Samuel Butler: a sketch | Page 2

like miniature soap bubbles; they very soon broke, but they
had a career of a foot or two. I never saw anyone else able to get saliva

bubbles right away from him and, though I have endeavoured for some
fifty years and more to acquire the art, I never yet could start the bubble
off my tongue without its bursting. Now things like this really do
relieve the tedium of church, but no missal that I have ever seen will do
anything except increase it.
In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H.
Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury are
reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at Roughborough in
The Way of All Flesh, Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy.
During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went straight
to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of other composers
had only awakened and intensified. He became as one of the listening
brethren who stood around "when Jubal struck the chorded shell" in the
Song for Saint Cecilia's Day:
Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell Within the hollow
of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well.
This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and
Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of
double pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing he
ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to
bring Solomon that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies of
"With thee th' unsheltered moor I'd trace." He often tried to like the
music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give
them up--they bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with
the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace,
an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have
loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the Messiah,
failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the greatness of these
composers, but he was out of sympathy with them, and never could
forgive the last two for having led music astray from the Handel
tradition, and paved the road from Bach to Beethoven. Everything
connected with Handel interested him. He remembered old Mr. Brooke,
Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been present at the Handel
Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss Susannah Apthorp,

of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon Handel's knee. He
often regretted that these were his only links with "the greatest of all
composers."
Besides his love for Handel he had a strong liking for drawing, and,
during the winter of 1853-4, his family again took him to Italy, where,
being now eighteen, he looked on the works of the old masters with
intelligence.
In October, 1854, he went into residence at St. John's College,
Cambridge. He showed no aptitude for any particular branch of
academic study, nevertheless he impressed his friends as being likely to
make his mark. Just as he used reminiscences of his own schooldays at
Shrewsbury for Ernest's life at Roughborough, so he used
reminiscences of his own Cambridge days for those of Ernest. When
the Simeonites, in The Way of All Flesh, "distributed tracts, dropping
them at night in good men's letter boxes while they slept, their tracts
got burnt or met with even worse contumely." Ernest Pontifex went so
far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a copy of the parody
"dropped into each of the Simeonites' boxes." Ernest did this in the
novel because Butler had done it in real life. Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of
the University Library, has found, among the Cambridge papers of the
late J. Willis Clark's collection, three printed pieces belonging to the
year 1855 bearing on the subject. He speaks of them in an article
headed "Samuel Butler and the Simeonites," and signed A. T. B. in the
Cambridge Magazine, 1st March, 1913; the first is "a genuine
Simeonite tract; the other two are parodies. All three are anonymous.
At the top of the second parody is written 'By S. Butler, March 31.'"
The article gives extracts from the genuine tract and the whole of
Butler's parody.
Besides parodying Simeonite tracts, Butler wrote various other papers
during his undergraduate days, some of which, preserved by one of his
contemporaries, who remained a lifelong friend, the Rev. Canon Joseph
M'Cormick, now Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly, are reproduced in
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).
He also steered the Lady Margaret first boat, and Canon M'Cormick

told me of a mishap that occurred on the last