This is Butler's own account of himself,taken from a letter to Sir Julius von Haast;although written in 1865it is true of his mode of life for many years:
I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived.I was always very fond of it and mean to stick to it;it suits me and I am not without hopes that I shall do well at it.I live almost the life of a recluse,seeing very few people and going nowhere that I can help--I mean in the way of parties and so forth;if my friends had their way they would fritter away my time without any remorse;but I made a regular stand against it from the beginning and so,having my time pretty much in my own hands,work hard;I find,as I am sure you must find,that it is next to impossible to combine what is commonly called society and work.
But the time saved from society was not all devoted to painting.He modified his letter to the 'Press'about "Darwin among the Machines"and,so modified,it appeared in 1865as "The Mechanical Creation"in the 'Reasoner',a paper then published in London by Mr.G.J.Holyoake.And his mind returned to the considerations which had determined him to decline to be ordained.In 1865he printed anonymously a pamphlet which he had begun in New Zealand,the result of his study of the Greek Testament,entitled 'The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically examined'.After weighing this evidence and comparing one account with another,he came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ did not die upon the cross.It is improbable that a man officially executed should escape death,but the alternative,that a man actually dead should return to life,seemed to Butler more improbable still and unsupported by such evidence as he found in the gospels.
From this evidence he concluded that Christ swooned and recovered consciousness after his body had passed into the keeping of Joseph of Arimathaea.He did not suppose fraud on the part of the first preachers of Christianity;they sincerely believed that Christ died and rose again.Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the truth but kept silence.The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from Butler's mind.
In 1869,having been working too hard,he went abroad for a long change.On his way back,at the Albergo La Luna,in Venice,he met an elderly Russian lady in whose company he spent most of his time there.She was no doubt impressed by his versatility and charmed,as everyone always was,by his conversation and original views on the many subjects that interested him.We may be sure he told her all about himself and what he had done and was intending to do.At the end of his stay,when he was taking leave of her,she said:
"Et maintenant,Monsieur,vous allez creer,"meaning,as he understood her,that he had been looking long enough at the work of others and should now do something of his own.
This sank into him and pained him.He was nearly thirty-five,and hitherto all had been admiration,vague aspiration and despair;he had produced in painting nothing but a few sketches and studies,and in literature only a few ephemeral articles,a collection of youthful letters and a pamphlet on the Resurrection;moreover,to none of his work had anyone paid the slightest attention.This was a poor return for all the money which had been spent upon his education,as Theobald would have said in 'The Way of All Flesh'.He returned home dejected,but resolved that things should be different in the future.
While in this frame of mind he received a visit from one of his New Zealand friends,the late Sir F.Napier Broome,afterwards Governor of Western Australia,who incidentally suggested his rewriting his New Zealand articles.The idea pleased him;it might not be creating,but at least it would be doing something.So he set to work on Sundays and in the evenings,as relaxation from his profession of painting,and,taking his New Zealand article,"Darwin among the Machines,"and another,"The World of the Unborn,"as a starting-point and helping himself with a few sentences from 'A First Year in Canterbury Settlement',he gradually formed 'Erewhon'.He sent the MS.bit by bit,as it was written,to Miss Savage for her criticism and approval.He had the usual difficulty about finding a publisher.Chapman and Hall refused the book on the advice of George Meredith,who was then their reader,and in the end he published it at his own expense through Messrs.Trubner.
Mr.Sydney C.Cockerell told me that in 1912Mr.Bertram Dobell,second-hand bookseller of Charing Cross Road,offered a copy of 'Erewhon'for 1pound 10s.;it was thus described in his catalogue:
"Unique copy with the following note in the author's handwriting on the half-title:'To Miss E.M.A.Savage this first copy of 'Erewhon'with the author's best thanks for many invaluable suggestions and corrections.'"When Mr.Cockerell inquired for the book it was sold.After Miss Savage's death in 1885all Butler's letters to her were returned to him,including the letter he wrote when he sent her this copy of 'Erewhon'.He gave her the first copy issued of all his books that were published in her lifetime,and,no doubt,wrote an inion in each.If the present possessors of any of them should happen to read this sketch I hope they will communicate with me,as I should like to see these books.I should also like to see some numbers of the 'Drawing-Room Gazette',which about this time belonged to or was edited by a Mrs.Briggs.Miss Savage wrote a review of 'Erewhon',which appeared in the number for 8th June,1872,and Butler quoted a sentence from her review among the press notices in the second edition.She persuaded him to write for Mrs.Briggs notices of concerts at which Handel's music was performed.In 1901he made a note on one of his letters that he was thankful there were no copies of the 'Drawing-Room Gazette'in the British Museum,meaning that he did not want people to read his musical criticisms;nevertheless,I hope some day to come across back numbers containing his articles.
