Читать книгу The Authoress of the Odyssey - Samuel Butler - Страница 4

It may be said that we owe this book, The Authoress of the Odyssey, to Charles Lamb. Butler, in his early days, had read all the usual English classics that young people read--Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, Scott, Lamb, and so on; as he grew older, however, he became more absorbed in his own work and had no time for general reading. When people allege want of time as an excuse for not doing something, they are usually trying to conceal their laziness. But laziness was not the reason why Butler refused to read books except for the purpose of whatever he was writing. It was that he was a martyr to self-indulgence, and the sin that did most easily beset him was over-work. He was St. Anthony, and the world of books was his desert, full of charming appearances assumed by demons who were bent on luring him to perdition. His refusal was not the cry of the slothful: "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep"; it was the "Get thee behind me, Satan!" of one who is seeking salvation. For he knew his weakness and that temptation comes in such unexpected shapes that the only way of escape is by perpetual watching and praying lest we fall. So he watched and prayed, and kept his powder dry by minding his own business. The Devil, how- ever, was on the watch also and had an inspiration; he baited his subtle hook with a combination fly composed partly of the gentle Elia and partly of the Rev. Canon Ainger. He knew that Butler, if he approached either of these authors, would do so without suspicion, because he had looked over his victim's shoulder one morning in the Reading Room of the British Museum while he was making this note:

"Charles Lamb was like Mr. Darwin, 'a master of happy simplicity.' Sometimes, of course, he says very good things, at any rate some very good things have been ascribed to him; but more commonly he is forced, faint, full of false sentiment and prolix. I believe that he and his sister hated one another, as only very near relations can hate. He made capital out of his supposed admirable treatment of her. Aunt Sarah likes him, so do most old maids who were told what they ought to like about 55 yeara ago, but I never find men whom I think well of admire him. As for Ainger's Life, well, my sisters like it."

We need not agree, and I personally disagree, with Butler's view of the relations between Charles and Mary Lamb, for it seems to me that it is not supported by the Letters of Lamb. I do not suppose, however, that Butler intended his words to be taken very seriously; nor are they intended to be taken as direct abuse of Lamb. They are addressed rather to Lamb's admirers, and are conceived in the spirit of the Athenian, whose reason for helping to ostracise Aristides was that he was so bored by hearing him perpetually called "the Just." They are Butler's way of saying: "Don't you go and suppose that I should ever have anything to do with self-sacrifice and devotion." And yet his own life shows that he was himself capable of both; but, like many Englishmen, he was shy of displaying emotion or of admitting that he experienced it. When we remember that he had not read the Letters we can understand his being put off Lamb first by the Essays, and then by the admirers --Aunt Sarah, the old maids, and Canon Ainger. We must also remember that Canon Ainger used to go and stay down at Shrewsbury with a clergyman who, among other dissipations which he organised for his guest, took him to tea with Butler's sisters, where he played on their old piano which had been chosen by Mendelssohn. Nevertheless it might have been better for Butler if he had not made the note, for retribution followed.

In June, 1886, while we were completing the words and music of our cantata Narcissus, which was published in 1888, Butler wrote to Miss Butler:

"The successor of Narcissus is to be called Ulysses; and is this time a serious work dealing with the wanderings of the real Ulysses, and treating the subject much as Hercules or Semele was treated by Handel. We think we could get some sailor choruses, and some Circe and pig choruses, and the sirens, and then Penelope and her loom all afford scope. I made up my mind about it when I read Charles Lamb's translation of parts of the 'Odyssey' in Ainger's book, but please don't say anything about it." {Memoir, II, 38.)

The serpent was lurking within the leaves of Ainger's book, and Butler was beguiled. The idea of using the story of the "Odyssey" for the words of an oratorio led him on to re-reading the poem in the original; but he could not make much progress just then because after his father's death, in December, 1886, he came into possession of all his grandfather's papers, and succumbed to the temptation of reading them and of writing Dr. Butler's life. When he did settle down to the poem it fascinated him, and there followed the further irresistible temptation of translating it. His grandfather's life still kept him so fully occupied that he did not reach Book ix till 1891; and then, as he writes in Chapter i of The Authoress of the Odyssey: "It was not till I got to Circe that it flashed upon me that I was reading the work not of an old man but of a young woman." And on a letter of 9th August, 1891, which I sent to him at Chiavenna, he made this note:

"It was during the few days that I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel Grotta Crimee) that I hit upon the female authorship of the 'Odyssey.' I did not find out its having been written at Trapani till 1892."

