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Sam Butler’s desire for truth and his stripping away from life and belief all the veils of illusion was the characteristic of a man truly poetic. He and his pupil, G. B. Shaw, by their passion for sincerity, help the imaginative life. When Michael Angelo maintained that only the Italians understood art, Vittoria Colonna pointed out that the German pictures touched the feelings. “Yes,” he replied, “because of the weakness of our sensibilities.” Poetry and the imaginative life can only flourish where truth is of supreme moment; an education which contents itself with half-knowledge and half-thought will inevitably produce a crowd of sentimentalists and false poets and rhetoricians. The great artist and the great poet have rigorous minds. Michael Angelo said of those German pictures that they were only fit for “women, ecclesiastics and people of quality.” After all a poet must believe, and without rigorous thinking there is no sense of belief.

To know things thoroughly, or not at all,—this was the habit of Butler’s mind, derived from his classical education, in which the whole stress is on the minutiæ of scholarship. For instance, he told me that he never studied music till he was twenty-one years of age, after which he gave to it every moment he could spare. Yet he only cared for Händel, content that all the rest should be to him an unknown world. What he could not study thoroughly he would not study at all. In his eyes superficial knowledge was superficial ignorance and the mental habits engendered by it disastrous. Among painters he valued chiefly those who, like John Bellini, are thorough to minuteness. Though he professed to despise style he was a precisian in words. At a restaurant which he and I frequented for our midday meal he met a man who said he never “used” hasty pudding. This application of the verb “use” was to him a source of endless amusement. I have heard him tell the story many times.