his father,
criticised his mother; his sisters scraped the edges of his nerves; a
man to whom he was extremely generous betrayed him. The like of these
things must happen to mortal men. Butler knew that as well as any one.
But his books were not read; the great men whom he attacked ignored
him. He thought himself to be something, they treated him as nothing,
and the public followed them. He knew all about it, and Mr. Jones
knows all about it. He had unseated the secure with _Erewhon_,
outraged the orthodox with _Fairhaven_, flouted the biologists,
himself being no biologist, plunged into Homeric criticism without
archaeology, swum against the current in Shakespearianism, enjoyed
himself immensely, playing _l'enfant terrible_, and treading on
every corn he could find--and then he was angry because the sufferers
pretended that they had no corns. How could he expect it both ways?
If he was serious, why did he write as if he was not? And if he had
tender feelings himself--as he obviously had--why should he expect
all the people he attacked with his pinpricks to have none? It was not
reasonable.

The answer to these questions is to be found in some little weaknesses
of his which Mr. Jones's biography, all unconsciously, reveals.
Butler, it is clear, was morbidly vain. Many writers are so, but few
let their vanity take them so far. Learn from Mr. Jones. In 1879 he
and Butler met Edward Lear in an inn at Varese. He told them a little
tale about a tipsy man from Manchester--rather a good little tale. "I
do not remember that Edward Lear told us anything else particularly
amusing, but then neither did we tell him anything particularly
amusing. Butler was seldom at his best with a celebrated man. He
was not successful himself, and had a sub-aggressive feeling that
a celebrated man probably did not deserve his celebrity; if he did
deserve it, let him prove it." There is no getting away from that
symptom, which is as unreasonable as it is perverse. Celebrated men
are not usually so anxious to "prove" their celebrity as all that
comes to. It is bad enough to be "celebrated." It was hard lines on
old Lear to sulk with him because he would not show off. If he had
wanted to do that he would not have gone to Varese. But that is
mortified vanity. The same thing happened when he met Mr. Birrell at
dinner in 1900. Then it was the celebrity who took pains to save
his host and hostess from a frosty dinner party. The same thing is
recalled