the real quality in Butler might be released by the disaster that had overtaken him, but it never was. For her the relationship was a quick, intense drama, so vivid indeed that the pressure of it sometimes made her wit almost rise into a shrill scream to Butler: "Can't you see what you are? Can't you see what you are?" Butler could not but feel that, and with male obtuseness thought she was exclaiming in every nerve: "Can't you see what you are to me?" Nothing of the kind: she knew herself. She had only beauty of soul, that beauty which is active in its love, and that she gave in full measure, as Butler well knew after she had died. He enjoyed the joke of it, of course, that the only possible wife life had ever presented him with was impossible. Yet she prevailed and married him by letter and hen-pecked him into being artist enough to write The Way of All Flesh.
From their own words, Mr. Festing Jones has created his wonderful story, curious and delightful in its perfection, charming in its surrounding detail. After Miss Savage's death Butler relapsed into the eighteenth century, giving up the nineteenth as hopeless. His father died and left him plenty of money so that he could become the rich; eccentric, travelling English milord, almost, like so many Englishmen of strong character, a person out of fiction, more fit to live with Parson Adams and Squire Western than with the rather grubby, savourless people who were beginning to throng London. He attached Mr. Jones to himself, and Alfred, and escaped into Italy and Sicily where he could still find people who, as he said, lived "under grace and not under the law"—and he was happy. Probably he was never anything else even during the dreadful years when he lived through both a mental and a financial crisis. He understood happiness: that is a rare faculty. The God he imagined was a happy God and Him he served all his days. He enjoyed his isolation and his notoriety, but most of all he enjoyed the appreciation that came to him at last, taking a childish pleasure in everything that was said and written about him. Possibly he is having a wonderful time pestering Handel and Homer and Shakespeare with posers about their work, or telling them what a wonderful person Miss Eliza Mary Ann Savage was. He would loathe the comparison, and I am sure Mr. Jones will detest it; but, being romantic, I like to think of them as consorting with Abelard and Heloise, who will perfectly understand all that went on inside these two dowdy, odd, ill-assorted but immortal little people.—Gilbert Cannan
