Samuel Butler: The Sinister Prophet Of Renaissance

Samuel Butler: The Sinister

Prophet of Renaissance ¹

BY K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR, M.A.

Satire has always shone among the rest,
And is the boldest way, if not the best,
To tell men freely of their foulest faults,
To laugh at their vain deeds and vainer thoughts.

I could not better introduce my readers to the author of the immortal "Erewhon" than by quoting the above lines from a wise poet on the function of that form of literature to which "Erewhon" belongs. For Samuel Butler, (to be distinguished from his illustrious namesake, the author of "Hudibras") was foremost and first, as writer and as man, the satirist prophet of modern democracy. He tried more than anyone else in his own generation, and as much as anyone afterwards, to rouse his countrymen from the colossal complacency of their social and religlous torpor, and though he was not heeded for many years, he had in the end the satisfaction of seeing his life-long, unremittent labours, not wasted, but seriously appreciated. English literature could boast of many satirists through the centuries: but so far there have been only two who were impelled to write and say what they did by no spark of malice, no inborn hatred of humanity and no questionable interests of self-aggrandisement. One was Swift, the creator of Gulliver: the other, the subject of the present sketch.

Samuel Butler's life career synchronised more or less with what has roughly been labeled as the Victorian Era. Born in 1835, a few years before the coronation of that august Queen, he lived throughout the heyday of her long and glorious reign, and died just as England was coming to realise that she had indeed lost her aged and good Queen, in 1902. Butler was thus an atom of the Victorian Age and felt profoundly the rhythm of its swing and tasted in abundance the sweets of its prosperity. But, almost alone among his compatriots, he had the penetrating hawk-like vision to gauge and expose the callous respectability and smug virtue of his age, whether in the sphere of religion, education or politics. He was in this respect what his great continental contemporary, Henrik Ibsen, was to the Scandinavian countries. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, he too had, like Ibsen, "the same grim hoaxing humor, the same grip of spiritual realities behind material facts, the same toughness of character holding him unshaken against the world.

It is perhaps true to say that in Butler's works the literary artist, a very considerable one though he undoubtedly is, is all but obscured by the social satirist and philosopher. But at the same time it is impossible to conceive a greater indication of lunacy on the part of some of the academical historians of English Literature than the wanton exclusion of the very name

of Samuel Butler from their hallowed studies of Victorian Letters. Undergraduates promenading in the quadrangles and halls of Universities have been and still are kept in religious ignorance of the work of the man who did more to liberate the soul of youth from the short-sighted shackles of convention, tradition and age superiority, than did Washington to free his country or Luther to curb the abused power of Rome. When Butler's devastating satire, "The Way of All Flesh", was published in 1903, it might justly have created a sensation in literary, social and ecclesiastical circles. On the contrary, it just disappointed one's most sanguine expectations. "It drives one almost to despair of English Literature," wrote Shaw, shortly afterwards, "when one sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler's posthumous "way of All Flesh" making so little impression. Really, the English do not deserve to have great men." Moreover, the deservedly popular "English Men of Letters Series" has not yet given us a volume on Butler, though many lesser men have been apportioned distinguished places in its array of authors. Not that there is no "Life" of Butler: we have it, an indubitable work of genius, in Mr. Festing Jones’s "Life."

Within the limits of this brief study, any attempt to give details of Butler's life would be grossly ineffectual. It would corrupt and crumple what should otherwise be a holy study. Suffice therefore to say that Samuel Butler very early in life produced a series of audacious books soaked in what was called irreligious and unorthodox speculation, in which he apparently made common cause with Charles Darwin and his theory of Evolution. His translation of Homer for the benefit of the working classes may also be mentioned, to give an idea of the incessant state of his intellectual activity. He wrote essays on a variety of topics, putting forward tantalising theories and fighting with his pen, unabashed and undismayed, the multitudinous army of his detractors and critics. He set to prove in one of his pamphlets that the author of "Odyssey" was a Sicilian woman, and somewhere in one of his novels he remarked that the real author of "The Iliad" was a clergyman. These are odd vagaries and he had his share of them like most men of genius. But over and above the flippancy of such innumerable tracts, he erected a few marble edifices finished with the highest art, the most careful and scrupulous sincerity, and certainly with unimpeachable honesty. It is on account of these products of his towering genius that he will ultimately take his place among the world's immortals.

