the incredible. But the romancing satirist has the anomalous task of creating a story good enough to be its own reward and then not allowing it to be. It must have all the air of being an end in itself the while it is being made the means to another end. This adroit manipulation whereby the idea appears subordinate to the plot, although the reverse is the case, is a point in which Butler surpasses the others on our list and ranks with the highest at large.[1]
But the idea itself was a premature blossom, and the winds of March, though late Victorian, were ruthless. About that time, however, it was the much more massive figure of Ibsen that happened to stand in the main current of the blasts, and Butler was merely blown aside and left until Shaw and the Twentieth Century came along and picked him up. One of his recent biographers has a serious time trying to establish him as the laws of chronology would dictate, and finally decides it cannot be done:[2]
"How is it possible to fit a man like Butler, * * * into
any system, * * * how are we to classify one who, above
- ↑ One's astonishment that it was Meredith who had the honor of rejecting the manuscript of Erewhon, submitted to Chapman and Hall, is exceeded only by the astonishment at the reason given,—that it was a philosophical treatise, not likely to interest the general public. One would hardly accuse this critic of a conservative reluctance to expose the public to iconoclastic bacilli, though he had not yet become the author of Beauchamp's Career, nor would one suppose his "public" to be composed entirely of tired business men and sentimental school girls. There remain the two cruxes in the history of satire: failure of the satirist Thackeray to appreciate the satirist Swift, and of the satirist Meredith to appreciate the satirist Butler. If they prove anything it is the diversity among satirists.
- ↑ Harris: Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, 13. Cf. Chesterton's whimsical remark that "the best definition of the Victorian Age is that Francis Thompson stood outside it."
