ARTHUR JOHN BUTLER.* A REAL scholar and an accomplished man
of letters, Arthur John Butler was yet truly described as " one of those men who affect the world more through their influence upon their friends than through their writings." He looked upon himself as something of a failure. Early successes in the scholastic world made him perhaps hope for more recognition than the world gives to men like him. Tho reader of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's pages, however, must regard him as having led en exceedingly happy life, full of affection, of interest, and of enjoyment. Ho passed his boyhood at \Vantage, where his father was a zealous High Church clergyman. Both his parents were religious, conscientious, and intellectual to a degree perhaps unknown outside the reign of Victoria. Butler's home was something of a forcing-house both for the soul and the mind; but, while returning with fervour the devotion of his parents, he retained completely his mental independence without ever resenting for an instant the efforts constantly made to keep hint bound, and up to the end of his father's and mother's lives no friction scorns ever to have existed between them and their son, who nevertheless thought his own thoughts and wont his own way from tho moment that he could think at all. He took his school and University successes end failures far more lightly than did his parents. He seems to have had a streak of indolence in his nature, which the pressure of his education never entirely overcame, " Even when he gained the Fellowship at Trinity, ho took it in a matter-of-fact way," writes his sister, " while his father's joy at hearing of his son's triumph knew no bounds." " The servant who placed the telegraphic message in my hands must have sot me down as crass'," he tells his son.
Sir Arthur fluffier-Couch thus sets his hero before us as a young man :— " The first years of his Fellowship wore perhaps the blithest of A. J. B.'s life. Ho was young, strong and (like David) goodly to look at. Intellectually, though in some respects his mental powers were late in developing, he had come to his own. He was sensitively impressionable to the arts, especially to poetry and music (for which his love lasted, although his interest in new composers declined somewhat in later life) ; and—thanks to his mother, who had an almost fierce horror of anything that pretended to be the best and was not—he knew how to choose. His mind was eagerly, affectionately inquisitive about all created things, from men and women to birds, flowers, stones ; and with men he had an air of accost, gay, imperturbably free and open, and charming and self- assured (because unconscious, as it was guiltless, of arriem pence), which engaged them to be friends before they knew it."
Already his study of Dante, which was to result in the translation of the whole Cominsdia, forming, as it did, the best-beloved work of his life, had begun.
After five years he gave up his Fellowship upon his marriage, and then the drudgery of work he did not care for seems to have
stilled the effervescence of his nature. Truth to say, he was never adaptable to the Civil Sorvice," writes his biographer, and his appointment as Examiner in the Education Department, Whitehall, was always a grind to him. The work was dull—much of it—regulated by carefully recorded precedents :-
" Butler," writes a colleague, " challenged them right and loft, and picked great holes in them at every conceivable opportunity. But here his interest was apt to end. 1 ital points of our achnuus- tredve detail, such as the sufficiency of wash-hand basins or of pupil teachers, offered no attractions to him whatever. Ho preferred Dante and other wholly unofficial seers."
For seventeen years he bore the drudgery, and at last left it for more congenial employment. Meanwhile, like Charles Lamb, ho found his real work outside his profession.
" Of Butler's work upon Dante," we read, " so far at least as regards the serious study of the poet in England, it is hardly too much to say it was epoch -making." Tho Paradise and the Purgatorio were still little known to the ordinarily well-road English. man when Butler translated them. He " invited the student on easy terms to enlarge his horizon, and venture on the exploration of a region outside the conventional limits of the Inferno." He himself thought little of his work, and declared it to be " a crib pure and simple." While he laboured at it he worked solidly also for the Athenaeum, and found time to make and keep a host of friends. He was an original member of the famous " Sunday Tramps Society," which was founded by Leslie Stephen. " When that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians, the Sunday Tramps, wore on the • Noma& of ilrthar John Butler. By Sir A. T. Qualm-Couch. London: Man, Miler, and Co. 17a. 6d. net.] march with Leslie Stephen to lead thorn, there was conversation which would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a bene- faction to the country," said George Meredith. It is, wo think, generally admitted that there is low good talk than them used to be. Talk has rather fallen into disrepute. It was too much thought of, we suppose, in Victorian days; but what can take its place, we wonder, as a means of keeping friendship in repair
Not very many letters load interest to this very pleasant bio- graphy. A letter to be really interesting must have something in it of self-revelation. The following letter from A. J. Butler to hie
son has that element. It is by far the most arresting in the book :- " As you hold no honours in your hand, and not any exceptionally good cards, you can only do this (will) by good play. I bad no honours to speak of. I hold good cards : I did not play them as I ought to have done ; and I ant whore I am. Now I have to toil at hack work, at a time of life when most people are beginning to take in their sails, or at any rate to choose the work that pleases them best. What is worse, through having shrunk from drudgery and tried short cuts when I was younger, I find it very hard now to apply myself to my work, so that I am always more or less driven, and take a whole day to do what most men would do in a morning. What you want., I am sure, is a definite purpose, or rather tho deter- mination to let nothing (short of what is dishonourable, which I know you would rightly stick at.) stand between you and your purpose. You let yourself be stopped cometimes by ' Ono can't.' Now there is nothing which ' One can't,' except disgrace oneself. To tako a perfectly imaginary case. Suppose there was some bit of knowledge essential to your work, which you could only get by writing to the Emperor of China, and could get it so—you should write to the Emperor of China, and find a Chinese scholar to trane- late for you. But you would say, ' One can't.' You should practise the operation known as picking people's brains. In nine cases out of ton they like it. As for your coach and your lecturers, it is what they are there for."
Butler goes on to impress his correspondent with the necessity of " hard grind with a purpose."
Wo all feel an inclination to contradict tho lecturer, be the didatticiam never so able. The reader cannot but bethink him, as Lo reads these words, how much poorer life would lie without its desultory scholars, without., for instance, such lovable figures as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has portrayed for us hero. The picture is very skilful. The biographer's hero was almost too conventionally perfect a character to interest the idle reader. His portrait could only bo drawn in eulogy—a dull medium as a rule. Sir Arthur taunter-- Couch has, however, succeeded in making hint lovable. Hose is an impression of his personality, written by an intimate friend :- " He was a good man to watch in his home ; a good matt to take you about his garden ; the best man in the world to walk with in his favourite weather, a fine December day—to my thinking the most perfect kind of day that two get in England—the colours at once brighter and softer than you get at any other time of year, the air perfectly clear, and the sun quite as strong as you want for walking. On such a day you felt the man and the weather to be one, his mask of austerity softened and suffused by a sunny interest in all creatures and a sunny sense of the beauty and nobility of life."
No one will read the Memoir without a certain fooling of gratitude towards the man who made him acquainted with its hero,
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