The sincerity and seriousness of purpose of the author of "Erewhon" are writ large on the painting by Goggin, hung in the National Portrait Gallery. It is of course not a lovable face, –in the ordinary meaning of the phrase. There lurk beneath it passionate and all-consuming fires–fires that repel with insurmountable energy–fires that glow in their radiance and alarm us with their intensity–fires, so to say, fiery. Nevertheless, a truer and a keener understanding of his personality is possible: it is welcome too, for it will endear Samuel Butler to ourselves as the ambiguous lover of humanity, who loved in contradictions, –with pity, with unconcern, with malignity, –who loved in spite of his mockeries, in spite of the cruel twists of his satire that pointed towards his brethren with an unerring aim at every unexpected turn. In short, Samuel Butler was no "demoniac imp": he was not in any sense a Mephistopheles: it was and is and will ever be possible to love him, to find in him a safe guide, a tolerant critic, a tried and trusted friend.

As an essayist Samuel Butler holds a unique place in later Victorian Letters. The few volumes of his collected essays, in particular his "Note Books" and that fascinating book, "Life and Habit", give ample proof of the sureness of his touch and are testimony in themselves as to how subtle a master of the craft of the essay Samuel Butler really was. "Ramblings in Cheapside", "The Humour of Homer", "Thought and Language", and indeed many more equally fine specimens of his work are a perennial delight to the ear and no mean feast to the reader's fancy. The severity of his facial expression, so predominant in Goggin's portrait, is unsubstantial. He talks gaily, simply, directly. One can almost feel the soft tread of his steps and be alive to the peering glances of that severe countenance while reading the delightful, the unforgettable "Ramblings in Cheapside." The whole essay is a fantastical illustration of the ludicrous doctrine of ‘metempsychosis or transmigration of souls.’ He says with the candour of conviction: "And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated together, far from it: but that as we can often recognise a transmigrated mind in an alien body, so we not less often see a body that is clearly only a transmigration, linked on to some one else's new and alien soul." A very nice thesis to sustain this! Yet, he has no difficulty in deciding who is who: one can but follow him and gaze bewildered at the gallery of his imaginary portraits. Hendel's body, he assures us, is now Madame Adelina Patey; the late Mr. Darwin lives, so he would have us believe, in Pope Julius II; Dante lives, but he cautiously adds, as an insignificant waiter at Brissago. And so the catalogue goes on. Surely an essay which stimulates our imagination to such extent as does this one, should be classed with the very finest specimens of literature. Butler's fame will endure, even if that should rest on his essays alone.

But the essays, brilliant as they are and finished with a placid perfection unattainable except by the most gifted, form only a minor part of this author's contribution to English literature. For his roaming, dazzling, almost capricious genius soared higher and higher, culminating in but three books, all novels if you will, or, as they have been more commonly called, satires. The first of these, "Erewhon", with which he electrified and exasperated the literary world, was published in 1872 and issued again by Mr. Jonathan Cape in 1902, with certain important additions. "Erewhon Revisited", a sequel to the above, was issued in 1901. (Cape) The last and greatest of all, "The Way of All Flesh," was, as already remarked, published posthumously, edited by his friend Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, in 1903. All these books are now available in ‘The Travellers’ Library,’ the joint enterprise of Messrs. Cape and Heinemann. A more minute examination of the intrinsic merits that made such a triple distinction, not only possible of achievement but even inevitable, may not be here irrelevant.

In the Prefaces to "Erewhon" we are told that the celebrated firm of publishers, Chapman & Hall Ltd., on expert advice from their reader, rejected the MS. and that it was published after a short interregnum by Messrs. Trubnur. But the profound fears of the talented reader proved utterly groundless, for, the book was acclaimed, immediately on publication, as worthy to rank with the world's greatest satires, and unquestionably fit to occupy a place incredibly close to "Gulliver's Travels." To appreciate in full the multifarious implications of its satire, the book itself must be read and re-read many times over. It touches upon so many aspects of mid-Victorian life and deals its veiled attacks from so many angles of vision that the completest analysis will only make it the nearest approach to confusion.

