众生之路

A small boy wets the bed one night. His father strips him, pins him at the bedside, and beats him. His mother stands watching, crying harder than the boy does — not out of pity, but because she feels he has let God down so badly. When it's over, the father presses the Bible back into his hands and tells him this is love.

This is not the Middle Ages. It isn't a parable either. It is a respectable clergyman's household in mid-nineteenth-century England, and a boy named Ernest Pontifex is being beaten, methodically, by the words piety and love, into the next man who does the beating.

The Way of All Flesh is a book that waited thirty years. Samuel Butler started it in the early 1870s, wrote it in fits and starts, and had it more or less finished by the mid-1880s. But he refused, flatly, to publish it in his lifetime — because the hypocritical, respectable clergyman's family in the book, the one that raises its son on tears and slaps, was modeled on his own. He was afraid of scandal, of lawsuits, of the relatives still living. He sat on it for nearly twenty years. The novel didn't appear until 1903, after his death.

Its place in English literary history is a strange one. On the surface it's a Victorian novel of family and growing up; underneath, it's a cold blade run through the Victorian myth of the family. It shaped the generation of writers after him, Shaw among them, who rebelled against Victorian pieties, and it stands as an early landmark of the ironic first-person narrator in English fiction. Reading it, you're listening to a dry-eyed old friend tell you the scandal next door, and by the end the laugh has gone cold.

The story spans four generations of the Pontifex family, but there is only one real protagonist: Ernest. Around him is a family web that keeps closing tighter. His father, Theobald, is a son who was forced by his own father into the clergy, and he takes the exact pressure he suffered and applies it, unaltered, to raising Ernest. His mother, Christina, comes from a household crowded with unmarried daughters all angling for husbands; married into the family, she pours her religious sentiment and self-regard entirely onto her children. Every tear she sheds is a second blow, landing where her husband's hand already has.

Two other people are impossible to leave out. One is his aunt Alethea, the only person in the whole family with any sense, a woman who never married. She saw early on that Ernest was worth investing in, and before she died she quietly set up a trust for him, timed to be handed over only when he turned twenty-eight, deliberately built to slip past his parents' control. The other is his godfather Overton, the book's first-person narrator. He stands to one side throughout, watching the family pass cruelty down as love from generation to generation, a polite, ironic smile on his face.

Ernest's world is the English rectory, the public school, and Cambridge. At Roughborough Grammar School he drills Latin and Greek by rote; at Cambridge he meets his close friend Towneley, a handsome, robust, entirely self-assured young gentleman who seems to belong to another species. Then, as naturally as his father once did, he walks into the Church.

To see how these irons were forged, the story has to run back a generation. Ernest's grandfather, George, was a carpenter's son who made his fortune in publishing and became a respectable family patriarch. He forced his only son, Theobald, to give up the law and go into the church instead, on the grounds that it was for his own good. Theobald complied, and then handed the same for-your-own-good straight down to Ernest, unchanged.

Theobald and Christina's clergy household looks, from the outside, like the most respectable in the parish. Sunday sermons, Thursday visits to the sick, a mother at the piano singing hymns. Behind closed doors, though, it's slaps and Bible verses in rotation. It isn't that they don't love Ernest. They genuinely believe that weeping over a child while beating him into obedience is the deepest love there is. Ernest grows up inside that grammar of love, slowly turning into a compliant, self-doubting young man who has no idea what a real feeling is.

As a boy Ernest is sent to Roughborough Grammar School, where the headmaster, Dr. Skinner, is a vain, lecturing old pedant who treats rote classical languages as the whole of education. Here Ernest learns a deeper muscle memory: that a mistake means punishment. Then comes Cambridge, where he meets Towneley, healthy, open, none of Ernest's own shadows, the kind of natural ease Ernest will spend his life admiring and never manage to learn. But once he's back on the family track, he becomes a curate, just as his father did before him.

