‘Rens-moi mon coeur, rens-moi mon coeur pillarde....’

In another form this melody more closely recalls Thomas Campion:—­

  ‘Seule je l’ai veue, aussi je meurs pour elle....’

But to compare Ronsard’s sonnet with ‘Follow your saint’ is to see how infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music was the Elizabethan than the great French lyrist of the Renaissance.  From first to last Ronsard was an amateur.

[SEPTEMBER, 1919.

Samuel Butler

The appearance of a new impression of The Way of all Flesh[10] in Mr Fifield’s edition of Samuel Butler’s works gives us an occasion to consider more calmly the merits and the failings of that entertaining story.  Like all unique works of authors who stand, even to the most obvious apprehension, aside from the general path, it has been overwhelmed with superlatives.  The case is familiar enough and the explanation is simple and brutal.  It is hardly worth while to give it.  The truth is that although there is no inherent reason why the isolated novel of an author who devotes himself to other forms should not be ’one of the great novels of the world,’ the probabilities tell heavily against it.  On the other hand, an isolated novel makes a good stick to beat the age.  It is fairly certain to have something sufficiently unique about it to be useful for the purpose.  Even its blemishes have a knack of being sui generis.  To elevate it is, therefore, bound to imply the diminution of its contemporaries.

   [Footnote 10:  The Way of all Flesh.  By Samuel Butler, 11th
   impression of 2nd edition. (Fifield.)]

Yet, apart from the general argument, there are particular reasons why the praise of The Way of all Flesh should be circumspect.  Samuel Butler knew extraordinarily well what he was about.  His novel was written intermittently between 1872 and 1884 when he abandoned it.  In the twenty remaining years of his life he did nothing to it, and we have Mr Streatfeild’s word for it that ’he professed himself dissatisfied with it as a whole, and always intended to rewrite, or at any rate, to revise it.’  We could have deduced as much from his refusal to publish the book.  The certainty of commercial failure never deterred Butler from publication; he was in the happy situation of being able to publish at his own expense a book of whose merit he was himself satisfied.  His only reason for abandoning The Way of all Flesh was his own dissatisfaction with it.  His instruction that it should be published in its present form after his death proves nothing against his own estimate.  Butler knew, at least as well as we, that the good things in his book were legion.  He did not wish the world or his own reputation to lose the benefit of them.