The snobbishness and self-complacency of the missionaries, the self-defeating and degrading nature of modern education, the self-deceptive and illusory standards of the Church of England, the giant strides of Industrialism and. the consequent imprisonment of ever greater numbers of men in sooty cities, the modern man's increasing dependence and parasitism on machinery–these and many other matters are viewed through the mercilessly dissecting medium of the author's satirical and ironical temperament and exhibited with ruthless candour in the scintillating pages of the book. The State of Erewhon (anagram for Nowhere) where everything is apparently topsy-turvy is, in fact, England itself. The following passage, purporting to explain away certain anomalies in Erewhon, exposes rather the national temperament of the English, and Butler lays his finger on the vulnerable spot indeed when he says: "The most glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual inconvenience; neither, provided they did not actually see the money dropping out of their pockets, nor suffer immediate physical pain, would they listen to any arguments as to the waste of money and happiness which their folly caused them. But this had an effect of which I have little reason to complain, for I was allowed almost to call them life-long self- deceivers, and they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter." (E. p. 9) As if anything mattered! In the three hundred and odd pages that follow, the anomalies above referred to are pitilessly exposed to universal scorn through the innocently gay medium of his pungent, deadly satire. It is possible to admire "Erewhon" as a mere novel of rattling adventure: but the irony of the satire, ascetic in effect though condemnatory in form,² is no less important and in fact is of far greater intrinsic import than the chiselled prose and gripping narrative. This is only another way of saying that "Erewhon" could be enjoyed, probably with considerable profit, –certainly with present and reminiscent pleasure–by men of any age and in any position in society. This is the true test of immortality and "Erewhon" fulfils it as satisfactorily as any other masterpiece has done.

In the apposite language of the Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrel, the true task of the satirist is "to lash the age, to ridicule vain pretension, to expose hypocrisy, to deride humbug in education, politics and religion." That Samuel Butler strived for all these things and more, one alone of the three books will demonstrate. Having a keener eye and a more penetrating intellect than most men of his time, he discovered the hidden sores of materialist, complacent England, and being also the rich inheritor of a rare indomitable courage, he had the surprising temerity to think things which few thought and say them in a way that no other man dreamt of saying. The present writer is inclined to interpret the following words of Ernest Pontifex, an autobiographical image by the way, as rather the unconscious translation, word for word, of the deep-set conviction of the author himself. Says Ernest: "There are a lot of things that want saying which no one dares to say, a lot of shams that want attacking and yet no one attacks them. It seems to me that I can say things which not another man in England except myself will venture to say and yet which are crying to be said." (W. p. 424) None could have measured his latent capabilities with surer self-confidence. And Butler proved as good as his word and resolution, and discharged his glorious mission uninterruptedly and unaided for near three decades, and only with the turn of the century, when death laid on him his icy hand, he brought his labours to a sudden termination. With regrets, surely: for his work was still incomplete, his last novel still unpublished, and the sum-total of his early promise still unfulfilled. Yet he had perhaps that inward satisfaction that somehow sheds its consoling influence in the end, the satisfaction that his work was entrusted to the charge of the capable hands of no less ardent a lover of humanity, no less carping a critic of its follies and foibles, –in the hands of his friend and disciple, Bernard Shaw.

The strange form that Butler's heroic ambition ultimately took has been stated in his own words: we have also in rather a dogmatic manner asserted that he laboured hard and reached almost the pinnacle of his ambition. But more than mere assertion, some amplification and elucidation are necessary to complete the picture. Which idiosyncracies, for instance, in Victorian society, did Butler so ferociously object to? Was he or was he not justified in his downright condemnation? Was he impelled to thunder his denunciations by a force that destroyed, or rather bya will unconquerable, that even as it wished to destroy, foreshadowed also the impulse to create with the larger heart and the kindlier hand? These are questions for which convincing answers should be sought in his books alone. However, as far as the limits of this article would permit, one or two features of Butler's indictment may just be examined on the fringe.