The opening of 'Erewhon'is based upon Butler's colonial experiences;some of the deions remind one of passages in 'A First Year in Canterbury Settlement',where he speaks of the excursions he made with Doctor when looking for sheep-country.The walk over the range as far as the statues is taken from the Upper Rangitata district,with some alterations;but the walk down from the statues into Erewhon is reminiscent of the Leventina Valley in the Canton Ticino.
The great chords,which are like the music moaned by the statues are from the prelude to the first of Handel's 'Trois Lecons';he used to say:
"One feels them in the diaphragm--they are,as it were,the groaning and labouring of all creation travailing together until now."There is a place in New Zealand named Erewhon,after the book;it is marked on the large maps,a township about fifty miles west of Napier in the Hawke Bay Province (North Island).I am told that people in New Zealand sometimes call their houses Erewhon and occasionally spell the word Erehwon which Butler did not intend;he treated wh as a single letter,as one would treat th.Among other traces of Erewhon now existing in real life are Butler's Stones on the Hokitika Pass,so called because of a legend that they were in his mind when he described the statues.
The book was translated into Dutch in 1873and into German in 1897.
Butler wrote to Charles Darwin to explain what he meant by the "Book of the Machines":"I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought I was laughing at your theory,a thing which I never meant to do and should be shocked at having done."Soon after this Butler was invited to Down and paid two visits to Mr.Darwin there;he thus became acquainted with all the family and for some years was on intimate terms with Mr.(now Sir)Francis Darwin.
It is easy to see by the light of subsequent events that we should probably have had something not unlike 'Erewhon'sooner or later,even without the Russian lady and Sir F.N.Broome,to whose promptings,owing to a certain diffidence which never left him,he was perhaps inclined to attribute too much importance.But he would not have agreed with this view at the time;he looked upon himself as a painter and upon 'Erewhon'as an interruption.It had come,like one of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn,pestering him and refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily shape.It was only a little one,and he saw no likelihood of its having any successors.So he satisfied its demands and then,supposing that he had written himself out,looked forward to a future in which nothing should interfere with the painting.Nevertheless,when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of 'The Fair Haven',which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection,enlarged and preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author,John Pickard Owen.In the library of St.John's College,Cambridge,are two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out;he used these pages in forming the MS.of 'The Fair Haven'.To have published this book as by the author of 'Erewhon'would have been to give away the irony and satire.And he had another reason for not disclosing his name;he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the authorship of 'Erewhon'was satisfied,the weekly sales fell from fifty down to only two or three.But,as he always talked openly of whatever was in his mind,he soon let out the secret of the authorship of 'The Fair Haven',and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition.
One result of his submitting the MS.of 'Erewhon'to Miss Savage was that she thought he ought to write a novel,and urged him to do so.
I have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with the idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to ascertain whether he was likely to succeed with a novel.The result seems to have satisfied him,for,not long after 'The Fair Haven',he began 'The Way of All Flesh',sending the MS.to Miss Savage,as he did everything he wrote,for her approval and putting her into the book as Ernest's Aunt Alethea.He continued writing it in the intervals of other work until her death in February,1885,after which he did not touch it.It was published in 1903by Mr.R.A.Streatfeild,his literary executor.
Soon after 'The Fair Haven'Butler began to be aware that his letter in the 'Press',"Darwin among the Machines,"was descending with further modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about evolution which took shape as 'Life and Habit';but the writing of this very remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the painting interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada.He had been persuaded by a college friend,a member of one of the great banking families,to call in his colonial mortgages and to put the money into several new companies.He was going to make thirty or forty per cent,instead of only ten.One of these companies was a Canadian undertaking,of which he became a director;it was necessary for someone to go to headquarters and investigate its affairs;he went,and was much occupied by the business for two or three years.
By the beginning of 1876he had returned finally to London,but most of his money was lost and his financial position for the next ten years caused him very serious anxiety.His personal expenditure was already so low that it was hardly possible to reduce it,and he set to work at his profession more industriously than ever,hoping to paint something that he could sell,his spare time being occupied with 'Life and Habit',which was the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other.
Following his letter in the 'Press',wherein he had seen machines as in process of becoming animate,he went on to regard them as living organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves.What would follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as machines which we had manufactured as parts of our bodies?In the first place,how did we come to make them without knowing anything about it?But then,how comes anybody to do anything unconsciously?
The answer usually would be:By habit.But can a man be said to do a thing by habit when he has never done it before?His ancestors have done it,but not he.Can the habit have been acquired by them for his benefit?Not unless he and his ancestors are the same person.Perhaps,then,they are the same person.
