The Samuel Butler Collection at Saint John's College, Cambridge Part 2

SAMUEL BUTLER

27. Oil sketch: Low wall and gra.s.s in front, snowy mountains behind. It must be a view in the Leventina Valley.

28. Water-colour inscribed "S.B.": Leatherhead Church.

Butler was particularly pleased with the dormer windows, an unusual feature in a church roof. This must have been done somewhere about 1877, but there is no evidence. This is one of the pictures given by Alfred.

29. Oil Painting: Montreal, Canada, from the Mountain, about 1877.

30. Oil Painting: Calpiogna, Val Leventina. 1877.

Evening, looking down the valley.

31. Oil Painting: Three sketches on one panel, scenes in the Val Leventina.

They are near Faido, but I cannot further identify them.

32. Oil Painting: Calonico.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. v.

33. Oil Painting: Tengia.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv.

34. Oil Painting: Prato.

Other views of Prato appear in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iii.

35. Oil Painting: Lago Tom, Piora, Val Leventina. 1877.

Ch. vi. in _Alps and Sanctuaries_ is headed "Piora." "Piora in fact is a fine breezy upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it." Butler thought he knew what went on in Piora and, as he proceeds through the valley, he says: "Here I heard that there were people, and the people were not so much asleep as the simple peasantry of these upland valleys are expected to be by nine o'clock in the evening.

For now was the time when they had moved up from Ronco, Altanca, and other villages in some numbers to cut the hay, and were living for a fortnight or three weeks in the chalets upon the Lago di Cadagna. As I have said, there is a chapel, but I doubt whether it is attended during this season with the regularity with which the parish churches of Ronco, Altanca, etc., are attended during the rest of the year. The young people, I am sure, like these annual visits to the high places, and will be hardly weaned from them. Happily the hay will always be there, and will have to be cut by someone, and the old people will send the young ones."

The foregoing pa.s.sage throws light upon that other pa.s.sage in _Life and Habit_, ch. ii., about S. Paul, which concludes thus: "But the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and wine--the true grace he drove out into the wilderness--high up, it may be, into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her in her ill report."

After Ernest has received Alethea's money, and while he and Edward Overton are returning from Christina's funeral, in ch. lx.x.xiv. of _The Way of All Flesh_, he tells his G.o.dfather his plans for spending the next year or two. He has formed a general impression that the most vigorous and amiable of known nations--the modern Italians, the old Greeks and Romans, and the South Sea Islanders--have not been purists. He wants to find out what such people do; they are the practical authorities on the question--What is best for man?

"Let us," he says, "settle the fact first and fight about the moral tendencies afterwards."

"In fact," said I laughingly, "you mean to have high old times."

"Neither higher nor lower," was the answer, "than those people whom I can find to have been the best in all ages."

Accordingly Ernest left England and visited "almost all parts of the world, but only staying in those places where he found the inhabitants unusually good-looking and agreeable." "At last in the spring of 1867 he returned, his luggage stained with the variation of each hotel advertis.e.m.e.nt 'twixt here and j.a.pan. He looked very brown and strong, and so well-favoured that it almost seemed as if he must have caught some good looks from the people among whom he had been staying."

We are not told what particular countries Ernest went to; j.a.pan is mentioned, but less because Ernest went there than because the name of a distant place was wanted to justify and complete the echo of the description of Sir Walter Blunt in I. _Hen. IV._ i. 64:

Stained with the variation of each soil Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours.

Butler confided to me verbally that Ernest visited, among other places, Piora, and that he stayed there "when the mowing gra.s.s was about." {8}

36. Oil Painting: inscribed, "S. Butler. Sketch of his own head. April 1878."

This is one of the series of portraits of himself referred to in the note to no. 7. Another of these later portraits was given after his death to Christchurch, New Zealand; and another to the Schools, Shrewsbury. This one was given by Butler to me soon after it was painted, and it remained in my possession till 1911, when I gave it to St. John's College. It is reproduced as the frontispiece to vol. I. of the _Memoir_.

37. Oil Sketch: Calonico.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. v. On a panel with no. 38, Rossura, on the other side.

38. Oil Sketch: Rossura. The altar by the porch of the church. 1878.

On a panel with no. 37, Calonico, on the other side.

