"The subject of this memoir," so Butler once suggested that his biography ought to begin, "was the son of rich but dishonest parents." Dishonest they may have been: respectable they certainly were. Dr. Butler, the first distinguished member of the family, was for twenty-seven years headmaster of Shrewsbury, a man with all the attributes of the great schoolmasters of the early nineteenth century, an imposing figure, who, towards the end of his life, became Bishop of Lichfield. His son was not so distinguished. His sole claim to be remembered, if his canonry be disregarded, is the fact that somehow or other he became the father of Samuel Butler. There is much detail, in Mr. Festing Jones's enormous book, on Butler's early life and his relation to his parents; but there is nothing quite so significant as an anecdote which occurs in the second volume:
At Saas he made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. MacCarthy, who were staying in the hotel with their son, an Eton boy. One day the father and son had been for an excursion and the father returned alone. The anxious mother, hearing that her boy preferred speculating in short cuts to accompanying his father, borrowed a red umbrella to make herself conspicuous, and went out "to look for Desmond." Presently she came upon Butler loaded up with his camera and toiling along on his way back after a fatiguing day. He told her he had seen a little white figure among the trees on the mountain-side and had no doubt it was her son who, he assured her, would be all right, and he himself was loitering, intending to be overtaken so that they might arrive at the hotel together.
"You see," he explained, "I know he will be late for dinner, and it may make things a little easier for him if he does not come in alone."
Years afterwards Mrs. MacCarthy told me that she had been reading _The Way of All Flesh_, and had remembered this incident and had for the first time understood why Butler thought that her son would require the presence of an elderly gentleman to protect him from his parents if he came in late for dinner.
This throws a curious and unexpected sidelight on Butler's childhood from the effects of which he never recovered. His parents learnt the art of bringing up children from a book which adjured them to "Break your child's will early or he will break yours later on." They did not break it, but unquestionably they deformed it. This may have been done on principle. To Butler, however, it sometimes seemed to spring from other motives. "I have felt," he once said of his father, "that he has always looked upon me as something which he could badger with impunity." He said that, like Ernest Pontifex, with regard to his father he could remember no feeling during his childhood except fear and shrinking.