The First Volume of Butler's Note-Books

422 2. THE FIRST VOLUME OF BUTLER'S NOTE-BOOKS The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, Volume I_ (1874-1883) , ed. Hans-Peter Breuer. Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1984. $24.50 Reading recently through 80-some Victorian dossiers—my department was looking to add someone in the period—I was struck by the number of vernal Ph.D. theses devoted first to Dickens, with George Eliot and Ruskin a distant second and third. Work on Tennyson or Browning, Hardy or Arnold, does exist, but only barely, while writers like Thackeray, Meredith , Trollope, Gissing, Disraeli, Carlyle, Mill, Morris, Newman, and Samuel Butler seem to have attained dissertational Nirvana: they have been released from the wheel of existence altogether. This is understandable. If a graduate student is first educated in Dickens and Eliot, criteria to measure the achievements of other Victorian writers will then be at hand. But the fact remains that a lot of redundant deconstructions, appreciations, mythographs, and dream analyses pile up on microfiche every summer in Ann Arbor, and that, out of the handful of these which become books, few genuinely reorient academics' bearings toward Bleak House or Daniel Deronda. That is why it has been refreshing to turn from lists of Ph.D. theses to the book here under review, the first volume of Hans-Peter Breuer's full-dress edition of Butler's NoteBooks . The project is a contribution to our knowledge of an important secondary figure. No one has ever bothered to bring all of Butler's notes together, and in the order he wrote them, though Henry Festing Jones's 1912 edition, along with Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill's 1951 selection, which incorporated the best of Jones and the further extracts published in the intervening 39 years, showed us Butler at work in a very fair light, and made for some excellent reading . More of the same is in this case quite welcome, and, bracketing the 232 pages of text, there are 54 pages of introduction and 79 of endnotes to help us identify the avenues, alleys, and culverts explored by Butler's cheerfully wool-gathering and sometimes bitterly quarrelsome mind. Mr. Breuer must have labored long to erect this apparatus, and Butlerians will henceforth be indebted to him. Why, though, should anyone who has been content to stop after Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh want to look into the Note-Books? To begin with, they were precious to Butler himself. After the brief success of Erewhon in 1872, caused in part by the guess that the anonymous work might be from the hand of Bulwer-Lytton, Butler's candle was kept under a bushel till 1903, when The Way of All Flesh was brought out posthumously. Though the 13 books in between were neglected. 423 he could still be his own audience in his note-books. They were the apologia pro menta sua, and in his last eleven years he carefully edited them, confident that posterity would vindicate the lonely sensibility that had, momentously, defended Lamarckian creative evolution against Darwinian circumstantial selection, or had, diversionarily, disclosed the authoress of The Odyssey. Vindication on the Lamarckian front he got immediately from Shaw, and later, not altogether coincidentally, from thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Arthur Koestler. But it is hardly smart to hook Butler's wagon onto the rising or falling star of the theory of creative evolution. It is enough to insist on the quality of his spirit—his inquisitiveness, his bright eighteenth-century wit, his common man's concreteness in diction, and his irreverence toward the too often heavily moralizing Victorian literati whose dogmatizing answered the need for some authority felt by an age which had seen theological and political certainties dissolve all round. He was, in Breuer's words, "the champion of the democracy of the mind," instinctively suspicious "of those who sought to impose on an unsuspecting public by an appeal either to hidden and recondite matter, or to the verdict of fashion and authority." This championship is as manifest in the fragmentary Note-Books as in the wellintegrated Erewhon or Way of All Flesh. A full edition of the Note-Books shows an embarrassing number...