39. Oil sketch on a panel: Rossura, from inside the porch looking out.

"I know few things more touching in their way than the porch of Rossura church." (_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv.)

"The church is built on a slope, and the porch, whose entrance is on a lower level than that of the floor of the church, contains a flight of steps leading up to the church door. The porch is there to shelter the steps, on and around which the people congregate and gossip before and after service, especially in bad weather. They also sometimes overflow picturesquely, and kneel praying on the steps while service is going on inside." (_Memoir_, I. 284-5.)

In _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv., is an ill.u.s.tration showing the people kneeling on the steps while "there came a sound of music through the open door--the people lifting up their voices and singing, as near as I can remember, something which on the piano would come thus:" and then follow a few bars of chords.

In the list which appeared in _The Eagle_, vol. x.x.xix., no. 175, March 1918, writing of no. 38: "Rossura: the altar by the porch of the church, 1878," I said that it had been removed. On reconsideration, I am not sure that it has been removed; but I have not been to Rossura for thirty years or more and cannot now say for certain. I believe, however, that it is still there, and that when I said it had been removed I was thinking of the alteration of an opening which there was formerly in the west wall of the porch, under the portrait of S. Carlo Borromeo, which hangs between the two windows. This opening is mentioned in ch. iv. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_, and Butler says that it had to be closed because the wind blew through it and made the church too cold. It is shown with the portrait and the two windows in another ill.u.s.tration in ch. iv.

The first ill.u.s.tration in ch. iv. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_ shows how the chapel with the altar in it (no. 38) is placed in relation to the porch.

This is the chapel he was thinking of when he wrote:

"The church has been a good deal restored during the last few years, and an interesting old chapel--with an altar in it--at which Ma.s.s was said during a time of plague, while the people stood some way off in a meadow, has just been entirely renovated; but, as with some English churches, the more closely a piece of old work is copied, the more palpably does the modern spirit show through it, so here the opposite occurs, for the old-worldliness of the place has not been impaired by much renovation, though the intention has been to make everything as modern as possible."

In 1878, the first time I was with Butler in Italy and in the Canton Ticino, he talked a great deal about the porch of Rossura; there is a pa.s.sage in ch. xvi. of the _Memoir_ about it. For him it was the work of a man who did it because he sincerely wanted to do it, and who learnt how to do by doing; it was not the work of one who first attended lectures by a professor in an academy, learnt the usual tricks in an art school, and then, not wanting to do, gloried in the display of his technical skill.

That is to say, it was done in the right spirit. The result of doing things in this way will sometimes appear incompetent; this never embarra.s.sed Butler, provided that he could detect the sincerity; for where sincerity is incompetence may be forgiven; but the incompetence must not be so great as to obscure the artist's meaning. At Rossura the sincerity is obvious, and the building is so perfect an adaptation of the means to the end that there is no suggestion of incompetence.

Rossura porch was thus an ill.u.s.tration of what he says in _Alps and Sanctuaries_ in the chapter "Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art." It was more than merely a piece of architecture. When Butler contemplated it he saw also the chapel with its altar and the people standing in the meadow during the plague; he saw the same people, after the pestilence had been stayed, kneeling on the steps in the dimness, the sky bright through the arch beyond them and the distant mountains blue and snowy, while the music floated out through the open church door; he saw through the windows the gleaming slopes about Cornone and Dalpe, and, hanging on the wall between them, the picture of austere old S. Carlo with his hands joined in prayer. All these things could be written about in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, but they could not be brought into the ill.u.s.trations apart from the text; and anyone who looks at Butler's sketches of Rossura may be disappointed. If he does not bear these things in mind he will not understand what Butler meant by saying that he knew of few things more touching in their way than the porch of Rossura church. He will be like a man listening to programme-music and knowing nothing of the programme.

40. Pencil sketch inscribed: "Handel when a boy. Pencil sketch from an old picture sold at Puttick and Simpson's and sketched by me while on view. Dec. 15th, 1879. S.B."

On the same mount with the sketch-portrait of Robert Doncaster, no. 56.

41. Water-colour: Otford, Kent; from inside the church looking out through the porch. 1879.

42. Drawing in pencil and ink: Edgeware. 1880.

43. Oil Painting: Rimella, Val Mastallone; up the Valley from Varallo- Sesia.

44. Oil Painting: Eynsford, Kent.