So he remained a bachelor, and, when Miss Savage was dead, contented himself with the intimate companionship of Mr. Jones and Alfred, his clerk. After he had resigned the ambition of becoming a painter, after his odd and disastrous excursion in the world of business, his daily life was that of an eccentric gentleman with a small independent income. He read and wrote in the British Museum, he went for walks in the country and took holidays in Italy, he published his books at his own expense, and he scrambled out of invitations to dinner as best he could. For a hobby he wrote music in collaboration with Mr. Festing Jones, oratorios which were to be as much like Handel's oratorios as possible. The first of them, Narcissus, was inspired by his own misfortunes in business, and the final chorus ran:
How blest the prudent man, the maiden pure,
Whose income is both ample and secure,
Arising from consolidated Three
Per Cent. Annuities, paid quarterly!
"We remembered Handel's treatment of 'continually,'" says Mr. Festing Jones, "and thought we could not do better than imitate it for our words 'paid quarterly.'"
And so his life went on and his interests drifted through the theory of evolution, the authorship of the Odyssey, the life of his grandfather, and the meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The sales of his books pursued a course by no means so varied, but steadily declined. In 1899, when he drew up a statement of profit and loss, the average sales of his eleven books, excluding Erewhon, which was the first, amounted to 306 copies each. Of his Selections from Previous Works, 120 copies were sold in fifteen years. Of The Authoress of the Odyssey, 165 copies were sold. He might well have added discouragement to his first cause of bitterness. The religion of Christ produced Canon Butler, the religion of science produced Darwin, the religion of good looks and good breeding produced Pauli. On paper he was indomitable. He swore he had enjoyed life, that on the balance his good luck overbalanced the bad. But he swore a little too often, he explained a little too much in detail for this to have been quite true. And then, at the very end of his life, the luck turned, and his last book, by a strange irony, was produced at the publisher's own risk, the greatest triumph in his literary career which Butler was able to see since the success of his first book. After he was dead his reputation, magically assisted with incantations by Mr. Bernard Shaw and others, sprang up to an amazing height, like the plant grown from the Indian enchanter's bean.
Now the world is confronted with a situation in which the neglected philosopher of Clifford's Inn has attained an importance he never dreamt of and perhaps would not have approved. "Above all things," he said, "let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in me." This useful motto was printed on the menu of the first Erewhon dinner; but a great number of his disciples have disregarded the admonition. I was once the witness of one undergraduate trying to proselytise another and telling him that it was a worthy ambition to desire to be like Christ. "I don't want to be like anyone else," replied the second undergraduate, "but if I did, I shouldn't choose Christ, I should choose Samuel Butler." This is at once an extreme instance and one strictly guarded against Butler's own disapproval: for the kernel of the remark would meet with his applause. But it illustrates the direction in which many of his admirers have more frenetically rushed. It is an ironic fate for so ironic a philosopher that his teaching should have become a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for so many solemn and ridiculous persons.
What, after all, is his total achievement? He himself summed up what he considered to be his life-work in a statement which is not dated but which must have been written in 1899 or later. It begins with (1) The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease [Erewhon], and ends with (17) The elucidation of Shakespeare's Sonnets [Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered.] "The foregoing," he continues, "is the list of my mares'-nests, and it is, I presume, this list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares'-nests in his diatribe on my Odyssey theory in the Classical Review." The two to which he probably attached most importance, to judge from the bitterness of his remarks on their reception, were his intervention into the great evolution dispute and his great discovery that the Odyssey was written by a female inhabitant of Trapani in Sicily. With regard to the second he continually complained that no classical scholar had ever replied to his arguments. It was once remarked in answer to this, that if a classical scholar published a book arguing that no player of Rugby football ought to be allowed to pass the ball to another without obtaining a signed receipt for it, the great community of Rugby footballers, intent on other matters, would probably ignore his suggestion. Butler's claim may perhaps be left there. Yet he did apparently take it seriously, in spite of his failure to deal with the singular fact that no scrap of confirmation of his theory has survived from the writings or the traditions of antiquity. His "mares'-nests," he said, "were simply sovereigns which he found lying in public places and which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up." They were mostly, however, one cannot help suspecting, recommended to him less because they seemed to be sovereigns than because other people would not pick them up. They were, in fact, the notions of a crank, who, having acquired a distrust of the rest of the world, took pains to differ from it as much as he could.
