of his private read- 
 ing. His philosophical studies were, no doubt, 
 amateurish, but they were eminently educational. 
 For he was learning to think for himself ; and, 
 as his days were spent with contemporaries 
 
^8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 similarly engaged, there was plenty of stimulating 
 dialectic. In this stage Butler was greatly in- 
 fluenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill ; 
 and I observe that some of the essays which he 
 wrote for the little society above mentioned are 
 inspired by Aristotle's Ethics. I imagine that 
 his study of that admirable treatise led the way 
 to the careful reading of the Metaphysics, which 
 bore good fruit in his Commentary on Dante. 
 This, however, came later ; for in the sixties meta- 
 physical studies, both ancient and modern, were 
 at low tide. 
 
 I think that in the summers of 1867, 1868, 
 1869, Butler had small reading-parties at Clovelly. 
 One day in the summer of 1869, when he was 
 about to " sit " for a fellowship for the last time, 
 I received a letter addressed in a hand which I 
 recognised as his, but it was his beautiful hand 
 with a notable difference. When I opened the 
 envelope, I learnt to my dismay that he had 
 fallen from the quay, and, having broken a bone 
 or bones in the right hand was- writing with the 
 left. When he presently returned to college, I 
 offered to ask the electors to allow me to 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 49 
 
 act as his amanuensis in the examination. His 
 answer was that he could not work comfortably 
 with an amanuensis, and that he proposed to 
 write his papers with his left hand. I confess that 
 while I admired his serene courage, I regretted 
 his decision. Happily, rapid penmanship was 
 not as important in the Trinity Fellowship Ex- 
 amination as in the examinations of the Senate 
 House, and Butler's policy was justified by success. 
 I remember well my relief when, during the pro- 
 gress of the examination, one of the electors con- 
 fided to me that Butler was doing very well. I 
 do not remember how long he continued to reside 
 after his admission to the fellowship ; but my 
 impression is that he was appointed to an ex- 
 aminership in the Education Department before 
 the end of 1869. In the autumn of 1868 and 
 the spring of 1869, Butler and John Willis Clark 
 read Dante together ; and in this way Butler 
 embarked upon his Ufe's study. 
 
 There was at Cambridge in those days an 
 inordinate dread of what was indifferently called 
 " sciolism " and " omniscience." That is to say, 
 we shrank from expressing an opinion on any 
 
50 MEMOIR OF 
 
 subject unless we had made it in some sort our 
 own ; and we feared to talk to an expert about 
 his specialty, lest we should be suspected of what 
 the Greeks called So^o<To<l)ia. " conceit of know- 
 ledge." Butler resented this conventional atti- 
 tude. When he met an expert, he boldly questioned 
 him about his speciality ; and, later, he would 
 rise and use effectively the knowledge which he 
 had thus acquired. In that brilliant but short- 
 lived periodical. Knight's Quarterly Magazine, 
 " Peregrine Courtney " (W. M. Praed) says to 
 "Tristram Merton " (T. B. Macaulay), "A truce 
 to your omniscience, Tristram." I am afraid 
 that in the everyday life of 1867 we were not as 
 polite as Praed had been in print some forty years 
 before, and that our protests were sometimes 
 rather crudely expressed. They drew from Butler 
 an earnest and effective reply, in the shape of 
 an essay on the question, " Is a little knowledge 
 a dangerous thing ? " That essay is now before 
 me, and I take from it the following extract : 
 
 Men are so determined to seize upon the bad 
 tendencies of things, to the oversight of any ad- 
 vantages that are or may be got out of them, that 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 51 
 
 " sciolist," " smatterer," " superficial," are as 
 opprobrious terms as you need wish to apply to 
 your dearest friend ; " dilettante " is perhaps 
 a shade less offensive, but still far from a com- 
 pliment. Nor is this a feeling produced by 
 modern thought only, for we have all heard of 
 the man whom the gods had made neither digger 
 nor plougher, who knew many things, but knew 
 them all badly. Now I wish to record my~opinion 
 that Margites was probably very far from being 
 a useless member of society : he would in all pro- 
 bability have been able to talk a little, intelligently, 
 on most subjects, and this is no such bad thing : 
 still more he would undoubtedly have been an 
 intelligent listener, which is a very good thing. 
 This brings me to the test of expediency as applied 
 to the possession of a little learning. In the first 
 place, though on this it is of course impossible 
 to speak with any certainty, my own view would 
 be that the man of mediocrity in many pursuits 
 enjoys existence far more than he who tries ,to 
 excel in one. For while to the latter a disappoint- 
 ment may be crushing, the other, if baffled in one 
 line, can always try a fresh one, and can counter- 
 act the pain of failure in one direction by the 
 pleasure resulting from progress in another. But 
 it is in his intercourse with others that his 
 superiority will be especially made manifest. 
 What can possibly be a greater nuisance than to 
 
52 MEMOIR OF 
 
 be thrown with a man of one idea or one taste, 
 whether the idea be the greatest improvement of 
 his species or the taste the highest art, unless 
 indeed you yourself happen likewise to be a mdn 
 of the same one idea or taste, in which case I only 
 hope you may meet with your own counterpart 
 as soon as possible, and remain as long as pos- 
 sible in his company. Seriously, however, I think 
 no one will deny that, if he had his choice, he 
 would prefer the companion of various knowledge 
 though in every branch his learning might be 
 little, to a man who had given his whole existence 
 to perfe^cting himself in some one line. We 
 admire a man of this kind from a distance, and 
 like to see his picture, and hear anecdotes of his 
 infancy, but we do not feel as if we shoidd care 
 to know him, except in so far as we might use him 
 as we should a treatise on his special subject. 
 But^th the other we feel that we should probably 
 have a dozen points of contact and common in- 
 terest, and that there would be many directions 
 in which we should be able to reciprocally im- 
 prove each other's knowledge of men and things. 
 
 I thought at the time that Butler completely 
 made out his case, and since those days I have 
 learnt to dread the narrow specialism which is 
 the besetting sin of the Cambridge curriculum. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 53 
 
 Butler never lost his catholicity of interest, and 
 throughout life it served him well. 
 
 Others of his essays have survived. One of 
 them has for its subject, " Is Swinburne or Morris 
 the greater poet ? " and sums up very emphati- 
 cally against Swinburne and in favour of Morris. 
 Another puts the question : eXpmv fj aXd^tov, 
 A Cambridge man to the core, he voted for the 
 etpwv as against the aXd^av, for the man who 
 understates his claims rather than for the man 
 who overstates them ; but he qualified this con- 
 clusion by the remark that " we are in danger of 
 letting British reserve and dread of ridicule over- 
 power the right claimed by every Briton, as well 
 as American, of saying what he darn pleases, 
 and that the results may be more serious than at 
 first sight seems possible," An essay on the ques- 
 tion, " Are the ties of consanguinity a relic of 
 Barbarism ? " concludes that at the present time 
 (1870) family ties are unwarrantably " protected," 
 and that " Free-trade in friends and acquaintances 
 is no less important to the well-being of mankind 
 in the present stage of civilisation than that in 
 the commodities of the breakfast table." " Is 
 
54 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Good Nature dangerous to Society ? " was another 
 characteristic question, and no one who knew 
 Butler will doubt what his answer was. I pick 
 out these subjects for mention because I think 
 that those who knew Butler in later years may 
 like to hear that in early essays, written, not for 
 publication, but that they might give occasion 
 for informal discussion, he was already insisting 
 upon principles to which he was always true. 
 For, at the end of his life, he dreaded narrow 
 specialisation, and affirmed his right to take an 
 outsider's interest in many subjects ; he hated 
 sensuousness in poetry ; he protested against 
 timidity in the formation and expression of 
 opinion ; and he resented subservience to con- 
 ventional standards. It was a dull time in poli- 
 tics, and in our youthful discussions we affected 
 to ignore such things ; but I note that then, as 
 always, Butler was a convinced free-trader. And 
 here I may add that he was a pronounced and 
 steadfast Liberal, and that Mr. Gladstone never 
 had a more loyal follower. 
 
 Once, and once only, Butler and I travelled 
 together. Towards the end of June 1877, my 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 55 
 
 wife and I, having with us my wife's sister and 
 our friend Mrs. F. C. Dickson, met the Butlers by 
 agreement at Chur. (I still remember how about 
 midnight a party of young fellows tramped 
 through the town singing " Es ist bestimmt.") 
 Thence the ladies of the party drove, and Arthur 
 and I walked, the first day to Tiefenkasten, 
 the second to Silvaplana. We had secured rooms 
 there at a countrified but comfortable inn. The 
 landlady naively wondered how it was that we 
 had preferred her simple hostelry, " Zum wilden 
 Mann," to the " Post," where, she told us, we 
 should have had a French waiter and a billiard- 
 table. We had some difficulty in satisfying her 
 that we did not care for those luxuries, and that 
 we were thoroughly content with our accom- 
 modation. I think that, whilst I pondered over 
 J. S. Mill's Logic and watched the busy life of 
 an anthill, the Arthur Butlers did a good deal 
 of walking. Most certainly, when they and I 
 walked to the Fuorcla Surlej and found ourselves 
 up to our knees in soft snow, I had to acknowledge 
 that they were in far better condition than I. 
 I think of another pleasant walk through Sils 
 
56 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Maria to the Fex Thai. At night we read 
 Shakespeare. It has been said, I think by Leslie 
 Stephen, that the- Engadine is the one dull valley 
 in Switzerland ; but I have pleasant recollections 
 of our stay there. In particular, I like to think 
 of the goatherd gathering his goats to the sound 
 of his pipe in the early morning, and of the little 
 children coming out of their homes to catch and 
 hug their playmates as they returned in the after- 
 noon. Presently the Butlers left us for Tirol 
 and then the rest of us dropped down the pre- 
 cipitous Maloia into Italy. 
 
 It cannot be said that Butler's Cambridge 
 life ended when he ceased to reside. When he 
 vacated his fellowship, it was soon understood 
 between us that he was to stay with me, when 
 he came to Cambridge, at my house so long as 
 I occupied Croft Cottage, and, after I gave it up 
 in 1890, in college. In later years he had always 
 something to do at the college library or at the 
 library of the University. There were editions 
 of Dante to be consulted, or productions of the 
 early presses to be investigated, or historical facts 
 to be looked up in connexion with the work which 
 he was doing at the Record Of&ce. In our leisure 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 57 
 
 hours we had abundant talk about old friends, 
 about books, about politics, academic and im- 
 perial, and about the gossip which Butler brought 
 from town. 
 
 Possibly his affection for Cambridge as he had 
 known it in his youth, made him, as it makes 
 many, a little intolerant of academic reform. 
 His views in such matters were definitely con- 
 ceived, and it would have been idle to try to argue 
 with him about them. He was always careful 
 to look up his resident friends, and he liked to 
 make acquaintance with men who had recently 
 joined the Trinity high table. He seldom missed 
 the annual commemoration feast ; and, as on 
 many other occasions, he sat next me at the com- 
 memoration feast of 1909. I cannot think that 
 there was ever a non-resident ex-fellow who kept 
 himself more completely in touch with the resident 
 society. Nor can I think that there was ever a 
 Trinity man who loved the college more fervently. 
 A gift to the chapel not long before his death was 
 clearly meant to be a last token of his loyalty 
 and affection. 
 
58 MEMOIR OF 
 
 A few notes on A. J. B. at Cambridge by his 
 life-long friend, Sir Frederick Pollock, may serve 
 as appendix to Dr. Jackson's recollections and 
 conclude this chapter. 
 
 A. J. B. went up to Trinity College from Eton 
 in October 1863, as I did. We took our degrees 
 in '67 and were elected Fellows in '68. Then I 
 went down to read law in London. He stayed 
 up a few terms more, I rather think, and soon 
 was appointed an Examiner in the Education 
 Office. 
 
 The most characteristic part of our Cambridge 
 life was the Long Vacation, when the scholars of 
 the college who meant real business in the Triposes 
 came into residence free from lecture routine in 
 July and August. This was before even lawn 
 tennis was invented — much less cycling — which 
 ceased to be a strange sight only in the eighties, 
 I think, and became fashionable only in the 
 nineties. We played croquet and bowls at the 
 back of the library — bathed in Byron's pool — 
 now and then had a boating excursion above 
 Grantchester (though the only one I can swear 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 59 
 
 to was towards the end of May term '68) — besides 
 the usual afternoon walks, which many reading 
 men then thought sufficient exercise. Regular 
 boats were of course suspended. A. J. B. was, I 
 think, in the Third Trinity (Eton and Westminster 
 men) second boat. 
 
 We regarded reading parties as all very well 
 for freshmen (and Oxford men : how the latter 
 got any real work done we did not understand). 
 
 There was lots of talk about all sorts of things 
 — Oxford as well as Cambridge men know that. 
 A. J. B. was not exactly brilliant but always alert 
 — very much on the spot about things he knew — 
 and kept things up to the mark by intelligent 
 scepticism about what he did not know. Here 
 I am inevitably reading in later memories, but 
 I don't think the cast of his mind changed much. 
 
 The special interest in Dante had not begun, 
 to the best of my recollection, when we left Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 Butler ought to have done better in mathe- 
 matics. Nobody quite knew why he was only a 
 Junior Op. (third class in Mathematical Tripos). 
 I never quite forgave him, for if he had done as 
 
6o ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 he ought we should certainly have got both the 
 classical (Chancellor's) medals for Eton, (The 
 mathematical qualification has now been abol- 
 ished many years.) 
 
 His classical scholarship was not dazzling, but 
 I am sure very sound. Later he made himself as 
 good a medievalist as one shall desire. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Trinity Fellowship 
 
 1867 — 1870 
 
 The conscientious biographer must now hark 
 back a little and articulate Dr. Jackson's reminis- 
 cences with a few dates and other dry bones of 
 recwd ; certainly few, and not (it is hoped) too 
 dry, since they are taken from A. J. B.'s own 
 warm-hearted letters. He was ever a good cor- 
 respondent, especially with his mother. 
 
 He had rooms in the Great Court of Trinity, 
 in a gatehouse midway in the block of build- 
 ings which is on your left as you enter. For 
 classics he went to the great men ShUleto and 
 J ebb ; for mathematics to Routh, most famous 
 of " coaches." Almost' from the first we find 
 his tutor (Robert Bum) advising him that, if 
 he wants to win a Trinity Fellowship, he should 
 lean his weight upon classics. 
 
 6t 
 
62 MEMOIR OF 
 
 As far as I can foresee, it is plain that there 
 will be no ordinary competition for Fellow- 
 ships in your year, and that you will have to 
 work hard and steadily to get one. Now what 
 I am afraid of in your case is that you should 
 read mathematics so far as to injure your classi- 
 cal degree very seriously, and yet not far enough 
 to increase your chance of a Fellowship. My 
 advice would therefore be that you should only 
 give up to mathematics just so much time as 
 is required to make you a safe Senior Opt., and 
 should not attempt to read more subjects than 
 this. 
 
 Some excellent advice follows on classical 
 reading ; for example : 
 
 The most finished undergraduate scholars 
 I have known have been those who used to read 
 such authors as Thucydides or Sophocles or 
 Tacitus right through at a breath, till they be- 
 came saturated with the spirit of the language 
 and gained an intuitive perception of the meaning, 
 from having completely entered into the point 
 of view of the author. 
 
 Now, if an Oxford man may say it — and the 
 reader, later on, will perceive that I do not 
 seeking to interpret Butler's life frankly, as he 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 63 
 
 would have wished, say it idly — what strikes me 
 as odd in the first of these two quotations, as 
 throughout Butler's own letters of this period, 
 is the intentness with which these Trinity men 
 observe one another as competitors for a definite 
 goal. The Fellowship may lie a year, or two 
 years, or three years ahead ; but it always looms. 
 And the rivalry is constantly generous. Still 
 it is there : a preoccupation as devout among 
 seniors and juniors as that of any racing-stable, 
 with A's "form," B's "condition," C's latest 
 " trial," D's " outside chance " : and from my 
 recollections of another University I cannot 
 fetch anything like it, even remotely. 
 
 A. J. B., as his letters prove, is no more in- 
 different to it than any other of his compeers. 
 He accepts and thoroughly enjoys his milieu — 
 it is just what with gentle pertinacity he has 
 been seeking ; and the Fellowship lies ahead. 
 He is patently one of the marked men, in the 
 running. As patently he is a shy horse, not a 
 certainty in the betting. He has his own way 
 of diffusing himself : he plays cricket and foot- 
 ball keenly but intermittently, after the fashion 
 
64 MEMOIR OF 
 
 of those days : he rows in the Third Trinity 
 third boat: 
 
 The May races began to-day. Alas, alas ; 
 alas, alas ! We, 3rd Trinity 3rd boat, got bumped 
 by 1st Trinity 5th. We were none of us in 
 training, and had never rowed together before. 
 They were. We had bad steering. They had 
 good. Perhaps we shall bump them back to- 
 morrow. (May II, 1864.) 
 
 He heeds not his tutor's sagacious coxmsel to 
 restrain the pursuit of mathematics to strict 
 limits of profit. He idles after the study, doing 
 too little while dallying with too much. He is 
 intrigued many times by the notion of carrying 
 the study on and into astronomy : 
 
 I had some delightful star-gazing the other 
 [night], through a big telescope of Coutts 
 Trotter's. I found him in the Court about 12, 
 and stayed looking at all sorts of things for about 
 an hour. He showed me a double star ; the 
 small one quite green, like an emerald ; and 
 many other pretty things. Observe Mars, rising 
 about 10 ; just in line with, and close to the 
 Twins, a little to the left of Orion. The 3 stars 
 make a beautiful object. Also look out for 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 65 
 
 shooting stars on the 13th. . . . Hoppett has 
 been made Head-porter. We suggested that 
 the Scholars would like to drink his health ; 
 but he did not see it in that light. (Nov. 11, 
 1864.) 
 
 I have had a letter from Brandreth, wherein 
 he recommends me to go in for the Sheepshanks' 
 Astronomical Exhibition this time next year. 
 The only objection is that it is not vacant until 
 the year after, when I shall not be compe- 
 tent. . . . But I am glad he thinks I may yet 
 do some good in that line. (Oct. 31, 1865.) 
 
 He was not well in health that summer. 
 The upshot was that he did rather miserably 
 in the Mathematical Tripos of 1867, getting 
 only a Junior Optime's place. He writes to 
 his mother : 
 
 In spite of my misfortunes I think I have 
 succeeded in remembering your birthday at 
 the right time this year. ... I hear that they 
 drew the line higher than usual : undoufctedly 
 the papers, 5th day especially, were much harder 
 than any I have ever seen. In fact, the pace 
 was too fast for me, particularly when I was 
 not in the very best condition. (Jan. 28, 
 1867.) 
 
 E 
 
66 MEMOIR OF 
 
 The worst of his ill-success is that it shakes 
 his nerve, and his usual sunny courage for the 
 moment deserts him at the prospect of the 
 Classical Tripos, to him far more important than 
 the Mathematical, and now close ahead : 
 
 I think both the luck and brains have passed 
 on to Billy .^. . . I am getting to feel worse than 
 I ever did before, except before Upper Divi- 
 sion Trials. It is all that abominable Math. 
 Tripos. ... I am afraid, too, that PoUock is 
 a little shaky. He has neglected his Classics 
 a little too much. On the whole our good year 
 will be a lamentable fiasco. There will probably 
 not be a single Double First. You need not be 
 afraid of my not doing all I can : only " can " 
 is a very variable expression. ... I do not 
 think I can miss a first class, but I am past being 
 astonished at anything. I shall most likely 
 do what I have never done yet, viz. lose my 
 head entirely. That is enough about me. . . . 
 (Feb. 5, 1867.) 
 
 Mrs. Butler, of course, shows this letter to 
 her husband, who loses no time in answering 
 it, with all the enlightened wisdom of love : 
 
 1 His younger brother, who had just passed into the India OiEce 
 by 'competition . 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 67 
 
 My dearest Arthur, — I write a line to go in 
 your Mother's letter, just to add my word, and 
 to beg you not to fash or fret or worry yourself 
 about the Classical Tripos. Just be calm and 
 cheerful, and all will come right. Of course, 
 we are all grieved at your disappointment in 
 the Math. Trip. But I have lived long enough 
 to see that such misfortunes are quite within 
 compass of retrievement. Cotton's case was 
 one in point. I remember how disappointed we 
 all were when he took his degree. Yet he was 
 the best man of his year, as was proved after- 
 wards, and as the Trinity people shewed that 
 they believed him to be, by electing him to a 
 Fellowship. Do not get out of heart or miserable 
 because a struggle lies before you. But gather 
 up your strength like a good fellow as you are, 
 and leave the result with Him, in whose wise 
 and loving hand all success and promotion lie. 
 God bless and keep you ever, my dearest 
 Child. 
 
 Your most loving Father, 
 
 W. J. B. 
 
 After all, the Classical Tripos of 1867 did 
 not prove to be the fiasco — " wash-out," I 
 believe, in the modern undergraduate's vernacu- 
 lar — of " our good year " so gloomily vaticinated. 
 
68 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Sandys of St. John's, to be sure (now Sir John 
 Sandys, and for many years Public Orator of 
 the University), was Senior Classic. But Pollock 
 was Second Classic ; Colvin, of Trinity (now 
 Sir Sidney Colvin), came third ; Cole, of King's, 
 fourth ; Daniell, of Trinity, fifth, with second 
 Chancellor's medal ; Cox, of St. John's, sixth ; 
 Warr, of Trinity Hall, seventh ; A. J. B. eighth. 
 I have omitted to say that, mathematically, 
 1867 was Niven of Trinity's year, with Clifford 
 of Trinity close up. 
 
 All the eight named as leading in the Classical 
 Tripos took- Fellowships ; and Dr. Jackson has 
 already told how A. J. B. won his, writing the 
 papers painfully with his left hand (in pencil, 
 by permission). He himself always averred that 
 this performance had really done the trick — 
 " The examiners probably said, ' If this chap 
 can do so well with his left hand, what would 
 he not do with his right ! ' " The telegrams 
 announcing his success, and characteristically 
 worded. All right, Arthur, found his father at 
 Liverpool, his mother at home at Wantage 
 " I think," wrote his father, " the servant who 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 69 
 
 placed the telegraphic message in my hands 
 must have set me down as crazy." 
 
 You cannot imagine the relief which it gave 
 me, nor what it is to see the hopes of 25 years 
 at last, after so many variations, crowned with 
 success. All those were absent with whom I 
 should have loved to speak . . . and my only real 
 relief was to thank, on my knees and with all my 
 heart, that good God and Father who has watched 
 over and blest you in all, and in your dearest 
 Mother and myself with so many mercies. 
 
 His mother wrote — and the reader will re- 
 mark how faithfully both parents' letters echo 
 and re-echo : 
 
 I cannot put off telling you how acceptably 
 your 2 words came in with 5 o'clock tea yester- 
 day. . . . We were all very glad together, 
 specially dear Grandpapa. I wrote off at once 
 to [she names various relatives and friends]. 
 Perhaps you will smile with a grain or more 
 of contempt at my caring, or these good people 
 caring, about the fulfilment of a wish dating from 
 a quarter of a century back. Your tendency 
 is to be " philosophical " and indifferent.^ . . . 
 
 ^ His sister, Mrs. Guinness, writes that, "even when he gained the 
 Fellowship at Trinity, he took it in a matter-of-fact way." 
 
70 MEMOIR OF 
 
 But do not, my darling, forget to thank God, 
 who is the giver of all good gifts, great or small. 
 . . . My thoughts will turn to the joy we should 
 have had in telling our dear Professor.^ 
 
 Sidney Colvin wrote : 
 
 Touche-ld / I shake your hand (the left one 
 under the circumstances). 
 
 And Stephen Fremantle, from ribald Oxford, 
 where he was now a Senior Student of Christ 
 Church : 
 
 There was an old Fellow of Trinity Who 
 raised a; + i to Infinity, and, in congratulating 
 you most heartily, I must be allowed to hope 
 that your life will be spent on some more useful 
 object. It is very gratifying that you should 
 have attained the great end of a Cambridge 
 young man's existence — and two Eton men out 
 of four is a good average. 
 
 Dr. Jackson (p. 49) would date A. J. B.'s 
 devotion to Dante from the autumn and spring 
 of 1868-9, when he and J. W. Clark read the 
 poet together. But I find an earlier hint in 
 a memorandum by his sister, Mrs. Knight 
 ("Emma"). 
 
 ' James Riddell had died the year before. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 71 
 
 After my eldest sister married, in 1866, 
 I became Arthur's chief companion at home. 
 We used to walk and talk together, and he let me 
 read Latin with him — Virgil and Catullus. I 
 have still a bit of translation from Catullus of 
 that date, with his corrections and comments. 
 In 1867 he spent some time at home while read- 
 ing for his Fellowship. There was a very heavy 
 fall of snow in March, and I remember our walks 
 over the Downs, sometimes finding ourselves 
 on the top of a hedge, the snowdrifts having 
 entirely filled the hollow road. It must have 
 been about this time that he told me of his am- 
 bition to bring out an edition of the Divina 
 Commedia. 
 
 But memories, at this distance of time, are 
 not to be cited as opposing evidence on so nice 
 a point, which, moreover, is of small importance. 
 A letter to his mother from the Engadine, dated 
 June 16, 1867, testifies more precisely that he 
 is becoming a skilful Alpinist. But mountain- 
 eering — the sacer furor montium, and secondary 
 passion of his life — shall be given a chapter to 
 itself by and by. 
 
 The first years of his Fellowship were perhaps 
 the blithest of A. J. B.'s life. He was young. 
 
72 MEMOIR OF 
 
 strong, and (like David) goodly to look at. In- 
 tellectually, though in some respects his mental 
 powers were late in developing, he had come to 
 his own. He was sensitively impressionable to 
 the arts, especially to poetry and music (for 
 which his love lasted, although his interest in new 
 composers declined somewhat in later life) ; and 
 —thanks to his mother, who had an almost 
 fierce horror of anything that pretended to be 
 the best and was not — ^he knew how to choose. 
 His mind was eagerly, affectionately inquisitive 
 about all created things, from men and women 
 to birds, flowers, stones ; and with men he 
 had an air of accost, gay, imperturbably free 
 and open and charming and self-assured (because 
 unconscious, as it was guiltless, of arriere pensie), 
 which engaged them to be friends before they 
 knew it. He had won the prize on which his 
 heart, and others for his sake, had been set — as I 
 see it, too intently. Still, it was won. Moreover, 
 he was of the age, being unspoilt, to fall in love ; 
 and meanwhile, being unspoilt, he brought home 
 to Wantage the same boyish loyal affection as ever. 
 Yet his sisters note that his reserve, always 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 73 
 
 instinctive on some matters, had to be spread 
 now to extend over some others. As I have 
 tried to show, in this atmosphere of solicitous 
 family love Arthur had from the first to guard, 
 and did guard unconsciously, his spirit's freedom. 
 He had now, more consciously, to preserve (as 
 Marcus Aurelius terms it) " with perfect sweet- 
 ness the independence of solitude " among those 
 whose feelings he could least bear to offend. 
 For at Cambridge he had become, as he remained 
 to the end, a Liberal, in practical politics as in 
 habit of mind. The figure of Gladstone fas- 
 cinated him ; and not only as a commandingly 
 great figure, or as the figure of Liberal ideas 
 personified, but also as the figure of a great 
 Church layman. His sister Grace's words put 
 it very simply and truly : 
 
 It seems to me that Arthur's was a very con- 
 servative nature in religious and personal matters. 
 Although in politics he was a strong Liberal, 
 yet the early atmosphere influenced him through 
 life, and he remained true to his bringing up in 
 religious ways, though always reserved in ex- 
 pressing any views. His father was his ideal of 
 
74 MEMOIR OF 
 
 what a clergyman should be, and the standard 
 by which he judged all the other clergy. 
 
 Here — so constant was A. J. B. to home 
 — I may quite fittingly introduce some recollec- 
 tions of him by Archdeacon Houblon, at one 
 time assistant curate at Wantage ; though 
 they actually date from 1873 : 
 
 Butler never failed to put in an appear- 
 ance at the Vicarage at the great Church Festivals. 
 Home had an amazingly close hold upon him, 
 and amidst the throng of worshippers in the 
 old Parish Church, Butler was always to be 
 seen on these occasions at the eight o'clock 
 service with his mother and sisters and younger 
 brother. 
 
 In those days the Curates always shared the 
 breakfast and midday meal at the Vicarage, 
 and I, as the son of an old and intimate friend 
 of the Vicar's, was a frequent guest at supper 
 also. Butler always had a hearty and kindly 
 welcome for his Father's Curates, as soon as he 
 got to know them, and he seemed to take a real 
 interest in them individually, and kept in touch 
 with them in their after careers. 
 
 The life at the Vicarage was a strenuous life 
 indeed, and in earlier days almost Spartan in its 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 75 
 
 simplicity ; the wants of the Parish always 
 came first ; but the family circle was distinguished 
 beyond any other circle that I have ever known, 
 I think, for intellectual capacity and brilliant 
 wit, combined with family affection and deep 
 religious conviction, 
 
 Butler's great ability and independence of 
 judgment always imprressed us curates greatly, 
 at those Festival home-comings of which I spoke 
 just now. He never lost his love for the old 
 home of his childhood, and the impress of that 
 home upon his character was never lost in after 
 life. During the last quarter of the Nineteenth 
 Century young men of the front rank in intel- 
 lectual capacity commonly held but loosely to the 
 cardinal truths of revealed Christianity ; but 
 Butler always clung to the Church of England, 
 its system and religious observances, and at the 
 last asked that he might be buried in Wantage 
 Cemetery. I have always understood that the 
 remembrance of his Mother's early teaching, 
 and reverence for her character and intellect 
 and devotion, were in no small degree responsible 
 for this. 
 
 The other side of his character with which I 
 was specially brought into contact in later years 
 concerns his great social gifts and his love of 
 outdoor life. He had a keen interest in all 
 
76 MEMOIR OF 
 
 kinds of sport and athletic contests. Though 
 not himself a sportsman, i.e. not himself ad- 
 dicted to shooting and hunting, he was eminently 
 sportsmanlike, both in character and action. 
 He was a great walker, devoted to nature and 
 outdoor life ; he loved the Berkshire dov^Tis, 
 the Surrey hills, and the seaside beauties of the 
 lovely West of England coasts: but his chief 
 delight was in foreign travel. I was more than 
 once his fellow-traveller in his beloved Tirol, 
 He was an ardent member of the Alpine Club; 
 his knowledge of that beautiful country, his 
 familiarity with both German and Italian, his 
 untiring energy and his fast friendship with his 
 Tirol guides, combined to make him a delightful 
 travelling companion. On my first trip with him 
 I freely confess that I was outpaced by him and 
 got a bit overdone ; but I shall never forget a 
 tour which he planned in London for the summer 
 of 1890, and planned so well that, favoured 
 by fine weather, we ascended four peaks in 
 the Ortler District, including the Konig Spitz 
 and the Adamello, and crossed, I think, three high 
 Passes, accomplishing each item in the programme 
 on the exact day for which he had planned it, 
 and parted at Botzen, I for Ober Ammergau. 
 and he for further rambles in his beloved 
 mountains. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER ^^ 
 
 In fact, to get Butler at his best you had (as 
 I can vouch) to take him on a hohday and com- 
 bine that holiday with plenty of strenuous 
 exercise, frank talk, and a something craggy to 
 revert unto at intervals and knock the mind 
 upon. I recall one such holiday in which the 
 something craggy was provided by a few sheets 
 of the Shakespeare 1623 Folio (in cheap reprint, 
 so that it mattered not when they got mixed up 
 with the sandwiches), and my obstinacy that 
 Shakespeare, to be understood, must be read 
 in that form. And I could have taken oath that 
 A. J. B. must have run a dead heat with " the 
 grave man, nick-named Adam"— a poetical in- 
 vention — as the perfect tutor for an Oxford 
 or a Cambridge reading-party, even before I had 
 for proof the following joyous pages contributed 
 by Mr, Walter Herries Pollock : 
 
 Mr. Pollock's Narrative of Clovelly 
 
 When as a recent undergraduate at Trinity, 
 Cambridge, I was introduced to Arthur Butler, 
 then a young don of brilliant past and future, 
 I recognised, very slightly altered, the Captain 
 
78 MEMOIR OF 
 
 of the Oppidans, whom I, a Colleger in his first half, 
 had constantly wa;tched with distant admiration 
 as he walked up chapel to his own place. I saw 
 close the qualities I had guessed at and admired 
 from afar — decision, alertness, a thoroughly well- 
 groomed air of one neither bashful nor over- 
 confident, a kind of friendly strength with a 
 touch of aloofness — ^how can one describe these 
 first impressions of youth with any accuracy ? 
 Anyhow, I counted it a good day when we met, 
 and the later day when Arthur became my coach 
 was one of the best days possible in many senses. 
 I do not suppose it happens very often that a 
 schoolboy's unspoken hero-worship grows after- 
 wards into the relations of Coach and pupil at 
 a University, and thence into a life-long and un- 
 broken friendship. What I am to write about 
 here, however, is a reading-party which Butler took 
 to Clovelly in the year 1870. There were three 
 pupils with him. The late Canon Valpy was one. 
 Freeman (son, I think, of a distinguished cleric) and 
 I were the other two. Clovelly then had hardly 
 been " discovered " in the modern sense ; the one 
 small tourist steamer seldom invaded the place ; 
 the commimication with Lundy Island was by sail ; 
 and it was easy enough from what one saw to 
 reconstruct the Clovelly that figures in Kingsley's 
 Two Years Ago. The inhabitants of the strange 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 79 
 
 precipitous village had mostly the beautiful 
 Devonian courtesy to begin with, and when, 
 Butler as always showing us the way, we got 
 beyond the stage of acquaintance, we found 
 among them friends whom after all these years 
 it is a joy to remember. Chief among them was 
 John Mill, who was acknowledged as the leading 
 spirit . He was boat-builder, mariner, philosopher, 
 and no doubt much else if one had found it 
 out. Among other things, he had been at a small 
 boys' school with Charles Kingsley ; and we owed 
 much to his taking us by the hand. 
 
 Before jotting down a few of the memories of 
 that singularly happy reading-party, I want to 
 say a few words in recognition and memory 
 of Butler's unusually fine qualities as Coach for 
 such a party. He was always bright, he had a 
 never-failing sense of humour, he was always 
 bon camarade, he never dragged on the reins, but 
 by a quiet unexpressed authority and example, 
 he made one work in working hours just as he 
 made one row cheerfully in a tiring sea when 
 need was for hard rowing. Moreover, his tact 
 was invaluable whenever there was the least hint 
 of pretensions and dissensions in the party. 
 No one could be out of tune or temper for long 
 when he was about. The instance used above 
 belongs to one of his happiest enterprises. He 
 
8o MEMOIR OF 
 
 found out — ^he was always finding out things, or 
 rather the village willingly told him things — 
 that there was a disused coast-guard gig for sale 
 at a very reasonable price. He called us into 
 conclave, and with very little discussion we 
 bought it, selling it again when we left at a reason- 
 able loss. The boat could be sailed ; Butler on 
 fit occasions sailed her himself, and how he knew 
 so many practical things I often wondered ; but 
 for the most part we rowed, and mighty good 
 rowing in beautiful seas it was. The only diffi- 
 culty we ever had has been indicated. The 
 sky grew suddenly overcast ; our Coach and 
 Captain foresaw a touch of a squall coining ; by 
 his direction and showing we rowed hard for 
 home, getting in just before his prescience was 
 justified. There were many fishing expeditions 
 in our own gig and in real fishing-boats; one 
 night expedition after congers is vivid in memory 
 because of its picturesque aspect and because of 
 the exceeding strength and cunning of the congers. 
 The fisherman in command— I think it was John 
 Mill — ^had seen to it that the tackle was very 
 strong and the bait very attractive. So the 
 congers found it, and thereout sucked no small 
 advantag:e ; for they bit right through the tackle 
 time after time, until the bait was exhausted and 
 we were well into the small hours. I think but 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 8i 
 
 for Arthur 's unfailing energy and cheeriness, the 
 party returning up the steep street to Mrs. Lee's 
 comfortable roof might have been somewhat 
 fractious. 
 
 On all such expeditions he had, generally, 
 a vastly pleasant companion in the person of 
 Tib (short for Tilburina), a beautiful Skye terrier 
 of unimpeachable birth and breeding, a present 
 to Butler from Mrs. Clark, mother of the late 
 John WUlis Clark, better -known to his number- 
 less friends as J. W., or, later, J. 
 
 Mrs. Clark was a remarkable and (to those 
 who " got on " with her) a delightful old lady ; 
 but she was not easily pleased, and it certainly 
 was not to every young man that she would 
 have given one of her famous Skye terriers. 
 
 For Tib, she was as charming in character 
 as she was in aspect, and soon after our first 
 acquaintance she admitted me to a special friend- 
 ship, whereof Butler, unlike some dog-lovers and 
 dog-owners, showed never a shade of jealousy; 
 which may be emphasised by one instance of his 
 devotion to her — her devotion to him was obvious 
 at every minute. We went a-sailing one day in 
 the regulation smack to Lundy, accompanied 
 by some young folk then staying at Clovelly 
 Court, and of course by Tib. When we got to 
 Lundy through the glory of a fringe of Atlantic 
 
82 MEMOIR OF 
 
 rollers, there was exploration galore to beguile 
 us all: consequently the appointed time was 
 near overrun : we had to embark in hot haste : 
 and only when it was too late to put back we 
 discovered that Tib was marooned on Lundy. 
 Lamentations were great, and I saw that Butler 
 was really distressed, but as usual he gave no 
 sign that any who did not watch him closely 
 could possibly discern. Next day he made up 
 his mind to go and fetch Tib, in whatever kind 
 of boat he could find that was at all fit for the 
 trajet. With the help of John Mill, he accom- 
 plished it in the face of a good many difficulties. 
 It must have been at best a singularly comfortless 
 voyage ; but he came back smiling with Tib in 
 his arms. Then there was a great matter of 
 starting for the first time a real lifeboat for 
 Clovelly, and, again under Arthur's lead, we 
 were all enlisted as members of the first committee, 
 and felt, I hope, duly honoured. Among other 
 results of this it came about that our leader 
 thought of a theatrical show to swell the funds. 
 We settled on two Maddison Morton farces, and 
 Butler characteristically cast himself for two 
 small parts, but was simply invaluable in getting 
 our friends the villagers to improvise a very 
 practicable stage in a boat-house, which held 
 quite a paying audience. He had put me into, 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 83 
 
 in each case, a rattling part of the Charles 
 Mathews kind, therefore not at all easy to 
 learn. At the last moment I was obliged to 
 drop out, having to go into mourning, and he 
 leapt into the breach, learnt both parts to per- 
 fection, and played them with an unaffected ease 
 and liveliness that were alone enough to carry off 
 the whole show. One part was full of intricate, 
 tricky " business," every point in which he took 
 up as if he had been rehearsing for weeks. 
 
 These be but toys in themselves : yet they 
 are no negligible part of the whole impression 
 made on me at the time when I saw Arthur most 
 constantly, most closely. That the friendship 
 then knit never suffered break nor tangle in after 
 life, when we grew, as men do, to seem much about 
 the same age — that is truly a possession for 
 ever. 
 
 He was at Clovelly in six consecutive years, 
 from 1866 to 1871. This chapter must close with 
 the tale of another reading-party, and a sadder 
 one. The name of Stephen James Fremantle 
 has once or twice occurred in these pages. He 
 was born April 2, 1845, the fifth and youngest 
 son of Lord Cottesloe. At Eton (Miss Evans' 
 house, with Dr. Balston and William Johnson, 
 
84 MEMOIR OF 
 
 author of lonica, for his tutors) he became one 
 of A. J. B.'s closest friends. He won the Prince 
 Consort's Prize for French in 1859, and the 
 Newcastle in 1863. His name and A. J. B.'s 
 appear next to each other in the School Lists 
 from 1861 to 1863. Mrs. Butler writes, when 
 both were selected for the Newcastle (letter un- 
 dated, but probably 1861), " I like Arthur and 
 Fremantle being bracketed : it will cement their 
 friendship." 
 
 He went with a scholarship to Balliol ; took 
 a Double First : was elected a Senior Student 
 of Christ Church, and Tutor in 1867 ; and in 
 1869 took Orders. 
 
 In August 1874 he captained a reading-party 
 of tutors and undergraduates to Newquay, Corn- 
 wall — Scott Holland (now Canon), Frank Paget 
 (late Bishop of Oxford), and Arthur Acland 
 were the tutors ; Laurence Hardy (M.P.), Luke 
 Paget (now Bishop of Stepney), Spencer Holland, 
 E. B. Reynardson, F. Greenwood, and two others 
 named Denison and Day were the undergraduates. 
 Nearly all of them fell ill — Frank Paget and Laur- 
 ence Hardy dangerously — of typhoid from the 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 85 
 
 water of Newquay. Stephen Fremantle died at 
 his home — Swanbourne, Winslow, Bucks — on Sep- 
 tember 1 6th. He had spent the previous Easter 
 at Wantage, and helped in the services in church. 
 
 I am afraid [writes A. J. B., two days before] 
 my dear friend Fremantle is very ill. I have 
 heard nothing directly from them for some 
 time : but I hear through our architect Hawkins, 
 whose nephew has also had the fever, that there 
 is a bad account of him. If he dies, the only 
 perfectly good man I know in the world wUl 
 have left it. James Riddell was the only other 
 I have ever known, and he died just eight years 
 ago. One hardly knows whether it is right to 
 wish that such people, to whom it must be a gain 
 to die, should stay here. 
 
 I have heard since his own death that Butler 
 could never hear Newquay mentioned without 
 bitter objurgations, and would never go there 
 to the end of his life, though he was staying 
 close by in 1907. That is true, though not true 
 in fact. Once — ^late in his life, when he was 
 visiting me — I proposed a visit to the holy well 
 in Holywell Bay, one of the loveliest scenes in 
 Cornwall. Four of us were to make the party 
 
86 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 and from Holywell to walk over towards the 
 exhumed fifth-century church of Saint Piran. 
 All was arranged when I, charged with "personal 
 conduct " of the tramp, happened to mention 
 that we must detrain at Newquay. A. J. B. 
 merely said that he held that place in aversion; 
 and I (then not in the least knowing why he 
 did so) assured him that we would avoid the town, 
 and on leaving the railway station take the first 
 cut-across to the left for the Gannell River, 
 Pentire, and Crantock. This we did, Butler 
 walking with us and keeping an unusual silence ; 
 nor was it until we reached the summit of West 
 Pentire that his gaiety returned. I knew him 
 to be in ailing health — he had, indeed, entered 
 the shadow of his last illness — and I attributed 
 his clouded mood to this cause. It was some 
 years before I learned the true one : since with 
 the same delicacy which had restrained him from 
 upsetting the little expedition he afterwards for- 
 bore to tell what would have marred, with one 
 pang of self-reproach, my recollections of a day 
 not (I believe) on the whole unhappy for him 
 and for me in my ignorance purely pleasant. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Whitehall — Marriage— Weybridge — Dante 
 1870— 1887 
 
 In 1870 A. J. B. left Cambridge for London. 
 He read for the bar for three months, but then 
 received an appointment as Examiner in the 
 Education Department, Whitehall. 
 
 His roots in Trinity were reluctantly torn up ; 
 and his new occupation pelded him small solace. 
 Truth to say, he was never adaptable to the Civil 
 Service, or, at any rate, to his branch of it ; and 
 did his work, albeit punctually and thoroughly, 
 yet critically and without any pretences at enthu- 
 siasm. The Education Office since 1902, presided 
 over by Presidents who in expeditious and fre- 
 quent succession have used it for a stepping-stone 
 or halting-place in their political careers, is, even 
 
 to-day, a public scandal. We have only so far 
 
 87 
 
88 MEMOIR OF 
 
 advanced that, since 1902, its officials are allowed 
 to have hopes and have them thwarted. In 1870, 
 and for years after, they were not even allowed 
 to hope. The " Department " consisted in a 
 dull, grinding machine, and Butler was caught 
 into the machinery. He was not the man to 
 be happy in its clutch. 
 
 The following note by his friend and colleague, 
 Mr. H. W. Hamilton-Hoare, makes this clear 
 enough. Butler's friendship with Hoare (the 
 " Hamilton " was prefixed in later life) dated from 
 Eton. Oxford (Balliol) and Cambridge parted 
 them, and the pair had lost sight one of another. 
 
 But in 1870 we were both given a post in the 
 Education Office under Sir F. Sandford and Mr. 
 Forster. Much of the work at that time was 
 mechanical and deadly dull. This part of it was 
 largely regulated by carefully recorded " pre- 
 cedents," which, in the administration of the 
 " Annual Grant " to Elementary Schools, were our 
 Bible. But "precedents" had no terrors for 
 Butler, nor did he burn incense to thern. On 
 the contrary he challenged them right and left, 
 and picked great holes in them at every conceiv- 
 able opportunity. But here his interest was apt 
 to end. Vital points of our administrative detail, 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 89 
 
 such as the sufficiency of wash-hand basins or 
 of pupil teachers, offered no attractions to him 
 whatever. He preferred Dante and other wholly- 
 unofficial seers. The result was that, as an ad- 
 ministrator, Butler fell short of success. None 
 the less for that many of his colleagues delighted 
 in breaking a literary lance with him. Among 
 such were F. T. Palgrave and W. J. Courthope, 
 and our deeply lamented Sidney Joyce, the 
 Charles Lamb of the Office. 
 
 After some seventeen years Butler could 
 stand it no longer, and sought a less tmcongenial 
 occupation. We were sorry enough to lose him. 
 Anyway, his sedentary life had not impaired his 
 vigour, as anyone will testify who ever walked 
 with (or. after) him on Alpine heights. 
 
 Reconstructing the portrait from many hints, 
 I see the A. J. B. of this time as a good-looking, 
 clean-limbed, and entirely clean-hearted young 
 man ; full of zest in life, but a trifle " viewy " 
 and highly disputatious ; with a monocle, and 
 something more than a touch of the Trinity S^pi'i : 
 and if anyone demand what precisely I mean by 
 this he shaU have, in lieu of definition, an anec- 
 dote. A young friend of mine, a Wykehamist, was 
 once set to read the late Mr. A. W. Kinglake's 
 
go MEMOIR OF 
 
 Eothen for a holiday task. At the end of the 
 holidays he confessed to me that he had read but 
 a dozen pages and knew nothing about the book 
 except that " the man came from Trinity College, 
 Cambridge." "Well, and so he did," said I ; 
 " though I don't recall the passage yielding that 
 information." " Nor I," said he. " I have only 
 read twelve pages ; but I hadn't read three be- 
 fore I'd have bet five to one on that." Now 
 this anecdote conveys, under show of malice, a 
 sincere tribute ; and Cambridge men (Trinity 
 men included) will understand just what is 
 meant when I add an extract from A. J. B.'s 
 diary as a pendant : 
 
 Oct. I, '86.— W. H. Thompson, Master of Trin- 
 ity, died. A typical Cambridge man : fastidious, 
 accurate, intolerant of slovenly word, thought, or 
 work : a Greek Professor who published nothing 
 but one dialogue of Plato : critical rather than 
 constructive. A few such men are indispensable, 
 but one cannot live on salt. 
 
 I have used the word " viewy." A. J. B. — 
 constant as ever to family ties — at once, on coming 
 to London, took up his residence with his equally 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 91 
 
 constant Aunt Lizzie (Miss Barnett) at 6 Onslow 
 Square, S.W. ; but he had, during the latter part 
 of his Cambridge career, opened his mind to a 
 Liberalism which perturbed his parents. As 
 early as 1865 Arthur had joined the since famous 
 society of Cambridge " Apostles." His father 
 wrote (Dec. 5th) : 
 
 I honestly own that, when I first heard of 
 it, SidvSixa fiepfiripi^a. Yet, after some thought, 
 the balance of my feelings is on the afSxmative 
 or approving side. There is no doubt that by 
 joining them you get the benefit of a strong 
 traditional intellectual atmosphere — which in some 
 respects is exactly what I wanted for you, and 
 which — as it seems, as Trinity now is — it is hard 
 to find elsewhere. Also you become linked with a 
 number of amiable brethren who, according to 
 my experience, are always ready to back up one 
 another, and have, moreover, from the position 
 of many of them, a good opportunity of doing so. 
 But you will easily believe, my precious chUd, 
 that to my mind all this would be dearly bought if 
 you were induced to give in exchange (as too many 
 have given) simplicity — ^naturalness of mind and 
 manner — and, above all, that sweet firm Faith in 
 your early training, and in definite theological 
 Truth, which it has been the joy of aU those who. 
 
92 MEMOIR OF 
 
 have loved you the best and longest to see abiding 
 in you. I know, and you know, that the tendency 
 of the mass of intellectual men, just now, is Hke 
 that of the philosophers whom Gibbon describes — 
 to think " all religion equally false," which is only 
 another form of thinking them all equally true. 
 There is something very " exalting " to some 
 minds in standing outside of all religions, and 
 looking down contemptuously and with pitying 
 criticism upon " the humbled insects." But that 
 will only hold good for a few years in the hey-day 
 of youth and hope : and there is — depend upon it 
 — a terrible retribution not far off in the famine 
 of the heart in after years, when this has past 
 away and nothing is left to supply it. 
 
 Some words in the above may raise a smile : 
 but the understanding reader will rather detect 
 its pathos — ^the fallacy of dread in a parent 
 that having taken infinite pains and spared no 
 expense to give his son the best liberal education 
 to be had in England, if not in the world, that 
 son shall, after all, grow up to think for himself. 
 
 The claim to this right, so cheerfully insisted 
 on by A. J. B., obviously raised heart-burnings in 
 the vicarage at home. Friends were consulted, 
 and under date May 8, 1872, we find Dr. Liddon 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 93. 
 
 writing to Miss Barnett from Christ Church, 
 Oxford : 
 
 I am very glad that Arthur is Uving with you, 
 and that you are able to talk freely with him about 
 his opinions. A young man generally makes a 
 " grand tour " of the world of opinion, at any rate 
 in political and social matters, before he finally 
 settles down. If he fears God, and tries to keep 
 out of moral evil and says his prayers, he may 
 profess some eccentricities, but he will come to be 
 all right in the end. It is a great thing to be tender 
 and — so far as possible — patient with him while 
 he throws his intellectual limbs about. He has 
 yet to find out that there are many truths and 
 considerations which have to be taken into 
 account, but of which he has not thought ; and 
 if he is not sent to Coventry (I do not mean that 
 you are likely to send A. there) he will do justice 
 to them in time. The Commune ^ itself embodies 
 some true and good principles amid a mass of 
 selfishness and brutality, and it is the former 
 which have laid hold on A.'s mind. He will find 
 that, to be really respected, these principles must 
 be upheld by some more worthy system. 
 
 We did not talk very much yesterday, except 
 about some few social and University questions. 
 
 1 A. J. B. ran over to Paris in 1871 for tliree days, when the Tuileriee 
 was still smoking. Also he had made friends with a French Communist 
 in London — a bookbinder — ^in whose views he took a keen interest. 
 
94 MEMOIR OF 
 
 In the present state of minds at the Universities 
 it is a great thing if a man continues to fear — and 
 to try to love — God. The heathenism which has 
 set in with the University Reform movement is 
 far worse than any aberrations in poUtics, and I 
 shall be very glad if Arthur marries early and 
 finds in the duties of home life some practical 
 arguments against the speculative rubbish to 
 which he is probably exposed at Cambridge. 
 Meanwhile he is in very good hands, and I hope 
 that before long I may see more of him. I am, 
 my dear Miss Barnett, 
 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 H. P. LiDDON. 
 
 This letter, admirably calculated to soothe 
 the perturbations of a maiden aunt, may or may 
 not have been passed on to Arthur by Miss 
 Barnett. At all events he continued to think for 
 himself. The trouble was not his peculiarly, but a 
 malady most incident to honest, thoughtful young 
 men of that time, as all readers of Tom Brown at 
 Oxford will remember ; and with Arthur it had 
 a great deal more to do with politics than with 
 religion. He stood in no danger, I believe, either 
 then or at any time of his life, of ceasing to fear 
 or to love God : and if his elders insisted on 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 95 
 
 confusing political Liberalism with irreligion, why 
 then it was (as it always will be) so much the 
 worse for the elders. A. J. B. had become a 
 Liberal in politics, and a Liberal he remained to 
 the last. To the last he kept up a fierce particular 
 hatred of " Jingoism " as personified in Disraeli 
 and Disraeli's successors, and the entry in his 
 diary recording Disraeli's death is implacable : 
 
 April 19, '81. — Benjamin Disraeli died at 
 4.30 A.M., aged 76. Probably no man of our time 
 did more harm to English poHtics ; rather, I 
 think, from a cynical contempt for all English 
 ways of thought than from any bad disposition. 
 He was probably a Jew, or rather a pagan, at 
 heart to the end of his days, and far more Asiatic 
 than European. He died with one hand clasped 
 by two peers whom he had created, and the 
 other held by a quack doctor. . . . His last in- 
 telligible words were, " I am overwhelmed." 
 
 His liberalism, however, was a habit of mind, 
 not a faggot of opinions, out of which if one were 
 taken the whole dropped to pieces. It was con- 
 sistent with reverence for the past and for all 
 things Catholic ; and indeed his mind saw it 
 based on such reverence. It was consistent 
 
96 MEMOIR OF 
 
 with the devoutest churchmanship. It was con- 
 sistent, above all, with a noble courtesy in action 
 and in defence of his principles. I will illustrate 
 this (although my narrative has already run too 
 far ahead of chronology) by two extracts relating 
 to the Cambridge (University) election of 1882, 
 when Professor Stuart, Liberal, in a forlorn hope, 
 opposed Mr., Cecil Raikes, the Conservative candi- 
 date. A. J. B. helped Stuart's candidature while 
 refusing — for reasons that will appear — to join 
 his Committee. 
 
 Diary, Nov. 1882. — Cambridge election has 
 been the chief business this week. Polling began 
 on Thursday. By Saturday Raikes was 400 or 
 so ahead of Stuart. Of course there are a few who 
 only see one point clearly, and therefore vote for 
 the man who is supposed to agree with them on 
 that one. But mostly it is sheer asininity or 
 
 hatred of "that d d intellect." Nov. 28.— 
 
 Poll at Cambridge closed. Raikes 3491, Stuart 
 1301. 
 
 Letter to A .J. B. from Ms Mother, Nov. zyth. — 
 I hope that you are not disappointed albeit sorry 
 that your man is not in. I must tell you that 
 both Father and I quite guessed why your name 
 was not on Mr, Stuart's Committee before we 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 97 
 
 heard it for certain, and we felt that it was Hke 
 our own old Boy. But Father said directly that, 
 had he known how it would be, he would not have 
 given his name to be put on Mr. Raikes' list, 
 because "it is fair that the young ones should 
 have a chance." 
 
 The story seems to me equally creditable to 
 the independence and to the filial delicacy of a 
 man who has passed his thirty-eighth birthday. 
 
 Among the houses where Butler found a 
 welcome in London was that of his father's old 
 friend, the Rev. William Gilson Humphry, ^ Vicar 
 of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, by Trafalgar Square. 
 In January 1872, at a little Christmas dance at 
 St. Martin's Vicarage, Arthur Butler and his 
 brother — the first two guests to arrive — ^were re- 
 ceived at the door of the room by Mrs. Humphry, 
 her eldest daughter, aged eighteen, standing by 
 in her first white ball-dress. Two younger sisters 
 sat in the background, looking on ; and of these 
 
 * WiUiartt Gilson Humphry had been Fellow of Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, and Chancellor's Medallist. He took Orders and was 
 resident chaplain to Bishop Blomfield, who gave him the living of 
 Northolt in Middlesex. In 1856 he became Vicar of St. Martin's- 
 in-the-Fields, Charing Cross, and held this cure until his death in 1886. 
 He married Caroline Maria D'Oyly, only daughter of Dr. D'Oyly, 
 rector of Lambeth and Sundridge, and joint-editor of D'Oyly and 
 Mant's Commentary of the Bible. 
 
 a 
 
98 MEMOIR OF 
 
 one (Mary Caroline), aged sixteen-and-a-half, 
 remarked to her junior, " Is it not extraordinary 
 to think that one of us might marry one of those 
 two men ? " It was an idle thought, not recalled 
 until long after. The young Cambridge don 
 and the young girl in the background made 
 scarcely an acquaintance that evening. 
 
 The next summer Mr. Humphry and his 
 family were invited to spend their holiday at 
 Lockinge House, Berkshire, to be company for 
 his old friend and parishioner Lord Overstone 
 (then aged seventy-seven), whose son-in-law and 
 daughter (then Colonel and Mrs. Loyd Lindsay) 
 had gone abroad. 
 
 I give the rest of the narrative as it has been 
 communicated to me : 
 
 The day after we arrived at Lockinge, Mr. 
 Butler, Vicar of Wantage (two miles off), drove 
 himself over in his pony-carriage to inspect the 
 Lockinge schools and came to luncheon with us. 
 It was the first time we girls had ever seen him, 
 and he fixed his eye-glass firmly in his eye and 
 inspected us thoroughly. He was delighted at 
 meeting his old college friend, and he always made 
 
ARTHUR JOUN BUTLER 99 
 
 much of girls ; and his one regret was that we 
 should just miss getting to know his daughters, who 
 nearly matched us in age — as he and his family 
 were starting for their holiday abroad in two 
 days' time. The only thing to be done was for 
 him to make my mother promise to come to tea 
 that very afternoon ; and he went off. When 
 my mother and sister drove over a little later to 
 Wantage Vicarage it was to find that an accident 
 had happened. Mr, Butler's pony had run away 
 and he had been thrown out of the carriage and 
 badly hurt. The only thing he could say and 
 kept repeating after he was picked up was, " Mrs. 
 Humphry is coming to tea, Mrs. Humphry is 
 coming to tea." His back was injured, and he 
 had to stay in bed for many weeks. Of course 
 the holiday was given up, and this seeming mis- 
 chance brought about a close intimacy between 
 our two families. Lord Overstone invited the 
 Miss Butlers to come and stay at Lockinge, and 
 great was the fun and many were the gallops we 
 had together over the Berkshire downs on any 
 suitable steeds that could be found. There was 
 much conversation about the beloved and brilliant 
 brother Arthur, but he did not appear upon the 
 scenes at that time, being I think slightly bored 
 at the prospect of meeting a party of girls. More- 
 over he grew his beard first that summer. It 
 was in the autumn of 1873 that his visits to St. 
 
loo MEMOIR OF 
 
 Martin's Vicarage became frequent, and we met 
 often at the Saturday Popular Concerts at St. 
 James' Hall and used to walk back to Onslow 
 Square (where he lived with Miss Barnett) when 
 his sisters were staying there. My sisters and I 
 had no brothers, and our parents wished us to go 
 in for the Cambridge Local Examinations, which 
 were a novelty in those days for girls educated 
 at home. We passed successfully ; and I won a 
 Scholarship at Bedford College (1873), which, 
 however, I did not take up. All this interested 
 Arthur : and I remember his surprise at finding 
 I had already read the three parts of the Divina 
 Commedia in Italian. Dances and chance meet- 
 ings brought closer intimacy, and we became 
 engaged February 8, 1874. 
 
 They were married on April 6, 1875,^ at St. 
 Martin's Church ; and so A. J. B. entered into a 
 good fortune of which, as it lasted to the end of 
 his life, to the end it was his first and happiest 
 and most constant service to show himself worthy. 
 In February 1874, on the morrow of his betrothal, 
 he had written : 
 
 I feel rather like Polycrates : ^ but nowadays 
 one is not allowed to choose what one will throw 
 
 ' A wedding cake, in accordance with tradition, was duly sent to 
 the High Table at Trinity. • Herodotus iii. 40. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER loi 
 
 away — so that one can only fall back upon In all 
 time of our wealth . . . 
 
 And in later days, when I knew him, his sense 
 of human affection remained so fresh, almost so 
 bojdsh, that his voice shook in reading these 
 lines (of an unknown Elizabethan) : 
 
 Love, they wrong thee much 
 That say thy sweet is bitter. 
 
 When thy rich fruit is such 
 
 As nothing can be sweeter. 
 Fair house of joy and bliss. 
 Where truest treasure is, 
 I do adore thee : 
 
 1 know thee what thou art, 
 I serve thee with my heart. 
 
 And fall before thee. 
 
 The engagement had been a great happiness 
 to both families ; and Miss Barnett as usual 
 played the fairy godmother to her nephew and 
 godson, not only by making him in part her heir 
 during her lifetime, but by turning out of 6 Onslow 
 Square and leaving the newly married couple the 
 greater part of the furniture, books, pictures, 
 
102 MEMOIR OF 
 
 china, etc.^ Here A. J. B.'s first child (Frances 
 Mary) was born, on January 29, 1876 — his mother's 
 birthday ; and here, in the small garden at the 
 back, repose the bones of Tilburina, the faithful 
 and the beautiful. 
 
 The society in South Kensington was friendly 
 as well as intellectual in those days — the early 
 days of the Bach Choir, to which young Mrs. 
 Butler belonged ; the days when Mme. Gold- 
 schmidt — Jenny Lind — took the sopranos and 
 altos for private practice in her own house, and 
 warbled still inimitable notes from her beautiful 
 throat ; and Butler returned from his daily 
 drudgery in Whitehall to a milieu in which his 
 heart could be well content. Just here I happen, 
 in his diary, upon a laconic entry : — 
 
 Jan. 10, 1876. — Began to translate Pufg. 
 
 His translation of The Purgatory (published 
 in 1880) was cast in literal prose of set purpose, 
 to continue Carlyle's work. Dr. Carlyle's consent 
 having been asked and accorded ; but I think 
 he must have, then or later, dallied with other 
 
 • She went to live at Wantage, and died there in 1900. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 103 
 
 temptations. At any rate I find among his 
 undated papers this rendering of Purg. xxvii. 
 94-109 :— 
 
 It was the hour, I think, when on the mount 
 First from the Orient Cytherea beam'd, 
 Who ever seems with fire of love aflame, 
 That in my dreams methought a dame I saw 
 Youthful and fair, who went about a land 
 And gather'd flowers, and in her song she said — 
 " Whoso my name enquireth, let him know 
 'Tis Leah, and as I go I move around 
 These my fair hands to twine myself a wreath. 
 For pleasure at the glass I deck myself : 
 But never doth my sister Rachel stir 
 Forth from her mirror, but sits all the day. 
 She to behold her own fair eyes is fain 
 As I to deck myself with these my hands : 
 Her to contemplate pleaseth, me to work." 
 
 Of this task which, at the first a irdpepyov, 
 extended itself and absorbed so much of labour 
 and enthusiasm that in the end it became the 
 branch of scholarship in which he will be re- 
 membered, more shall be said by and by. 
 
 The lease of 6 Onslow Square came to an end 
 in 1879, and the Butlers moved to Wood End, 
 
104 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Weybridge, a permanent home with a garden in 
 which A. J. B. constantly deUghted. Here a 
 friend — especially a Cambridge friend — was always 
 welcome : here he would entertain a guest with inti- 
 mate and accurate information on the properties 
 of the Bagshot gravel : here, in an atmosphere 
 of constant affection, his children were born 
 and grew up, trained always to fear God, love 
 their fellow creatures (even the dumb ones) and 
 value the things of the mind. The children were 
 seven, and their names in order : Frances Mary, 
 Grace Ellen, William Martin, Margaret Dorothy, 
 Rhoda, Rachel Elizabeth, Mary Caroline. 
 
 Here, too, in June 1879, on his thirty-fifth 
 birthday, he wrote : 
 
 Come fa 1' uom che, in alti gioghi andando 
 
 Freddo ed infermo e stance piu non osa 
 
 Indugiar ni salir, ed ogni cosa 
 Gli da paura 
 Se forse al sommo vien, onde guardando 
 
 La casa sua 
 Alfin, s'affretta in qui e non si posa. 
 
 Ma va cogli occhi '1 diletto ostel cercando : 
 Cosi fa io ; or con amor ardente 
 
 Tu mi riscaldi, e con speme gradita 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 105 
 
 Mi ferma il cuore, e con fede valente 
 
 Mia debolezza Signer caro aita ; 
 Perche oggi giunto son lasso e dolente 
 
 Al mezzo del cammin della mia vita. 
 
 Under date " March 22, '80," occurs an entry- 
 relating to his translation of the Purgatorio : 
 
 Took errata to Macmillan. So ends four years' 
 work. Prosit I 
 
 But there is an intermediate one : 
 
 Jan. 15, '79. — Dined Macmillans at Tooting. 
 They are friendly folk, but I wish the old fellow 
 would take a more cheerful view of Purg. H [enry] 
 J [ackson] thinks it will do, and advises an attempt 
 on the Pitt Press. 
 
 The book — The Purgatory of Dante : A Prose 
 Translation with Notes — appeared in 1880. 
 
 Oct. 8, '87. — Purg. has at last paid its expenses 
 and cleared £iy, 12s., of which half comes to me ! 
 
 It reached a second edition in 1892. 
 
 The conciseness of the notes and its unpretend- 
 ing form may well, to anyone who opens this little 
 book nowadays, make it incredible that here was 
 something in its way revolutionary. " Before 
 1880," writes Sir Frederick Pollock, " unless 
 
io6 MEMOIR OF 
 
 my memory and the catalogue of the London 
 Library are both at fault, the English reader had 
 practically to take his choice between the com- 
 mentaries of Bianchi and Fraticelli. Philalethes 
 was there, certainly ; but the English students who 
 could use elaborate German notes with ease were 
 fewer than they are now. Whether original or not, 
 Butler's work was pioneer work in England." 
 
 The Paradise of Dante followed in 1885 (2nd 
 edition, 1891), and The Hell of Dante in 1892 ; 
 A Companion to Dante (translated from the German 
 of J. A. Scartazzini) in 1893 ; Dante, His Times 
 and his Work, a popular book, in 1895 (2nd edition, 
 1897) ; and The Forerunners of Dante, posthu- 
 mously, in 1910. To appreciate these works, even 
 after studying them carefully, one has to remember 
 that, when Butler began, the study of Dante was 
 a mere recreation for cultivated men. If, as some 
 of us believe, a sense of medieval literature must 
 in time become as necessary a part of humane 
 education as a sense of Homer and of Virgil, 
 then to Butler will be due no small share of the 
 praise, and I am writing of a man who will some 
 day inherit his own. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 107 
 
 But my own knowledge is slight here; its 
 
 arrested infancy dating, almost exactly, from the 
 
 time when Butler published his first book : and I 
 
 give place here to an eminent scholar. Dr. Paget 
 
 Toynbee : 
 
 Of Butler's work upon Dante, so far at least 
 as regards the serious study of the poet in England, 
 it is hardly too much to say that it was " epoch- 
 making." At the time of the publication (in 1880) 
 of his first volume, the translation of the Purgatono, 
 the impulse given to the study of Dante by the 
 celebration of the sixth centenary (1865) of the 
 poet's birth, which gave rise to a plentiful crop 
 of translations of the Divina Commedia in. this 
 coimtry and in America, had almost died away. 
 Most English students of Dante still confined 
 themselves to the Inferno, partly no doubt on 
 account of the supposed superior interest of the 
 narrative of the first division of the poem, which is 
 more dramatic and more " sensational " than that 
 of the Purgatono or Paradiso, and partly, it may be 
 supposed, owing to the fact of the existence in an 
 easily accessible form (as a volume of the well- 
 known Bohn series) of the admirable prose transla- 
 tion of the Inferno by Dr. John Carlyle, and to the 
 lack of similar facilities in the case of the other 
 two Cantiche. By the publication of his prose 
 translation of the Purgatorio, accompanied by the 
 
io8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 text of the original, and English notes, Butler 
 invited the student on easy terms to enlarge his 
 horizon, and venture on the exploration of a 
 region outside the conventional limits of the 
 Inferno. The response may not have been large 
 at the outset — not at any rate from the publishers' 
 point of view — but the door was opened, and the 
 result was sufficiently encouraging to lead to the 
 issue five years later (1885) of a companion volume 
 comprising the Paradiso, which in its turn was 
 followed, after an interval of seven years, by the 
 Inferno (1892), thus completing the work and 
 furnishing for the first time an adequate English 
 prose translation into notes of the whole of the 
 Commedia} The steadily growing appreciation 
 of an ever widening circle of readers was testi- 
 fied to by the demand, within a few months of 
 the publication of the last instalment, for new 
 editions both of the Purgatorio (1892) and Paradiso 
 (1891). 
 
 The motive which led Butler to undertake his 
 translation and commentary of Dante's poem is 
 explained in the preface to the original edition of 
 
 * A prose translation, it is true, was already in existence : but this, 
 as Butler observes, while professing to render the whole poem, does 
 not go beyond profession, for the performance is of tjie poorest. The 
 author of this version (for the most part a feeble paraphrase), which 
 was published in 1852, was the Rev. E. O'Donnell, whose exaggerated 
 estimate of his own work may be gathered from his claim in the 
 preface '' thatno translator has ever done more justice to the author 
 han I have in every respect." 
 
Errata. 
 
 Page 108, line 14, for "into notes," read " with notes," 
 Page 109, line 3, for " de Lundi," read " da Lundi." 
 
 Memoir of Arthuff John Butlm. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 109 
 
 his Purgatory. After quoting the following remark 
 from Sainte-Beuve's review of Mesnard's transla- 
 tion of the Inferno in the Causeries de Lundi (Dec. 
 II, 1854) : " Lire Dante et le lire de pres, c'est 
 presque inevitahlement desirer de le traduire, c'est 
 entrer dans les replis de^son ginie, et apres y avoir 
 pintlri [ce qui demande tout un effort), c'est congevoir 
 la pensee d'y introduire les autres," he says : " With- 
 out pretending to the hardihood, so characteristic 
 of the writer's nation, which talks easily of pene- 
 trating into the recesses of Dante's genius, the 
 present translator may admit that some such idea 
 as that indicated by Sainte-Beuve was what first 
 suggested the task he has undertaken." Butler 
 himself did not rank his translation above the 
 level of " a crib, pure and simple" ; he made no 
 pretension to literary graces ; and it must be con- 
 fessed that his version sometimes strikes the reader 
 as needlessly bald : but the success of his experi- 
 ment on the whole, as regards text, translation, 
 and notes, especially the last, which were recog- 
 nised at once as bearing the distinctive mark of 
 ripe scholarship, amply justified his attempt to 
 make Dante accessible in a " classical " edition to 
 those who were willing to be taken by the hand and 
 to be led ' dentro alle segrete cose " of the Purga- 
 torio and Paradiso, to be introduced, that is, to the 
 beauties and mysteries of the two upper realms, 
 as well as to the horrors and pathos of the Inferno. 
 
no MEMOIR OF 
 
 A characteristic feature of his notes, which it 
 may not be out of place to mention here, was 
 his acute appreciation (as befitted a member 
 of the Alpine Club) of the evidence afforded by 
 sundry hints in the poem of Dante's experiences 
 as a climber. Thus, when the latter, who was 
 " blown " after a stiff climb over rocks, says that 
 he kept talking as he went, so as not to appear 
 " done " {Inferno, xxiv. 64), Butler observes : 
 " A human touch. Few climbers have not done 
 the same." Again, he detects " an accurate bit 
 of mountaineering practice " in a detail of Dante's 
 description of his climb out of hell {Inferno, xxxiv. 
 86) : " Virgil, like a careful guide, gets his traveller 
 safely on to a ledge, and then follows." 
 
 Butler did good service in insisting on the 
 importance of the Divine Comedy as a subject of 
 study, over and above its purely aesthetic merits, 
 as part of the general scheme of liberal education. 
 " It is not too much to say," he writes in the above- 
 mentioned preface, " that there is no one work of 
 human genius which can equal it as an instrument 
 of education, intellectual and moral. ... It is 
 the summary of all the thought and speculation, 
 the record of all the action of the thirteenth 
 century : the age which of aU whose memory 
 remains to us produced the greatest number of 
 great men. This was the age of Frederick II, 
 Lewis IX, Simon of Montfort, Thomas Aquinas, 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER iii 
 
 Roger Bacon ; the age which saw the revival of 
 painting in Cimabue and Giotto, of sculpture in 
 Nicholas ; while Amiens and Westminster, the 
 Old Palace of Florence and the Holy Field of Pisa, 
 are living evidence of what it could do in the 
 noblest of all the arts. It was to such an age as 
 this that Dante's poem first gave a voice ; and he 
 who would appreciate the poem, must first have 
 made himself in some degree familiar with the 
 age." Again, in his preface to the /fe// .• "Dante 
 fills the stream of human history from side to 
 side. There have been greater poets, one or two ; 
 there have been greater thinkers, greater men of 
 affairs ; but of no other poet can it be said that 
 he was the greatest political thinker of his age ; 
 of no other philosopher or theologian that he was 
 its greatest poet. Nor have poets as a rule taken 
 a very high place in science or philosophers in 
 scholarship ; yet in these subjects Dante was 
 among the first men of his age. His acquaintance 
 with all accessible literature and his grasp of all 
 attainable scientific knowledge were equally com- 
 plete." " We need not despair," he adds later, 
 " of seeing Dante one day take his place beside 
 (but not instead of) Homer and Virgil in the 
 curriculum of our schools and universities "—a 
 consummation devoutly to be wished, and one 
 that, whenever it is brought about, as assuredly 
 sooner or later it must be, will have been hastened 
 
11^ MEMOIR OF 
 
 in no small degree by the devoted labours of 
 Butler himself. 
 
 At a time when scepticism in all matters 
 Dantesque had become the fashion, especially with 
 a certain school of critics in Italy, Butler uttered 
 a much needed word of protest against the lengths 
 to which it was being carried. He encouraged a 
 healthy questioning of accepted data, but within 
 limits ; scepticism, he urged, should " confine 
 itself to its proper domains, and not extend its 
 borders imtil it includes negative dogmatism." 
 It is interesting to note in this connection that 
 he was, from early days, a firm believer in the 
 authenticity of the treatise De Aqua et Terra, 
 now, thanks to the critical labours of Dr. Moore 
 and Dr. Shadwell, happily vindicated as a genuine 
 work of Dante against the " blind unbelief " of 
 sundry continental scholars. Nor was he on the 
 side of the sceptics on the Beatrice question, 
 the shibboleth which divides, or did divide, 
 Dantists into two distinct camps. He had no 
 sympathy with those who disbelieve in the 
 existence of a real Beatrice and choose to 
 regard the whole story of Dante's love as purely 
 allegorical. 
 
 He was most refreshingly impatient of the 
 perversities and pedantries of the Dante com- 
 mentators. " There is no end to wondering over 
 their vagaries," he wrote to the present writer 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 113 
 
 in 1888 ; " it would be rather sport to bring 
 out a Canto or two with a complete collection 
 of all the absurdities that have been dSbites over 
 them." 
 
 Besides his three volumes on the Divina 
 Commedia, which constitute his chief claim to 
 the gratitude of Dante students, Butler published 
 (anonymously) in 1900 a revised text of the poem, 
 the last book we believe issued, before their dis- 
 solution, by the firm of Rivingtons, with which 
 he had been connected for some years. In 1893 
 there appeared a translation from his hand, 
 under the title of A Companion to Dante, of Scar- 
 tazzini's Dante-Handbuch, in which, while giving 
 due credit to the author for his valuable work, 
 he felt constrainfed to call attention (in an 
 occasional footnote) to the more remarkable in- 
 stances of his misplaced ingenuity, the effect of 
 which, as the translator observed, is less to con- 
 vince the reader than to rouse him to opposition. 
 Two years later he published a useful oeuvre de 
 vulgarisation in the shape of a book entitled 
 Dante: His Times and His Work, which was 
 mainly a reprint of papers which he had contri- 
 buted to the Monthly Packet and the Magazine 
 of the Home Reading Union during the previous 
 year. In 1902, with what some of his friends 
 thought mistaken generosity, he introduced to 
 the Enghsh public a book with a very similar title 
 
114 MEMOIR OF 
 
 {Dante and his Time) by Karl Federn, an English 
 translation, by the German author, of a work 
 (hardly, it must be said, worthy of Butler's 
 sponsorship) which had already appeared in its 
 native dress. 
 
 Butler's latest contributions to Dante litera- 
 ture appeared posthumously. These were a 
 volume of selections, with notes, from Italian 
 poets before 1300, entitled The Forerunners of 
 Dante (an apparently unconscious adaptation of 
 the title, / Precursori di Dante, of an Italian 
 book by A. D'Ancona on a different subject), a 
 laborious piece of work upon which he had been 
 engaged for several years, and the article on 
 Dante in the eleventh edition of the Encychpcedia 
 Britannica ; both of which were published in 
 1910, the year of his death. 
 
 Not the least valuable of his services to Dante 
 students were his periodical reviews of English 
 and foreign books and articles upon Dante through 
 a long series of years in the columns of the 
 AthencBum. 
 
 He at one time projected, and made some 
 progress with, a translation of Dante's prose 
 treatise, the Convivio, but eventually abandoned 
 the task, owing partly to the corrupt state of 
 portions of the original text, partly to the pres- 
 sure of other work. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 115 
 
 Butler's literary activity was not confined, 
 even in the years covered by this chapter, to trans- 
 lating and annotating Dante. On his coming to 
 London his Cambridge friend, Norman MacCoU, 
 editor of The AthencBum, had invited him to do 
 some occasional reviewing for that paper ; and 
 his connection with it lasted from 1870 even to 
 igo8 — that is to say, under two editors, the second 
 of whom, Mr. Vernon Rendall, supplies me with 
 the following notes : 
 
 It is a pleasure to me to write about Butler's 
 AthencBum work, which was never advertised 
 for the public gaze, as is the fashion nowadays. 
 " The paper, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton and 
 one or two men who are given a free hand, is 
 written by safe nonentities." — Years ago I 
 remember reading and smiling at some such 
 statement as this concerning The Athenceum. 
 Butler was not a nonentity, and he was not 
 particularly " safe " in days when the dignity 
 of literature and language were regarded as of 
 importance. Singularly correct in detail, he was 
 not at all academic ; he was a specialist without 
 the specialist's heavy style and indifference to 
 life. MacCoU, his contemporary at Cambridge 
 and his friend and editor for many years, did not 
 
Ii6 MEMOIR OF 
 
 like slang, though he enjoyed a touch of humour. 
 Both wrote excellent English, but Butler, like 
 Andrew Lang, was fond of an occasional touch 
 of the vernacular, which, indeed, like the jokes 
 in Stubbs's Constitutional History, was the more 
 effective for its setting. Butler occasionally tried 
 to be outrageous, to see how far the editor would 
 go, and I remember discussions with MacCoU 
 as to whether such and such a phrase of his— in 
 inverted commas, of course — should be retained. 
 Generally it was, and added to the humanity of 
 the paper. 
 
 Butler reviewed a great deal of solid matter 
 from 1870 onwards, writing on memoirs ; history, 
 especially of the Italian sort ; and the frequent 
 and occasionally irritating products which are 
 classed as educational literature. His thorough 
 criticisms were paid for in earlier days at a price 
 that would astonish an accomplished reviewer 
 to-day. He was always great on detail, and 
 never content with the showy summary which 
 relies largely on the Preface of the book treated, 
 and attacks with brilliant confidence the com- 
 monplaces of the subject. On mountaineering, 
 classical translations, Eton, Cambridge, Dante, 
 he said his say often. In 1895 he sparred with 
 the AthencBum reviewer of Dante : His Times and 
 His Work, maintaining his faith in a real Beatrice, 
 and this the Beatrice Portinari of Boccaccio. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 117 
 
 Besides all this solid matter he reviewed a 
 multitude of novels, from Hardy to Ouida; and 
 scattered through The Athencsum are a host of 
 wise and ironical ohiter dicta concerning the art 
 and practice of fiction. He notes, for instance, 
 that the archdeacon of novelists is a polished and 
 cynical man of the world ; that they project 
 modem culture into a semi-civilised past ; and 
 that historical romances commonly fail by being 
 too historical. An unusually wide range of 
 scholarship and general knowledge, a zeal for 
 accuracy, and a ready and easy vein of humour 
 were, as Butler's friends would expect, his chief 
 qualities as a reviewer. He hated public indul- 
 gence in personalities, the fierce light that beats 
 from the cheaper press on everybody who is 
 eminent or prominent. Perhaps I can best 
 exhibit his style by a few sentences from his 
 reviewing, but I ought to add that he never 
 scamped his work, and that his verdict was not 
 contested in any of the reviews which 1 have 
 examined. 
 
 He began chiefly with classical translations, 
 including a gentleman who changed Aeneas to 
 " Aeneius " in order to make him rhyme (more 
 or less) with " pious." He noticed the versions 
 of Theocritus by Calverley and Lang, and many 
 of less mark. One of these suggested the idea that 
 " among translators the works of ancient authors 
 
ii8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 were what peaks and passes are to the Alpine 
 Club, things to be ' done ' without any further 
 object." The fuss made about peak-climbing 
 was derided in several articles. Butler records 
 that a noted climber had ascended the Matter- 
 horn without using his hands, and in the same 
 review makes the characteristic comment : 
 " ' Alpine Club ' should never be used in an 
 English book (even a translation) to denote any 
 but the English club, which alone has a right 
 to the name without any qualifying prefix." 
 
 Dealing with English travel, Butler disposes 
 of amateur comments about Surrey antiquities, 
 and recalls the remark of Jennings about " the 
 fearful man on the bicycle." 
 
 Lord Avebury's Pleasures of Life (1887) 
 suggests the remark that the address on "The 
 Choice of Books," innocent in itself, was the 
 means of opening the floodgates to a wondrous 
 stream of nonsense and self-advertisement. Re- 
 viewing the " Memoir " of Henry Sidgwick, he 
 does full justice to that admirable man and 
 philosopher who, when he took to politics, " like 
 the spirits in Dante, had a better view of the 
 remote than of the immediate future." Noticing 
 together two accounts of Italian History by a 
 fluent don, he points out numerous mistakes, 
 and demands a standard of knowledge which 
 would depress many a promising devotee of Clio. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 119 
 
 The historian is "to show a familiarity with the 
 events he treats of equal to the attentive news- 
 paper reader's grasp of the present." The review 
 of Early Italian Love-Stories deals, naturally, with 
 those used by Shakespeare, and the character 
 in "Bandello " who corresponds to Don John in 
 " Much Ado " is denounced as "a cad who in 
 any other country in Europe would have been 
 kicked out of decent Society." Butler evidently 
 enjoyed noticing the grumbles at large which 
 Ouida called " Views and Opinions." He reduces 
 her frenzied veneration for all that is antique 
 by pointing out that " the black gondola — ^nay, 
 any gondola — was an innovation in its day ; and 
 probably the Ouidas of the period slanged 
 the municipality of Arpinum for allowing these 
 hideous machines to supersede the neat coracle." 
 Ouida promised some " Pensees eparses," and 
 gave a specimen six lines long in which the relent- 
 less reviewer discovered two wrong accents, one 
 false concord, and one error in S3nitax. 
 
 When he had in his last days given up most of 
 his AthencBum reviewing, he still read the paper 
 carefully, and sent queries as to the correctness 
 of this or that. To have a critic of such range and 
 such good humour was a real benefit. Like all 
 precise men, Butler delighted in the outrageous 
 misprint, though I may add that his examples 
 did not come from the Athenceum. 
 
120 MEMOIR OF 
 
 He and his editors found a genuine and lasting 
 pleasure in personal association apart from " shop " 
 and the thorny chair of office. The point would 
 seem obvious, but it is, perhaps, worth mentioning 
 at a time when such relations are considered 
 useless or even deprecated. 
 
 I am conscious that this chapter, or the latter 
 part of it, has been occupied somewhat dispropor- 
 tionately with Butler's desk-work. For the way 
 to get him at his best, and at his most character- 
 istic, was to approach him with Wordsworth's 
 exhortation— 
 
 Up, up, my friend, and quit your book ! 
 
 — an exhortation to which he ever responded 
 with alacrity, even with glee. He was, indeed 
 — as a friend afterwards described him — "one 
 of those men who affect the world more through 
 their influences upon their friends than through 
 their writings." He was a good man to watch 
 in his home ; a good man to take you about his 
 garden ; the best man in the world to walk with 
 in his favourite weather, a fine December day — 
 
 " to my thinking the most perfect kind of day that 
 we get in England — the colours at once brighter 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 121 
 
 and softer than you get at any other time of year, 
 the air perfectly clear, and the sun quite as strong 
 as you want for walking." 
 
 On such a day you felt the man and the weather 
 
 to be one, his mask of austerity softened and 
 
 suffused by a sunny interest in all creatures and 
 
 a sunny sense of the beauty and nobility of life : 
 
 and this sense would play at such times upon 
 
 everything, from the Holy Roman Empire down 
 
 to a cyclamen or a winter aconite, so that I used 
 
 to charge him with resembling the ungodly in 
 
 the Book of Wisdom, in that he let no flower 
 
 of the field pass by him. He loved the walk the 
 
 better if it led to the house of a friend, and was 
 
 interested if the deus terminus happened to be 
 
 an interesting stranger. In the diary, under 
 
 date April 5, '91, I find a note of such a call 
 
 upon Tennyson : 
 
 Went with D. W. F. to Farringford. Found 
 the great man about to start, and walked for 
 nearly two hours with him (Wilfrid Ward of 
 the party). He was very friendly. "Why did 
 Hutton quote M. Arnold's version of the camp- 
 fire scene ? It is not good. Now mine is 
 beautiful." Quoted Catullus at length, &c., &c. 
 
122 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 On board a yacht he would skin his hands 
 with hauHng upon the fore-sheet, and reUgiously 
 smoke more than was good for him in the zest 
 of the game. But it was rather an Alp than a 
 deck that he trod with the security of an expert ; 
 and, to redress the balance of Dante and The 
 AthencBum, the Alps and what he did on them 
 shall have a chapter to themselves. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Alpine and Other Tramps 
 
 As we have seen, the manse of Wantage usually 
 took its holiday abroad : in Switzerland by 
 preference, and, as time went on, in the remoter 
 Alpine ranges. The Butlers, indeed, would seem 
 to have held the table d'hSte in equal abhorrence 
 with its frequenter, the sturdy, record-breaking 
 British climber. 
 
 But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly ! 
 
 Their dislike may have been fastidious to 
 excess, but I find it intelligible : and I note that, 
 as these twin bores extend their area of occupa- 
 tion, the family's holiday correspondence crosses 
 the frontier of Switzerland proper and tends to 
 be dated from fastnesses deep and yet deeper in 
 Tirol. 
 
 The boy A. J. B., tutored in climbing by 
 
 "3 
 
124 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Riddell, his beloved " Professor," probably became 
 a mountaineer without quite knowing how. He 
 grew to be a peculiarly expert one, with two 
 strong idiosyncrasies for which the reader will 
 not be unprepared. 
 
 (i) He despised " peak-bagging " — ^that is to 
 say, the notching of so many " first ascents," on 
 which certain climbers vaingloriously boast them- 
 selves. He coldly classed this with professional 
 athletics and pot-hunting. If, for the sake of 
 dialectic, you pointed out that anyhow to conquer 
 a virgin summit (apart from the subsequent 
 boasting) was an ambition presumably more 
 disinterested than that of collaring a piece of 
 plate in a hundred-yards' sprint, he was apt to 
 answer that he declined to be interested in a line 
 of disinterestedness drawn between two things 
 in themselves uninteresting. 
 
 (2) He loved these excursions not only for 
 the play they put on the muscles of a stringy man, 
 and their calls on the mind to court and face 
 danger for the fun of it, yet warily, but because 
 they led him, plump and unexpected, into all 
 sorts of habitations of strange men going about 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 125 
 
 their familiar daily business. IIoW&ji' 8' avdpa-n-av 
 tSev aa-rea koI voov eyvco — I have never known a 
 man with a better sense of Europe than Butler 
 had. Of the late Lord Acton, whom he met in 
 1896, he records in a familiar letter, " . . .a 
 most delightful man, though one feels a little 
 awed by his knowledge of past and present history. 
 He has known personally every man who has 
 known anything for the last forty years " : and 
 of course Lord Acton's genius for vitalising an 
 immense knowledge of the past with a curiosity 
 for all that was eminent in the world in his own 
 day has passed into a byword. But A. J. B. was 
 curious about all sorts and conditions of men. 
 I will not say, as Mr. Birrell says of Burke, that 
 "he knew how the whole world lived"; but he 
 had a passion to know how honest men lived in 
 every nation ; and a cobbler in a chance valley 
 of the Oetzthal would be meat and drink to him 
 and keep him chatting by the hour. 
 
 By the simplest of paradoxes, then, Butler — 
 despising " first ascents," clinibing in the remoter 
 Alps for the fun of it and because they were 
 remote — casually put quite a respectable number 
 
126 MEMOIR OF 
 
 of first ascents to what he would have damned 
 as his " credit." He has summarised, in The 
 Alpine Journal, under the title of " Some Un- 
 designed New Routes," a bag of three which 
 (owing to fog and other mishaps) he made in 1890 : 
 two in the Oetzthal and one in the Adamello 
 group — ^this last in company with his old com- 
 rade. Rev. T. H. A. Houblon. Of the first he tells 
 merely that he wandered in a mist " till we found 
 ourselves on the top of something." By-and-by 
 the fog lifted and the peak they had started for 
 hove into sight, a quarter of a mile away. " It 
 became clear that we had strayed to the top of 
 the highest and most northerly of the Henne- 
 siegelkopfe. When we got back, Praximarer 
 [the landlord] — who is probably as good an 
 authority on the subject as anyone — said that 
 he knew of no previous ascent, nor can I conceive 
 any reason why there should have been one." 
 
 Mr. A. J. Mumm {Quis terra non novit . . . ?) 
 sends me the following note : 
 
 Butler did not become a member of the 
 Alpine Club until December 1886, when most of 
 his climbing had been done ; but he was already 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 127 
 
 known as a mountaineer, and in 1890 he became 
 Editor of the Alpine Journal. He was Editor 
 for four years (1890-93 inclusive, vols. xv. and 
 xvi.). His own view of himself as a mountaineer 
 is given in a characteristic " Prefatory Note " 
 prefixed to vol. xv. on his taking over the editor- 
 ship. It was probably by virtue of his position 
 as Editor that he became a member of the A.D.C. 
 (Alpine Dining Club), a small body consisting 
 mainly, though not exclusively, of past and present 
 officers of the Club who, almost since the first 
 days of the Club, have dined together — ^in numbers 
 averaging about twelve or fourteen, but occasion- 
 ally rising to twenty-five and more — ^before the 
 Monthly Meetings. Butler was one of the most 
 regular attendants at these dinners, almost to 
 the end. They are light-hearted, informal gather- 
 ings,, and no one entered into the spirit of them 
 more heartily than he. 
 
 In the above-mentioned " Prefatory Note " 
 he tells us that " to him, from various causes, 
 the ' centres ' are almost totally unknown. His 
 acquaintance with the chain of Mont Blanc is 
 founded on dim schoolboy recollections of a 
 walk rotmd the lower cols in days when the Alpine 
 Club itself did not exist ; Zermatt he has not 
 seen for nearly a quarter of a century, while 
 Grindelwald remains to him merely a place on 
 the map." He was not a man to whom the 
 
128 MEMOIR OF 
 
 attractions of " centres " made any appeal. What 
 he enjoyed was the exploration of little-known, 
 out-of-the-way districts, and he gratified this 
 taste by devoting himself, year after year, to 
 the peaks and passes of the Oetzthal Alps. Of 
 these in the 'eighties he possessed a knowledge 
 which was shared by few, if any, other moun- 
 taineers — certainly by no other Englishman. He 
 first visited them in 1874, when he climbed the 
 Wildspitze, the monarch of the region, and made 
 a new route up the Similaun. The next trace 
 of him that I have come across is in the record 
 of " New Expeditions " in 1880 [Alpine Journal, 
 X. 104], when he made the first travellers' passage 
 of the Oberettenjoch with the Rev. T. H. Archer 
 Houblon. In 1881 and 1882 he crossed some 
 little-known passes, about which he sent some 
 " Notes on the Eastern Alps " to the Journal 
 [xi. 123-4] • ^^d some further notes by him 
 appear in 1884 as "Hints on the Eastern 
 Alps, &c." 
 
 He figures again in the list of " New Ex- 
 peditions " in 1886, as makifig a new descent of 
 the Wilde Freiger with (Sir) Frederick Pollock 
 [xiii. 127] : and yet again in 1888 with the first 
 passages of the Kleinbergjochl and the Quelljoch, 
 and the first complete passage of the Similaun- 
 joch. Early in 1889 he read a paper before 
 the Club on " The Oetzthal District," describing 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 129 
 
 his 1874 climbs and some others, including what 
 was probably the second ascent of the "Grasstaler 
 Grieskogel." 
 
 I have endured much, at one time and another, 
 from the reminiscential talk of Alpine climbers ; 
 and for its drip of boredom I know nothing harder 
 to endure save the talk of a golfer. But it ever 
 impresses pie, and I feel a diffidence in claiming 
 that A. J. B.'s attitude towards an Alpine climb 
 is the only one proper to a grown man. So 1 
 content myself with stating the fact that, as 
 often as not, he did an ascent purely for the jest 
 of it and quite in the manner of Mr. Wemmick 
 — " Halloa ! " said Mr. Wemmick. " Here's a 
 church. Halloa ! Here's Miss Skiffins ! Let's 
 have a wedding ! " " HaUoa ! " said A. J. B. 
 " Here's a peak ! Let's climb it." His letters 
 treat it all in this casual way. " On Tuesday 
 morning," he writes in 1867, " I took my knap- 
 sack and started alone for a three days' walk 
 among the Dolomites." In 1880 he joined his 
 father and mother and sister for a hohday in 
 the beloved Tirol, The Vicar, as his custom was 
 on a holiday, had left his letters to accumulate 
 
130 MEMOIR OF 
 
 at Wantage. In the heap lay one from Mr. 
 Gladstone, offering him a canonry of Worcester, 
 and weeks elapsed before the curates, agitated 
 by a sweating enquiry from Downing Street, 
 turned out the letter and telegraphed its con- 
 tents. A. J. B., having preceded (in company 
 with Houblon) his pzirents by a week or two, 
 had been working his muscles up to whipcord 
 by feats upon the Weiss Kugel. 
 
 Josef [his pet guide] said he knew of a pass 
 which no tourist had ever crossed. . . .By this 
 time it was blowing and snowing hard, and as 
 we got up to the pass it got worse. We could see 
 hardly anything and had to struggle on as we 
 could. My beard was frozen stiff and decorated 
 with icicles an inch long. Then we got down 
 some rocks, out of the wind and into the sun, 
 and so to Kurzras. In the afternoon a lot of 
 peasants from Meran appeared, and five of them, 
 led by the organist of Unsere Frau, got out some 
 song-books and sang one thing after another 
 extremely well. Wednesday looked no better, 
 so we crossed the Nieder Joch to Fend, again in 
 a cold wind but less snow. At Fend we found 
 a large company, including two very pleasant 
 Americans from Philadelphia. They were in 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 131 
 
 difficulties for want of a guide ; so we suggested 
 that they should cross the Gepatsch Joch with 
 us. Thursday opened more promisingly, and we 
 reached the Joch with no more difficulty than 
 arose from the incompetence of a man whom 
 we took as porter. He had a cough, and could 
 not go a bit, so that he had to be lugged up the 
 last slope. At the top the snow began to come 
 down merrily, and, soon after, we got into a 
 regular labyrinth of crevasses, through which 
 Josef piloted us with great skill. One of the 
 Americans went through, right over his head, 
 but was got out with no further casualty than the 
 loss of his hat ; though it was a nervous moment 
 when I felt the rope cracking with the strain. 
 On the whole I got the worst of it, for I was next 
 ahead of him : so I lay on the snow while H. and 
 Josef pulled like demons in front of me and nearly 
 squeezed the breath out of my body. After that 
 we got on nicely, and went down the magnificent 
 glacier to the Gepatsch Haus, and did well there : 
 for we got first-rate bottled beer, and we found 
 a guitar and a man who could play it, and Josef 
 sang Tyrolese songs in a voice most ludicrously 
 like 's. 
 
 This violent gymnastic had to be curbed, 
 of course, when his parents arrived. But it 
 
132 MEMOIR OF 
 
 continued to be strenuous. The ladies travelled 
 from place to place in an einspanner ; while the 
 Vicar (aged sixty-three) and A. J. B. (carrying 
 the knapsack for both) tramped across the 
 mountains from Oetz to Hulden, Hulden to 
 Solden, Solden to Fend, and back. The father 
 writes (Aug. i8th) : 
 
 Walking with Arthur after an interval of 
 eighteen years makes me feel again like a young 
 man. Only our relative positions are changed, 
 and he takes the lead instead of me ; pays, talks, 
 and arranges. ... I cannot tell you the intense 
 enjoyment which this walk with him has given 
 me. It is most delightful to find how much we 
 sympathise with one another, and how much — 
 in spite of difference of expression — we are at 
 one in the essentials. You may imagine how 
 very many matters we talked out as we walked 
 side by side under the shade of the most glorious 
 larches. 
 
 A. J. B. writes home, under the same cover : 
 
 As the enclosed will show, we have had a 
 very successful expedition. ... At Heilig Kreuz, 
 where we looked in for a vierfel, the parson (a 
 very rough party) asked Father if he was a 
 " Posuit." After some difficulty I saw that he 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 133 
 
 meant a " Puseyite," and replied " Freilich." 
 There was a tremendous party at Fend : where 
 they all slept is a mystery. The consequence was 
 that when we started at six yesterday morning 
 there was not a scrap of salted meat in the house, 
 and we had to put up with eggs and cheese. We 
 got on very well, however, except that the snow 
 was soft and slippery. ... By the time we got 
 to Solden, after ten hours' actual walking, Father 
 had had enough of it, and I was a little afraid 
 that he might be overtired. But he slept well, 
 and is as fresh as paint to-day. 
 
 Ten years later he writes again from the same 
 haunts : 
 
 Unsere Frau : Aug. lo, 1890. 
 
 Here I am again in this sweet spot. Came 
 this morning via Hoch-joch, across which I acted 
 as guide to a party of studenten, who passed the 
 night in the Hospiz, as I also did. Yesterday I 
 had an excursion which can only be described as 
 a buster. We started from Gepatsch, intending 
 to cross the perfectly easy Kesselwand Joch. 
 Alois had not been there for six years, nor I for 
 ten : so we made a mess of it, went too far, and 
 found ourselves on the top of tremendously steep 
 snow slopes and a ridge of equally steep rocks, 
 looking over the Hintereis Ferner — i.e. two 
 
134 MEMOIR OF 
 
 glaciers south of where we ought to have been.^ 
 We were neither of us quite sure of our position ; 
 but we knew we had to get down, and down we 
 got — fortunately each in one piece. How often 
 poor Alois said that it was a verdammte Geschichte 
 I should be sorry to say, or how often I impressed 
 on him that es muss gehen. However, we let each 
 other down in turns, taking two hours to get down 
 perhaps looo feet : and after all we solved a 
 problem that had often haunted me, viz. whether 
 a way could be made from the Gepatsch to the 
 Hintereis glacier. . . . 
 
 A pretty incident occurred as we came up the 
 Kunenser-thal. I met a nice little girl, of eleven 
 or so, carrying a baby. A few steps further was 
 a rosary l5dng on the ground. It was hers and 
 I gave it to her. She caught my hand and gave 
 me such a kiss ! A nice clean pretty little girl 
 as ever you saw. 
 
 Solden: Aug. 17, 1890. 
 
 Here we ^ are, under the Ortler, on a heavenly 
 day. ... I do not think I shall come here again ; 
 it is too much of a " centre," though a mild one : 
 perhaps when I am quite old and can only loaf 
 about the meadows, which are lovely. 
 
 1 This was obviously the " undesigned new route " of which par- 
 ticular mention has been made on p. 126. 
 
 ' The " we " again includes the Rev. T. H. A. Houblon. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 135 
 
 MaJidronhutte der Section Leipzig des 
 D. V. Oe. A.V. : Aug. 21, 1890. 
 
 I think I will begin a letter to you from this 
 elevated spot (8300 feet about). . . . To-morrow, 
 if the weather holds, which just now looks rather 
 doubtful, we shall be up betimes and do the 
 Adamello. 
 
 Same place: Aug. 22, 1.45 p.m. 
 
 We got off at 5.30. Snow in lovely order. 
 Got to the top of Adamello at 10 — I think the 
 grandest view I ever saw. Scarcely a cloud ; 
 and every peak from Monte Rosa to the Glockner 
 clearly visible — except Weisskugel and Wildspitze, 
 which was behind the Ortler. But Piz Linard, 
 Buin (I think I made out Cotschen), Fluchthorn, 
 etc., were all to view ; likewise Similaun and his 
 brethren. To the South the lake of Garda, and 
 all the plain of Lombardy purple and hazy. I 
 think I wiU never go up a mountain again. It 
 seems a pity to wipe out such a view. 
 
 After 1890 he contributed no more to The 
 Alpine Journal, but he continued his visits to 
 the Alps, visiting the old resorts with Mrs. Butler 
 (who shared his passion for them) and teaching 
 his children to climb. I turn up a letter of 
 August 17, 1897. 
 
136 MEMOIR OF 
 
 J Klosters in Pratigau. 
 
 My dear Q., — It is a fine morning and I am. 
 sitting in the valley. Yesterday it rained, and I 
 had spent the previous night in a Club Hut. 
 Such is fortune. Had I waited 24 hours in that 
 hut — but then my family would have raised 
 the hue-and-cry, and stalw'art peasants would 
 have explored every glacier in the neighbourhood. 
 Such is fortune, I repeat ; and, as usual on the 
 Alps, I am her fool. So I think I will write to 
 you. ... I have read precious little of anything 
 since July 4, on which day I left my home — to 
 get left and planted at the diillest spot in the 
 Engadine. I had, however, a beloved retreat near 
 at hand, and spent a week there, during most of 
 which it rained or snowed. There were some 
 interesting people — a scientific Pole, long domiciled 
 at Davos, and a Swiss Doctor, and wine was good 
 and plenty. Thence I made my way to a little 
 place in St. Gallen, where my wife with Grade 
 and Martin joined me. Last week we came on 
 here — 4000 feet high, in a valley of meadows 
 (as the name imports), closed at the upper end by 
 a pretty glacier and snow-peaks. It is a favourite 
 place with Germans, and in a German resort one 
 must make one's big meal at 1 o'clock, so that 
 expeditions must be practically all day or not at 
 all . . . and I do not care much for walks 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 137 
 
 admitting of nailless boots. [That would be a 
 nice phrase in Greek verse — or perhaps better oi 
 the walker, da-iSTipov KprjiriSav, or so.] 
 
 I have read Od. xiii, xiv, xv, and translated 
 a little of Dante's Convito. I have been up one 
 fairly big peak, the Fluchthorn, 11,175, and 
 several from 7500 to 10,500. I have sweated and 
 shivered. I have been within a few hundred feet 
 of a live eagle — ^he came and swung round Martin 
 and me on the top of a highish pass, but finding 
 we were not lambs, he went off, no doubt cursing 
 his luck. 
 
 We got a Speaker yesterday, not by my in- 
 structions. From it I learn that you are not de- 
 void of acerbity. ... I care absolutely nothing 
 for Politics, Literature, Science, or Art. There 
 are very pretty houses here : I wonder if any 
 owner would deal. ... It is monstrous idleness. 
 But I have not had a real holiday for 2 or 3 years ; 
 and, after all, I am not sure that this is not the 
 life which the truly good and wise ought to lead. 
 Look at the opening of Paradiso xi, and you will 
 see how one feels on a mountain-side on a fine 
 morning. 
 
 I have chosen these extracts to show the 
 sort of mind Butler took with him on a holiday. 
 But I am sure that almost every man carries 
 
138 MEMOIR OF 
 
 his truest mind when he walks alone, and maybe 
 the reader will best divine Butler's mountaineering 
 mind from the following paper contributed to 
 Cassell's Sports of the World, about 1903. 
 
 Solitary Clinibing : Some Reflections of an 
 " A lies Murmelthier" 
 
 The practice of solitary climbing has, from 
 very early times, incurred, and, no doubt, pro- 
 perly incurred, the severe reprehension of Alpine 
 moralists. Other practices in other departments 
 of ethics have likewise, from time to time, incurred 
 the censure of moralists, with little or no attempt 
 at justification, even on the part of those touched 
 by it. Yet, somehow or other (theologians tell 
 us it is owing to original sin), the practices do not 
 become extinct, as according to all logic they 
 might be expected to do. As we say, human 
 nature is too strong for us. When Mr. Stephen, 
 a professed moralist, found the top of the Cima 
 di Ball, who was his companion ? 
 
 It is a good many years since Sir W. M, Con- 
 way took occasion in this journal to formulate a 
 theory, or several theories, touching the various 
 motives by which those who seek their recrea- 
 tion in mountain ascents are impelled, and to 
 classify such persons accordingly. We aU know 
 his famous subdivision of mountaineers into the 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 139 
 
 groups of " centrists " and " eccentrists," as de- 
 termined by the proportion in which the various 
 motives referred to combined to drive them Alp- 
 ward. Another division, nearly, but perhaps 
 not quite, coincident with that given above, was 
 into " gymnasts " and "climbers " — " wanderers " 
 would, perhaps, have been a better contrasted 
 term. The gymnast was defined as " a man for 
 whom the overcoming of physical obstacles by 
 means of muscular exertion and skill is the chief 
 pleasure of mountaineering." The definition of 
 the other class was left to the reader's imagination ; 
 we cannot go far wrong if we make it consist of 
 those for whom the overcoming of such obstacles 
 as present themselves in mountain travel by the 
 exercise of observation and intelligence is the 
 chief pleasure of mountaineering. Of course, the 
 two are not mutually exclusive ; indeed, they 
 were combined in many of the first exponents 
 of the mountaineering pastime, and must be 
 combined in any guide who would attain excel- 
 lence in his profession. Tactical skill alone wUl 
 not make a great soldier ; but still less will swords- 
 manship alone. 
 
 Of late, no doubt, as Sir W. M. Conway and 
 others have often insisted, the tendency has been 
 to magnify the gymnastic motive and to under- 
 value the others. The present writer was once 
 talking to an eminent Viennese climber, and 
 
140 MEMOIR OF 
 
 regretting the great development of the " Weg- 
 markirung " system in the Austrian Alps as 
 destructive of the pleasure of exercising one's 
 powers of observation in finding the road. He 
 met, however, with no sympathy. The more 
 easily and rapidly one could be brought to one's 
 object — ^that is, to the point where the gymnastics 
 began — ^the better. Surely this kind of thing 
 goes far to justify Mr. Ruskin's satire about 
 greased poles. 
 
 Yet there must still be a few who enjoy 
 pitting not their muscles only, but their wits as 
 well, against all the hindrances which the Spirit 
 of the Mountains, aided as he is apt to be by the 
 Prince of the Power of the Air, would put in the 
 way of those who seek to penetrate his fastnesses. 
 To find your own way over an unknown pass in a 
 blinding snow-storm, even when no glacier is in 
 question, is a very different and far more exhilara- 
 ting business than plodding over behind a guide, 
 with nothing to think about except how many 
 dry articles you will find in your rucksack at the 
 end of the day ; and here we come to our point. 
 There can be little doubt in the mind of any one 
 who has tried it, that the interest is vastly in- 
 creased if you have no companion at all. For 
 as Euclid might put it, with a reminiscence of 
 Shakespeare, if two go together, either they must 
 be exactly equal in experience and capacity (a 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 141 
 
 case that hardly occurs), or one must be older 
 in practice, abler, in better condition, than the 
 other. Such an one will naturally be the leader. 
 If it is the other man, you will again be merely 
 the plodder behind ; if it is yourself, the added 
 responsibility of getting somebody else out of 
 the scrape besides yourself may heighten interest 
 to the point of anxiety. 
 
 But even in fine weather one may sometimes, 
 without being precisely a sage, see charms in the 
 face of solitude. " The untrammelled freedom 
 of the wanderer's life," to quote Sir W. M. 
 Conway again, is ten times more untrammelled, 
 if he has nobody's little fancies to consider but 
 his own. He can choose his own hours, his 
 own Proviant — ^his own temper, shall we add ? 
 — ^unchecked, uncriticised. Oddly enough, too, 
 he is likely to get even more society. Fellow- 
 travellers at their inn in the evening are apt 
 to be mutually self-sufficing ; unless, indeed, as 
 will at times happen, they have fallen out by the 
 way. But the solitary is perforce thrown on such 
 society as the quarters afford ; it may be the 
 Wirth, it may be the Curat, or other local person- 
 age ; it may be a fellow-guest. In any case he 
 is pretty sure, in the less frequented parts of 
 the Alps, to find civihty and intelligence, to say 
 nothing of profitable exercise in the language. 
 
 So much for solitary roaming. Solitary climbing 
 
142 MEMOIR OF 
 
 stands on a somewhat different footing, and 
 appeals, perhaps, to a somewhat different part 
 of human nature. It cannot be denied that the 
 gambling spirit is gratified by it. The stake is 
 the same as in the orthodox climb — ^upon this 
 part of the metaphor each reader may put his own 
 interpretation ; the odds against the player are 
 longer, and the pleasure of " pulling it off " is 
 accordingly greater. 
 
 Here we must clearly distinguish between 
 solitary climbing and climbing without guides. 
 That is quite a different matter ; and the propriety 
 of it in any particular instance must be judged by 
 its results. A guideless party differs in degree only 
 from a party led by any amount of professional 
 talent ; it is exposed, except incidentally, to no 
 greater dangers ; it can attempt the same expedi- 
 tions, it can go into the same places. The sole 
 limit to its achievements is the capacity of its 
 members. With the solitary rambler or climber 
 it is quite otherwise. What is safe or easy for 
 two or more is dangerous or impossible for one. 
 For danger, the well-known case of the snow- 
 covered glacier may serve, or rocks on which, in a 
 party of climbers, only one would move at a time. 
 The following instance will show how the presence 
 of a companion may convert impossibility into 
 ease. There is a certain tor on Dartmoor, the 
 summit of which is formed by several granite 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 14s 
 
 blocks, in shape like gigantic pillows, superposed 
 one on another. As you stand on the slope of 
 one the edge of the next catches you about the 
 top button of the waistcoat. There is no hand- 
 hold, and the height is just too great to allow of 
 a steady hoist of the body from the flat palms. 
 An acrobat might manage it, but hardly an ordi- 
 nary gjrmnast. The writer was there once with a 
 friend who had climbed every tor in the neigh- 
 bourhood from almost every side, but had never 
 conquered this. "S^Tien two were together, how- 
 ever, the problem became ridiculously simple. 
 For one to, drop on one knee, and for the other to 
 mount on the corresponding joint of his other leg 
 was, as the old romances have it, the work of an 
 instant ; from thence it was easy to scramble 
 on to the upper " pillow " ; an outstretched hand 
 afforded the grip necessary to enable the second 
 member of the party to surmount the obstacle, 
 
 and the first recorded ascent of Tor was 
 
 made. Every one who has travelled in mountain- 
 ous regions and stepped off the beaten tracks will 
 be able to quote similar instances from his own 
 experience. Some things the solitary climber 
 must let alone. 
 
 On the other hand there is a large class of situa- 
 tions in which the main difference between solitude 
 and society is that the former demands increased 
 attention and more extended prevision. Where 
 
144 MEMOIR OF 
 
 with a companion you ought to be sure of ten steps 
 ahead, alone you ought to be sure of twenty. 
 Slopes of old snow must be negotiated with caution; 
 they are apt to thin out at the lower end, and if 
 you abandon yourself to the delights of a glissade 
 for 9, few yards too far, you may suddenly find 
 yourself, as the present writer once did, with the 
 upper part of your body prone, head downwards 
 on a steepish incline, your loins gripped by a 
 frozen crust, and your toes dangling in vacancy 
 above a little torrent — an attitude undignified at 
 the best, and one from which it is not always 
 easy, without the aid of a friendly hand, to resume 
 the normal. You must also take increased heed 
 to your footing, remembering that when there is 
 no one at hand to render or seek assistance, a 
 trifling disablement — sprain, twist, or bruise — 
 may have very serious results. Other rules for 
 solitary climbers or ramblers are : study your 
 map minutely — ^if you propose to cross a pass, 
 most minutely on the descending side, remember- 
 ing that while it is much easier to lose the way 
 going up hiU, it is ten times more serious to lose 
 it going down. Be very clear, especially on the 
 descent, about the side of the stream you should 
 be on. On the ascent look back frequently, and 
 notice objects which you have passed ; so that in 
 the event of your having to retreat, the way may 
 not be unfamiUar to you. The same remark 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 145 
 
 of course, applies to climbs when you mean to 
 come down the way you went up. Take especial 
 note of the openings of side-valleys, and the points 
 where their torrents join the main stream. 
 
 Always carry a compass, and in cloudy weather 
 consult it every few minutes. In fine weather, 
 accustom yourself to steer by the sun till you get 
 your orientation instinctively. This last hint 
 would seem superfluous did not experience show 
 how many people may have been familiar with a 
 place for years without knowing the ' aspects ' of 
 it, or how few seem to see instinctively on which 
 side of a tree you ought to lie if you want the 
 shadow to pass on to you and not off you. Con- 
 ducted in this way, there can be no doubt that 
 solitary mountaineering is a fine school for teach- 
 ing endurance, foresight, and skill, to say nothing 
 of observation ; qualities for which no one is 
 ever the worse in the mountains, even where no 
 great " technical " difl&culties are before him. 
 After all, it is in the unlikely places that accidents 
 happen ; and the man who is accustomed to going 
 alone learns to regard no place as more likely 
 than another, and therefore is on his guard in all 
 — Explicit advocatus diaboli. 
 
 Let us now recollect ourselves from Switzer- 
 land and Tyrol to the " home counties " ; and 
 to lesser feats, yet famous. 
 
146 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Towards the close of 1879 Leslie Stephen, with 
 the aid and abetment of Frederick Pollock, 
 George Croom Robertson (the editor of Mind), and 
 a few other friends, founded the confraternity or 
 brotherhood of the now-famous Sunday Tramps. 
 Its purpose — the reason of its being^ — was to take 
 long Sunday walks within range of London : and 
 the original members of the society, about ten in 
 number, were for the more part addicted to 
 philosophy (I quote from F. W. Maitland's Life 
 of Leslie Stephen, c. xvii, the locus classicus. Mait- 
 land came fourteenth on the roll). But there was 
 no examination, test, oath, or subscription, and in 
 course of time most professions and most interests 
 were represented. The first ten were : 
 
 L. Stephen, John CoUier, 
 
 F. Pollock, Douglas Freshfield, 
 
 G. Croom Robertson, James Sully, 
 
 J. C. Morison, Shadworth H. Hodgson, 
 
 Walter Pollock, A, J. Butler, 
 
 — ^thus entered and numbered in the roll, which 
 Leslie Stephen, as Captain, rigorously kept. In 
 course of time the list of names extended from ten 
 to sixty, as old members dropped out and new 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 147 
 
 blood was infused — for the institution carried on 
 pretty steadily until 1895. Also some few are 
 catalogued against whom Stephen had to write 
 sternly " never came out " : and on the roll are 
 many names now heroic. 
 
 It omits that of George Meredith, who often 
 joined in a part of the walk, but was too infirm for 
 the full rigour of Stephen's untiring stride, and 
 conscientiously refused to join on as a fuU member. 
 Yet Meredith has left us, in ten lines or so, the 
 best account of the brotherhood, its ^eoi and its 
 customary jinks : 
 
 "When that noble body of scholarly and cheer- 
 ful pedestrians, the Sunday Tramps, were on the 
 march with Leslie Stephen to lead them, there 
 was conversation which would have made the 
 presence of a shorthand writer a benefaction to the 
 country. A pause to it came at the examination 
 of the leader's watch and Ordnance Map under the 
 western sun, and word was given for a strike across 
 country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner 
 in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, 
 over ditches and fallows, past proclamations 
 against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken 
 for more serious depredators in flight. The chief 
 of the Tramps had a wonderfully calculating eye 
 
148 MEMOIR OF 
 
 in the observation of distances and the nature of 
 the land, as he proved by his discovery of untried 
 passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy 
 for pursy followers. 
 
 May I record here that I once cut across the 
 scent of the Tramps. It happened at Meredith's 
 house, under Box Hill. Leslie Stephen was there, 
 having dropped out of the run to pay a caU on his 
 old friend. In the midst of talk he arose and 
 fled hurriedly to catch the train, leaving his rail- 
 way ticket — a return ticket — on the mantelpiece. 
 I was wickedly amused and wondered if he would 
 punish himself by walking home. He was con- 
 scientious enough to do it, and quite capable 
 of doing it. There is no malice in this little 
 anecdote. 
 
 A. J. B., as we have seen, came tenth on the 
 original list. When the brotherhood was founded 
 he had already settled at Weybridge, and so could 
 come out only when the walk (which " met " 
 for the start in London) was in his county — " I 
 should say," writes Sir Frederick Pollock, " about 
 once in seven times ; but he knew that region 
 very well and was one of the keenest Tramps. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 149 
 
 Several times he entertained such of us as could 
 stay for supper (also Geo. Meredith's custom at 
 Box Hill). He wrote a Ballade of the Tramps in 
 '81, which is printed by Maitland, Once or twice 
 in L. S.'s absence he took charge as ' local guide 
 for N.W. Surrey.' A report so signed by him, 
 addressed to me as Deputy Chief Guide in the last 
 season of the Old Tramps (1894) is in the Book. 
 He seems to have come oftener in the later years, 
 when Stephen was disabled ; partly from zeal to 
 keep the walks going, partly because we had come 
 to give a more decided preference to the southern 
 home counties." 
 
 Sir Frederick Pollock adds : 
 
 The original Tramps lasted 1879-1894. Not 
 many years after, the walks were revived by 
 certain sons of the founder and other Tramps, 
 and in 1909 (November) a joint walk of old and 
 new Tramps was held at which the continuity 
 of the Sunday Tramps was proclaimed, and the 
 original book in which Stephen recorded the 
 walks was solemnly redelivered to the guide of 
 the young Tramps (in whose custody it had 
 been for some time) from the Stephen family, 
 by Stephen's last deputy.^ A. J. Butler, though 
 
 ' [F. P.] 
 
150 MEMOIR OF 
 
 already in failing health, attended part of this 
 walk. 
 
 Here is a specimen walk, recorded in a letter 
 
 to Mrs. Butler, under date of May 3, 1886 : 
 
 We had a lovely tramp yesterday. Wind 
 cold enough but day fine. Started from Guild- 
 ford, walked along Hog's Back, through Putten- 
 ham to Elstead, where we were hospitably en- 
 treated by Frederic Harrison. Eleven of us in 
 all, several new ones. Then we went on over 
 the commons to Hindhead, and turned in at 
 Tyndall's for tea. Afterwards we all dined with 
 him, and after seeing the rest off, F. and I stayed 
 and chatted awhile, and then went down to 
 " Hind Head Copse " (as it is now to be called) 
 and smoked. This morning 1 was up betimes, 
 and helped F. to remove a notice board which 
 the man who sold his land to him has set up within 
 his boundary — ^which may result in an action, 
 and if so, I shall have to be a witness. Then we 
 had breakfast and walked down to Haslemere. 
 
 And here follows the 
 
 Ballade of the Sunday Tramps 
 
 If weary you grow at your books 
 Or dyspeptical after you've dined, 
 
 If your wife makes remarks on your looks. 
 If in short you feel somewhat inclined 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 151 
 
 For fresh air and a six hours' grind 
 And good metaphysical talk — 
 
 With a party of writers in Mind 
 You should go for a Sabbath day's walk. 
 
 Leave the town by the earliest train 
 (In your Bradshaw betimes underlined), 
 
 With umbrella in case it should rain, 
 Enduring of sun and of wind — 
 'Tis no harm if they toughen your rind — 
 
 Your boots you'll remember to caulk, 
 Your pockets with sandwiches lined. 
 
 You are good for a twenty-mile walk. 
 
 Though surely we all by our rule 
 
 Are as peripatetics defined. 
 Yet each philosophical school 
 
 Is here with each other combined : 
 
 Idealists, realists, find 
 Representatives here as we stalk 
 
 In the breezes, like them unconfined, 
 Over hills of clay, gravel, or chalk. 
 
 Envoy 
 
 So, Prince, leave your troubles behind. 
 And resolving for one day to baulk 
 
 Black care with the writers in Mind 
 Go forth for your Sabbath day's walk. 
 
 A. J. B. 
 
 April 3, iS8r. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 Rivington's and Cassell's 
 
 I887-I895 
 
 A. J. B. interspersed his diary, much in Matthew 
 Arnold's fashion, with quotations from the Vulgate 
 — ^the Psalms especially-— for birthdays and other 
 occasions. Among these, and dated January 12, 
 1881, is an entry : " All sorts of schemes for 
 redistributing work, remodelling Code, etc., going 
 on at Office : which I am pretty much ' out 
 of.' I fear I shall never get my superiors there 
 or elsewhere to regard me as an homme strieux. 
 Perhaps I am not one." 
 
 From this I turn to 1887, and leave the 
 following extracts to tell their own tale : 
 
 June 3. — Saw Mr. F. Rivington [the publisher], 
 
 who is looking out for a " salaried partner." . . . 
 
 I think it may suit, and I am pretty sick of the 
 
 E[ducation] D[epartment] and the follies of 
 
 officialdom as at present conducted. 
 
 132 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 153 
 
 Oct. 21. — Our colleagues gave Courthope and 
 ~me a dinner at the Metropole. Twenty-one 
 present, including Asst. Sees. A jolly evening.^ 
 
 Nov. 8. — I left the Education Dept., where I 
 had served seventeen years. The C[ivil] S[ervice] 
 is a miserable profession as at present managed : 
 but one makes good friends. 
 
 Dec. 31. — A year of interest to us. I have 
 got rid of the trammels of red tape and found 
 more congenial work. The only regret is losing 
 pleasant friends. 
 
 A sentence or two from a letter written on 
 January 12, 1890, to his friend Charles Chauncy 
 Binney ^ of Philadelphia may be appended : 
 
 The papers this morning announce the death 
 of my late chief, Pat Cumin. ... If it had 
 
 * On this occasion his colleague, Mr. R. M. Tabor, wrote some 
 verses descriptive of the company, one of which runs : 
 
 Here sits as scholar and as author known. 
 Whose jests relieved ofi&cial vitae tasdia, 
 Butler, our book of reference, our own 
 Encyclopaedia. 
 ' One of the " two very pleasant Americans " whom A. J. B. met 
 and helped at Fend in 1 880 (see p. 1 30), and not the one who lost his 
 hat. The meeting set up a lasting friendship. " Our acquaintance," 
 writes Mr. Binney, " began in a most unusual act of kindness on his 
 part : not unusual for him, perhaps, but certainly unusual for the 
 average man. About the last thing one could expect an Alpine climber 
 to do would be to add to his own party two young men not of his nation, 
 utter strangers to him, and obviously rather green as far as concerned 
 climbing, and to do so merely in order to help them out of an incon- 
 venient situation. Yet this was just what he did, and it has always 
 been a delight to me to look back on that climb over the Gepatsch Joch, 
 as certainly the pleasantest day in all my climbing experiences, in 
 spite of rather adverse weather," 
 
154 MEMOIR OF 
 
 happened three years ago, I might have been 
 at the Education Department now : but, though 
 we were good friends personally, he had a very 
 poor opinion of me as an of&cial, and it was the 
 knowledge that as long as he was in command 
 I should never get a chance of any work out of 
 the strictest official groove that made me catch 
 at the first chance of escape. 
 
 As will be seen. Fortune in his vocation was 
 twice to play him fickle ; but I believe A. J. B. 
 never ceased to remember 1887 as Jubilee Year, 
 or to associate it with the act of grace traditional 
 on Jubilees — deliverance of captives. At Wey- 
 bridge in course of time he joined the local School 
 Board, of which his clear sense of what Elemen- 
 tary Education can and cannot attempt, and his 
 knowledge of all the departmental ropes, made 
 him a most useful member. Also in the later 
 days of our friendship, when the Act of 1902 had 
 dragged me deep into educational work in the 
 extreme West of England, I could always count 
 on him for wise and knowledgeable counsel. 
 But I feel sure that in all our acquaintance he 
 alluded not half-a-dozen times to his personal 
 experience of the Education Office, and not once 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 155 
 
 at greater length than a couple of sentences. 
 Of Eton, of Cambridge, of the Alps, of his home, 
 his children, his friends, his literary work and a 
 hundred-odd matters he would talk gaily or 
 seriously, freely as one does with a friend. But 
 somehow I seemed to divine that on those 
 seventeen years of Whitehall he preferred to 
 keep a closed door. At any rate I forbore to 
 knock ; and the queer part of it is that I forbore 
 quite unconsciously. Indeed we had been friends 
 for a year or two before ever I learned that he 
 had been an " Official." 
 
 The Rivington partnership released him from 
 what he had always felt as a servitude, a dull 
 grind in which he was never given a chance — or 
 let us say, in fairness, never made a chance — 
 to do good work on any pattern which he had 
 some share in inventing. But commercially the 
 adventure did not turn out quite so happily. 
 Messrs. Rivington & Co. were contemplating the 
 sale of their business : a step of which Butler 
 had not been warned and in which (as I gather) 
 he was inadequately protected. I quote again 
 from his diary : 
 
156 MEMOIR OF 
 
 May 22, 1890. — A telegram to say that the 
 negotiations for the sale of the business to 
 Longmans were concluded. R. & Co. therefore 
 cease to exist on June 30th after a life of about 
 180 years. I do not know what the result to 
 me will be. 
 
 June 16, 1890. — Saw T. N. Longinan, who 
 said that they would not have taken me over 
 but for my agreement, and that when that ex- 
 pired (September 30, 1892) they would not be 
 likely to renew it. So I shall have to start 
 afresh at 48. 
 
 July 1, 1890. — To Paternoster Row. They 
 are very friendly, but it is a different state of 
 things, and I cannot feel that I have been fairly 
 dealt with. 
 
 In the autumn of 1891, almost a year before 
 the contract expired, he got an invitation to be 
 Chief Editor for Messrs. Cassell & Co. 
 
 Nov. 5, 1891. — Saw Wemyss Reid at Cassell's. 
 Shall probably go there. 
 
 He went, and worked as Chief Editor for 
 Cassell's until Midsummer 1894 ; and that is 
 how I come to be writing this story, obedient to 
 one of his last wishes. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 1571 
 
 In 1892, when Butler took over at Cassell's, 
 I had been for some little time "reader," or 
 literary adviser, to that firm ; was publishing 
 novels and stories with them ; and was also 
 working under Mr. [afterwards Sir] Wemyss 
 Reid, their Managing Director, as assistant editor 
 of The Speaker, a weekly review of Politics, Letters, 
 Science and the Arts, afterwards rechristened 
 The Nation, and under that name still very much 
 alive. It happened that overwork and the then 
 prevalent influenza had broken me down in health 
 and spirits when, late on a dingy afternoon in 
 February, A. J. B. called at my house. I knew 
 nothing about him except that he had succeeded 
 to the post left vacant by the death of an old 
 friend, John WilUams, sometime a scholar of 
 my own College at Oxford. Now Williams, on 
 my first coming to London, had chosen to play 
 the " elder brother " to me, seeming to shake off 
 the weariness of his overwearied life for the fun 
 of imparting his knowledge of all the haunts 
 and out-of-the-way corners around Fleet Street, 
 Ludgate Hill, and " the Row " — a knowledge 
 that ranged from quiet City churches and the 
 
158 MEMOIR OF 
 
 halls of guilds with their libraries, to the special 
 dishes of uncanny restaurants and wines of 
 recondite cellars. I mourned his loss, and was 
 too ill to like the prospect of building up ac- 
 quaintance with his successor. 
 
 The business on which Butler had come was, 
 as I remember, quite trivial : a couple of minutes 
 disposed of it. But he remained an hour, and I 
 was sorry when he went : for presently he was 
 giving me wise advice, much as one coaxes a 
 sick child ; and, a little later, we were laughing, 
 and for me the laughter Was like the first glass of 
 Burgundy allowed to a convalescent. We had 
 each found a friend, and our liking lasted — without 
 a misunderstanding amid many business discus- 
 sions and a deal of private dialectic — ^until the 
 day of his death. For me, it was just Montaigne's 
 sufficient excuse—" he was he, and I was I." 
 But I was of an age at which friends are still 
 made pretty easily. I daresay Butler — ^who (as we 
 have seen) had written of the Civil Service as "a 
 miserable profession, but one makes good friends " — 
 was hungry for that which, with all its notorious 
 virtues. La Belle Sauvage Yard (Messrs. Cassell & 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 159 
 
 Co.'s place of business) had not supplied him ; 
 and I recall an observation of Boswell's : 
 
 Friendship, the wine of life, should like a 
 well-stocked cellar be continually renewed : and 
 it is consolatory to think that although we can 
 seldom add what will equal the generous first- 
 growths of our youth, yet friendship becomes 
 insensibly old in much less time than is commonly 
 supposed, and not many years are required to 
 make it very mellow and pleasant. . . . The 
 proposition which I have now endeavoured to 
 illustrate was, at a subsequent period of his life, 
 the opinion of Johnson himself. He said to Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds, " If a man does not make neW 
 acquaintance as he advances through life, he 
 will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, 
 should keep his friendship in constant repair." 
 
 But I cannot weigh Butler's friendship in any 
 scales, and to find a thoroughly sufficient reason 
 for it were probably to find a false one. 
 
 A discreet word or two must be said of the place 
 and milieu in which A. J . B. was now installed. The 
 renowned and respectable firm of Cassell & Co., 
 Limited— formerly Messrs. Cassell, Petter and 
 Galpin — ^has its premises in La Belle Sauvage 
 
i6o MEMOIR OF 
 
 Yard, E.G., on the site once occupied by the old 
 La Belle Sauvage Inn ; also famous in its day, 
 albeit for different reasons. Its famihars know 
 it as " The Yard " ; and under that name in my 
 time affectionately blessed or cursed it. It is 
 approached by an archway, the first turning to the 
 left as you go up Ludgate Hill. By the passage, 
 perennially blocked by a carrier's van, or vans, 
 you came to the Yard, and at the end of it to a 
 door, a stone staircase, and a lift with authors 
 upon it, ascending and descending — that is to 
 say, with beings whom you mistook for authors. 
 Later, you learned that they were printers' assis- 
 tants : still later (from some cynic), that you 
 need not blush for the error — they were probably 
 both. 
 
 Narrow tortuous passages ramified from the 
 stone stairway among " departments " housed in 
 hutches composed of wood and glass. To reach 
 the Editorial Department you took three twists — 
 right, right again, and left — and emerged upon one 
 of several galleries running around a central well, 
 on the floor of which, deep down, the steam-presses 
 laboured in travail with the firm's productions — 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER i6i 
 
 The Quiver, CasseU's Saturday Journal, Cassell's 
 Popular Educator, Cassell's Magazine, Chums, 
 Little Folks, and what not. Their contending din 
 beat on the Chief Editor's door : close outside his 
 window, at the end of the railway-bridge stuck — 
 in the late Walter Thornbury's phrase — ^like a 
 fish-bone in the throat of Ludgate Hill, the loco- 
 motives of the London, Chatham, and Dover 
 Ra,ilway Company whistled, shunted, and daUied 
 to blow off steam. " Come in ! " Butler would 
 call, and explain cheerfully, " This, you may like 
 to know, is my ' sanctum.' " 
 
 Other corridors wound past " department " 
 after " department," into secret places never fully 
 explored by me. There was a Counting House, 
 of course ; and an Art Department, a Publishing 
 Department, a Publicity Department, a Depart- 
 ment (it was rumoured) mysteriously concerned 
 with the laying of eggs, a Department in which 
 Liberal and Conservative scribes wrote leading 
 articles for the provincial press. I shall have 
 more to say — or, rather, Butler will have more to 
 say — about this System of Departments ; but 
 the reader will already have remarked in their 
 
i62 MEMOIR OF 
 
 titles a tendency to " cross-division " — ^that error 
 in logic under which Wordsworth classified his 
 poems and an Oxford tradesman advertised him- 
 self as " University, Pork, and Family Butcher." 
 In practice their work sometimes overlapped, 
 sometimes ran at cross-purposes ; but a common 
 and almost ferocious tradition held them together 
 after a fashion — whatever else happened, the 
 Editorial Department must be kept in its place. 
 A Board of Directors presided over this System. 
 The late Sir Henry Fowler (afterwards Lord 
 Wolverhampton) presided over the Board. Its 
 Managing Director was Wemyss Reid, kindest- 
 hearted of men. 
 
 My illness, driving me home to long retirement 
 in Cornwall, loosened my close ties with the 
 Yard, and gave me few opportunities to observe 
 this new friend of mine in his daily work. But I 
 did observe that the two secretaries who helped 
 him — Mr. Frederic Whyte and Mr. J. S. Mann — 
 soon conceived an affection for A. J. B,, and it 
 endured to the end. In our business relations I 
 found him ever punctual, wise, kind, and just ; 
 averse from censure, but never afraid of it ; 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 163 
 
 honourably persuaded that the relations in all 
 commerce between buyer and seller lie in fair 
 common profit, not in mutual antagoiiism. But 
 although in the main his letters dealt with business, 
 by swift degrees they came to be remarkably unlike 
 business letters. They usually wound up, more- 
 over, with some disinterested chat about poetry ; 
 the excuse for this being that I had started to amuse 
 my convalescence by compiling an anthology of 
 Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrics. It was pub- 
 lished in due time by Messrs. Methuen, under the 
 title of The Golden Pomp, and duly dedicated 
 to A. J. B., who had taken a hand in the game 
 partly for the fun of it and partly (as I divined) 
 to encourage a recreation which he guessed to 
 be doing me good. He had that which is not 
 least of the rewards of loving and studying Dante 
 — an almost impeccable taste in English verse. 
 It was probably for this that I fell into the way 
 of keeping his MSS. : a habit which at this moment 
 I cannot bless without qualification : for I cling 
 to grace by another, which (better man than I 
 in most respects) he would never learn — that of 
 dating all letters in full. 
 
i64 MEMOIR OF 
 
 I make no oath, then, upon the chronological 
 order of the following extracts : 
 
 You cannot dogmatize on Milton till you are 
 well over thirty. There comes a time when mere 
 sonority is a delight in itself. I quite agree that 
 he seldom moves you in P. L. or P. R. (though he 
 does, I contend, in some of the minor poems) ; 
 but no more does Pope me, ever. Yet I read 
 Pope with pleasure — again of a different kind. I 
 do not think one can confine the name Poetry to 
 the kind that makes a choke come in the voice 
 when one tries to read it aloud : though I do 
 think that the man who has never felt that 
 choke has no right to have any opinions about 
 poetry at all. 
 
 What a wonderful rhythm is B. Jonson's 
 " Follow a shadow " ! Is there any other equally 
 early instance of that kind of choriambic measure 
 in English ? 
 
 " Seem to fly it, it will pursue — 
 In-ter-missa Venus diu." 
 
 I should like to turn Bridges on to it. , . . 
 
 " You meaner beauties of the night " — 
 Balston set us that for lyrics the week the 
 P. of Wales was married (1863). I thought it 
 was excellent of him. (You know that Wotton 
 was Provost of Eton ?) Did you ever read the 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 165 
 
 Trompeter von Sakkingen ? There's a rather jolly 
 song in it supposed to be sung by the trumpeter 
 in honour of the same lady : 
 
 " Ich knie vor Euch als getreuer Vasall 
 Pfalzgrafin, schonste der Frauen ! 
 
 Befehlet, so streit' ich mit Kaiser und Reich, 
 Befehlet, so will ich fiir Euch, fiir Euch 
 Die Welt in Fetzen zerhauen." 
 
 He got sent down for singing it, too. . . . 
 Quite right to put in " Fair and fair and twice 
 so fair," That has been a delight to me ever 
 since I can remember. 
 
 While agreeing that the transcription of 
 documents is not writing history, I dislike the 
 Johnny Green business even more, and Froude 
 worst of all. Green probably knew his facts, 
 though he seldom imparts them to his readers. 
 But I must say that I read history to find out 
 the answers to Who ? What ? Where ? What 
 with ? etc. Of course if, as with Gibbon, I can 
 get these questions answered in language which 
 it is an aesthetic pleasure to read, so much the 
 better : but I do not demand it. As for the 
 " picturesque " business, 1 can do that for myself. 
 I read John Villani with infinitely more pleasure 
 than Macaulay. 
 
 I am not sure that I do much like the Syracuse 
 business. [He had promised to write on the 
 
i66 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Syracusan Expedition for a book which I was 
 editing.] I prefer Phormion's actions in the 
 Gulf of Corinth. The other makes me miserable. 
 Indeed I would never read Thuc. vi. again after 
 the first duty-perusal. Still, it was a great event, 
 and must go in. But it was not sportsmanlike. 
 The Armada was, thoroughly ; and the longer 
 I live the more convinced I am that it is the 
 sportsmanlike and nothing else which can preserve 
 conduct from decay and oblivion. The vates 
 sacer is only in it when he selects this quality for 
 his eulogy. 
 
 You are right in the main about the novels. 
 One sees such a frightful lot of rubbish that 
 one's standard gets lowered insensibly. But the 
 problem is further complicated by the fact that 
 the absolute merits of a work of fiction are only 
 remotely connected with its comrn.ercial success, 
 and one is always thinking, " Is this the kind of 
 rot the public wiU like ? " Now, unless one is 
 a real connoisseur in rot, that is often a hard 
 question to decide. Why should not any casual 
 illiterate MS. contain the potentiality of Mr. 
 Barnes of New York ? . . . I knew of the Chimney 
 [on Scawfell. This letter was written after a 
 visit to the Lakes, where I had commended a 
 certain climb to him. — Q.], but did not like to 
 try it with an inexperienced party. It was there 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 167 
 
 that the German was killed, last spring. Also 
 I hate places where water drops on you. That 
 long step is certainly very long. I should like 
 to know if there is any place on the Matterhorn 
 where you have to negotiate 8 or 9 feet of vertical 
 rock without foothold. 
 
 I am going to Berkshire for a day or two to- 
 morrow. May perhaps make an excursion to 
 see Bridges. I see he has been delivered of a 
 work with which he was travailing when I was 
 there last — on the metre of Milton. / am content 
 to believe that Milton wrote in (approximately) 
 ten-syllable lines, with a stress (approximately) 
 on the even syllables. But that is too simple 
 for R. B. I know few subjects on which people 
 tolerate differences of opinion so little as in the 
 matter of scansion. 
 
 How did the gale of Sunday week treat you ? 
 A man from Norwich told me that in his road 
 the air was dark with fij^ng greenhouses. . . . 
 Here is an extract from a catalogue which reached 
 me to-day : 
 
 605— Myers (F. W. H.) Poems. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, dull. 
 
 If you see a publication called The Town 
 for last week, look at the BeUage thereto. It 
 consists of views in Samoa — only process things, 
 of course, but interesting to one fascinated by 
 
i68 MEMOIR OF 
 
 A Footnote to History, as I have always been. 
 I really think that book in its way the best thing 
 R. L. S. ever did. At least I can read it as often 
 as anything of his. It only shows that history, 
 and the contemporary history of a small and 
 " non-historic " people may be presented in a per- 
 fectly sound narrative form, and yet made attrac- 
 tive. Fancy what Tout would have made of it ! 
 
 I was reading, this afternoon, some remarks 
 of yours about poems in dialect. I confess with 
 regret that I don't care for such when they are 
 really in " dialect." Scots is a language, not a 
 dialect. From Dunbar to Burns, Scotsmen of 
 the highest cultivation and intelligence have 
 talked it, and there is no incongruity between the 
 thought and its expression. But I do not believe 
 that anyone who said " mwore " and " twoad " 
 and " the zettun zun " ever had the sentiments 
 which Barnes expresses in that lingo, let alone 
 the capacity for articulating them. 
 
 Next, how will this do ? If it is any good I'd 
 like to have a go at some more ; but I haven't 
 an idea whether it is or no : — 
 
 " Lesbia, let us live and love : 
 Pedants' grumbling let us prove 
 At a penny's fee we prize. 
 Suns may set and suns may rise : 
 Us, when one brief day is o'er. 
 Night and sleep hold evermore. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 169 
 
 Give me kisses, thousands, hundredsr- 
 
 Then more thousands, then more hundreds. 
 
 Other thousands, other hundreds . . . 
 
 At the millionth kiss or so 
 
 Cook the reckoning, lest we know. 
 
 Or lest envy grudge our blisses. 
 
 Knowing all our tale of kisses." [Catullus, v.] 
 
 You know Daniel's lovely version of lines 4-6 ? 
 
 I append some briefer broken extracts in 
 more domestic, if not more familiar, vein. The 
 first seems to be in answer to a protest of mine 
 against some supposed " editorial " censure. 
 
 No : not at all as " redactor." Merely as a 
 friend with 19 years 5 mo. more (mostly spent 
 foolishly) behind him. 
 
 We have had a lovely Christmas, fine and 
 warm. The day itself was cloudless, with light 
 S.W. breeze : the sort of day they only make in 
 small sizes, so that you cannot get it in June. 
 I have been converting a gravel-pit into a sunk 
 garden with the aid of lumps of stone (and the 
 birds sang like February all the time). Also I 
 have written a brief summary of the Saga Haraldi. 
 ... I wish I had time to work a little more at 
 Icelandic. 
 
 I hope this [S5a-acuse] will do. ... I have 
 made it rather a sketch of Athenian naval history 
 
170 MEMOIR OF 
 
 in prosperity and adversity. How much better 
 Thucydides is than Grote in description, and 
 Thirl wall in general narration. Indeed Grote is 
 little more than a rather diffuse crib, with hits 
 at Mitford. 
 
 I have been to Bradfield to see the Alcestis 
 this week. Very pretty ; but I'm hanged if I 
 can make head or tail of the play. Did Euri- 
 pides think Admetus a good sort of fellow ? 
 Was Eur. a Greek Ibsen ? If Herakles likes 
 Admetus, why does Alcestis so obviously despise 
 him ? 
 
 Motto for the yote — 
 
 La Vida es Sueiio.' The Vida is all I dreamt her. 
 
 This last is an allusion to a toy of mine — Vida, 
 a 7-ton cutter and a thing of beauty — ^in which 
 Butler spent some pleasant whiles with me. It 
 was only by accident of fate (I think) that the sea 
 ranked after the Alps in his affection, as it ranked 
 before them in mine. Certainly, as time went 
 on, he came to love the small harbour, beside 
 which my home lies, only less than his ancient 
 haunt, Clovelly. 
 
 It is a harbour frequented by ships of many 
 nations, and these vessels often arrive " in ballast," 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 171 
 
 which they usually discharge into lighters, to 
 be towed out to sea and sunk ; but sometimes 
 the stuff, being accounted good enough for road- 
 metalling, is carted inland from the town quay, 
 A. J. B. — to whom no form of knowledge came 
 amiss— had often on our walks lamented my in- 
 difference to geology — a Cornishman, of aU men, 
 should have a sense of it ! He on his side resisted 
 my attempts to win him to Celtic folklore : 
 
 I will study Cuculain with care, but I take 
 no stock in Celtic legends. I can't think why, 
 because I like Classical and Teutonic. It must 
 be the names, I think ; which always seem 
 amorphous. Perhaps it wiU come some day. 
 I find one can usually take interest in a thing 
 if one waits. I used not to care about geology : 
 now I have a kind of passion for it. 
 
 My revenge came one hot day when, with a 
 pipe in the shade of a hedge, I watched him 
 phrenetically at work discovering more and yet 
 more of volcanic tufa in a heap of road-metal ; and 
 suppressed, with my mirth, the information that it 
 had been brought, some weeks before, by ship from 
 the Bay of Naples. There was also an evening 
 
172 MEMOIR OF 
 
 when he had, by pure accident, timed his visit for 
 the date of our annual race-meeting, and I met him 
 at the railway station with a warning to be pre- 
 pared for some change in the habits of the little 
 town. It could not have been arranged better 
 had I gone to the vast expense of ordering 
 the bookie in the crimson-plush waistcoat who 
 emerged from the booking-office, or the troupe of 
 Pierrots and Pierrettes at the station entrance, or 
 the Scot in yellow McLeod tartan whom we met at 
 the first turn of the road — all hurrjTing to catch the 
 excursion train. A. J. B. kept his face and merely 
 remarked that this was a most gratifying welcome. 
 For it had come to be assumed between us — 
 by a convention gravely pushed to extravagant 
 foolery — ^that however often he visited Corn- 
 wall, he always came as a foreigner, for the first 
 time ; as I was assumed to be equally ignorant of 
 the manners and customs, fauna and flora of 
 Weybridge and London. A business letter would 
 interrupt itself to impart — for a specimen — ^this 
 information : 
 
 I am writing in London by gas-light at I p.m. 
 At home it is, I am assured, beautifully fine every 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 173 
 
 day. All I know is that 17°, 14°, 11° are the 
 figures of my thermometer for the last three 
 nights, and mine is, I should say, a thermo- 
 meter of eironic disposition. My neighbours talk 
 in the train of far lower temperatures. 
 Withal I have had but one skate. ^ 
 Skating is a thing you do with an iron affair 
 strapped to your boots. This causes you to fall 
 about a good deal and so keeps you warm. I 
 daresay you never saw it, where you live and 
 where I propose to render myself next Thursday 
 by the Cornish Riviera Express, (Watkin ! What 
 a name !) 
 
 Another convention was that I had never 
 heard of Cambridge, he never of Oxford. So I 
 may here cast forward a little to a happy week- 
 end when — the convention always sternly observed 
 between us — Butler played the guide to me 
 through Cambridge and the recesses and wonders 
 thereof. The curious may date it by this — ^that it 
 was a brilliant hot Saturday on which the Senate 
 decided not to admit women to University 
 degrees. Butler had come up to vote for the 
 
 * A. J. B. was a keen skater. ... In his Diary, Jan. 2, 1887, 19 
 the entry : " Skated with M. A. [Matthew Arnold], who told me that he 
 had seen Wordsworth's last skate on Rydal Water. He fell and cut his 
 head, being nearly 70, and was never allowed to skate again." 
 
174 MEMOIR OF 
 
 women . There had been an unholy undergraduate 
 row around the Senate House : the abutment 
 of Caius was gay with banners, proclaiming that 
 the age of chivalry was past, or had not yet 
 arrived (I forget which), and at the entrance of 
 Trinity Street one trod deep in confetti. I did 
 not, of course, miss to accept all this as part of 
 the normal life of Cambridge ; but asked inno- 
 cent questions calculated to combine polite 
 interest with as little as possible of wonder. 
 
 The curious, I say, can find the exact date 
 from this clue. For my part I date it by remem- 
 bering that, on this visit, I purchased, in Messrs. 
 Bowes' shop, Francis Thompson's New Poems, 
 recently published, and first read his "Mistress of 
 Vision " : 
 
 "Secret was the garden . . . 
 It was a mazeful wonder ; 
 Thrice three times it was enwalled ; 
 
 With an emerald 
 Sealed so asunder. 
 
 All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their 
 music thralled. " 
 
 Into such a garden, just then, Butler had at 
 length admitted me. Outwardly it was the 
 Fellows' Garden of Trinity (and, sure, there can 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 175 
 
 be few spots on this earth where so much of 
 beauty, of amenity, lies packed " in a little room "), 
 and Butler wore the garb then customary for 
 non-resident members of the Senate. It imposed 
 upon the academic gown the top-hat of more 
 worldly respectabiUty, without, to the irreverent 
 eye, achieving harmony, or aesthetic congruity, 
 or, apart from the consecration of use, anjrthing 
 more than the Absurd. Outwardly, too, our talk 
 — or his talk, rather ; for I played the listener — 
 ran on trifles, odd anecdotes, phenomena of the 
 past. But actually while I listened I knew that 
 this was the garden of his soul, and he was making 
 me welcome. 
 
 Blake wrote somewhere — most likely on the 
 margin of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses — 
 that " to generalise is to be an idiot " ; ^ and 
 since that day time and circumstance have taught 
 me how much of fooUsh ess lies in many a 
 generalisation on the differences between Oxford 
 and Cambridge, Oxford men and Cambridge men. 
 Yet I will risk saying this, which I find to be 
 
 * This, by the way, itself partakes of the nature of a general obser- 
 vation. 
 
176 MEMOIR OF 
 
 generally true — ^that while a Cambridge man 
 reverts to Cambridge as to a place, gracious and 
 hallowed by the feet of great men as well as by 
 those of his own transient youth, it does not lay 
 on him just that spell which binds an Oxford man 
 to personify Oxford, to enshrine and adore her as 
 veritably and ineffably, at once and all together, 
 mother and mistress and queen — and yet not 
 three goddesses but one goddess. In depth of 
 attachment to his own College the one man differs 
 no whit from the other. I am not, however, 
 speaking of Colleges, but of Alma Mater, University 
 in entity : and, if I am right in this — ^as I am 
 prepared to have it hotly contested — I should 
 proceed to discover the reason of it, and especially 
 for Trinity men, in the overshadowing stature of 
 Trinity. It is difficult to make one statue of 
 disproportionate members. 
 
 So I think I do my friend no injustice in saying 
 that, while Cambridge had no son more devotedly 
 attached, Cambridge to him was Trinity set 
 about with ornaments and with kings' daughters 
 for her honourable women : and an illusion like 
 that works little harm, along with much good. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 1771 
 
 when it works in a mind as generous and liberal 
 as Butler's. But below my understanding of 
 what this garden meant to him I had a sense 
 of the " Vanity of Human Wishes " : 
 
 " Quid tam dextro pcde concipis, ut te 
 Conatus non paeniteat votique peracti ? " — 
 
 with a stress on peracti, allowable though be- 
 yond the Roman poet's intention. At twenty- 
 three he had achieved his heart's desire (and his 
 parents') without having reckoned that it was a 
 place in which there might be no stay. To live 
 one's life out in the service of learning as a per- 
 manent Fellow of Trinity, and concurrently to 
 be, as Butler was, the best of husbands and of 
 fathers, were a gift to be asked of the gods, and 
 to be wisely granted by them, if the Statutes 
 had only allowed it. But they had not : and, 
 as it seemed to me, Butler had never been quite 
 able to adjust his compass to a new pole. It 
 always twitched back towards Cambridge and 
 this garden. 
 
 On the Saturday he was my guest at the board 
 of the Ad Eundem ; a small Society of Oxford and 
 Cambridge men in equal numbers, who alternate 
 
178 MEMOIR OF 
 
 a terminal dinner at the two Universities and 
 forgot that they are grave or were ever rivals. 
 [The rule against strangers must have been relaxed 
 for Butler.] On the Sunday he was my host 
 at the high table of Trinity, in that very noble 
 hall which (having to make a stand somewhere) 
 I declined to admit as surpassing, or indeed 
 equalling, the hall of Christ Church. Butler in a 
 company of his peers could talk brilliantly ; and 
 on both occasions I saw and heard him at the 
 stretch of his form in an art which I can but 
 admire at a distance. 1 admired, but prized 
 better the morning's confidences (interrupted by 
 the discovery of a starling's egg in the sacred 
 gravel of the Roundabout — " The starling is a 
 born 'Arry ; a bird incurably vulgar. He — well," 
 with a long gaze at the egg, " we will suppose it 
 to be she — ^is capable of this kind of thing any- 
 where, here as easily as on Hampstead Heath "). 
 Crasingensiterabimus. . . . It must have been 
 penal for Butler to go back from these glimpses 
 -of a paradise lost to the Monday din in " The 
 Yard." But he had a Spartan sense of life's 
 obligations, and was the last man to be com- 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 179 
 
 miserated on enduring the nuisances attendant 
 upon any honest job, if only he were left free to 
 fuimit. 
 
 He was fastidious ; but the trouble did not 
 lie with his fastidiousness, save in its forbidding 
 him to be content with any work that could not 
 be sharply and clearly executed. CasseU's has 
 passed into new management under Mr. Arthur 
 Spurgeon : and I, for one, am glad of its renewed 
 prosperity. But the old system of cross-divided 
 " departments " — each with a jealous say on 
 every matter over which the Chief Editor should 
 have had control — simply broke the heart. A 
 state, however democratic, must be ruled by a 
 head : and where that nominal head, under a 
 Board of Directors, is kept the shuttlecock of 
 " departments " at variance, there can be only 
 one result. A. J. B. writes : 
 
 The arrangement into Departments is the most 
 deadly obstacle to despatch in business. How 
 anybody, with the fearful example of the pubhc 
 service before his eyes, can ever have organised 
 a concern on that pattern is to me inconceivable. 
 
 OvK dyaObv TToKvKoipaviij, I wish I WaS Koipavo'i for 
 
 a week ! 
 
i8o MEMOIR OF 
 
 The main purpose of the Board in those days 
 seemed to lie against the publishing of any book 
 specially commended ; or, indeed, against the 
 publishing of any book at all. While reserving 
 the opinion that a publishing firm could hardly 
 maintain its dividend on a mere renunciation of 
 publishing, one had to admit that, this policy 
 once fixed, it was waste of money to pay anybody 
 for counteracting it. 
 
 In March 1894 Messrs. Cassell & Co. decided 
 to cut down expenses in the Editorial Depart- 
 ment, and on the following Midsummer A. J. B., 
 with some humorous remarks, left the editorial 
 desk. 
 
 This blow — if indeed it could be called a blow — 
 fell lightly if not imperceptibly, for it fell close 
 upon what was a blow indeed. In July 1893 
 his parents had celebrated their Golden Wedding 
 at Lincoln. It was marked by various gifts to 
 the Cathedral, notably a beautiful Bible for the 
 choir lectern from their children and grand- 
 children. A. J. B. had taken infinite pains with 
 this, having it bound to his own design by the 
 best hand-binder he could discover. His sister 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER i8i 
 
 vvrites, some years later, " Do you remember 
 Father and Mother on the Golden Wedding 
 morning, leaning together over the Bible, 'with 
 tears of thankfulness that it was his choice ? " 
 Three months later the Dean travelled to preach 
 at Maidenhead ; where, close on the time for 
 going to the pulpit, a telegram was put into his 
 hands, announcing that Mrs. Butler, whom he 
 had left in good health at home, was stricken with 
 paralysis. He mounted the pulpit, preached — 
 not knowing, as he afterwards said, how he did 
 it— and hurried back to Lincoln. 
 
 There, having cancelled aU immediate engage- 
 ments, he devoted himself to his wife's bedside. 
 Her seizure had not been a severe one, though 
 the warning could not be mistaken ; and so 
 these two strenuous, most loving souls dwelt 
 together and communed, as it were, in the brief 
 afterglow of their long harvest day. It was very 
 brief. At the close of December the influenza 
 then raging in Lincoln entered the Deanery ; and 
 A. J. B., obeying a telegram, travelled from 
 London to find both his parents seriously ill. 
 The Dean died on Sunday, January 14, and on 
 
i82 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 the next Sunday Mrs. Butler followed him. They 
 rest together in the Cloister Garth, in the north- 
 east corner. A. J. B. writes to me from Lincoln 
 (January 24) : 
 
 I am beginning to think St. Barnabas was not 
 such an uncommon kind of man, after all. The 
 world seems full of sons of consolation just now. 
 May be it is my want of experience — for I have 
 lived now nearly fifty years without having any 
 occasion to seek the sympathy of friends in a 
 great sorrow — but I am certainly amazed before 
 the amount of kindly feeling which the world 
 contains, and, I may add, the power which 
 people seem to have of expressing it. ... I 
 hope the plague is really abating with you. This 
 house has been full of it, and it was primarily 
 that which ended my Father's life : at least he 
 caught a bad cold which influenza converted into 
 pneumonia. My Mother had the same, but in 
 her the will to live had gone. It was Christiana 
 following Christian, though at a shorter interval. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Weybridge — ^Translations 
 1895—1898 
 
 "To-day ends the strangest year of my life," 
 A. J. B. writes in his diary on New Year's Eve, 
 1894, and closes the Old Year with these words : 
 
 So at the age of fifty I find myself a picker-up of 
 odd jobs and stray literary work. The summer 
 was passed pleasantly enough as Asst. Commis- 
 sioner to the Royal Commission on Secondary 
 Education. Since then I have to do what I 
 can with small literary jobs. Thanks be to God, 
 all our children are well, and I myself easier in 
 mind than for a long time. . . . Confitebor tibi 
 in seculum quia fecisti. . . . 
 
 I seemed to spell henceforth, beneath the 
 
 stoical humour of his letters, a double current 
 
 running : exhilaration at release from office, 
 
 time-table, dead routine, with an undertow of 
 
 183 
 
i84 MEMOIR OF 
 
 the brown water of disappointment. Decades 
 are sharp reminders^" Don't you feel very old ? " 
 he wrote, on my accomplishing one. In his 
 fiftieth year it happened to Butler, hitherto un- 
 acquainted with bereavement, to lose both father 
 and mother, and almost simultaneously to be 
 taught at a blow that he had not only missed 
 to fulfil something of their hopes, but had actually 
 let slip a " career " which was now irrecoverable. 
 Such regrets wUl haunt a man even so scornful 
 as Butler was of the cheap success of the market- 
 place, and they held a sting of truth. He had 
 defended the independence of his soul, which is 
 a man's first duty : yet if he had obeyed the 
 parental wisdom, how it might have justified its 
 sagacity ! He had been indolent, fastidious, 
 always a little too easy in trusting to his talent 
 (so quick and superior to the run of talent), 
 too eager for knowledge of this and that, all and 
 sundry, too slack of application to a long-sighted 
 personal goal. He, a man of the world, had 
 somehow been throughout less worldly-wise than, 
 his saintly parents. 
 
 For my part, I hold that A. J. B. was the 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 1S5 
 
 better man for having held on his own way. 
 These pages, at any rate, had never been written 
 to celebrate the sort of success he accused himself 
 of having missed. But he was too much of a 
 Roman to spare himself the accusation. As late 
 as 1903 I find him writing to his son, who has 
 just exchanged Eton for Trinity, Cambridge : 
 
 My sending you to Cambridge at all, apart 
 from the rather sentimental (and selfish) wish 
 to keep up the family tradition, was of the nature 
 of an investment. ... As you hold no honours 
 in your hand, and not any exceptionally good 
 cards, you can only do this [win] by good play. 
 I had no honours to speak of. I held good cards : 
 I did not play them as I ought to have done ; 
 and I am where I am. Now I have to toil at 
 hack work, at a time of life when most people are 
 beginning to take in their sails, or at any rate to 
 choose the work that pleases them best. What 
 is worse, through having shrunk from drudgery 
 and tried short cuts when I was younger, I find 
 it very hard now to apply myself to my work, 
 so that I am always more or less driven, and take 
 a whole day to do what most men would do in a 
 morning. 
 
 What you want, I am sure, is a definite pur- 
 pose, or rather the determination to let nothing 
 
i86 MEMOIR OF 
 
 (short of what is dishonourable, which I know 
 you would rightly stick at) stand between you 
 and your purpose. You let yourself be stopped 
 sometimes by " One can't." Now there is nothing 
 which " one can't," except disgrace oneself. To 
 take a perfectly imaginary case. Suppose there 
 was some bit of knowledge essential to your work, 
 which you could only get by writing to the 
 Emperor of China, and could get it so — you should 
 write to the Emperor of China, and find a Chinese 
 scholar to translate for you. But you would say, 
 " One can't." You should practise the operation 
 known as picking people's brains. In nine cases 
 out of ten they like it. As for your coach and 
 your lecturers, it is what they are there for. And 
 be very suspicious about thinking you know 
 anything until you have written it out correctly. 
 Bacon says, " Writing maketh an Exact Man," 
 Also, writing is an excellent challenge to indolence, 
 and so is a moral as well as an intellectual training. 
 Remember that character is built of habits, and 
 habits are formed by small acts constantly re- 
 peated ; integration in fact ; or like a coral-reef. 
 Much the same applies to the mind, only that is 
 in some way more physical, depending on the 
 condition the cells of your brain are in. You 
 can make your brain firm or flabby, just as you 
 can your muscles ; but in both cases hard grind 
 with a purpose is necessary if flabbiness is to be 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 187 
 
 avoided, and by grind I do not merely mean 
 sitting with a book in front of you, but an effort 
 to know some new thing every day, having 
 previously made quite sure what you do know 
 and what you do not. 
 
 Butler's three months on the Assistant Com- 
 missionership were, after some preliminaries 
 which took him to Manchester, entirely spent in 
 Norfolk, with headquarters at the Maid's Head, 
 Norwich : 
 
 June 17, — My dear Q., — At this moment I 
 am bilious and somewhat depressed. For one 
 thing, it appears that the Commissioners will 
 expect a report extending to the dimensions of 
 an average 3- volume novel. I reckoned one that 
 Fitch wrote for a former Commission at 240,000 
 words ! Considering that every conceivable fact 
 bearing on the subject is perfectly well known 
 already, and most of them are in print, it is 
 hard to see how anyone is to come up to this 
 model. I wish to goodness they had given me 
 Devonshire. 
 
 Sept. 20. — I finished my time in Norfolk a 
 month ago, and have been cooking my report ever 
 since. I wish I could confine it to the expression 
 which one good gentleman — and he a School 
 
i88 '\'r> MEMOIR OF 
 
 Board clerk — ^used to me, to the effect that Secon- 
 dary Education was infernal rot. But I fear 
 that that would not suit my Commissioners either 
 in form or matter. 
 
 Jan. 3, 1896. — My dear Q., — Knowing your 
 interest in imaginative literature, I am sending 
 you a copy of my Secondary Education report — 
 one of a lot which reached me to-day. I did not 
 want them a bit ; but having got them I may as 
 well get rid of them. 
 
 The letter of September 20 informs me further 
 that he has been "filling up odd moments by 
 translating Sainte Beuve for E. Arnold and (last 
 week) by writing, for a periodical called Bihliogra- 
 pMca, an account of those alphabetical woodcuts 
 found in the i6th Cent. — Italian books — about 
 which I expect I have told you." He had (to omit 
 his prose renderings of Dante) made proof of his re- 
 markable skill as a translator (and of his yet more 
 remarkable dexterity in abridging) in his version 
 of The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot — Napoleonic 
 General and true spiritual son of Dumas, born 
 before his father — and Letters of Count Cavour 
 and Madame de Circout, Edited by Count Nigra : 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 189 
 
 the one published by Longmans in 1893, the other 
 by Cassell in 1894. In the midst of these activities 
 I received a note from him : " As I am about to 
 bury myself for some months in a German work 
 on Ethnology, I feel like one retiring from the 
 world, and wish to retire at peace with all men. 
 But I will not retire at peace with you unless you 
 write. Is it a part of your system of life to write 
 no letters in the second half of the year ? " " The 
 work in question " — ^he revelled in jargon and 
 collected specimens for my delight — was finished 
 in 1896 and published by Messrs. Macmillan — The 
 History of Mankind, by Friedrich Ratzel ; five 
 volumes boUed down into three, " while I am 
 boiling down Dante into a caput mortuum for 
 Innes." 1 
 
 Characteristically, having burnt his boats and 
 set up his rest upon this glorified hack-work, he 
 at once fell to enlarging his library and scriptorium. 
 
 Mar. 15. — We are all over bricks and mortar, 
 beginning our addition. I cannot afford it ; but 
 it was that or going away, and it will be something 
 to play with in August, I hope. Just now I have 
 
 1 Dante, His Times and His Work, i vol, A. D. Innes & Co., 1866 
 (znd ed. 1897). 
 
190 MEMOIR OF 
 
 no time to play at all. But I have had a nice 
 walk to-day — 20 miles or so — ^and my wife has 
 played the overture to Magic Flute and Leonora ; 
 so I feel good. . . . Our things are coming out 
 apace : daffodils in all corners, and violets coming 
 on. 
 
 Oct. 9. — Let me do equal justice to my various 
 occupations by neglecting them all, and writing 
 to you. We are quite settled in, or as much so 
 as people can be whose kitchen is being enlarged, 
 whose garden yawns with trenches for drainage, 
 and bricks and mortar abundantly. Fights with 
 sanitary inspectors are looming. A confounded 
 inspector has the impudence to dictate to me 
 regarding the position of my rain-water drain. 
 If I get through the winter without apoplexy or 
 hydrocephalus, I shall be thankful. ... I am 
 divided at present between Ratzel and George 
 Canning — ^the latter for choice. I believe I told 
 you that I thought of publishing a bunch of his 
 early letters. This has involved a lot of reading, 
 to get properly oriented ; and having once begun, 
 one goes on. I should like to do a real life of 
 him — only. Would any one read it ? Odd that 
 it never has been properly done. 
 
 I am writing in a newly-built room, which 
 is to be my room-of-all-work when we are fairly 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 191 
 
 settled into one annex. The big room is fairly 
 satisfactory on the whole, and will hold a lot of 
 books. 
 
 He used to tell Leslie Stephen that it was 
 the production of the Dictionary of National 
 Biography that had forced him to build this 
 library. In a note to his wife about it and its 
 fittings he writes : "I have no preference for 
 panelling. I shall suggest plaster, with '*TXHS 
 lATPEION on it." This instruction was carried 
 out, and the dedication of the room as " the 
 soul's healing-place " remained for a year or two 
 on the arch over the fireplace, until the room 
 was papered. On the mantelshelf he kept two 
 small photographs in oval frames — one of James 
 Riddell of Balliol, the other of John Mill of 
 CloveUy, personifjdng, side by side, the good 
 life contemplative and the good life of action. 
 
 He had a good library — " a scholar's library " 
 said the auctioneer who came to appraise it after 
 his death. It contained a valuable collection of 
 Dantes and old Italian books. In accordance 
 with his wish these were afterwards given to his 
 University ; and his little collection of books of the 
 
192 MEMOIR OF 
 
 old Gioliti press was purchased by some of his 
 friends, led by Sir Charles Holroyd, and given to 
 Trinity College library as a memorial. On the first 
 page of the Dante catalogue, which he made him- 
 self, he wrote, " Cum interieret non sumet omnia." 
 The letters last quoted are punctuated with 
 groans over Ratzel — " that infernal nigger book " : 
 and meanwhile Lord Acton had set him to do 
 
 an awful job, viz. boil down the French wars of 
 religion from 1560-94 (say) into 17,000 words for 
 his Variorum History. He expects me to go to 
 the B. Mus. and look up original documents too, 
 if you please. 
 
 The^Memoirs of Baron ThUbault appeared 
 in 1896 (Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., publishers). 
 It " comes pleasantly as light evening work after 
 a morning and afternoon spent in wrestling with 
 my German ethnologist " — ^for ^yhom, before he 
 had done, Butler conceived something like a 
 personal hatred. 
 
 He says that a normally developed German is 
 physically and corporeally a finer specimen of 
 humanity than the average Zulu. Would not 
 you like to see a fight between 100 of each sort — 
 assegais only permitted ? 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 193 
 
 The theory of a man who does something 
 eminently well has usually the defect of not 
 carrying any one very far. Butler's, at any 
 rate, had the merit that it made no masonic 
 secret of a business which is, after all, mainly a 
 matter of tact. " My theory is that a trans- 
 lation ought to be written in grammatical and 
 fairly fluent English, so rendered that any good 
 scholar would be able to retranslate it verbatim 
 into the original. There are, of course, as many 
 moulds of thought as there are languages, and 
 inevitably the thought is influenced by its vehicle. 
 A Frenchman, for instance, may be more logical 
 in expression because his vocabulary is not so 
 full as ours, and therefore he puts his ideas in 
 fewer, clearer words. On the other hand, I often 
 find that certain trains of thought are not only 
 German in character but inevitably in expression 
 also " — and he once, happening on a German 
 sentence sixteen lines long, carefully translated 
 it to length. " It gives you the author rather than 
 Butler, anyhow," he remarked, perusing the result. 
 
 The secret, in fact, comes to this, that in 
 dealing with a foreign book Butler knew what 
 
194 MEMOIR OF 
 
 he was about. In Greek, Latin, French, German, 
 Itahan he had the equipment of a scholar, with 
 a working knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, 
 Swedish, and Dutch. He also knew English, and 
 could write it. Moreover he took pains. His 
 remarkable talent for " abridgment " — ^he con- 
 densed the five long volumes of Thiebault into 
 two — was begotten by Cambridge conciseness 
 upon natural reticence. 
 
 In one particular this last word must be 
 qualified. I imagine him writing this Memoir, 
 and at this point adding that " he had, I regret 
 to say, a foible for writing to the public press : 
 nor was it a complete justification of this habit 
 that it amused his friends." Amuse them it 
 certainly did. I have a collection of these fugitive 
 trifles before me, pasted "into three volumes, the 
 whole headed in his handwriting : A. J. Butler. 
 His Contributions to Public Discussion, from April i 
 {an appropriate day) 1876. They start with a 
 pretty concatenation of subjects — the Preface 
 to The Baviad and Maeviad (with a moral upon 
 the late Mr. Edmund Yates), the Altruism of 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 195 
 
 Ants, London Water and its Inhabitants {suaves 
 res, si non narrdsset causas earum et naturas), the 
 Russo-Turkish War (several), Greek at Cambridge, 
 " Bad English," Sleeping Cars on the Continent, 
 Royal Surnames, the " Pia " of Dante's Purgatorio, 
 Mr. Gladstone, Chinese Christians, The Deceased 
 Wife's Sister, the Wine Tax, Cicero. They deal 
 with English hotel-charges and the costume of 
 Bishops, with Second Wranglers and with Rabies 
 in Dogs, They glance at Sir Edwin Watkin as a 
 Company Promoter, at Professor Flinders Petrie 
 as an interpreter of St. Paul. [" To say that St. 
 Paul did not see it needful to prohibit polygamy 
 is either a truism or grotesque. So far as I am 
 aware he nowhere prohibits cheating at cards."] 
 For these ema wrepoevTa the Holy Roman Empire 
 is not game too high, nor the split infinitive too 
 common ; rieither did Mr. Gladstone go too fast, 
 nor a South Eastern Railway train too slow for 
 them. They all go into the " mixed bag," and 
 A. J.- B., if asked why he had done it, could 
 only plead with the Three Jovial Huntsmen 
 that he had " powdered up and down a bit and 
 had a rattling day." 
 
196 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Among his earlier papers I find a sonnet : 
 
 Thoughts on Reading the Decameron 
 
 A gallant company of youths and maids 
 Pass'd from the plague-struck city, and baited 
 not 
 Before they came unto a pleasant spot 
 Where nightingales sang sweetly 'mid cool glades 
 Of garden, and the duly water'd blades 
 Dipp'd in the stream. There, when the day 
 was hot. 
 They told their merry tales, all fears forgot, 
 'Neath trellis'd vines and odorous orange-shades. 
 
 And yet — though England is not Italy, 
 
 Nor London Florence, nor can Brompton boast 
 The flowers of orange nor the orange ripe, 
 Nor trellis'd vines nor nightingales — still I 
 Read and not envied those : for one thought 
 crost 
 My mind — " Good Boccace never smoked a pipe." 
 
 Now, in his library at Weybridge, Butler lit his 
 pipe, settled down to his daily task and, participa- 
 ting in their pleasures, to bring up his family in 
 godliness and good learning. For this last, here 
 is a characteristic note to his wife, on choosing a 
 governess : 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 197 
 
 There is no need for a first-rate scholar. I can 
 give them the scholarship. What we want is 
 some one to give them the stimulus, to teach them 
 to do things with all their might, and to give them 
 the desire to excel in whatever they may take up — 
 botany, language, history, anything ; which can 
 only be done by plodding. In other words, we 
 want some one who can saturate them with a 
 sense of duty, and yet keep clear of pedantry. 
 
 He delighted in the smallest delights of his 
 household. His letters to me solemnly enclose 
 programmes of nursery theatricals, and the chil- 
 dren do not rejoice in possession of a new dog 
 but I get a joyous report of it. He tells me that 
 he has bidden farewell to publishing and straight- 
 way proceeds : 
 
 A more cheerful subject is a new dog. Such a 
 dear little beast ! White fox terrier with lemon 
 head : 2^ years old with a pedigree and a prize. 
 Has changed owners in consequence of killing a 
 lamb — I fancy by mistake for a rat. Wants to 
 fight every larger dog he sees, but is thoroughly 
 amiable at heart. He bites me, but no one else ; 
 and dogs always bite me, I find, as a sign of 
 affection. 
 
igS ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 We had a tragedy yesterday. Grade's beloved 
 gtainea-pig was slain by Bully. They had just 
 erected an elaborate run of wire netting for the 
 poor little animal : and in the course of a minute or 
 two during which it was left unwatched, the dog 
 got one of the posts up, inserted his nose, and 
 gripped the unhappy rodent, who expired in a 
 few minutes. 
 
 I always say that it is unlucky to go into a 
 newly-built house. 
 
 He was buried later on, in a card-box filled up 
 with pansies and other flowers of the season. 
 A small friend from next door, the original donor 
 of the pig, dug up his own best hyacinths to 
 plant on the humble tomb, and proposed to 
 erect a cross. But a plain slab is thought 
 more appropriate. 
 
 So, during these years, he worked and played ; 
 and 9,lways his help and the store of his multi- 
 farious knowledge were at the disposal of any 
 fellow-student who sought it ; always gladly 
 given, and most gladly to the young. 
 
 Note. — Since writing this chapter I have come across the following, 
 written to Count Nigra by a French critic who had been reading the 
 Cavour Letters : . . . " le traducteur a fait mentir le proverbe Italien. 
 II a traduit sans trahir. U est 6videmment un homme intelligent, 
 sachant le franfais, ce qui se rencontre souvent chez les Anglais, et 
 sachant aussi, ce qui est beaucoup plus rare parmi eux, I'anglais." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Record Office — Last Days 
 1898-1910 
 
 In 1898 Butler was offered work at the Public 
 Record Office by his friend Sir Henry Maxwell 
 Lyte, Keeper of the Records. He took up his 
 task that year, soon found delight in it and in the 
 friendships he made there, and continued in it 
 (travelling up from Weybridge to Chancery Lane 
 and back) until the last fortnight of his life. 
 
 He edited, in all, five volumes of the Calendars 
 of State Papers — Reign of Queen Elizabeth. Un- 
 doubtedly the deciphering of documents wore upon 
 his eyesight in these later years, and failing eye- 
 sight was a sore trial to one who loved books as 
 Butler did ; but he maintained to the end that he 
 could read any book printed before 1500 much 
 more easily than any modern one. 
 
 That was his way. His letters of this period 
 
 (save when they touch on politics) abound with 
 
 cheerfulness. 
 
 199 
 
200 MEMOIR OF 
 
 This is really very good sport, though hardish 
 work by reason of the abominable writing and 
 spelling. But I cannot imagine how anyone can 
 have the cheek to write a history. A lifetime 
 would seem too short to read the documents. I 
 suppose the usual way is to settle what you are 
 going to say and then look for a few facts in docu- 
 ments — or in indexes — ^to back it up. I am 
 convinced that between the Quellen and Dumas 
 there is no real halting-place. 
 
 Come and look me up here [Record Ofi&ce]. 
 Then I will jolly soon let you know all about Clio 
 — though indeed I am beginning to think that there 
 ain't no such person, or that, if there is, her family 
 is far more near akin to the Scotts and Dumases 
 than to any of the gentlemen who write what is 
 called history in this or any other country. They 
 are all right, but they have no use for the Muse. . . . 
 Bless you, no ! — I am not a freemason. My brother 
 has lately become one ; but, so far as I can make 
 out, the only tangible result is the loss of his 
 umbrella, stolen at the dinner of his lodge. 
 
 Yours of yesterday just received. You do not 
 perhaps know that Shakespeare went out of his 
 way to make Juliet young. In the Italian story 
 she was i8. Also observe that the play does in 
 some degree make for disparity of age. Romeo 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 201 
 
 — as I have shown in an opusculum to be found 
 in an old no. of the P.M.G., perhaps 20 years 
 back — cannot be much, if at all, under 30. Still I 
 am quite with you as regards 45 and 18 marriages. 
 The French say that h — 2 zei — ' 10 is the proper 
 formula ; with which the particular case given 
 by Hesiod agrees (where h ^■^o.w =20). . . . No 
 doubt those early medieval and Elizabethan mar- 
 riages had a great deal to do with the shortness 
 of life. You know that none of our sovereigns 
 reached 70 before the i8th cent. ... I agree 
 entirely that if men married at 25 or 26 it would 
 be much better than the state of things we are 
 coming to. Only I should require a much higher 
 standard of continence before marriage. 
 
 Dec. 30, 1900. — I have been reminded of your 
 continued existence by the appearance of The 
 Oxford Book of English Verse, a copy of which my 
 family gave me at Christmas ; and so was minded 
 to send you a greeting for the new century .... 
 By the way, did you ever hear of an anthology 
 called The British Egeria ? My 1718 Daniel has 
 been scored all through by some Johnny who 
 seems to have been compiling a work under that 
 title. . . . You remember that poem you ex- 
 tracted (from Bullen, I think) and put in The 
 Golden Pomp ? 
 
 " Yet if his Majesty, our sovereign Lord." 
 
202 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Reading Bishop Grosseteste's life the other day, 
 I came across what may have given the suggestion 
 for it. Writing to the Convent of Peterborough 
 he says, " Who is there who, if he were about to 
 entertain an earthly king, would not cleanse and 
 purify in every way his abode, sparing neither 
 labour nor expense until the house was duly 
 prepared with all adornment ? But in youi 
 monastery the King of Heaven continually dwells," 
 etc. A collection of Grosseteste's letters was 
 printed in 1690 (Brown, editor). Can we put 
 the poem as late as that ? 
 
 The last of Butler's translations had ap- 
 peared a month or so before he sent me this 
 New Year's letter ; and the making of it was a 
 remarkable literary — or, as he would have inter- 
 rupted, " say ' journalistic ' ! " — feat. The title- 
 page correctly advertises his share in it : Bismarck | 
 The Man and the Statesman \ Translated from the 
 German under the supervision of A. J. Butler \ 
 London \ Smith, Elder & Co. The story is this : 
 Quite early in October 1899, Mr. Reginald Smith, 
 Q.C., of the publishing firm of Messrs. Smith, 
 Elder & Co., asked Butler to come with him and 
 see "a new book that had been offered for trans- 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 203 
 
 lation." They repaired to the Hotel Metropole 
 (fifth floor), where the agents of Messrs. Cotta, 
 the German publishers of Bismarck's Memoirs, 
 awaited them. 
 
 One of them spoke English fairly fluently 
 [says A. J. B.], and we soon discovered that they 
 had everything ready for inspection. They 
 produced a bound and printed German book 
 in one volume, which I supposed was the final 
 form in which Bismarck had approved the work — 
 though I seemed to have noticed a few differences 
 in the form given to the German public, ... I was 
 anxious enough to look at what they brought, 
 and, as time was important, I lit a pipe and read 
 as hard as I could. It did not take me long to 
 make up my mind. I was sure, before I began, 
 that all the '' oddments " and eccentricities had 
 been given to Busch, and that what I had to see 
 would not be merely after-dinner stories, but the 
 real volume by which Bismarck wished posterity 
 to judge him, his KTrjfia e? aei, written not for 
 mere amusement, but to provide material for 
 the historian, to give a full brief to his advocate. 
 So I quickly gave Mr. Smith my opinion that he 
 ought at once to take the English rights. 
 
 It must have been about the 8th of October that 
 we chose our staff of translators, for there was no 
 
204 MEMOIR OF 
 
 hope of any one man being able to get through 
 the work in tinae. Three ladies and six gentlemen 
 were promptly found and engaged upon the 
 business, and my first ' copy ' reached me in a 
 week's time. My business was to fit these nine 
 versions into a connected whole. On Saturday, 
 Oct. 15th, my work began ; and as, naturally, 
 all nine styles were different, I had to stick to 
 my desk seven or eight hours every day for five 
 weeks before I could satisfy myself that the public 
 wovild not discover where the " joins " came in, 
 and would get a thoroughly correct version. On 
 a certain day — I forget the exact date — all my 
 MSS. had to be ready for the press by 2 o'clock ; 
 and I handed in the bundle at 1.30, to the evident 
 delight of Messrs. Smith, Elder's excellent assistant. 
 Everything had worked smoothly and easily in 
 the office ; for everyone seemed anxious to help, 
 and everyone knew exactly what to do. It was 
 on the i8th of November that I saw the final proofs, 
 answered the last queries of the conscientious 
 readers in Messrs. Spottiswoode's Printing Office, 
 and walked out with no little relief, free at last 
 from Bismarck and all his works.^ 
 
 There is more in this last sentence than meets 
 
 * Butler corrected the final proofs of the index on November 20 
 Advance copies were being sent out on November 26 — less than 
 seven weeks from the day when the translators first saw the original 
 German. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 205 
 
 the eye. The career of Bismarck intrigued him 
 intellectually, but A. J. B. was the unlikeliest 
 man on earth to feel any moral sympathy with 
 the forger of the Ems telegram, or, when he 
 interrogated ultimate causes, anything short of 
 a profound moral aversion. I did not know of 
 this Bismarck adventure at the time, as no doubt 
 he lacked leisure to tell me about it ; but on 
 November 26 — the day on which the advance 
 copies went out — ^he wrote me a funny letter on 
 our own Bismarckian adventure in South Africa 
 and our " loathsome " daily press. No professed 
 " patriot," I dare to say, felt a keener anxiety 
 for his country and her soldiers than did A. J. B. 
 during the Boer war ; but loathing is the only word 
 to express his attitude towards the financiers and 
 the Jingo newspaper-men who had (in his be- 
 lief) engineered the whole business and brought 
 England under condemnation of the whole comity 
 of Europe. He writes to his friend C. C. Binney 
 in America (February 11, 1900) : 
 
 I wish you or anyone would tell me what we 
 are at war for. . . .Of course now it is begun it 
 must be finished ; but I can assure you that 
 
2o6 MEMOIR OF 
 
 people are by no means so agreed on the justice 
 and necessity of this war as the newspapers seem, 
 to indicate. I should say that an anti-Turk in 
 187S was far more likely to find himself in a 
 minority of one in any company of respectable 
 people (to say nothing of a Northern sympathiser 
 in 1863) than a " Pro-Boer " — the favourite 
 Jingo term now. Note that the class who pro- 
 moted this war was the same as would have had 
 us back the Turk and the South by force of arms. 
 They are the people who would abolish popular 
 education, restore " Protection," put down Trades 
 Unions by law ; and who would have hooted 
 down Burke for ad\dsing the conciliation of the 
 North American Colonies. As old John Bright 
 said, before age had weakened his perception — 
 " They always have been wrong^ ; they always 
 will be wrong : and when they cease to be wrong 
 they will cease to be the Tory party." What 
 makes this worse is that behind it all is the loath- 
 some gang of uiternational capitalists. . . . 
 
 I am sick of the whole business. One wakes 
 at night and thinks of those poor Highlanders 
 hung up on a wire fence 50 yards from the trenches : 
 Kimberley unrelieved because the War Office had 
 not the wit to know what I and thousands of 
 others could have told them — that wire nippers 
 would be useful. Now they have ordered 4,000 
 pairs ! , , , I perceive that I am not a cheerful 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 207 
 
 correspondent patriai tempore iniquo. It is the 
 worst time I have ever known since I was old 
 enough to know anything. Success and failure 
 seena equally dangerous, and there's no honour to 
 be got from either. 
 
 When he came in with the evening paper 
 containing the news of the disaster at Nicholson's 
 Nek, he was silent with surprise and grief, and 
 then exclaimed, " If I were twenty years younger 
 I declare I would go out ! " 
 
 Butler was not the only Englishman who went 
 about in those times as a man possessed of a 
 dreadful premonition of which the mass of his 
 fellows had no sense. What he saw (and fiercely 
 described in a letter to the press) was the miscon- 
 duct of London on " Maf eking night " : what he 
 did not live to see (but it would have done his 
 heart good) was the Roman sobriety of England, 
 from the capital down, during the tremendous 
 crisis of 1914. He loved his countrymen, but he 
 feared for them ; and he feared because he saw 
 them yielding more and more, during his latter 
 days, to the insidious fallacy of " national hatred," 
 a fallacy (as he maintained) carefully distilled 
 
2o8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 into the bodies politic of Europe by financiers 
 operating through a subservient Press. To use 
 his own words : 
 
 We have heard a good deal of this fallacy 
 lately. Wiseacres write to the papers asking, 
 " Why does Austria (or France, or Germany, or 
 Hohenstiel-Schwangau, as the case may be) hate 
 us ?" I fail to attach any meaning to the implied 
 proposition. I know some Austrians, some French, 
 some Germans, who to the best of my belief do 
 not hate me. Many other Englishmen also know 
 such. No doubt I know of some who, if I were 
 a sufficiently powerful personage, would hate me, 
 and whom I should wish to do so. But then 
 I know of some Englishmen of whom the same 
 might be said : men whose hand, I trust, I should 
 have the presence of mind to refuse if it were held 
 out to me. Do I therefore " hate England," or 
 wish " England " to hate me ? 
 
 The truth is that our habit of referring to a 
 nation as an indivisible unit of the feminine 
 gender is responsible for a deal of international 
 ill-feeling, and merely plays into the hands of those 
 who make their profit by fishing in troubled 
 waters. Community of ideals, or even of interests, 
 unites men more than community of taxation. 
 (May 31, 1900O 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 209 
 
 Now " community of taxation " here is a phrase 
 of dialectic, and in our dialectic I had frequent 
 occasion to urge that the community of a great 
 many ideals in this wicked world was a community 
 within a particular nation and pretty well ceased 
 at its frontier. Butler would maintain with great 
 force that " the proportion of wise men, or of 
 good fellows, or of decent folk who are the salt of 
 the earth, does not appreciably differ in any half- 
 dozen civilised countries you may choose " ; and 
 this may be ; but it does not get around the 
 trouble that, as we now too fatally see of Germany, 
 a doctrine of " national hate " or of national 
 boastfulness, sedulously fostered in a people by 
 its rulers, may become endemic, infect good and 
 bad together, and make good and bad together 
 a solid nuisance to civilisation. 
 
 Butler would, no doubt, have granted this ; but 
 being an ardent Englishman and mainly concerned 
 with the things of the spirit, he was preoccupied 
 with the spiritual danger of his own countrymen. 
 He was a Liberal of the last century — a Victorian 
 Liberal, if the reader please — and therefore an 
 " individualist," impatient of such a personifi- 
 
210 MEMOIR OF 
 
 cation as " the State," or " our Empire." He 
 hated generalisations and loved to reduce them 
 to definite concrete terms (" Else, what was I doing 
 at Cambridge ? " he would have asked). But 
 he had the sturdiness and honesty of his school. 
 On the one hand he laughed at the pretence that 
 we were at war because President Kruger had 
 assaulted us : quoting the Discours Merveilleux 
 sur Catherine de Medici : 
 
 En matiere de combats, qui premier met I'epee 
 au poing est coupable, et non qui premier frappe. 
 
 And, from Machiavelli : 
 
 Come non quello che prenda prima I'armi 
 e cagione degli scandali, ma colui ch'e primo a 
 dare cagione che le si prendono. 
 
 But on the other hand he had austerest comfort 
 for those who, sharing his opinions, would bewail 
 that they were roughly treated at public meetings. 
 
 Freedom of speech — that is, the right to express 
 opinions not in themselves unlawful — only exists 
 as against the Government, not as against the 
 public. If I make a speech which is obnoxious 
 to the Government, and that Government sends 
 its officers to punish me or to intimidate me, then 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 211 
 
 I am entitled to say that one of the most precious 
 privileges of a freeman has been invaded. If, 
 however, I address my speech to my fellow citizens, 
 they are not in the least obliged to listen to me, 
 and if I persist in speaking of that which annoys 
 them they are fully entitled to express their dis- 
 approval within legal limits. I do not say that 
 they are entitled to knock me on the head, but 
 they are certainly within their rights in shouting 
 me down. Freedom of speech as against the 
 public is a matter of lungs, not of right. 
 
 He brought the same habit of thought to bear 
 on the Tariff Reform controversy, which (it will be 
 remembered) grew, or took its revival, out of the 
 South African War. The root-fallacy of Tariff 
 Reform, he insisted, is the assumption that one 
 country trades with another country. Thus he 
 writes to the Westminster Gazette : 
 
 Sir, — Your correspondent who wrote yesterday 
 says that " New Zealand is trying to make her 
 own shoes." May I point out that neither New 
 Zealand nor any other country makes shoes ? 
 Certain individuals — perhaps one in a thousand — 
 make them : the rest buy them. The result of 
 a tariff is that the 999 have to pay more for 
 the shoes. The one collars the difference. It is 
 
212 MEMOIR OF 
 
 sometimes urged that you ought to deal by 
 preference with your fellow-citizens ; but I notice 
 that this always applies to the buyer only. Does 
 the New Zealand shoemaker — or any producer 
 in any country — sell cheaper to a fellow-citizen 
 than to a foreigner ? I should like to see his face 
 if it were suggested.^ 
 
 The argument, so put, seems as incontestable 
 as that Free Trade is the natural way of trading 
 in a world of men and States agreed to play fair. 
 The intelligent Protectionist only comes in with 
 the Watch's question to Dogberry, " How if 'a 
 wiU not ? " Even so, every sane man knows that 
 peace is better than war. There is no question 
 about it untU you encounter a bully. I hold no 
 brief here on either side of the argument, but 
 have tried to indicate what were my friend's life- 
 long political principles. 
 
 On March 3, 1907, it was discovered that he 
 was suffering from diabetes. He wrote in his 
 
 1 Extract from a letter of this period : " I made a stanza long 
 ago ; but cannot make any more to it. Will you take it and complete 
 the poem ? 
 
 The General Public, more or less, 
 
 Care not a for Outs or Ins ; 
 
 But all agree that Joseph's mess 
 Is twice as large as Benjamin's." 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 213 
 
 diary this day, " Benedicam Domino qui tribuit 
 intellectuum mihi : insuper et usque ad noctem 
 increpuerunt me renes mei." 
 
 He was always sanguine about illness : and 
 the courage he had more than once put into 
 others, now, when his own time came, proved 
 itself undiminished, being genuine. His friend 
 Henry Jackson writes : 
 
 During the months of Butler's ill-health I 
 admired unceasingly his courage and his serenity. 
 In the " Apology for Sciolism " of which I have 
 spoken,^ he had written of " the good that may 
 be gained by a slight acquaintance with one's 
 own body," and had brushed aside my objection 
 that a little learning may make a man a malade 
 imaginaire. When the failure of his eyesight 
 and the obligations of a severe and troublesome 
 diet was pressing him sore, he amply justified 
 his early forecast. He early recognised his limita- 
 tions and made the best of them. He looked the 
 dangers in the face and did not permit them to 
 sadden him. He took an intelligent interest, 
 which was not morbid, in his symptoms, and he 
 carefuUy noted the effects of variations in his 
 diet. Knowing that life was precious, he went 
 about his literary undertakings as quietly and as 
 
 • [See pp. 50-52.] 
 
214 MEMOIR OF 
 
 steadily as he had done in health, and he continued 
 to enjoy, as always, the society of friends. He 
 said to me, in so many words, that he had no 
 inclination propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. 
 His calm envisagement of his disabilities was at 
 once a lesson and an encouragement. I saw 
 him for the last time in February 1910, when he, 
 Francis Storr, Basil Champneys, G. A. Macmillan, 
 and I talked together in the billiard-room of the 
 Athenaeum. 
 
 I am permitted to add a characteristic letter 
 of A. J. B.'s to his doctor : 
 
 Feb. 21, 1909. — My dear Rob, — I hope my 
 " courage " is not of the -variety which results 
 from ignorance of danger. But in any case I do 
 not see much to be afraid of. Sixty-four years 
 of life (mostly inefficient) ought to be enough for 
 anybody. But it is hard to conceive oneself in 
 imminent peril when one feels as well as I do. I 
 think, after all, I shall die in my boots — pro- 
 bably at a crossing or on the " Tube " stairs. . . . 
 
 Hot bicarb, of soda is rather beastly. It is 
 nice enough cold. 
 
 The snowdrops and aconites are beautiful, 
 and the thrushes are singing like mad. 
 
 He broke the news to me in a letter half- 
 humorous, half wistful. It managed to convey 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 215 
 
 that the trouble might be spoken of freely, but 
 that the skeleton must on no account be treated 
 as a bugbear : and to this extent we talked frankly, 
 while behind our discourse my heart sometimes 
 ached if his did not. His eyesight had by this 
 time failed perceptibly. The old injury, too, to 
 his right hand had been revived by rowing, and 
 in these years gave him great trouble : and for 
 the first time in his life he fulfilled his wish to 
 have a boat built to his own design in 1908. 
 Again, as in the competition for the Trinity 
 Fellowship, he had recourse to his left hand, and 
 his last letters to me are all in this left-handed 
 script, which steadily improves itself into some- 
 thing daintier than one man in twenty takes the 
 pains to achieve with his right. " When it came 
 to the point, I thought I would see what a left 
 hand was good for, and it has responded on the 
 whole very fairly. With the aid of the machine 
 [typewriter] I hope it may last my time." 
 
 He went on steadily with his task at the 
 Record Office. He had always been severe with 
 himself about keeping engagements ; never, for 
 seventeen years, missed a day at the Education 
 
2i6 MEMOIR OF 
 
 Department ; never once in forty-nine 57ears 
 stayed in bed for breakfast ; could not tolerate 
 the young who were late of a morning, servants 
 who scamped their work or (worst of all in his 
 eyes) clergymen who neglected their duty. But 
 his spirit was not less cheerful than austere. At 
 home he fell to work bravely upon an anthology 
 of early Italian verse. The Forerunners of Dante 
 (posthumously published by the Clarendon Press). 
 Also he assures me in a letter, " On the rare 
 occasions when I have a day free I feel bound to 
 realise my Maker's original idea by taking some 
 bodily exercise." Here are some sentences Jrom 
 his correspondence which I group about this 
 time: 
 
 My dear Q., — Several points in your letter 
 (the receipt of which gave much satisfaction) seem 
 to call for a rejoinder ; and as I cannot tell which 
 side of the grass I shall be two months hence, I 
 wiU deal with thenv at once. . . . For poetry, 
 I see none in these times : none modern, I mean. 
 I buy what any of my young friends publish, but 
 I usually leave it on the table. Of that centum 
 qui proficit annos I am not likely to hit on any 
 which has escaped your search. . . . How do 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 217 
 
 you like " Alone walking " (Skeat, Chaucer, 
 vol. vii. p. 448) ? I lighted on it by chance 
 yesterday, and it rather took my fancy. 
 
 . . . Yes, it is a rum world. However — as 
 a pupil of my Father's in bye-gone days used to 
 say, " This world and the next, and then aU our 
 troubles will be over." 
 
 ... I am glad your boy has made a good start. 
 Character is everything. Books do not matter 
 a hang ; nor games either, except as they test 
 character. 
 
 . . . My view of Mackail's experiment [Odys- 
 sey] was expressed in a recent number of The 
 AthencBum. I cannot believe that any form of stanza 
 will do ; though the Chaucerian 7-lines might answer 
 for parts — say ix-xii. Demodocus, the somewhat 
 improper, would do well in octosyllabics. 
 
 . . . The loss of F. W. Maitland hits us very 
 hard. I do not think you ever knew him. I wish 
 you had. M., by the way, was a good " pro-Boer " : 
 his clear wit saw through a swindle fast enough. 
 
 I give this small extract, though on the surface 
 trivial as well as provocative, because in truth 
 (as it seemed to me when we met) the loss of Mait- 
 land, whom he had loved and admired but a little 
 "this side idolatry," and the bruise which his 
 spirit had taken from the business of the South 
 
2i8 MEMOIR OF 
 
 African War, together depressed him — at any 
 rate consciously — ^far more than his own disease. 
 I may add, as trifles are often important to a sick 
 man, the fumum et opes strepitumque — ^the " dust, 
 noise and stinking opulence " — of the host of 
 motors by this time desecrating the roads about 
 Weybridge and spoiling his country rambles. He 
 could never hear Brooklands mentioned but he 
 broke into invective half earnest, half whimsical. 
 
 [With the gift of a little volume of Italian lyrics] 
 By the way, there is a very excellent Spanish 
 volume in the same series, which I would also send 
 you if you would read it. As a tongue Italian 
 is not in the same class with Spanish. I h^ive 
 lately started on the Lusiad, which opens rather 
 comically .... 
 
 It seems to me that this casual utterance 
 might be commended, just now, to a good many 
 doctrinaires with axes to grind. Here was a man 
 who had spent no small part of his working 
 days in studying the greatest of Italian poets, 
 and patiently making good the ground on which 
 some knowledge of The Divine Comedy might 
 be claimed as necessary to any liberal education. 
 In my experience, most men who take up an 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 219 
 
 " unpopular " subject develop (or narrow) into 
 ferocious advocates of its study. This was not 
 Butler's way. He saw the favourite study of^ his 
 life, comparing it with other fields of study, in 
 almost too modest proportions. 
 
 Nevertheless, haying been Professor of Italian 
 Language and Literature since 1898, it was with 
 something of pride that he received his appoint- 
 ment as Barlow Professor of Dante Studies in 
 University College, London. He gave his In- 
 augural Lecture on October 27, 1909, having but 
 a few months to live : and I append it to this 
 Memoir as a sound specimen of Butler's writing 
 and in some sort an apologia pro vita sua. 
 
 He paid my home a couple of visits in those 
 later days, for holidays among the Alps had been 
 abandoned perforce. " It doesn't work," he ex- 
 plained, " with the young ones all going up-hill 
 and myself all the time going down." But he kept 
 his old dehght in the sea. At the last, as he went 
 out of my porch, he took his old Clovelly guernsey 
 and put it over my son's shoulders laughing and 
 with some light word about " prophet's mantle " 
 — the habitual elpavda maintained to the close. 
 
220 MEMOIR OF 
 
 I did not see him again ; but he had made 
 friends at Fowey, and I beUeve that two of them 
 — Mr. and Mrs. Austin M. Purves, of Philadelphia 
 — ^had some part in persuading him to undertake 
 an adventure which, in his state of health, was 
 almost heroic. In May 1908 A. J. B, and Mrs. 
 Butler sailed out by the Hamburg-American 
 lin^, and landed at Philadelphia on June i. Mr. 
 and Mrs. Purves, his old friend C. C. Binney and 
 Mrs. Binney, were down at the wharf to greet 
 them. The next day they went on to Washing- 
 ton and stayed two nights at the Embassy with 
 the Bryces (now Viscount and Viscountess Bryce). 
 The Ambassador, another old friend, showed 
 the sights, and they went down the Potomac 
 to Mount Vernon, where A. J. B. did not omit to 
 take off his hat by the grave of George Washing- 
 ton. (But later, at Boston, he revenged himself 
 upon the noise of the Fourth of July by appealing, 
 amid the uproar, to have explained to him the 
 difference between Faneuil Hall and Tammany 
 Hall — " he was never quite clear in his mind 
 about this.") 
 
 Engagements did not allow them to visit 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 221 
 
 " the waterfall down in Buffalo." They returned 
 to stay with the Binneys at Chestnut Hill, Phila- 
 delphia, and the two friends enjoyed, in the 
 Wissahickon Valley, the last of their many tramps 
 together. From Philadelphia the visitors made for 
 Middletown, Connecticut, as guests of Mr. Charles 
 Binney's brother, and thence away for Nova 
 Scotia, where their eldest daughter (Fanny) had 
 been at work for more than a year as a school- 
 mistress in the little town of Windsor. The real 
 excuse for the trip had been to combine this visit 
 with a meeting of the Boston Dante Society. 
 The meeting missed fire somehow, though Mr. 
 Robinson, the secretary, welcomed them warmly ; 
 but to Boston the Butlers went back, and A. J. B. 
 not only had some agreeable talk about Dante 
 with Professor Charles Eliot Norton, but came 
 in for the Harvard Commencement with all its 
 feasting and glory. 
 
 The next day we went to the annual gather- 
 ing of the Phi Beta Kappa, where I walked in 
 procession with pink and blue ribbons in my 
 button-hole, being adopted for the occasion into 
 the class of 1877. Old Dr. Furness delivered the 
 
222 MEMOIR OF 
 
 "oration"— a delightful rambling discourse, full 
 of learning and humour, on certain Shakespearean 
 points. 
 
 The Yale-Harvard boat-race was on at the 
 time, and " we tried to feel that it was as im- 
 portant as the Oxford and Cambridge ditto ! " 
 
 They sailed for home from Boston in the White 
 Star Liner Republic on the 4th of July, putting out 
 from shore amid the patriotic flag-waving and 
 cheering proper to that day. 
 
 The heat towards the end of their stay had 
 been excessive ; and all the kindness of friends, 
 the quiet of the club to which he was introduced, 
 and the coolness of cocktails, could not cure his 
 nostalgia for our English climate. Moreover, 
 though one of the most temperate of men, and 
 even abstemious, in his diet, Butler was impatient 
 of an invalid's regimen as, while his heart con- 
 tinued to go out to his fellows, he abhorred to 
 practise an unsocial habit in their company. His 
 last letter to me recounts gleefully how he attended 
 a Trinity Feast, taking for guest a friend he had 
 met under my roof. It is dated " Dec. 26, 1908." 
 
 Four weeks ago I walked seventeen miles, 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 223 
 
 carrying a little weight ; and was all the better, 
 though stiff. Ice-cream in the U.S.A. did not 
 improve things; but health decent again now. 
 We sang your Carol (with Stanford's music) at 
 Christmas. So, with all best greetings to you all, 
 I am yours ever, — A. J. B. 
 
 Actually he was failing fast throughout the fol- 
 lowing year. He went up to the Public Record 
 Office for the last time on February 12 1910 ; 
 finished his notes on The Forerunners of Dante on 
 February 14, and died, after five days' illness in 
 bed, on February 26, igio. 
 
 Towards the end he expressed a wish to be 
 buried at Wantage, " where the larks sing " : 
 and there, at the foot of the Berkshire downs, 
 he was laid on March i, close by the Cemetery 
 Cross erected in memory of his beloved aunt. Miss 
 Barnett. Dante's Rose of the Blessed is carved 
 on the stone covering his grave, with the words 
 Luce, Amore, Letizia, with which Beatrice welcomed 
 her poet to purest Heaven.^ 
 
 1 Paradiso, Canto xxx, U. 40-42. His own note on this passage 
 {Paradise, p. 389) is " Light, love, joy, are the complements of Faith, 
 love, hope." Because he had always loved the sea, this verse of the 
 Psalmist's is added — So he bringetk them unto the haven where they 
 would be. It is also the foundation of a noble passage in Dante's 
 Convito, 
 
224 MEMOIR OF 
 
 As I have allowed the narrative to reveal, 
 there were days — and towards the close, in the 
 shadow of a disease notoriously depressing to the 
 spirits — when my friend, looking back on his 
 career, had to acknowledge that it had been, on 
 the whole, something of a miss-hit : and I have 
 allowed this as well for the sake of truth as 
 because, trying to read back, I feel sure he would 
 have wished the admission to be made. For 
 along with the high standard he inherited, and 
 his sensitiveness to anything that fell short of it, 
 he preserved a Roman integrity that obliged him 
 to render the account against himself to the last 
 farthing. I never knew a man who was less of 
 a self-deceiver. 
 
 I endeavour, then, to face the account out with 
 him. Before I entered into the privilege of his 
 friendship, years had brought him the philosophic 
 mind : he started also With me as a comforter 
 in physical trouble, and I dare say that the first 
 conditions of our acquaintance were always re- 
 membered, if but subconsciously. He began, and 
 remained, the mentor and helper, and we two had 
 never a cross word. But while nothing could be 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 225 
 
 clearer than his trustfulness and his almost child- 
 like inability to believe any wrong in those he 
 loved, it was equally clear that, if you didn't 
 happen to be one of the fools he happened to love, 
 you had a small chance of being suffered gladly. 
 
 He was, as I have said, fastidious : impatient of 
 the second-rate, and of all loose thinking. I make 
 no doubt that as a schoolboy and as an undergra- 
 duate he offended many who — ^noting his eyeglass 
 and borrowing it for their own eye — ^reckoned him 
 " supercilious." His mind galloped, and in those 
 days it delighted in idling, catching up with 
 duller minds at the last moment, maybe passing 
 them with a shade of contempt, to be remembered 
 against him with that tenacity with which the 
 dull in this world revenge themselves. At Eton 
 he was never in " Pop," though he should have 
 been its President. 
 
 It must be allowed, moreover, that to the last 
 he claimed and maintained, even as a scholar, the 
 divine right of " cussedness." He once wrote 
 (and printed) the proposition, " If a scholar like 
 to take his fling now and then, and diversify his 
 labours with a little paradox, why should we 
 
226 MEMOIR OF 
 
 grudge him the amusement ? " He certainly de- 
 lighted in flings of this sort, and regularly, as of 
 set purpose, raised the temperature of the Oxford 
 Dante Society when he attended its meetings. 
 His sarcasm or his challenge came to the bowstring 
 and was sped in a moment ; but he was as in- 
 capable of hurting any man's feelings with intent 
 as of harbouring one thought of malice after 
 the sharpest bout of dialectic. In short there was 
 nothing cantankerous in this foible, which partook 
 rather of the nature of playful mischief.^ It 
 hardly did, however, for practice upon a Govern- 
 ment Department or, at a Directors' Meeting, 
 upon a retired-colonel-turned-publisher. As he 
 once quoted to me in a joyous letter — 
 
 " Many a green isle needs must be 
 In the deep, wide sea of — Philistie " — 
 
 and the world, we agree, is sadly the poorer since 
 
 ihe composition of Kuhla Khan was interrupted 
 
 ior ever by the visit of " a person from Porlock." 
 
 But the world being mainly inhabited by persons 
 
 from^Porlock, and its ordinary business conducted 
 
 by them, and its patronage largely in their hands, 
 
 1 I have heard him argue, at length, that a Cemish pasty could be 
 made as successfully with cooked meat as with fresh — and this with a 
 lady who knew all there is to be known on this subject. 
 
ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 227 
 
 he who offends them may, by a moment's scorn, 
 lose what hard work and briUiant abiUties have 
 deserved. 
 
 Butler, for all his interest — ^his delighted 
 interest — in all forms of man's activity, could 
 never lay full account with Philistia. But if 
 he " messed a career " thereby, I am very certain 
 that he made a fine business of life. 
 
 As a son, a brother, a husband, a father he 
 was not only irreproachable : the word almost 
 insults one who threw the service of his heart 
 so eagerly into all these functions. As a man he 
 walked in God's eye, consciously but fearlessly, 
 and his courage was as ready at hand for dis- 
 appointment and illness as for any sudden test 
 on an Alpine peak. 
 
 I add what is, in my experience, one of the surest 
 proofs of a complete man that he could open his 
 lungs to the broadest human jest and laugh his 
 soul utterly clean of it. At the point where good 
 men are delicate his delicacy became almost 
 girlish. I never knew one who with more easy 
 an instinct separated the Holies from the Court 
 of the Gentiles. 
 
228 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER 
 
 He never spoke of what he did for others in the 
 way of charity and kindness. But I am assured 
 that this was not little. 
 
 As a friend and companion he was unforget- 
 able. You not only felt the silent inexhaustible 
 fund of his good will : you were alongside a man 
 whose talk, however jocund or seemingly trivial, 
 always played close to the causes of things and of 
 the things that really matter. Anecdote, quip, 
 positive information — these indeed he did not 
 despise, and I used to accuse him of teaching at 
 least as gladly as he would learn ; but he had the 
 root of good converse which goes deeper than 
 quip or anecdote or positive information. He 
 caught up a subject with you and, in earnest or in 
 play, hunted it like a true hound of dialectic, his 
 laugh belling always on the right scent — ^the 
 essence of its relation to life — as he followed in 
 cry or picked it up after a check. 
 
 He loved his fellows, his books, and the flowers 
 of the field. I have quoted the words carved on 
 his tomb. My own inscription would be, Here 
 lies a scholar and a Christian gentleman. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 DANTE AND THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 {Barlow Inaugural Lecture, delivered at University 
 College, London, October 27, 1909) 
 
 We are apt to think and speak of Dante as the 
 father of Itahan poetry, and so far as chronology- 
 is concerned, the phrase may pass muster. But 
 from the Uterary point of view, he closes, rather 
 than opens a period. In his great poem, mediaeval 
 literature goes out gloriously, but he is distinctly 
 a successor and not a forerunner. His work 
 is inspired by mediaeval theology, philosophy, 
 science and art. His very diction is, to a great 
 extent, that of the dugentisti, the prolific band 
 of lyric poets who sprang up in Italy towards 
 the middle of Frederick H's reign, and continued 
 to the end of the century to pour out, from all 
 parts of the peninsula, odes and sonnets, for the 
 most part little more than echoes of the Pro- 
 vengal troubadours, but occasionally of rare 
 beauty. Such longer poems as were written 
 
 229 
 
230 APPENDIX 
 
 during this ' period were chiefly of a didactic 
 character, and may be left out of the reckoning. 
 Of the heroic poem we hear, so far, nothing. 
 Dante indeed seems, in a passage of the De 
 Vulgari Eloquentia, to complain of its absence 
 from Italian poetry. Love was practically the 
 everlasting theme — the so-called courtly love as 
 it had been known in the courts of Provence. 
 The poems of the Vita Nuova really belong to 
 the same school, though pitched in a sublimer 
 key and inspired by a sincerity which we miss 
 in most, though not all, of the older l5n:ics. 
 
 But Dante in truth had no successor, for we 
 can hardly consider the geographical treatise of 
 the excellent Fazio degli Uberti, the Dittamondo 
 as he calls it, written though it be in the metre 
 of the Commedia, and embodying many of its 
 phrases, as belonging to the school of Dante. 
 There is no school of Dante, there is no period 
 of Dante ; he alone is his own period. There is 
 contemporary poetry, but the stream of it flows 
 round him as a river round an upstanding rock. 
 Very little if any trace of his influence, very little 
 similarity of thought or in manner, can be fotind 
 the work of his contemporary and close friend, 
 the lawyer poet, Cino of Pistoja, who, with his 
 far-fetched conceits, and often laboured diction 
 (for now and then, as in his famous ode addressed 
 to Dante on the death of Beatrice, he could sing 
 
APPENDIX 231 
 
 sweetly enough), seems to form a link between 
 the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, preserv- 
 ing the weaker points of one, and anticipating 
 those of the other. He is the real forerunner 
 of Petrarch ; and Petrarch it was who set the 
 fashion for Italian lyric poetry. It is a curious 
 thing, by the way, what a very small proportion 
 Petrarch's vernacular work bears to his Latin 
 writings. It was with the latter, not with the 
 former, that he meant to make his bid for fame. 
 His Latin is not the Latin which Dante wrote. 
 Dante had read Cicero and Virgil, to say nothing 
 of other classical authors ; but it did not occur 
 to him to try to write Latin like them. Even 
 the playful eclogues which he wrote near the end 
 of his life, though they have sometimes quite 
 a Virgilian cadence, are by no means in the 
 language Virgil wrote. As for prose, he wrote 
 just the prose of St. Thomas Aquinas, the really 
 living Latin of his own time, a useful and flexible 
 language, but of a kind which wovild have made 
 Cicero shudder. As for Greek, he practically 
 had none ; in fact, during his life there was in 
 Western Europe none to be had. Before he was 
 long dead, however, Greek manuscripts began to 
 arrive in Italy, though it was many years be- 
 fore more than a very few persons acquired any 
 knowledge of that language. Petrarch himself 
 possessed a manuscript of Homer, but could not 
 
232 APPENDIX 
 
 read it. With Latin the case was somewhat 
 different ; the mediaeval Latin continued to be 
 used for many purposes, as all readers of Ben- 
 venuto's commentary on Dante will know. But 
 people also began to read their classical authors 
 with an eye for style, and in Petrarch's voluminous 
 correspondence, doubtless written with a view 
 to publication, we perceive a constant striving, 
 sometimes fairly successful, to attain the Ciceronian 
 model. The eye for style had a momentous 
 influence on the course of ItaUan poetry, at any 
 rate of Ijric poetry. Henceforward we feel that 
 the poet cares much less for what he says than 
 for the way in which he says it, and consequently 
 there is scarcely any Italian poetry after the 
 Commedia which moves the reader with the true 
 poetical ecstasy. We admire the form, we wonder 
 at the art, but the matter leaves us unmoved. 
 
 Petrarch did once put himself into competi- 
 tion with Dante. The somewhat curious poem 
 in terza rima, called / Trionfi, is obviously an 
 attempt to meet Dante on his own ground. In 
 spite of a fine passage here and there, the result 
 is somewhat disastrous. The diction is polished, 
 the lines flow smoothly enough, there is a great 
 parade of classical and mythological learning, 
 contrasting curiously with Dante's apposite in- 
 troductions of such matters, but the whole thing 
 bears to the Commedia very much the same 
 
APPENDIX 233 
 
 relation that the Epic of Hades bears to (Enone and 
 Ulysses ; and we cannot fail to mark here and 
 there, a touch indicating that envy of Dante 
 which even Petrarch's warmest admirers have to 
 recognise. Petrarch, however, was a poet, and 
 had the root of the matter in him, and Spirto 
 gentil and the last twenty lines of Trionfo della 
 Morte, or the exquisite ode Vergine bella, are 
 enough to show that ; and several other of the 
 lyric poems can be picked out of a vast quantity 
 of highly elaborated conceits which have some- 
 thing of the true poetic power. But his influence 
 over Italian poetry was not propitious. Since 
 him there have been many skilled versifiers in 
 Italy but scarcely a poet ; for I cannot accord 
 the name of poet to the Petrarchists of the fif- 
 teenth and sixteenth centuries. Two men only, 
 so far as I know, deserve this name ; they form 
 a curious juxtaposition : Lorenzo de' Medici and 
 Michelangelo Buonarotti. Lorenzo, during his 
 short life of forty-three years, was too busy, and 
 too much occupied in the affairs of the world, to 
 do more than indicate what he might have done 
 if he had devoted himself to literature. But 
 there are suggestions, in the body of verse he has 
 left, of a true poetical instinct. Michelangelo 
 was a kindred spirit with Dante. Both were 
 " dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of 
 scorn, the love of love." Michelangelo's poetic 
 
234 APPENDIX 
 
 work is even less in quantity than Lorenzo's. 
 It is often rugged and harsh, but it has a red-hot 
 core of poetry. 
 
 But we must return to Dante. At what rate 
 was he esteemed by the polished writers of the 
 Renaissance, when the Italian language, almost 
 neglected during the greater part of the fifteenth 
 century, came by its own again in literature ? In 
 passing, let me remark that I dislike this word 
 Renaissance particularly. It would probably 
 surprise many of my readers to learn how ex- 
 tremely modem it is, at all events in the wide 
 and somewhat vague sense which is now-a-days 
 assigned to it. The New English Dictionary ha^ 
 not yet reached it, and may not for some years 
 to come, so I speak under correction. But I am 
 pretty sure that you will not find it in Hallam, 
 nor in a still later work dealing specially with 
 the most brilliant portion of the period generally 
 embraced under the name, Dennistoxu;i's Dukes 
 of Urbino. In its original sense, I believe it was 
 appUed chiefly, if not entirely, to the revival of 
 classical architecture. Now it seems to carry 
 with it the notion of a period of general enlighten- 
 ment, of an age in which the finest pictures the 
 world has ever seen were painted, and sciilpture 
 and the minor arts flourished exceedingly under 
 princely patronage ; of a liberation of the human 
 spirit from the bonds of mediaeval and scholastic 
 
APPENDIX 235 
 
 thought ; of a splendid and happy time when men 
 could say and do as they pleased, when killing 
 was no murder, when virtii, efficiency, more 
 especially in crime, earned the highest honour ; 
 an age whose chief glory was Caesar Borgia, and 
 its prophet Machiavelli. There was of course, 
 so far as literature went, another side, a side of 
 elegant manners, where virtue, not virtu, was 
 the subject of polite discussion. There was the 
 Cortegiano ; but it must be remembered that 
 several of the interlocutors in that charming 
 work were men of anything but charming moral 
 character, though the author, so far as is known, 
 was blameless. But though the Cortegiano was 
 admired, the Prince was the manual of conduct. 
 How was an age like this likely to appreciate 
 Dante ? Of its men of action, there are very few 
 for whom he would not have found appropriate 
 quarters in some part of Malebolge. If they 
 had read him, which probably few of them did, 
 they would have found little that was in any way 
 congenial. But it is the men of letters with 
 whom we are chiefly concerned : how did they 
 look at him ? Well, some of them, notably 
 Landino, whose commentary was first published 
 in Florence in 1481, wrote voluminous notes, far 
 exceeding the text in bulk, and mainly serving 
 to show their own erudition, and that they 
 understood Dante less than the fourteenth 
 
236 APPENDIX 
 
 century commentators had done. Others, like 
 Pierfrancesco Giambullari and Giovanbattista 
 Gelli, read lectures before the newly established 
 Florentine Academy on detached passages of the 
 Commedia. Both these excellent men and others 
 undoubtedly loved Dante after their fashion ; 
 Gelli is full of him. But we see that what they 
 really liked was to trace out the topography of the 
 poem, or to take two or three lines of Dante as 
 the text for a philosophical sermon. It was with 
 their heads, not their hearts, that they appre- 
 ciated him. Signer Michele Barbi, in a learned 
 and interesting work, Delia Fortuna di Dante nel 
 secolo XVI, has attempted from these and other 
 instances to show that Dante still stood high in 
 general reputation during the so-called Renais- 
 sance. As a further corroboration of his view, 
 he quotes a very curious passage from the 
 Orlandino, a ribald burlesque of that erratic 
 genius, Theophilo Folengo, of which (so curious 
 is it) I may venture to quote a few lines. In- 
 cidentally it may be remarked that the open- 
 ing passage shows how thoroughly, amid all 
 his buffooneries, Folengo had grasped the true 
 principle of poetic criticism. 
 
 Ci6, dico, percM ofi&cio h del Poeta 
 Giovar e dilettar con tal maniera 
 Distile, che '1 Lettore non s' attedia ; 
 E cid fa Dante nella sua Comedia. 
 
APPENDIX 237 
 
 Quel Dante sai ? Lo qual Omer Toscano 
 Appellar deggio sempre ; come ancora 
 Virgilio e detto Omero Mantovano 
 Perqui la Patria mia tanto si onora ; 
 E chi il Petrarca fa di lui soprano, 
 Nel arte mattematica lavora; 
 Che Dante vola piii alto ; e questo dico 
 Col testimonio di Giovanni Pico. 
 
 The next stanza quotes Pico as comparing 
 Dante with the fruit, and Petrarch with the 
 flower, adding that the style of the one must 
 yield to the " vast a e orenda mole " of a lofty 
 genius, capable of spreading its wings beyond 
 the eighth circle of the Heavens. He continues 
 that, by so far as kyrice of Josquin surpasses the 
 madrigals of Tamburino, 
 
 Cos! parmi che Dante alto e divino 
 Si lasci appo le spalle gli altrui Canti; 
 Ch6 quanto piii dell' opre val la fede, 
 A Beatrice tanto Laura cede. 
 
 The last couplet, I would observe in passing, 
 is a specially audacious reference, which, twenty 
 years later or so, even Folengo would hardly 
 have dared to venture. 
 
 But I think it may safely be said, that at 
 that time there would have been foimd more 
 people in Italy to set Faith above Works, than 
 Beatrice above Laura, Folengo was an excep- 
 tion all round. WTien we come to the acknow- 
 ledged arbiters of hterature we find the great 
 
238 APPENDIX 
 
 Bembo — ^who, originally a Latinist, had in after 
 years done more than any man to restore the 
 vernacular language to its proper place — we find 
 him, while recognising Dante, treating Petrarch 
 as the model. Nay, if we may believe Sperone 
 Speroni, Bembo used to tell him that Dante might 
 be neglected (" e nulla"). But Sperone was a 
 very old man when he wrote this, and Bembo 
 had been more than thirty years dead ; so we may 
 hope, if we like, that there was some little lapse 
 of memory : and indeed, if Bembo did say some- 
 thing of the sort, he may have been referring 
 rather to style and diction than to intrinsic 
 poetical merit ; if, that is, he was capable of dis- 
 tinguishing the two things. Sperone himself, in a 
 letter to the Admirable Crichton, written nearly 
 thirty years earlier than that last quoted, has 
 the grace to say that " Dante is no less an honour 
 to our language, than Homer to Greek, or Virgil 
 to Latin." But Sperone himself, if I mistake 
 not, was quite capable of criticising him for 
 uncouthness of diction. In spite of S. Barbi's 
 special pleading, based on a few great names in 
 literature, and the proceedings of the Florentine 
 Academy, I venture to think that the real estimate 
 of Dante formed by the general reader of the 
 Cinquecento, is better illustrated by references 
 to its general literature. For one thing, the 
 greatest of Italian publishers, Gabriel Giolito 
 
APPENDIX 239 
 
 of Venice, during his long career covering almost 
 exactly the middle third of the sixteenth century, 
 while producing editions by the score of Petrarch, 
 Boccaccio and Ariosto, printed Dante just once, 
 [it is a very pretty little edition, printed in 1555, 
 and is interesting as being the first in which the 
 epithet Divina is applied to the Commedia. This 
 fact is somewhat significant. Men of that age 
 are never tired of calling Dante the Divine Poet ; 
 but for one copy of the Commedia, they buy 
 twenty or thirty of Petrarch. 
 
 In Dante's own city of Florence, where the 
 learned men of whom I have spoken were so 
 assiduously engaged in the exposition and ampli- 
 fication of minute fragments of his work, not a 
 single edition seems to have appeared between 
 the Giustine of 1506 and the Cruscan of 1595. 
 Venice no doubt did somewhat better, but even 
 there the Dantes bear a small proportion to the 
 total <ii the books turned out by the great home 
 of Italian printing. i 
 
 Only the other day I came across what seems 
 to be an even more striking piece of evidence. 
 In 1545 a young man of letters, Giuseppe Betussi, 
 pubUshed a treatise in the popular form of a 
 dialogue, on the nature of love. Two friends, 
 Raverta and Domenichi, are calling on a Venetian 
 lady named Barba. The conversation at once 
 turns upon that favourite, not to say for those 
 
240 APPENDIX 
 
 days inevitable subject ; and it is pursued through 
 many windings with much store of anecdote and 
 quotation, apparently through the whole after- 
 noon. Petrarch is often cited, Dante not quite so 
 often, but enough to show that the author had a 
 fair knowledge of him. Towards the end of the 
 conversation they digress into the question of 
 visions and dreams. Domenichi refers to Inferno 
 xxxiii, where Ugolino speaks of a horrible vision 
 that he had had, and quotes the three lines in 
 which his children implore him to eat their flesh. 
 The lady interrupts, " What was his dream ? " 
 Now she is represented as a thoroughly cultivated 
 person who can refer to TibuUus and Virgil, and 
 knows something of ancient history ; but it is 
 quite clear she had not heard of Count Ugolino. 
 Elsewhere in the dialogue, in reply to some request 
 of hers for argument or information, Domenichi 
 begins his reply by playfully quoting the two 
 opening lines of Arno d'Agnel's Provengal speech 
 at the end of Purg. xxvi. " For Heaven's sake," 
 says the lady, " talk to me in some Christian 
 language." The dialogue is highly dramatic, the 
 character of the speakers is well maintained, 
 and we can hardly doubt that it gives a pretty 
 faithful picture of the style of conversation 
 among the cultiva,ted class in Venice. Barba 
 is, as has been said, anything but an illiterate 
 woman ; and in those days, as we see for instance 
 
APPENDIX 241 
 
 from the Coriegiano, women could hold their 
 own with men, both in reading and, as Bacon 
 would say, " conference," yet she does not know 
 the most famous passage in the Inferno, nor one 
 of the most striking in the Purgatory. 
 
 But, after all, for the most convincing proof 
 of the comparative eclipse of Dante's reputation 
 in that age, we need only turn to its Hterature. 
 In lyric poetry, Petrarch is everywhere, Dante 
 nowhere. He is out of the current altogether. 
 Of course, a detached phrase may here and there 
 be found, but even these more frequently in the 
 semi-burlesque epic than in the sonnet or the ode. 
 His very metre, the stately terza rima, is either 
 employed for graceful idylls by Lorenzo, or for 
 satire by Ariosto and others, or debased to the 
 purposes of the so-called capitoli, burlesque at 
 the best, and often unspeakably foul, in the 
 hands of such writers as Berni, Dellacasa, Molza, 
 Aretino. i 
 
 Passing to the greater poems produced after 
 the revival of Italian literature, we are more 
 than ever struck by the complete opposition of 
 the spirit which pervades them to that which 
 inspires the Commedia. The greatest of these is, 
 of course, the Orlando Furioso, and it is, in its 
 own line, a very great work. Ariosto was by no 
 means a loose liver ; he was frugal, sober, and 
 in his general life quite as respectable as any of 
 
242 APPENDIX 
 
 his contemporaries. He worked hard, and at 
 one period of his life did some good public service. 
 But one may read the Furioso from end to end 
 without coming on anything calculated to arouse 
 in any reader the nobler emotions which, as Dante 
 saw, must lie at the base of all poetry truly 
 deserving the name. You wiU remember the 
 passage in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (II. 2) in 
 which he says that themes for the highest poetry 
 are threefold — valour, the kindling of love, and 
 the right direction of the will. Modernising his 
 language sUghtly, we may express his meaning 
 by defining poetry as the embodiment in dignified 
 language and metrical form of the nobler emotions — 
 so expressed as to give delight to the hearer and 
 arouse the corresponding emotions in him. Where 
 in the Furioso do we find any of this ? The 
 Paladins with their Hippogriphs, their enchanted 
 swords, their magic rings, are entertaining enough : 
 but can we take them seriously ? Can we suppose 
 that their creator took them seriously ? As for 
 their loves, the less said about them, perhaps, the 
 better. There is not much chivalry in Ruggiero's 
 behaviour towards Angelica, and that, too, just 
 after he has delivered her from the Ore. Now 
 Ruggiero is perhaps the pattern man of the whole 
 poem, and his affection for Bradamante comes, 
 on the whole, nearest to what Dante would have 
 understood by love. Once or twice we cannot 
 
APPENDIX 243 
 
 but suspect Ariosto of an intention to banter 
 Dante. At any rate, such an episode as that of 
 Lydia, in the thirty-fourth canto, suggests that 
 he would have meted out a very different judg- 
 ment to Francesca from that allotted to her by 
 his stern predecessor. 
 
 This lack of appreciation in Italy, one may 
 mention in passing, seems not to have been with- 
 out its effect on our own Uterature. The English 
 poets of the sixteenth and early seventeenth 
 centuries were, as every one knows, largely in- 
 debted to Italian models. But Dante was not 
 among these. From Chaucer to Milton even the 
 indefatigable industry of Dr. Toynbee has been 
 scarce sufficient to detect more than two or three 
 stray lines here and there which may possibly 
 indicate that their writers had looked into the 
 Commedia. Even in the case of Spenser, the 
 parallel passages which he adduces seem to me, in 
 every case where I have tested them, to resolve 
 themselves into the merest poetic commonplaces. 
 In one or two, indeed, I can trace no resemblance 
 whatever. Even the incident of the bleeding 
 bough in Faery Queen, Book I, C. 2, seems to 
 resemble more closely the passage in III Mneid, 
 whence Dante borrowed it, than Dante's own 
 description in Purgatory xiv. There is nothing 
 to show that Shakespeare had ever heard of 
 Dante ; and, what is perhaps more curious, even 
 
244 APPENDIX 
 
 that thorough Itaiianist, Samuel Daniel, who 
 knew his Tasso well enough, seems to have yielded 
 nothing to Dr. Toynbee's researches. Perhaps 
 the most curious and significant fact of all — I 
 give it again on the authority of Dr. Toynbee — 
 is that John Florio, in the first edition (1598) of 
 his famous dictionary, does not include Dante 
 in the " Catalog of books that I have read 
 through of purpose for the accomplishing of this 
 Dictionary " ; yet by other evidence we know that 
 Florio had at least read Dante, and in his second 
 edition, thirteen years later, he gives some, though 
 few, references to him. 
 
 Milton was no doubt steeped in Dante, but 
 Milton was independent of poetic fashion, and 
 his spirit was so much akin to Dante's that it 
 would have been strange if he had failed to study 
 him. But generally it may be said that so long 
 as Dante was neglected in Italy, he was unknown 
 in England. 
 
 We may take it, then, I think, that in spite 
 of the Academic recognition of Dante in the 
 sixteenth century, there was no general study or 
 appreciation of his work. The causes of this do 
 not seem to me very far to seek. His whole 
 outlook on life was profoundly different from 
 that which prevailed among the cviltivated people 
 of that period. He believed in this world as a 
 place of training for another and higher worlds 
 
APPENDIX 245 
 
 where every man would receive the due reward 
 of his deeds. Hence the dominant note in his 
 character is a stem austerity underlain by a 
 profound tenderness. " He loved well because he 
 hated, hated wickedness that hinders loving." 
 Now I think we may say that neither austerity 
 nor tenderness is what we expect to find in the 
 most notable works of Italian literature. Of 
 sensuality and mockery there is plenty, and 
 nowhere more than in the work of the Cinque- 
 cento. I do not mean to say that friendship and 
 kindly feehngs were unknown among the men of 
 that age. The numerous letters that they have 
 left to us afford plenty of instances, StUl less 
 would I imply that there were not men who led 
 perfectly decorous lives, good husbands and 
 fathers, men who were possibly as good Christians 
 as Dante himself, men who prayed and fasted 
 as the Church bade them, and generally followed 
 its ordinances. But these were not the men who 
 rose to distinction, or whose names have come 
 down to us. For the most part they confine their 
 opinions to their own thoughts. To rebuke 
 wickedness in high places, or, for the matter of 
 that, in low places, was no part of their business. 
 The fate of Savonarola was enough to show what 
 would happen to them if they did. Dante could 
 appreciate beauty and art as well as any of the 
 cultivated gentlemen who graced the courts of 
 
246 APPENDIX 
 
 Urbino and Ferrara, possibly even better. He 
 had a keener eye for all that is lovely in nature. 
 But for him the beauty of this earth was not an 
 end in itself ; he valued it in so far as it was part 
 of " the glory of Him who moves all things, which 
 penetrates the universe, shining more in one place 
 and less in another." Art for art's sake would 
 not have been a maxim that appealed to him. 
 
 To make the matter clearer than I can do in 
 my halting sentences, let me read a few words, 
 written half a century ago by one of the greatest 
 masters of English whom the last half century 
 has seen ; I mean the late Dr. Church, Dean of St. 
 Paul's. I hope that at least some of those who 
 read this know his essay on Dante, unrivalled by 
 any study of the Commedia that to my know- 
 ledge has ever been produced in any language. 
 I have quoted thfe passage before now, but in a 
 volume which is out of print, so I perhaps may be 
 excused for refreshing your memory. " Those 
 who know the Divina Commedia best . . . know its 
 austere, yet subduing beauty ; they know what 
 force there is, in its free and earnest and solemn 
 verse, to strengthen, to tranquillise, to console. . . . 
 "But besides this, they know how often its 
 seriousness has put to shame their trifling, its 
 magnanimity their faint-heartedness, its living 
 energy their indolence, its stern and sad grandeur 
 rebuked low thoughts, its thrilling tenderness 
 
APPENDIX 247 
 
 overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its 
 strong faith quelled despair and smoothed per- 
 plexity, its vast grasp imparted the sense of 
 harmony to the view of clashing truths. They 
 know how often they have found, in times of 
 trouble, if not light, at least that deep sense of 
 reality, permanent though unseen, which is more 
 than light can always give — ^in the view which it 
 has suggested to them of the judgments and the 
 love of God." Such is the lore to be learnt from 
 the Commedia. Will any one say that the men 
 of the Renaissance had any use for it ? 
 
 Politically, again, the condition of Italy in the 
 sixteenth century wovild have been thoroughly 
 distasteful to Dante. Bred as a Guelph, that is, 
 as a member of what one may caU the Separatist 
 party, the party, that is, which desired to keep 
 Italy a group of small city states, torn by fac- 
 tions and constantly at war with each other, he 
 learnt by experience how impossible this system 
 would be if Italy was to remain prosperous. 
 Even in his own day he saw the cities of Italy 
 fuU of tyrants, and he must have foreseen that 
 this would have been the inevitable result for 
 them all. He ultimately — though, as he says, 
 he formed a party by himself — came round to 
 the view associated with the Ghibellines, that 
 internal union as part of one great imperial 
 system was his country's best road to the strength 
 
248 APPENDIX 
 
 which comes of quietness. His dream was 
 magnificent but impracticable. Italy remained, 
 indeed, in theory a portion of the empire. Its 
 duchies and marquisates were in theory imperial 
 fiefs. Between 1300 and 1440 five emperors 
 were crowned at Rome, but the first of these 
 had to fight his way thither, and the rest, unless 
 we except Louis the Bavarian, exercised very 
 little influence over Italian affairs. The imperial 
 cause was practically lost before Dante had 
 finished writing the De Monarchia. Italy itself, 
 a prey alternately to France and Spain, remained 
 a geographical expression down to our own days. 
 The literary and artistic people of the Renais- 
 sance did not probably trouble themselves more 
 about Guelph or Ghibelline than about anything 
 to come after the present life, even when they 
 saw Rome sacked by the imperial armies. Pro- 
 vided that they could win the favour of a prince 
 by flattery couched in polished verse, by skill 
 of hand or splendour of design — for, like the 
 Cyxenaic philosopher in Horace, they held that 
 to have pleased princes is no small praise — ^they 
 were content so long as they escaped the dagger 
 of some rival in letters or in love. 
 
 French and Spanish armies contended on 
 Italian soil. The Pope sided with one or the 
 other, and sometimes led his own forces into the 
 field. The various states took various parts, now 
 
APPENDIX 249 
 
 with one, now with the other, and joined in the 
 fray. But, save for a few scanty allusions, we 
 should know very little of this from the literature 
 of the time. Italy produced no T3Trt£eus. If 
 Dante's great ideal of a universal monarchy 
 with an emperor at its head to whom all sovereigns 
 would be vassals, under whom all men might 
 live at peace, who should be arbiter in aU tem- 
 poral things as the Pope was in spiritual — ^if this 
 ideal did not occur to them, they were hardly 
 to be blamed. Maximilian was probably the last 
 emperor who might have dreamt of anything 
 of the kind. Even Charles, though a far more 
 powerful prince than his grandfather, acted 
 merely as one of several rival sovereigns, and 
 though after him traces may be found of a feel- 
 ing that the emperor enjoyed a special dignity, 
 he was never, as a matter of fact, in a position 
 to assert it. 
 
 When the De Monarchia was first printed, in 
 1559. it was printed in Germany, and in Italy 
 was promptly put on the Index. The Commedia 
 never quite shared that fate, though for a long 
 time, whenever the Inquisition got hold of a copy, 
 whether manuscript or printed, certain passages 
 were carefully blocked out. 
 
 It is clear, then, that between the mind of 
 Dante and the mind of the Renaissance, there 
 could be no sympathy. Perhaps I may add. 
 
250 APPENDIX 
 
 though with some trepidation, that I doubt 
 whether, in spite of the enormous labour bestowed 
 on his work by modern ItaUan scholars, in spite 
 of the endless discussions on various points, 
 even the most minute, which are ever pouring 
 forth from the presses of Italy, the conditions 
 are reaUy much improved. Manuscripts are 
 ransacked, texts are revised, notes almost as 
 voluminous as Landino's are written; but it is 
 rarely that we come across any appreciation, 
 such as that left by the distinguished man whom 
 I have quoted above, of what it is that constitutes 
 Dante's real greatness. The modern Italian may 
 still call Dante the Divine Poet, but, unless I am 
 much mistaken, his real poetic divinity is rather 
 Leopardi. 
 
 But to return for one moment, in conclusion, 
 to our general theme, Which was, after all, the 
 free man — Dante wandering about in exile and 
 poverty, and hurling his fierce invective at Popes 
 and Potentates, fearlessly admonishing the mighty 
 ones of the earth ; or Petrarch paying his court to 
 the tyrants of Padua and Milan — to the latter 
 in such a manner as to call forth remonstrances 
 even from his easy-going friend Boccaccio, and 
 disapproval from his admiring biographer Mr. 
 HoUway-Calthorpe ; or Ariosto finding no taste of 
 bitter in the bread, doled out by a contemptuous 
 patron, and going up and down a Pope's stairs for 
 
APPENDIX 251 
 
 even less reward ; daring to pour his complaints 
 into friendly ears only, and in half private letters, 
 and reserving the work wliich was to gain him 
 the ear of the world as the vehicle for fulsome 
 flatteries of men whose measure he had taken as 
 well as any ? And what is true of Ariosto is true, 
 in its degree, of all, or nearly all, the greatest 
 men of letters of that time. A brief comparison 
 like this will serve perhaps as well as anything 
 else to show how widely Dante's scheme of life 
 was separated from that which satisfied the men 
 of the Renaissance. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER'S WORKS ] 
 
 The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri. Edited with Translation 
 and Notes by Arthur John Butler, late Fellow of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge. Quisque suos patimur manes, exinde 
 per acceptum Mittimur Elysium. London : Macmillan and 
 Co., and New York. 1880. 2nd edition, 1892. 
 
 The Paradise of Dante Alighieri. Edited with Translation 
 and Notes by Arthur John Butler. London : Macmillan 
 and Co., and New York. 1885. 2nd edition, 1891. 
 
 La Commedia di Dante Alighieri. London : Rivington. 
 1890. 
 
 The Hell of Dante Alighieri. Edited with Translation and 
 Notes by Arthur John Butler. London : Macmillan & Co., 
 and New York. 1892. 
 
 A Companion to Dante. From the German of G. A. 
 Scartazzini by Arthur John Butler. London : Macmillan 
 and Co., and New York. 1893. 
 
 The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot, Late Lieutenant-General 
 in the French Army. Translated from the French by Arthur 
 John Butler. In two volumes, with portrait and maps. 
 London : Longmans, Green & Co., and New York : 15 
 East i6th Street. 1892. Fourth edition, slightly abridged, 
 1893. 
 
 Count Cavour and Madame de Circourt. Some unpublished 
 correspondence. Edited by Count Nigra. Translated by 
 Arthur John Butler. Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, Paris, 
 and Melbourne. 1894. 
 
 Dante : His Times and His Work. By Arthur John 
 Butler. London : A. D. Innes & Co., Bedford Street. 1895. 
 
 Select Essays of Sainte-Beuve, Chiefly Bearing on English 
 Literature. Translated by A. J. Butler. Londpn : Edward 
 Arnold, 37 Bedford Street, Strand. 1895, 
 
 253 
 
254 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The Memoirs of Baton Thiebault, Late Lieutenant-General 
 in the French Army. Translated and Condensed by Arthur 
 John Butler, Translator of the ' Memoires du Gdn6ral Marbot.' 
 In two volumes, London : Smith, Elder and Co., 15 Waterloo 
 Place. 1896. 
 
 The History of Mankind. By Professor Friedrich Ratzel. 
 Translated from the second German edition by A. J. Butler, 
 M.A. With Introduction by E. B. Tylor, D.C.L., F.R.S. 
 With coloured plates, maps, and illustrations. London : 
 Macmillan & Co., and New York. 1896. 
 
 Bismarck : The Man and the Statesman. Being the reflec- 
 tions and reminiscences of Otto Prince von Bismarck, written 
 and dictated by himself after his retirement from office. 
 Translated from the German under the supervision of A. J. 
 Butler. With two portraits. London : Smith, Elder & Co. 
 1899. 
 
 Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of 
 Queen Elizabeth. Preserved in the Public Record Office. 
 Edited by Arthur John Butler, M.A., under the direction of 
 the Master of the Rolls, and with the sanction of His Majesty's 
 Secretary of State for the Home Department. London : 
 Printed for His Majesty's Stationery Office. 5 vols. 1901- 
 1909. 
 
 The Forerunners of Dante : A Selection from Italian Poetry 
 before 1300. Edited by A. J. Butler, Professor of Italian 
 Literature in University College, London. Oxford : At 
 the Clarendon Press. 1910. (Published posthumously.) 
 
 ARTICLES FOR MAGAZINES, HISTORICAL WORKS, 
 AND BOOKS OF REFERENCE 
 
 ' An Eton Tutor.' Macmillan's Magazine. June 1898. 
 
 'A Colonel of the Grand Army.' Cornhill Magazine. 
 May 1897. 
 
 ' Paris in June 1871.' Cornhill Magazine. June 1897. 
 
 ' The Retreat from Moscow.' Cornhill Magazine. August 
 1895. 
 
 ' Gislikon,' Nov. 23, 1847. Battles of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury. Cassell & Co., 1896, 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 255 
 
 • The Storming of Brescia,' March 31-April i, 1849. 
 Batiks of the Nineteenth Century. Cassell & Co., 1896. 
 
 ' The Battle of Maida,' July 4, 1806. Battles of the Nine- 
 teenth Century. Cassell & Co., 1897. 
 
 ' The Action off Pulo Aor,* Feb. 15, 1804. Battles of the 
 Nineteenth Century. Cassell & Co., 1897. 
 
 ' The Wars of Religion in France.' The Cambridge Modern 
 History. Planned by the late Lord Acton, Regius Professor 
 of Modern History. Vol. III. The Wars of Religion, Chap. I. 
 1904. 
 
 ' The End of the Italian Renaissance.' Vol. III. The Wars 
 of Religion, Chap. XIV. 1904. 
 
 ' Mr. Hardy as a Decadent.' National Review. 
 
 ' The Initial Blocks of some, Italian Printers.' Bihliogra- 
 phica. Vol. I. 1893. 
 
 ' Some Alpine Books.' Transactions of the Bibliographical 
 Society, 1901-1909. 
 
 ' Elizabethan Ciphers.' Transactions of the Bibliographical 
 Society, 1901-1909. 
 
 ' The Gioliti and their Press.' Transactions of the Biblio- 
 graphical Society, 1901-1909. 
 
 ' Dante.' Encyclopeedia Britannica. 
 
 ' Charles Knight, 1791-1873.' Dictionary of National 
 Biography. 
 
 ' Dante and the Renaissance.' Barlow Inaugural Lecture. 
 The New Quarterly, February 1910. 
 
INDEX 
 
 AcLAND, Arthur, 84 
 Acland, Sir C. T., 34 
 Acton, Lord, 125, 192 
 Ad Eundem, the, 177 
 Alpine Club, The, 76, 126 
 Alpine excursions, 55 sq., 76, 
 
 123 sqq. 
 Alpine Journal, 127 
 " Apostles," The, 91 
 Anson, Sir W., 36, 40 
 Arbuthnot, R. G., 44 
 Arnold, Matthew, 173 n. 
 AthencBum, the, 114 sqq. 
 AthoU, Duchess of, 28 
 
 Balliol College, Oxford, 30, 
 
 37. 43 
 Balston, Dr , 28 
 Barnett, Elizabeth (aunt of 
 
 A. J. B.), 13, 19, 26, 29, 
 
 91. 93. 94. 101. 223 ; letters 
 
 from, 15 
 Barnett, G. H. (grandfather 
 
 of A. J. B.), I, 2, 13, 20, 
 
 26, 27, 29 
 Binney, C. C, 153 n., 205, 220 
 Bismarck, the Man and the 
 
 Statesman, 202 
 Boer War, the, 205 sqq., 218 
 Boston Dante Society, 221 
 Box Hill, 148 
 
 257 
 
 Bradfield College, 16, 18 sqq., 
 170 
 
 Brandreth, Henry, 31, 45, 65 ; 
 letters from, 31, 32 
 
 Bridges, Robert, 167 
 
 Bryce, Viscount, 220 
 
 Burn, Robert, 43, 61 ; letter 
 from, 62 
 
 Butler, A. J., birth, 12 
 sqq. ; enters Bradfield 
 
 College, 19 ; enters Eton 
 College, 27 ; wins Newcastle 
 prize, 39 ; wins Tomline 
 prize, 39 ; leaves Eton, 41 ; 
 wins Minor Scholarship at 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 41 ; wins Bell University 
 Scholarship, 41 ; passes 
 Mathematical Tripos as 
 Junior Optime, 65 ; passes 
 Classical Tripos (first class), 
 68 ; elected to Fellowship 
 at Trinity CoUege, 68 ; 
 appointed Examiner in 
 Education Department, 87 ; 
 lives at 6 Onslow Square, 91 ; 
 marriage, 100 ; begins trans- 
 lation of Purgatory, 102 ; 
 joins Sunday Tramps, 146 ; 
 leaves Education Depart- 
 ment, 153 ; joins Riving- 
 ton's as a partner, 152 ; 
 
 R 
 
258 
 
 INDEX 
 
 becomes Chief Editor for 
 Cassell's, 156 ; leaves 
 Cassell's, 180 ; becomes As- 
 sistant Commissioner for 
 Education, 187 ; translations, 
 188 sqq. ; letters to the press, 
 194. 195 ; enters Public 
 Record Office, 199 ; trans- 
 lates Bismarck's Memoirs, 
 202 ; becomes Barlow Pro- 
 fessor of Dante Studies in 
 University College. London, 
 219 ; ' visit to U.S.A., 220 ; 
 death, 223 
 
 Butler, A. J., letters from, 19, 
 27, 28, 29, 64, 65, 66, 85, 
 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 
 150. 153. 164 sqq., 182, 185, 
 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198, 
 200, 201, 203, 205, 214, 216 
 
 Butler, Edith Emma, 13. [See 
 also Knight, Mrs.) 
 
 Butler, Emma (mother of 
 A. J. B.), I, 2, 10, II, 26, 
 37, 181, 182 ; letters from, 
 17, 18, 69, 96 
 
 Butler, Mrs. A. J., 135, 150 
 
 Butler, William George, 13, 
 40, 66 
 
 Butler, Rev. W. J. (father of 
 A. J. B.), I, 2, 4 sqq. 98, 99, 
 132, 133, 181 ; letters from, 
 13. 33. 67, 69, 91, 132 
 
 Butler, WiUiam Martin (son 
 of A. J. B.), 104 
 
 Calendars of State Papers, 199 
 Cambridge, 174 
 Canning, George, 2, 14, 190 
 Canning, Mehetabel, 2 
 Canning, Stratford (Viscount 
 Stratford de Redcliffe), 2 
 
 Canning, William, 2, 5, 14 
 Cassell & Co., 156, 158 sqq., 
 
 179, 180 
 Champneys, Basil, 214 
 " Christopher," the, 35 
 Clark, J. W., 45, 49, 70, 81 
 Clark, Mrs., 81 
 CUfEord, W. K., 44, 68 
 Clovelly, 48, 78 sqq., 170, 219 
 Cockshott, A. H., 45 
 Cole, J., 68 
 Collier, John, 146 
 Colvin, Sir Sidney, 44, 68, 70 
 Community of St. Mary the 
 
 Virgin, 9 sq. 
 Companion to Dante, 106, 113 
 Convivio, the, 115 
 Cotta, Messrs., 203 
 Cox, W. A., 68 
 Crawley, W. P., 45 
 Cumin, Mr. P., 153 
 Currey, W. E., 45 
 
 Daniell, F. H. B., 68 
 Dante, 49, 70, 88, 223, 229 sqq., 
 
 App. 
 Dante, his Times and his Work, 
 
 106, 113, 116, 189 
 De Rosen, Mrs., 28 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 95 
 Divina Commedia, 71 
 
 Education Department, 58, 
 
 86, 152, 154 
 Eton College, 20, 26, 27 sqq., 
 
 225 
 
 Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond, 
 
 44 
 Forerunners of Dante, 106, 
 
 114, 216, 223 
 
INDEX 
 
 259 
 
 Forster, Mr., 88 
 
 Fourth of June, 28 
 
 Fowey, 220 
 
 Fowler, Sir Henry (Lord Wol- 
 verhampton), 162 
 
 Fremantle, S. J., 40, 70, 
 83 sqq. 
 
 Freshfield, Douglas, 146 
 
 Furness, Dr., 221 
 
 Inck, G. H., 44 
 Innes, A. D., 189 
 
 Jackson, Prof. Henry, 70, 105 
 contributions from, 42, 213 
 Jebb, Sir Richard, 61 
 Josef, 130, 131 
 Joyce, Sidney, 89 
 
 GiOLiTi PRESS, 192 
 Gladstone, Stephen, 34 
 Gloucester, Duchess of, 28 
 Glympton Park, i, 13, 26 
 Golden Pomp, the, 163, 201 
 Gorham Judgment, 9 
 Greenwood, F., 84 
 Guinness, Mrs., contributions 
 from, 25, 73. 
 
 Hardy, Laurence, 84 
 
 Harrison, Frederic, 150 
 
 Harvard College, 221, 222 
 
 Hell of Dante, 106 sqq. 
 
 Hervey, Lord Francis, 40 
 
 Hind Head Copse, 150 
 
 History of Mankind, by F. 
 Ratzel, 189, 190, 192 
 
 Hoare, H. W. H., 40, 88 
 
 Hodgson, H. Shadworth, 146 
 
 Holland, Canon Scott, 84 
 
 Holland, Spencer, 84 
 
 Holroyd, Sir C, 192 
 
 Hoppett, 65 
 
 Houblon, Archdeacon T. H. A., 
 126, 128, 130, 134 n. ; con- 
 tribution from, 74 
 
 Humphry, Mary Caroline (Mrs. 
 A. J. Butler), 98 
 
 Humphry, Mrs., 97, 99 
 
 Humphry, Rev. W. G., 97 
 
 Keble, John, 4, 12 
 Kennett-Barrington, V. H. B., 
 
 44 
 
 Knight, Mrs., contribution 
 from, 71 {See also Butler, 
 Edith Emma). 
 
 La Belle Sauvage, 158, 159, 
 
 160 
 Lakes, the, 166 
 Letters of Count Cavour, 188, 
 
 198 n. 
 Liddon, Dr., letter from, 93 
 Lockinge House, 98, 99 
 Longman, T. N., 156 
 Longman & Co., 156 
 Lundy, 81 sq. 
 Lyte, Sir Henry Maxwell, 199 
 
 MacColl, Mr. Norman, 115 
 Mackail, 217 
 Mackey, A. J., 44 
 Maclean, F. W., 44 
 Macmillan, Mr. George, 105, 
 
 214 
 Maitland, F. W., 146, 149, 217 
 Mann, Mr. J. S., 162 
 Manning, Cardinal, 4 
 Marriott, Mr., 28 
 
26o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Marriott, Charles, 4 
 
 Memoirs of Baron de Marbot, 
 
 188 
 Memoirs of Baron TkiSbauU, 
 
 192. 194 
 
 Meredith, George, 147, 148 
 
 Mill, John, 79, 80, 82, igi 
 
 Morison, J. C, 146 
 
 Mumm, Mr. A. J., contribu- 
 tion from, 126 
 
 Newquay, 84 sqq. 
 Kiven, Sir George, 68 
 Nortoii, Prof. Charles Eliot, 
 
 221 
 Nova Scotia, 221 
 
 O'Brien, G. T. M., 44 
 Onslow Square, 91, loi, 103 
 Overstone, Lord, 98 
 Oxford Book of English Verse, 
 
 201 
 Oxford Movement, 4 
 
 Paget, Francis (Bishop of 
 Oxford), 84 
 
 Paget, Luke, 84 
 
 Palgrave, F. T., 89 
 
 Paradise of Dante, 106 sqq. 
 
 Patrick, Captain R., 2 
 
 Pembrokeshire, 2 
 
 Philadelphia, 220, 221 
 
 PoUock, Sir F., 36, 44, 66, 68, 
 106, 128, 146 ; contribu- 
 tions from, 58, 149 
 
 Pollock, W. H., contribution 
 from, 77, 146 
 
 Public Record Of&ce, 56, 199, 
 
 215 
 PuUeine, J. J., 45 
 
 Puller, Rev. F. W., 32, 34, 44 
 Purgatory, 102, 103, 105 
 Purves, Mr. and Mrs. Austin 
 
 M., 220 
 Puseyism, 9 
 Putney, i 
 Puttenham, i 
 
 Raikes, Cecil, 96 
 
 Reid, Sir Wemyss, 156, 157, 
 162 
 
 RendaU, Mr. Vernon, contribu- 
 tion from, 115 
 
 Reynafdson, E. B., 84 
 
 Riddell, James, 30, 37, 70, 
 191 ; letters from, 37, 38 
 
 Rivington, Mr. F., 152 
 
 Rivington & Co., 6, 155, 156 
 
 Rob, Dr., 214 
 
 Robertson, George Croom, 146 
 
 Robinson, Mr., 221 
 
 Routh, Dr., 61 
 
 Saga Haraldi, 169 
 
 St. Bernard, the, 30 
 
 St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, 97 
 
 Sainte Beuve, translation of, 
 
 188 
 Sanderson, Dr., 21 ; letters 
 
 from, 22 sqq. 
 Sandford, Sir F., 88 
 Sandys, Sir John, 68 
 Selwyn, J. R., 44 
 Shilleto, Richard, 47, 61 
 Sidgwick, Prof. Henry, 45 
 Smith, Mr. Reginald, 202 
 Spurgeon, Mr. Arthur, 179 
 Stephen, Leslie, 146, 147, 148, 
 
 191 
 Stevenson, R. L., 168 
 Storr, Francis, 214 
 
INDEX 
 
 261 
 
 Stuart, Prof., 96 
 
 Stuckey Coles, Rev. V. S., 11, 
 
 34 
 Sully, James, 146 
 Sunday Tramps, the, 146 sqq. 
 Swainson, J. H., 45 
 
 Tariff Reform, 211 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, 121 
 
 Thompson, W. H., 90 
 
 Tib, 81 sq., 102 
 
 Toynbee, Dr. Paget, contri- 
 bution from, 107 
 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, 4, 
 37, 41, 42 sqq. ; Fellows' 
 Garden, 174, 175, 192 
 
 Trotter, Coutts, 64 
 
 Tullibardine, Marquis of, 28 
 
 Vale of the White Horse, 6 
 Valpy, Canon, 78 
 Vincent, Rev, T., 16 
 
 Waktage, 5 sqq., 31, 98, 99, 
 
 223 
 Warr, H. D., 68 
 Warre, Rev. Edmond, 28 
 Westminster School, 4 
 Weybridge, 103, 148, 172, 196, 
 
 218 
 Whyte, Mr. Frederic, 162 
 Wilberforce, William, 4 
 Williams, John, 157 
 Wood End, 103 
 
 Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 36 
 
 AT THE BALLANTVNE IRESS 
 
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