Between 1892, when he made this discovery, and 1902, when he died, Butler published the Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited, and a new and revised edition of Erewhon. These three books were the working off of material which was already in his mind, but everything else published during the last decade of his life grew directly out of the "Odyssey." There was a pamphlet entitled The Humour of Homer (1892), which was first delivered as a lecture at the Working Men's College; there were two other pamphlets which appeared in a Sicilian magazine (1893 and 1894), one of these being translated into English and published in 1893; there were articles about his Odyssean theories in The Italian Gazette, then under the editorship of Miss Helen Zimmern, published in Florence. In 1897 came The Authoress of the Odyssey; in 1898, The Iliad Rendered into English Prose; in 1899, Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered; and in 1900, The Odyssey Rendered into English Prose. Besides these publications there were letters and articles about the "Odyssey" in the Athenœum, the Eagle and Il Lambruschini, a journal published at Trapani in Sicily.

The translation of the "Iliad" became a necessity when once that of the "Odyssey" had been undertaken, and the book about the Sonnets was also a consequence of the "Odyssey," for his interest in the problem of the Sonnets, the work of the greatest poet of modern times, was aroused by his interest in the problem of the "Odyssey," one of the two great poems of antiquity. Besides all this he was engaged upon the words and music of Ulysses, in making journeys to Sicily to pick up more facts about the topography of Scheria, and in making a journey to Greece and the Troad to investigate the geography of the "Iliad." Thus it may be said that the last ten years of his life were overshadowed by the "Odyssey," which dominated his thoughts--and not only his thoughts, his letters were full of it and it was difficult to get him to talk of anything else. I have little doubt that this perpetual preoccupation--I may even say obsession--tended to shorten his life.

None of the eminent classical scholars paid any attention to Butler's views on the "Odyssey," or if any did they did not say so in public, and he resented their neglect. He was not looking for praise; as Sir William Phipson Beale, one of his oldest friends, said to me very acutely: "People misunderstood Butler; he did not want praise, he wanted sympathy." It is true as he records in The Authoress (p. 269), that "one of our most accomplished living scholars"--I do not know who he was, though I no doubt heard at the time--chided him and accused him of being ruthless. "I confess," said the scholar, "I do not give much heed to the details on which you lay so much stress; I read the poem not to theorise about it but to revel in its amazing beauty." This can hardly be called sympathy. Butler comments upon it thus:

"It would shock me to think that I have done anything to impair the sense of that beauty which I trust I share in even measure with himself; but surely if the 'Odyssey' has charmed us as a man's work, its charm and its wonder are infinitely increased when we see it as a woman's."

Still there were some competent judges who approved. The late Lord Grimthorpe interested himself in the problem, accepted Butler's views, and gave him valuable suggestions about the description in the poem of the hanging of those maidservants in Ithaca who had disgraced themselves. Mr. Justice Wills also expressed agreement, but he did it in a letter to me after Butler's death. These names are mentioned in the Memoir, and there is another name which ought to have appeared there, but I overlooked the note at the right moment.

Butler delivered at the Fabian Society a lecture entitled, "Was the 'Odyssey' written by a Woman?" At the close of the lecture Mr. Bernard Shaw got up and said that when he had first heard of the title he supposed it was some fad or fancy of Butler's, but that on turning to the "Odyssey" to see what could have induced him to take it up he had not read a hundred lines before he found himself saying: "Why, of course it was!" And he spoke so strongly that people who had only laughed all though the lecture began to think there might be something in it after all.

These, however, were not the eminent Homeric scholars to whom Butler looked for sympathy. He was disappointed by the silence of the orthodox, and it was here that Charles Lamb got in his revenge, for the situation never would have arisen if it had not been for that fatal reading of "Charles Lamb's translation of parts of the 'Odyssey' in Ainger's book."

When Keats first looked into Chapman's Homer the result was the famous sonnet. When Lamb did the same thing the result was "a juvenile book, The Adventures of Ulysses." He wrote to Manning, 26th February, 1808:

"It is done out of the 'Odyssey,' not from the Greek (I would not mislead you), nor yet from Pope's 'Odyssey,' but from an older translation of one Chapman. The Shakespeare Tales suggested the doing of it."