Firstly about his attacks on society. These are scattered about the book in astonishing abundance, and the wisest criticism one might offer is that they are always pert and never commonplace. Here is for example his opinion of Ydgrun and the Ydgrunites : "They were gentlemen in the full sense of the word: . . . . They seldom spoke of Ydgrun or even alluded to her but would never run counter to her dictates without ample reason for doing so; in such cases they would override her with due self-reliance and the goddess seldom punished them; for they are brave and Ydgrun is not." (E. p. 177) Ydgrun is anagram for Mrs. Grundy and the Ydgrunites, the ‘high Ydgrunites’ especially, form the so-called bourgeois population in modern society. Apparently Butler laughs at the Erewhonians: in sooth, alas! he is only pointing the finger of scorn at his own countrymen. In "Erewhon Revisited" one can come across with the highly interesting character, Mrs. Humdrum, the very personation of Ydgrun. They would sacrifice anything to take the line of least resistance: the high Ydgrunites would. So much for the crazy slavery of the modern world that shilly-shallies with the stupid permutations of public opinion.

The vehicle of his satire being a novel, the outlets of free expression are necessarily much circumscribed. The satire is made out rather by implication and suggestion than by frontal gun and shot. Yet not seldom does the novelist throw off his mask, if only for moments, to indulge in some bits of carping criticism or display the glaring absurdities of a useless custom. He would now be, to all intents and purposes, taken up with expounding the Erewhonian principles of Law and Order, their remarkable views concerning death or their perverse customs accompanying birth; he would be devoting one full chapter to a minute description of some Erewhonian trials drenched in sheer idiocy, or he would be giving you a most scholarly account of the origin, the nature and the working of that most curious of the Erewhonian institutions, their Musical Bank system. But the inveterate, invincible satirist will be there, as it were, in suspension, in embryo, ready to precipitate without a moment's notice a prodigious mass of bitter invective or eject with cruel un-expectedness a piercing, devastating reflection. Then would the effect be, in the poignancy of its suddenness as much as in the genius of its appositeness, ten times more profound and as bitterly vibrant. These for example: "What is the offence of the lamb that we should rear it and tend it and lull it into security for the express purpose of killing it? Its offence is the misfortune of being something which society wants to eat and which cannot defend itself." (E. p. 126)

"For property is robbery, but then we are all robbers or would be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and revenge. Property, marriage, the law . . . ." (E. p. 126-127)

The germs of the socialist are discernible in ample measure in the author who wrote these sentences.

Let us now pause for sometime over Butler's views on education. He devotes considerable space to this all-important topic in "Erewhon" and returns to it with renewed zest in his "The Way of All Flesh." The two chapters suggestively entitled "The Colleges of Unreason" in the former book, and the chapters in which Theobald's and Ernest's education is traced with microscopic particularity in the latter, offer a comprehensive symposium of the author's views on education. His attacks are mostly covert and wound only on application. But once it wounds, the wounds are fatal. In the best tradition of the conventional grandfathers, he adds detail upon detail in giving a graphic description of the College of Unreason, its Professors of Evasion and Inconsistency, its extravagant schemes for the study of hypothetics and the rudimentary necessity for their gospel of Unreason. There is no remark in the chapters herein cited but has its pointed bearing on the subject in hand and its own miserable tale of woe to tell. Each statement is a miniature mirror wherein intelligent beholders see in rapid reflection the monstrosities of their own nature, in so far as they are members of modern society. In the Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason, the mainstay of the Professors and students was the study of an altogether superfluous hypothetical language, and the all-embracing scheme of studies included among other things extensive exercises in translation, year in year out, of exquisite specimens of Erewhonian literature into the barren and soul-blasting hypothetical tongue. One might laugh at the Etewhonians after a perfunctory first reading. But after all, are we any better ourselves, in spirit if not in letter? Further, with a note of disparaging mockery, we are told how a certain distinguished Professor of Worldly Wisdom remarked: "It is not our business to help the students to think for themselves . . . . Our duty is to ensure that they shall think as we do." (E. p. 222) A malicious statement no doubt to be put into the mouth of a University Professor! And yet, honesty alone should compel everyone of us to concede that there is no country in modern society but is shamelessly unwilling to put the mark of unequivocal approbation on freedom of thought, exercise of individual judgment or embarkation in original enterprise. It is quite an incontrovertible fact, so Butler argues, that "our seats of learning aim rather at fostering mediocrity than anything higher", and with his caustic pen dipped in gall he adds: "They think they are advancing healthy mental assimilation and digestion whereas in reality they are little better than cancer in the stomach." (E. p. 226) Exceptions there might be and there are but the fact remains that the very greatest men of all nations and at all times have almost exclusively been recruited from those who never enjoyed a course of University training. Instances of Shakespeares, Shaws and Macdonalds are ample.

