224 INNOCENCE XXXIII 1895 pen can describe the meeting that shall be come with your second Aet. 59 visit if it please God. It is my pray to our Lord God to protect you and to keep you glad and happy for ever. Though we are far from each other yet we can speak with letters. Thank God to have your love of friendness with me and mine with your noble person. Hopeing to hear from you ISMAYEL from Byramich hizar memuerue iuse bashi. Butler returned from the Troad to Athens, but was not allowed to land because quarantine had been established; so he changed his steamer and came on to Catania. There were two young Americans on board "as innocent as two green peas in May." They "read their Bible on the Sunday morning and were otherwise very fresh, ingenuous, and new-laid-eggy." Butler to Hans Faesch. ACI REALE. 13 May 1895-By the way, I am afraid I shall never venture to Singapore; the six days I had on board the ship between the Dardanelles and Catania made me feel as though I could hardly stand a month of it, especially in tropical seas. I had forgotten what voyages were. However, who knows but I may take heart after all, later on. You may be sure I should like to. The perpetual jarring of the screw is what I found most trying. And now I am just under Mount Etna, and this morning I saw it without a cloud and such a lot of snow on it. I thought of poor dear you passing this very town where I am now two months or so ago, and having the mountains all hidden in clouds. He spent a couple of days at Aci Reale and then went to Palermo, Trapani, Calatafimi and back to Palermo, telling all his friends about his experiences in Greece and the Troad, and how what he had seen bore upon his Odyssean theories. From Palermo he went by boat to Naples and then to Rome. He had seen in The Times a statement that Mr. Gladstone intended to make a Mediterranean cruise, and wrote to him from Rome trying to interest him in the XXXIII SCALPS 225 Aet. 59 Sicilian origin of the Odyssey, begging him, if he touched 1895 at Trapani, to consider the question on the spot. Emanuele Biaggini, from Trapani, and Mario Puglisi, from Aci Reale, also wrote to Mr. Gladstone who replied to Mario. He thought that "Homer" got the idea of Trinacria from a Phoenician report of Sicily and that the voyages of Ulysses were confined to a part of the Mediterranean more towards the East. At least this is what I understood; and, if so, it is improbable that Gladstone touched at Trapani. Butler received two postcards from him, acknowledging receipt of his book or some pamphlets on the subject, or perhaps this letter from Rome-I have forgotten which. I remember, however, that he treated the postcards somewhat in the spirit in which we used to read that the North American Indians treated scalps, he had them framed and hung them up in his rooms. After his death they were given to his nephew, Harry Butler, and I have not got them to refer to. I also gave to Harry Butler Ismail's brass watch-chain. From Rome Butler went to Casale, where the Avvocato Negri had unearthed the contract with the Varallo people for the making of Tabachetti's "Journey to Calvary' chapel, dated 27th April 1599: Therefore the chapel described in Caccia's guide, 1586, which appeared to correspond with it, must be some other now cancelled. It makes a great change in my ideas of things. I go to Varallo to-morrow for one night to see Arienta and talk to him about it. From Varallo he returned to London, stopping at Basel to salute and photograph Madame Faesch and her family, and reached London early in June. It may not seem much of a rest or change to be taken from the Odyssey to the Iliad; nevertheless the journey to Greece and the Troad was both to Butler. He found nothing to disagree with in the received opinions concerning the geography of the Iliad, consequently there was nothing to invent objections or to fight about, and he returned to London with his health restored to something like what it had been before the Odyssey began to trouble him. VOL. II Q 1895 CHAPTER XXXIV 1895-PART II. PREPARING DR. BUTLER'S LIFE, THE ODYSSEY BOOK, Butler to Hans Faesch. 14th June 1895 MY DEAR HANS-I took Alfred to Gadshill on Sunday. Aet. 59 The public-house where the lady was about whose bowels I enquired has changed hands; the old landlord and his wife have retired into private life. I am sorry, for I liked the woman well enough. Everything just the same at Gadshill-the garden very gay and pretty and eggs abundant. Yesterday I took him to Harrow Weald, where Queen Elizabeth is, and we lay down and went to sleep for an hour on the common at the top of the high ground. These outings do both him and me so much good that now the summer is on I mean to take a lot of them. I have picked up a good deal this week but my head is still not all that it ought to be, and I have no doubt it will be some time yet before I undo all the mischief that has been done. Alfred has never once had to say "Hans" to me since I came back, so I begin to think I am getting quite good-tempered. Jones and I, talking about the death