In February,1876,partly to clear his mind and partly to tell someone,he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake,Thomas William Gale Butler,a fellow art-student who was then in New Zealand;so much of the letter as concerns the growth of his theory is given in 'The Note-Books of Samuel Butler'(1912).
In September,1877,when 'Life and Habit'was on the eve of publication,Mr.Francis Darwin came to lunch with him in Clifford's Inn and,in course of conversation,told him that Professor Ray Lankester had written something in 'Nature'about a lecture by Dr.Ewald Hering of Prague,delivered so long ago as 1870,"On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter."This rather alarmed Butler,but he deferred looking up the reference until after December,1877,when his book was out,and then,to his relief,he found that Hering's theory was very similar to his own,so that,instead of having something sprung upon him which would have caused him to want to alter his book,he was supported.He at once wrote to the 'Athenaeum',calling attention to Hering's lecture,and then pursued his studies in evolution.
'Life and Habit'was followed in 1879by 'Evolution Old and New',wherein he compared the teleological or purposive view of evolution taken by Buffon,Dr.Erasmus Darwin,and Lamarck with the view taken by Charles Darwin,and came to the conclusion that the old was better.But while agreeing with the earlier writers in thinking that the variations whose accumulation results in species were originally due to intelligence,he could not take the view that the intelligence resided in an external personal God.He had done with all that when he gave up the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.He proposed to place the intelligence inside the creature ("The Deadlock in Darwinism,"post).
In 1880he continued the subject by publishing 'Unconscious Memory'.
Chapter IV of this book is concerned with a personal quarrel between himself and Charles Darwin which arose out of the publication by Charles Darwin of Dr.Krause's 'Life of Erasmus Darwin'.We need not enter into particulars here,the matter is fully dealt with in a pamphlet,'Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler:A Step towards Reconciliation',which I wrote in 1911,the result of a correspondence between Mr.Francis Darwin and myself.Before this correspondence took place Mr.Francis Darwin had made several public allusions to 'Life and Habit';and in September,1908,in his inaugural address to the British Association at Dublin,he did Butler the posthumous honour of quoting from his translation of Hering's lecture "On Memory,"which is in 'Unconscious Memory',and of mentioning Butler as having enunciated the theory contained in 'Life and Habit'.
In 1886Butler published his last book on evolution,'Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification'?His other contributions to the subject are some essays,written for the 'Examiner'in 1879,"God the Known and God the Unknown,"which were republished by Mr.Fifield in 1909,and the articles "The Deadlock in Darwinism"which appeared in the 'Universal Review'in 1890and some further notes on evolution will be found in 'The Note-Books of Samuel.It was while he was writing 'Life and Habit'that I first met him.
For several years he had been in the habit of spending six or eight weeks of the summer in Italy and the Canton Ticino,generally making Faido his headquarters.Many a page of his books was written while resting by the fountain of some subalpine village or waiting in the shade of the chestnuts till the light came so that he could continue a sketch.Every year he returned home by a different route,and thus gradually became acquainted with every part of the Canton and North Italy.There is scarcely a town or village,a point of view,a building,statue or picture in all this country with which he was not familiar.In 1878he happened to be on the Sacro Monte above Varese at the time I took my holiday;there I joined him,and nearly every year afterwards we were in Italy together.
He was always a delightful companion,and perhaps at his gayest on these occasions."A man's holiday,"he would say,"is his garden,"and he set out to enjoy himself and to make everyone about him enjoy themselves too.I told him the old schoolboy muddle about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco and saying:"We shall this day light up such a fire in England as I trust shall never be put out."He had not heard it before and,though amused,appeared preoccupied,and perhaps a little jealous,during the rest of the evening.Next morning,while he was pouring out his coffee,his eyes twinkled and he said,with assumed carelessness:
"By the by,do you remember?--wasn't it Columbus who bashed the egg down on the table and said 'Eppur non si muove'?"He was welcome wherever he went,full of fun and ready to play while doing the honours of the country.Many of the peasants were old friends,and every day we were sure to meet someone who remembered him.Perhaps it would be an old woman labouring along under a burden;she would smile and stop,take his hand and tell him how happy she was to meet him again and repeat her thanks for the empty wine bottle he had given her after an out-of-door luncheon in her neighbourhood four or five years before.There was another who had rowed him many times across the Lago di Orta and had never been in a train but once in her life,when she went to Novara to her son's wedding.He always remembered all about these people and asked how the potatoes were doing this year and whether the grandchildren were growing up into fine boys and girls,and he never forgot to inquire after the son who had gone to be a waiter in New York.At Civiasco there