But the evils of modern education do not stop here. That originality should be stifled, enterprise blocked and effervescence stilled, are bad enough. But there are worse evils that cry for remedy with dumb mouths and mute entreaty. Our institutions, says Butler, not only fail to discharge certain duties of infinite import but do doggedly persevere to make the pupils committed to their charge totally unfit for life. Luckily for the world, they do not always succeed. The Principal at the Deformatory at Fairmead is only one of the many, now labouring in the different parts of the world, highly exaggerated it may be, yet true in the very extravagance of its caricature. The Counsels of Imperfection, the Gambling book-making and speculation classes, the unshakable conviction of Principal Turvey that "It is obviously better to aim at imperfection than perfection" (E.R. po.157) and his ready willingness to translate his ideas into action–these, prima facie, seem absurd and ridiculous. But the satire implied is unanswerable. In "The Way of All Flesh" again, the utter inadequacy and demoralising nature of present-day education are illustrated and amplified by personal explanation in many stages in the story. One can stumble upon the following damning indictment very early in the course of the narrative: "A public school education cuts off a boy's retreat: he can no longer become a labourer or a mechanic, and these are the only people whose tenure of independence is not precarious–with the exception of those who are born inheritors of money or who are placed in some safe and deep groove." (W. p. 34) The moral of this sentence should come home with piercing poignancy to the mind of every unemployed educated Indian. It is University education as at present inefficiently conducted in India, aiming at no higher goal than that of turning but thousands of graduates every six months from the gloomy portals of Convocation Halls, that has led to this nation-wide calamity of middle-class unemployment, giving rise to an unsavoury spectacle witnessed in no other country in the world. Turned out like inanimate machines from our knowledge factories, if I may be permitted so to style our Universities, Our graduates are branded ‘gentlemen’ for lifetime, which position has been too dearly bought to be thoughtlessly repudiated and proves the incorrigible old man on poor Sinbad's shoulders. The victim must perforce sink in degrees or sink whole. "Being a gentleman is a luxury which I cannot afford, therefore I do not want it." (W. p. 399) Such words might come from Ernest after the bitter experience of six months in jail, but such exceptional circumstances as transmuted the base metal of Ernest's calibre to one of Supreme gold are not the portion of every unfortunate young man. Of course, as the wise satirist himself admits, the sons of the rich are not affected by the venom of a public school education. But then the sons of the rich rarely distinguish themselves in school and college, and even if by stroke of miracle they do succeed in their studies, their money-bags have such potency that, not long after, they are comfortably placed in some position in life. The rich–by far the most of them, if you will–study not that they might acquire learning, for the thing is absurd in their opinion and impossible in any case, but that they might kill somehow the hereditary ennui from which there seems no escape. There is too the desirable possibility of an adequate development of a sense of one's own importance, which every scion of a plutocratic family looks upon as the sine qua non of his earthly existence. These are the reasons–if reasons are necessary at all for any move on the part of the purse-proud–that drive them to the schools and colleges and make them mix with the poor, –the very poor they loathe with inward derision. But the humbler classes are moved and ruled by a more elemental passion every time they take a plunge into the abyss of modern education. It is with them a question of life and death: and more often, the latter, in a restricted sense, is served as their portion. They complain: nor have they the courage sublime "to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them." The edge of intellect has been blunted: like shadows shunned, they plod their weary way with numbed sensibility and amicable submission. All the mighty-mouthed exhortations of Samuel Butler have availed nothing.