I suppose that by "Ainger's book" Butler means Charles Lamb in the "English Men of Letters Series," edited by John Morley and published by Macmillan in 1878; at least I do not find any other book by Ainger about Lamb which contains any mention of The Adventures of Ulysses between that date and the date of Butler's letter to his sister in 1886. If I remember right Butler saw "Ainger's book" at Shrewsbury when he was staying with his sisters, and I like to think that it was a copy given to them by the author. But I doubt whether he can have done more than look into it; if he had read it with attention he would scarcely have spoken of Lamb's work as translation. I imagine that he listlessly took the book up off the drawing-room table, and, happening to open it at page 68, saw that Lamb had written The Adventures of Ulysses; this would be enough to suggest the story of the "Odyssey" to him, and he must have missed or forgotten Ainger's statement that Lamb said to Bernard Barton: "Chapman is divine and my abridgement has not quite emptied him of his divinity." What concerns us now, however, is to note the result on Butler, which was that he embarked upon all this apparently fruitless labour. It is interesting to note also that as Lamb, by writing the Tales from Shakespeare, had been led to the "Odyssey," so Butler, by choosing Ulysses as the hero of our oratorio, was led, in a contrary direction, to the Sonnets.

We must now come nearer to modern times. The Authoress of the Odyssey appeared in 1897, and Butler's Translation in 1900--that is about twenty years ago; during which period, sympathy or no sympathy, the books must have had a good many readers, perhaps among the general public rather than among classical scholars, for now, in 1921, the stock is exhausted and new editions of both are wanted. They have been reset entirely, misprints and obvious mistakes have been corrected, the index has been revised, and there are a few minor typographical changes; but nothing has been done which could be called editing, bringing up to date, adding supplementary matter, dissenting or recording dissent from any of the author's views. The size of the original page has been reduced so as to make the books uniform with Butler's other works; and, fortunately, it has generally been possible, by using a smaller type, to get the same number of words into each page, so that the pagination is scarcely altered and the references remain good. Except for the alterations about to be noted (in respect of The Authoress), the books are faithful reprints of the original editions.

(a) About three lines have been interpolated on page 207 which upsets the pagination until page 209. The interpolation, which is taken from a note by Butler in his copy of the work, is to the effect that the authoress, in Book vii, line 137, almost calls her countrymen scoundrels by saying that they made their final drink-offerings not to Jove but to Mercury, the god of thieves. On this passage there is a note in the Translation saying that the poet here intends hidden malice; but, except for this interpolation, attention does not appear to be called to the malice anywhere else in The Authoress.

(b) The note on page 214 is so printed that the pagination is upset for one page.

(c) The illustration of the coin which shows the design of the brooch of Ulysses is now given on a separate page, whereas formerly it was in the text, therefore the pagination is thrown out from page 227 until the end of the chapter, page 231. Doubt has recently been cast upon the accuracy of the statement on pp. 226-7, that this coin certainly belongs to the Eryx and Segesta group.

(d) Some of the headlines have been shortened because of the reduction in the size of the page, and here advantage has been taken of various corrections of and additions to the headlines and shoulder-notes made by Butler in his own copies of the two books.

(e) For the most part each of the illustrations now occupies a page, whereas in the original editions they generally appeared two on one page. It has been necessary to reduce the plan of the House of Ulysses.

On page 31 this note occurs: "Scheria means Jutland--a piece of land jutting out into the sea." Butler afterwards found that Jutland means the land of the Jutes, and has nothing to do with jutting. A note to this effect is in The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, p. 350.

On page 153 Butler says: "No great poet would compare his hero to a paunch full of blood and fat cooking before the fire (xx, 24-28)." This passage is not given in the abridged "Story of the Odyssey" at the beginning of the book, but in Butler's Translation it occurs in these words:

"Thus he chided with his heart, and checked it into endurance, but he tossed about as one who turns a paunch full of blood and fat in front of a hot fire, doing it first on one side then on the other, that he may get it cooked as soon as possible; even so did he turn himself about from side to side, thinking all the time how, single-handed as he was, he should contrive to kill so large a body of men as the wicked suitors."

It looks as though in the interval between the publication of The Authoress (1897) and of the Translation (1900) Butler had changed his mind; for in the first case the comparison is between Ulysses and a paunch full, etc., and in the second it is between Ulysses and a man who turns a paunch full, etc. The second comparison is perhaps one which a great poet might make.

In seeing the works through the press I have had the invaluable assistance of Mr. A. T. Bartholomew of the University Library, Cambridge, and of Mr. Donald S. Robertson, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. To both these friends I give my most cordial thanks for the care and skill exercised by them. Mr. Robertson has found time for the labour of checking and correcting all the quotations from and references to the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and I believe that it could not have been better performed. It was, I know, a pleasure for him; and it would have been a pleasure also for Butler if he could have known that his work was being shepherded by the son of his old friend, Mr. H. R. Robertson, who more than a half a century ago was a fellow-student with him at Cary's School of Art in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury.

HENRY FESTING JONES.

120 Maida Vale, W.9.

4th December, 1921.