The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion of the event.  All that piety can do for them is beside the mark.  Their wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his libation is spilt idly upon the ground.  Although it would be too much and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones has been similarly turned to derision—­after all, Butler was not a great man—­we feel that something analogous has happened.  This laborious building is a great deal too large for him to dwell in.  He had made himself a cosy habitation in the Note-Books, with the fire in the right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism.  In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic.

   [Footnote 11:  Samuel Butler, author of ’Erewhon’ (1835-1902):  a
   Memoir.  By Henry Festing Jones. 2 vols. (Macmillan.)]

And if it be said that a biography should make no difference to our estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works, we reply that it shifts the emphasis.  An amusingly wrong-headed book about Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is something a good deal more serious.  And even The Way of all Flesh, which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement, becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious and infinitely careful record of experienced fact.  Further still, even the edge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the ‘Notes’ is somewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised.  The origin of the amusing remark on Blake, who ’was no good because he learnt Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him—­well, Tennyson goes without saying,’ is to be found in ’No, I don’t like Lamb.  You see, Canon Ainger writes about him, and Canon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts.’  Repeated, it becomes merely a clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to say we couldn’t bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him, and Butler was no good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr Jones goes without saying.

Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some danger in Mr Jones’s tabernacle, he does continue to live.  What his head loses by the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder whether Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange.  Butler loses almost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist when the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald and Christina in The Way of all Flesh are merely reproduced from those which his father