Samuel Butler: A Sketch | Page 4

but,
by tipping the searchers, generally got through without inconvenience.
The bread was sour and the Italian butter rank and cheesy--often
uneatable. Beggars ran after the carriage all day long, and when they
got nothing jeered at the travellers and called them heretics. They spent

half the winter in Rome, and the children were taken up to the top of St.
Peter's as a treat to celebrate their father's birthday. In the Sistine
Chapel they saw the cardinals kiss the toe of Pope Gregory XVI., and
in the Corso, in broad daylight, they saw a monk come rolling down a
staircase like a sack of potatoes, bundled into the street by a man and
his wife. The second half of the winter was spent in Naples. This early
introduction to the land which he always thought of and often referred
to as his second country made an ineffaceable impression upon him.
In January, 1846, he went to school at Allesley, near Coventry, under
the Rev. E. Gibson. He seldom referred to his life there, though
sometimes he would say something that showed he had not forgotten
all about it. For instance, in 1900, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, now the
Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, showed him a
medieval missal, laboriously illuminated. He found that it fatigued him
to look at it, and said that such books ought never to be made.
Cockerell replied that such books relieved the tedium of divine service,
on which Butler made a note ending thus:
Give me rather a robin or a peripatetic cat like the one whose loss the
parishioners of St. Clement Danes are still deploring. When I was at
school at Allesley the boy who knelt opposite me at morning prayers,
with his face not more than a yard away from mine, used to blow pretty
little bubbles with his saliva which he would send sailing off the tip of
his tongue like miniature soap bubbles; they very soon broke, but they
had a career of a foot or two. I never saw anyone else able to get saliva
bubbles right away from him and, though I have endeavoured for some
fifty years and more to acquire the art, I never yet could start the bubble
off my tongue without its bursting. Now things like this really do
relieve the tedium of church, but no missal that I have ever seen will do
anything except increase it.
In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H.
Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury are
reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at Roughborough in
'The Way of All Flesh', Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy.
During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went straight
to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of other composers
had only awakened and intensified. He became as one of the listening
brethren who stood around "when Jubal struck the chorded shell" in the

'Song for Saint Cecilia's Day':
Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell Within the hollow
of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well.
This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and
Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of
double pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing he
ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to
bring 'Solomon' that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies
of "With thee th' unsheltered moor I'd trace." He often tried to like the
music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give
them up--they bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with
the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace,
an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have
loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the 'Messiah',
failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the greatness of these
composers, but he was out of sympathy with them, and never could
forgive the last two for having led music astray from the Handel
tradition, and paved the road from Bach to Beethoven. Everything
connected with Handel interested him. He remembered old Mr. Brooke,
Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been present at the Handel
Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss Susannah Apthorp,
of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon Handel's knee. He
often regretted that these were his only links with "the greatest of all
composers.
Besides his love for Handel he had a strong liking for drawing, and,
during the winter of 1853-4, his family again took him to Italy, where,