LM Montgomery on “The Way of All Flesh” by Samuel Butler

“A clever book but not by any means the great novel some have pronounced it. It is full of truths and half-truths and yet it is on the whole a very false book. It impresses me as having been written by a man who was incapable of feeling any lofty or inspiring passion or even any decent pleasing ordinary emotion. He therefore refused to believe that any other person could feel such … Real pleasure I found not in reading the book, but a certain titillating intellectual delight I did find.”