had been a humourless man like Ruskin or Carlyle or William Morris! But the thing he was fighting for was precisely the intuition of the divine joke of the universe which is called the sense of humour, and it made Butler, one of the most insighted men of his time, a Conservative. The strain was too great: he knew that what he had tried to do was all-important, but he could not find acceptance from the world or deliverance from his own difficulties. He had tried to become a painter and was not a good painter, and in writing he remained an amateur. The professionals could overlook him because he could not—or would not—learn their jargon.
Life, with delightful sense of humour, presented him with a third obsession, the lady, Miss Eliza Mary Ann Savage, who turned him into a writer of potent influence, and of whom he wrote, as in his old age he turned it all over in his whimsical brain, the following sonnet:
"She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day:
The more she wrote, the more unmoved was I.
The more she gave, the less could I repay.
Therefore I grieve not that I was not loved,
But that, being loved, I could not love again.
I liked: but like and love are far removed:
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain,
For she was plain and lame and fat and short
Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell
That, though I loved her in a certain sort,
Yet did I love too wisely but not well.
Ah! Had she been more beauteous or less kind
She might have found me of another mind."
He was always most obstinately unromantic and unimaginative or he would have known that she had found the artist in him and could not rest until she had brought it to light and life. How much of what is commonly known as love was mixed with this desire in her it is possible only to guess: in all likelihood she wanted to discover in the odd shy little man what he would not—or could not—discover for himself, the sensitive, quick perception of the flame of life which had been almost numbed by Butler senior, who so lamentably confused the flame of life with the flame of Hell. In one letter of Miss Savage's there is an almost gasping eagerness that
