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wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof,

and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor-
this is the gift of God."-Ecclesiastes 5:1, 4, 7, 19.

Both personal experiment and observation of others have convinced the Preacher that man cannot understand or alter the works of God, so the only thing for him to do is to trust God, as a power higher than all, to do what is right.

"Consider the work of God; for who can make that
straight which he hath made crooked?

In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day
of adversity consider; yea God hath made the one
side by side with the other, to the end that man
should not find out anything that shall be after
him."-7:13-14.

"Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself
wise overmuch. Why shouldest thou destroy thyself?

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He that feareth God shall come forth from them all."

-7:16-18.

The conclusions drawn from experiment and observation are stated beginning with 8:16, and closing in the beautiful allegory in chapter 12, with the note concerning the effort of Preacher to teach the people wisdom.

The voice of experience cries to the young:

"Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth;

And let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth,

And walk in the ways of thy heart,

And in the sight of thine eyes;

But know thou that for all these things

God will bring thee into judgment."-11:9.

These are simply the words of wisdom gained by experience of life addressed to the youth. Live your life with a clear recognition of the fact that there is a judgment ahead.

SAMUEL BUTLER

BY LOUIS W. FLACCUS

Professor of Philosophy

Butler is commonly known as the author of "The Way of All Flesh," a novel which remained unpublished at the time of his death. It is one of the ironies of life that a man is often judged not by the value of his work in the large or the span of his interests, but by one outstanding thing. The novel is striking beyond a doubt: sharply focussed in its study of character, bold in its satire, and worked through with thought. Butler is not, however, a man of one book. Back of The Way of All Flesh" are a life significant for all its lack of explosive changes and a mind of unusual interest; to overlook them because they are undramatic is to do scant justice to the man and his work.

Born in 1834 at Nottingham, the son of a clergyman and the grandson of a schoolmaster and bishop rolled in one, educated at Cambridge for the ministry, trained for a year in parish work among the city poor, Butler seemed fitted by heredity and training alike for a place in that system of solid respectability whose strength he came to make his own, and whose many weaknesses he was to attack relentlessly. But no system, however respectable, is proof against the seepage of a satiric mind. When Butler sailed for New Zealand in 1859 with enough borrowed money to buy a sheep ranch, he was simply shaking off what no longer had any real hold. There was no spiritual upheaval by way of a dramatic touch. Unromantic, too, were the five years he spent as a rancher; a hard life in the open, and rough but kindly human contacts. But unproductive they were not. Their routine was broken by occasional contributions to Christ church papers; and the stock of fresh impressions they yielded were just the thing to set English society in the needed satiric perspective. Butler came back

to England with enough money to try the experiment of shaping his life in his own way. He took up painting and worked at it very hard; but bad teachers and lack of natural ability proved a double handicap, and he soon came to understand that he had failed. Painting, like music, remained one of the inspirations and pleasures of his life; many of his summers were spent in Italy, in out-of-way places, and he became a keen and original student of primitive Italian art. But for serious work he turned to writing, where he felt himself to be strongest. The rest of Butler's life, some thirty-eight years, was the simple, methodical life of an intellectual worker; it swung back and forth between his bachelor's quarters at Clifford Inn and the reading-room of the British Museum, where he hovered about the shelves like a wasp "flying up and down an apricot tree."

His work on first acquaintance seems to lack uniformity. He wrote so many different things: essay, satirical Utopia, theological argument, scientific studies on Darwin and heredity, travel impressions, biography and autobiography, and a novel. He translated the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" and gave a fantastic, but original turn to the Homeric problem. But not a single one of his works suggests either in form or material experiment for experiment's sake. However startling the titleas in "The Authoress of the Odyssey"-or however radical the ideas, there can always be found, at the cost of a little thinking, a quality of thoroughness, of eager but disciplined conviction, of blended tolerance and independence, which makes his work of a piece. His intellect is of the stalking kind. He may occasionally be on the wrong scent, but when he catches sight of his prey his movements become smooth, deliberate, inevitable because perfectly timed. He remarks that he wrote only what insisted on being written. This is something his contemporaries could not see; that we can is due in large measure to his notebooks, published ten years after his death. These random jottings of many years, in part still unprinted, are the best key to his work; they reveal a remarkable unity of tone and purpose. Butler throws reserve to the winds; he fears the obituary notices of the "Dictionary of National

Biography" worse than death itself. "If the colors in which I paint myself fail to please, at any rate I shall have had the laying them on myself."

In these notes Butler reveals much of himself. He was well aware that his life was not considered a success. He had fallen afoul of the scientists and the clergy, and of men with big reputations generally. As for publishers, they considered him a man of one book-Erewhon, published anonymously, had scored-and a poor financial risk. Butler has it all prettily tabulated; the money loss from his books amounted to some seven hundred pounds. Neither neglect nor loss touched himthat seemed so damnably perverse. The secret of this indifference is to be found in the notebooks. He refused to pay the price of success. "I am so intent on pleasing myself that I have no time to cater for the public." Again with a note of contempt: "the public ear is like a common; there is not much to be got off it, but that little is for the most part grazed down by geese and donkeys. Those who wish to gain the public ear should bear in mind that people do not generally want to be made less foolish or less wicked. What they want is to be told that they are not foolish and not wicked. Now it is only a fool or a liar or both who can tell them this; the masses therefore cannot be expected to like any but fools or liars or both. So when a young lady gets photographed, what she wants is not to be made beautiful but to be told that she is beautiful."

There is little in what Butler himself published to match this reckless statement. The truth of the matter is that Butler did not care to please his contemporaries with a shop window display of his cleverness, nor did he seek to shock them with brilliant cynicisms. Scattered throughout the notebooks are sayings-sharp, epigrammatic, disquieting, perversely and devilishly clever-such as Shaw would have hurled at the heads of his public or used as biting ingredients in his literary recipe. Here are a few of them: "It is the function of vice to keep virtue within bounds."-"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."-"I do

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