His theories of evolution hold a different position. Darwin's theory has now been so greatly modified, as much by his supporters as by his opponents, that it cannot be said any longer to hold the field as he first presented it; and Butler's attitude has been in a manner justified. But this change has been accomplished not by the acceptance of Butler's views but by the work of experimental biologists. He did, in fact, offer many general principles, some well founded, some mistaken, all stimulating, for the consideration of practical workers; and it would not be possible to assert, without an exhaustive enquiry into the history of the matter, that his writings have had no influence on the development of science. But Charles Darwin and his followers were practical men—men no doubt with faults, with the intolerance and impatience of the laity that are often to be found in the scientific investigator. It is not hard to see why they received Butler with tepid interest, and finally ignored him when he forsook their path of enquiry. For they did ignore him: they did not, as he supposed, conspire to silence him. He seems to have believed that Darwin was a sort of Anti-Christ malevolently determined to force on humanity a diabolical belief of his own invention; and he was only too ready to suspect him of unscrupulous dealing and machinations. When he conceived that Darwin had engineered an attack on him, though he obtained an expression of regret for an accident, he flung violently into print, and did, though he remained ignorant of the fact, get from Darwin and his friends the attention as an enemy which they would not bestow on him as a scientist. His letter to the Athenæum seriously perturbed Darwin, who drafted two replies to it, and submitted them for advice to the members of his family and to Professor Huxley. The advice given was against replying; and Butler was accordingly confirmed in his opinion. But this was an opinion which a less suspicious man would have been slower in forming and readier to discard.
Darwin was not, in his career or in his handling of Butler, a model of the urbane virtues. Butler did right to protest against the sacerdotal attitude which Victorian men of science frequently adopted. But he did wrong not to realise that Darwin did not take him altogether seriously, and why this was so. Butler's challenging manner of writing, the prickly defensiveness which he developed on the smallest provocation, must have been disagreeable to the great investigator who had spent years of careful research into the problems which Butler airily settled at his writing-table in the intervals of other pursuits. Darwin is perhaps to blame, but not so greatly to blame as Butler contended, if he regarded Butler at first as a well-disposed, and then as an ill-disposed, amateur; and that was in effect his view of the whole matter. When he sent Evolution Old and New to Dr. Krause, he expressed the hope that the German writer "would not expend much powder and shot on Mr. Butler, for he really is not worthy of it. His book is merely ephemeral." And it was in fact ephemeral or nearly so. Butler's works on evolution contain many inspired guesses; but the inherent value of these ceases to have much more than a historical interest when they are confirmed by practical observation. If they are not so confirmed they remain open to question, though they may have their uses in suggesting paths for research. Butler's place in science is somewhat below that of Goethe, who did after all make a practical discovery which remains valid to-day.
Some of his "mares'-nests," then, were "mares'-nests" from the beginning. Others, neglected when they might have been useful, had begun to be superannuated when they first attracted attention. But Butler, apart from his theories and his discoveries, remains as an observer of life and a teacher of conduct. Passages of this nature exist in all his works; but, generally speaking, his claim to be accepted as a philosopher rests on five books, Erewhon, Erewhon Revisited, the Note-books, The Way of All Flesh, and Mr. Festing Jones's biography.
Mr. Festing Jones observes that "I was struck by his uncompromising sincerity. If a subject interested him, he took infinite pains to find out all he could about it first-hand, thought it over and formed an opinion of his own, without reference to what anyone else thought or said." In demonstration of this, Mr. Jones relates the following reminiscence: