Butler achieved for himself and the one which these NoteBooks so fully and singularly exemplify.

There is a kind of man whose sensations come at the double, who must take them down as they fly by or lose them eternally. Butler's Note-Books were not kept for such a purpose. It was not his senses that were imperious for a scribe: it was his ruminations, his ideas. He was painter and musician as well as writer, and he was writer in the most general interpretation, but his chief characteristic was not, so to speak, sensuous impressionability. It was an incessant intellectual activity. He had "the principle of stopping everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes, as the true painter will stop anywhere and everywhere to sketch," but the notes were not wild or woodland, they were memoranda in his endless discovery of wisdom. Occasionally the spectacle of the world urged him to record emotion, and he observes that from the age of twelve the music of his well-beloved Händel was never a day out of his head. But it was the opinions and ideas he derived from experience that stirred him to write in his Note-Books. Experience did not so much enamor him as stimulate his mind.

The vivacity of Samuel Butler's mind is astonishing. He was not brilliant in the sense that his expression was dazzling. Dazzling writers like George Meredith were distasteful to him, and he felt little of their need to give acuity to the words that were to convey poignant experiences. Neither did he wish to incite passion or ecstasy. He held everything, even his God, at arm's length, and the light by which he examined. his world was daylight. Because of his sharp curiosity, however, his independence and audacity and humorous scepticism, he achieved that kind of penetrativeness which is often called brilliant. Penetrative he was to an extraordinary degree and over an area that few men of his time even dreamed of encompassing. He was dry on occasion and on occasion captious, but he never said a heartless thing or a foolish. And from the first line he wrote to the last there is not a single dishonest utterance. Almost every one who writes is tempted now and then to say something which is not quite authentic, to use a hackneyed phrase if not a hackneyed thought. Samuel Butler authenticated everything he uttered. During his growing years and indeed all through his life he found

himself brushed aside by the pundits. From pretentiousness he suffered as only a modest man can suffer, and he abhorred it. One result of it was to accentuate his own priestlessness and simplicity. He could easily have got himself up as an authority. It is a thing that almost any busybody with a plodding secretary can accomplish. Butler leaned over backwards to avoid doing it. He even went so far as to suspect everything that had the air of being professional, and to take a perverse pleasure in offering to machine-made scholars his own hand-made heterodox views. And not only were his views pragmatically decided, so were the bases on which he formed them. It is significant that though he was born in 1835 and lived to 1902 he got more out of Händel in music and Bellini in painting than out of any other masters. Homer and Shakespeare happened to interest him, but he paid no attention whatever to those "imaginary obligations" of an academic or journalistic order which keep most people from discovering what they really value. Tolstoy and Ibsen, Morris and Karl Marx, were Butler's contemporaries. They might as well have lived in Kamchatka for any chance they had of crossing the threshold of his hospitable but resolutely unfashionable mind.

Between the cravings of gregariousness and the exactions of his critical intelligence, then, Butler was never at a loss to decide. But this severance from the crowd was not without an emotional result. There can be no doubt that he suffered some of the penalties of being an intellectual anchorite. From the egoistic rigidity that may so easily be the outcome of isolation-if not its promoter-he was preserved by common sense. Though he embraced the most difficult of experiments, the experiment of true independence, he kept on the right side of the thin partition mainly through avoiding the mistakes of that early ancestor who imagined God as solemn because "he was impressed with an undue sense of his own importance and, as a natural consequence, he had no sense of humor." In spite of extreme common sense and humor, the price of being heterodox told on Butler. He was much too spirited to lament his exile, but sometimes he was cross-grained and spiritually dyspeptic. His dislike of Beethoven, Leonardo and Goethe was not mere buoyant unconventionality or admirable aesthetic sabotage. It had a slightly

diseased contrariness. He was wonderfully outspoken about his own neglect and comparative failure, and exceedingly candid about his aspirations for fame, but all this could not prevent his being estranged from certain great men by very reason of their general acceptance. Those who are themselves frustrated cannot help the impulse to frustrate others, and the fact that his unaffected opinions were not fairly received sometimes gave Butler an animus in challenging opinions that

were.

Unsparing pragmatism, however, kept him from being a crank and made him a priceless critic of what H. G. Wells calls "first and last things." And the freshest of his discriminations, the most unexpected and the most unqualified, are to be found in his Note-Books. It is a common thing in life to hear some one bemoaning a talker whose music died in him. Here is a wise and humorous and varied man who preserved his observations as they sprang from him. It is monologue, it is true, rather deliberate and reasoned monologue editorially cut-and-dried. The fact remains that it is the essential Samuel Butler in his normal habit of mind. Under compulsion to think for himself, his Note-Books detect him in the process, and so represent the range and depth of his genius. That it was genius, though often blue in the cold of his era, there is no questioning. And it is peculiarly precious because it is liberating. It cannot but open the doors for those who have felt orthodoxies stifle them in their own attempt to think for themselves.

FRANCIS BYRNE HACKETT.

Preface to the Original Edition

ARLY in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note

to remember; it might be something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he said himself. In one of these notes he gives a reason for making them:

"One's thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails."

So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually winging their way across the field of his vision. As he became a more expert marksman his collection increased and his museum grew so crowded that he wanted a catalogue. In 1874 he started an index, and this led to his reconsidering the notes, destroying those that he remembered having used in his published books and re-writing the remainder. The re-writing shortened some but it lengthened others and suggested so many new ones that the index was soon of little use and there seemed to be no finality about it ("Making Notes," pp. 100-1 post). In 1891 he attacked the problem afresh and made it a rule to spend an hour every morning re-editing his notes and keeping his index up to date. At his death, in 1902, he left five bound volumes, with the contents dated and indexed, about 225 pages of closely written sermon paper to each volume, and more than enough unbound and unindexed sheets to make a sixth volume of equal size.

In accordance with his own advice to a young writer (p. 363 post), he wrote the notes in copying ink and kept a pressed copy with me as a precaution against fire; but during his lifetime, unless he wanted to refer to something while he was in my chambers, I never looked at them. After his death I took them down and went through them. I knew in a general way what I should find, but I was not prepared for such a multitude and