Let us now turn from this gloomy picture to another and a more fundamentally disgusting feature of Victorian life. I refer to the relations then existing between parents and children. In one of the introductory paragraphs I had occasion to call Samuel Butler the pre-eminent liberator of the soul of youth from the vicious circle of outside interference. How far abnormal restraint of a child's freedom of movement can lead to a permanent paralysis of its intellectual power or even a grotesque distortion of the same, has been vividly sketched in his masterly novel in the delineation of the character and the tracing of the only too common career of five generations of Pontifexes; Butler and the late Sir Edmund Gosse, two of the most ill-treated of children, have laid threadbare in their books the vain pretensions of Victorian parents, and it was largely due to their sturdy independence even in the midst of the redoubtable Mumbojumbo of parental autocracy that the present atmosphere of goodwill and co-operation has come with good grace to stay in our homes. To some it may sound nothing short of an infamous heresy to listen to Butler's rendering of the moral of ‘Casabianca’ that "young people cannot too soon begin to exercise discretion in the obedience they pay to their Papa and Mamma." (W. p. 142) That is the true rendering nevertheless. We have wooed one another long with lies and hypocrisy and self-deception. Let belated honesty come into its own. What, for instance, would one's feeling be when one realises the full implications of the following anecdote? Poor Ernest, when a mere boy, could not pronounce the word ‘come’ but would say it as though it were ‘turn.’ This was more than what his father, with his characteristic parental punctilio, could suffer. The storm was brewing for a long time and one Sunday it burst in all the fury of its accumulated horrors.

"Very well, Ernest," said his father, catching him angrily by the shoulder. "I have done my best to save you but If you will have it so, you will," and he lugged the little wretch, crying by anticipation, out of the room. A few minutes more and we could hear screams coming from the dining room, . . . and knew that poor Ernest was beaten.

" ‘I have sent him to bed,’ said Theobald, . . . ‘and now Christinia, I think we will have the servants in to prayer,’ and he rang the bell for them, red-handed as he was."

And Theobald was a clergyman! The very extremity and stringency of their piety and affection drove these parents to such inhumanities. Samuel Butler, with the breath of absolute sincerity would have been the last person to deny that. He knew the enormous love that parents had for their children. What he so emphatically objected to and deplored were the wrong channels which this love was made to traverse and the perverse destinations it ultimately reached. What pungent irony is in this sentence, for example! "When Ernest was in his second year, Theobald . . . . began to teach him to read. He began to whip him two days after he had begun to teach him." (W. p. 105) But the irony of ironies is that the irony is very little removed from pathos–the pity of it, O, the pity of it! And "all was done in love, anxiety, timidity, stupidity and impatience." (W. p. 105) And with what welcome result! Father and son became enemies for life. Would this have happened, had but commonsense ruled? No, it was not to be. Take again the instance of Gosse. The exquisitely amiable companionship that one gains by perusing the charming pages of his autobiography, "Father and Son", is in no small measure tinctured by the tinge of divine discontent, the discontent emerging out of the outpourings of a soul that had suffered long under the undue circumspection of parental vigilance. What a pang of remorse would not the reader experience when he lisps the complaining melody of a passage like this! "I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but combative; if my father could have persuaded himself to let me alone . . . What a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my father would have been!" How barren is a speculation of these ‘ifs’ and ‘might-have-beens’! The grim reality alone mattered and engulfed them all, and over the waste held its imperial sway. But it is a far happier vocation to imagine Butler and Gosse looking down at the scene of their activities and sighing, not without regret, yet smiling with serene satisfaction that they had not worked in vain: one might fancy further how elevated they might feel in soul and how thankful for the mysterious ways of Providence.