of the Sultan of Johore last night, said: "Why do they not make Hans the new Sultan, and then we could go and stay with him in his Imperial Palace?" But the older I grow the greater fools I find everybody to be, except you and Jones and myself and Alfred and Gogin and about. half a dozen more. There! It is 9.30 A.M. and I hear Alfred fumbling away with his key in the key-hole. He will be inside in another second and then how much more do you think he is likely to let me write to you or to anyone else? So with a whole prayerbook full of the most beautiful good and kind wishes that a grandfather may send to a very dear grandson-I am yours, S. BUTLER. XXXIV SHORTENING DR. BUTLER 227 Butler's literary agent did not meet with success in 1895 offering the MS. of Dr. Butler's Life to publishers. One Aet. 59 of the publishers maintained that 150,000 words was the limit for such a book, whereas the words in Butler's MS. appeared to amount to nearly a million. This was an exaggeration; nevertheless the work was too long. Butler, however, could guess neither how much nor what kind of reduction a publisher would be likely to require; and even if he could, the idea of shortening the book was not pleasing to him because, as he wrote to his agent (17th April 1895), he believed that, if less widely saleable, it would be more permanently useful as a book for reference on all questions connected with the history of education from 1790 to 1840 in the shape in which he had it than in any other. After anxious thought he at last made up his mind to cut out as much as he could bring himself to omit and to publish the book at his own expense, knowing that this was not giving it the best chance of selling, but despairing of finding any publisher willing to speculate in it. He returned to Mr. Murray, who had already declined to publish the MS. at his own risk, and arranged that he should publish it on commission after it had been shortened. The shortening and the seeing the book through the press provided him with a troublesome occupation for more than a year. Butler to Hans Faesch. 10 July 1895-I am in the thick of getting my Life of Dr. Butler ready for the press and my head is still not what it should be; it is all right as long as I do not fatigue it, but with a very little extra exertion the mischief returns. My Selection Book. I send a copy by this mail and am glad that there is someone there [in Singapore] whom you should wish to show it to. Hear my prophecy: Some day, when you least expect, some one will come to Singapore whose mere presence shall change the aspect of the whole place. Or a veil will drop off from some one who is there already, and the heat will become less hot thenceforward. Zola. [Hans had been reading Lourdes, and wanted Butler to read it too.] Nothing can make me think worse of clerics 228 DESIRE AND POWER XXXIV 1895 generally than I think now. When I have written all I want to Ael. 59 write, then perhaps I may have a little time for reading, but the older I grow the less I read beyond what I am compelled in the course of my own studies. Towards the end of June I saw Rockstro for the last time. He was in bed, ill in body, but with all his wits about him. He was correcting an exercise and said: "I am not now looking out for fifths; it's not worth while; anybody can do that for you; but you won't get anybody else to tell you the things I am telling you.' I was to go again for another lesson, but he was too ill to see me and died on the 2nd of July, aged 72. The reader, knowing Butler's views about learning and doing, may have been wondering what can have happened during his counterpoint lessons. When they began I was nervous, as I have said in chapter xxviii. ; but I soon saw that there was no probability of their being discontinued. In the first place, Butler was very much interested in Rockstro and his obiter dicta, and, secondly, Rockstro was no less interested in Butler and in all he said. Every bar of every exercise became the prelude to a discussion on the philosophy of art. It was flogging dead horses and fighting battles o'er again for both of them, but their enjoyment was not thereby spoiled. They, no doubt, enunciated between them all, and more than all, that Butler and I had said during our drive from Varese to Angera in 1878 (ante, I. p. 282), when we passed the architectural mausoleum which provided the text for our conversation about ἀγάπη and γνῶσις. If Rockstro, as he probably did, said, as I had said, that an artist must master his technique before he can express what he wishes to say, Butler certainly objected, as he had done to me, that in devoting his energies to gaining this power, the artist will lose the desire to say anything, and then will come the temptation, which generally proves too strong, to glory in merely displaying the ability he has acquired. This naturally afforded opportunities for a repetition of the contents of the chapter, "Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art" in Alps and Sanctuaries, and of those chapters in the published Note-Books |