I have never liked the novel as a form. There is something about it that turns me off. A certain kind of earnest bourgeois sentimentality and moralism seems to be embedded in the DNA of the genre, and besides that, reading about the complexities and nuances of interpersonal relationships strikes me most of the time as a boring waste of mental energy. Yes, yes, I know… there are many novels that are literary masterpieces. Granted. But my own preference is to take literature in the highly distilled and concentrated form known as poetry.
There is one spectacular exception. And that is the novel The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler.
I first read The Way of All Flesh as a teenager simply because it was on a bookshelf at my parents’ home in Woodside. At that time I wasn’t able to follow the intricacies of philosophical comment and religious argument that dominate the work. Nor did I have the requisite knowledge of Anglican ecclesiastical usage to make sense of some of the sections. But the plot and the characterizations were compelling enough to hold my youthful attention.
Since then I have re-read the novel probably thirty times, and I teach it in toto in my Western civilization class every spring semester. I consider it an absolutely crucial text. I published a scholarly article on the novel some fifteen years ago in Victorians Institute Journal. Every time I re-read the book or teach it, I am powerfully struck by the sheer common sense, humanity, and intelligence that radiate from its pages. As I tell my undergraduates, “If you read and understand Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, you are inoculated for life against the moral blackmail known as liberalism.”
The story traces, in brief outline, the history of the Pontifex family from the early eighteenth century till approximately 1880, concentrating on the life and fortunes of Ernest Pontifex, who was born in 1835. Indeed, one of the strangest aspects of the novel is that this main character isn’t born until Chapter 17. The reason for this delay is that the author wishes to give a complete psychological portrait of Ernest’s family background as a means of allowing readers to understand what factors have gone into forming his personality.
The novel is a profound meditation on family and on religion, most particularly Low-Church Protestantism and its pernicious effects in both private life and political opinion. Ernest Pontifex must break the psychological chains that have been imposed upon him by the moralistic pettiness and small-mindedness of his Low-Church Anglican parents.
A great number of these psychic shackles take some form of the verb ought. Ernest is constantly told by his parents that he ought to believe such and such, and that he ought to act in a certain way, and that he ought to feel in an approved manner. Everything in his life is portrayed as a series of moral obligations that he is required to honor. His “responsibilities” and “duties” are constantly and mercilessly drummed in his ears, at the expense of any rational consideration of his own wants or self-interest. And all of this training is slathered over with that psalm-singing oleaginous piety that evangelical Protestants are so adept at purveying.
Ernest escapes from the confines of this mental prison only after horrendous personal trouble and humiliation, all directly traceable to the reformist, judgmental, quasi-millenarian, Low-Church Protestant “earnestness” that his parents have drilled into him (it’s no coincidence that his name is Ernest). He is saved by two loving godparents, who make him financially independent; and he finally frees himself from emotional subservience to his parents by dropping all his religious beliefs and deciding to live solely for his own personal interest and desires.
Ernest Pontifex becomes non-judgmental and non-fanatical. He has no interest in reforming the world or saving it. He becomes profoundly unconcerned with politics, except insofar as to vote Conservative to protect his financial position. He simply lives his life, happily pursuing his love of drama, music, and literature. He becomes an easygoing, commonsensical aristocrat, unmoved by any impulse except the sane one of wanting to live pleasantly and intelligently, free to enjoy all the good things that money, leisure, and a liberal education can provide. In short, Ernest Pontifex drops his Protestant earnestness and takes up in its place the Greek ideal of kalos kai agathos. Fervent religion, fanaticism, moral absolutism, contentiousness, and reformist agitation he dismisses as lower-class phenomena, unworthy of an affluent and cultured English gentleman.
Liberals and leftists have always hated The Way of All Flesh, because it is one of the very few works of English literature that makes clear the connection between Low-Church Protestant evangelicalism and revolutionary social agitation. The reformist mentality—that intrusive, meddlesome need to tell other people how to live and think—has its roots in religious Dissent, and its bastard child Liberalism. The urge to save the world, to be “progressive,” to “make a difference”—all of this is the misplaced missionary zeal of evangelicals, now directed to secular and non-religious ends. When Ernest breaks free from it, readers share the ecstatic exhilaration that comes to one who finally realizes that all the left-liberal blather about “social duty” and “moral responsibility” is just pseudo-religious chin-music and emotional blackmail.
The Way of All Flesh is a brilliant book, filled with unforgettable vignettes of Hogarthian vigor. There’s the addlepated and semi-hysterical Victorian female, represented by Ernest’s mother Christina; the cruel and unfeeling paterfamilias Theobald, both sadistic and parsimonious; the pompous Dr. Skinner, the epitome of a savage English public school headmaster; the odious and appropriately named Badcock, a bumptious and repulsive evangelical; the closet homosexual Pryer, the very image of High-Church hypocrisy and venality; and the comical lower-class Mrs. Jupp, a barely respectable East End landlady. There’s nothing in Dickens that comes close to this rogues’ gallery of caricatured types.
The good people in The Way of All Flesh are precisely those types who represent the Greek ideal of kalos kai agathos. There is Ernest’s godmother Alethea Pontifex, a charming and independent young woman in love with life and the arts; his godfather Edward Overton, a comic dramatist and good-natured boulevardier; his college friend Towneley, a handsome, sophisticated, and rich young man of an easygoing and amiable disposition. All of them are happily leading comfortable and full lives of affluence and leisure, and they haven’t the slightest interest in religious matters, or in surreptitiously religious matters like “social reform” or “improving the world.” When Ernest Pontifex consciously chooses to model himself on these people rather than on his moralistic parents and tiresome teachers, he is reborn.
Read the novel if you dare. But I warn you—if you really get into the text, it’s only a matter of time before you shed your liberalism like a dead skin.
