The Way of All Flesh. Samuel Butler.

The Way of All Flesh
Samuel Butler
New York: Washington Square Press
1903 (1959)

Why read it? Novel. Through three generations, sons in the family Pontifex lived in fear of their fathers and then treated their sons in the same way. Ernest breaks the chain by allowing his children to be brought up by someone else.

Butler does well in reproducing the thoughts of a young child viewing the adult world. The novel is about Ernest's progress from thinking about, but being afraid to say, what is wrong in the world, to having the freedom and ability to say/write what he is thinking. Ernest progresses from fear and dependence while growing up to independence as an adult. However, wealth and the ability to be independent go hand in hand in British society.

An attack on the stereotypical family and the abuse of children by their parents. This abuse is both physical and emotional. Do all sons hate/dislike their fathers? Communication between fathers and sons is the problem. Neither understands the other. Neither knows the other.

What I most enjoyed about this book was Butler's satiric comments on almost every subject.

Some sample ideas from the novel:
"The result depends upon the thing done and the motive goes for nothing."

" 'Grown-up people,' he [Ernest] said to himself... 'never did naughty things, but he was always doing them.' " "All grown-up people were clever, except servants--and even these were cleverer than ever he should be. Oh, why, why, why, could not people be born into the world as grown-up persons." "I have said more than once that he believed in his own depravity; never was there a little mortal more ready to accept without cavil whatever he was told by those who were in authority over him."

"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible. A more unreliable book was never put upon paper. Take my advice and don't read it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely." "Every change is a shock; every shock is a ...death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and present as resembling one another." Of Dr. Skinner: "...he was a passionate, half-turkey cock, half-gander of a man whose sallow, bilious face and hobble-gobble voice could scare the timid but who would take to his heels readily enough if he were met firmly, that his Meditations of St. Jude, such as they were, were cribbed without acknowledgment and...beneath contempt."

John, the servant, on being dismissed by Theobald: "Now Master...you may do as you please about me, I've been a good servant to you, and I don't mean to say as you've been a bad master to me, but I do say that if you bear hardly on Master Ernest here I have those in the village as'll hear on't and let me know, and if I do hear on't I'll come back and break every bone in your skin...." "Theorists may say what they like about a man's children being a continuation of his own identity, but it will generally be found that those who talk in this way have no children of their own."

"One great reason why clergymen's households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home...." "I have often thought that the Church of Rome does wisely in not allowing her priests to marry. Certainly it is a matter of common observation in England that the sons of clergymen are frequently unsatisfactory."

Quote: "Besides, Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are; the nice people whom you delight in either never knew any at all or forgot what they had learned as soon as they could; they never turned to the classics after they were no longer forced to read them; therefore, they are nonsense, all very well in their own time and country, but out of place here."

Quote: "Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you will have occasion for this or that knowledge or foresee that you will have occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better...."

The novel is full of comments like these, some of them even more blunt.