y he never tired of that; and
perhaps the thinness of the jokes--little misreadings of hymns, things
about the Mammon of Righteousness, and so on--in a kind of way added
to the fun of them. It is their subject matter which offends. They
commonly turn upon the health of the respective parents and the
chances of an attack carrying them off. _Queste cose_, as the hero
said of the suicide, _non si fanno_. But I suppose that if you could
put your mother's death-bed into a novel, you could do almost anything
in that kind.

I am myself singularly moved, with Coventry Patmore, to love the
lovely who are not beloved--but not the unlovely. Those little jokes,
and many others, are by no means lovely, and if Butler repeated them
as often as Mr. Jones does, it is not surprising that he was avoided
by many who missed or dreaded the point. His lecture on the _Humour
of Homer_ made Mr. Garnett unhappy and Miss Jane Harrison cross, Mr.
Jones says. I don't doubt it. It is very cheap humour indeed, and no
more Homer's than mine is. It is entirely Butler's humour about
Homer, a very different thing. Its impudence did not mitigate
the aggravation, but made it more acute. If he had picked out a
fairy-tale, rather than two glorious poems--_Little Red Riding Hood_,
_The Three Bears_, _Rumpelstiltskin_, for example--he could have been
as facetious as he pleased. But that would not suit him. There would
have been no darts to fling. Butler was a _banderillero_. All right;
but then don't complain that the Miss Harrisons, Darwins, and others
shake off your darts and go about their business, which, oddly enough,
is not to gore and trample the _banderillero_; don't be huffed because
you are held for a _gamin_. Butler wanted it both ways.

The conclusion is irresistible that Butler's controversial books were
not primarily written to discover truth, but because he was vain
and wished at once to be sensational and annoying. He resented the
greatness of the great, or the celebrity of the celebrated; his vanity
was wounded. He sought, then, for "most aggravating and impudent
matter" to wound them in turn who had vicariously wounded him. He
"learned" them to be toads, or celebrities, or tried to. But his love
of little jokes betrayed him. He, a sort of minnow, thought to trouble
the pool where the great fish were oaring at ease by flirting the
surface with his tail. It seemed to him that he was throwing up a fine
volume of water; but the great fish held