No review, however short, of Samuel Butler's work would be complete without a passing reference at least to his attacks on religion as constituted then. His attacks are many and varied and are scattered in a thousand places in the volumes of his works. While it would doubtless be a gross travesty of truth to deny the higher spirituality and the sterner religious sense of Samuel Butler, he has reiterated times without number his conviction that Christianity, as preached and practised in the palmy days of Queen Victoria, was nothing more worthy of admiration, not to say reverence, than what one might feel bound to show towards a convenient institution or organisation subservient to man's earthly needs. The theory of Evolution, the growing disbelief in miracles, the advancement in science and the pioneer work of Darwin and Huxley, sowed the seeds of scepticism and doubt in the minds of millions in Christendom as to the divine origin of the Bible and in fact on the very basis of Christianity. Reason gained the upperhand over dogma, and mystical sublimation came under the vigorous purview of science. People realised that "religion unillumined by reason degenerates into an evil thing." ³ Samuel Butler was acutely conscious of all happenings around him and with little hesitation threw himself on the side of Darwin, with all the zeal of his advocacy, though subsequently he fought against "the theory of Natural Selection" as, in his opinion, it attempted in outrageous manner the banishment of God from the Universe. This one fact alone should suffice to still the parrot-cry that Butler had no religion. The validity of his objections to the priestcraft of his age would be seen from the following: "Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unknown world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can never know–forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence, is no better." (E. pp. 163-164) In the preface to "Erewhon Revisited" and in some of the concluding chapters, Butler makes his religious position as clear as the English language would allow: "I would say that I have never ceased to profess myself a member of the more advanced wing of the English Broad Church." (E. R. p. 10) Later in the book, Mr. Higgs, the originator of Sunchildism, the new religion of Erewhon, makes a statement of his opinions on religion which, mutatis mutandis, we are empowered by the author to apply to himself. The passage may be quoted in its entirety: "Our religion sets before us an ideal which we all cordially accept, but it also tells us of marve1s like your chariot and horses which we most of us reject. Our best teachers insist on the ideal and keep the marvels in the ground." (E. R. p. 267) This, we are told, is the position taken by the Broad Churchmen. This also, one might conclude, was the religious belief of Butler. In other words, he believed like Mathew in "a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness."

I am afraid I have traveled far afield and that what was intended to be a very brief article has grown very longish. Before closing let us take one more glance at that sinister figure that has loomed through the decades as one of the greatest forces to have stirred society to its depths and sounded the organ pipe of a new renaissance. Equipped with highly-cultivated powers of observation and capable of a superhuman range of intellectual vivacity, he had, too, an uprightness of character that brooked no sham, no vain pretension, no hollow mockery but fought them and annihilated them with unsurpassed obstinacy and vigour. Every vested interest he attacked with unprecedented violence; for every pining good cause he quite generously placed at its disposal the invaluable service of an indomitable spirit. "Everyman's work," he wrote, "is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly his character appears in spite of it." (W. p. 74) The satirist, the philosopher, the prophet, –he is discovered everywhere in his work, and perhaps he only is what ultimately matters. And Butler's works raise the veil off a marvelous person indeed. The prophet in him was greater than the satirist: and he was no mean artist either. It is idle and futile to say what else he might have been or done. There is quiet wisdom in the question of Mr. Jack Horner (‘Stet’) who commenced his essay on Butler in the columns of the "Saturday Review" with: "Why on earth cannot people take a writer for what he is and be happy with him, instead of either complaining that he is not somebody else, or else insulting him by pious exaggeration?" Let but the honest reader go through "Erewhon’ and its successors and the delightful collections of his essays and then form what estimate he will of the author of these works. One feels sure that if Samuel Butler is approached with scrupulous honesty, he will in his turn discover unto the eager readers vast stretches of untrodden fields where refinement and gaiety, wit and satire, dance and sing like elves and honey-bees and create on very sordid earth a literal dreamland of fantasy, sorrow–life itself. With the charming gifts of the true story-teller and the precious talents of a delicate artist, Samuel Butler has woven sustained narratives and polished them over with the excellence of a rounded perfection. Restrained in his sensibility but boundless in his generosity, supremely conscious of the proud part he was to play for the amelioration of the down-trodden but sublimely indifferent to the fruits of his own labour and the empty applause of a half-crazy audience; Butler presented a magnificent example of happy contrasts, and truly therefore he was, in himself and in his works, a figure in history without a parallel, a figure sui generis.

1 Copyright reserved by the author.

2 Mr. Humbert Wolfe, writing in the October Number of ‘The Criterion’ also refers to the task of the satirist as ‘ascetic’ and subsequently remarks: "The satirist seeks not only for judgment, but condemnation." This really is a happy coincidence. Mr. Wolfe's interesting article might be read with profit in this connection.

3 Quoted from Prof. Julian Huxley's "Essays of a Biologist." (p. 920)