Although he had a few forgiving, appreciative friends, a constant and ardent mistress, and a devoted servant who mothered and domineered him, engrossing interests and boundless energy, still he was chronically unhappy, the sweetness of his soul being embittered by contempt of his fellow men.
The offspring of a narrow-minded, obstinate, inflexible, selfish father and a gentle, reverential, yielding, and kindly mother, it was taken for granted that he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman. He found when he began to take thought that he could not accept the Christian miracles or believe in a personal, anthropomorphic God. So he went to New Zealand and became a successful sheep-grazer, and within five years he had more than doubled the four thousand pounds which he had been able to screw from his father.
His life during these years is interesting in so much as it shows how a man of education and breeding lived in the bush while developing intellectually. The devil often tempted him there, but not always with success, though he became terribly fussed over the death and resurrection of Christ. He thought and wrote about it, but he was not successfully delivered from his dilemma until the idea of "Erewhon" took possession of him. This idea was that machines were about to supplant the human race and be developed into a higher kind of life. When the conception first seized him he wrote to Charles Darwin, whom he started by admiring and ended by despising, that he developed it "for mere fun and because it amused him and without a particle of serious meaning." He had Butler's "Analogy" in his head as the book at which it should be aimed, but when "Erewhon" appeared most readers thought he had "The Origin of Species" in mind.
From this time one begins to see how extraordinarily laborious were all of Butler's writings. "Erewhon" was not published until eight years later, during which time he had written and rewritten, corrected and re-corrected, pruned, elaborated, and incorporated sentences from letters, records of experiences which he had while prospecting for and developing his sheeprun, and innumerable notes from a commonplace book which he early acquired the art of keeping. Ten years after its publication he wrote to an indiscriminating, ardent admirer: "I don't like 'Erewhon'; still it is good for me."
The next book he wrote, "The Fair Haven," he liked very much, but few others did. When he was a very young man he had written a pamphlet on the Resurrection. He was disappointed that it made little or no impression. Finally he decided it had been written too seriously. It then occurred to him to treat the subject as he had treated the analogy of crime and disease in "Erewhon." The book purports to be written by the son of a clergyman, the antithesis of Butler's father, insane before the manuscript was completed, and of a mother, the replica of his own mother. A brother gives the book to the world, prefixing a memoir of the author modelled after Butler. The book fell flat. The few who resented it were the sensitive orthodox whose feelings were outraged. Butler could not understand why he was unable to induce people to reconsider the gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
The second distinctive characteristic of Butler's make-up was his spirit of God-I-thank-thee-that-I-am-not-as-other-men.
When Butler left New Zealand he had eight thousand pounds, partly in his pocket and partly invested in the country that had been so bountiful to him; he decided to return to England and devote himself to painting, which he felt convinced was the field of activity in which he gave real promise. It was then from the exceeding high mountain that he saw Charles Payne Pauli, of Winchester, and Pembroke College, Oxford, who had gone out to the colony and found employment on a newspaper. One evening Pauli called upon Butler and stayed talking until midnight. "I suddenly became aware that I had become intimate with a personality quite different from that of any one whom I had ever known." Within a few months there was established a strange intimacy, "one of those one-sided friendships when a diffident, poetical shy man becomes devoted to the confident, showy, real man as a dog to his master." He loaned Pauli one hundred pounds that he might return with him to England; he maintained him in London until Pauli was called to the bar; then he put him on an allowance which he continued for many years and which used up one-half of his savings and earnings.
When Pauli began to earn a comfortable income at the bar he treated Butler with scorn, though accepting money and food from him. When he died none of the nine thousand pounds which he had accumulated was left to Butler. Indeed, the latter did not know of his death until he saw a notice of it in the London Times. However, his love for Pauli, which surpassed understanding, surmounted all obstacles and he wrote a long, detailed account of the relation between himself and Pauli which, his biographer says, if ever printed in full, will be "very painful reading."
Some time before he broke with Pauli he started a friendship with another man which fortunately did not test his indulgence and his generosity to a similar extent, but it was no less remarkable. Indeed, it was more so, for Butler was now fifty-six, and he poured the depleted vessels of his affection upon Hans Rudolf Faesch in such a way as practically to submerge this young man. I doubt if there is anything in literature of men's friendships which for intensity of passion and affection surpasses the letters which Butler addressed to the young Swiss. The poem, "Out in the Night," addressed to Faesch on his departure for Singapore, is a genuine, impassioned expression of grief coming straight from the heart. And the letters to Faesch are truly remarkable documents. In fact, the letter written to Hans Faesch after he had started for Singapore, when Butler was fifty-nine years old, might well have been written by Pericles to Aspasia or by a sentimental youth to his dulcina. "I should be ashamed of myself for having felt so keenly and spoken with as little reserve as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me when it is about you." And yet we speak of Anglo-Saxon frigidity and aloofness!
Butler would seem never to have been in love in the ordinary usual way. We are justified in concluding that he had only a tenderness for "Madame," who "during the twenty years of intimacy with Butler had no rivals." Certainly he never was in love with Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage, an extraordinary woman whose mentality is reflected in all of Butler's books. From 1871, when he was writing "Erewhon," until her death, in 1885, Butler submitted to Miss Savage everything he wrote, and remodelled in accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. Not only did he submit the drafts of his books to her, but the suggestions of many of them originated with her. If ever the soul and spirit of one person operated through another, the soul and spirit of this brilliant woman operated through the apparent mental elaborations of Samuel Butler. She understood him as no one else understood him; she loved him as no other woman loved him. Her devotion to him, her appreciation of his talent, her unrequited love, her unfailing humor and mirth, her incomparable courage when confronted with serious disease and with death, and her apparent willingness that her talent should shine through him is one of the most extraordinary things in literature. I am at a loss to understand why neither his biographers nor the critics of Butler's writings have given the subject adequate consideration.