were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases
escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard
all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and
wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle
the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett
of the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange
example of mutual mystification.

Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not
greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with
the whole) but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, the
music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by
insisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he
managed to except them from his natural aversion. So, in the last
resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the
majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truth
was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few.
There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is
merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this _Memoir_
we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the
impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not like him the
less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with
which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.
Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something
childish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as a
shrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete,
he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was
complete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to
us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.