"There is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a severe mortification. I have never failed to read the literary supplement of the _Times_." So says Mr. Somerset Maugham. The first part of the statement is difficult to believe after reading "The Moon and Sixpence." The latter part may be true, but it can't be truer than the statement that any one, possessed of ordinary decency and sensibility, and belief that love, sentiment, kindliness, generosity, altruism, forgiveness, and faith are the seven lamps that illumine our path on our way to immortality, will subject his flesh to severe mortification, while being interested and sometimes even amused by reading Mr. Maugham's new book. CHAPTER IX THE LITERARY MAUSOLEUM OF SAMUEL BUTLER "Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their love of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?" _--Lytton Strachey._ Samuel Butler's "Note-books" and "The Authoress of the Odyssey" added to the delights of the spring of 1915, which I spent in Sicily. The former, which is the quintessence of his wisdom and his impudence, gave revealing peeps into the mental and emotional make-up of the man who in "Erewhon" forecast the advent of the supremacy of machines and anticipated Mrs. Eddy in considering disease a sin and a crime, and the latter gave a quickened interest to Trapani, Segesta, and many other places, some of which have since become shrines in my memory. From these "Note-Books" and from "The Way with All Flesh," which gave a remarkable vista of his own unconscious mind as well as those of his ancestors, I made a vivid picture of the author. It has been blurred, and in some respects quite erased by the two massive biographic volumes recently given to the world by Mr. Henry Festing Jones,[A] and which depicts him in all the nakedness of his virtues and his infirmities, revealing an unloving and unlovable character. Some day it will be explained to us why we cannot be left in possession of the cherished delusions that add to our happiness, increase our good-will toward our fellow men, and in no wise impair the reputations of those to whom they are directed. [A] "Samuel Butler, author of 'Erewhon,'" a memoir by Henry Festing Jones, Macmillan & Co., London, 1919.