is a restaurant which used to be kept by a jolly old lady,known for miles round as La Martina;we always lunched with her on our way over the Colma to and from Varallo-Sesia.On one occasion we were accompanied by two English ladies and,one being a teetotaller,Butler maliciously instructed La Martina to make the sabbaglione so that it should be forte and abbondante,and to say that the Marsala,with which it was more than flavoured,was nothing but vinegar.La Martina never forgot that when she looked in to see how things were going,he was pretending to lick the dish clean.These journeys provided the material for a book which he thought of calling "Verdi Prati,"after one of Handel's most beautiful songs;but he changed his mind,and it appeared at the end of 1881as 'Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino'with more than eighty illustrations,nearly all by Butler.Charles Gogin made an etching for the frontispiece,drew some of the pictures,and put figures into others;half a dozen are mine.They were all redrawn in ink from sketches made on the spot,in oil,water-colour,and pencil.There were also many illustrations of another kind--extracts from Handel's music,each chosen because Butler thought it suitable to the spirit of the scene he wished to bring before the reader.The introduction concludes with these words:"I have chosen Italy as my second country,and would dedicate this book to her as a thank-offering for the happiness she has afforded me."In the spring of 1883he began to compose music,and in 1885we published together an album of minuets,gavottes,and fugues.This led to our writing 'Narcissus',which is an Oratorio Buffo in the Handelian manner--that is as nearly so as we could make it.It is a mistake to suppose that all Handel's oratorios are upon sacred subjects;some of them are secular.And not only so,but,whatever the subject,Handel was never at a loss in treating anything that came into his words by way of allusion or illustration.As Butler puts it in one of his sonnets:
He who gave eyes to ears and showed in sound All thoughts and things in earth or heaven above -From fire and hailstones running along the ground To Galatea grieving for her love -He who could show to all unseeing eyes Glad shepherds watching o'er their flocks by night,Or Iphis angel-wafted to the skies,Or Jordan standing as an heap upright -And so on.But there is one subject which Handel never treated--Imean the Money Market.Perhaps he avoided it intentionally;he was twice bankrupt,and Mr.R.A.Streatfeild tells me that the British Museum possesses a MS.letter from him giving instructions as to the payment of the dividends on 500pounds South Sea Stock.Let us hope he sold out before the bubble burst;if so,he was more fortunate than Butler,who was at this time of his life in great anxiety about his own financial affairs.It seemed a pity that Dr.Morell had never offered Handel some such words as these:
The steadfast funds maintain their wonted state While all the other markets fluctuate.
Butler wondered whether Handel would have sent the steadfast funds up above par and maintained them on an inverted pedal with all the other markets fluctuating iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn every one to his own way in the 'Messiah'.He thought something of the kind ought to have been done,and in the absence of Handel and Dr.Morell we determined to write an oratorio that should attempt to supply the want.In order to make our libretto as plausible as possible,we adopted the dictum of Monsieur Jourdain's Maitre a danser:"Lorsqu'on a des personnes a faire parler en musique,il faut bien que,pour la vraisemblance,on donne dans la bergerie."Narcissus is accordingly a shepherd in love with Amaryllis;they come to London with other shepherds and lose their money in imprudent speculations on the Stock Exchange.In the second part the aunt and godmother of Narcissus,having died at an advanced age worth one hundred thousand pounds,all of which she has bequeathed to her nephew and godson,the obstacle to his union with Amaryllis is removed.The money is invested in consols and all ends happily.
In December,1886,Butler's father died,and his financial difficulties ceased.He engaged Alfred Emery Cathie as clerk,but made no other change,except that he bought a pair of new hair brushes and a larger wash-hand basin.Any change in his mode of life was an event.When in London he got up at 6.30in the summer and 7.30in the winter,went into his sitting-room,lighted the fire,put the kettle on and returned to bed.In half an hour he got up again,fetched the kettle of hot water,emptied it into the cold water that was already in his bath,refilled the kettle and put it back on the fire.After dressing,he came into his sitting-room,made tea and cooked,in his Dutch oven,something he had bought the day before.
His laundress was an elderly woman,and he could not trouble her to come to his rooms so early in the morning;on the other hand,he could not stay in bed until he thought it right for her to go out;so it ended in his doing a great deal for himself.He then got his breakfast and read the Times.At 9.30Alfred came,with whom he discussed anything requiring attention,and soon afterwards his laundress arrived.Then he started to walk to the British Museum,where he arrived about 10.30,every alternate morning calling at the butcher's in Fetter Lane to order his meat.In the Reading Room at the Museum he sat at Block B ("B for Butler")and spent an hour "posting his notes"--that is reconsidering,rewriting,amplifying,shortening,and indexing the contents of the little note-book he always carried in his pocket.After the notes he went on till 1.30with whatever book he happened to be writing.