In London, Ernest takes his first real fall. Pryer, a fellow curate who is pious on the surface and a swindler underneath, talks him into it with a smooth line of persuasion, and Ernest sinks the small inheritance he has into a partnership that doesn't exist. The money is gone, and his faith starts to come loose with it. But the money isn't what really does the damage.

What really drives him into the abyss is a moral experiment so absurd it tips into black comedy. In a fit of naive zeal to save a fallen soul, Ernest mistakes a respectable young woman on the street for a prostitute and approaches her. She screams, bystanders seize him, and he is convicted of indecent assault and sentenced to six months' hard labor. In prison he loses his religious faith entirely, not because anyone argued him out of it, but because humiliation and labor wear it away. On the day he's released, his father Theobald publicly disowns him in the newspaper.

Ernest comes out of prison with nothing. His godfather Overton steps in, not with a lecture, but with a tailor's cutting table, so Ernest can earn a living with his hands. It's in this gray stretch of his life that he marries Ellen, once a housemaid at the Pontifex house, out of pity. He believes he's doing something good. Only after the wedding does he find out that Ellen drinks heavily, and that she had married another man before him without ever divorcing him. The marriage is invalid from the start.

The real turning point doesn't come from any moral reckoning. The year Ernest turns twenty-eight, Overton, honoring an old arrangement, hands over the trust his aunt Alethea had secretly set up before her death. She had built it specifically to bypass Theobald and Christina; while she was alive she had seen straight through her brother and sister-in-law's hypocrisy, and she had seen that this nephew was the one member of the family who might actually get out. She hid the money away until the day he came of age, timed to reach him just when he could no longer hold on by himself.

Once he has money of his own, Ernest does two things no respectable Victorian would do. First, he places the son and daughter he had with Ellen with a bargeman's family to raise. He would rather they grow up rough and unpolished but free of pious hypocrisy than have them walk the Pontifex road again. Second, he becomes a bachelor man of letters in London, cold-eyed about both marriage and religion, never setting foot in a church again, never again taken hostage in the name of love.

What makes this book genuinely sharp is its refusal to let Ernest earn his redemption through moral growth. Butler tears apart the whole Victorian favorite: the prodigal returning, reconciling with his parents, love and virtue healing every wound. Ernest's freedom doesn't come from becoming a better man, or seeing the light, or learning some profound lesson. It comes because, at twenty-eight, he happens to receive money that someone else hid away for him. This is Butler's biggest affront to his age. He takes the Victorians' favorite line, heaven helps those who help themselves, and replaces it with something colder: sometimes you need another clear-eyed person to plan your escape for you, years in advance.

Harsher still is what he does to the word love. Strip away the piety and family sentiment wrapped around every beating, every threat, every tear, every act of disownment in this book, and what is left is naked domestic abuse. Butler was writing this before Freud, long before anyone had a concept of family of origin, and yet he already had the psychology of oppression dressed up as love laid out in plain sight.

One more thing worth not skipping over is the narrator, Overton. He isn't Ernest. He's the godfather, an old family friend, a bystander. In a restrained, ironic, occasionally black-humored voice, he lays out the absurdity of four generations of Pontifexes, never crying on their behalf, never arguing their case. That narrative stance is itself Butler's weapon against Victorian sentimentality. He won't let you feel sorry for anyone. He makes you go cold on your own.

A guide can give you the map, but the text has something no map can give you: the feeling of being frozen, degree by degree, by Butler's sentences. The passage with the slap, the passage of stone-breaking in prison, the passage where the mother stands by crying harder than her own child. Reading them, you will suddenly catch yourself laughing, and then feel a chill run down your back once the laugh is over. That rhythm, that alternation of warm and cold, is something only the restrained syntax of the original Victorian English can produce. The first time I read the passage where Theobald announces the disownment in the newspaper on the day Ernest is released, I went back and reread the page before it. I would guess you will do the same thing when you get there.